In which things are happening

On June 20, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I just want to talk about the news tonight, which you should understand to mean “I want to say things I already said on Twitter earlier today, but I want to use more words.” There were two big stories today; the missing Titanic submersible, and Hunter Biden pleading guilty to a couple of minor tax violations and a gun charge of some sort.

Let’s start with the easier story. I don’t care about Hunter Biden. If Hunter Biden is a criminal of some sort, convict and punish him for his crimes. I’m fine with that, and it doesn’t affect my opinion of Joe Biden, particularly since Dad appears to be going to great pains to get the hell out of the way. There is an argument being made out there that Hunter is actually being treated more harshly than, just for example, someone who hadn’t been targeted endlessly by the entire Republican Party for the last five years, might have been. I, myself, have turned my taxes in late before, although I think in Biden’s case the issue was he didn’t pay taxes at all for two years. I’m unclear on what the deal is with the gun charge although apparently it’s just going to be dealt with somehow. Whatever.

You might think, knowing the– ahem– basic outlines of my politics, that I might be pissed about Hunter Biden being held to a higher standard than most Americans while, oh, I dunno, some other president’s son-in-law can accept two billion dollars from the Saudis the minute his father-in-law leaves office and nobody does anything about it. I am, and this is probably obvious, still pissed about the other thing, but honestly? I’m a teacher and I’m well and Goddamned used to the idea that ethically and legally I get held to a higher standard than most people because of my job. I really don’t have a problem with the idea that the progeny of public officials need to keep their noses cleaner than most. One way or another it doesn’t appear that dude is going to jail. He’ll be fine. I’m not pressed about it.

I genuinely hope that the five men aboard the Titan are dead. That probably sounds mean, but the simple fact is that I don’t think there is any chance of them being rescued and it is therefore better for them to have died in some sort of explosive decompression incident, where they likely would have gotten little to no warning of what was about to happen and they didn’t have time for any of it to hurt. Because the alternatives are all terrifying. There is literally nothing they can do inside that thing to save themselves, and while there is a slight chance that the vehicle has managed to make it to the surface and will be found, it seems like there’s a really good chance that the process of heading for the surface would have killed them anyway, and dying from the bends, from what I understand, is fucking awful.

The other option, of course, is that four men who have gone their entire lives not being told “no” very much and the pilot of the vessel are trapped in pitch black, with little to no food and no bathroom facilities, slowly getting colder and colder– the ocean is fucking cold, and it seems reasonable to think that dying of hypothermia at that depth is a genuine danger, and could happen before asphyxiation, depending on a bunch of variables I have no access to– sitting in what amounts to a tin can with no seats and unable to get away from each other. The part of my brain that writes and reads horror stories is pretty certain that there has already been some unimaginable violence inside that tin can, if it’s the case that the submersible lost power or got stuck somehow. I would be shocked if they were rescued. I would be even more shocked if they were rescued and at least one of the five hadn’t been murdered.

There has been some other discourse on Twitter about how everyone on the internet has suddenly become an expert in deep-sea diving, which, on one hand, isn’t entirely without merit, and on the other hand, as someone with no relevant expertise of any kind, I don’t feel like anything that I’ve said really constitutes any kind of leap that an actual expert wouldn’t make, and the places where I could be wrong– maybe however far down it traveled before losing contact with the surface isn’t deep enough for the pressure to crush the ship, or maybe carbon nanotubes insulate really well and hypothermia isn’t a realistic problem. I could be wrong about those things.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter all that much, does it? The only way they’re getting rescued is if they’re bobbing around on the surface right now and they are found before they run out of air, and the prospect of running out of air while floating on the surface is a breathtaking bit of irony.

I didn’t mean to put that pun there, by the way, but now that I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in.

One way or another, though, the basic variables don’t seem to be all that complicated. I am, in general, pro expertise of all kinds, and I wish I knew more about literally everything than I do. And maybe I know so little about this that I don’t even recognize the degree to which I’m wrong; if you don’t quite understand what I mean by that, argue with someone about evolution sometime. So, yeah, I am no kind of expert at all, and I could theoretically be wrong about a whole lot of shit, but as near as I can tell most of the shit I could be wrong about just makes it suck more, and I’m absolutely certain that I know enough about human nature to be deeply worried about what’s happening inside that submersible if they’re still alive.

Anyway, I’m off to play Subnautica, a game about deep-sea exploration, and a game I had planned to start playing this week before I knew any of this was happening. It’s a coincidence, I swear.

And here we go again

On March 16, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how we are embarking on a new round of home improvement around here; the new roof is more or less set in stone and is happening in a couple of weeks, the new bathroom is almost certainly happening (more on that in a bit) but doesn’t have a timeline yet, and today we had someone out to talk to us about a new water softener.

Technically this would be a replacement water softener, but the one it would be replacing has never been used once in the entire time we’ve lived in the house and may actually be as old as the house itself. I’m not going to go looking for posts right now, but I know I’ve talked about this house and its plumbing issues before: the original builder was a contractor, and there are clearly things about this house that were done by someone who knew what they were doing and was concerned about doing a good job, and … and then there’s the plumbing, which … was not. We have had people out before to look at the plumbing and they have declined the job, and when the water softener guy went into our basement to look at the existing “system” and the various pipes involved in bringing water into our house and moving it around, it literally rendered him speechless. He was so shocked and horrified that he couldn’t get through a sentence for a good twenty minutes. This is not an exaggeration.

We are being charged for installation. He was very apologetic for this, saying that installation was usually included in the cost of the unit, but there is so much repiping required and so much work necessary to figure out just what the fuck all these pipes are for that he felt he had no choice. We asked how often they felt like they needed to charge, and the answer was that in seventeen years of water softening he never had.

My wife and I spent most of the consult laughing our asses off at how clearly flummoxed this poor guy was. He’s bringing three other guys out with him when they come out for the install. It was hilarious.

I asked him whether he thought it would be okay if I documented their attempts to fix our system for the Internet, and he got a little twinkle in his eye and suggested we video the whole thing. I think I like this dude.

(Re: the bank; further cementing my wife’s theory that banking is bullshit, I had a car drive very slowly past our house today, pausing for about a minute at the foot of our driveway. The car had a magnetic sign on the door, but as I was in my office looking out the window at the time (and teaching a class, for that matter) I was unable to read it. If I find out that that was the appraiser, who did nothing more than basically ascertain that a house did in fact exist at the address we provided, I’m going to laugh my ass off. Then I’m going to hire a couple of black actors to go into that bank with exactly the same information we had and ask for a loan and see if they’re handed thirty grand as easily as we were.)

Hamlet’s momma, she’s the queen

On July 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting1 Comment

full-metal-jacket-1987-04-g I just found out that my bathroom is going to cost me one million dollars, so today’s post is basically gonna be a couple of links and some whining. Y’all are okay with that, right? Good.

I found this article when a friend of mine shared it on Facebook. I need to spend some time reading up on disciplining toddlers; I flat-out asked my wife the other day how long I had to wait before I could expect the boy to understand that when I tell him to do something I actually want it done promptly, and furthermore am deeply uninterested in a prolonged explanation/negotiation process. The boy is actually pretty well-behaved in general so far, but he’s still not quite two yet, so I understand the next year or sixteen will be a time of limit-testing and tantrums. I am old school enough to want to believe that creating an atmosphere of Do This or Daddy Smash will be sufficient but I suspect that something somewhat more nuanced and, well, humane will probably be necessary. I’m generally pretty good at getting older kids to do what I want them to do, but dealing with middle-schoolers who are capable of seeing reason (or at least understanding I Will Kill You Boy) is somewhat different than raising a toddler. I like the way this Janet Lansbury person thinks, for the most part (that’s the lady who wrote the article at the link you didn’t click on) so I’ll start by digging more deeply into her website in the near future.

Oh, and my mom asked when we were gonna start potty training him the other day. Can I just say that potty training is the part of parenting I’m least looking forward to? Another Facebook friend posted a picture of his kid standing on his shoes so that he could reach the urinal in a public bathroom and it made me suicidal. Can’t we just get him a litterbox or something? Is that okay?

I don’t know if I’ve claimed that being a parent hasn’t changed me much, but I certainly feel like being a parent hasn’t changed me much. One way in which it absolutely has is that reading this article made me an absolute wreck, and it certainly wouldn’t have had that effect before the boy was born. I’m occasionally surprised to find myself jumpier about safety-related stuff than my wife or parents or in-laws are; I wouldn’t have expected that, but it’s happened anyway. What gets me the most is the sense that Horrible Shit Can and Will Happen at Any Goddamned Time that pervades the entire article. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of this before having a kid, but it’s more likely to mess with my head now that I do. I will say that I can’t wait until the moment when we can flip that damn car seat around so that I can actually see him from the front seat.

I’ll bitch more about the house once I have a better sense of what we’re in for. It’s gonna be ugly.