Action figures of the Book

The Marines won't be giving out talking Jesus dolls to kids this Christmas owing to the possibility of giving offense to non-Christians. "We can't take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family."

The obvious solution would be to go a little further back give out talking dolls of religious figures the three monotheistic faiths can agree on. The same company making the Jesus action figure already makes one of Moses (as does toypresidents.com), and King David is also esteemed by each religion. But why stop there?

• Abraham/Ibrahim: "Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?" "If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!" "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."


• Noah/Nuh: "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem!" "May God extend the territory of Japhethand may Canaan be his slave."


• Isaac/Ishaq: "She is my sister." "Now the LORD has given us room and we will flourish in the land."


• Jacob/Yaqub: "Sell me your birthright." "I am Esau your firstborn." "Give me my wife. My time is completed, and I want to lie with her."


• Adam: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."

And of course you could have Eve and Rebekah and Sarah and Rachel figures for the girls and unselfconscious boys, though they don't seem to get nearly as many lines in Genesis so one would need to be a little more creative. All the very best passages in the Bible/Torah go to Yahweh, who could be represented by a Burning Bush or an Ark of the Covenant perhaps.

And if any of the kids receiving toys happen to be Buddhist or Hindu or Wiccan? Well, you can't please everyone.

Rubikations

I read this story about a world-class Rubik's Cube solver and was befuddled in two places.

1. "This weekend he will try to regain the title of world blindfold Rubik's Cube champion" Blindfold Rubik's Cube? How can that be? I did a little searching around and found that the idea is that one receives a scrambled cube, studies it, then dons a blindfold and unscrambles it. Silly me, I thought that they would first put on the blindfold, then receive a scrambled cube where the colored faces are replaced with tactile cues (sandpaper, grease, Braille dots, thumbtacks) and then solve it just by touch. It might actually be easier than what the fellow's doing. Ah well, not a completely original idea after all, though I didn't know it at the time.
   
   I think I thought this because of my other idea for a Braille condom. But that's for another time.


2. "'That was also a lot of fun,' said Mao, who is now working for a constancy firm." Pardon me, a what? I Googled around and found hits for web constancy firm, management constancy company, and that kind of thing, but no clue as to what the definition of this (apparently Commonwealth country) entity is.

I've never figured out Rubik's cubes myself. For me, the most fascinating thing is taking them apart to see how they work anyway. I think some architect should adopt this scheme to build a Rubik's apartment building (not an office building, for God's sake), so everybody could have a different view every day. Or a Rubik's fridge, to make it easier to rotate out those things which usually get stuck at the back for far too long.

Happy days are here again

Happy days are here again
Originally uploaded by milkfish.

More evidence of a photographic sort on the utility of plain old paper. Our friend John (former Dumont borough council member and also an usher at our church) is posting up the numbers on the wall of the Elks Club as they are gathered district by district by the local Democratic party's representative as the polls closed at 8pm last night. It was an overfull slate this year with four council seats in contention by the two parties.

The first returns were from the parts of town which are more Democratic-friendly, so when they came out solidly in the Democrats' favor the optimism was tempered. You can see the tension here. But by the time the more well-heeled, Republican-leaning part of town had its numbers tallied, also solidly in the same direction, everyone in the room knew that it was a sweep.

I presume the Republicans were having their election night event on the other side of town at the Knights of Columbus hall, though I did not see or hear of their representatives conceding the tally.

The great idea of this post is that local politics is still interesting to be involved with and that people are still working hard to try to run the detailed business of our communities. A fine party like this one (and the catered buffet was a fine one indeed) has got to beat an apathetic night at home watching the pundits on TV any time.

Opt-out campaign ads

If there's anything as annoying as public radio and television pledge campaigns, it's political campaign ads sprouting up on the airwaves every Fall. I know they work to sway the undecided voters, but for those of us who have their minds made up (for some time now, actually), they are a waste of time and money.

Couldn't a subscription model work there too? Once you've decided you don't need any more of the arguments they are proposing, really and truly for sure, you could flip a setting on your TV and radio and telephone and be spared any further pitches.

Maybe we could arrange things that the act of switching the setting actually registers your vote ahead of time absentee-style. That way the political interests would know for sure that there is no point bombarding you any further, since you have already made your choice, October/November surprises or no. So making your selection would have to be done only when you have a feeling of ironclad commitment, also telling the political powers that there is also no point in appeals to you attempting to affect the voter turnout (the second main function of political ads).

In order to get people to keep their minds open and to not opt-out, advertising consultants would have an incentive to make their ads interesting to watch and creative, the same way other advertisers have. The undecideds might want to withhold their commitment in order to enjoy the play of ideas and issues right up until Election Day. This, I think, would also be a good thing as something to help counteract voter apathy.

They'd be perfect if we didn't need to run programs on them

The finish line is in sight for the two-week long odyssey of the computer rebuild hell which has made my outlook on life even gloomier than usual these days. Just today I read a column in the local paper about the importance of file backups, but I'm here to tell you that admirable as this endeavor is, it is simply not enough if you value your precious binary data.

The problem is that simply copying the data over to a new machine is not enough, even if you don't happen to need to go between different versions of the operating system. Even though I had the contact management and the bookkeeping data files from just before the old laptop died, they were basically useless without the programs themselves in running order, and it didn't take much difference between the layouts of the old and new machines to insure that the program files and configuration would not play nicely with my new setup. No, it was a matter of going back to original distribution CDs and reinstalling everything from the bottom up.

The trouble was that over time I seem to have acquired a hundred or more of the installation CDs, packed away in boxes and folders and sleeves, and I spent a long, long time looking for what I needed. Luckily I did find a Windows XP Pro installation disk I'd bought years ago when I thought I was going to upgrade my wife's Presario, a failed effort at the time, so with some effort I was able to set up a dual-boot arrangement on the laptop, making it a little less likely that I'd destroy everything I had. But the CRM and ancillary software installation disks were nowhere to be found, and I began to suspect that at the time I started up my business, the laptop was delivered to me without the installation media. If I were an independent operator I would have had a hard time getting these, but as a franchise member in good standing with my Home Office I was able to contact the IS people there who set up the machine and get some disks of the appropriate vintage sent out to me by overnight mail.

This is the basis of my current idea: I would like there to be a service which would take my installation disks and store them for me in some organized fashion. Including the vital license/serial number information and the documentation for installation. Maybe they'd just provide mailers so I could dump in the whole box the software came in, and periodically email me a list of the software they have on hand. I guess for software which I received electronically (as a download), I could imagine an upload server to send the package to. Then when the hardware fails, I could contact them with a list of what I needed and they would send back just what I needed (maybe from a common stock of media from their warehouse, along with an electronic record of the license key). Maybe it would be on a subscription basis, so that as long as I had a current membership they would not need to charge me at crunch time, or maybe they could have some kind of partnership program with software vendors where they could provide programs (and upgrades?) to their members at a discount. Or they could have an arrangement whereby one could obtain software which had not been previously vaulted, assuming I knew the name of the program and the version, with a new key.

If you are like most people and the data you want to keep is in the form of text files, pictures, and music files (DRM-free, that is), this won't be quite so critical to you, since pretty much any computer you buy off the shelf will be able to give you access to these. But you might well have some accounting software or video editing applications which might not come standard on a basic computer which you still might need to maintain the ability to install when the PC dies.

It's times like these that remind me why I do not ever want to go back into the business of supporting computers myself. I actually contacted a company here to do the hard work, but it turned out that they were already working at capacity and declined taking my troubles on at $125/hour.