i'd like to book a flight...to hell!

so the big company i work for was recently swallowed by a bigger company. i would normally find such distinctions fairly irrelevent, particularly on this relatively modest level. but today i had my first experience with red tape (and a smattering of just plain things-not-working-ness) gone wild.

i live in portland and fly down to SF about once a month for work. i generally stay a week, monday through friday. i was just there the week before last. i learned yesterday that i'd have to go down again next week. so, today i jumped online and made a reservation at the hostel that i generally stay at when i go down there. it's kinda skeevy, but it's cheap and it's a 30 minute walk from the office and it's conveniently located to burritos. today, i started looking for flights. i haven't lived up here long, but i've flown down to SF/oakland a fair number of times and haven't had any problems with flights. today: nothing. as in, no flights. for any price. in my entire life, i think this is the first time that's ever happened to me. i started having a mini panic attack. was i supposed to drive? there goes 2 days.

anyway, on my girlfriend's suggestion, i tried flights out of seattle and found an embarrasment of riches (which says something about portland's place in the airline world, but anyway). so now i gotta drive up to seattle early next monday morning, then drive back down next saturday afternoon.

anyway, in the course of making this trip, as well as simultaneously trying to fill out an expense report for the last trip i just made, i encountered a host of stumbling blocks, mini-waterloos, wailing walls, what have you. some were of my own doing, but many can be traced back to the moronic processes and web applications the bigger company foists on us. i mean, seriously, i am so prepared to believe that this entire company is nothing more than a front for scientists who are studying us the way that kids study hampsters on wheels. and if i ever see the letters 'p', 'd', and 'f' in the same paragraph again, i will take a hostage. and kill them.

the good old wars

ben stein's funny.

in a nutshell, a bunch of golfers paid the equivalent of their mexican housekeeper's daily salary to listen to ben stein pontificate about the evils of the movie industry, with exhibit A being their failure to observe a moment of silence at the recent academy awards for our armed forces members in iraq.

first of all, can we please for the love of christ stop politicizing people's feelings about our troops? who the fuck are these people that hate our troops? can we all just agree that we would love to have all the troops over to our place for beers and a nice well-stuffed pipe? next.

secondly, what should be pointed out here is that ben is clearly waxing nostalgic for a period he never even lived through: world war II (he was born in november of '44). i wasn't around then, but i would be willing to bet that it was hard to go anywhere in the US and not be confronted with some reminder of the war. car stickers and ribbons to the contrary, the iraq invasion does not seem to have generated similar broad-based appeal. while opinion polls should probably taken with a grain of salt, it seems clear that, at the very least, there is great ambivalence on the part of a not-insignificant portion of the population. gee, maybe what people think about their government's military dealings is important. who knew?

what's more insidious than annoying, however, is the implication behind ben's rant. the government doesn't want us to think of this as an invasion/occupation. they want us to think of this as a war. they want us to think of this as our government defending us, as opposed to, say, as our government going out and stirring up trouble and making us potentially less safe in the process. just as an example.

and here's the kicker: this war doesn't end. for when can you reasonably claim that terrorism is completely eradicated?

world war II lasted for almost 4 years. that seems like a long time for your country to be locked in such a monumental struggle. i think that will look like nothing compared to the war on terrorism. instead of spending 4 years watching the maps of the world shift like tectonic plates, we'll spend generations sitting with an uneasy malaise. we won't have to ration bread, but we may wind up rationing things far more important.

how can my dessert be less healthy?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, bacon.

any paragraph that starts off with the line, "I was giving a bacon seminar", is worth reading.