Cyberquill | Blog

"You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point."

Citizens Split on Citizens United

By Cyberquill • 01/26/2012 • 10 Comments

U.S. Supreme Court Chamber

“There are real problems when people want to spend lots of money on a candidate … they’ll drown out the people who don’t have a lot of money,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recently remarked in reference to the infamous 5-4 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010, whose dissenting minority of four he had joined.

By nature, when a decision isn’t unanimous, “somebody is making a mistake,” he added.

But which side was making a mistake in Citizens United?

Was it the five-justice majority, who struck down key provisions in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of … Read More →

The Missing Amendment

By Cyberquill • 01/06/2012 • 9 Comments

Americans love their bread and circuses. The presidential election hullabaloo is in full swing, and it verges on the intolerable, as it does for almost two out of every for years. (If I see or hear the word “poll” one more time, I think I’ll have a seizure—high time to stock up on anticonvulsants, for election day is still quite a ways off.)

Here’s a curious excerpt from President Andrew Jackson’s Third Annual Message, delivered on 6 December … Read More →

Watchmakers All the Way Down

By Cyberquill • 12/27/2011 • 3 Comments

A body with a fractured calvarium is found lying face-down on the sidewalk.

The coroner explains that the victim was smashed over the head with a blunt object from behind.

No witnesses, no murder weapon, no footprints, no fingerprints, and no DNA other than the victim’s, who, by all accounts, had no enemies.

Tough filbert to crack.

Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Inspector Columbo are available to investigate, and the standard-issue law enforcement professionals are stumped.

At long last, the search for the killer is … Read More →

Omar and His Brides

By Cyberquill • 12/15/2011 • 8 Comments

Although I’ve expanded upon this topic twice before—and I promise I have absolutely nothing new to say on this front, so the following remarks are but a mildly condensed rehash of points already made here and here—I continue to find it fascinating from a civil rights perspective as well as with regard to an aspect of plain elementary logic which precludes me from hopping aboard the gay marriage “rights” bandwagon in spite of my overall sympathy for the cause itself.

Yesterday, Move On posted an entry titled Why Voting On Gay Rights Is Just Plain Stupid, which featured a snazzy shot of Rachel Maddow rocking funky Buddy Holly cheaters and a pithy civics 101 splattered across the nether regions of her caliginous Cash-y cowboy shirt—you’d think she’s about to grab her guitar and break into a medley of Peggy Sue meets A Boy Named Sue. (Not sure, though, if the words in quotes are the model’s own or if her likeness was merely hijacked for the sake of putting a professorial-looking mug to the message.)

So let me explain, once again, why reading gay [marriage] rights into the Constitution is just plain … Read More →

Fork in the Road

By Cyberquill • 11/26/2011 • 14 Comments

When you come to a fork in the road, take it out.

For whatever reason, somebody may have driven a salad fork into the blacktop. Or a pitchfork. A visual artist may have done it. Or a savage road killer.

A construction worker worker may have accidentally dropped a fork into the smoldering asphalt mix during his lunch break, whereupon the hapless piece of cutlery merged with the bituminous brew and thus ended up a fork in the road.

What else might a “fork in the road” conceivably be?

Picture your standard-issue dinner fork: it consists of a handle which, at one end, terminates into several pointed prongs called … Read More →

Rainy Day ♫

By Cyberquill • 11/23/2011 • 6 Comments

So ein Sauwetter...

I re-recorded one of my songs so as to improve upon the previous version, if ever so slightly. Eventually, I may submit this one to the Weather Channel:

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(For the rich, the tune is available for download here. For the remaining 99%, the lyrics are posted here for free.)

Counting Pregnant Women

By Cyberquill • 11/21/2011 • 7 Comments

And as for those women whose ill will you have reason to fear, admonish them first; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them; and if thereupon they pay you heed, do not seek to harm them. (The Holy Qur’an, 4:34)

According to various accounts, the Prophet Muhammad was none to thrilled about the notion of violence against women: “I wanted one thing, but God has willed another thing,” he reportedly lamented, whereupon … Read More →

Tickets for Jihad

By Cyberquill • 11/12/2011 • 8 Comments

One score and zero years ago, during a break while rehearsing a German-language production of West Side Story in which I mimed, warbled, and pirouetted along as of the Jets, the director held forth on the importance of selecting catchy titles for musicals: the shorter and simpler, the better, he explained, and he cited notable examples such as Hair, Fame, Grease, Cats, Chorus Line, and, of course, West Side Story.

Then he said Jeans would make a crack title and expressed surprise that no such show existed yet.

Speaking of “J,” may I suggest an even cracker title for a show that has yet to see the light of day:

Jihad

What a great word. A debatable doctrine, to put it mildly, but the word itself rocks. It screams to … Read More →

I Had a Dream

By Cyberquill • 11/05/2011 • 20 Comments

Most of my nocturnal dreams I don’t remember at all, and the few that do linger in my consciousness upon waking generally don’t lend themselves to verbal recounting due to excessively convoluted plot lines.

The other night, however, I had one of those simple dreams that I can (a) recall and (b) put into words quite easily.

In this dream, I attended a class of some sort: a female teacher of unspecified exterior (i.e., not necessarily the lady in the slightly photoshopped picture, which I added for purely aesthetic reasons to spiff up this post) was delivering a lecture on an unspecified subject in an unspecified language while standing next to a blackboard in a nondescript classroom. I was seated in the first row front left from the student perspective. Other students were present, although I don’t recall how many nor their ages and sexes and looks, except that one female student was seated to my left.

At one point during her lecture, the teacher wrote exactly one word on the blackboard to underscore … Read More →

The Oreo Hypothesis

By Cyberquill • 11/04/2011 • 12 Comments

If you desire to hold on to your belief that God created the cosmos on 23 October 4004 BC, as reportedly sleuthed out from Biblical data by the venerable James Ussher in the 17th century AD, then how do you respond when confronted with truckloads of non-trivial astronomical and archeological data that put the age of our planet at roughly four billion and the age of the universe at 13 billion years and change?

Piece of cake. You simply introduce an auxiliary hypothesis which says that God created the cosmos 6,000 years ago but made it look as if it were billions of years old. After all, a God powerful enough to design and create an entire cosmos is certainly powerful enough to give it a retro look that’ll dupe a bunch of nosy folks digging about for trilobites or poring over … Read More →

Let Us Dance Into the Night ♫

By Cyberquill • 10/15/2011 • 4 Comments

This is a new demo recording of a song I wrote a few years ago. It’s about trying to get a woman—or whoever else may be wearing “sexy lingerie” underneath a “pretty flower dress”—to disrobe:

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You can download it here. The lyrics are posted here.

“Fair and Balanced” and the Contrast Factor

By Cyberquill • 07/25/2011 • 6 Comments

Once upon a time, I worked at a restaurant that featured white cloth napkins, neatly folded, on glossy wooden tabletops. After some time, the owner—no idea what had possessed him—suddenly decided he wanted black napkins instead.

Fine. So henceforth, black napkins graced those wooden tabletops.

One day the laundry delivery was late, meaning our funereal napery wasn’t ready for the dinner shift, and the white napkins from before were pressed into service again.

When I came to work that night, a tidal wave of dazzling albescence almost knocked me back out the door. I thought I’d gone … Read More →

The Fox News Paradox

By Cyberquill • 07/14/2011 • 23 Comments

This network thinks Sarah Palin is a genius, that it’s OK to slaughter any Muslim you see, and that Obama is a Nazi and deserves to be overthrown.

Hard to say whether the commentator who posted the above analysis on Facebook was being serious, deliberately hyperbolic, or merely clowning around, but his words do reflect a widespread and sincerely held sentiment regarding America’s top-rated cable news network.

Jimmy Carter does not come across as a … Read More →

Live and Let Live

By Cyberquill • 05/22/2011 • 6 Comments

There is no courage without fear. Implicit in the concept of courage is the notion of acting in spite of being afraid. If you’re not worried that anything bad might happen to you in consequence of your actions, you cannot be said to be acting courageously. Knowingly entering a body of water full of ravenous sharks is courageous, but diving into a great-white-infested bay in the sincere albeit erroneous belief that it contains no sharks or that the sharks it may contain are harmless even though they aren’t, requires no courage. From your perspective, it’s no different than going for a swim in the pool. What’s courageous about that? The fact that you may end up getting ripped to shreds is irrelevant when it comes to determining your level of courage going in, which is exactly zero if you are oblivious to any potential dangers lurking in the water—as it would be if, for whatever reason, you didn’t mind getting supped upon by a big fish.

Likewise, you cannot be said to be “tolerant” unless you have a problem with that which you are being tolerant about. If rap music doesn’t bother you and never has, it makes no sense to … Read More →

The Individual Case

By Cyberquill • 05/20/2011 • 11 Comments

In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then-president of Harvard, got himself in hot water for stating that, overall, women’s aptitude for high-end science and engineering jobs was lower than men’s, and although the difference in terms of standard deviation from the mean between male and female was small, it supposedly translated into a substantial gender disparity in the available work pool. Or something like that.

I have no idea whether this disparity exists or not, and if so, how “substantial” its consequences may be. But assuming such a disparity was indeed discovered, so what? It’s just an average that says nothing about any particular individual’s aptitude.

On balance, men are probably better at fixing cars. Yet I’m a man, and I couldn’t find the battery under the hood. In fact, I may have trouble finding the hood. Women, on the other hand, are considered to be more eloquent and better endowed than men, vocabulary-wise. This, of course, doesn’t say anything about how well-endowed I am (vocabulary-wise). Women are also more given to bursting into tears in public—on-camera serial weepers Glenn Beck and John Boehner notwithstanding—and men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s, even though the oldest living person often turns out to be … Read More →

Equality for Ketchup

By Cyberquill • 04/12/2011 • 26 Comments

When you go out for brunch, there’s a good chance the ketchup you slather on your mushroom omelet is married. Anyone, such as myself, unfortunate enough to ever have toiled in restaurants is intimately familiar with the server sidework known as “marrying” the ketchup, i.e., pouring the contents of one partially filled ketchup bottle into another partially filled ketchup bottle and repeating the process until one ends up with a bunch of brimful bottles and can toss the empty ones. Everything in a dining establishment should always be filled to the top, the rationale being that the trusting customer will erroneously associate filled with new and fresh. So unless the ketchup bottle your waiter brings you is factory-sealed, be aware its contents may have been married more often than Liza Minelli and some of the red stuff you are about to consume most likely dates back to the Nixon years.

Let’s say the state of Connecticut passes a law outlawing ketchup marriage: henceforth, combining the contents of one half-empty ketchup bottle with those of another shall be illegal in … Read More →

Black Ink

By Cyberquill • 03/09/2011 • 16 Comments

You are my favorite visitor.

Absent nonverbal clues, you have no way of knowing whether I’m being sincere, sarcastic, affectionately teasing, polite in a perfunctory way, or none of the above.

As written and in isolation, “You are my favorite visitor” could mean you are my absolute favorite visitor, my least favorite visitor, that I’m just goofing around, or anything in between.

During an acting class, a teacher of mine once opened a play to a random page, held it up, and asked what this was. Student responses ranged from “a play” to “a scene from a play” to “a page in a play.”

The correct answer? … Read More →

A Novel Window to the Soul

By Cyberquill • 03/06/2011 • 8 Comments

The Naked Therapist

Her eyes may be the windows to her soul, but her unclad epidermis is the window to the souls of her clients—at least according to Sarah White, New York’s famous “Naked Therapist” and most likely the only therapist in the country that might be able to sway Charlie Sheen to sign up for the counseling he so desperately needs.

Ms. White claims to be “currently studying psychology and collecting research for a dissertation on Naked Therapy” and that during her $150/hour web-counseling sessions, she uses the “power of arousal” to help her clients gain more control over their lives

And, presumably, to help herself gain more control over her clients’ wallets.

Prior to venturing into psychotherapy, Ms. White labored as a web designer—you guessed it: The Naked Coder—and I predict that once the counseling cash begins to dry up, she’ll take a stab at real estate and market herself as The Naked Broker, in which capacity she’ll be slowly peeling off her clothes while showing luxury condominiums to prospective buyers in order to … Read More →

The Bigger Clown

By Cyberquill • 03/02/2011 • 21 Comments

Bill O'Reilly

In my previous post, I discussed a segment on The O’Reilly Factor in which host Bill O’Reilly had stated several times that President Obama was not a Muslim, that he was not born abroad, and that everyone who thought otherwise was “insane.”

The following day, on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, after Mr. O’Donnell had referred to his prime time nemesis on Fox News as “the Bill O’Reilly character played by Bill O’Reilly on the long-running Fox News sitcom The O’Reilly Factor,” Mr. O’Donnell’s guest David Brock, chairman of the progressive watchdog site Media Matters for America, said this:

The truth is everything Bill O’Reilly said in that segment is false.

This stunning revelation followed right on the heels of Mr. O’Donnell having shown a clip of Bill O’Reilly asserting that “sane, clear-thinking people understand the president is not a Muslim, and he wasn’t … Read More →

Mullah Obama?

By Cyberquill • 02/15/2011 • 17 Comments

Surveys have shown that a non-trivial percentage of Americans (roughly one in five) believe President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Chances are an even greater percentage of Americans hold the Fox News Channel in large measure responsible for perpetuating this perception, along with the notion that Mr. Obama was born not on Oahu, but in Kenya.

A few months ago, former President Jimmy Carter said this on CNN:

A lot of gullible folks in the United States actually believe what Fox [News] puts forward as facts, when most of it is just complete distortions. And they’ve also attempted to twist around what [Barack Obama's] religious faith is and whether or not he’s an American and so forth.

So what type of information exactly does Fox … Read More →

If Words Have No Meaning

By Cyberquill • 01/17/2011 • 19 Comments

From today’s edition of the Washington Post:

Federal authorities are planning to move the trial of the alleged gunman in the Jan. 8 mass shooting in Tucson to San Diego because of extensive pretrial publicity in Arizona, federal law enforcement sources said Sunday night.

Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution:

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. [emphasis added]

The Tuscon shooting on 8 January 2011 was clearly a crime, was clearly committed within a state, and my copy of the Constitution does not contain a trial location exception for “pretrial publicity” or anything else.

What is government if words have no meaning?

Carnage on Your Corner

By Cyberquill • 01/12/2011 • 10 Comments

So some feeble-minded twerp with a semi-automatic Glock showed up at a political event in front of a Tucson Safeway—apparently not as safe as the name implies—and opened fire. Twenty people were hit, six of them fatally, yet the primary target miraculously survived in spite of a bullet having entered her forehead above the left eye, traversed her entire left cerebral hemisphere, and exited through the back of her skull. Although the extent of Rep. Giffords’s ultimate recovery cannot yet be foreseen, it seems that at least one positive side-effect of the protracted U.S. military engagement in the Middle East has been … Read More →

The Bison at the Beaver Pond

By Cyberquill • 12/19/2010 • 21 Comments

From Bush to beavers. If only there were a Pulitzer for most seamless segue.

I grew up near a small creek. Come each spring, my buddies and I would set about constructing a dam at a particular spot in the creek. The dam itself and the little lake it created served no practical purpose whatsoever—we had no plans to add a power plant and earn ourselves candy & milkshake money by supplying the neighborhood with extra electricity, nor did the reservoir ever grow large enough to allow for meaningful swimming or boating. The creek simply needed a dam. Why? Because it needed a dam, dammit!

And so a dam we put up and maintained throughout the summer months until autumn rains turned our pacific little creek into a raging … Read More →

From Crawford With Book

By Cyberquill • 11/27/2010 • 13 Comments

George W. Bush has risen from the Lone Star State and is making the talk-show rounds to promote his autobiography Decision Points. He says he has few regrets, loved serving the country, gave it his all, is glad to be back home in Crawford, and will leave the final verdict on his presidency to future historians.

Fair enough.

On her most recent visit on Letterman, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, sporting a pair of spiffy blue spectacles, mused that “the most interesting thing about Obama’s first year is how crazy the opposition has gone in reaction to him.” Verily, Ms. Maddow must be ravaged with fascination over the opposition’s decade-long-and-counting state of exasperation over … Read More →

None of Your Business

By Cyberquill • 10/30/2010 • 34 Comments

NOYB

If I ask you what’s your favorite ice cream flavor, what was the last Hollywood movie you saw, and whether you’ve ever been to Vermont, chances are you’ll answer my questions honestly and with little hesitation, provided you’re in the mood to chat in the first place.

If I move on to inquiring about your ATM PIN, your kinkiest sexual fantasy, and your rap sheet, you’ll probably balk at disclosing these items, at least initially, and perhaps you’ll choose to withhold them for good.

Obviously, how many slices from which segments of your overall information pie you’re game to share with me will hinge on a variety of factors, such as the nature and depth of our relationship, the time and place of our conversation, your upbringing, and how many … Read More →