drat fink

mission creep

"the life and death of pablo escobar"

now hear this

more fucking phone repair nonsense. my expedited service call time between 8 and 10 am came and went. apparently, they came by twice but did not follow the instructions for gaining access to my apartment. that my building has no buzzer makes it difficult but hardly impossible. that they had explicit directions to call my cellphone (the guy on tuesday had no difficulty with these instructions) should have made the task manageable for anyone with a functioning brain. now i realize that isnt a prerequisite condition for the job of telephone repairman. the most ludicrous excuse that the mci rep gave me was that the repairmen 'are not required to call' a customer. so the telephone company wont use the phone to call a customer in order to facilitate a repair even if that is the only way to get at the repair. the guy on the phone kept asking me if they could access the box with a ladder. so they are willing to risk injury and jump through hoops to get to the roof when all they had to do was pick up the phone, which is their fucking business! but they are not obligated to do so. to make matters worse, the rep said that since the service was for an mci customer but the repairman worked for verizon, the verizon subcontractor would not go out of their way to get the job done, but it was the verizon repairman that fucked the line up to begin with. its not my line thats broken (but the roof access is through my apartment), its my upstairs neighbors line, which was fine until the repairman came to fix my line on tuesday. now im forced to wait possibly until six pm. how much do you want to bet this guy fucks something else up, if he even shows at all?

the great uncle

"Saddam is a loner by nature, and power increases isolation. A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself. But if he prospers through the choices he makes, if he acquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power, his options gradually and inevitably diminish. Responsibility and commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move. The tyrant's choices are the narrowest of all. His life—the nation!—hangs in the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on him—and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn't wish to hear. Power gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world. Everything comes to him second or third hand. He is deceived daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power, to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything."

brother, can you spare a dime?

i love this blogstory, lets call it "Spare Change, Spare Time."

hold the line

the fun never ends here. looks like my phone line is fixed but in the process the verizon repairman knocked out my upstairs neighbors line. unfortunately he is an mci customer and despite the fact that the verizon guy screwed it up they wont repair it. so now im waiting for mci to come and fix his line sometime between now and the end of time. and all of this (again) because my asshole neighbors have a penchant for fucking up the lines which runs beneath their access to the roof. which reminds me of the time a couple of years ago when they blamed the chinese for breaking the line. they claimed they were trying to steal long distance by tapping into our phones. the repairman and i had a good chuckle over that one. i thought the neighbors were just rude insensitive and boorish, but now im wondering if theyre not more than a bit touched in the head. they could all use a good spanking, preferably with a two by four.

we now return you to your regularly scheduled reprogramming.

now i just got a call from mci. theyre bouncing it back to verizon but they wont come until tomorrow morning. at least they called and didnt leave me waiting all day. is there some version of repairman's stockholm syndrome.

down and outsourcing

my phone is down til tuesday. so i am unofficially on hiatus.

nothing but net

"Bin Laden and his henchmen had hit on a truth about soccer. The sport, which in the U.S. is chiefly a placid entertainment for children, arouses in the rest of the world collective passions that are matched by nothing short of war. And unlike any other sport -- indeed, unlike almost any cultural phenomenon -- soccer is distinguished by its political malleability. It is used by dictators and revolutionaries, a symbol of oligarchy and anarchy. It gets presidents elected or thrown out, and it defines the way people think, for good or ill, about their countries."

puff daddies

dnArt

"All of these productions, like so much contemporary art, reflect the way we view the power of genetics — for good or otherwise — to create new, extended and possibly transformed lives for us. Yet what underlies these fantasies and fears is a simple and unsurprising fact. As Lisa Vincler, a bioethicist and assistant attorney general in Washington State, put it bluntly, "Our culture just doesn't have an attitude that's very accepting of death." Billions of dollars in new genome-based drugs will be made on the principle that we are impatient with nature's judgments. And for all its wariness, this new gene art now finds itself pulled into the colossal force field that science and money have made."

rich man, porous managers

"But as we need some version of a Warren Commission to get to the bottom of what went wrong, so we need an inverted Manhattan Project (one that will stop a bomb rather than build one) to recruit America's best minds to set things right. Mr. Ridge, a decent politician with no expertise in intelligence or counterterrorism, is a frivolous choice for security czar. Mr. Ashcroft, an aspiring J. Edgar Hoover isolated from reality by a circle of cronies, lacks the intellect and leadership ability to take on an adversary as cunning as Osama bin Laden. What he cares about most is maximizing his own power, and not just over civil liberties. His Justice Department has joined in the effort to block Mr. Ridge from consolidating the four overlapping agencies in charge of watching American borders. Now we learn, with the news of his suppression of the F.B.I. Phoenix memo, that Mr. Ashcroft will even cut the president out of the loop of law-enforcement embarrassments occurring on his watch."