It appears that I have a job. Not just any job, mind you, but a good one.

We'll have a sort of "test run" through the end of this month to make sure we're still in love with each other before I officially go on staff. So on general principle I'm not going to do the typical "new job" things until May: one always wants to get a new briefcase or something like that, but I'll hold off for now. Fortunately, I love my existing briefcase.

I did, however, get all the stuff done on my car today that I've been putting off for months. So I should be able to rely on it for the time being. (I've been researching possible upgrades, but that whole issue can definitely wait. Actually, I hope to trick my husband into getting a new car, so I can just adopt his old-ish one. Because I'm lazy.)

On a certain level, of course, I still consider a staff job as freelancing: one has to have the mindset that an employer—even in a staff gig—is a "client," and to want to be of service in that situation. Naturally, I won't be blogging about work matters or my company. Most of you are aware that I've only identified one client publicly, because I was promoting this person's work and ethics demanded that I disclose the identity for that reason.

In short, I'm afraid that the whole thing will be a bit mysterious from my readers' point of view, but it's an editing job that will combine several of my passions: for technology, for futurology, and for select elements of pop culture.

So you see how it is: even when I had the multiple interviews with possible employers/anchor clients, it didn't feel real, like I'd necessarily get one of these gigs—much less the really juicy one.

Attila the Hub has a saying that is his standard defense against the temptation for pessimism: "remember that anything can happen—even good things."

I hate to admit that Attila the Hub is very often right, but . . . well. You get the idea.

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. . . He wouldn't look like a neocon at all.

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Does one traditionally shake a Polaroid picture? And why? Is it supposed to make the image show up faster?—and what would youngsters today know about that?

The whole thing sounds suspicious to me.

And I'm shakin' nothing.

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Apparently, every time we turn around and run people think better of us.

(Okay, lefty readers: I know you think I'm advocating that we fight fire with fire. I am not. Neither is Darleen. However, if one is going to fight fire, one ought to have more than Good Thoughts and Hemp in the toolbox.)

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Glenn publishes a handful of mail from people who are upset about our lopsided immigration "policy." But please note that a big part of the problem is how punishing the system is for those who want to immigrate "the right way." Fixing this is essential to the problem, which means we have to reform a bureaucracy.

And that's hard to do, but it's essential.

Right now, our attitude toward immigrants—whom we need, by the way, given our system of entitlements and falling birth rates—is, "welcome to the United States. Fuck you."

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Ted Nugent, or Alice Cooper? (I'll take plenty of each, please.)

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First, get your minds out of the gutter. Thanks.

I've been putting off this review because I just can't think of enough good things to say about Wet by Beefeater. This is the stuff; it's similar to Bombay Blue Sapphire, but "ever so much more so." It's more flavorful than Bombay Blue (or Tanqueray Ten), but still in the smoother tradition of English gin, rather than the more robust Dutch style.

In other words, in my mind it's the ultimate balance between smoothness and bite, with the perfect amount of juniper flavoring.

Wet is here just in time to catch the gin craze, and it's positioned beautifully to do quite well: the bottle is gorgeous (and shows the clarity of the liquor better than a blue or green bottle would), and it gives you that juniper hit without knocking you over. Its slogans range from the semi-respectable "get wet, because anything else is just dry" to "if this won't get you wet, nothing will." (I didn't understand that last one, of course.)

I would drink this gin every day if I could. If I'm ever rich and famous, I might do exactly that.

Get your own though, okay?

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I can sense what's about to happen. My mood will continue to lift for 12-24 hours until I get stricken with horrible cramps. (Dad? Are you reading this? I'm out of codeine, and I know where you live.) I'll put up with that for another 12-24 hours before I get to be a human being for, oh, a week.

In exchange for enduring this nonsense, members of my sex are permitted to go through even more excruciating pain in order to produce children, which they are then allowed to raise.

And our dry-cleaning costs more. Plus, we always get stuck with the dishes.

I'm really ready to make someone pay for all this.

In order to protect my marriage/friendships, I've locked myself out of the house and am blogging from my mom's place in Westchester. (She's safe in the Bay Area right now.) I bundled up all her knives and dropped them off at Goodwill, just to be sure. I'll be disconnecting the phone soon, and then disabling the internet connection.

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Steve Verdon has an interesting post in Outside the Beltway that reflects a lot of my concerns on the question of "illegals." Please note that I do not regard all those who advocate sealing the borders as racists, but I have yet to hear a conversation about this on the radio that doesn't accommodate at least a few racists. Very often, callers on talk radio will say the most disgusting things about Mexican-Americans without being checked whatsoever by the host. After all, we're "all on one side in this thing." Which presumably means we should tolerate the racists. It makes me queasy, to tell you the truth.

Verdon's focus, however, is on the cost-benefit aspect of illegal immigration, regarding which Darleen and I have been playing verbal volleyball for some time. (You'll want to note here that Darleen's non-racist credentials are impeccable, though I wonder if her saturation exposure to the Latin underclass occasionally informs some of her views.)

I continue to believe that in order to address the problem, we must 1) secure the border; 2) streamline the legal immigration system for those who truly want to come here and assimilate; and 3) offer some sort of guest-worker program for young people who simply want to be here temporarily to make a few dollars, and then go home.

Typically [this morning's radio] discussion was about little Juanito and how much money it costs to educate this illegal child in the U.S. school system. Nothing was said about the work that JaunitoÂ’s parents do and the value such works adds to the economy. Nothing was discussed about the taxes paid. The true measure of the costs here should be the net costs, not the total costs.

So how much are the net costs of illegal immigration? This report from the GAO from 1995 (pdf) put the net costs at anywhere from $2 billion a year to $19 billion a year with an illegal population of 3 to 5 million. So even if we take the worse case scenario of 3 million immigrants and $19 billion in net costs and scale it up to todayÂ’s estimated population (say 12 million) we are talking about $80 billion in net costs. A middle of the road estimate would be around $50 billion. Either way I see this as chump-change for the most part.

First we have to remember that the U.S. economy is well over $12 trillion dollars in terms of GDP. Or in other words illegal immigration is equal to about 0.64% of GDP. By contrast the U.S. budget deficit is ten times larger as a percentage of GDP. Spending for the Medicare Prescirption Drug plan is going to cost $18.2 trillion.1 And Medicare, aside from the prescription drug program, has a shortfall in the range of $50 to $60 trillion over the next 75 years. But here we are worried about chump-change due to illegal immigration.

This leads me to, “Why?” The only thing I can think of is that things like Medicare shortfalls are boring and dull. After all it requires reading actuarial reports, figuring out what the taxable wage base is, and looking at projections which brings in things like statistics and already 48.3% of the audience is on the verge of a coma.

Nice, Steve. Some of us were paying attention, there.

Illegal immigration on the other hand seems to touch off some sort of fear of people who are different. They don’t look like “us”, the don’t talk like “us” and they eat all that weird food and dammit I can’t read the signs over the stores that cater to their consumption! So illegal immigration gets lots of attention, but the complete shambles that things like Medicare are in are just ignored. If we could just stem the flow of illegals why economic nirvana would result. Americans would go back to hanging drywall, mowing their own yards, and chopping up chickens. I’m even sure that controlling the U.S.-Mexico border would reverse the global downward trend in manufacturing employment.[/sarcasm]

In short, I see all this handwringing about the U.S. becoming part of Mexico as nothing more than misplaced priorities by people who seem deathly afraid of people who are different than them. The response to the charge of racism is often, “It isn’t racism! We just oppose illegal immigration. And the costs are real.” Sure the costs are real, but they are much smaller when compared to other issues such as Medicare funding. And sure illegal immigration isn’t a good thing, but instead suggest a guest worker program (i.e. make those illegal immigrants legal) and you still get the howling. So both objections, IMO, while technically true are just rhetoric to deflect criticism and hide the rather disquieting aspects of the illegal immigration movement.

Okay. So he's just as turned off by the Latino = bad thing as I am, and it looms large in his argument.

But the cost-benefit thing is relevant, and the huge resistance to guest-worker programs does set off a lot of red flags in terms of some of us feeling that there's a huge xenophobia out there, and/or a huge willingness to ascribe the recession we just went through (over the past five years) to a phenomenon that's been going on in one form or another for decades.

Tag, boys and girls. You're it.

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My writing teacher sent an e-mail along that contained this link to an article for Poets and Writers by C. Michael Curtis. It's thoughtfully written, compassionate, and respectful of the individual writer's sensibilities—along with the massive power inequity between writers and editors. Curtis clearly has a a warm heart, and a deep love for those who produce the written word.

The intent certainly wasn't to make me consider driving off a cliff, but that was the effect, naturally.

I'm coming around to the position that the desire to write is a cancer not yet addressed by medical science. Someone should set up a fucking foundation, you know.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a nap.

(Fear not: I should get my period within a few days. Then I'll be in pain, but a good deal less cranky. The following week I'll be happy and smiling and fun again. Biology may not be destiny, but it certainly affects one's moods.

Besides, with so many options available, no sensible crime writer could ever choose a method that had the right panache. Hence, the napping alternative, which leaves one's future options open, and facilitates that happy smiling fun week that lies just over the rainbow.)

UPDATE: Okay. The package containing that stupid story everyone wants me to send out is ready. I just cranked it out as an exercise some weeks ago, and people keep telling me it's great—even Attila the Hub, who isn't given to hyperbole, likes it. After a while, one ought to trust others' judgement on these matters.

So I feel marginally better. At least I can get started on that average of 19 rejections any given story receives before it's accepted anywhere. (That long horrible one that I really hate—but keep sending 'round because I worked so hard on it—just has a few more rejections to go before I either get it published or give up on it for good.)

I'm no longer toying with suicidal thoughts; I've moved up to homicidal ones, which is my interpretation of mental health.

It's still raining. Hog Beatty called me to recommend anything from Bowie's "Berlin" period for this drizzly day. I left him a message that almost all my Bowie is on vinyl, and I still don't have a turntable. So it's Ziggy Stardust, Changes2, or silence.

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The movie.

I know some people think it's "too soon," five years after the fact. But if that's your perspective, you might want to take a look at this:

It wouldn't be there if the passengers of Flight 93 hadn't taken action. (And the White House wouldn't be there if it were easier to spot from the air: instead, our friends from AQ had to settle for the Pentagon.)

Ed Driscoll has more on United 93, via Insty.

And it's nice to know that someone in the entertainment industry has neurons that actually fire now and again. Other than Lionel Chetwynd, of course.

Please, guys: we want to see this addressed. We want to see victory over the terrorists. The victories can be symbolic some of the time, though the terrorists are very real. And this particular victory is about as real and basic as it gets.

Via Insty, Jim Garaghty's got some great thoughts on the film, including the fact that a few ignorant lefties refuse to admit that this incident even took place: Garaghty quotes one moonbat who maintains that the 9/11 Commission Report dismissed the idea of a passenger uprising on United 93. Naturally, Jim gives us the relevant passages from the Report that show the passenger assault did, in fact, occur.

Judith Weiss of KesherTalk discusses the movie's prospects: she foresees it doing moderately well in theatres, and then becoming a cult classic among those who really don't want us ever to forget what happened that day. I think it might do exceedingly well: one has to consider the effects of pent-up demand. I don't want to compare this movie to The Passion of the Christ, but I guess I must. After all, once more with Flight 93 there is a whole arena of human experience that we don't see addressed in the entertainment world very often. So when it is addressed, people will flock to see it. There are millions of people in this country who are profoundly grateful to the folks on Flight 93 for saving the Capitol Building. And I'll bet each of those people has $20 for a movie. As with watching The Passion of the Christ, it will be a deeply moving experience, and possibly a spiritual one.

The Kesher Talk posting has a great recollection of the passenger assault on the hijackers from the point of view of a surviving spouse, who was in contact with her husband by cell phone as the uprising began. It's sad and stirring.

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If you haven't seen The Right Brothers' new video yet, here's your chance.

Hm. The right hasn't really had an anthem band for some time—IIRC, not since Oingo Boingo. (No: my favorite wasn't "Only a Lad" nor even "Ain't This the Life." It's a bit politically incorrect, but I adored "I Want To Make Violent Love to You." Naturally, I never bought any of their albums, because they were such horrible reactionaries. And I only listened to them with the windows closed and the shades down, so I'm sure it was okay.)

Apparently, the Right Brothers have two albums out, and they have a new song, "What About the Issues?" that addresses a lot of their hate mail:

Whatcha gonna do to fight three chords and the truth?—
Just ignore the issues?

You can download it for free here, though there's no video just yet.

Hat tip: everyone, but I saw it first by linking from Hackbarth's site.

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. . . from SoCal LawBlog regarding the Bear Flag League's brief in the Apple case (O'Grady v. Apple):

As some of you may know, the BFL filed an amicus brief with the California Court of Appeal in the litigation between Apple and two bloggers. We weighed in on the issue of a blogger's entitlement to the same first amendment protections that traditional journalists received. We filed our brief about a year ago and the court has since been very quiet. Last week we received notice that the court will hold oral argument this month. I'll keep you updated on the status of the case.

Included in the e-mail is a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website; the Foundation is following the case. (You'll note that the BFL amicus brief is the first one listed in the Foundation update linked above.)

For more on the Golden State bloggers behind the Bear Flag League, start here.

BTW, I'll grant that there are a lot of us, but keep in mind that the last time I checked, California was the most populous state in the country. (I said "populous," not "popular." Yeah, I know people love to hate us. Especially people who live here. I don't see 'em making plans to move, of course. As for me, you'll have to pry the palm fronds out of my cold, dead fingers.)

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On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

That won't ever happen again.

When I was a teenager, I used to be willing to wait a few minutes to see the time change to either 11:11 or 12:34 on my digital clock.

Of course, I was a strange girl.

You know: strange back then in the 70s/early 80s. Thank goodness that's all over with.

UPDATE: Let's see: we've dealt with 24-hour time, the issue of future centuries, and now . . . Europe's date notation, which I hadn't even though about!

Does anyone know what the larger Commonwealth countries (other than the UK) do in their date notations . . . ? I'd assume that they use the British/European system, but this is the internet, so I thought I'd throw it out there. Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and others should let me know.

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. . . takes on the terror of female sexuality that pervades many strains of Islam:

So frequently do we joke about men's preoccupation with sex and female body parts in the West, that we have failed to notice that the Muslim world is literally consumed by female sexuality and with their fear of it. It is ironic that both Muslim men and women are under the mistaken impression that Western society is oversexualized compared to them, when in fact, it is practically impossible to be more obsessed with sexual matters than they are in Muslim communities.

Consider for a moment a culture that would prefer to let young girls die in a burning building than to risk having them run out of said building not clothed in properly modest dress; and tell me that such a society is less preoccupied with matters of sex than we are in the West.

Enormous effort goes into veiling women, dressing women modestly, silencing women, covering women's bodies, punishing women, controlling women, reviling women, humiliating women, beating women, subjugating women, avoiding the dishonor of women, keeping women uneducated, policing women, infantilizing women--in short, dehumanizing women -- all under the guise of "protecting" and "honoring" them as they relegate them to animal-like status.

The women in this misogynistic Islam are brainwashed from birth into thinking that this cultural preoccupation somehow is necessary and that it "liberates" them in some bizarre manner.

Amazingly, this medieval culture has grasped the fundamentals of both Orwellian and postmodern rhetorical rationalizations, that are so prominent in certain intellectual quarters within our own culture! I have heard the canned rationalizations coming from their lips of muslim women myself; and they all claim that it frees them from having to be "sexual objects."

On the contrary, in Islamic society that is apparently the only role open to women. That, and breeders for the jihad.

Please read the whole thing; it's an amazing post.

Hat tip: Glenn.

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. . . here.

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for jumping the gun on the Jill Carroll story. It makes me feel all warm and gooey inside that people rushed to condemn actions she took under duress.

Sean had this one right from the beginning. I wish more people had been willing to wait for Real Data to come in (that is, statements Carroll made once safely back in this country).

Memo to the Telegraph:
Of course, every country hopes that its own nationals will be heroic under the stress of capture. Though to my knowlege no one has matched or exceeded the performance of the Italian gentlemen, who, realizing he would be beheaded, messed up the jihadists' video by fiighting back, declaring, "this is how an Italian dies."

Some of us definitely need to learn to keep our powder dry.

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The husband and I definitely argue like writers. James Thurber once pointed out that the typical way in which writers agree tends to go like this: "you're right; you're absolutely right. The problem is, you don't have the faintest idea why you're right."

We each had squabbles with the way evangelicals were portrayed on this week's episode, though for very different reasons. Attila the Hub thought Catholics were getting smeared alongside Protestants, though I thought this week's Catholic-baiting was pretty mild; after all, how can one top Christopher helping to bury Ralphie's head—encased in a bowling ball bag, after Chris himself had dismembered the body—and crossing himself as the earth is placed atop it? That incident, several seasons ago, was the Catholic-baiting apogee.

The fact that evangelical support for Israel is mentioned, and then qualified by another Jewish person who feels cautious about Christian support is not at all contrary to my experience: there are some old-school Jews out there who are skeptical about Christianity, given the little incidents there have been over the centuries. (One friend and I have at least annual arguments about whether the Nazis could be considered even nominal, surface-level Christians. Once one grants that, it is all over, and one has to concede his premise that Christians are essentially out to get Jews. Which I feel is a few centuries behind the times.)

The spouse felt that Tony's conversion to "what the bleep" spirituality this week came about as a result of a stacked-deck comparison between Catholics/Evengelicals and this more "woowey" approach to spirituality. ("Woowey" is my Tai Chi teacher's self-description. It fits, you know.)

I thought the portrayal of evangelicals worked rather well, given that it was a cartoon, with my usual caveat that pro-abortion writers never seem to get this nuance: Protestants don't have issues with birth control methods they don't consider abortifacients. Their argument is not with artificial birth-control per se, but rather with anything that might kill a fetus, embryo, or pre-embryo. This distinction is often obscured by those who either wish to proclaim that all pro-lifers are out to get their birth-control, or are simply intellectual slatterns. Not that there's anything wrong with being an intellectual slattern, of course.

The Catholic subplot? Not related to Tony's new "what the bleep" philosophy at all: it's simply a way of explaining Paulie's increasing willingness to take chances for rather stupid reasons. We're supposed to wonder if he's going to get caught. And I do.

The "what the bleep" business will very likely fall by the wayside in coming weeks: we know that Tony is able to excise any tendancy toward soft-heartedness/humanity when his "business" is on the line.

Let's review:

Attila Girl = right right right
Attila the Hub = wrong wrong wrong, unless we agree, in which case he's likely right for entirely the wrong reasons

Honey, do you need me to put this on a 3x5 card and place it on your desk as a reminder?

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I just finished Glenn Reynolds' latest. I was a bit disappointed to find out that it wasn't about my social life (rife as that is with guys named Jeff and John and—especially—David) but it was compelling nonetheless. More later.

I thought about live-blogging the experience of reading the book, but that seemed almost as pathetic as leaving Instapundit, closing the browser window, turning the computer to "sleep," and picking up A of D. Which, of course, I've never done.

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You need to get ready for Daylight Savings Time tonight or tomorrow.

So spring back, and this autumn we'll all fall forward.

Unless I'm somehow confused . . .

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