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March 28, 2006
sean's happy place
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Sean Penn revealed to the New Yorker that when he's really angry he likes to abuse an Ann Coulter doll, and that he's put some cigarette burns in some "funny places" on the doll.
Now if Sean were a teenager, this would be a disturbing story. Would you want your teen hanging out with kids who did stuff like that for kicks? On the other hand, teenagers do dumb things sometimes. They don't always think things through before they pull a stunt.
But there is something grotesque about this kind of childish confession from a grown man. Without any discernable trace of shame he confides to the public that when he's emotionally frustrated, he takes it out on a toy, a proxy for a woman.
If that isn't impotence defined, I don't know what is.
Posted by joel at 12:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 19, 2006
paris burns while villepin fiddles with labor laws
France doesn't want to compete in the global economy...no wait they do...well, they sorta do.
Astonishing fact: up til now, French businesses were not allowed to lay off any employee without a Danged Good Reason™. This is a fitting tribute to the nation which gave the world some of the greatest philosophers during the Age of Reason. But now a Villepin-backed law would allow French business owners to layoff the youngest workers, during the first two years of their employ.
This is excellent news if you're a young French person. Generally the small business owners haven't been willing to hire the youngsters, even if they desperately need the help, because if they do they're stuck with them. Forever. Now business owners can give a young person a chance with less risk of being saddled permanently with lackluster employee. Hooray for yutes! Hooray for partial deregulation! *
So who's doing all the protesting? Is it France's older workers who are suddenly rendered less competative? Are the old farts lighting police cars and storefronts on fire because they are less attractive hires than the firable young set? If I were a middle-aged French worker I'd be T-O'd. Imagine a new business starts in France (an hitherto almost unthinkable proposition). Who will this new business prefer to hire? A bunch of old curmudgeons that they'll be stuck with? Or will they prefer to staff a constantly cycling crop of the young and the layoffable? If you were an employer, would you want a workforce that could be taylored to match the fortunes of the company?
But no, wait, it's not the curmudgeons doing the rioting. It's the youths --the very ones who stand to gain an unfair advantage from all this hiring/firing-- who are the arsonists. Go figure, if you can. Meanwhile, some young laborors may get arrested or injured. Hopefully that will mean their employers can replace them with somebody who isn't bent on destroying company property.
* Partial deregulation is usually just as evil as the thing in its fully regulated state. This is no exception.
Posted by joel at 10:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
gag-oogle
The following is a complaint I sent to Google regarding their decision to completely purge thepeoplescube.com from their search results. If you'd like to also voice your complaint, go here.
Dear Google,I was seeking specific information about a satire website called thepeoplescube.com. Why have you purged it from your search results?
In light of recent decisions you've made, I find myself unnerved at the thought that you may have removed this site from your indexes for ideological reasons. China was able to get you to be their enforcer in China, but why be the enforcer here in the States?
Granted, until you become a department of the United States government, you are not bound by those sections of the Constitution which assure American citizens that their right to free speech will not be curtailed. But I am saddened at the thought that in the case of this political satire website you would deviate from your customary practice of not making value judgements about the content of the websites you crawl.
Other companies can put together a good search engine. It may not be worlds better than Google, but it could be just about as good. The only reason you have continued to dominate the web search business is that overwhelming numbers of people trust you to provide fair and comprehensive search results without garish, flashy banner ads.
In your decision to suppress the voices of dissenters, both in China and at thepeoplescube.com, you have begun to undermine that trust, the cornerstone of your continuing success. Before these two incidents I would never have considered purposefully switching to another web search site. I, like many Americans, am disturbed by the oppression of the Chinese people by their government. But there's generally very little I can do about it. And like many Americans, I don't like to see my fellow citizens' opinions suppressed, whatever those opinions may be. But there's generally little I can do about that.
Well, Google, I think you've just given me something to do.
I hearby announce my intention to cease using Google as my search engine of choice. Furthermore, I am placing the following robots.txt in the http file root of chezjoel.com:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
Posted by joel at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 12, 2006
for the birds
As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. --Matthew 13:4
The single direst weakness of the human race is a short attention span. For all the encounters I've had with God, one would think they would stick in the mind from sheer saturation. But it seldom works that way. I find it is very difficult to hang on to the inspiration gathered from Sunday's sermons until Sunday night, let alone Monday morning. Here is my attempt to cultivate, water and protect some of the seed of the Word of God I heard today.
This morning Chris Bunch of The Jar spoke about the importance of grieving and its role in healing. And I realized that in some things that had happened in my life, I wasn't grieving, but was instead still trying to work them out. And I realized that in other areas I had grieved, and that I was starting to heal.
When I was divorced, when I lost my health, when I lost my job and got into debt, my life tilted sidways (from my perspective). I see now that I've had secret plans to fix all those things. I was unwilling to live the life I woke up to every day. I wanted to tell my friends, my family and everyone I met, "this isn't me, this isn't who I am. This is not my life. Stay tuned, folks, because I'm going fix this very soon." But the false hope of a great comeback will make the heart sick. Tragically, ironically, the constant focus on the comeback leads me to neglect the very things that might lead me out to a better place. And while I schemed my comeback, the years began to slip by.
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Chris Bunch spoke about the invalid who lay by the pool of Bethsaida for 38 years, waiting for his chance to get in the water first. Jesus asked him, "Do you want to get well?" What a crazy question. But it is the right question. I can imagine what would be going through my head if it were me that day lying by the pool. "Do I want to get well? What I want is to have my f***ing life back!" Do you doubt the invalid felt something like this? I don't; his answer wasn't "Yes I want to be healed." Instead he recounts how he'd been done wrong, passed over, neglected like so much human compost for so many years.
Was he healed before Christ told him to get up, or was it as he attempted to get up? John doesn't say. But however Christ healed him, and whenever it happened, the only thing He said to the invalid was essentially this: "Get up, gather up your stuff, and move on."
We don't get it in writing (not even from the Gospels) that life after tragedy will be as good as it was before. The words of Paul don't sit well with me at the worst of times; he told the Romans, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose." [Romans 8:28] It is in my nature to look back instead of forward. "I don't want this present situation to 'work together' for some vague, cakey future good, I want the old good back." But today Chris has me thinking that what I'd really like to do is to gather up my stuff and walk the road on which I find myself.
Posted by joel at 01:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack