Stuck In Traffic #7 by Calvin Stacy Powers ÿ ================= Darwin Award 1995 Earlier this year, the Arizona Highway Patrol discovered a pile of smouldering metal smashed into the side of a mountain at the apex of a curve in a highway. At first they thought it was the wreckage of a small airplane, but later decided it was a car, though they couldn't determine what sort of car it was because the car was mangled so badly. But during their investigation the story began to come out. It seems that a man had somehow managed to get his hands on a solid-fuel rocket used to give heavy military transport planes an extra boost during take-off. This fellow had driven his Chevy Impala out into the middle of the desert on a long straight road, attached the rocket to the roof of his car, ignited the rocket, and literally taken off. Investigators estimate that the Chevy Impala reached a speed of about 250-300 miles per hour. Now that's a joy ride! Unfortunately, these solid-fuel rockets don't turn off once you ignite them; and straight roads don't run on forever. You can just imagine this man's range of emotions during his escapade. First the exhilaration, then the slight worry once he realized that he hadn't planned on how to turn off the rocket,. Next, panic when the brakes burned up followed by sheer terror when he saw the curve up ahead. According to news circulating on the Internet, this man has been nominated for this year's Darwin Award. This award is an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing himself in the most spectacular way. (Last year's award was given to a man who killed himself when he tipped a Coke machine over on himself while trying to steal himself a free soda.) But ya know, I kinda gotta admire the guy for going after the thrill. =================== Bold New Initiative As the deadline for The Junto #29 approaches, the President has just announced a bold new initiative to transform the world as we know it, or it least score himself some cheap ratings points for the next election. He has announced that smoking is bad and the FDA should have authority to regulate the sale and distribution of tobacco just like any other drug. And in a brilliant campaign strategy move, he chose to announce this bold new initiative in the heart of tobacco country, North Carolina. Our Democratic Governor was not amused. How insightful our President is. How in tune he is with the times. Congress is bothering with mundane issues like how the heck we are ever going to balance the budget and what we can do to keep the Medicare system from going bankrupt. Those head-in-the-clouds politicians in Washington are holding hearings on the Waco massacre, which could arguably be the worst abuse of government power in recent history. Those out of touch rascals we call representatives are wasting their time figuring out what to do about the Bosnian civil war. What are these folks thinking? I suppose the President will expect them all to set these issue aside and join him in a united, bipartisan war against tobacco. I guess after trying to sell the nation on gays in the military, Nationalizing the health care industry, the invasion of Haiti that wasn't called an invasion, establishing diplomatic relations with Viet Nam, the 50 billion dollar Bailout of the Mexican government, the Bosnian arms embargo, the President felt like he had to do Something. Anything. Anything at all to show that he is worthy of leading the nation. And yet, somehow, I think the President missed the boat on this one. Despite his tobacco proposal being overwhelmingly popular, I think he has proven just how ineffective and out of touch he is. I mean, is this the best he can do? ================================================= Hit `em Again! Hit `em Again! Har-der! Har-der! The AP News service reports that a long time fugitive by the name of Nick George Montos, who has the distinction of being the first man to ever be on the FBI's 10 most wanted list twice and who has been running from the law for nine years, has been apprehended by a 73 year old antique shop owner by the name of Sonia Paine. It seems that Mr. Montos had tied up Ms. Paine and was robbing her store. But she was able to break free and the two got into a fighting match. Mr. Montos had managed to hit Ms. Paine with a baseball bat and spray her with mace before she really got mad and wrestled the bat away from him and returned the slugs. "I don't take any crap from anybody," Ms. Paine said, "I beat the hell out of him." And a good thing, too. ====================================== The Politicization Of Medical Research Once again, Senator Jesse Helms has managed to offend the sensibilities of many citizens by merely stating the obvious. One might wonder if he is running for reelection. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Helms called for a reduction in federal research money earmarked for AIDS research for two reasons. First, he cites figures that indicate that AIDS is only the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, yet more federal money is spent on AIDS research than other research programs for more deadly illnesses. Second, he calls for a reduction in federal research money because the disease is primarily spread by homosexuals engaging in "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." There's little doubt that Senator Helms can back up his claims of disproportionate AIDS research funding with accurate government figures. Others have made similar claims in the past. And yet critics of Senator Helms can almost certainly cite different government figures that show fair and equitable funding with equal accuracy, thanks to the myriad of government programs involved and the labyrinthine ways that the government does its bookkeeping. Besides, many people will be quick to point out that, ideally, federal research money should not be a "quota" program in which money is doled out to various fields of research in proportion to their "importance." Each area of research should receive the funds it needs to do through, prudent, yet efficient research. It's sad and unsettling to think of various fields of medical research being pitted against each other in a morbid battle for funds. But that's the way it is. When one strips away the emotional rhetoric, Helms is correct in pointing out that federal research money is doled according to the political weights exercised by various lobbying efforts and special interest groups rather than any sort of noble evaluation of need or merit. Even setting up a panel of scientists to set spending priorities on research programs rather than by politicians, as some have suggested, simply shifts the politicization to the selection of the panel. He who gets to choose who's on the panel more or less gets to determine how the funding will be doled out. Distribution of federal money will always be politicized. It's always been that way. Everyone knows it. Welcome to the world of politics. And while lamenting about the politicization of AIDS research funding, Helms is also engaging in political pandering of his own by trying to imply that funding AIDS research is a tacit approval of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." Such rhetoric plays well with some of Senator Helms' constituents but one can use the same reasoning to justify cutting just about any other federal research one cares to. For example, there are millions of people in the country, many of whom live in Senator Helms own district, who regard smoking as ``deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct'', yet we don't hear Senator Helms calling for an end to lung cancer research. Nor do we hear him advocating the abolition of federal price support programs for tobacco. Indeed, he is among the staunchest defenders of federal tobacco programs. Compassion for a human being's suffering is sometimes independent of one's approval or disapproval of that person. One may feel compassion for someone suffering with AIDS while disapproving of his homosexual life-style that put him at risk. One may feel compassion for a lung cancer patient while disapproving of the fact that he smokes. So why is Helms campaigning for reductions in AIDS research but not lung cancer research? Politics. Pure and simple. One would like to imagine a world in which medical research was de-politicized, a world in which scientists did not have their agendas set by politicians pandering to their home constituency. The first step toward de-politicized medical research is to phase out federal funding entirely and to create tax incentives that favor and encourage medical research through independent, non-governmental institutions. Medical research will only become de-politicized when it is funded by charitable organizations and compassionate individuals and politicians like Senator Helms are bypassed entirely. =================== The Net: The Movie It seems that cyberspace is the hip place to make a movie these days. There is Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, the not yet released Strange Days, and The Net. So last weekend I trouped off to the local mid-night movie house to watch The Net. I figured that if nothing else, it had Sandra Bullock in it. As it turns out, Sandra Bullock is just about the only thing in the movie worthwhile. She's currently enjoying her 15 minutes of fame as the sexiest woman in American pop culture, and deservedly so. It's been too long since the girl-next-door-whose-femininity-shines-through-despite-no -attempts-to-emphasize-it brand of sexy has been fashionable and I for one am glad to see its return. But I still think Daisy Fuentes is the highest embodiment of that style, but I like Sandra Bullock also. But I digress. The Net has a thoroughly unremarkable plot. Typical summer chase thriller. Some chase scenes in visually interesting places. A hint of sex, though not flagrant or gratuitous. Some good beat up on the bad guy shots complete with a fire extinguisher across the jaw scene. But there is nothing you haven't seen a jillion times before. Almost. There are a couple of redeeming things about this movie. First, it has Sandra Bullock in it and she does a good job playing a computer geek. She had all the mannerisms down pretty well. The crossed arms, not looking at people in the eye, the nervous, stuttering manner of speaking. Of course all the computer geeks I know are slovenly, pasty guys and Sandra Bullock is trim, good-looking and very female. Dennis Miller also has a small role as Sandra Bullock's obnoxious, self-centered, ex-lover/psyichiatrist (oh these complicated `90s). He does a good job at it, but then such a role comes naturally for Dennis Miller. But the other redeeming quality in this movie is that the techno-babble is amazingly accurate, for a movie. It appears that the screen writers paid a lot of attention to detail when dealing with the Net itself. They did have to invoke poetic license in a number of areas. For one thing, The Net even during the best of times under the best of circumstances is not nearly as fast as was prtrayed in the movie. Also, they showed a lot of things visually that weren't necessarily visualized. For example when a virus trashes your computer, the screen doesn't necessarily melt away into garbage. It is more likely to just go blank. But those are minor transgressions. From what I understand about how the Internet is set up and how it's underlying protocols, TCP/ip, work, the movie showed Sandra Bullock's sleuthing on the net pretty darn accurately. There's one scene where she's trying to access a site on the internet but trying to hide where she's dialing in from and it shows how she does that using the same technique that that East German spy ring was using to get into military computers a couple of years ago. Also there's a scene in which she's trying to track down someone else's location on the internet and it appeared she was doing all the steps a person would have to go through to really do this on the internet. Also the online chats seemed realistic, even down to the slang. (Many techno movies put _too_much_ slang into characters' conversations). I also liked the way the bad guys operated in this movie. The bad guys are the Praetorians and the are wreaking havoc all over the globe in order to get people to use a software security package that their front company sells. The security package, called GateKeeper supposedly protects computers on the Internet from unauthorized intrusions, but it secretly has a way to let the Praetorians into the computer. This giving the bad guys access to hundreds of Very Important Computers all over the world. But they have to get people to install the GateKeeper software in the first place so they create panics in whihc, of course, the only computers unaffected are the ones guarded by the GateKeeper software. There were several other unrealistic bits in the movie, all of which can be explained away by poetic license. For example, the movie's premise is based on the notion that all these Very Important Computers, like the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve are on the Internet. But of course in real life they aren't, for the obvious security reasons. But the only glaring inaccuracy that I couldn't excuse was in the movie's climatic scene in which Sandra Bullock destroys all of the Praetorian's work by running a PC virus on a mainframe computer. This just doesn't work. `Mainframe' is a vague, over used, over generalized term that can mean just about anything. But usually the term mainframe refers to computers built according to IBM's system 360 or System 390 architecture. These beasts are the work horses of big business and are the best there is at efficiently slogging through all the junk that companies have to get done on a computer. But they do not, can not run PC software. So there was no way Sandra Bullock could have brought down the mainframe with her PC virus program. Still, I'd say it was worth seeing, though you might wait for it to come out at the $1 movies. ================================= A Sentence or Two About Paragraph I subscribe to quite a few small magazines and if one were to judge magazines strictly in terms of how much they cost per word, Paragraph magazine would easily be the worst magazine I get. But it's actually one of the best and one of my favorites. Paragraph magazine is, surprise, a magazine of paragraphs. That is to say, there are no essays, stories, poems, or pictures in this publications. The whole zine is a 4 inch square booklet consisting of 30 or 40 pages. On each page is a single paragraph written by a different author. They're sort of like short stories on steroids. I'm constantly amazed at how much whallop a good author can pack into a single paragraph. Single issues are $4.00, but you can get a three issue subscription for $10.00. The magazine comes out once per quarter I believe. Paragraph Magazine can be ordered by writing to editors Walker Rumble and Karen Donovan at 18 Beach Point Drive, East Providence, RI 02915. =============== My First Record I can't exactly remember explicitly the first record I ever bought. I can however remember the first record I ever owned. This was in 1977 or 1978. I was living with my family in Corpus Christi Texas at the time. I was in 7th grade, if I remember right. Now at the junior high school I went to that year, you were allowed to like one of three bands. AC/DC, KISS, or Aerosmith. Why? I don't know. That's just the way it was back then. It's like there was an unwritten law that had been passed someplace. But I had begun listening to the radio before I went to sleep at night, secretly. Why did I have to do it secretly? Were my parents monsters or something? No not at all. I'm sure they wouldn't have minded. So I don't know why I felt the need to keep it a secret. Anyway, I had this little pocket AM/FM radio, it was about the size of a large deck of card. And I would tune it into the local rock'n'roll radio station put it under my pillow. And I'd lay very quietly and listen to the songs. I had to be very still be cause if moved my head too much, it would turn the tuning dial on the radio and lose the station. One of the big deals in Corpus Christi is that they have a Naval Air Station there, a big one. And as I understand it, it is used to do a lot of the Navy's pilot training. All I know is that almost every night, there was a steady stream of planes flying over the area. It seemed like they were flying right over our house. And if I held my head just right, I could see out the window in my bedroom and watch the planes fly across the sky while I listened to the radio. Imagine the perfect music to go with that scenario. Late night, dark, dreamy, flying music. One night I heard it. It was the Steve Miller Band. The song was "Fly Like An Eagle" off the album by the same name. I don't know if the album had just come out or if it was just the first time I ever heard it. But at the time I thought it was the coolest song I had ever heard in my life. So somehow I got it. It was probably a birthday present, but I can't remember. I do remember playing it for the first time and discovering that the whole album is like some sort of cosmic trip on a spaceship and the various songs are like new worlds being discovered on the way. Of course I carefully concealed this musical aberration of mine from my friends since it wasn't one of the approved listening choices in our junior high. But I still own that album and every now and then I haul it out and play it. And yes, I still think it's one of the coolest albums I've ever heard. ================================================================== Stuck In Traffic is a bi-monthly e-zine edited by, and mostly written by Calvin Stacy Powers. Copyrights of individual articles are held by their respective authors. All unsigned work is authored by Calvin Stacy Powers, who holds all copyrights. Permission is granted to redistribute Stuck In Traffic provided that it is redistributed in its entirety (including this copyright notice), and that no fee is charged. For commercial redistribution rights, or for permission to reprint/redistribute individual articles contact Calvin Stacy Powers at powers@rdu007.pdial.interpath.net. If you would like to receive Stuck In Traffic free by e-mail subscription send e-mail to the address listed above.