S.KRAUSE

Reticent Ramblings

Way back when ...: meaning, several years ago, when Clinton was president (you know, when the country was outraged he would lie about fellatio ... in contrast to spring, 2003, when no one seems to care when Emperor George “Please put me out of my misery because I’m So Fucking Stupid” Bush Jr. and John “I lost to a dead man” Ashcroft lie day-in and day-out about our so-called War on Terrorism, but I digress) I put together a page I titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. Since then I’ve bought the movie on DVD, and many people/groups on that list are no longer relevant (the Kelly Family, anyone?); therefore, I’ve decided to retire that page. I never got around to keeping it up-to-date anyway. However, rather than let it disappear completely, I am posting its contents to this page. Therefore, let the following be considered as what I considered what was right and what was wrong with American so-called “culture” (popular, political, and otherwise) in the late 1990s.

The Good:

Organizations or People who—in my opinion—are making (have made) a positive contribution, or are simply cool for one reason or another

The Bad:

Oganizations or People who, for one reason or another, exert (have exerted) a negative influence upon our world.

The Ugly:

Any combination of the following: screw-ups, morons, fools, clueless, spreaders of bad taste.

—This list is neither authoratative nor exhaustive.—

The Good

• Star Trek (all series, all movies) (update April 13, 2003—I am ambivalent about Enterprise)
• Star Wars: Yes, I did like episode one.
• The Lord of the Rings (film by Peter Jackson, the BBC radio version, the Minds Eye radio version, and those pesky books)
• The Sierra Club
• The World Wildlife Fund
• The ACLU
• Amnesty International
• Planned Parenthood
• The Madison, WI chapter of NOW
• NPR (National Public Radio)
• PBS (Public Broadcasting Service)
• The TAA (Madison Teaching Assistants’ Union)
• Ralph Nader and NetAction
• The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• NASA
• Linus Torvalds
• Linux: The Choice of a GNU generation
• Redhat: they give back to the community
• Debian: all free, all the time
• Steve Wozniak
• The Onion: America’s finest news source
• Peter S. Beagle, David Brin, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Joel Rosenberg, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks, Robert A. Heinlein, Spider Robinson, Sheri Tepper, and Tad Williams (some are thought-provoking, others are simply good story-tellers)
• Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke (all are late 19th and early 20th century German writers/thinkers, and all worth reading)
• Rick Steves is such a dork, but I love to travel, and his videos/shows, while at times painful to watch, are quite fun.

The Bad

• Paramount: they really support their fan-base ... NOT
• The Harry Fox Agency, Inc.
• The SPA (Software Publishers Association)
• The BSA (Business Software Alliance)
• WIPO (The World Intellectual Property Organization—a bunch of corporate stooges. Read about the type of legislation and treaties they’re involved with ... it’s scary)
• The RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America)
• The MPAA (Motion Picture Assocation of America)
• The Smiley Licencing Corporation Ltd (they actually have the smiley face trade-marked; talk about grotesque)
• IPIX (Interactive Pictures Corporation)
• The NSA (National Security Agency)
• The NRA (National Rifle Association—gun freaks. Add Charleton Heston to the “Bad” list, too)
• Nike
• Microsoft
• Bill Gates
• Steve Ballmer
• Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush (both of them)
• Intel (not as evil as they used to be)
• AOL (mega-spamming, privacy-infringing, poor-service, over-priced piece of shit; but they make a good web-server)
• The Republican Party
• Most, but not all, Republicans
• Ticketmaster
• The Christian Coalition
• The Cult ... I mean ... Church of Scientology (By association: L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, etc.)
• Amway
• Larry Craig (Idaho’s evil representative in the U.S. Senate—Mike Crapo isn’t quite as bad)
• Helen Chenoweth (used to be one of Idaho’s two members in the U.S. House of Representatives: of questionable judgment and intelligence)
• Mike Simpson and “Butch” Otter (Idaho’s current Representatives)
• Dirk Kempthorne (Idaho’s jerk of a governor; good example of a sleezy politician)
• The KKK and the like
• JIF (their choice to sue Air)
• Barney
• Carl Jung
• Sonny Bono
• NATO
• Bill Clinton: Trousergate was a farce—I could forgive it; I was ambivalent about Iraq; now I’d like to send the bastard to Serbia to explain to the people there why he’s such a fuck-up.
• Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav President
• Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and other psychotic, genocidal maniacs
• The government of Quebec

The Ugly

• Boy bands, teen music groups, etc. (you know who you are)
• Hammer, Vanilla Ice, New Kids on the Block, and other bad memories
• The Kelly Family
• The remaining Republicans who weren’t included above
• Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft and partial-owner of Ticketmaster—both extremely evil—but he is also involved with more benign activities, and he left MS a long time ago)
• Apple Computer: I love the new laptops ... but they seem to love fucking-up.
• IBM and OS/2
• AMD
• Novell: the company that literally defines incompetence
• Dan Quayle: evil, but too ludicrous to be anything but part of the the ugly
• Heaven’s Gate
• Jerry Springer
• Rush Limbaugh
• William Shatner: any explantion needed? (I still like TOS, but have you heard his interpretation of Mr. Tambourine Man? Have you seen him in Incubus?)
• Objectivism and Ayn Rand (too ludicrous to be ’Bad’)
• The Libertarian Party (often scary, they’re not—yet—influential enough to be put in the “Bad” category)
• Al Gore: the fuck-up couldn’t even win his own state

—April 13, 2003

Sweet dreams are made of these: Old things, kept in files, folders, under couches, in boxes in closets, at the back of cupboards, behind tools and other junk in garages—it almost sounds like what little boys are made of. Every so often the rebel in me does not take to the street, but instead takes the pack-rat in me to task and goes about the task of clearing out old computer files. Today, a day when I should be doing other things, is exactly such a day for the rebel to wield his scythe.

A year ago I created a slender volume of my prose, poetry, and translations as a birthday gift for a friend; the LaTeX files I used for that project are stilling hanging around on my hard drive. Or rather: they were. The only thing I am not trashing is the style file I created to take care of the specific modications to the standard LaTex book format that I needed:

% Remove numbering from sections
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2}

\renewcommand{\subsection}{\@startsection
 {subsection}%
 {2}%
 {0mm}%
 {\baselineskip}%
 {-\fontdimen2\font
  plus -\fontdimen3\font
  minus -\fontdimen4\font}%
 {\normalfont\normalsize\scshape}}%

\newfloat{Illustration}{hbt}{ill}
\newcommand{\longpage}{\enlargethispage{\baselineskip}}
\newcommand{\shortpage}{\enlargethispage{-\baselineskip}}

That particular project won’t be repeated, and I have both the mastercopy (print) and two extra completed print versions of the “book.” At this point I still need to go through several directories of old academic papers and convert the papers to a more text-friendly mode (that is, many of them are saved as *.doc files from way back when); the day ASCII text can no longer be read is the day millions or billions of citizens cry out in terror because their computers are useless. That day may come, but when it does, the ability (or inability) to read my old texts will be of minor concern. As stated elsewhere on this site, I first started moving things to HTML in the mid-late 90s; a more generalized markup language would be a better choice, except HTML is sufficient for most of my needs, and it can be converted (with little effort) to other text-formats. For professional quality output I prefer LaTeX, output to PostScript or PDF.

In addition I have various old archived emails and the like; some I have kept around because they have a single piece of information I want to remember; of course, I should make note of that piece of information, and then delete the rest of the text. I, however, am not so sensible a person. However, I will post one such text here—then I can delete the local copy.

I am also sharing this message with you, dear reader, because it could very well prove useful to your own research (if you are interested in German-language literature from eastern Europe).

I have a note in another text file that I should read Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “By the Waters of Babylon”—I must have picked up that piece of information at /. or K5 some time ago. I still haven’t read it.

—April 13, 2003