House of Eratosthenes

On Groundhog Day I woke up like I always do, engaged in some carnal delight like I usually do, made the coffee like I always do, took my shower, got dressed, logged on to tweak the brittle liberals like I always do…heh heh. Gathered my gear, kissed my sweetie goodbye and walked over to the garage like I always do. Then I pushed the button on my keychain like I always do and the garage door slid up like it always does.

Something just shy of eight inches. Woops.

I tried it again, with the same results. Eh…this needs some addressing. There’s no other way to get in. After fiddling around for the better part of a minute I saw the problem: The metal door was catching on the bottom of the license plate frame. Did I really park the car that way? Is my memory going?

It turned out, yeah, maybe it is, just not in the way I thought. On Groundhog-Day-Eve, I forgot to set the damn parking brake…

Uff da. If your grandfather lived with you and he pulled these shenanigans, you’d start up with that speech about surrendering the license, right? I think most of us would at least give it some thought. What are the rules for this when you’re forty-four instead of eighty-eight? I think, at my tender age, it’s reasonable to have a one-time pass. Get some yuks in, make sure it doesn’t happen again or else the “it’s time, Grandpa” speechifying will begin in earnest.

Maybe I’m biased, but that seems reasonable. Okay then. How in blazes do I get to work, short of crawling around on the dusty floor like a little kid or something? It’s a li’l four-banger, and about eighty pounds of force disengages the car from the door. But I found it somehow impossible to maintain this while avoiding the beam that disengages the motor; there’s a gentle slope to the cement floor, so the vessel rolls back in place when I stop shoving; and as slow as it’s rolling, it’s so much quicker than the door mechanism. Just a two-by-four to block the tires, and this would be so much easier. But there is none.

I ended up sticking my foot in there to jam the Leatherman tool I carry on my belt, under the tire. And, mercifully, the first Groundhog Day misadventure was at an end. Yet another triumph for American ingenuity. Just imagine calling a tow truck over something like this…yikes…forget about drivers’ licenses, let’s talk about Man Cards. What does a tow truck driver’s hysterical laughter sound like? I’m happy to plead an honest ignorance on this point, like any proper red-blooded meat-eating beer-drinking Leatherman-carrying American man.

But clearly I’m fallible, and you have some idea of just how fallible I can be at times…

And so it arrives as something of a shock when I see things like this:

One of my favorite bloggers is Morgan Freeberg a.k.a. House of Eratosthenes. He is able to explain things clearly, although not always concisely. Simple ideas or complex ideas, when Morgan gets a hold of it, he can boil it down to something that is understandable. I urge you to make him a daily stop.

But I was a little dismayed when he rather off-handedly remarked that he didn’t like fisking, musing that doing so usually didn’t add anything to a discussion.

Of course, I’ve been doing a weekly (more-or-less) fisking of a liberal columnist for several years now. I don’t think Morgan’s comment was directed at me, because those fiskings are on a more obscure website that is more of a diary than a blog, but I did take it as whispered advice from an older brother. I hold Morgan’s advice in high regard, so whenever he expresses an opinion, I weight it a bit more than other people’s words. So I quit doing fiskings and figured that I would never do them again.

Until now.

Oh, dear. Maybe the blogs are enhancing our ability to communicate a little bit too well; we have some ditz who can’t even park his car & set the brake, making an off-hand comment about not liking the fisking, and because of that one thing we have some potentially wonderful writing dribbling off into oblivion.

I am not inclined to refudiate the remark about fisking; as a general rule, I still don’t like it. It encourages an intellectual vigor that is broad but not deep. The message behind it is one of “look how gloriously flawed my target must be, for behold the vast quantity of flaws I have uncovered in his work.” But what does that say, really, when you waded into the exercise with that very preconceived notion. And so you began with the intent of finding a bunch of flaws…you found them…this usually says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking. And when it says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking, and the goal was to say something about the thing you’re fisking, then what we have created is an abomination in that it appears to have met a goal when it really fell short.

That is my objection — it does not apply to what Captain Kardde jotted down after the “until now.” You do need to go read that, it is really something. The target of the fisking has it comin’. When I read things like this (comments by Bob Scott, target-of-fisking, in italics):

Even though I am not willing to conclude that the hatred spouted by conservatives like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (Fox News) is responsible for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the distinguished chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, along with five other Americans,

That’s mighty white of you, Bob. Seeing as how that’s what the evidence has proven.

…it is time for conservatives to examine that possibility.

Oh. I see. So, conservatives and the “hatred” that we have “spouted” are not responsible for the shooting, but we need to examine the “possibility” that we are.

It all makes perfect sense!

Aw fuck it, fisk away. What an insufferable jackass.

Anyway, in the evening I came home to an empty house because the girlfriend is taking evening classes. I’d much rather come home to find her, but in her place I found the two dozen St. Pauli’s I’d stocked in the outdoor (daddy) fridge the night before, a package from older relative containing a book called “The No-Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t“; and, Season One of the Six Million Dollar Man, produced for the first time on DVD Region 1 — yes! Plus a bowl of shake-n-bake chicken drumsticks in the (momma) fridge.

The slow motion, I have to say, has not aged well. In fact, the timing of the story in these episodes is much more tedious and plodding than how I remember. Maybe that’s because when I was seven I was just waiting for Steve Austin to jump over a wall or hit somebody. Another thing that I find interesting is that the influence of James Bond was much more perceptible than the way I remember it. Col. Austin is not just bionic, he’s a man’s man, capable of seducing any woman, relocating an engine from a pickup truck into an airplane, designing some super-world-saving-ramshackle device on the spot, apparently has an IQ of over 200 or so. Since he’s fighting bad guys who really have to be stopped, it goes without saying that he must work for some super-secret government agency. It’s an interesting comment on the times in which we lived back then; I wonder if it would have been possible to make this a couple years later, with Watergate & all. In fact, I’d wager not. Knight Rider did exactly the same thing, but he worked for “The Foundation.”

But still. In that subsequent era, with our confidence completely blown, when you went to the boob tube the real shadowy guys who were up to no good never worked for the government. Sure, you could tell they were bad because they wore nice suits…all the time…even in the middle of the night. Good guys wore plaid shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, and jeans that were skin tight up top around the derrier, flowing like draperies down by the ankles. Suit == bad. But the bad guys weren’t government agency employees, they were super rich megalomaniacs running large corporations. See the little twist? Government screws up…and in our national consciousness, this means free enterprise cannot be trusted.

Another thing that has not aged well from this show, and it is more central to the costuming issue: Steve’s clothes. I can see exactly what they’re getting across — here the scientists and generals and Oscar are briefing Steve on his next mission, and if you’re seeing this for the first time you can tell this guy in the middle of the room is the cool one because he’s a fashion plate. That’s how it looks in 1973. Nowadays, you look at it and go, why is that man wearing a carpet for a suit?

To the asshole book: Wish it arrived twenty years earlier, I could’ve used something like that. By sheer coincidence, Severian posted a comment, also on Groundhog Day, that said

This is why the left almost always wins. Bureaucracies only work when workplaces are harmonious, and so they create elaborate structures to enforce harmony. Since leftists are offended by almost everything, those enforcement structures err on the side of caution and begin enforcing mandatory leftism. And on and on the vicious circle spins…

And here we come to another elaborate thought about workplaces. Chapter four, “How To Stop Your Inner Jerk From Getting Out,” concentrates on avoiding the zombie characteristic of asshole-mania, how to keep from becoming one after you have been bitten. Perhaps this is where the relative wants me to concentrate my energies, I don’t know. It’s chock full of advice and has a self-assessment.

I’m pleased and proud to report that, of all the people who shared a difficult workplace with me and nurtured or became inextricably devoted to the thought that I’m an asshole, their thinking went something like this: Morgan isn’t doing every little thing, large & small, exactly the way I’d be doing it if I were Morgan, that makes him an asshole. And you know what, I’ll take that. I think something needs to be faced here, the word “asshole” is not so much a word that serves to insult, as a word that serves to dismiss. Once you go through life saying “I seek to dismiss any & all persons who do not do things exactly the same way I would do them,” then I submit you do not need to take an asshole self-assessment quiz, we already know the answer…such a being is lower than anybody who ever fisked somebody, or anybody who ever got fisked even if they had it coming.

And this ties in to Severian’s comment. If you have a workplace that is harmonious only because some busybody is “enforcing harmony”…and that busybody, or someone who shares a factional agenda with the busybody, is “offended by almost everything” — how harmonious is that workplace going to be? To paraphrase Stalin, it doesn’t matter who is the asshole, it matters who counts the assholes and therefore defines the assholes.

More than once I have wondered, how do we explain this to future generations? We are going to make our workplaces harmonious, by deferring to the opinions of self-appointed dictators in determining what is “offensive”…oh, and the dictators will generally be self-appointed on the basis of being super-sensitive to perceived slights. That is what makes our workplaces so flexible, so friendly, so welcoming. Above all, non-threatening. That is the paramount goal, so since that goal is higher than any other, we will achieve it by making sure your minute-to-minute behavior, actual & perceived, is adjudicated by some frenzied neurotic you’ve never met, who never had to convince anybody that he or she can be fair or impartial…someone who might very well be nuts. We will end your career over this. We’ll send you to special classes to make sure you understand these are the rules, so you know ahead of time that you are toiling eight hours a day under the Sword of Damocles.

That this creates a non-threatening business environment, is something that will be much more difficult to explain to future generations than — well, The Six Million Dollar Man’s leisure suit.

So there you have a day in the life. Groundhog Day. It covers a lot of subjects, and perhaps in the elaborate treatise above I have managed to tie all of them neatly together. Except for Steve Austin who’s just sort of sticking out there. But he’s cool like that. Nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga….

Wow. I’m privileged. Only my second post on Pundit Press, and already a mention on HoE.

But, it’s Kaptain Krude, not Captain Karrde. I go by AnonymousGuy on Fark and here, but Kaptain Krude most everywhere else in the political sphere. (By the way, that offer to buy you a beer if you ever come through Arkansas still stands. I really did appreciate the one month of Total Fark that you bought me. The Fark liberals have really become insufferable, so much so that I very rarely spend any time there any more.)

I really wanted to explain your distaste of fisking with more detail, but I didn’t really think it was germane to the discussion, so I threw almost all of it out. I knew what I meant when I wrote that you were like an older brother whispering advice to me, but I threw out a few sentences that I thought dragged the whole piece down. So, in hindsight, maybe I should have left a few words on both of those two points in to prevent any kind of confusion. Live and learn.

I am pretty critical of myself when I’m writing things like this, so I do a lot of writing, followed by a lot of editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing. By the time I get to something that I really like, too much time has passed and the subject is stale. So, when you stated that you disliked fisking, I looked at what I was writing and judged that maybe I was trying to find fault in other people’s works simply for the fisking.

That, and it was also fairly time-intensive. I was spending four or five hours minimum on the weekly fisking of the liberal weekly columnist, looking up facts from articles that I had read earlier in the day, or week, or month, or year. Then going back and re-reading what I had wrote and editing to make sure that it would make sense, and was either informative or entertaining. And then going back and re-reading what I had wrote to make sure that everything was the way I wanted it.

Yes, Bob Scott really is an insufferable jackass. I make as much relentless fun of him as I can, when I can. Between him, a liberal columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Times by the name of John Brummett, and the liberal columnist that I have been fisking for many years, I have enough material to do at least 6 fiskings a month. But I think I can only do maybe one high-quality fisking per month, and I have to be as fired up as I was for Bob’s letter.

Perhaps I’ll come across something else that will fire me up like Bob’s letter did. But I think I’m going to close the door on my fisking writing for now.

Thank you for the kind words. The egoist in me bristles at the “potentially” part of the “potentially wonderful writing”. Why, don’t you recognize greatness when it dribbles off your screen?

And then I stuff the egoist back in his box, slam the top of the cage closed, and go back to reading. We’ve been hit pretty hard by snow ever since Tuesday, so I have a lot to catch up on.
- AnonymousGuy | 02/05/2011 @ 17:28
Ah damn, I forgot to look up the spelling. I hate it when I do that. I was thinking of the Star Wars character for some reason.

I know Arkansas from a business trip back in the spring of ’03. It was the eastern part of the state. I landed in Memphis, rented a car and headed to Blytheville. The Hooters waitresses in Tennessee were kind enough to give me directions, some juice to charge up my laptop, counter space for my remote office, and and then they taught me to drop the “th” so I didn’t sound like the city boy I was. As far as the Arkansas sunsets — completely unforgettable. Good times.

I estimate TotalFark to be somewhere between 50 and 60 percent college kids melting down their university’s wireless routers. That’s probably on the low side. I hope you managed to pollute TF with your knuckle-dragging right-wing claptrap and drive ’em straight up one of the trees they want to hug.
- mkfreeberg | 02/05/2011 @ 17:40
“Groundhog-Day-Eve”

Heh. We call it that, too. Plus, it also happens to be our wedding anniversary.

I occasionally fisk, and I enjoy reading a good fisk of someone who has it coming. I vaguely remember your post grumbling about fisking… but … apparently I didn’t internalize it. You can’t agree on everything.

The Hooters waitresses in Tennessee were kind enough to give me directions, some juice to charge up my laptop,

Heh again. “Some juice to charge my laptop”. Is that what they’re calling it these days?

Sorry, couldn’t help myself 😉
- philmon | 02/05/2011 @ 19:39
[…] Attitude Toward the Constitution This Is Good LXXIX “Universities On The Brink” Memo For File CXXX The Nuts and Bolts of the ObamaCare Ruling Study: Men Should Leave Care of Children to the Women […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/06/2011 @ 08:33

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