Author: MacPhoenix

My older, fatter cat, Jinx, likes to play this game where she gets under the bed-sheets and turns over onto her back, with all four paws sticking up, making a deadly tent of cat fury. She waits for a hand to “attack” her in this position, and she grabs it with her front paws, rakes with her back claws, and bites and growls and twists. Katherine cuts Jinx’s nails regularly, so she usually does very little damage to me or the sheets until she gets a little worked up. When she does, it’s usually her biting that threatens to injure.

She’s not really trying to hurt me; although, I doubt my cat-hostile friends, like Jim, would agree with me. Jim’s a dog person and would take Jinx’s actions as the just the typical thing a vicious nasty ol’ cat would do. I, however, think of it the same way as playing “tug-o’-war” with a dog. While the dog is holding on to the end of whatever, the dog will begin to growl and threaten and make those bug-eyes, snapping its jaw to get a better grip, and it gets more aggressive the longer its playing. It’s the nature of the particular beast.

So really, I usually don’t overreact when Jinx gets a good bite or scratch on me during the game. She hardly plays anymore, anyway, since she’s a bit more mature, and she lets the younger cat do all the dominating.

But a few weeks ago, she jumped up on the bed, got under the sheets, and flipped over. Her nails had just been cut a couple days before. I reached down into the cauldron of death, and Jinx swiped at just the right moment and… Bing! a single claw sunk into my right pinky. I yelped and pulled my hand away. Jinx flipped back over immediately, knowing something was wrong, and got out, back on top of the sheets. Her ears were back, and she walked a bit away from me, as if trying to convince me that she wasn’t the cat that just did that thing that made me react like that.

The shock of it, at first, was all I felt. It hurt, but no more than other lucky shots she’s given me. I looked at the puncture, and it was a slight blue mark right below the fleshy part of the fingertip. Then wave after wave of throbbing pain overloaded my senses. Suddenly, this motherfucker hurt! It was a pain I felt once before, when I got my blood-gasses checked and the pulmonary doctor stuck a needle into an artery in my wrist. He warned me that it would hurt, but I still wanted to punch the guy to get him off of me. If I hadn’t been watching him, I would have sworn he was stepping on my wrist with spiked boots. It was an intense pain.

Now, with this good hit from Jinx, the blood began to flow, seemingly more than should come from a wound that I could barely see. The blood was dark and steady. I’m pretty sure she nicked my vein. For about 10 minutes, I paced from the bedroom to the bathroom and back while holding my hand above my head, pressing a tissue into my pinky. It may have looked like I was trying to staunch the blood flow, and that was indeed what happened, but really, my hand was over my head because I was in a decent amount of blinding pain, and it was the only place that I could hold my hand where I couldn’t look at it. It felt *better* not to look at it. I kept saying, “Wow,” and “Whoa,” under my breath. I became clammy, sweaty and pale.

Eventually, I washed my finger off, and marveled again at the tiniest of wounds. I put a bandage on it, and it didn’t bleed much again during the night. The pain went away a day later. I thanked Jinx for withdrawing as soon as she hit me, because if she had stayed hooked as I pulled my hand away, there would have been stitches involved that night. Instead, there’s just the tiniest trace of smoothed skin on my finger, three weeks later. Jinx has long forgotten the incident, but we haven’t played the game since. Next time, gloves, for both me and the cat.

Last night, I heard “Run Like Hell,” by **Pink Floyd**, on the radio. This, sadly, is not an uncommon occurrence. Applying the [pop-poseur rule][1], “Run Like Hell” is a *poseur*’s song on *The Wall*. It is a step above the crowd-pleasing “Comfortably Numb,” but not quite at the true-fan level of “In the Flesh?” let’s say, or “The Trial.” What I find ironic, though, is that the song used to be a secret fan-favorite and never heard on the classic rock stations, but now is in heavy rotation, seemingly replacing the used-to-be-ubiquitous “Mother.” I remember my friend Joe and I discussing the song twenty years ago, perplexed at it’s absence from the airwaves, and calling our local rock station, requesting it played. Inevitably, they’d play “Mother” or “Comfortably Numb.”

At least it was from the same album. If we were feeling arrogant and punkish, which was quite often, we’d ask them to play “If” or “Free Four,” and they’d play “Mother; or “Comfortably Numb.”

> *On the radio*: “This goes out to Deer Park for showing the world they love rock-and-roll.”
>
> *Music begins: “Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody IN there?…”*
>
> *Me*: “Wait, is that us? Are we Deer Park? We didn’t ask for [expletive-deleted] *Comfortably* [expletive-deleted] *Numb*! [Expletive-deleted]!!”

Joe and I were heavy Floyd-heads. In 1986, we saw [Water’s Radio KAOS tour][2] at the Garden. We were both way too young to do that unaccompanied, but we did we know? We spent the next four years acquiring the back-catalog, reading fanzines, debating the extent of Syd Barrett’s legacy. We drifted apart for various, awkward, teen-aged reasons, but then, when I was 22, we started hanging out again.

I remember, specifically, I was 22, despite my hazy memory, because that’s when I started my drinking career. I was the only one of my peers to start drinking after turning 21. Previously, I hated beer and I couldn’t abide by drug use. I was pretty uptight.

Joe, Erick (my best man), and I were in the City, at a place called **The Slaughtered Lamb**, which had gas lamps and unvarnished wood–very olde-English tavern-style. Joe, always the show-off, got himself a $12 bottle of Belgian beer. The stuff poured like maple syrup into his mug. I had to try it. It was, frankly and surprisingly, delicious. That was something I could get into. Luckily, I was poor, so I didn’t get myself a bottle. My love of beer would have to wait until that summer.

Where Joe and I went to some loud bar in Bay Shore. Did we know the band–was there some specific reason we went to that place? I don’t remember. Joe got himself a [Sam Adams][3], and I was intrigued. I had never heard of it. It smelt like pine needles. I got myself a bottle. Oh, sweet nectar of the gods! What was this world that I was missing? To that point the only beers that I had tried were the watery, funky domestics and **Heineken**. No offense to the legion of **Bud** drinkers out there, but your beer sucks. And Heineken* is worse. My first beer was exceptional, and I haven’t been able to settle for less since then.

And Joe was there the next time my beer horizons expanded. That summer of Sam was packed full of amazing experiences, only some fueled by that amazing elixir known as alcohol, but that fall, Joe and I lose touch again for a couple years, I don’t remember why. But I do remember one cold winter’s night in Huntington. Joe and I walk into bar, mostly to get out of the cold. We were headed some place specific, and that wasn’t the place. But to take the chill off, we both order a beer.

> *Me*: I’ll have a Sam Adams.
>
> *Bartender*: Want a Winter Lager?
>
> *Me*: Um. Sure?

Why anyone would deny anyone a **Samuel Adams Winter Lager**, I can’t imagine. That first sip was bliss from my chilled nose to my chilled toes. I warmed up immediately. I swear I have never taken a more pleasurable sip than that. When November comes around, I begin my perennial quest to find bars that have Winter Lager on tap. It helps, too, if they keep their screens clean. Winter Lager poured through a skunky screen turns into a bland brew. No one wants that. (Apparently, I’m still pretty arrogant. I’ve lost a bit of the punkiness, though.)
So hearing “Run Like Hell” on the radio for the zillionth time still brings a smile to face. It reminds me of good beer, and great concerts, and Fourth-of-July fireworks from the rooftop of a restaurant at the marina. It reminds me of my friend Joe, and our crazy relationship. This next pints for you Joe–may you continue to run like hell.

*There is a story behind Heineken’s green bottles, which is marketing. In Holland, the bottles are brown. Why? Ever have it on tap? It tastes completely different. Green bottles don’t prevent skunk. Every bottle of Heinie that you’ve had has been skunky. **Corona**, too. That weird shaped neck on a Corona bottle? It prevents you from smelling the skunk. The lime? It’s to prevent you from tasting the skunk. **Don’t drink beer from clear or green bottles.** This has been a public service message from the Arrogant Beer Connoisseurs of America (ABC-USA).

[1]: http://www.macphoenix.com/creative/blog/archives/2005/07/the_popposeur_r.html
[2]: http://www.macphoenix.com/creative/blog/archives/2006/09/roger_waters_live_at_the_garden.html
[3]: http://www.samueladams.com/ “Warning: age verification ahead.”

This isn’t a line drawn in the sand. I like when people are helpful, so the last thing I want to do is discourage helpfulness. But sometimes, being too helpful becomes a burden.
Recently, I had a print job that I handed off to a company through an online uploader. The uploader had a preview feature that showed how the final print would look, but when I picked up the job, my prints were not correct. There was a big white square where an image should have been. I was very willing to admit the error was my fault, until I realized that the person who ran the job saw the same preview as I did. They ran all the prints, even though they were significantly different than the preview. So I went home and called the corporate headquarters, and they agreed to run the print job again. A very helpful representative made sure that the prints would go through this time with everything in place.
Now I had set this print job up with crop marks, meaning that the final size of the job was less than the paper size it was printed on. This is fairly standard in printing. But what I did not do was ask for the prints to be cut down to the final size. I just wanted the prints; however, going above and beyond, the very helpful representative cut my job for me, I assume, to make up for the job not printing right in the first place.
I’m willing to forgive, for an example, the fact that the job was cut incorrectly, because it amounted to about a ¼" difference, but I had to print on the back of this particular job, and this instance of helpfulness made me spend extra time on something that had a looming deadline. I was able to get the job out, but there was a sinking feeling when I pulled those cut prints out of the bag when I went to pick them up.
Again, no names are mentioned here, because I don’t want to discourage helpfulness. The person who helped me with those prints really came through when I needed it. But going beyond what I needed created its own set of problems.
Sometimes, acts of charity come from strange sources. Yesterday, I was working on a bit of web code for a job. I tested the code on **Safari**, the **Apple** browser, and everything was working well. I uploaded the job to the test server, and told my client to check it, and sure enough, it didn’t work for him.
I checked it again, on the server, using Safari, and it worked fine. Now there are several browsers, and they all tend to display web pages slightly differently, but the code that I was writing had to do with a form, and that’s all server-side standards that shouldn’t be affected by what browser sends the data.
And yet, when I tried the same form that was working fine in Safari, it failed in **Firefox** and **Internet Explorer**. I was mightily confused, and it took me about two hours to discover that I had made a spelling mistake. There is an attribute to the form called *enctype*, which stands for encoding type. It helps the browser send data to the server in the proper format. The enctype that I wanted to send was “multipart/form-data,” essentially meaning that I wanted it to send different types of data at once, text and files. Unfortunately, what I typed was “mutlipart/form-data.” I’m willing to bet that many people, at least at first glance, wouldn’t see the difference. It took me quite some time. But when I did find the dyslexic typo, the stress that was building up in me squeezed out like an undone balloon.
And then I thought, Hey! Why did Safari allow the form to go through?
Safari was being helpful. Very helpful. Too helpful. If the form didn’t work when I first typed it, I would have looked for a spelling mistake right away. It’s part of my workflow. I expect to have plenty of spelling errors in my documents, so I would have had to scrutinize my code. I would have caught it at the beginning of my scripting, and not sent it to the client, who’s wondering why I would deem a job finished when it’s throwing errors all over the place.
There is a balance, then, but I guess I’m glad that there are people who err on the side of too helpful. The world would be a genuinely frustrating place if it were filled with those who are too helpful, because we’d all have to backtrack a bit before we could get on with what we were supposed to be doing, but it’d probably be a whole lot better than this selfish, do-unto-others-*before*-they-do-unto-you world.

There’s a silly public access program that’s repeated often late night on cable. The title of the series is **The (Not So) Hidden Agenda**. I’ve watched snippets of two different episodes, but both the episodes are repeated over and over again, so I assume that this series is mad up entirely of two hour-long episodes. Both episodes are noted for their lack of clarity and confusing visuals. They take stock footage and overlay it with simplistic graphics or filters that turn everything negative or [solarise][1] images or whatever. Then there is narration and often a backtrack of heavy metal music.
I’m not clear on why the producers of this series decided that heavy metal music was appropriate for the show. I guess to make everything more exciting. At any rate, the two episodes that I have seen both deal with the hidden connections of everything. I have a soft-spot in my logic center for [holistic][2] histories, so the episode that deals with the earth-goddess and phallic symbols and triple-headed gods is all fine and good, if too new-agey and trippy. That episode has plenty of conspiracy theories in it and assumes that we all hate the Freemasons, but the other episode I’ve seen is entirely about the Freemasons and their plot to control our lives.
It’s very silly. There is a part where they go on about **The Simpsons** episode with the *Stonecutters* that is mind-bogglingly puerile, but that’s not important right now.
What got me though, and still bothers me, weeks after I’ve seen it, was tortured logic and bad history about the founding of America. Yes, it’s true. America was founded by Freemasons, which is like saying that Corporate America is run by Ivy League graduates. It proves that elites run in small circles, but nothing more.
Anyway, the fear-mongering about Masons running the government isn’t the *really* crazy part. It was this: The show talked about England being run by the Masons in Colonial times. France, however was not. The Masons in France were middle-class, but were not in the nobility, so their machinations were limited by their lack of power. So they set up the French Revolution, which pitted the poor against the rich. See? The Masons, who were in the middle, could just sit back and let the poor do their dirty work. Brilliant! And it worked really well, too. The king was beheaded, and France looked like it was going to fall in control of the Masons.
But the Masons miscalculated. The show is not clear on how exactly. It really ignored the [Reign of Terror][3], so it wasn’t that the poor got fed up with the autocratic and capricious rule of their new masters. Instead, the show says that the Masons screwed up by not counting on Napoleon taking over. Napoleon, the show assures us, was not a Mason. Of course not, since England (ruled by Masons, remember) worked so hard to defeat Napoleon. The Masons were determined to not make this same mistake in America.
So the middle-class American Masons, who did not have power in Colonial America, overthrew the government, and installed themselves into power, thus preventing a Napoleon-like figure from taking over.
The narration strained over this amazing bit of misinformation. The show had spent the last 10 minutes talking about how the Masons controlled England. So it was a teensy-tiny bit illogical to say that the Americans overthrew the English Masons to install American Masons. But, the show stressed, that’s how clever the Masons are. What they were really doing was preventing a Napoleon-type strong-arm from taking the Colonies away from their control.
I was floored. Luckily, I was in bed, and my fiancée was asleep next to me. I wanted to yell out, “What the hell?” but instead whispered curses to myself. It’s bad enough that conspiracy theories screw with logic so badly that it can be difficult to cut through all the bullcrap. Most of us end up saying, “Huh, that could be true,” and let it seep into our subconscious, poisoning our reasoning. Once we accept that there are huge structures of control around us that we can’t even see, let alone access, we begin to assume that we are powerless to decide anything. Nothing means anything anymore.
And it is a poison. Let’s ignore for a moment the idea that there is a shadow organization that means to enslave us by some crazy-assed means. Let’s ignore the idea that a single group, hellbent on world domination, would pit two nations, *that were already under its control*, against each other in order to further its agenda. Instead, let’s look at the dates:
* The French Revolution: 1789–1799.
* *Napoleon* stages the coup leading to his installation as emperor: 1799
* The American Revolution: 1775–1783
* *George Washington*, a [Freemason][4], is elected first President of the United States: 1789
So the Masons were so sophisticated that they knew the revolution, which would not occur in France for 6 more years, would end in bad tidings for them, so they labored to get the very unpopular George Washington into office, which would prevent a Napoleon-like leader (Napoleon himself keeping busy, but out of history, for a further 10 years) from taking over America.
Brilliant.
To be fair, I realize that what the program was actually saying was that the writers and producers don’t know shit about history. I understand that their ignorance is the very thing that feeds their paranoia about Freemasons. It’s really easy to connect the dots when we don’t actually connect them in any particular order. No doubt, when we do, it always comes out shaped like a pentagon or pentagram or crescent moon, or whatever else we feel like being scared about.
Freemasons. I snort in their general direction. They couldn’t rule a city block. But so what? The vast majority of Freemasons are just interested in having a beer with some buddies. They’re as powerful as volunteer fire departments and the Elk Lodge. Unless you’re [Ed Brown][5], who convinced me that even idyllic New Hampshire can have it’s share of paranoid, militia-forming nutjobs. I have a huge amount of respect for New Hampshire’s motto, *Live Free or Die*. (I believe that to my core. In that way, I, too, am a nutjob.) But Ed Brown gives us patriots a bad name. See, he’s convinced that his taxes are going to pay for evil [Freemason plots][6].
> Brown, who asserts that the federal government has no jurisdiction in New Hampshire and no authority to charge him under a non-existent law, said the activity surrounding his properties in Plainfield and West Lebanon yesterday was a “Zionist, Illuminati, Free Mason movement.”
Or maybe he just wants justification to not pay his taxes. Maybe that’s the real genesis of conspiracy theories. If we don’t like something or the man is keeping us down, why not just say that the Oogey-boogeys are zapping all of us with Depresso-rays (and I’m particularly sensitive to those damned rays). It’s a lot easier than admitting failure. Hell, maybe we could even get a book deal out if it. Or produce a really crappy public access show with a kick-ass metal track. Yeah! That’ll show them Oogey-boogeys.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_Effect
[2]: http://dirkgently.podomatic.com/ “Not a Wikipedia link!”
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_terror
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Religious_beliefs
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lewis_Brown
[6]: http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Ed+Brown+says+feds+have+no+jurisdiction+in+New+Hampshire&articleId=844a9c5f-5475-4d71-a149-102ea693ee4b