things that fell out of WorldWideWeber's head

I believe in America. That’s why I voted today for Barack Obama.

Yesterday Ana Marie Cox wrote that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Romney wins. Nor if Obama wins, if your nightmares run in that direction. She also makes the “belief in America” argument, and I agree with her—up to a point. She notes the damage likely to occur in the former case, and frankly, I’d really, really like to avoid that.

I never thought Obama could walk on water, but it was shocking how much toxic sludge an ideologically crazed, monolithic Republican Party could pump into the political sphere. If this election breaks the implacable bloc that has refused to address the issues we face as negotiators in good faith—as problem solvers—that would be a great achievement. New Jersey governor Chris Christie has set the tone. Will any of his fellow Republicans follow suit during the second Obama term?

Now we’ll post from the Kindle Fire. I’m sure it will work.

Another colleague who was trying to help in my absence today mentioned that the post was going into the caption. So I guess I need to add a photo and a caption.

Contrails and wires over Washington

Image uploading was a bit tetchy. I needed to add it to my media library—couldn’t just insert it into the post. An extra step—oh, well …

So, here is a photo, with a caption. We’ll see how it renders.

I’m hearing that a colleague is having problems posting to my day job’s WordPress site using a Galaxy tablet and the web interface. So here I am posting from my Galaxy S3 phone, using the native browser. Let’s see if it works …

To the surprise of many, Chief Justice John Roberts has saved the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Unsurprisingly, his reasoning in doing so was cockeyed. He rejected the Commerce Clause justification in support of the federal government’s authority to enforce participation in health care coverage (the so-called “mandate”), citing instead the government’s fallback position, that the penalty for not being covered by insurance can be considered a “tax,” and the federal government clearly has the authority to impose taxes.

Maybe this is just semantics. But here’s what’s cockeyed: Roberts writes that those who are not insured “are not currently engaged in any commercial activity involving health care …” Maybe the operative word for Roberts is “currently,” as in “at this very moment.” But it seems unlikely that every single uninsured person in this country uses no health care services or products, whether or not they pay for them; or that they will not require them at some point in the future, if only in the form of a final ambulance ride to an unsuccessful resuscitation at the hospital.

Judging from the muddled national “conversation” on the subject, it appears Roberts is not alone in not understanding health care—how it works in this country, and how it is failing its populace, whether or not one has health insurance. The uninsured are an unfair burden on the insured portion of the population, and the PPACA is a first step in fixing that problem. The problem of runaway costs remains, but “Obamacare” can be seen as a halting first step toward comprehensive health care reform that includes equitable cost containment. Those who wanted a single-payer solution, or the extension of Medicare to all, may yet live to see their preference enacted.

Thankfully, whatever his reasoning, Roberts upheld the product of years of painful Congressional labor, imperfect as it is. The irony is that the bone of contention—the individual “mandate” to purchase insurance—was a Republican idea. The GOP only turned against it when Obama adopted it and the PPACA showed a chance of passing. Roberts will catch hell from the right, but it will be painful only if rank hypocrisy has the power to sting.

Cars were stopping in the middle of Key Bridge this morning. Some people got out, others just craned their necks from inside. They were doing what the pedestrians and cyclists on the walkway were doing: watching the space shuttle Discovery make its ceremonial passes around Washington atop a 747 before heading out to pasture at the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles.

I momentarily felt bad that I didn’t have a decent camera on hand. Then I thought of the online flood of excellent photos that others (better positioned) would take and didn’t care much any more. Yet I felt compelled to take at least one picture with my cell phone. In lining up the shot I made an unrelated discovery: a huge inflatable hockey player atop one of the houses on Canal Road in Georgetown. Go Caps!

You may think this is about a linguistic nicety, the bit that comes before the main part and imparts a nice twist—something came before, or after (pre-, post-); or the word sort of applies (pseudo-); or the action is being done again (re-); and so on. No. It’s about a dinner that come before another dinner, apparently—a “prefix dinner.” Three courses for 29 bucks in Bethesda, Maryland—who could possibly have room for the dinner itself?

Before I go off on the sorry state of the mother tongue in 2012, I am tackled by the obvious fact that … prix fixe ain’t even English.

Granted. But is that an excuse? Did the phrase “prefix dinner” actually make sense to both the restaurant manager and the sign maker? (Then again, sign makers seem to have abdicated all oversight, having drunk the bromide that “the customer knows best,” God save us all.) Yes, it sounds right. But the whole point of English is that hearing is deceiving. We have appropriated bits of every language on the planet, so that our vocabulary is the hugest by far. But how many of us know how to handle it? There’s the rub.

And here’s the agenbite of inwit for yours truly: both the restaurant manager and the sign maker knew what they were talking about, and perhaps 99% of the people viewing the sign understood it without a snicker (“Hm, so that’s how that’s spelled …” some of them probably thought). Yours truly knows what a prefix is. Well, la-dee-dah.

Addendum 2012.03.26: A Google search on “prefix dinner” produces an alarming number of hits (including the charming “Pre Fixe”), all over the map. As of this date, it has not infiltrated Webster’s online. Here’s the stupid thing: they could just say “fixed-price dinner” (I would even hold my tongue if they left off the hyphen). Same number of syllables. I can hear the objection now: the consonantal collision between “fixed” and “price” (the sound “kstpr”). In practice, the phrase would invariably (and, I have to concede, naturally) devolve to “fix price” (because of our lazy ol’ American way o’ talkin’). Which is almost worse than “prefix.” Almost.

You’ve heard of artisanal food, right? No? Good for you!

But surely you’ve been told not to play with your food. I see you nodding. You did it anyway, right? Good for you!

Sometime last year, some folks in Italy really went to work on some watermelons—you can see their handiwork here.

This carving isn’t even the best of the bunch. It just happens to have a bicycle in it.

The Dell Inspiron mini, maddeningly, does not include a numeric keypad. This is what you need to enter so-called Alt-codes to produce special characters (e.g., ê, —, “). The workaround you see most often is to use the Character Map and copy-and-paste. Frankly, that sucks.

You might also add an external keypad, but as one commenter online said, that defeats the effing purpose of having a netbook (emphasis added, all caps removed).

I started looking around for a virtual keyboard, after seeing one in action at Google Translate. Well, it turns out Windows has had on “on-screen keyboard” for several iterations of Windows as part of its suite of accessibility tools. It’s called osk.exe, and I made a shortcut to it in my taskbar.

Don’t think the trail ends here, though. There’s no way to hold down the Alt key on the virtual keyboard, so there’s no way to enter the multidigit code. I discovered that you can hold down Alt on the physical keyboard, but that in combination with the virtual numeric keypad didn’t work.

Back to searching …

Someone online had suggested the Alt-Fn combination with the regular number row, which didn’t work (surprise). But, what the heck, I thought I’d cobble that combination with the physical/virtual combo above (Alt on one, numbers on the other), and—I’ll be damned!—it worked. (See them dashes? I mean, see the em-dashes? Made on the Inspiron mini without the use of Character Map or any copying/pasting.) You have to press Alt first, then Fn (holding them both down), before hitting the numbers (i.e., Fn then Alt doesn’t work).

I’m still pissed off at Dell for not including the numeric keypad on the Inspiron mini. But I can now, finally, relegate that animus to a deeper part of my psyche.

From the You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Dept.—headline, 28 December 2011:

Police storm Church of the Nativity to break up brawling priests

That’s the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem. Not Pennsylvania—the Holy Land.

It seems the Armenians wanted to use Spic and Span, but the Greeks insisted on Murphy Oil Soap. Neither of which works as well or as quickly as Mop & Glo, but if the Papists had been there and suggested that, it would have been a three-way melee, no doubt. (Scholars are not in complete agreement as to the cleaning agent Jesus Himself used most frequently—hence the opportunity for this particular doctrinal dispute to flare periodically.)

Some guy at Slate went to a lot of effort to let us know the ten worst catchphrases of 2011. I confess that the only reason I looked at it was to see if it included an annoying tic I see a lot, especially in online comments. It almost always closes the anonymous burst of brilliance, and it is this: “Just sayin’.” God, do I hate that.

Well, Mr. Slate Guy did not include it, and here’s probably why: some guy at Gawker complained about it in 2009.

I think I can confidently predict we’ll be seeing Mr. Slate’s 10 awful crutches (some of which aren’t so awful, but—whatever*) in 2013.
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*Banned in 1997.^{[citation needed]}