Looking back at a month’s worth of entries, I think a lot of them are, well… just not very good.  Pretty much every night I ran up against the deadline, and often I published a preliminary version of the piece only to finish after midnight. Even with this time extension most nights, the writing just isn’t very good.  They seem rushed, as indeed they were.

Having a deadline does force more production, and real writers will often tell you that it’s important just to write every day — just get some words down on paper.  I can see where there’s value in that, but I think that Brian Dunning at Skeptoid has a more insightful and useful guideline.  Dunning has taken Skeptoid from scratch to a popular podcast (roughly 100K downloads a week), lecture series, books, a video podcast, and is working on getting a version of the show on PBS, all in about four years.  That’s fantastic, and when he released Skeptoid episode 200 in April 2010, he revealed the secret.

To make all of this happen, my alarm clock goes off at 5:30 in the morning, every weekday, every week, every month, for three and a half years so far. Yes, it’s a big commitment and one that I take very seriously. It’s fun, but it can’t be treated like a hobby. I treat it like a business. I follow a strict schedule, and it’s the first thing I block off on my calendar — before work, before play. A hobby, by definition, is something that you fool around with in your spare time. It’s not managed. My commitment to my listeners is that Skeptoid is not a hobby. That’s why you expect, and receive, a new episode every single week at 7:00 AM Pacific time every Tuesday morning — without fail. And that dependability I think is one reason why people respond the way they do.

Someday, I hope to develop the kind of commitment to this blog, or some other writing venue, that Dunning brings to Skeptoid. That I haven’t done it so far, is the reason why this blog has readers numbering in the low single digits.

penultimate

1. next to the last: the penultimate scene of the play.

The penultimate signature on the Declaration of Independence is that of Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut.  He fought in the Revolution, reaching the rank of Major General, and died in office as the Governor of Connecticut.

25-year-old Canadian Private George Lawrence Price may have been the second-to-last man to die in World War I, at 10:58 AM on November 11, 1918. Private Price was pursuing retreating German soldiers when he received his fatal gunshot.

The Slovak koruna will become the penultimate currency to be merged into the Euro, assuming that Estonia discontinues use of the kroon as scheduled on January 1, 2011.  Given how well the Euro is faring these days, you have to wonder how eager the Estonians are to drop the kroon.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska is, of course, the penultimate state… just before Barack Obama’s Hawaii.

Of course, the koruna might lose its penultimate status — the most likely current candidates to drop their currencies to join the Euro are Lithuania (the litas was supposed to have been replaced by the Euro on January 1, 2010, but the change was postponed because of the current crisis), Latvia (the lats is expected to change over in either 2012 or 2013), and Denmark (the Danish krone – unlikely since Danish voters opted out of the Euro in 2000).  Similarly, Alaska would cease to be penultimate if, say, Puerto Rico voted for statehood (no such plebescite is currently scheduled).

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is the penultimate film in the series.  It’s the seventh film in the series, which had only seven books. However, Warner Brothers, in their quest to milk as many dollars out of the license as possible, have split the final novel into two films. <sigh>

November 29th is the penultimate day of NaBloPoMo 2010.

So, instead, I present this photo of Tulip, taken last month when I was packing for a trip to Orlando.

Tulip wants to go, too.

racism

1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

Professor William A. Jacobsen, at his blog Legal Insurrection, reports on comments made by Professor Cornel West on the radio program Democracy Now. The program’s host played a clip of an interview with President Bush about his memoir and specifically about his response to the comments of rapper Kanye West, who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, said that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Professor West said,

“No, I think Kanye West was actually right, but we have to make a distinction between being racist in motivation and intention versus racist in effect and consequence…. But I think what happened was that President Bush understood this in an individualistic way, which is the way most fellow Americans understand racism: ‘Do I actually hate black people individually?’ No, I don’t think President Bush individually hates black people. His policies were racist in effect and consequence and especially classist in terms of generating misery among poor and working people, disproportionately black and brown.”

Professor West is wrong on two counts.  Most Americans don’t understand racism as hating black people individually; they understand it the way the dictionary describes it: hatred or intolerance of another race as a group.  And there’s no such thing as racism “in effect and consequence.”  Racism is solely a belief, a state of mind… an intention.  If there is no racist intent, there is no racism.

Andrew Ryan is the founder of Rapture, a fabulous undersea libertarian utopia. The city collapsed into various factions, all of which were driven mad by gene splicing technology that had given them super powers.

I find Ryan endlessly fascinating. Like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged he has created his perfect world.  But Ryan’s ideals were tested in a way that Galt’s never were, and — here’s the fascinating part — Ryan failed the test.  He became the government he hated, seizing the property of the rivals that threatened his regime.  And yet he never stopped believing in his ideals.

Games website IGN placed Ryan in their list of greatest videogame villains, but I don’t think Ryan is a villain.  He’s a hero who failed to live up to his own ideals. In that sense, he’s more real than John Galt or Howard Roark. To be able to say that about a videogame character is a great compliment to Ken Levine and the team at Irrational Games.

What really angered me about the story was that the woman reporting on the trial said, at least twice, “It’s hard taking a pill every day.”

No. It’s not hard to take one pill a day that will prevent you from getting a dread disease.

Of course, AIDS is a disease that can be avoided by not engaging in certain high-risk behaviors.  These people can’t seem to avoid doing that either.

This story is exploding all over the media and the blogosphere. But this is just the latest expansion of the intrusiveness of security screening at our airports. I travel by air a few times a year for work.  Every time I go through security, I want to ask how long this is going to continue.  I never do bother asking, though, because I know the answer: it’s never going away.

However, this is the first time that we’ve seen such an outcry against security procedures.  It’s gone so far that Saturday Night Live ran a sketch mocking TSA this past weekend.

One of my favorite pictures of Amy.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Amy, taken with my cell phone about four years ago.  It’s the picture of her that shows up on my phone when she calls.