You Can't Make Mistakes.

In case you are starting from scratch.

I caught this on Slashdot this morning. Apparently, McDonalds, not satisfied with making people fat, is now making a move to take over the sandwich market: completely. They have filed a patent for the process of making a sandwich. David Adam has a good article on the topic as well.

This is a flowchart detailing the process which they are trying to patent:

Call me crazy, but I think that they making of a sandwich is pretty self explanatory. Also, what if other fast food chains are using this same method? Does that fall under prior art? Will Burger King be sued? Will local sandwich shops either be sued out of business or have to pay licensing fees to the burger giant?

These are uncertain times.

Regardless, patent law in the states has a few problems. Though, this likely will not effect everyday users of sandwiches and sandwich construction materials. Just don’t try to use this process and then sell what you made or you might be in for a nasty surprise lawsuit.

Sometimes things still surprise even me.

I was sitting on the balcony the other morning with Stacey having our tea, and suddenly she jumped up and screamed at the sound of a crash in the street. I stood up and looked on with her and saw that a mint green car had hit two guys on a scooter. They had jumped/fallen/been knocked clear of any injury, and were standing up, checking themselves to make sure that nothing was broken, rubbing bruised knees and elbows. The young woman in the car did not move but just raised her hands in exasperation and glared at them. They started shouting at her as another man stopped to help them extract the scooter from under her front bumper.

She got out of the car at this point, shouting at the two men that it was their fault and what did they think they were doing? They shouted back that she was crazy and needed to be careful what she was doing. The scooter’s seat had fallen completely off and there was a puddle of gas and oil leaking out of some newly disconnected hose or damaged casing. They pulled the scooter off to the side of the road as a police officer walked up from a nearby street-corner. She was already back in the car. Just as they had finished getting the scooter clear of the car, she tried to pull around them, honking her horn. The guy who had been driving the scooter shouted in anger and pounded the hood of her car with his fist shouting that she had to wait and take care of this.

Rather than doing that she honked her horn at him and when he and the other man refused to move she just drove forward a little as if to threaten. This had one of the guys incensed, and he raised his hands shouting at her. The police officer lit a cigarette and watched. By this time she was in the next “lane” over as she had been trying to squeeze over to get around them, refusing to take any responsibility for the accident at all. When the man further refused to budge, she just gunned the engine and hit him, sending him up onto her hood. He somehow managed to roll off to the side like a portly, middle-aged ninja and remained astonishingly uninjured as she sped away down the street at the full speed of her late-model luxury Citroen. The police officer threw his cigarette butt down with no regard for the puddle of gasoline in the street and sauntered away to his corner without a word.

The two guys managed to get most of the pieces of the scooter and limped it down the street while a bawwab on the street picked up a piece of the scooter which someone pointed out that they had missed. He looked down the street as if in an attempt to ascertain their distance so that he might run after them, then shrugged and chucked it over onto the sidewalk and shuffled back to his perch in the middle of the road.

We were both naïvely astonished, which quickly wore away. This is not the first time I have seen someone from the lower class here grossly mistreated by someone of the obviously privileged class, but it was such a perfect visual metaphor for the state of things here: a young girl in a new car runs over a man while an officer of the law looks on disinterested. The privileged exploit and abuse the disenfranchised while the state looks the other way. That is the reality of daily life here, and sometimes it seems like the winds of change are forecast a long way off.

To the losers.

Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.

This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.

On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:

“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]

It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.

Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”

Well, you know the rest.

I can explain.

Normally, I wouldn’t do this—I am feeling especially loopy today, and I need to vent some brain garbage—but I would like to relate a dream that I had last night. It might be a nightmare. I can’t decide. You decide and then tell me.

So, I was in a car and arrived at a country house on a hill. I was with friends, I think. We get out of the car and go inside the house proceeding immediately to the “rec room” in the basement. Standard middle-American, not-used-since-1978-pool-table-and-a-bar sort of thing. Wood paneling and lame neon everywhere.

Sitting on sofas and chairs are John McCain and Sarah Palin, drunk. Not just regular sort of drunk either, but sloppy wasted. I laughed (probably out loud), and Gov. Palin got up, gave me a big hug and went to make me a martini. “Just how you like it,” she slurred, “three olives and I showed them the vermouth yesterday.” Seriously. I like my martinis dry with a lemon twist. God.

The worst part about all of this is that I appeared to be having fun. I liked these people. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure that Gov. Palin would be fun to drink with, if she weren’t a right-wing Christian. Sen. McCain, I would probably have a scotch with anyway, now that he is back to being his old self. I always kind of liked the guy.

Anyway, back to the dream. I asked where the others were. John McCain was drinking Pabst out of a can. I figured him for a scotch man—as mentioned above. Odd, I thought. He said that they would be there shortly. He put on a barbecue apron, but the kind that looks like a woman wearing a cocktail dress. He made some comment about his tits to Gov. Palin and then sat back down.

The doorbell rang, and a dog ran from behind the bar and up the stairs. A moment later he ran back down the stairs followed by Carl Rove and Don Rumsfeld, my friend Leslie, and my friend Canadian Terri. Odd company to say the least. Canadian Terri’s drunk roommate Linda lurched into the room a few minutes later. This is her usual state and didn’t seem as surreal in retrospect.

Anyway, this can’t end well. The music got turned up—Sen. McCain cranked Creedence Clearwater Revival and shouted “Just call me MC Cain, bitches.” Pool was played, and then beer pong. Then Rove—grabbed some tequila and slurred something about “body shots” and took a head-shot off the bottle. Gov. Palin danced on the bar. Canadian Terri threw maraschino cherries to see if she could catch them in her mouth.

I, thankfully, woke up just as she was beginning to twirl one of those severe, shoulder-padded jackets over her head. It was the most superreal dream that I have had in ages. Usually they fade away into wakefulness, but this one made me feel weird when I woke up. Like, my real life didn’t make any sense, but it made sense that I would be drinking in a basement with Sarah Palin and John McCain. I hate that feeling.

McCain in the cocktail-dress apron was funny though.

And now the real work begins.

Well America, as a collective, we chose well. We were faced with the most important set of decisions that we have made in a long time and we made the right ones. I, for one, am thrilled. I actually cried out of relief this morning.

While President Elect Obama is positioned to be able to effect change in a significant way, what with being backed by a Congress which will support the directives of the new administration, there are a few things which didn’t go so well.

Michigan passed the stem cell research and medical marijuana ballot initiatives, both of which are positive things for people who suffer debilitating and painful diseases, and their respective ratifications are a step away from maligned points of view that these things stand in moral opposition to goodness and rightness. They will hopefully help many people.

I said above that we chose well and we did, for the most part. However, in this time of celebrating immanent changes for the better and positive steps forward, it is important to point out our failings, lest we forget ourselves. I would like to point out, for instance, that—at the time of writing—in Florida and Arizona have decisively banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has decisively banned adoption for gay people. California is still uncertain at this time—with only 20% of the polls reporting results from their ballot initiative—though it doesn’t look good there either, which saddens me.

Update 21:51 EET: With 95% of the precincts reporting, California has passed the gay marriage amendment ban. 52% Yes, 48% No.

Why are these things important? First, they indicate that even in seemingly liberal or progressive places, conservative/bigoted rhetoric is still very powerful in convincing people to make decisions about social issues. Second, at a time when things are looking up and we have a new golden-boy—who actually speaks in a positive way about gay people in his rhetoric—we obviously still have some work to do.

What do I mean by this? I mean that we have reached a new echelon of civil rights issues. We now will have a President who is part of a formerly legally disenfranchised—currently practically disenfranchised, in many ways—section of the American populace. This being the case, we now have an even greater chance to chip away at the bigotry which still lives in our law code. This was less possible over the past 8 years during a time when the dominant political thread was busy pandering to the very people who support that bigotry in their daily lives.

We have a chance now to rectify the mistakes that were made in the past 8 years, and in some cases 16 years—let us not forget that it was President Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage act into law. The current President Elect is quite a bit more progressive than President Clinton was, but it won’t mean a hill of beans if we don’t actually progress. We can only hope that in the coming years, we will be able to overturn these bigoted state constitutional amendments and have a new kind of civil rights revolution in which people are treated equally again under the eyes of the law.

God Damned Right It’s Time

Well, if you haven’t voted already, since there seemed to be a great trend toward voting early or absentee—likely because Americans are leaving the United States like rats from a burning ship: it’s time.

The Economist finally published their endorsement for a U.S. Presidential candidate this week. I will let you guess who they chose. Or, you can read it for yourself.

I have to say that, in all honesty, I was thrilled to read it. I think that they made the right decision, so now maybe you all can make the right decision. Jeff and I voted via absentee write-in ballots, which don’t even get counted unless there is some electoral problem—which wouldn’t shock me in the least. So, if you haven’t planned on voting, or if you feel like you are too busy, or some other thing: please go and cast your vote for Barack Obama on our behalf. If you can’t vote for Obama, then Bob Barr is a good second choice.

Anyway, those are my two cents on the matter. I don’t have a whole lot of words for you right now as most of my words are being given to my papers and coursework. But I will say that I would greatly appreciate if you went and did your part and set the ball in motion for the United States to right itself a little bit. I’ll thank God one way or another when this is over, but I hope that it is thanks that I will be able to come back to the United States someday because it is the place that I remember, rather than having to stay away from it because increasingly resembles places that I would never want to go.

Thank you.