Tuesday, July 05, 2005

I was going to write about blood, but I ran out of room. Next time!

It was Independence Day in the US yesterday. On a semi-rant on a site I frequent, a guy noted that "Christ, I drive an imported Japanese vehicle to the bar, fueled by Saudi Arabian oil, and I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt sewn together by young Third World Asian hands. My shoes were stitched together in the Philippines, the glass I'm drinking from was wrought in France, and the basketball players prancing across the television screen have Islamic names. Believe it or not, the very code utilized for you to read these words was put together by Panamanians and Philipinos for trivial installations of money. The drugs to which I've become addicted are a product of Peru, and the vodka I'm pouring down the throat of this woman is imported from Sweden. "

Things the US depends upon:
  • Thailand and Taiwan for their clothing;
  • India for their computer programming;
  • Central Africa for their processor chip and cell phone components;
  • Mexico for their immigrant minimum wage labour force;
  • Japan and Germany for automotive engineering;
  • South America for drugs;
  • South Africa for diamonds;
  • The Vatican for approval;
  • The Middle East for petroleum;
  • Caribbean Islands for vacation resorts;
  • Russia for their space program;
  • Scandanavia for premium liquors, and;
  • Great Britain for bullshit political support;

Well, none of that was from me. Just a little friendly bashing. ;)

Twelve days have passed since Jay wondered if I could put my old restoration skills to use in knocking back DiceGimp's smell. After careful consideration, both chemical and mechanical, I've come to the conclusion that anything that would do the job suitably would almost certainly be fatal and/or impractical.

And the range on his breath is getting longer. We're up to close to a meter, and this on the SkyTrain with the nearest window open and giving me a breeze. It's probably due to how he drinks his hot chocolate - a packet in a styofoam cup, hot water, and then enough white sugar on top that it doesn't fall in - it actually floats in a pile.

Can you even have teeth after knocking that back every night? :P

I think he might have a film over his eyes too. Let me explain:

I think I've mentioned before that DiceGimp isn't exactly the most observant character. There are lots of examples, but about the best one is when he's doing the exterior of my building.

Among other things, he's to see if there are broken windows, people where they shouldn't be, et cetera. But during my initial round, I go around on the ground floor and close all the blinds so that the various baddies we have in the area can't see if there's anything to grab on the other side. The theory being, of course, that if you can't see it, you won't try to take it. So far so good - we've never had a broken window where the blinds have been closed.

Anyway, as I've also mentioned repeatedly, to close some of these blinds involves me climbing on the desks and stepping into the window ledges to be close enough to twist the louvres shut. While I'm doing this, I'm about as big and visible as can be - standing half a meter off the ground, legs spread for balance, one arm out to steady myself, and the other stretched to the other side of the 1.8m wide window to close the louvres. The white shirt and bright yellow jacket with reflective stripes ought to be a beacon outside.

But you'd never know it to see DiceGimp. Many times he's ridden by outside, at no more than two meters distance, and not seen me. I know this, because there's no reaction, and he's staring into the distance straight ahead.

From my perch in the windowsill, I've immediately phoned him and said, "Dude, how could you blast by and not see me? I'm like the freaking bat-signal over here!"

"What? Where were you?"

"In one of the windows - you just blasted by me!"

"On what side of the building?"

"Nevermind." Sigh.

When I finish my first round, he's usually sitting out in the lobby already, so many times I've gone out there laughing at him, poking fun at his apparent blindness. I tell him (since he doesn't seem to understand) that he's on a bike so that he can respond more quickly to an alarm, not to zoom so fast on his patrols that he can't see anything.

His response?

"Oh, I'm paying attention."

"Oh really," I say, "then how is it you never see me under this ever vigilant scrutiny? If there was someone breaking in, they'd pick one of the windows that doesn't have an exterior spotlight beaming off of them, behind one of the bushes, and they'd be wearing dark clothes. Harder to spot than I am. Besides, I see you when you go by - you're watching straight ahead, where you're biking, not looking around."

"Oh, I look around. (Begin lame improved excuse that really doesn't make any sense) See, what I'm doing is scanning ahead of me to either side at a thirty degree angle. That way, I can take everything in before I get there, and I miss nothing."

Pause for a beat.

"You missed seeing ME!"

"Yeah, I can't figure that out. Why don't you knock on the window to get my attention when I'm going by?"

It's entirely possible I stutter a bit when replying. "Do you think a thief is going to bang the glass and yell `Yo!' at you when you go by?"

"Oh, I'd see a thief."

And so on. In other conversations, he'll brag about how observant he is, and construct various (unlikely) scenarios and how he'd respond, most of them relying on powers he just doesn't appear to possess.

So being the arrogant asshole that I am, I attempted to demonstrate his lack of observation to him.

In the middle of my first patrol on Tuesday night, I snuck out of the building with a roll of masking tape and went over to a window that I'd previously pointed out to him as having badly cracked under its own weight at one point. It's long since been fixed, but in telling him about it I mentioned how the two guys from his company (it was The Romanian and Polish Guy, if you're interested) on patrol that weekend never noticed the cracks across the 1.8m width and 2.2m height.

Anyway, I went out and wrote UF in tape letters thirty centimeters high, at about head level if you're on a bike, above the decorative hedge on the outside of the window. Since the interior is dark, and the blinds were closed, the glass was very black. The exterior spotlight reflected against that whitish-yellow masking tape and made it blaze. Even from a distance, but certainly from the distance that he patrols at.

Then I went back inside, finished my patrol, and told him that Umbrella Foxtrot has really left his mark on the site tonight. He didn't know what I meant, but that was my clue to him.

You may or may not remember that we're calling Buffalo Kisser "Useless Fucker" at work now, since he does nothing at work anymore but show up late, go home early, and watch tv/surf the net during his shift. "Umbrella Foxtrot" is just the radio sign for the initial "UF".

Well... technically it should be Uniform Foxtrot, but to me that just sounded like he was well-blended, as in uniform in consistancy. So sue me for creative licence.

Anyway, it took DiceGimp five and a half hours to spot "the anomaly". He counts it as a victory that he found it. I count it as a failure since it took so long. Bah.

And, and he has the temerity to lie about when he found it!

I was keeping an eye on it from the inside, and when I saw that it was finally gone I went to the front lobby and told him congratulations for finally finding it. A while later, he told me he'd actually found it an hour before I congratulated him.

"Really?" I said. "Really," he said.

"Dude, an hour before you were drinking tea with me in the cafeteria. I was with you for forty minutes, and then I kicked you out because I was starting my patrol. So you started yours and that's when you found it. Don't lie to me about stuff I'm involved in!"

"No no, I really found it an hour before you mentioned it!"

Oh please.

Anyway, the next night I taped a giant X, a meter square, on the window of an adjacent building while on my first patrol. This sucker was clearly visible (light on dark, and with another exterior spotlight on it) at over one hundred meters distance, which is as far as I checked it. Then I went inside and told him I'd put a mark on the ground floor window of one of the buildings.

He never found it.

Several times during the night he'd say that it wasn't fair that I wouldn't tell him the shape, or which building it was on. That if only he knew that, he'd pay extra attention to that area. He appeared not to understand that reflective tape is much easier to see than someone in dark clothes crouched behind foliage, or a dark window with a hole in it.

So at the end of the shift, I walked him out to the general area on the pretext of looking at some sprinklers, and then asked him where the mark was. He said he didn't know. I looked him straight in the eye, and said "Where is it?"

He caught on that he could see it from where we were, and slowly looked around. On his second pass, he saw it. Across the road. Blazing not as brightly as at the start of the night (dawn had broken, banished the high reflectivity) but still clearly visible from many angles and distances.

"Huh," he said. "I don't know how I missed it!"

Indeed.

The next night he was on with The Romanian. Because I was feeling lazy, and to amuse The Romanian, I taped a swastika on the back of Dice Gimp's chair.

Normally I wouldn't have done that, but it was July 1 and nobody was coming in to the building that morning.

He never found it either. Sigh.

Last night though, after mid-shift tea when I remarked that he hadn't found the latest mark, he did find it. Another meter-wide X on the window where we'd last been broken into, on The Sleeper's shift back in November.

He was very proud of having found it.

I put that up the previous day. No kidding, it had been there for 28-29 hours. Way to notice, dude.

He's finally admitted that his powers of observation might be lacking a bit, but he says he's doing the best he can. Which he's not, because both The Romanian and I have explained to him how you're supposed to see things.

This may sound pedantic, but at night in a place where there's no people and things that are desireable to steal, we're all at a little bit of risk. If a window gets broken, and two or three people come in, and hurt me... how long before DiceGimp notices the broken window and discovers I'm not answering my phone? Must I bleed out for five hours before anybody even looks for me?

The Romanian feels the same way.

Well, enough of my "dance puppets, DANCE" routine. Stuff in the news lately that I enjoyed:

You know what TiVo is, I expect? Well, the RIAA is taking except to RiVo (which is the same thing, but for audio), wanting to either cripple it beyond usefulness, or ban it outright. If you read through the article I've linked, check out the short form of Gary Shapiro's (president/CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association) reply to RIAA president Cary Sherman's memo to him. It starts at paragraph four, with "Shapiro's reply stopped just shy of telling Sherman and the RIAA to get bent, saying ..."

Tit for tat! Down in the US there was a decision made (not at a federal level) that local government can seize the homes and business of residents to facilitate the building of something (office complex, mall, whatever) that would provide economic benefit to the area, and more tax revenue to the city.

This is different from how it was, which only allowed such action for public use things, such as highways, and not for private use.

So, a property developer has filed to have the Supreme Court Justice that handed down the decision's personal house and property to be seized so that he can build a new hotel on it.

Wrote the developer: "Although this property is owned by an individual, David H. Souter, a recent Supreme Court decision, Kelo v. City of New London, clears the way for this land to be taken by the government of Weare through eminent domain and given to my LLC for the purposes of building a hotel. The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare."

According to the developer, the "Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Cafe" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in the US. Instead of a Gideon's bible in each room, guests will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged", the statement said. Read the whole thing (article, not the novel) here.

Down in California, the state is weighing a couple of bills requiring bullet marking. The bill, dubbed SB 357 after the popular calibre, basically says that all of the bullets in a given box would have to be engraved with the same serial number, and retailers would have to record who purchased each box. Read more.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Oh, and BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN to the US! Toyota is building a second plant in Ontario in Woodstock, to make RAV-4s. The reason they chose there instead of one of several places in the US that was willing to subsidize them even more? Essentially, "Americans are too stupid for factory work". Check out the article. :)

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