X-Mom

This is my mother, Alecia Ragan. While undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer at an advanced research facility in Dallas, Texas, she was exposed to COSMIC RAYS and developed SUPER-POWERS!

It's the truth.

Mom had thyroid cancer when I was a wee lad, and beat it, or so everyone thought. A couple of years ago it was discovered the cancer had survived. She underwent treatment with radioactive iodine at a hospital in Dallas, during which time she was sequestered in a radiation ward and we were not allowed to visit her. They had to dispose of her urine as both a biological and a radiological hazard. The treatment, though unpleasant, was successful and the cancer was beaten. A side-effect, however, was that Mom developed a hypersensitive olfactory ability--SUPER SMELL! She'd always had a pretty good sniffer, but now it's nearly supernatural.

Like all super-powers, Mom's super-sniffer has been both blessing and curse. On the one hand, she loves to cook and her new hypernose has enhanced her appreciation for the fragrant aromas involved; on the other, she couldn't sleep on her fancy expensive Tempurpedic mattress for several months after purchase because of the VOCs it outgassed; most people can't even detect this smell after a week. I certainly couldn't. Likewise, the smell of potpourri or artificial air freshener is so strong that it sickens her, and she cannot stay indoors with it. This has caused more than one embarassment at a party.

Still, in spite of the hardships fostered by her newfound ability, Mom continues to use her powers for good. Perhaps next Mother's Day I'll get her a costume.

Minimalist Accent Lamp

The outlet is wired to a wall-switch, as is common in apartments and condominia. The "lamp" consists entirely of the outlet-to-socket converter from the hardware store for $1. The bulb is a low-power compact flourescent that generates lots of light but very little heat. The bottom plug can be used normally.

Cel Has One L, Dammit

The 1990s saw the coining of the phrase "cellular telephone" and its inevitable contraction "cel." We all know this word: "What's your cel number?" "Call me on my cel!" "My cel's ringing; hold on."

Some perverts, however, seem to think this contracted word, when written out, should be spelled with two Ls, as "cell," having the same spelling as the word used quite broadly to indicate closed systems with distinct boundaries in biology, electricity, architecture, entomology, and aeronautics, among others. "Cell" returns 12 significant meanings at dictionary.com, whereas "cel" returns only 1, which is the noun referring to a transparent piece of celluloid used in the graphic arts, especially animation. If only for the sake of lightening the load on "cell," it makes sense to adopt "cel" to contract "cellular telephone."

But there are other reasons. "Cell" is not a contraction of any kind of longer word when used in its pre-wireless sense. When referring to the unit of biological structure or the room for containing a prisoner, we do not imply that the term we choose is aural shorthand for a longer, multisyllabic, more difficult phrase, as we do with hold-on-my-cel-is-ringing. And the natural place to contract "cellular" is at the syllable, between the Ls, as we would when breaking the word across lines on a page. Some might argue that since "cellular" is derived from "cell" we should contract "cellular" as "cell," but that misses some subtle points of etymology. "Cellular" may be derived from "cell," but when we contract "cellular telephone" we're not making the logically reverse adjective-to-noun derivation--we're just shortening a cumbersome phrase.

What's more, "cell" already has an established meaning in the field of wireless communications, viz. the geographical area covered by an individual antenna in a "cellular network."

Finally, there's the argument from Occam's razor: "cel" uses fewer letters and thus less ink and less space on the page or screen. The extra L is "done in vain," and while force of habit and concerns regarding clarity might excuse (if not justify) its presence in the traditional uses of "cell," if we're going to coin new uses for the sound we might as well spare the extra letter and emphasize both the novelty and contractive origins of the word with "cel."

The Role of Isolation in Penology Under Social Contract Theory

Crudely, from the contractarian point of view, the criminal is one who has violated his obligations under the implied "contract" into which citizens enter by virtue of their participation in society. Turnabout being fair play, the obligations of society toward the criminal are likewise nullified by his violation. Now comes the humanitarian crisis: What are we to do with one whom we are no longer obliged to treat as a citizen? History provides scores of apalling answers, but I propose that which is simultaneously most effective and most humane (and most rational, from the contractarian viewpoint), which is simply imposed exclusion from society in general. Note that I do not say "polite society" or "the society of the governed" or "civilized society;" by "society in general" I intend not any particular society but society itself. I mean to say, i.e., that the proper punishment for crime is total isolation from the rest of humanity for a period of time suitable to the severity of the crime: No family, no friends, no guards, no lawyers, no other inmates. No visits, no conversations, no telephone calls, no letters, no e-mails. The cruelty of such treatment is not to be underestimated, and its value over the present penal system, which does not so much exclude the prisoner from society as introduce him to a new one, should be obvious. As a society, prisoners can adapt to the challenge of prison; all that's required for the individual is that he or she learn to play by a new set of rules. Witness here the gang phenomenon. As individuals, however, isolated prisoners are simply shunned. Their only hope for belonging is a return to proper society, and the only means to that end is reconciliation with its rules. Maintaining an environment of monkish isolation for every prisoner of course increases expense, but this could be recovered by releasing consensual criminals (i.e. those convicted of consensual crimes). Prisoners who truly do not understand what civilization requires of them are rare indeed; unwillingness, rather than ignorance, is the rule, and it should be the function of punishment to provide incentive for assimilation by promoting the need to belong.

The Literature of Spam

The more I consider the huge volumes of spam that saturate the intertubes every day, and the ongoing battle between spammers and spam-fighters which drives the former to produce better algorithms for writing "realistic" human prose and the latter to produce better algorithms for identifying it, the more I believe we are approaching a literal manifestation of the old thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand-typewriters concept. The difference is that spam-monkeys aren't just punching random keys--they're using sophisticated heuristics to write properly-constructed sentences and paragraphs that are at least grammatically meaningful. One of these days, simply by the law of probability, one of them really is going to produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, or something equally profound. The irony is that no one may ever read it because some super-advanced spam-filter somewhere will recognize it as spam an delete it. Hell, it may already have happened.

Can it be very long before we start receiving meaningful e-mails right out of the ether? Could spam be the basis of a whole new species of poetry or literature? A kind of oracle? The voice of the global brain? Are the snippets of prose and poems tacked onto the ends of those penny-stock scams and viagra ads the infantile babbling of a developing consciousness? It would be an irony worthy of Phillip Dick if it turned out to be advertising that ultimately drove our machines to learn to think and speak for themselves

Best Spam Ever

"Viagra Soft Tabs will give you the wings of the eagle."

My Starrior

I was digging through my toy chest the other day, looking for a spare TV remote, and I chanced upon a number of toys preserved from my childhood and, until that moment, forgotten. It was quite the trip down memory lane.

When I was around ten I loved Starriors, which were a line of plastic robot toys produced by Tomy, which, in retrospect, were remarkably prescient of Lego's Bionicle. The franchise featured a somewhat-before-its-time storyline about a post-apocalyptic Earth in which two "races" of machines--"Destructors" and "Protectors"--vie for control of the planet. According to legend, both races were created by Man and left behind when he forsook the Earth's surface, the Protectors to salvage, reconstruct, and protect the natural environment, and the Destructors to eliminate nasty mutants and aliens and other out-of-control beasties. In Man's absence, the Destructors have taken over, enslaving the protectors and trying to blot out the memory of Man so they can rule without obligations. The Protectors keep the faith and do what they can to bring about the rebirth of Man, who is said to be concealed in hibernation in an ancient battle station. Most of the Starrior toys featured a tiny silver humanoid "pilot" figure apparently "riding" in the head which, in the story, was known as a "control chip." These contained the essence of each Starrior--his or her robosoul, if you will. Supposedly the chips were shaped by Man in his image so that the Starriors would never forget their obligations to their Creator. Although the mini-comics that came with the toys were somewhat ambivalent on this point, if the control chips were scale replicas of human beings then the Starriors themselves were giant mecha by our standards.

In proper collect-them-all spirit, the packaging inserts listed all the available toys in the franchise, and I owned every one that was sold in the US, including the super-cool Armored Battle Station playset, for which I worked odd jobs to earn the necessary $20. The toys were not all released at once, with at least two "generations" appearing months apart and two particular toys, I recall vividly, never coming to market at all. These two were humanoid-type Starriors (known as "Wastors") whose names were Flashfist and Bolar. Flashfist was a Protector and Bolar was a Destructor. They were listed and pictured in the packaging materials but never sold, a fact which frustrated me to no end. I even wrote a letter to Tomy asking when they would be released. I got some sort of canned response, as I recall.

One of the many cool things about the toys, in my opinion, was that the bits were interchangable. One could swap heads and arms and torsos and legs back and forth among the Wastors, and some of the other parts from the non-humanoid varieties. In truth there were few aesthetically satisfying combinations, however, as the colors from different toys tended to clash garishly and thus cause the hybrids to look exactly like what they were--bits and pieces of other toys stuck together. I experimented with lots of permutations before I discovered the red-and-black guy pictured below. I know I gave him a name, but I can't now remember what it was. I do remember that I loved him intensely, and that I obsessed over him in a way that probably wasn't healthy. I carried him around with me everywhere and would lose track of time staring at him from every angle, admiring the way all the bits fit together and complimented each other and considering myself pretty clever for having dreamed him up. He has the legs of Slaughter Steelgrave (the Destructor leader), the torso of Slice (a 2nd-gen Wastor with wind-up arm-weapon), and the arms and head of Saw-tooth (a 1st-gen Wastor with wind-up chest-weapon).



I remember quite clearly, when I was 11 or 12 years old, swearing to myself that when I grew old I would not put aside my toys and would continue to play with Starriors. They brought me so much happiness that I could not then bear the thought that I might ever part with them. In the end, of course, I did put them aside. They were dumped into a plastic barrel that lived in the attic of my parents' house until I went off to college, and subsequently donated to charity when they moved out of that house. Only my little custom guy survived, and as an adult that seems right to me. Now, as a grown-up, I understand that the magic I experienced with these toys was not in the toys at all--it was in my head. And that's why it's right that the only one still with me is the one I made.