Grump!

There are days when even I feel grumpy and today was one of them. To make matters worse it seemed that everything conspired to thwart my efforts. I couldn't sleep last night so my attempt to sort my schedule around failed and I slept in till 5:00 pm. When I got up I could hardly think straight and stumbled downstairs to discover there wasn't any coffee waiting. I wasn't up for making coffee (I couldn't even SEE other than a blur), so I nuked cold tea from the night before. Somehow it came out of the microwave just as cold as it went in. I had to nuke it a second time, trying to carefully keep track of what I was doing, and it came out luke warm. I gave up and drank it like that. I quickly found that I couldn't move without banging into something or tripping over something or knocking something off of a table. I also discovered when I bent over to pick something up that I must have strained my back hauling in the groceries the other day, because when I bend over I'm in sudden agony. I got so frustrated taxlady saw me throw a cat toy across the room when it tangled in my feet for the sixth time in three minutes.

I went back upstairs to my office with the plan of just sitting at my computer and working on notes for the Science Fiction game I promised to start lo so long ago. Well, Wordperfect decided that it was going to crash every 4 or 5 minutes that I worked on the file. When I wasn't restarting Wordperfect or rebooting my machine because all of the crashes had destabilized it, my Linux internet server was rebooting. It has some long-standing bug that makes it reboot every day or so but lately it seems to be doing it every couple of hours. This just makes me more frustrated since there is an old Daffy Duck cartoon I've been trying to download from the Internet. There's a download Queue and I always start out somewhere near number 100. I typically get down to number 20 and my server reboots and I have to restart at 100 again. I've been in that same queue 24 hours a day for the last 2 weeks. Today it was just too much to take.

I went downstairs to get me some coffee at last and taxlady held me and patted my head and said "there there" to me over and over. Corney as it sounds, it helped. I decided to answer my e-mail and was 1/2 way into a long reply when my sweetie asked if the server was down again. No, this time it was the whole ISP. Of course, they had recently changed their tech support number so I couldn't phone to ask what had happened, and I couldn't get online to find out their new number. I do have an emergency dial-up account with another ISP, but they weren't allowing connections (something they do when load shedding).

EVENTUALLY I managed to dial into one ISP so that I could get the number for the other and phoned Tech Support. Turns out an ADSL lan card or two had blown and were being replaced. They estimated they would have service back in 90 minutes.

Meanwhile I made myself some lunch and managed to type up a bunch of my notes in another, more primitive, editor. About the time my creative juices were waning the ADSL line came back on, so maybe things are improving. I sure hope so.

Gore Vidal

Is a character that I only know of from caricatures in the cartoon section at the back of Penthouse magazine in the mid seventies; a time at which I was still early enough into my puberty that I turned to the cartoon section first... Last night my sweetie and I were up very late and it was partially due to a fascinating biography of Gore Vidal. This is a man who grew up a senator's grandson in Washington, someone who was groomed for power at an early age and given an introduction to how things really work in the American Government. He was taken to congress and shown how most of the negotiations took place in the cloak rooms of congress not on the floor of the house. He was able to witness what Senators said in confidence to his grandfather vs what they said to the public. He thought long and hard about going into politics (and even made a stab at it in later years) but he decided to be a writer instead.

His first book "The City and Pillar" was the first mainstream novel to ever show a positive homosexual relationship (involving the main protagonist, no less) and was published in 1948 at a time when even heterosexual intercourse between unmarried adults was taboo. He has since gone on to produce many, many controversial novels, many of which are historical. According to the various historians that were interviewed during the biography, Vidal is uncannily good at piecing together historical documents and drawing conclusions that fit the facts better than traditional historical narratives, especially of things American. It was Gore who first published the evidence that Thomas Jefferson bore a number of illegitimate children from one or more of his black slaves, that Benjamin Franklin was driven by a desire for power as much as a desire to do good, and that Arron Burr (a mostly forgotten founding father) pulled many of the strings behind the scenes while the constitution was being drafted.

He's still writing things as controversially and unabashedly true as when he started out. At one point in the show he read the following quote from his book "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" about September 9/11:

"...fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues...we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine..."

I think I'm going to go out and get me a few books by this guy...