The Drug War Requires a Police State

Interesting thought experiment by Kevin Carson considering how the War on Drugs would fare in a society in which the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution were respected according to their plain meaning and spirit. "Not well" is the short version.

Carson concludes:

If you want the Drug War, you must sacrifice the Bill of Rights and the due process rights of the accused, and submit to a police state in which you have no rights or protections whatsoever.

I would tend to put this the other way round, that the Drug War (like its antecedents, including Prohibition) exists because of its impact on due process rights: if drugs didn't exist they'd need to be invented, because the same rights that are essential to democracy are obstacles to capitalism.

Six Down, Something Like 300 To Go

As I mentioned earlier, I went back and tried Richard Maltby's first Harper's crossword. It was pretty easy! I've since printed out and solved five others.

The clues seem easier than in current puzzles. I do like that some of the interesting recurring puzzle varieties (dedicated dodecahedron, diametricode, righTangles) were in use right from the start.

At the same time, it seems like the clues in the older puzzles are not quite as "fair" as in his present-day puzzles. That was actually something that prompted me to look up older Maltby crosswords when I wanted more than one puzzle a month and found the ones on offer from the UK too UK-centric, while Frank Lewis's for the Nation strike me as insufficiently Ximenean. But yeah, so one of these first few Maltby clues included "Change livers (6)," which is easy enough, but which he would never use today.

But yeah, fun, in any case. I subscribed to Harper's somewhere around 2002 and haven't finished every puzzle since then, though I've given pretty much all of them the old college "try." So I have about three hundred to catch up to that point. That's what, two years' worth? Maybe I should ration them.

Literary Mashups?

I was thinking the other day that it would be cool to get some Project Gutenberg texts, typeset them nicely in some free document processor, make a cool cover image and then put them up for sale at one of those digital print-on-demand sites. Or even just have a series of classics printed up for your personal library. There must be people doing stuff like that, right?

And then I was wondering, does anyone take advantage of any of the copylefted or public domain texts out there and actually modify them significantly? Like adding a whole bunch of illustrations, or even changing the plot or removing characters. Instead of trying to ban Huck Finn from school libraries, conservatives should be publishing their own rewrites where Huck does the right thing and turns Jim over to the authorities.

Anyway, keep an eye out for my upcoming masterpiece, 10,000 Leagues Under Ulysses, featuring stills from Lady Frankenstein.

Wow

Found this review of The Recognitions:

When carefully and thoughtfully read a rich bounty of rewards awaits the attentive reader. I have had many intimate moments with this work when, perhaps sitting in a coffee shop, I'll be involved in a particularly frustrating piece of dialogue and I'll laugh out loud at Gaddis' razor-sharp eye for the frailty of human interactions...

Too perfect. I suppose furious masturbation does technically qualify as an "intimate moment."

Razor-sharp eye indeed.

Pointless Satire

This JSF op-ed about how we should eat dogs is pretty silly. I think anyone who's ever really thought about the taboos surrounding which animals we'll eat and which we won't has come to the same conclusion, that it's to a large extent arbitrary with very little basis in reason or any kind of absolute ethical standard. But who cares?

Foer tries to imply that the meat of all the animals euthanized in shelters goes to waste, but then he immediately acknowledges that in actuality a lot of those bodies are turned into feed for other animals. He calls that an "inefficient and bizarre middle step," but of course it isn't: our pets and livestock have to eat something, after all, so why not give them the stuff we don't want?

And it's not like if someone found an unidentified cow wandering along the side of the highway, turned it over to animal control, and nobody claimed it, that it would then be chopped up into hamburger and sold at the supermarket. We're not nearly as careful about monitoring the health of the animals we eat as we should be, but we certainly don't consume "strays" of any species, and I doubt any (perfectly legal!) puppy mill comes anywhere close to satisfying the standards for farms raising animals for human consumption.

Finally, Foer avoids the almost obligatory "Chinese restaurant" jokes, but only just barely. I have no idea what I'm talking about and will gladly retract if I am wrong, but I am going to go ahead anyway and call bullshit on this little factoid: "the Sino-Korean character for 'fair and proper' (yeon) literally translates into 'as cooked dog meat is delicious.'" Sure it is. The Filipino recipe for dog stew that begins with slaughtering instructions is also way out of line, again for obvious reasons.

But yeah, anyway, retarded essay. The old rule of thumb, that any piece of satire that has to include the phrase "modest proposal" in its title or subtitle is not worth the reader's time, holds up once again.

Puzzling!

I was paroozing some crossword-related discussion boards, specifically wondering if the fact that I only ever do Richard Maltby's puzzles in Harper's means I'm really just a fan of Maltby's rather than cryptics in general.

I have definitely been completely frustrated trying to solve English cryptics (which require quite a bit of general knowledge), and also found the clues in Frank Lewis's Nation offerings to follow the cryptic "rules" much less strictly than I was used to, though maybe they were just going over my head.

In any case, someone mentioned that Maltby started setting puzzles for Harper's in January 1976, and he prefaced the first one with a nice little introduction to cryptics (subscribers-only link, images posted below) that even includes his "mental repunctiation" refrain. So I'm going to try that one and see whether he had that style from the beginning.

Also! it appears that Stephen Sondheim wrote puzzles for New York! Weird! They did a blog post with his first three. Apparently he is credited with developing the "US style" of cryptic. I am going to try those out as well.

PUZZLE

TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES
By Travis Scholtens




Eight answers from the Across clues must first be altered before they can be entered in the diagram. Naturally, word lengths are omitted for these clues.

When the diagram is completed, the entry at 15A will be a familiar slogan describing the alteration.

Altered entries are common words and contain no proper nouns. Clued answers include one proper noun. 27A is an alternate spelling. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to the last puzzle appears after the jump.

across

   1.  After being fixed, paler cat is calmer

   5.  Shows are inside: second-rate, front of stage (5)

   9.  Sounds likely to be grounds for a lawsuit (5)

10.  Bordeaux cartel broken up

11.  World government players regarded to be intact

13.  Speaker czar

14.  Ovation less enthusiastic, initially: bravo! (3)

15.  See instructions (3,4,3)

18.  Frolicked in reversible scarlet cloak

20.  Old pie goes bad, becomes water molecule, e.g. (6)

22.  Chats about gym class, love, urges (6)

24.  Sweet drink from bar at center thrown back

25.  Pains leave shore with fore moved aft (4)

26.  Alarming contents of NASCAR in German

27.  Sore on eyelid in crust (yellow) (4)

28.  Put into concrete form, a nice rant goes off the rails

down

   2.  Beginning of novel buried amidst property claim sheets (5)

   3.  Core shown in bas-relief (3)

   4.  Overjoyed to be part of a family with no head (6)

   5.  Buffets for smokes (5)

   6.  Audible shaft moisture to perform again (4)

   7.  Everybody else up late? (2,2)

   8.  Convenience store blends test puree (9)

10.  Lions missing a thousand toy bricks (4)

11.  Great places mix up oxtail soup with no lox (7)

12.  Until death preserves Iberian diacritic (5)

13.  Thoroughly hinder packaging record with missing note (6)

16.  Not pro game: without me, it's a Cuban line dance (5)

17.  Wide awake right after beer (5)

19.  Project beginnings of each movie in theater (4)

21.  Write new leader (leader of English colony) (4)

23.  Tails-up nickels are evil (3)

I Wonder

When Microsoft named the ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem method, did they name it that way so it would sound like you were talking about something involving a "pool cue" when you said it aloud?

Bodega

This is by my house:

"Privatized" Utilities

Love it: phone companies still cater to the needs of shareholders rather than those of the public, but when it comes to their communications with the government, well that's a state secret or something. State capitalism's privatization of public services once again gives ordinary citizens the worst of both worlds.

I also love love love the argument that any sort of conversation should remain private in the context of defending the telecoms from charges of eavesdropping on their customers.

Cycling Mugs

I spent all morning on these:



The minimum pixel size option on Google image search is a tremendous boon to the casual zazzler.

Listen to the Rich Guy

Robert had shared this Joel Spolsky essay on "duct-tape programmers" the other day, and it was sort of bugging me. In searching for it again, I found that it's already received its share of criticism.

It did make me wonder what made Spolsky so willing to promote Jamie Zawinski's advice despite a lot of it appearing to me to be pretty badly misguided. And I guess it has to be because, whatever happened to Netscape later on, he got his zillions of dollars, making him a success by the only meaningful metric of capitalism. And therefore someone whose wisdom should be respected.

Finally!

Terrible piece in the Times about next Tuesday's runoff for comptroller. "Sparks finally fly," but not word one about whether any of the candidates' spark-emitting accusations might have some validity.

Sadly not unusual when it comes to political reporting, but weird in light of the fact that the same reporter profiled each of candidates John Liu and David Yassky in yesterday's edition. Those are good articles! Very informative! And yet from today's piece you'd think the Times couldn't care less about informing voters, four days before they go to the polls.

And in More Mixtape Non-News

I never listened to Lil' Wayne's "rock" stuff when it was coming out. How did nobody tell me about his take on an "End of the World as We Know It"/"We Didn't Start the Fire"–style laundry list of modern evils, "Politics"?

Love, hate, size, race, grime, grace, lip injection, lethal injection, lip injection
Lethal injection, your assumption, economical destruction, breast reduction, police corruption
Love, hate, size, race, grime, grace, crime rate, lip injection, lethal injection
Lip injection, lethal injection, breast reduction, police corruption, your assumption
Economical destruction, breast reduction, police corruption, your assumption, economical destruction

Amazing.

Dips of the Woooooorld

The French Dip, which is actually a roast beef sandwich that you DIP.

Invented by France, hence the name.

Dips of the World!

Artichoke Dip, coming to us from Middle America.

Dips of the World

Dips of the World.

Guacamole of Mexico.

Google Fails Me!

My street cleaning program appears to be working just fine, except for the fact that for some reason Google never sent me either of my SMS reminders this morning. I looked at the calendar and they're set up and everything; I just never got the message. And it worked perfectly on Monday!

It cost me a $115 ticket for double parking, though thankfully my neighbor alerted me before they could tow my car.

Clearly, I'll need a text-messaging system more robust than reminders in Google calendars. AppEngine will let me set up cron jobs (nullus), which I should then be able to use to trigger a message via Zeep.

Another SMS Thing

I keep track of my checking account balance and track all my bills in a sparsely populated spreadsheet, with a row for each calendar day and a column for each category of credit or debit (paycheck, transfer to savings, gas bill, ATM, &c.). The resulting balance is tracked in the rightmost column.

My practice has been, when withdrawing money from an ATM machine, to pocket a paper receipt until such time as I find myself before my computer and may record the transaction.

So I made another App Engine service that lets me enter ATM withdrawals into a database,

,

and publishes monthly accounts as XML,

,

which are then consumed by Google spreadsheets' ImportXML() function:

.

I called it "A.T.Them," and once I had it working, I added an endpoint to handle Zeep operations. Now when I withdraw money, I can decline the offer of a paper receipt, saving some trees, and text "atthem 61.50" or whatever and it will pop up right in my spreadsheet.

I can't figure out how to post the source without Blogger mangling the HTML, but it's all trivial in any case. One note is that ImportXML() doesn't do any kind of authentication, so the monthly lists of all my ATM withdrawals are not protected by anything beyond my keeping the URI's at which they may be found a secret.

Likewise (and this vulnerability, such as it is, applies equally to any Zeep service), someone who knew the URI that handles Zeep requests and my Zeep subscriber ID could impersonate "atthem" messages and populate my spreadsheet with junk. It's easy enough to add some sort of challenge and response to Zeep operations, but I didn't bother.

Cyclones vs. Spinners

Sarah and I biked down to Coney Island yesterday for the Cyclones' final regular-season game. Playoff slots had already been determined, so there wasn't anything at stake, which might have been why both teams kept putting in new pitchers. It was weird.

Carlos Beltran was playing for Brooklyn on rehab. He had a solid hit for his second at-bat, and some good if unspectactular fielding, but I think he struck out swinging a couple times. Not really a big hitting day for anyone, actually, with a really strong wind coming in off the water.

Ultimately an exciting game, with Brooklyn attempting a rally in the ninth but unable to overcome the 4-2 deficit. We were glad we brought sweaters, and didn't stick around for the fireworks show scheduled for ninety minutes later.

The ride down was fun, it was our first time going down into Brooklyn from the new neighborhood, which really just means we take Bedford down and then go West on Caton Ave where before we would have been going East on it. I think next time I'm going to stay on Bedford and take Church instead; maybe it was just West Indian Day Parade traffic last night, but I think Caton is usually pretty crazy.