I try not to judge people who come into the store, seeing as how I don’t really have data points to work with save for our brief interactions, but occasionally a customer is particularly chatty. Usually I get nothing more than mundane details about somebody’s life or comments about the news, but the other day this woman came in who I decided was crazy. Not crazy in a psychotic, random fashion, but subtly so.

She was making copies of a fitness article for her husband and we ended up talking about health in general, how little decisions every day can add up. There was an earnestness to her that unnerved me, though. She seemed to be almost too single-minded, devoting everything she had in that head of hers to the conversation. Eyes a little too wide. Leaning in just a bit too close. It wasn’t until she started fixating on just how young she thought I looked that those tiny little warning flags began to rise. She leaned in and with an unnecessary intensity emphasized to me how, in the end, it was faith in our lord Jesus who is also the Christ that can keep us healthy.

I guess Jesus provides a good cardiovascular workout, but the only way I can imagine somebody being responsible for said workout is a bit blasphemous.

One of my housemates secured me a job interview at a company that, wonder of wonders, would be stable and career-oriented. At the same time, the cancerous rot that’s entwined with the franchise store I’m working at has begun to metastasize. I’m not going to go into any details until it’s all finished this week, but I can say that it involves a lot of money, bad hair plugs, poor management, possible criminal trespass, and irrational cost-cutting.

A little boy urinating himself in the store was also involved, albeit tangentially.

The crap surrounding the Attorney General and the seemingly political firings at the Justice Department just got a little more interesting. You can read the article at the New York Times, and it’s a good article, but there’s something quite subtle in there. Here’s the opening paragraph.

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted Tuesday that he would not resign but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.“

The emphasis is mine. Do you see what Gonzales did there? The apparent admission was in the passive voice, shifting blame for the mistakes to an unnamed third party, shielding himself from incrimination. For comparison, here’s a quote from President Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union, addressing the Iran-Contra affair.

The goals were worthy. I do not believe it was wrong to try to establish contacts with a country of strategic importance or to try to save lives. And certainly it was not wrong to try to secure freedom for our citizens held in barbaric captivity. But we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.

In both cases, by whom were the mistakes made?

It’s an interesting trick of grammar. In both cases, use of the passive voice masks whomever it was who actually made the mistakes. The subject becomes the mistake in question and not those responsible, despite the appearance of an admission of guilt. Unobservant critics see an admission and are satisfied, though the official in question can semantically and maybe even legally argue that no such admission was ever made. It’s a clever use of language that can easily go undetected.

Accepting guilt without admitting it. That has to be healthy for a democratic government, right?

The STEREO-B spacecraft had its cameras calibrated on the 25th of February, which is unremarkable save for the capture of a lunar transit of the sun.

This is what an eclipse looks like from space.

The lunar disk was filmed to provide a baseline level of dark for the calibration of the STEREO-B camera, which orbits the sun about a million goddamn miles behind Earth. You really need to watch the (very) large Quicktime video to get the full effect. Being able to see the actual movement of the sun’s surface, along with the different scale of the moon itself, is more than a little surreal.

Terrifying, actually. I can’t put my finger on the exact reason why, but I’m sure it has something to do with the insignificance of humanity in the face of the goddamn ball of nuclear fire we orbit.

I’m beginning to really despise Time Warner Cable, and yet I can’t exercise the consumer privilege of switching providers. Time Warner holds a de facto monopoly on cable broadband, and DSL? Kind of hard to get a DSL when one doesn’t have a telephone landline to begin with, and naked DSL isn’t offered in our area.

Three weeks ago. Our web connection was spotty and the television feed was either full of artifacts or dropping random channels. A few service calls later we get a tech to come out and troubleshoot – some ancient cabling was replaced and a signal booster put in, while the modem is claimed to be fine. Two days later the television goes out entirely, but the internet is still working. Another service call, and the new yet broken cable booster is replaced. All is well.

Two days later the web connection stops, well, connecting. After time on the phone and some troubleshooting with Time Warner we get signal again, this time with the advice to reboot the cable modem if and when the signal goes out. We end up with a connection that works for about 15 minutes after a modem reboot, if luck holds. Another tech comes out and claims we need to replace the cables running through the attic to the modem, and that it’ll cost.

Our attic is more of a crawlspace, filled with rusty nails sticking down out of the roof and decades worth of dust and fiberglass. Several uncomfortable hours later I’ve finished running new cable and we have a connection better than we’ve ever managed.

Three hours later it’s dead again, only working for a few minutes after a modem reboot. We only get a consistent connection when the modem is in the garage, bypassing the cables in the house. Either my new cabling is borked, which is weird because it does work for a bit after reboot, or the cable modem that we were told is fine by Time Warner is a piece of crap.

To whomever is maintaining the open wireless a little west of us, thanks. Seriously. You’ve been a lifeline.

We rent mailboxes at the store, so we get a lot of people who mask their true address by renting a box for official correspondence and abandoning the box when they’re done with it. I’ve had to return child support notices and jury summons to sender and accept court summons for box-holders. Shady stuff.

A little while ago two sheriff’s deputies came in asking after somebody, Jane Doe, who was receiving mail at the store. They needed to drop off a summons. The box in question, though, was technically not hers any more. She was moving out of state and hadn’t renewed it. As a favor she was allowed to receive the remainder of her mail here until she left, but the box wasn’t actually hers anymore.

The sheriffs, when informed that she was moving out of state in a few days, were a little surprised. In the end they didn’t leave the summons because they could only drop it off at a legal and official point of contact.

Inane self-help programs come and go with boring regularity, so I didn’t think anything of the most recent grist in the mill. What little I had seen convinced me that it was just the same old crap repackaged with some brazen DaVinci Code-esque packaging. I shrugged, went on with my life.

Yesterday I visited the family for my sister’s 20th birthday. While there I found a copy of “The Secret”, the aforementioned inane self-help program. The DVD was sitting unopened in a pile of other discs, probably given to my mother by one of her clients. They tend to do that. I thought nothing of it at the time. We went to The Stinking Rosefor lunch, opened presents, &c, and I drove home. That’s when I decided to look into what the program was about and realized that the people behind “The Secret” are either evil or goddamn insane.

“The Secret” is what they call the “Law of Attraction”. The idea is that thinking about and wanting something is enough to actually get it. Don’t want to get sick? Just think healthy thoughts. Overweight? It’s not the food, it’s that you’re thinking too fat!

Think about how crazy that sounds. The claim is that “like attracts like”, that negative thoughts attract negative events. Never mind that the magnetic metaphor they use is a broken one, that negative attracts positive. Nevermind that the idea is crazy and makes absolutely no goddamn sense, being just a modern rehash of sympathetic magic.

Michael Beckwith, one of the supposed experts on the DVD, spoke with ABC News about the program. What did he say?

“I’ve seen kidneys regenerated. I’ve seen cancer dissolved,” said Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder of Agape International Spiritual Center.

Byrne told ABC that she wouldn’t even get a flu shot because “if you’re feeling good, how can you attract any illness to you?”

If you feel good and stay positive, you can’t get sick. According to Beckwith’s logic, he could go into a hospital and lick the ever-loving hell out of patients and equipment and just sort of rub himself up against everything and come out fine. He could get into a fight with an ebloa patient and not end up bleeding out of every orifice because if he feels good, how can illness be attracted to him?

That’s not all, though. This is what Rhonda Byrne, the producer, had to say when asked about the genocide and slaughter in Rwanda.

“The law of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we’re on by what we’re thinking and feeling… If we are in fear, if we’re feeling in our lives that we’re victims and feeling powerless, then we are on a frequency of attracting those things to us … totally unconsciously, totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important.”

The Producer of The Secret claims that victims of ethnic cleansing were slaughtered because they weren’t thinking positive thoughts. The implication is that it’s their own damn fault for not thinking positively enough.

I can believe that these people are either insane or exploiters of the highest order, preying on the insecurities of those who want to affect change without putting in too much effort. Were that the end of it “The Secret” would wither and die like others before it, excepting of course extraordinary circumstances.

Enter Oprah Winfrey, an extraordinary circumstance.

Oprah is, through her media empire, able to significantly influence people worldwide. To have Oprah promoting something is to lend it a credibility based on nothing more than raw fame. People listen to her, for better or for worse, and her support of “The Secret” can only lead more people into supporting and following some rather destructive ideas. There’s an article at Salon that explores Oprah’s support and what it means far better than I can do here.

I should probably call my parents about that disc when I get home.

One sees some strange things when working retail.

An elderly man came in, smelling strongly of fried chicken and mumbling to himself while pulling a folded slip of paper from his wallet. I gathered that he wanted some copies made, but then he started to say “onion skin” to me repeatedly, how he needed the copies on onion skin for his body, onion skin.

Onion skin!

All I could assume was that “onion skin” was a thin sort of paper, kind of like vellum or something. I told the man that we didn’t have that here, and that the Kinko’s across the way might be a better bet. He thanked me and started talking about how he needed copies on onion skin for his body. It had to do with god, you see! In the sky!

That was when he actually started talking about fried chicken and wandered away.

A little while ago I watched the first episode of The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a sort of hybrid between SNL’s Weekend Update and The Daily Show with a conservative bent. Politically I fall into the secular left, but if something is funny I don’t care what the bias is. Comedy is comedy, regardless of whom the target is. Besides, I was raised in Simi Valley, CA, proud home of the Reagan Presidential Library and conservative bastion.

(Growing up in the same town as a Presidential Library is a guarantee of mind-numbing field-trips, year after year, although I once attended a private dinner and tour of the upper levels. Nancy Reagan’s security detail ended up getting briefly involved when a silent alarm was triggered.)

I was skeptical about The 1/2 Hour News Hour when it was first announced, but what the hell. It deserved a chance. The DVR was set to record it, and a little after the first airing I sat down with my housemates to watch it.

I only finished watching it out of spite, the desire to not let this abortion of comedy claim victory.

I’m not the target audience, I know that, but good lord was the thing bad. There were maybe, maybe, one or two jokes that were funny. The rest were either juvenile jabs (”Obama’s initials are BO! Tee hee!”) or outright attacks. (”The ACLU defends the right to snort cocaine while pregnant!”) Hell, I’m still trying to figure out why there was a running Ed Begley Jr. gag. (”His electric car doesn’t have much horsepower! Silly liberal!”)

The entire show was a hodge-podge of undeveloped ideas and concepts, presented rapid-fire by hosts with little to no charisma and produced more for the sake of having a conservative Daily Show alternative than of actually being entertaining. I may still watch the second episode to see where they go, but I’m certainly not going to be expecting much.

Prove me wrong, fuckers. Please.

Underway in a fashion, of course. I’ve been playing about with the Wordpress template system, using the provided default as a reference to how the PHP fits together. It’s proving a little more difficult, however, to get all of the code – PHP, CSS, HTML, et al. – to play nicely with each other. I have no idea how long it’ll take to get everything ticking nicely, so to hell with it. Hence, the current theme. It’s better, I feel, to be able to get into the habit of posting now than to simply leave up a placeholder.

It’s a nice theme, though. I should probably change up the apple graphic on the individual post view. They taste good, but I don’t eat them too often. I should probably do something about that.