Question #118: Unidentified ≠ Alien

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Do you think those people down in Texas really saw a UFO?
- Scott Baio Gave Me Pinkeye

Dear Scott Baio Gave Me Pinkeye,
  I have absolutely no doubt that people in Stephenville, Texas did see several UFOs on the night of January 8th. I am, however, just as certain that they didn't see a spaceship full of aliens out for a night of "probe the redneck."

  The key is the U in "UFO." To belabor the point just a bit, it stands for "unidentified." I'll spare you the dictionary definition, but it's worth pointing out that any object or light in the sky that the viewer can't place is a UFO. I'd bet that the nearly every person in the industrialized world has, at some point, seen something in the sky and not been quite clear as to what that something was. Yet there has never been any compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

  It's a pet peeve of mine that "unidentified" has become popular shorthand for "alien." Despite the squawking of true believers, nobody has ever produced evidence for alien origin of UFOs. Read up on any major UFO sighting, and you'll find a perfectly rational, and entirely mundane, explanation. Lo and behold, the Air Force Reserve has confirmed that ten F-16 fighter jets from the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve were conducting training flights over North Central Texas that night.

  It's unfortunate that the Air Force Reserve initially disclaimed any military aircraft activity in the area. Doubtless the conspiracy theorists will seize on this revision as "evidence" that the government is covering up something it doesn't want us to know about. This might seem odd to you, the rational reader, but I promise it will happen. It takes a special kind of crazy to believe in a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about alien visitors. National governments are large, unwieldy organizations. They employ multitudes of personnel who rate at all levels of incompetence. The idea that even the most ruthlessly efficient national government could successfully suppress such a sensational revelation is just silly. The idea that the same government which brought you Watergate, Filegate and countless other -gate suffixed scandals could keep a lid on such big news is unfathomably absurd.

  Supposed extraterrestrial hijinks always make a little sad, and a lot purple-faced with rage. I'm a sci-fi geeeeek. I want so hard for intelligent alien life to be real, and for interstellar travel to be practical. To my continued frustration, we've found no evidence to suggest that either of these things is true. Whenever I read about a kerfluffle involving odd lights in the sky, a small part of me dares to hope that this will be the time when it turns out to be something truly exciting. 'Tis a small hope, repeatedly dashed. It's annoying that credulous assbaskets can't stop setting me up for disappointment. It's infuriating that paranoid nutbags retreat to insane theories about covert shenanigans, rather than dealing with the woe like the rest of us. I can only hope that, if the aliens ever show up and start handing out anal probes, they start with this guy.

I Have Nothing To Say To You

  Instead, I offer you a list of 100 crazy quotes, courtesy of Fundies Say the Darndest Things! God commands you to click, and discover the wonders of his greatest creation.

Tales From SEPTA: That Lady With The Hair

  Oh, Jesus Christ, the hair. It was supposed to be – had been, about six weeks earlier – red. Purple goop, squeezed from a tube and smeared on unsuspecting follicles resulted in a red that, given candlelight and sufficient squinting, could probably have passed for natural. After a month and a half, the weak winter sun had stripped the pigment, leaving behind a tarnished brass like a trumpet pulled from the rubble of a house fire. Under the fluorescent bus lights, it managed to appear vaguely auburn, brown, and a weird purplish green at the same time. My cones screamed in frustration as they tried to reconcile the conflicting signals, while my rods chuckled and went back to sleep. I've never been so happy to have a book to read.

Question #117: Holiday 2007 Postmortem

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What's your favorite part of the holidays?
- Elf Help

Dear Elf Help,
  My favorite part of the Winter goodwillgasm is when it's finally over. The trappings are packed away and the insane amount of refuse and discarded wrapping is hauled away to the landfill. Radio stations shelve the all-Christmas tunes and go back to their brain-numbingly horrible soft rock and adult contemporary schedules. People drop the rotting veneer of holiday spirit and go back to being unbelievable pricks.

  And yet, there are nuggets of real enjoyment buried amongst the vast strip mine of treacle, especially for veteran cranks like myself. One of those compact bundles of corrosive glee is the 2004 animated train wreck The Polar Express.

  Screenwriter/director Robert Zemeckis is either a black-hearted, cynically commercial holiday troll or a pathetically desperate believer in the secular magic of Christmas. Whatever his motivation, Zemeckis and his team of animators managed to turn a 32 page children's book into a feature length Christmas freakout.

  I love this movie because it fails so spectacularly. It wants so hard to be a warm parable about the wonder of the season and the magic of belief, punctuated by family-friendly thrills. But despite all efforts, it steams right past the village of Holiday Charm and derails just outside of Fucking Creepyville. Here are just a few of the unsettling elements of this Christmas creepfest.

The Animation: The rich, warm painted illustrations of the book are replaced by a gasping attempt at photorealistic animation. Everything is rendered in crisp, hyperaware detail, which makes the human characters really odd to look at. To be fair, the animators are pitting their processing power against millennia of evolution teaching our brains how to interpret human faces. The result crashes right into the Uncanny Valley; the faces are too detailed to be cartoonish, but not quite human enough to be... well, human. As a result, the non-intoxicated viewer can't help but twitch a little bit every time one of the human faces is in close-up.

The Scary Train: Let's start with the fact that this train is clearly haunted. Not only is there a hobo who appears to live on top of the train, but he's a DEAD HOBO GHOST. Maybe it's just because I'm old, but I suspect I'd be too freaked out by the fact that I'd been hanging out with a dead hobo to be all that impressed by meeting Santa.
  Next, let's talk about safety features. Rather, let's talk about the total lack of safety features. Why is a train, specifically intended to transport curious pre-adolescents, designed in such a way that a passenger can scamper onto the roof? And why does the track seem to be laid out in such a way as to pretty much guarantee mortal peril? Again, maybe I'm showing my age, but I think the pants-filling scares of nearly crashing and derailing several times, not to mention almost falling off the top of a moving train riding on what is essentially a roller coaster track, would put me right out of the mood to believe in a benevolent winter spirit.

The North Pole: Santa's Fortress Of Holi-tude is usually depicted as a homey place, with fireplaces and overstuffed armchairs and earnest elven workers making wooden toys by hand. Santa keeps the naughty and nice lists, but nobody worries about how he actually knows the moral balance of each child's soul. He just knows.
  This is, of course, an absurdly quaint and sentimental notion. To manufacture and ship billions of toys a year would require a huge facility, armies of workers, and assembly line automation that would make Henry Ford's colon explode. To give Zemeckis credit, his North Pole, modeled after a railroad car manufacturing complex, tackles this conundrum. It's huge, cavernous, and mechanized to the hilt.
  There are two issues with this approach. First, it sort of undermines the whole "belief" message. Who needs to believe in magic when there's a giant conveyor belt shuffling thousands of machine-wrapped packages off to be shipped. Second, the whole place is creepier than Grandma's thong drawer. It's massive and empty. Christmas carols play on a skipping record player, and tinny speakers echo in the vast spaces. (If Hideo Nakata ever directs a glacially-paced horror movie set at Christmas, he'll have his soundtrack.) A skeleton crew of elves mutters Yiddish slang while keeping tabs on the children of the world, peering at them on a giant bank of video monitors straight out of Orwell's dream journal. Giant machinery sits brooding, lurching to life without anyone at the controls. It's the antithesis of the traditional North Pole, and the least heartwarming place outside Hades.

The Elves: So much is wrong with the movie's version of Santa's traditional indentured servants that I have a hard time even seeing them. My brain tries to focus on other details of the scene, so that I won't have to look at them directly. To start with, they suffer from the same not-quite-lifelike facial animation plaguing the human characters. This is compounded by the exaggerated features that are supposed, I guess, to look comical, but just come off as unsettling. They look like the world's sprightliest nursing home patients, with big floppy ears, long pointy noses, and eyes that scream about centuries of cabin fever. All of this is stuck onto tiny bodies so small that, even to the 10 year old protagonist, they're running around just below eye level.
  To make matters worse, there are millions of the little lunatics. When they all pack into the square surrounding the North Pole, it looks like an inside out ant colony.
  The final straw is the Steven Tyler elf, who appears to sing about how the elves all rock out after Santa departs. That guy is weird enough looking, and the transposition of his features onto such a cringe-inducing character design kind of makes one wish he'd done us all the favor of overdosing when he was still doing heroin.

Know-It-All (That Fucking Kid With The Yellow Pajamas And The Horn-Rimmed Glasses): All of the other kids sound like kids. Why are they hanging out with a "child" who is clearly a middle-aged Jewish man?

Tom Hanks: I respect Tom Hanks. He's a good actor and, based on interviews I've heard, seems like a genuinely decent person. That said, why are we forced to pretend that he's a competent voice actor? Was there no other voice talent available that week? Hanks had to voice the Father, the Conductor, the Dead Hobo, the Janitor, the Guy With The Wart, and God? All of these characters are clearly Tom Hanks. The small affectations he puts on aren't enough to distinguish any of the voices from the others. Why do we have to pretend that they are?

The Difficulty Of Believing: Let me say that I am a skeptic. I like to see evidence before I believe in things, especially extraordinary things like, say, a fat guy in a sleigh who delivers toys to billions of kids in a single night. That said, how much do you need to experience before you start to buy the party line? A bell flies off a reindeer's harness and lands at your feet and now you finally buy it all? We're talking about a kid who has literally climbed into Santa's actual toy bag, and been dropped out of the sky into his sleigh. Somebody tell the Tooth Fairy that she'd better punch this kid in the nuts if she doesn't have all night.

  In short, it seems like the message of this film is something like "you'd better believe, or we'll freak you out until you do." Alright, Mr. Zemeckis, you win. Just don't make me look at Steven Tyler elf anymore.

Question #116: New Year, Old Hat

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Are you making any New Year's resolutions this year?
- Olde Man Tyme

Dear Olde Man Tyme,
  No. I don't see the arbitrary choice of a dividing day between solar orbits as any reason to chain myself to the boulder of inevitable failure by adopting unreasonable aspirations which I have, thus far, been unable to achieve. If I was going to improve myself, it would have happened by now. I'm going to be unremarkable until I die. Thank you for playing.

Law Geekiness: The Rational Basis Standard of Review

  When applying the Rational Basis standard of review, the Court seems to be giving the government ever-wider freedom to act as it sees fit, without any meaningful check from the judiciary. In 1949, Justice Jackson's concurrence in Railway Express v. New York lauds the "salutary doctrine that cities, states and the Federal Government must exercise their powers so as not to discriminate between their inhabitants except upon some reasonable differentiation fairly related to the object of regulation."

  In 1973, the Court said that a suspect classification would be "examined to determine whether it rationally furthers some legitimate, articulated state purpose." San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 17 (1973).

  By 1980, United States Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz saw Justice Rehnquist proclaiming that "where, as here, there are plausible reasons for Congress' actions, our inquiry is at an end." The Court no longer required that the actual reason for a law be rational. Rather, any sufficiently convincing post hoc justification that could be conceived of would suffice.

  In 1993, the Court in FCC v. Beach gave up all pretense of oversight, and instead placed the burden on litigants challenging a discriminatory law "to negate every conceivable basis which might support it." One pictures competing attorneys filling up notebooks with possible justifications and counterarguments. If the government attorney manages to think of just one more than the challenger, it's a check in the win column.

  The Court has done a neat job of ruling itself into a corner. When the Court found that the challenged Amendment in Romer v. Evans was discriminatory and motivated purely by hatred for homosexuals, the Court had to bludgeon the Rational Basis standard into a nearly unrecognizable state to enable it to strike the Amendment down. Critics who say that the Court was actually engaging in a stricter review are right. Unfortunately, the Court had very little choice. The Rational Basis standard has so little practical power to invalidate a law that the Court had to choose between dressing Intermediate Scrutiny in a hand-me-down Rational Basis t-shirt, or declaring sexual orientation a quasi-suspect classification and granting it the automatic protection of that stricter standard.

  Comparisons to the sexist reasoning in Muller v. Oregon immediately spring to mind. Again, the Court granted a much-needed protection, while (albeit a tad more subtly) endorsing intolerance toward the class it was protecting by upholding a particular discriminatory perception, namely that sexual orientation is a voluntary, rather than immutable, characteristic.

  All of that was the long way around to the following question; can the Rational Basis standard of review possibly get any more deferential? Is the chance to argue about the justification for the challenged legislation a certain thing, or will we see a day where the Court will simply deny certiorari if the government's list of justifications is longer than the challenger's list of arguments against them?

Question #115: Privacy Schmivacy

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Aren't you worried that a future employer will Google your name and refuse to hire you? You say fuck a whole bunch.
- HR On The DL

Dear HR On The DL,
  Job-hunting has become an electronic minefield, where a potential employer can too easily stumble over a picture of you doing unspeakable things with a bottle of cheap Vodka and a farm animal/fraternity pledge/Republican Senator. I've been lurking on the Internet since the days when the big innovation in text-only chat rooms was making the words turn different colors, and I've developed some reliable (so far) strategies for distancing myself from my incriminating past.*

1. Create an entirely fictitious online persona.
  If you craft a World Widentity (or three), and only interact with other web trolls while wearing your web mask, curious hiring managers will never know that you're the guy on the body mod blog with his cock stuffed through a hole in his left armpit. Just make sure that your new identity has a name that's different enough from your own that a search engine won't confuse the two. For instance, my real name is Wanklord Battlepants, while my Internet friends know me as Greg.

2. Don't ever have any fun in public. Ever.
  Does your idea of a good time involve nudity, intoxicating substances, farm animals or some combination thereof? Close the blinds, head down to the basement and go to town. If you don't leave the house, it's much easier to avoid being the subject of incriminating photos. If you find constant isolation too crazy-making, you'll have to be extra careful not to get involved in anything more scandalous than a lingering handshake.

3. Subterfuge = subterHUGE!
  If you're unwilling or unable to consider hermitage, a smart disinformation campaign can help you avoid awkward questions at your next interview. Getting a nickname, or even a fake name, and using it consistently will ensure that, should a third party post something scurrilous about you, the name being besmirched won't match the name on the résumé. Adding a prosthetic nose and fake beard to your party outfit makes deniability even more plausible, especially for the ladies.

4. Wait about 40 years.
  Whether we like it or not, the instant information technology of search engines and social networking is forcing a dramatic evolution of social standards of propriety and expectations of privacy. In another generation or two, the folks making hiring decisions will be sharing realtime 3-D scratch-n-sniff emotions (and nude pics) with wetwireless braincasting. They'll be sending text messages (and nude pics) from the womb. And they'll almost inevitably have much more realistic expectations about the range of human morality and sexuality, and how private behavior actually reflects on workplace ability.

5. If all else fails, go work in porn.
  Seriously, those guys don't care what or where you drink, who or what you like to please sexually in what public places, or what tattooed body parts you've got displayed on your blog. If you're morally flexible, there's a whole industry out there that's willing to become the next in your long line of unfortunate choices.

*All of this presupposes that you're smart enough not to post pictures or stories of your own drunken sexcapades. If you haven't made that connection yet, then no amount of listmaking on my part is going to save you from your own stupidity.

Question #114:

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What are u doing RITE NOW???
- Wants 2 Know

Dear Wants 2 Know,
  Closing the blinds, turning off the lights and crouching behind the couch, preparing to call the police.

Question #113:

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What's the best thing about being a blind, stupid, bleeding-heart, unrealistic, Satanloving, hellbound, hippie liberal cockface?
- One Nation Under GOD

Dear One Nation,
  I'd say it was the sense of smug superiority, but I suppose there's plenty of that at every point on the ideological spectrum. Self-righteous boobs of every political bent succumb to the temptation to cocoon themselves in the silky softness of like-minded opinion. Of course, affirmation addiction strikes non-political types as well. Without it, Michael Jackson might still have a nose and the Star Wars would likely have been Jar-Jar free.

  There are a lot of good things about being a liberal/progressive/lefty. Our girls are hotter. Our scientists don't waste time trying to prove that an invisible sky man made it all from scratch. Our gene pool tends to be broader and more diverse. We're allowed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that comes from a living in a country that listed equality as a sacred principle while simultaneously enshrining slavery in its founding document.

  On the whole though, the most awesome thing about being on the ideological left is the inevitable approbation of history. The progress of freedom and justice is a little like the stock market. In the short term, there are ups (Brown v. Board of Education) and downs (the USA PATRIOT Act). In the long term, it's all upward momentum. Social taboos evaporate and political barriers to individual expression erode. The doomsayers who warned that suffrage for women would ruin us, and that interracial marriage would destroy the American family, are dismissed as misguided fools. The uptight moralists claiming that gay marriage will tie "traditional" marriage to a stake and beat it to death with pink-handled hammers will eventually get the same treatment. Say what you will about self-confidence and the courage of your convictions, but it's awfully pleasant that history, and hindsight, keep proving us right. Er, correct.

Question #112: Obligatory Thanksgivingness

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  So, what are you thankful for?
- Bringin' Turkey Back

Dear Bringin' Turkey Back,
  I'm thankful that Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie got the modest, tasteful marketing campaign that a film of its obvious artistic merit so richly deserved.

Law-ku: Interrogation After Invocation

Please scrupulously
honor the invocation
of Miranda rights.

Right to be silent
is invoked for each offense.
Ask about past crimes.

Right to have counsel
is custody specific.
No further questions.

EDIT: Okay, so this isn't entirely correct. Under some circumstances, police can resume questioning about a crime even after the suspect invokes her right to remain silent, so the right isn't purely crime-specific. The preceding stupid poem makes no representation of accuracy.

If You've Ever Wondered What Law School Is Like

LAW SCHOOL MUSICAL

A Shout-out to the Meth Dealers and Users in the Audience

  A few years ago, I expressed my contempt for lavish entertainment industry awards shows by sniffing disdainfully at the Emmys. I compared the networks' skill at creating quality television with my own (total lack of) skill at making crystal meth. As part of my snark, I ran a quick search for instructions on operating a meth lab, and linked to a couple of the pages that came up.

  Enter a group called 1800NoDrugs, which offers referral services for drug users looking to get into rehab. They've created a website at methamphetamines.org which, through clever use of keywords, comes up in a search for instructions on making meth. Budding entrepreneurs looking for an all cash opportunity, and desperate junkies looking to do a little homebrewing, go out on the web looking for help in setting up their labs and wind up getting advice on finding a residential treatment program.

  I'm all for a little subterfuge in the pursuit of helping drug addicts get clean. I don't give a puddle of opiate-laced urine what people put into their bodies, but if a search for tips on manufacturing drugs misleads someone into getting help for a life-sodomizing dependency, that's fine by me.

  The confusing bit is that, after the offer for help in finding a rehab program, methamphetamines.org lists other links for meth-making info. It's as if the site is saying "Oops, sorry for wasting your time with an offer of potentially life-saving help. Here's that information you wanted on using volatile chemicals to make an addictive substance." Seriously? Make the wannabes go back to Google if they're that determined to be drug kingpins.

  I'm flogging this particular equine-American because, by virtue of its included links, my long-ago Emmy-bashing post wound up in this list of "crystal meth making instructions Resources." Which means that I get a few hits a week from people who are, one assumes, looking for help in playing Trailer Crack: The Home Game.

  So, here's a friendly nod to the meth dealers and users wandering by. If the shakes subside long enough, feel free to browse around. Sorry, but you won't find any drug manufacturing instructions here. And in case you're wondering, I still don't watch the Emmys.

EDIT: I have caved to popular pressure and posted a sure-fire recipe for making crystal meth. Start building your drug empire here.

Happy Birthday, Earth!

  And let me say, for a sprightly lass of 6,010, you're still looking great. Don't worry about that slight equatorial bulge. It happens to all of us after our mid-5,000s.

Correction: Soda Comes In Cans

  As a helpful Livejournal user pointed out, my statement that single-serving energy drinks are sold in smaller sizes than soda ignored the existence of the humble 12 ounce can. While I can honestly say that I drink soda exclusively from 20 and 24 ounce plastic bottles, my ignorance is no excuse for so casually dismissing a whole group of containers. These valuable receptacles hold soda and beer with equal aplomb, and I made a terrible mistake when I overlooked their contribution to the portability of our society's beverages.

  I'd like to issue a public apology to the Aluminum-American community. I will endeavor in the future to be more sensitive to the needs and concerns of our recyclable cousins. I sincerely hope that my unfortunate lapse in judgment will lead to an open dialog about the size, shape, composition and contents of our drink containers, that will allow us all to be more understanding of containers that are different from our own. Thank you.