Steaming Turd

I was going to post this as a comment to Madeofmeat’s blog here, but then realized that I was starting to go on at some length, making this a more appropriate place to post it.

Things like national security letters and warrantless wiretaps really bother me. They both seem like a blatant attempt to dodge the Constitutional protections generally offered by the Judicial Branch (and, in fact, warrantless wiretaps are definitely that).

The Dems are all up in arms about Gonzales firing those attorneys; well, I say who cares about that, when it’s clear that a large portion of the reason that Gonzales is in and Ashcroft is out is that Ashcroft wouldn’t play ball on warrantless wiretaps (who knows, maybe he was starting to have second thoughts about NSLs after the DoJ lost Doe v. Ashcroft). I can’t figure out why the Dems haven’t shifted their focus to address the Ashcroft sickbed incident and the surrounding circumstances. The only thing I can think is that it sticks in the craw of the far left to give Ashcroft credit for anything, and that’s just what they’d have to do in order to start focusing on an issue involving actual illegal activity on the part of the federal government rather than personnel matters that, while they smack of political maneuvering, are legitimate.

Mary Jane’s Assets Causing Stir in Spider-Man’s World

A lot of people are taking umbrage at this sculpture. Personally, I think it’s much ado about nothing. I’m a dude, and I’m also not a big Spidey fan in the first place (never read the comic or saw any of the movies), but I don’t get the big deal. Not every woman is a bra-burning liberation-marching ultra-empowered feminist, and some women still do laundry for their men. In fact, might it be more insulting to women to degrade the ones who choose to take this role in their life instead of shattering glass ceilings and putting us lowly men in our proper place?

Don’t get me wrong. I like strong women characters in my TV and movies. Samantha Carter, Zoe Washburne, and Dana Scully are all teh hawt. But the beauty of artwork based on fiction, and not strictly connected to that fiction (like an episode of a TV series would be), is that you can explore a character by putting them in out-of-character situations without diminishing the character. And, by extension, without diminishing what the character stands for.

I have another theory concerning this article.

Namely, young people don’t want to see naked old people.

Due to a freak computing accident, I’ve been forced - er, given the opportunity, rather - to upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0. Unfortunately, the same freak accident has caused me to lose all of my old e-mail. I still have it lying around on the hard drive - hundreds of megs of it, in fact - but Thunderbird will no longer access it. There’s probably a way to trick it into letting me view those folders again, but that’s a project for another day.

So, if you sent me an e-mail in the last couple of days and I haven’t replied, I probably won’t. You’ll have to e-mail me again. Sorry!

Update: Turned out it wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it would be. I have no idea why my old install of Thunderbird stopped being able to find my e-mail, but I just copied the files from the old profile directory into the new one, and it worked fine. In fact, the only thing that I’m not sure whether or not it works now is the “sanitizer” feature that I had been using before. The sanitizer trims out tons of HTML content that I don’t want to view. This consists mainly of IMG and EMBED tags, where content gets loaded from a remote server automatically. That lets e-mail senders implement web bugs, where they put a unique URL in for the filename of an image, and then they can track whether or not you’ve opened the e-mail or not. True evil it is, so I use the sanitizer to prevent images from being displayed in the first place.

Anyway, it works now, and I can see all my old messages again. Whew!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,270854,00.html

Announcing a new blog I’ve started on my site: Ten Acres

I recently added the Plain Dealer’s RSS feed to my list of feeds, so that I can remain informed every time someone gets shot in the vicinity of MLK and Kinsman. Well, apparently, today is a particularly slow news day.

It looks as good as it flies.

This comment about the reworked V-22 Osprey was made on a TV show I saw recently. I’m not writing this to comment on the aircraft or the veracity of the statement, but rather the grammatically confounding sentence itself.

The sentence essentially compares the magnitude of two shorter statements and asserts that they are equal. The first, “It looks good,” is not problematic, as it describes the appearance of the aircraft as being good (i.e., aesthetically pleasing). However, the second statement, “It flies good,” is grammatically incorrect, since good is an adjective with nothing to modify. One would normally say, “It flies well,” replacing good with the adverb well, which then indicates how it flies.

However, in the context of the above sentence, an even equally bad thing happens:

“It looks as well as it flies.”

There are two ways to read that sentence. In both readings, the second statement, “It flies well,” is correct. But the first statement, “It looks well,” is now hosed up with semantic, rather than syntactic, problems.

One reading indicates that the aircraft looks healthy, i.e., well. This isn’t what was intended by the speaker, as he was indeed commenting on the good looks of the craft. (The anthropomorphization of the V-22 by describing it as “healthy” is a bit dubious as well.)

The other reading indicates that the aircraft is capable of looking (i.e., seeing), and it does that with adroitness. Now, the V-22 is equipped with FLIR, but this isn’t what the speaker meant either.

The final quandary, however, is that I can’t think of an easy fix for this sentence. There is a certain flair of conciseness being used here which one might wish to keep. One could say, “It looks good and flies just as well,” but that sentence is somewhat unwieldy, and the breakdown of parallel between each statement’s modifier (adjective versus adverb) still bothers me. So, what do you think? Is there a better way to express this sentiment, or should I be shot just for bringing it up?