Everything is Shit

Just started watching Starhunter, a sciFi show from the early part of this decade that was (naturally) killed before it had a chance to grow into something more. Anyway I’m still watching it after eight episodes. Here is a link to the show on YouTube: Starhunter 2003

The google ads (which don’t seem to appear when I use linux) crank the volume *way* up, so the best thing to do is turn the volume down, push the slider to the right until you get to each ad — the ads are marked by short vertical lines — and play them. Then turn the volume back up, push the slider back to the beginning and watch the whole show ad free.

There is supposed to be a season prior to the season at the above link, but I haven’t found it yet.

This is a link to the closing theme music (by Peter Gabriel): Darker Star Reprise

Today this blog is one year old, which is ironic considering I haven’t written for quite a while, which hasn’t been fair to my three readers (and after they stuck with me all this time too!) I’ve been sick, unfortunately, for most of this year. The good news is the Veterans Administration found out about me and wanted to know where their missing disabled veteran had been since 1986 (ok, it wasn’t exactly like that, but close enough.) So, now I have medical care, I’m slowly getting well, and I may have a chance at finishing grad school, so all is not lost.

While I was sick (at least sicker than I am now) I got so wrapped up in my own problems that I sort of left the internet. I did a few things here and there, wrote a review on Amazon, but I didn’t check my email (or for that matter my snail mail) for two months. Yes, it cost me some money, but it also cost the feelings of a friend of mine who lives overseas: he thought I had ended the friendship for some unknown reason. I was just so self absorbed with my own fears that I forgot about everyone else. I did a lot of apologizing over it but I was lucky he is one of those people who truly forgive and forget, and do so quickly.

My Google rankings have resolved themselves: If you google “Everything is Shit” you will find this blog on page one of the search, and its been that way for a couple of months, so I guess they decided I’m not affiliated with that Nigerian Prince that keeps trying to give me all that money. Perhaps I was wrong about Google, and they are not shit after all.

In the meantime I made some new friends this year, and they are a riot:  a group of Native American Harley riding Trekkies who dress as Klingons and ride around looking ferocious (they are actually some of the sweetest people I’ve met in decades.) I think they want me to to join them in their escapades, but I’m not sure that’s me — I just enjoy their company.

I checked google today and did an ego search for “everything is shit” (without quotes) and sure enough, it was gone again. From page one to limbo in 24 hours. I checked as far back as page 30 and only found one link leading to this blog, nothing to the domain site itself. How can a service this fickle be relied upon for anything? Everything is shit .COM was right up front as the number one search result, as always, despite the fact that my site has been up longer, changes regularly, etc. (again, I wish them no ill will, I’m just perplexed.) Google is capricious at best — and is quickly becoming unusable (spent a half hour trying to find something on google yesterday, went to Yahoo and got it on the first try.)

All is not lost, however: the comment spammers who bizerked this blog after google put it on page one have not abandoned me, if anything they have redoubled their efforts to make sure I never feel unnoticed again. Kinda makes ya feel warm and fuzzy, eh?

Whadda Ya know? I wrote that post about google a week or so ago and now if you do a search for “everything is shit” — without quotes —  I’m on page one. Maybe they listened? With all the gazzilion voices out there could it be true? I don’t know, but its pretty cool anyway.

On the bad side, I cleared over a hundred spam comments out of my Akismet comment queue today. You people are costing me time. In fact, from this moment forward you are on notice: all spam comments (defined as comments that provide even a single link to any product being sold) will never see the light of day, will be deleted, and if I ever get lucky enough to find out who you are, be advised that I consider the time you are stealing from me to be valuable and I will charge you accordingly. The current rate that I am charging (subject to change at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with or without announcement, and may be backcharged to posts that were deleted BEFORE I changed the rate) is $10 per comment that you force me to delete. If you still choose to post spam comments, be advised that you are agreeing to the contractual relationship described above, and if I do find you, I will come to collect it with lawyers, guns and money (and you are agreeing to that too.) Have a nice day.

(Comments that are not spam [defined as comments that link to any non commercial site that is demonstrably relevant to the topic I am writing about] are not only excluded from the contractual relationship described above, but are welcome.)

Pollyanna loves Cassandra

How is it possible that you can get your own modest domain, pay for it, put it up, write some humble html — circa 1995 I will admit — and put up a modest blog that has no intention of ripping anyone off or making a dime, yet be shunned by the one search engine that counts? Seriously, type “everything is shit” in any search engine but google and you will find this site on the first page, right at the top, which makes sense: after all, “Everything is Shit” is the domain name for crying out loud. Try the same search — enclosed in quotes — on google and you will find it on page seven. Without quotes it sometimes shows up on page 27, sometimes on page 97, sometimes not at all. I mean nowhere.

What’s worse, you can find obscure blogs that use the word “shit” once, and you can find them repeated in the search results 10 to 15 times by the time you get to page 27! How can google claim to be a search engine when you can’t find a domain called “everything is shit” by typing the words “everything is shit”?

Worse still, there is a web site called “Everything is Shit.com” which is pretty cool, but it’s static: whoever put it up has written a short missive claiming that everything is shit and always has been. I enjoyed what the author had to say the one time I read it, and I even linked to his site. Nothing bad about it. Its just that its not the most profound thing I’ve ever read, and there is not much to it, and what little there is never changes, yet whenever I do a search for “everything is shit”, there it is at the top of page one. Is it possible half the world thinks this small group of paragraphs is so profound that everyone is linking to it? Is it possible that the author thinks that these few paragraphs are so important he spends weeks learning all the ever changing tricks to getting placed highly on google searches? I don’t see any money being made from his site so what is going on?

So far I’ve just been bitching (and let’s be honest, this blog/website is pretty much like that tree that fell in the forest: maybe it fell and maybe it even made a sound but who cares? I long ago stopped writing this for anyone but myself, and truth be told I’m pretty sure writing this blog in plain site has been the most private thing I’ve ever done — I doubt my own family would read it [even to be polite]); however, I think there might be something more than just bitching about my ratings here, and I think it reflects on the quality of google’s product.

This experience caused me to wonder if google is really all its cracked up to be. We have all gone through the horror of typing search terms into google, only to confront 3 million plus hits, much of it unrelated to anything we were searching for (I’ve often found it easier to search in google images than to do a google web search.) Curious, I started using Yahoo and found the search to be quicker, while the the results were more relevant. I had a similar experience with Dogpile — even LiveSearch was less frustrating. The only search engine that did not turn up results that were as good as google was Ixquick, which I still use sometimes because they respect our privacy and somebody needs to support them until they can match the other search engines (and when they do, they will be my only search engine.)

So, there it is. Google used to be a wonder. Now they have gotten so clever at defeating the search engine optimization experts that they outsmarted themselves and created a product that can’t find what you are looking for. Google, you have become shit.

Immortality: its the one thing you want to take with you.

Zima is kinda like me: it was cool for about thirty seconds. Zima, though an icon of the 1990s, is actually studied as the paragon of the product cycle, because it rocketed to popularity, collapsed into obscurity, then hung on for over a decade, trying to reinvent itself (usually with unfortunate results.) Zima finally met an unremarked fate recently, when Coors Brewing Company (or Miller, can’t remember which) decided that while it was still a moderately profitable product, it really wasn’t worth their time or trouble. Most people didn’t notice, and of those who did, most said “Good riddance”. For the rest, Zima’s demise is a bit of a minor cause: people are actually coming out of the closet and telling the world they want their Zima back — or at least they did, before their website went under too, probably from a lack of hits (before it was canceled, Zima was like a Moped: fun, but they wouldn’t want to be seen doing it.)

Babylon 5 fans are in a bit of a quandary, because Zima exists in the Babylon 5 universe. If you ever watch B5 look above the bar in some of the drinking scenes and you will see a Zima sign somewhere. Product placement? Probably. Zima came out right when Babylon 5 — another ’90s icon — hit the now defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network, and both were popular topics on and early users of the Internet (which also exploded in popularity at the same time.) More to the point, my friends and I used to play a drinking game that involved watching Babylon 5 while drinking copious quantities of Zima. Those were good times, and I still drink a (single) Zima when watching reruns of the first season of B5 (or at least I used to.)

Yes, you read correctly. I admit it. I am a (mostly) macho guy who drinks Zima. And I like it (well, I like ONE Zima: the second Zima isn’t quite so good, and the third is kinda nasty, so if I’m determined to get plowed I usually switch to wine after that single Zima. Also I never drink it unless I’m watching B5, its a retro thing.) I know its not cool to like Zima, but nobody has called me cool since college and I’m old enough now that I don’t care any more.

So, when I saw the last three six packs of Zima on clearance sale at the local grocery store, I bought them. They are taking up space in my fridge and probably will for some time. The question is, if Zima was still profitable on a small scale and it still has its fans, would it not make a decent business for someone interested in serving a niche market? Hmmm . . . maybe I could be my own boss? Zima, anyone?

Republicans use MicroSoft
and hate anyone who doesn’t

Liberals use Macs
and pity anyone who doesn’t

Libertarians use Linux
and understand it
but not anyone who doesn’t

I recently wrote about listening to a radio talk show in New York where the host would call his former teachers and pull a gag on them. I don’t remember what the show was (I’m not from that part of the country) but a few months later I was listening to the same show where they stirred up a debate about a kid who used his extraordinary I.Q. to finish school early and begin his career young, with the goal of curing a major disease and retiring while he was still young.

I don’t think I ever heard quite so much reaction to any other radio talk show. One after another, the listeners mounted an impromptu guilt campaign to bully the child and his parents to repent and allow the child to, “Be a kid”, or he would never “fit in” and would likely grow up to be an “evil genius”. You would not believe how many times I heard that phrase: “evil genius”, over and over, I had to wonder where had these people — each of them remarkably average — absorbed their fear of intelligence? It was as if forcing the child to be less than what he obviously was could ameliorate the caller’s fear that somewhere, someone might outwit them at pinochle.

The problem of course, is that a child like this will never fit into a world designed for the average. Look at a child who has an I.Q. of 60, which is 40 points below the mean (average) of 100. The difference is obvious — fair or unfair, they stand out. The same is true of children with I.Q.s 40 points above the norm: they stand out from the crowd and serve as targets for violence, at least until they can find their way into a world of people like themselves, and be among people who can understand what they are talking about, people who don’t fear them.

The child on the radio show had an I.Q. over 70 points above the norm. How can anyone expect him to fit in? If you put him on a construction site do you think he would be just one of the guys? There are some things even the best actors can’t fake day in and day out, and this kid was no actor.

You want to make an evil genius? You want something to really be afraid of? Take a kid like that, a kid with a seething intellectual curiosity, and force him to learn something he already knows — far better than his teachers ever will — day after day, year after year, for twelve years. Do this to him while excluding him from all social interaction, all while being insulted and getting the tar beaten out of him, and knowing he will have to work years later in life than he otherwise would have just to achieve the same goals he could have many years earlier. Do you really think he will feel any loyalty to the home team team after such abuse?

Let that kid go, let him become what he can be, let him populate the intellectual world he was meant for, and be kind to him and teach him to be kind in return — free him to cure cancer and ease the suffering of the people he will remember, long after they have forgotten him.