God loves you, so send your money in today

I dislike televangelists. Rather, I dislike the picture of the Christian right they paint: a swath of people who believe the human is superior to other species due to their allegiance to a deity and their adherence to a set of texts sent down from said deity.

Now, don't get me wrong here: I have respect for all people of any religion in name. Further, half of my family are evangelical, and I love them very much and appreciate what they do for me. However, I believe that if someone decides to follow a man — or woman — on television because of their supposed representation of God, they end up worshipping the man representing God, not God. These representatives include Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn, and Tim LaHaye (and did include Jerry Falwell and Tammy Faye Messner), who all have started as people with faith but turned into veritable megalomaniacs, many of them amassing huge fortunes as a result of running huge ministries or even television stations. While I do not approve of the practices leading up to this, as I will explain later, it should be considered that the message they at first tried to put out was indeed of good faith, yet power and fame simply corrupted them.

Evangelism as a media genre can be put back arguably as far as Charles Coughlin's radio programme, broadcast in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, in which he angered several religious audiences with anti-Semitic comments until, after World War II and failed attempts by the government to control him, a Detroit priest ordered him off the air. The first time money became involved, though, may have been a plea from Pat Robertson to keep his television station at the time, WYAH-TV, which resulted in a telethon that still continues today on its successor — the Christian Broadcasting Network — and many other religious stations, first starting with $10 donations from a benchmark of 700 donors a month (hence the name of the flagship programme, The 700 Club). The telethon, which was enough to keep the station afloat, pales in comparison to the telethons still held on Trinity Broadcasting Network's Praise the Lord programme. TBN, in effect, was formed when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker broke with CBN, but they eventually left TBN alone and started the PTL network, which would soon become infamous for the failure of a Christian theme park, the imprisonment of Jim Bakker for tax evasion, and his affair with a secretary that he tried to settle with $250,000.

TBN, under the direction of Paul and Jan Crouch, has become probably the largest religious television network in the nation, with revenues upward of $150 million annually. However, much of the money any such network seems to make goes toward the luxurious lifestyle of the hosts. Indeed, according to Business 2.0's Dumbest Moments in Business History, Bakker had diverted more than $3.7 million in revenue for personal issues, including an air-conditioned doghouse. Whatever the money is specifically used for, the fact that the bulk of it comes out of the pockets of viewers as 'donations' is unsettling in the least. Rather than live out as a pay-per-view programme offered with, say, DirecTV, people have to donate to the station. In theory, donating is good — but what if, Chris Hedges asked in his book, American Fascists, you start demanding $1000 or more at a time? You claim that 'you are robbing God', and that 'it is Your show, Your airwaves'. To me, that sounds much like extortion, seeing as no deity like the one they claim to represent would actually need money. Much of money inevitably goes to Crouch or whomever is running the station, and to see them spend an excessive amount of money on a jet plane and several mansions, not to mention cosmetic surgery — rather than give some money to actual charities and keep a modest sum — is nothing short of incensing, and even more so when you back up such opulence as a 'gift from God' for running a ministry.

If money is enough to incense me, I can't bear to think of how awful it is to couple it with the constant purporting that God wants the financial best for His followers. On a Detroit News article that is no longer online, a church pastor evidently got to write off a mansion as a donation from members of his church, which subscribed to the 'Gospel of Wealth', a system of Christian beliefs that come to the conclusion that God wants followers to be as wealthy as possible. There's a little problem with that, however:

And as he was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, even God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor thy father and mother. And he said unto him, Teacher, all these things have I observed from my youth. And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. But his countenance fell at the saying, and he went away sorrowful: for he was one that had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:17-25 ASV)

It seems as if Jesus didn't see wealth as necessarily a qualification for getting into heaven; rather, it seems as if he wanted the rich man to be generous to the poor as he certainly had the resources to do so. While it is true that the religious right does tend to give more to charity than liberals and the secular (even when donations to organisations such as TBN are factored out), there are some who, despite the great trend, believe that an expanse of wealth and power is acceptable by God regardless of where it goes. The Gospel of Wealth, therefore, probably isn't a very good interpretation of what should be done on the part of Christians.

Even more harrowing is the thought of not wealth alone, but power — over the government. We see it today, with states passing laws forbidding same-sex couples from marrying, apparently in the light of a Massachusetts ruling that allowed them to do so. Last year, South Dakota even tempted Roe v Wade by banning abortion altogether except in cases in which the mother's life was at risk, even disallowing exceptions for rape and incest. It's unfathomable to me how this could have been the result of a bloc bred on the teachings of pastors in the media — we have the Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell in the hopes of creating a voting base of people opposed to specific or implied actions prohibited in the pages of the Bible. The resulting voting base took credit for putting Ronald Reagan in power, and they almost certainly helped both Bushes enter office. The latter Bush, turned to when America was attacked on 11 September 2001, turned out to be one to cause mayhem in the moral sphere — not to mention Iraq — based on his evangelical beliefs, egged on by religious Republicans and arguably the forces of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Indeed, the latter was featured on The 700 Club two days after the attacks to give his analysis (click the video link below the picture of his face) of what caused it — and it had nothing to do with militant Arab fundamentalists:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularise America — I point the finger in their face and say, you helped this happen.

Eventually Robertson, who said 'Well, I totally concur', recanted. All the same, the attack was caused by militant Arab fundamentalists — and it seems to me that remarks like this could have been the very fuel needed for such an attack. When it gets down to it, these fundamentalists and these beacons of the Christian right are quite the same in their steadfast intolerance for even other religions. That's what the whole mess in the Middle East is over, after all.

While we're on the subject of gays and abortionists, I might as well say what I believe. People like Falwell will use a prohibition in Leviticus as well as Paul's letter to the Romans* to justify such inconvenience to gays. That's fine to me — but it's not fine when rigid interpretations make their way into the government of a free society. The decision that homosexuality is a sin is in the moral sphere, something a straight or gay person alike might see as a hindrance or a sign of weakness. But marriage is a different issue, one that carries legal consequence. I believe that the government has no responsibility to rule on strictly moral affairs as homosexuality when it occurs in the bedroom; as such, denying a couple a legal right based on an individual, moral interpretation is downright wrong. Although marriage has always been sacrosanct in many religions, even as the union of one man and one woman, I do not see this having much validity when applied to legal statutes that apply to all people regardless of their sexual orientation — if marriage is a legal term, I say let same-sex couples marry.

As such, I am adamantly pro-choice. I realise there are many couples who want to have a child and place a value on the foetus any woman is carrying, but this doesn't necessarily apply to them since they want the child. There are some out there who are brave enough to pull through with raising a child even if they were raped — this is not for them, either. The issue here really covers those who have sex as a form of recreation or trust, even outside marriage. On one hand you have the girl who was raped or was a victim of sexual abuse within the family, and on the other you have the girl who had sex with her boyfriend in which no condom was used or the condom or any other device failed. The latter case I do find a little immoral, but it happens either because of indifference to the situation or as a token of trust. In either case, if a pregnancy arises, it's ultimately the woman's decision whether to go on with the pregnancy and raise the child, or abort it. A pregnancy at a young age, while possible in older times, is made much more difficult by college and the possibility of a career (not to mention the scant availability of sitters). Indeed, in Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, the point is made that a child arising from an unwanted pregnancy and not given up for adoption most likely will grow up bearing the scars of his or her mother's resentment and turn to crime. Indeed, Levitt was criticised across the board when the point was made clear that legalised abortion was a major factor in the fall of crime in the 1990s despite apocalyptic predictions for the decade. I think the fact that a pregnancy forced upon by a moral interpretation of a foetus as a separate life — when it's not even counted in population and mortality records — will likely result in the child being raised in an environment conducive to resent and criminal behaviour is enough for me to say a woman should have the right to abort at any stage of pregnancy. Even if it is a little gross.

One of the people I met at the conference over last weekend was pressured into sex four times by a former boyfriend. At the conference, a boy she liked (I'm sketching here) rejected her because of her belief that she should have the right to abort should she find herself incapable of raising a child. She cried for a few minutes before her friend, a staff member, and I gathered around and dried the tears before resuming the water play.

Now, my aunt and uncle donate to CBN, and I have watched two episodes of The 700 Club at their house. The objective of the show, I will repeat, is to uplift viewers with miracles in others' lives, but when they begin political rhetoric — such as the talk on gays and abortion — things get ugly. I just hope there'll be someone who comes along and actually gives a decent ministry without forcing literal interpretations of the Bible on viewers. After all, humans did write the book — from their perception of the world, albeit with insight as to how God wanted the world to run — and humans are interpreting it.

* The last two paragraphs of the first chapter of Romans are a polemic on 'unnatural relations' leading to other sorts of sin, an allusion to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis. We'll assume for a second that the Bible is true: While the documentation of a gang of men wanting to draw other men out for forced sex has led literalistic Christians to say that homosexuality led to the collapse of Sodom, I believe that a collection of graver sins, or perhaps even the simple fact that these men just wanted to force sex on other men to exact misery, but not because of individual orientation, could have led God to supposedly destroy the city. Also, the Archbishop of Canterbury recently issued a statement accusing such Christians of ignoring what Paul wrote at the beginning of the second chapter, immediately after his polemic, invalidating man's right to judge others based on their sins due to this situation.

Fonts

The link above goes to a BBC Magazine piece on Helvetica, a font that you'll find almost anywhere. It's a Macintosh font, it's a logo slogan choice, it's something you perhaps didn't know the name of but saw everywhere.

However, another link on the page goes to BanComicSans.com, an attempt by two Canadians to push legislation to outlaw the use of Comic Sans in publishing. As many of you know, Comic Sans is that Windows default font developed first for use in help bubbles and then anything directed at a juvenile audience, such as a comic. Now, though, it's likely to be found on anything in attempts to connect with the consumer at a colloquial level. It may seem to be reasonable to the people pushing for its removal due to the fact that its ubiquity does no justice to the fact that it looks really out of place in the commercial environment, but no, it will not be banned. This is due to two main reasons: It's a ridiculous idea to make a government ban a typeface, and — hold your breath — it's a Windows (and now Macintosh) pre-load.

Because Windows operating systems come with fonts such as Comic Sans and Verdana that were developed for use by Microsoft, as well as fonts like Arial that are licensed from the Monotype Corporation, those fonts are probably going to be the ones you encounter in a world of small, fledgling businesses and MySpace-like placards. Decent fonts, such as Univers (I would say Helvetica, but that's a Macintosh pre-load), are not cheap, let alone free — so what choice do you really have if you're starting out or are just a regular guy writing invites to a house party? Even at that, you have the fact that such fonts will not render for many others on the Internet, so you're stuck with Microsoft pre-loads. Decent fonts, even non-Microsoft fonts, end up being in graphics.*

Personally, I don't like Comic Sans. I really don't like any of the Microsoft pre-loads, but Comic Sans is probably the most misused of all. I would use it for school activity worksheets or flyers, but that's where it stands; in my mind it's not even a good candidate for — well — comics! The line height is too high, upper-case letters are far from uniform, and mixed-case captions in comics never really took off (unless they were in Mad). Instead of banning it, though, I would probably seek to educate people in decent and tasteful graphic design and typography, and maybe call on Monotype, Linotype, ITC, Adobe, and Agfa to lower their rates.

* There are, however, a few notable exceptions: The websites for the Guardian and the Sun use Macintosh-native Geneva as their primary face. Also, Photobucket has started using Adobe-propagated and newly Macintosh-native Myriad in headers.

It's a girl's world

I get to explain away my failure to update often with an ostensibly lame excuse: I'm a boy. And it seems to carry truth when you compare the journals of a normal guy versus that of a girl.

I'll share my findings with you and admit that most of the material is in the LiveJournal spectrum. Indeed, if you look at my friends page, you won't find too many updates by men like us, and when they do, they're concise and abbreviated. soanevalcke's journal is a good example aside from mine; his updates are far and few between and the latest post at time of writing suggests that the practice has become boring for him, which is backed up by the statement in writing and the length of time it took to come up with what's called a 'meme' (which I assume to be a diminutive of 'memory', a tool available on LiveJournal that I've never had the patience to experiment with).

Now look at a post by any of the women and compare. Here is a public entry made by the blogger mentioned before:

Walked in the park today. And then, as a bit of side time to burn off, Lucas (my dog, might I remind most of you), Vincent and I decided to jump across the river. Vincent said that I wouldn't make it, and I did. Lucas swam across, eager to get back to me. He got his toes wet.On the second try, I wasn't so lucky. One leg of mine made it across, the other slipped into the smelly creek. My shoe's currently out to dry, and I quickly ran home to wash my right leg. Lucas got drenched all over. D:

Then look at a post that otherwise would have a similar mood, this being by lightningchan:

Right, so skipping over early morning stuff since it's just whining about cramps and no one cares. So. School.

I got there around eight and only read one of the signs on the door, and even then only half of it. XD I thought all the homerooms were posted in front of the caf, so I had to shove my way through a MASSIVE wall of people to try to see, since god forbid the kids go to their frigging classrooms, or move out of the way, or even INTO the caf so that people can see the lists, or even move around in that huge hallway. Anyway, I figured it out a moment later and went to the gym where I figured it would be anyway. XD It was there and I got my room number and headed off.

Dude, I know almost EVERYONE in my homeroom. There are only...5 people I've never seen before? And even then, I think I've seen them, just not had any classes with them. It's insane. o_o Of course, best part is how Dean, Lisa, Mara and Alyssa are all in the class, too. :D Yay. Our lockers are RIGHT there too. Mine's a palindrome and third-closest to our class. XD; I'm not upset about them moving the lockers around now. I have no classes on the side of the school that Physics is at, so it'd just be annoying to still have my locker there. Anyway, we really didn't do very much in Philosophy. Just looked at quotes and then wrote down what we think Philosophy is and what we want to get out of the course. I copied Dean's second answer: "a 90." XDD; Then I drew Axel and Marluxia on his paper. Which evolved into all the Obvilion Orgy members. That was fun.

Next was Discrete with my old Calculus teacher. WHAT FUN. And...it actually wasn't bad. It really is just my Physics class over again with less people. XD; There are only two or three people who weren't in it. The teacher handed out a review sheet that was just a lot of simple trig. The hardest thing we had to do was rearrange the formula for the cosine law to find an angle. The other side was pretty much the same, but with graphing, so we didn't do that. Overall it was pretty good though, and the only question on the front that we didn't know, we actually got a lesson on. o_o; And I understood it after he taught it, too! If he actually teaches like that every single day, I may do well in this course. How exciting. XD;

After this class was English. In a portable. DX I managed to ask someone in my Calculus class where P7 was, though. Didn't have to though, since I was right in assuming the seventh one was one of the newer ones, right out one of the nearest doors. XD So I went there and saw Ann sitting at a group of desks in the corner. I don't know her amazingly well, but we sat next to each other in Grade 10 Science so yeah. I sat with that group. Sharon's there too so at least I know people. We didn't do very much in that class. Just took papers, she explained our CPT and wants us to choose our books by Monday (wtf! so early!) and then we did some brainstorming on the word "fragmentation." XDD We ended up talking about asexual reproduction since, technically, it could be a type of fragmentation. :[ It involves cells splitting apart or whatever.

English teacher let us out early, so I went to the caf and bought food. It was good, and we've all got the same lunch again, so this semester should be fun. :D I've missed having lunch with the whole group, even though not everyone was there today for some reason or another, including a bunch of guidance visits which for Dean's we took the liberty of eating his pizza so it wouldn't get cold. XD

Last but not least as Calculus. Fomg, I zoomed through the worksheet she gave us. :B I didn't finish, but damn I remembered everything. So proud of myself, even if it was just simple things like evaluating functions, expanding, factoring, and finding roots. XD; Ann's in that class too so I sat beside her and Mitch sits in the two-desk row beside us. So yay, I know people. I got 75 last year (or was it 74? I dunno.), but I want higher. Hopefully I'll get a much better mark this time. We're doing review today and tomorrow and then we start the course. :D It's sad that Calculus is probably going to be my favourite class this time around. Philosophy will be fun, but I miss being good at math and having already taken this course, I'll probably be good at it.

Now I'm home. Gonna wait for Bryan to come home so I can open the door for him, considering he's too lazy to take out his key, then go get changed and then...start on my homework, I guess. Two math worksheets to finish up, got to pull together a few binders and organize them for my classes and then...get mom and dad to write out cheques for my textbooks.

Hey, I can use my school:calculus tag again! XD

Blimey. I admit I don't make it a point to detail the school day, given that I'm pretty much restricted as it is as far as classes go and not much goes around socially since the school is so remote. And even if scenes were made every day and the school I attended was in a more urban area, I probably wouldn't find it in me to record it.

The conclusion then comes from my stepmother: It's a matter of them being more vocal. Now you wonder why there are so many books in the library written in the point of view of girls — seventh-grade Bebo users, ninth- and tenth-grade MySpace users and clubbers, all ignominiously leaving out the boys in such roles, except perhaps as hot crushes or concerned relatives. I know that there are some boys out there who probably love to document their outings, and many of them have pictures that generally take the place of words, but when it comes to the Internet, a vision I have been seeing seems to have credit: In the Internet, it's simply a girl's world. It's a world where cute animated backgrounds, pink and black stripes, fluorescent colours, and stars are accepted fixtures. It's also a world where, whenever the aforementioned is absent, animé characters, Photoshop images and icons, and text smilies dominate. And a lot of it can be attributed to the impact women have had on the Internet. And that's being masculinely conservative about it.

So what can be said in conclusion about the men? I really don't know. I believe we should leave it to the women to say that.

High school is no fun

When I left middle school, many things changed. For one thing, I wasn't able to get away with murder — well, that was the only thing I was aware of until recently.

In your public library, I'm purely assuming, there's probably a section called Young Adult Fiction. A lot of this stuff consists of television fanfics and novelisations — Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sweet Valley High — and dramatic kid novels that supposedly document a kid's adventure in seventh or eighth grade, or perhaps facing the impending age of seventeen. One book in particular at my library is modelled as a collection of blog entries and has a back cover that looks roughly like a profile you'd encounter on Bebo. This wasn't the thing that shocked me; rather, it was that the narrator was a thirteen-year-old girl. Just passed the COPPA clearance, a year away from eligibility on MySpace — and from the looks of it, one of many in a breed that's been hunched on the Internet so much that it partially governs their lives. Many of the teenage books on the shelf are in the same format — many girls under the age of consent blogging about their school life. (Now I understand why MySpace is taken so seriously.)

And this past Sunday I eavesdropped on some of the high-school freshmen that attend the youth summit with me chatting fervently about MySpace and comments made by boys they'd dumped or girls they'd faced off against. And there was me thinking that this was only supposed to be characteristic of high-school upperclassmen — how wrong I was.

These days, I'm starting to miss my old middle school days. I'm thinking that it should have remained the same through high school, but two things happened: There were three schools to which we could go without much hitch, and I went to the least popular of the three. On top of that, I'd decided that, after introspection, that it wouldn't be worth any effort to contact any of them thereafter, instead relying on chance encounters. As a result, I ended up where I had no support from anyone else except an uncle (who put pressure on me in his Physics classes). I was done with the graduating class merely because I was too lazy to attempt to connect.

When you compare my high school years to middle school years, it's no contest. Even though I had been in withdrawal for some middle school years, I couldn't love them more. It's probably due to the fact that I had people who knew me and admired me — probably for the wrong reasons, but I still had some sort of company. I was able to go to dances with them; we could simply trot down to their residences in cases of projects; secrets were few and far between. I only realised this when I looked through those books at the library — I found that my best years were back in the seventh and eighth grade, and they would remain the best as long as I lived. It doesn't matter to me that I had a big head back then but didn't realise it; I'm making this comparison using mind settings of those times for each one. Even if I hadn't been as big-headed, there still were dances and secrets. Someone was paired up and dances were always fun, even if you did get your helmet destroyed or got embarrassed trying to dance for the first time, later to sink so deep into it that you got a fetish for the next four years. The drawback, though, was that I had been hit in the face with a short anti-Pokémon spell, rumours going about that I was infatuated with a Muslim student, and (this killed the rumours right away) the stigma of having sworn at another student for spitting in the group's cheese dip.

In high school, though, this was not present. If it indeed was, it wasn't widespread. In my first year both major dances were cancelled due to attendance issues. Plus which, more anti-Pokémon sentiment was in the air, and it took four years to go away. It was only until year three, when the health sciences programme was in full swing, when anything started happening. Compared with the students who were either unhealthily obnoxious or immersed in their studies, the breed the nursing programme drew in was a mixture of the two. Sometimes you'd have a few who wouldn't really be learning to be a nurse (I wonder how their internships will go). All in all, however, they had some charisma; alas, since it's been three years since I started, I'm going to narrowly miss the real activity I could have had to rival the days of middle school.

And had those books mirrored what my life in seventh grade was like, I'd be a giddy little fish that James wouldn't stand — probably solely based on the possible ownership of a MySpace or Bebo account. But for my time, Kidz Bop did rule. At least that was enough.

Blazing comments

It's a disappointment to Blaze, evidently, that the Community failed to collapse after the hacking, but he had hopes for Shinou.com to surpass PC in some time due to either a lack of funding for the server or lack of general linterest. His aspirations have gone so far as to create a blog — one that now has the Community Staff kicking up a fuss.

Blaze's blog has contributions from many members of Shinou.com, including BGTFamily, who owns the back end site Total Pokémon. In his post 'Guest Blogger', he allows BGT to post what seems to be evidence of Shinou.com steadily overtaking the Pokémon Community and provides numbers courtesy of 'some fellow fans', while the numbers prove, on further examination, to be completely fabricated. BGT rates the Pokémon Community to have 3,344 members against Shinou's 2,060 at the time of writing, but a quick look at the PC boards will tell you that the number of registered users — not active users, since the article doesn't say that — is currently 20,839, the day after publication of the article.

Another piece of information contributed by kind Blaze is a review of Paul's PokéJungle project. Upon hearing that the domain is 'Spinarak', he jumps and yells that Spinarak is a trademark of Nintendo, which it is, and warns against removal of the domain. It may seem like a shrewd warning, but wasn't it Blaze himself who took the domain Shinou.com, another trademark of Nintendo? Any sane person will know that copyright laws don't extend to the use of these domain names for fan sites, which Shinou.com and the Spinarak domain are.

Then there's a quip below that article: 'While we were at this once amazing forum, we were in talks with Kwesi (the humble and quite rad owner of PC) to co-pay for a server for PC/TotalPokemon.com. Approximently about Five Days after Kwesi paid for the Server in full, did we pull out of the agreement due to the arrogant PC Staff who did not like the idea of us having control . . . [and] decided that they rather pay for the Server, then have us have anything to do with it. Apparently they didn't keep their word, because about a few days ago PC once again has ads featured all over the forum.' They broke the word when the agreement was broken, so they had no choice. This post is effectively bull.

Most unfortunately, I'm not the first to report on the sleight of hand and otherwise plain and simple tosh that this blog offers. Remember FandomObserver? While he refuses to reveal his identity (and there have been calls for him to do so), he's become a good contemporary of mine. While he maintains the idea of just reviewing the fandom as a whole, he's gone in and criticised Blaze, something I should have done long ago, closing the first part of his latest review with a title, 'Misguided Webmaster With A Big Ego'. All I can say in addition to that specifically is that Joe's eating his heart out right now.

So what is Blaze? Does he have an ego? Yes. Does he remain true to his contemporaries, especially Erica, whom he said would be the only one out of PC's staff administrators to get any staff holding? No. Does BGT? No, he relied on ridiculously inaccurate statistics (Alexa, which is generated by users using the site's toolbar) after three months of quibbling with the rest of the PC staff.

It's a good thing Nicola's not including Total Pokémon in her collaborative 'Autumn Always'.

Texting

Di-di-dong, goes the chime emitted by AIM on a Sidekick. Someone's replied to what is construed to be an urgent message when it merely adds to the current drama consisting of anger over an unfaithful boyfriend. Sometimes it's a girlfriend. But whatever the case, texting is another feature of cell phones in which the purpose is defeated.

My main concern is the charge incurred by sending a line of text. On TMobile it's probably two cents to send a line of text, but compared to a five- or ten-cent minute, I'd say the vocal minute is more productive. I'll assume that the average person sends and receives four or five lines a minute: Usually in five lines you get about a quarter of the conversation done whilst the conversation is nearly over (about 80 percent) when the vocal minute passes. And it's a separate charge, one that many teens have compromised to pay for separately.

But what is the logic here? I happen to know that LiveJournal and Blogger allow you to blog from your mobile, but when people do, as I've observed from the blogs that link here via the Next Blog function, it's usually to send a picture, not necessarily text, but since it has to be posted as HTML it still counts as a line of text — two cents more. Compare it to taking photos on a digital camera and then uploading them onto your computer at night, when time is plenty. I'd take the latter any day. Plus which, for all cell phones (don't mention the Treo, Sidekick, or Blackberry to me; they're called PDAs no matter how you look at them), the lack of a QWERTY keyboard makes posting and recording difficult for the poster and potential reader; it's designed more for short recording and the usual speak on AIM.

Of course, this applies to the United States. In Europe and Asia (except China, where text messages are censored), texting is as useful as the vocal minute due to less reliance on the car. For the Americans, the fact that texting diverts your eyes off the road is another lack of support. We already have states passing laws against the use of cell phones whilst driving; with new studies coming out, they might push for harsher penalties on those texting whilst driving. In Europe, you're sitting on a train or walking much more than you can drive due to the city's unaccommodating layout, so it's a lot safer and more productive. They have an excuse, at the very least.

Note to self: Don't start this habit if stuck with the GoPhone for Christmas. The smilies have been knocked down and the tilde is starting to crumble away.

Four things that have to go

It's time to kick into gear. While this blog is primarily used to document forum ills and, to an extent, Pokémon and my life, I have been toying with the idea of adding quips like this, in the mode of George Carlin. So here we are with a few things I've been wanting done and over with.

1. Sequence ordering for exit numbers. The objective here is to number exits in a streamlined fashion, starting from 1 for the first exit and numbering them in order of occurence. However, as more interchanges are often added, the system collapses and you need to add letter suffixes such as 'A' and 'B'. For example, the stretch of I-4 outside Walt Disney World had five letters tied to the number 24, and once all of the interstates in Florida were switched over to mileage numbering, this anomaly was reduced to three exit numbers, one for US-192, one for FL-417, one for the Walt Disney World thoroughfare. The advantage mileage numbering has is that it's flexible and it's easier to use the system to judge how far you've gone since mile markers are actually not posted on most stretches of highway, especially in New England.
2. And on the subject of interstates, the southern half of the new Jersey Turnpike (NJ-700). Having this and I-295 within five miles of each other for the majority of the way and running parallel, especially when the latter provides more access to the area south of Philadelphia without any tolls, is stupid. Whenever you can see a motorway on the side of the one you're travelling on and the pattern persists for 50 miles, it's a sign of error. And while removing this half of the Turnpike resolves the road burden for the south, it'll also provide a definite path for the I-95 in place of the path that the town of Hopewell rejected.
3. Foreign alphabet glyphs and accentuations in place of English alphabet characters in forum posts, MySpace profiles, and the like. I have gone over this before — there is no place for bars, parentheses, brackets, and numbers as letters, and the same can be said for Greek, Russian, Armenian, and Hebrew letters. This could be said of a certain PC member earlier in the week.
4. Friend lists. I believe the people you choose to talk to and randomly assort on your MSN or AIM list constitute your friend list. You do not need to go off to another site and arrange something that states otherwise, especially if by adding a certain friend you end up incurring far more than that one friend. And going beyond the Internet, friend lists turn into slam books in which you're free to write whatever you want against a certain person. In fact, the staff had more than 10 slam books confiscated in 2001. But yes, with the news of bullying on MySpace, it seems these slam books are unfortunately eternal.