9-11

Once again I found myself in trouble at the Los Angeles International Airport, and once again it was (arguably) my own damn fault. Last Thursday I flew Southwest to Providence, Rhode Island to testify in court on behalf of my dad, who was in the midst of a textbook “frivolous lawsuit”. I detest being late in general, and even more so when it comes to flying. I am the guy that gets to the airport at least two hours in advance. My adventure began almost as soon as I got out of my friend’s car.

I was told by the Southwest skycaps at the curbside check-in that my flight was canceled. “What?! Why?!” I exclaimed. I was told by the first skycap that it was because of inclement weather in Rhode Island. He directed me to his superior, who told me that it was because of a mechanical problem with the plane. (Much later in the day I would be told that the flight was canceled because there simply weren’t enough people wanting to fly from LA to Providence that day to justify sending an entire plane on the route.) She took my luggage and got me on the next flight, due to leave for Phoenix in three hours.

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Now is a very good time to go and read what I wrote five years ago.

And when you’re done with that, go watch Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on 9/11. [link via letsgetnuts]

from an episode of Dennis Miller on CNBC:

Dennis Miller:  When Clinton was President, I found him to be a really reprehensible human being. I didn’t like him. … But on a day-to-day basis, him being President never really bothered me. I thought, “Well, listen, Bill, it’s a tough job. I’m behind ya.” I didn’t like him. I thought he was a bad guy, but I remember thinking, “I’m not gonna whine about it too much because it’s a tough gig.” If Bush is re-elected, will it upset your day-to-day life?

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It’s been one week.

So this is the first anniversary of sorts. And next week it will be two weeks. And then it will be a month since. And then it will be six months. And then a year. And then five years.

When all the networks went back to “regularly scheduled programming” it felt wrong. I’m not trying to pick a scab or dwell or anything like that, but it seems like it’s still right here, y’know? It seems like it just happened this morning. I don’t like the idea of “getting back to normal”. I’m not talking about some demented, bleeding-heart, “the people that died can’t go back to normal” empathy. I just mean that it doesn’t feel right to “go back to normal”. What the #$*@ is normal? Nothing is normal.

Do you have sticky notes on your monitor? Post-It© notes? Of course you do. Here’s a good one for you. Write it on a Post-It and place it on the edge of your screen so you can see it all day. If you work for the federal government, get it tattooed on your forehead.

Insufficient Resources <> Inefficient Use of Resources

I heard for the umpteenth time this morning a representative of my government using the phrase “insufficient resources” to explain why his department was incompetent. In this instance it was the head of INS and he was telling dear NPR listeners that his IT department wasn’t capable of handling the new stresses of post-September 11 security because of “insufficient resources”.

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This month in Maxim magazine there is a special Anti-Terrorism section. One page details several excellent gadgets you can buy to protect yourself from … well … bad guys.

Check out some of the crazy stuff you can buy:

• SpySite: a ton of cool toys
• portableelectricgenerators.com: the URL says it all …
• Approved Gas Masks.com: Gas masks galore!
• Delta Scientific Corporation: Destroy a 15,000 lb truck at 50 mph!
• Sensar-Stellar: Put an invisible sense-field around your house!
• Pedsco Canada Ltd., makers of the Bomb-Disposal Robot
• SecurityPlanet.com, for all your stun-gun needs …

So it’s been six months now. I’m still thinking about what I said when it had been one week. It’s very strange to look at posts pre-9/11 and try to imagine what I was thinking when I wrote them. What world was that? Such an odd date - 09/11/2001 - has suddenly become the temporal demarcation line for millions of people. Billions of people.

I grow old … I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I just realized this weekend that September 10, 2001 was the one-year anniversary of the day I arrived in Los Angeles. I’ve been here a year and six months now.

Americans share President Bush’s harsh feelings about Iran and Iraq, but attitudes about the third “Axis of Evil” country outlined in his State of the Union address — North Korea — are more up in the air.

The new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows that 82% of Americans are willing to use the word “evil” to describe the government of Iraq, while 69% say the government of Iran is evil. But only 54% say the government of North Korea is evil. Americans are also less convinced that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States than they are that Iraq or Iran has these weapons.
There is strong support among Americans, in general, for the concept of acting to prevent countries that sponsor terrorism from threatening America or its allies with weapons of mass destruction.

I wonder why Americans are “less convinced that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States.” It only takes a simple AskJeeves query to find numerous pages discussing North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

Doh! I tossed an airball this morning. I was listening to The Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN radio on my way to work. Tony was asking if one of the actors from the old TV show Gunsmoke was still alive.

I remembered that one of my previous bosses, Kelly, created a site where you could bet on when “famous” personalities were going to die. I called ESPN (1-888-SAY-ESPN) and, miraculously, got on national radio with Tony K! I said I was “Dave from LA” and that he should visit deadpool.com to get his answer.

Unfortunately I was wrong. The correct URL for Kelly’s site is stiffs.com, not deadpool.com.

I had already arrived at my office so I didn’t even get to hear myself on the air, but I’m going to guess Tony ripped on me when he went to deadpool.com and found some lame Sept. 11 retribution site. Oh well.

“The important thing is to never stop questioning.” That quote is often attributed to Einstein. I cannot confirm that he ever actually said this. But I doubt I would hear many arguments if I suggested he was one of the greatest thinkers in history.

Is “questioning” really all that important? I guess it depends on how you interpret “important”. At some point in my life I decided to take that path. “Questioning” … “knowing” … is very important to me.

It’s even more important to me than “happiness”. At caterina.net right now there are some questions about … well … questioning. Caterina says:

I also read a study once of a conjectural connection between intelligence, depression and a “sense of reality”: they tested people who identified themselves as “happy, content” and people who identified themselves as “unhappy, depressed” and gave them a test to assess their knowledge of history and current events. The “happy” people had no idea what went on or what was going on, whereas the “unhappy” people did. Whether they knew these things because they were depressed type people or were depressed because they knew these things is hard to guess.

I know from experience that there is a very definite correlation between how aware I am of current events and how happy I am. I don’t even need to use the example of my extreme “awareness” during the weeks immediately following September 11 to illustrate my point. A much simpler analysis can be made by using the weeks surrounding the whole “Cuban-raft-boy-Elian” episode.

I remember that the events of this boy’s life so overwhelmed the media that I simply stopped listening. I went from being able to tell you which specific bills were before Congress and the names of all of the Cabinet members to barely knowing what the day of the week was. I went from listening to NPR for two or three hours each day and reading the newspaper to listening to nothing but my CD player and reading only mind-numbingly boring tomes on database access.

If you’re waiting for some flash of brilliance here, you’re not going to get it. I apologize, but I’m just thinking out loud now. It’s amazing, sometimes, how reading someone else’s blog will spark a whirlwind of confusion and contemplation in my mind.

In the end I am - and always will be - someone who believes that it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And in the end I think … well … the love you take … is equal to the love …

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I think that the best linking weblog on line right now is Follow Me Here. Every time I visit I find a half-dozen or so excellent articles. Eliot must be a voracious reader, and his comments are insightful and thought-provoking. If you have never been to his site, go right now. Here are a few of his more recent links that I found particularly interesting:

· A few months ago - just after Sept. 11 - I wrote a little rant about parallel universes and how I deal with the concept of infinity. I never claimed that it was an original idea, or my own. But I like it. It seems like this theory, which dates back to at least 1957, has sparked some renewed interest. The Economist has a very enlightening and much more scientific explanation of a theory of infinite universes than the one I provided. If you’re as fascinated by the concept of infinity and its implications as I am, you’ll appreciate the Economist’s essay.

· The London-based eZine Spiked published an article on “the Singleton Society” last week. I’ll give you an excerpt here, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

… the age-old tension between the aspiration for self-realisation and commitment is difficult to resolve. In the past this tension could be contained through the widespread influence of the ideology of romantic love - which celebrated the value of self-realisation through an intimate encounter with another person. The synthesis of autonomy and commitment helped diffuse conflicts of interests, at least for a brief period of time.
But the ideology of romantic love could only effectively contain conflicts of interests because women were expected to renounce their desire for autonomy in favour of maintaining the relationship. Since the 1970s, this one-sided arrangement has come unstuck. At a time when women seek to develop themselves no less than men, love ceases to provide the focus for an ideology that can sustain durable commitment.

· The Crackpot Index claims to be, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.” It’s very funny, more so if you often find yourself trying to debunk those with seriously high levels of bunk.

The Sept. 11 attacks increased, rather than decreased, Americans’ expressed satisfaction with the way things are going in the country — one of the most intriguing public opinion shifts of 2001. Gallup’s December reading on satisfaction, at 70%, is the highest since February 1999. The October and November satisfaction ratings were 67% and 65%, respectively. This satisfaction rating averaged just 50% in nine readings in 2001 before Sept. 11.
The American public has evidenced resilience across a variety of other measures as well. About six in 10 Americans are “extremely” or “very” confident that the
American way of life will be preserved in the future.

“It’s not yet clear where bin Laden was,” Rumsfeld added, “but he seemed to be speaking from some sort of gigantic, bombed-out litter box.”

The airlines are dropping prices like mad lately. I can hardly believe that Delta Web Fares is offering round trip tickets from LAX to Rome, Italy for only $314. That ticket would’ve been triple that a few months ago. I saw a commercial yesterday advertising $99 - $199 one-way tickets on American to anywhere in the continental US. I’ve flown twice since September 11 - well, four times, actually, since they were round trip - but after the most recent New York crash I’m pretty wary of flying. I just don’t trust security at the airports, and I don’t know that it’s going to get any better any time soon. I’m going to have to fly for the holidays, of course. What are you gonna do?