Then

Where were you when. . . .

I had moved to California from New York in mid-August. Perfect timing, in retrospect. New to California, I was on this fitness kick: No more layers of winter clothes to cover winter (and other season) fat. I had even taken up jogging in the mornings. Alarm went off at 6:00, and I was out the door by 6:05, jogging down the hill to this little market where I would buy a bottle of water to rehydrate me on my way back home.

As I walked into the bedroom, around 6:30, my wife (not WOS--ex-WOS, if you will) told me that two planes had just crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought, "God, that is terrible flying." It took me about thirty seconds to shake off whatever grogginess still remained. "Oh. . . ."

There was a message on the phone from my father; he must've called while my wife was in the shower: "I don't know if you've got the television on, but it looks like we're at war."

I headed out to work. In the car, I swapped classic rock for news. About five minutes into my drive, Bernard Shaw announced, "The South tower of the World Trade Center. . . has collapsed." Reports kept coming in. The Pentagon had been hit. Another hijacked plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. A bomb had gone off at the State Department. That last one turned out not to be true, but the rumors were flying from all directions.

I got to work. One of my colleagues--another transplanted East Coaster--had called in to say she wasn't coming in. She knew some people who worked in the lower Manhattan. I couldn't help but think that, if we had stayed in New York, my wife--who had worked at an employment agency about five blocks from the towers--would have been in the middle of everything.

When I got home that evening, there was a message from my landlord. She wanted to know if we were OK--if people from our old neighborhood were OK. She knew we were from Queens, but she had a Californian's grasp of New York geography. (Since then, I've learned that the New Yorker's grasp of California geometry is just as spotty: Whenever an earthquake hits the Los Angeles area, my parents invariably ask if I'm all right; I live near Berkeley.)

I didn't know anybody in the towers. I do know people who knew people. Two degrees of separation. While the phone lines were jammed for hours, I managed to get an e-mail out to my mother; somehow she managed to get online and reply. "I'm OK. So sad. So much will never be the same."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Something about Pride. . . .And Falls. . . .And Their Relative Positioning . . .

A brief post. The video says it all.

God Bless You, Terry Jones

The Right Reverend Scrotum-breath has called off his Bonfire of the Quranities. We'd like to take credit for his change of heart. So we will! (Hey, you'd rather think of him as having a semblance of humanity?)

Our favorite part of the story is that Jones claims he called off his protest because the imam of the "Ground Zero" mosque agreed to relocate from the "holy ground" surrounding the World Trade Center site. Yeah. Right. So impassioned pleas--not all of which were wholly deranged--from a wide variety of politicians, civic groups, other public figures, and assorted average citizens met with stony indifference and/or callous rejection. But an unhinged xenophobe threatens to burn a few holy books and those Muslims are a-headin' for the hills!

For the record, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf denies that any such deal is in place.

Lest you have any doubts about Jones' sincerity, he has not only abandoned plans for International Burn a Quran Day, but he has made a heartfelt plea to all his potential emulators:

"We are, of course, now against any other group burning Qurans," Jones said. "We would right now ask no one to burn Qurans. We are absolutely strong on that."

Oh, great! Now what are we supposed to do with the trunkload of Qurans we bought?!? Wait. . . Hold on. The quote continues:

". . . . We are absolutely strong on that. It is not the time to do it" (emphasis added).

Whew! So, fingers crossed! Here's hoping we get to burn us some Qurans (look at that spelling! Does that seem Amurrrican to you?) sometime soon!

Still, what are we going to do on Saturday night? Guess we'll check out what the Klan's up to. Yee-hah!

Scenes from Shopping

(The scene: A major bullseye-themed big box store that we know we're supposed to boycott, but look at these prices! SOLIPSIST and WOS wheel their cart into the condiment aisle.)

SOL: Look, WOS (pulling a jar off the shelf), 'Laura Scudder's Peanut Butter.'

WOS (Mostly ignoring): Uh-huh.

(SOL starts giggling.)

WOS: What?

SOL: Y'know what goes really well with this? (More giggling) 'Richard Snelly's Apple Jelly'! (Unnerving cackle.)

WOS: Yeah. . . . That's. . .funny. . .?

SOL: And. . . (giggling repeatedly). . . and. . . 'Martha Flayo's Super Mayo'. . . . and. . .(gasping for breath). . . and. . . . 'Billy Fletchup's Orange Ke--'

WOS: What is wrong with you?!?

SOL: BWAAAA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

WOS: You're gonna get us banned from another supermarket, aren't you?

SOL: Hee-hee-hee-hee-heeeeee. . . .

WOS: Good lord!

(Image from Laura Scudder's website, obviously)

The Brewing Pogrom II

At the risk of superfluity, we must express our outrage towards Pastor Terry Jones (our least favorite member of Monty Python) and his Church of the Grizzled Hick or whatever the hell they call themselves. In case you haven't heard, Jones has decided to "honor" the memory of 9/11 with a celebratory bonfire of Korans.

Yeah, that'll show Osama that he's got the wrong idea about Americans.

Of course, convincing Osama is not really part of the agenda. Or maybe it is--the fact is, we are clueless as to what, exactly, Jones hopes to accomplish.

OK, we're not clueless. We know what Jones hopes to accomplish. Smoking pyres of Korans will lead to smoking pyres of mosques--or, we can only hope, Muslims! Of course, being a good man of God, Jones would be shocked--shocked!--were his actions to lead to such violence. Not that he'd complain.

Members of the administration and the military are appealing to Jones' sense of patriotism to get him to call off his pogrom; they say that this inflammatory action will, well, inflame the masses in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and could put young Americans at risk. Frankly, we find this argument disingenuous. After all, our young soldiers are already at risk, and we doubt the repugnant actions of a sociopath will increase their danger to any appreciable degree.

If anything, we fear the attention paid Jones by the politicians and generals somehow legitimizes him--somehow sends the message to the Islamic world that this guy actually speaks for America and so must be silenced. These requests ultimately put Jones in a win-win situation: If he burns the Koran, he has stood up to the limp-wristed powers-that-be; if he backs down, he gets to claim that he is only doing so out of consideration for our troops.

(If Jones is so militantly anti-Islamic, by the way, why doesn't he strap on some body armor and go fight the Jihadi where they live? Oh, right, that would require actual courage.)

We feel helpless right now. We raise our voice and scream, we encourage our Facebook friends and others to denounce Pastor Jones and his congregation of hate, but we know we're largely preaching to the converted. What we would love to see is NOT Terry Jones backing down in a pseudo-show of civic-mindedness. In our fantasy, we imagine Jones standing in front of a bonfire of Korans, surrounded by his whooping, dribbling, leering pack of semi-human jackals--all of whom should have their names and images published in as many outlets as possible (hey, wouldn't they be proud to have their "patriotism" so acknowledged)--and, beyond them, watching silently and with dignity, thousands upon thousands of real Americans, saying a silent prayer for the future of this country.

(Picture of the schmuck from Google)

A House Is a Home

Interesting article on the housing market, today. Many economists have declared that the government should once and for all stop trying to "solve" the problem of plummeting house prices and just let the market fall to whatever level it will ultimately fall to. On the one hand, this could help prospective buyers, who will see house prices fall; on the other hand, this will hurt current homeowners, who will see the already diminished value of their houses diminish even further. In turn, this could exacerbate the economy's problems, as these homeowners decide simply to walk away from underwater mortgages. As the article points out, "If [homeowners] see an identical house down the street going for half what they owe, the temptation to default might be irresistible."

Now, we stipulate here that the Solipsist does not own a house, so his opinions come from that perspective.

We remain unconvinced by the implied--or overt--arguments of this article. For one thing, we dispute the inherently unfairness of homeowners having to pay off mortgages whose balances are now higher than the value of the houses for which they paid. In fact, one of the proposed government interventions would cut mortgage balances on such houses. But while it may seem unfair to make someone pay off a $500,000 mortgage for a house now worth $250,000, consider that these people agreed to pay off a $500,000 mortgage. They probably assumed that the house would increase in value. If that had happened--if the house had appreciated to, say, $750,000--would we now say these homeowners were responsible for that amount?

Some will say the banks and other lending agencies acted dishonestly and that homeowners should not be held responsible for their deceptive--perhaps criminal--behavior. Fair enough. We don't want to see people losing their homes living on the street. The problem we have, though, is that many of these government programs seem focused more on protecting the value of homes, rather than on protecting the people who live in them. A government program that helps people avoid foreclosure and eviction is something we can get behind. A government program that seeks to make sure people don't lose money on their investments is ludicrous.

Maybe this comes from our non-homeowner mindset, but we've always considered that, if and when we do buy a house, it will not be an "investment": It will be a place to live. As long as we can continue living there, our ability to flip it for a profit will remain a minor concern.

Warnings

Lately, when we log on to blogger.com, a box pops up asking whether we only want to view the information that was delivered securely. We've seen this type of warning before, but it's only recently started appearing on Blogger. At first, we clicked "No," figuring that Blogger has never burned us before, so why should we worry about whether the information was delivered "securely" or not. Then, when the warning continued to appear every time we logged on, we tried clicking "Yes," thinking that might satisfy the overprotective overseers at Google. No such luck: We're still getting the warning.

Does this mean that Blogger has recently started "delivering" dangerous material? Or at least material that is somehow more dangerous than whatever material it used to deliver? Times like these, we wish we knew more about computers than that they're shiny and fun to type on.

On another blogging-related note, what, precisely, is the protocol for responding to comments? As longtime Sloppists have noted, YNSHC tends simply to post your musings and leave it at that, not getting drawn into any particular back and forth. We've wondered lately, though, whether we are supposed to respond to commenters' comments.

See, we always felt that the comment section of a blog should be the place where loyal readers can confer about the day's topics. That the role of the blogger was to stimulate discussion but then, godlike, simply to sit back and observe the results of His handiwork. Maybe not, though. Maybe our loyal followers--all six of you--have anxiously, if vainly, awaited our own ripostes to your posts. We've decided, therefore, to withhold our benedictions no longer. Henceforth--or until we get bored--we will respond to all comments, no matter how undeserving those comments may be.

You have been warned! You're welcome!