Happy Non-Denominational Gift Giving Season to All!
This Is Actually Quite Charming
SNL doesn’t hit the mark often these days, but I think this one really gets the Non-Denominational Holiday Season Spirit right, without tending into snark, irony, treacle, or pedantry:
Good News, Everybody! We Finally Know for a Fact that the Electoral College Has Outlived its Function
I outlined my thinking more fully about two weeks ago (here’s the post: The Final Test of the Electoral College), but I think it’s fair to say that the Electoral College has finally proven itself to be, at best, a quaint vestigial
growth on the Republic, and at worst a systemic effort at the national level to generally discount the value of votes in the most populous states (which are also, incidentally, where the densest populations of immigrants and people of color live) in favor of giving undue weight to those in the least populous (and, entirely coincidentally, predominately white) sections.
Please contact your state reps and encourage them to support the National Popular Vote. Abolishing the popular vote has seen support left, right, and center in recent years, including that of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I have it on good word that the National Popular Vote way of going about getting this done is basically the only way it’s gonna happen; support them. 
Could your office’s awful flickering fluorescents stave off Alzheimer’s?
Almost certainly not, but listen:
Crappy fluorescent fixtures flicker at 120 Hz (i.e., 120 times each second, twice the frequency of the AC mains)—but that’s when performing perfectly. Usually, you won’t notice that at all. In fact, a flicker can get down to around 60 Hz before the average person can see it (I’ve been told that this was part of the motivation for choosing that frequency, as early incandescent bulbs would tend to noticeably pulse along with the AC).
But if the fluorescent light is visible and unambiguously flickering, then it’s 
definitely down below 50 Hz. And here’s the thing: the bright LEDs they’re using in this experiment to successfully treat and reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s, they’re pulsing at 40 Hz—i.e., the “creepy horror-film industrial building” frequency.
(Please do listen to the entire podcast before deciding to spend a lot of time sitting under shitty office lights; the research is in its infancy and the rate of successful transfer of Alzheimer’s research from rodents to humans is something like 0.4%).
Tech Companies: “How Dare You Suggest We’d Help Build the Muslim Registry We Already Built!”
So, when I saw this item the other day, I immediately thought of this blog post I penned in January 2015. tl;dr on all this:
Trump transition team has been publicly mulling over creating/reviving a “Muslim Registry.” The Intercept started calling social media/tech companies and only one—Twitter—said “We’d never help with this!” (FYI, IBM has been down this road before, and yet still somehow doesn’t know the right answer to this question). Yesterday, Facebook finally clearly said “No way! We won’t do it! We’d never build a Muslim Regsitry!”
But here’s the thing:
- As I pointed out back in Jan 2015, these companies have already built these databases. They know when you are sleeping, they know when you’re awake, they know if you’ve been bad or good or if you even give two shits about Santa Claus.
- More to the point, the abstract threat I wrote about back in Jan 2015, when it freaked me out a little that Amazon had clearly flagged me as a Jew, became real in the Spring of 2016 when a bomb threat was called in to the Jewish Community Center housing my daughter’s daycare. Because I sit on the Board of our congregation (which uses that building regularly for our religious services), I ended up touching base with the local police and FBI agents investigating the incident. As it turned out six JCCs across the U.S. (in locales as far-flung as St. Louis, New York, and Louisiana) received the same threats at the same time—and all had very similar names. When I did some googling, I found that all of us were listed together alphabetically in online Jewish education directories, with our phone numbers and addresses. I.e., someone was just working their way down a list. This time around, it was just to make phone calls and fuck with us and our kids. Next time? Who knows; here’s what said in 2015, and it’s still about the same:
[I]n Amazon’s datacenter, I’m a row in a table. The index on that row is something like “CUSTOMER #2045674” and the cells include “kindle-owner” and “SF reader” and “owl pellet buyer” and “Jew” and my mailing address. Just another row, among millions–until that table gets resorted by the “Jew” column, and then I’m a box waiting to be ticked off by God-knows-who for God-knows-what-reason. Maybe they want to send me free Xanukah candles! Maybe they want to send me a bomb disguised as a printer cartridge! I guess I’ll have to wait for the mail man to come and find out then!
So I guess it’s swell that Facebook and IBM and Amazon and whoever else 
would never-ever-ever build the Muslim Registry they already built, but what if they maybe entirely accidentally do build a registry (which they already built, which is already being used to facilitate hate crimes and international terror)? What then?
FYI, in business jargon, this is an externality.
Offered Without Commentary: “Little Ghost”
TRANSCRIPT:
[panel #1] “Hey”
[panel #2] “I… um…”
[panel #3] “I’m… a little… concerned…”
[panel #4] “that I look like a wang, Dave.”
[panel #5] OFF-PANEL VOICE: “You aren’t a wang! You’re a little ghost in a cape, and if I call it…”
[panel #6] OFF-PANEL VOICE: “… Little Ghost, then everything will be fine, so you shouldn’t worry.”
Rule the Season: Make Fancy Booze to Give to Your Friends!
Once again it’s that very special
time of year when I remind you that it’s hella easy to make your own booze, appropriate for gift-giving or general drunkification. (That link goes to my time-tested E-Z DIY Limoncello recipe; make it now, give it during Xmas/Xanukah week, get super-popular in the Dark Days of the Unconquered Son/Sun)
Continue reading “Rule the Season: Make Fancy Booze to Give to Your Friends!”
FREE FICTION FRIDAY: The Final Installment of “The Faster Horse” is racing toward destiny! @motor1com
My alt-reality horses-and-highways serial sci-fi story is rounding the home stretch over at Motor1.com! You can now read the entire story in one go; enjoy this FREE READ for your Friday!
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses!'”—attributed to Henry Ford
Fist fights, affable drunks, and belligerent horses! Check it out: “The Faster Horse” (part four of four)
I’m Pretty Sure It’s *Not* the Economy, Stupid
Listen: Basically all consumer goods are imported. Go through your things now and look for labels: your phone, tv, and computer are Chinese; your shirts are Bangladeshi and Cambodian, your pants Mexican and Nicaraguan. There is exactly one U.S. factory making men’s underwear; those undies are awesome, and cost ~$28 each.
If Trump places a 35% tariff on foreign goods, you’ll need a $6,000/year raise in order to keep treading water (in that your spending on imported manufactured goods—about 38% of the average American household budget—will go up by 35%). Alternately, you can spend $28 for each pair of Made in the USA underwear, $12 for every pair of socks, and I guess not have an iPhone or TV or vitamin supplements or anything with a rare-earth magnet in it (i.e., a computer, a hybrid car, many power tools, many car covers…the list goes on).
The only reason that most Americans haven’t noticed that our real (inflation-adjusted) household incomes have been flat since 1965 is because we’ve enjoyed the enormous savings on manufactured goods that comes with globalization. I’m foggy on why anyone wants to give that up—even if, by some crippled miracle, a huge tariff leads to t-shirt and underwear manufacturing returning to U.S. soil, we don’t have the capacity to produce those things at volume any more. I think there’s only a single jersey cotton weaving mill left in the U.S. It would take years to get factories retooled (or, hell, built; many of those old factories are now lofts, open-plan offices, and unoccupiable attractive nuisances). In the meantime you have the same crappy job you did in October, and you’re paying 35% more for the same shoes and kids pajamas and phone chargers and disposable razors.
So what were Trump voters voting for if it wasn’t the economy, stupid? I really can’t imagine; I didn’t vote for him.
Read a nice chunk of my new novella, “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God,” over on Asimovs.com
Here’s a tiny excerpt of the big excerpt:
Chico and the portal guy were waiting for me outside FDA Annex D. Chico was smoking a cigarette. If this was a screenplay, his entire character description would read “sinister Mexican.” The portal guy was just standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at the stars and whistling that “Yakkety Sax” song from Benny Hill. He abruptly cut off as I climbed out of my car.
“This is your New Guy?” he asked Chico. The portal guy was one of those cheap-blue-oxford-&-khaki-pants cubicle drones, but younger and skinnier than the stock character. He looked pretty damn rumpled—not just “it’s three a.m.” tired, although it was three a.m. It was more the “I’m tired of my whole stupid life” kind of tired. Chico blew twin streams of smoke out his nose, flicking away his cigarette butt without acknowledging the portal guy’s question.
“New guy?” I mugged like a vaudevillian, joining them at the glass door, “What happened to the old guy?”
“Gal,” the portal guy answered as he waved us in through the glass doors of FDA Annex D. “She got burned as a witch.” . . .
If you dig actors, gastropubs, meth dealers, heists, Early American Material Culture, academia, mobsters, or Mexican food then this is the novella for you!!! Read more: “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson
@SquiDaveo !!! pic.twitter.com/jo7jdUorao
— David Helder (@dhelder) December 7, 2016
For those with a taste for “inside baseball”: The original working title of this novella was “Colonial Meth.” That is an awful title—but still an improvement over “Time-Portal Crystal Meth Missionaries,” which is what I scrawled at the top of the first index card. If you squint, you can see that the first legal-pad draft is already titled “Where There is Nothing, There is God”—a title I cribbed from William Butler Yeats by way of my old pal Fritz Swanson.
I’m not sure when I started the index cards for this story (these tend to get carried around in my pocket and taped to the bathroom mirror for a few months while I mull a story over) or the long-hand legal-pad draft, but I’ve got typed draft pages with creation dates as old as November 2013. My submissions log indicates I first sent this out in November 2014—so I guess it took a year to write/revise—and then basically another year-and-a-half to sell (the story was actually accepted in March of 2016), and several more months to revise to everyone’s satisfaction, proof, etc.
