Monday, 29 November 2004
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{Five
Years
Ago Today]
08:22
- Barbara took Malcolm to the vet this morning. Malcolm has a
cracked fang and it's become infected. So the vet is going to put
Malcolm under general anesthesia and remove the fang. Barbara will stop
by the house after work and pick me up. We'll pick up Malcolm at the
vet's place and I'll ride home in the back with him.
You can call me Baldrick,
because I have a very cunning plan.
Nowadays, almost anything is politically possible if one can make a
credible claim that it's "for the children". So, I have a modest
proposal to make, for the children.
A child born today in the US will be exposed to something like a
million television commercials while growing up. (The estimates vary,
but it's always a huge number.) I don't know anyone who believes this
is a good thing. We're exposing our children, who have not yet learned
to discriminate truth from lies, to a barrage of commercials that are
carefully crafted to modify their behavior, preferences, and indeed
their overall thought processes. A case could easily be made that
exposing children to this onslaught of commercial messages has unknown,
untested, but almost certainly undesirable effects. (Just ask any
parent...) We are allowing Madison Avenue to sculpt the unformed minds
of our youth.
So, it seems to me that it is reasonable to give parents the power to
control how much, if at all, their children are exposed to this barrage
of propaganda. It is within the mandate and the powers of the FCC to
solve the problem. All they need do is (a) require that for all
over-the-air, cable, and satellite programming all commercial breaks
begin and end with a unique, machine-identifiable signal to separate
commercial content from program content, (b) require that all
televisions and television recording devices sold in the US be capable
of detecting those signals and using them to automatically blank the
screen and mute the audio during commercials, and (c) forbid embedding
commercials, including products featured for a fee, in program content,
as well as such work-arounds as running crawlers during programs. In
other words, a complete firewall between content and advertising.
The advertisers, networks, television stations, and cable systems will
scream, of course. Let 'em. It's for the children.
And, speaking of barrages of commercial messages, the FTC is
considering gutting the Do Not Call list. They're accepting public
comments, so let
them know what you think about this proposal before it's too late.
I've already submitted my comments, saying that the DNC rules should be
tightened, not loosened, and that calls by or on behalf of politicians,
non-profits, and pollsters should also be required to honor the DNC
list.
12:38
- If you've ever wondered what my voice sounds like, now's your
chance to find out. I'm being interviewed from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
(EST) this evening on the Computer Outlook Radio Talk Show,
which broadcasts live from Las Vegas and is streamed on the Internet. I
have no idea how long or when during the show I'll be on. For all I
know, they'll interview me for five minutes. Or it could be the entire
hour. And of course I'm coming down with laryngitis as I write this...
[Top]
Tuesday, 30 November 2004
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{Five
Years
Ago Today]
09:35
- Doing the radio show was fun. I was on for the whole hour. If
you missed this one and want to hear me speak, you can tune in again on
22 December, when they've invited me back to do another show. Or I
suppose you could download last night's show, although I haven't
figured out how to download shows from their site. I think my ad
blocker is hiding the buttons I need.
I've mentioned before that I plan to donate several older systems to a
local non-profit, Senior
Services. Of course, I need to strip those machines down to bare
metal to remove our data from them. While Brian Bilbrey was visiting us
over Thanksgiving, he mentioned a GPL program called Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN),
which sounded ideal for wiping the hard drives in the older systems
before I donate them.
I downloaded an ISO image of DBAN yesterday and burned a CD. Therein
lies a story. I used one of the old CD-R blanks from the Spindle That
Will Not Die. Years ago, when I bought my very first CD writer, a Smart
& Friendly 4X unit, I also bought a spindle of 100 S&F 4X blank
CDs. Unbelievably, I still have some of them, even though I've gone
through who knows how many spindles of Taiyo-Yuden and other
high-quality CDs in the interim. I should have thrown out the S&F
CD-R discs years ago, but I paid more than $1 apiece for them. So,
ignoring the concept of a sunk cost, I decided I'd use them all up if
it killed me.
Burning the DBAN disc seemed like a good opportunity to use up one of
the old discs. The DBAN ISO image was only a couple of megabytes, so a
4X burn wouldn't take too long. I popped an S&F blank into the
Plextor PX-708A DVD burner, and told K3b to burn the CD. But I forgot
to change the burn speed, which was set to 40X, the fastest the PX-708A
supports. The Plextor started burning merrily away at 40X.
Now, understand, these old S&F CD-R discs are so bad that most
burners won't even write them reliably at 4X, let alone 40X. But the
Plextor happily wrote that 4X disc at 40X. No hits, no runs, no errors.
People sometimes ask me why I continue to recommend Plextor burners,
which sell at a significant premium, when excellent drives like the NEC
ND-3500A are available for half the price. Media compatibility is just
one of the reasons. Plextors just work, and they keep on working. I've
never had a Plextor drive fail in routine use, despite the fact that I
use the hell out of them. And the discs they burn are reliable. I've
never had a read problem with a disc burned in a Plextor drive that was
attributable to the Plextor.
Oh, and DBAN worked fine. I used it to wipe the hard drives on old theodore, our former NT4 Server
box. Before I donate that system to Senior Services, I need to install
the latest Xandros 3.0 beta on it to see if a problem that manifested
with an earlier beta is still present. Once I do that, I'll nuke the
drives again and install something reasonable on it before I donate it.
Probably Ubuntu Linux.
12:25
- Subscriber Dave Browning posted the following on the
messageboard:
Recently
I discovered an indispensable tool. It is the Ultimate Boot CD and includes
a lot of useful utilities. It has MemTest86 and every hard disk
manufacturer's diagnostic utilities among other things. Also it has
Darik's Boot and Nuke and three other disk wiping utilities. It
really is the Swiss Army Knife of Boot CDs.
As soon as I get a chance I am going to make three copies. One
for home, one for work and one to stick in the carrying case of my
laptop. It is simply that good.
Bob should recommend it in the next edition of PC Hardware in a
Nutshell.
I'm downloading the ISO now, and plan to add it to my toolkit. This is
one of those things that when you need it, you really need it. I
suggest you download the ISO, burn a copy, and stick it in your kit.
I've also added it to my daynotes document (which has nothing to do
with this page, but is simply a text document that I keep open in an
editor to jot down ideas). I will indeed include it in the next edition.
15:46
- I downloaded Ubuntu 4.1 "Warty" Linux with high expectations.
Alas, I was disappointed. Ubuntu is a perfectly competent Debian
distro, but those who have compared it favorably to Xandros have, not
to put too fine a point upon it, exaggerated. Ubuntu is comparable to
Xandros in the same way that a Trabant is comparable to a Rolls-Royce.
I suffered through the interminable text-mode installation process in
the hopes that the resulting system would be a good, free desktop
Linux. I suppose it is in some respects, but it's certainly crude
compared to Xandros.
I'm grabbing Xandros OCE via BitTorrent as I write this. That'll at
least give me something to install on the systems I'm donating to
Senior Services so they can verify the boxes are functional. They can't
legally run OCE, which is for personal use only, but at least they'll
see what a good desktop Linux looks like.
16:50
- I'm not sure what Ubuntu did to my system, but I don't much
like it. Before I installed Ubuntu, the system booted reliably from the
Plextor SCSI CD-ROM drive. Now that Ubuntu is installed, the system no
longer boots from CD-ROM.
I burned a copy of Xandros OCE, stuck it in the drive, and rebooted the
system. A few minutes later, I turned around and found the system
sitting at a Ubuntu login prompt. After mucking about a bit and doing
several reboots, I finally pulled the Xandros OCE CD, figuring there
was something wrong with it. I inserted the Darik's Boot and Nuke CD,
which I'd used earlier today on this system, and restarted the system.
It booted through into Ubuntu.
Okay, time to look at BIOS Setup, where I found the boot order still
set for SCSI followed by the first IDE hard drive. I tried several
combinations of boot sequence, finally disabling the hard drive
entirely. When I tried rebooting with just the CD-ROM drive enabled in
the boot sequence, I ended up at a BIOS prompt from the Intel Ethernet
adapter, which was trying to boot from the network.
Either Ubuntu killed my optical drive, or it just died coincidentally,
which I find hard to believe. At any rate, as things are now, the only
thing I can boot to is the Ubuntu installation on the hard drive. This
is very annoying.
[Top]
Wednesday, 1 December 2004
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{Five
Years Ago Today]
09:47
- I see that the school board in Dover, a small town in
south-central Pennsylvania, is the first to mandate teaching of
so-called Intelligent
Design, a thinly-disguised version of Creationism. Two of the
school board members were so strongly opposed to this decision that
they resigned, which unfortunately left the ignoranuses in charge.
As a scientist, I deplore such attempts to put pseudo-sciences like
Intelligent Design on an equal footing with real science. Intelligent
Design is no more worthy of consideration than astrology or numerology.
The nutcases who advocate ID claim it to be science, but no real
scientist considers ID to be anything more than a veiled attempt to
push the Creationist agenda. Like all pseudo-sciences, ID is
fundamentally incompatible with the Scientific Method, so by definition
anyone who supports ID is not a scientist.
As a libertarian, though, I think the religious whackos have a point.
It is, after all, their tax money that is being spent to expose their
children against their will to evolution, a scientific theory to which
they are rabidly opposed. Conversely, rational people want their
children to be taught science, and not exposed to pseudo-scientific
garbage like Intelligent Design. How can one school system satisfy both
groups? It can't.
It is a fundamental precept of libertarianism that when rights appear
to be in conflict, one is looking at the issue from the wrong
viewpoint. The problem here is not Creationism versus Evolution. The
problem is state-run schools.
Although I have no respect for them intellectually, I completely
support the right of fundamentalist Christian parents to educate their
children as they wish, including teaching Creationism and having school
prayer breaks every five minutes. Their anti-science curricula no doubt
advance ignorance and superstition and do not provide what I consider
to be
an education, but it is or should be their right to rear their children
as they wish. Conversely, I also support the right of rational people
to have their children educated rationally, and not exposed to the
superstitious garbage advocated by know-nothing fundamentalist
Christians.
One school cannot do both, so the obvious answer is to eliminate public
schools and allow diverse private schools to flower. I have already
proposed a simple solution. Each public school district must determine
how much it spends per year per student, including direct per-student
funding by local, state, and federal sources as well as the
infrastructure costs that are seldom included when per-student spending
is reported.
That per-student amount, adjusted each year, should be paid to any
school, public or private, that has students registered from the
district in question, whether or not the school is located within that
district. No private school should in any way be subject to any form of
control by any government entity. The government's sole involvement
should be to pay the per-student amount to any private school that
registers students from that district.
If my school district spends $8,000 per student annually and the
parents of ten students decide to send those students to a private
school I set up in my home, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools
loses $80,000 in funding, which goes straight into my pocket. No
strings, no meeting standards established by "educators" with their own
axes to grind, no mandatory curriculum, no minimum scores on
standardized tests required, nothing. If the parents are satisfied,
that should be all that matters.
The public schools would be subject to the same rules, and would
receive the same funding in the same way. They would have to compete
for students, of course, which would be a refreshing change. The
quality of education would improve by an order of magnitude overall,
and all parents would be able to choose the type of education they
considered most appropriate for their children.
Everyone wins. Except, of course, the teachers' unions, the NEA, and
the rest of the educational bureaucracy. And it's high time they
disappeared anyway.
11:35
- Here's a response I received from a professor who teaches a
hard science at a respected major university. Although this person
didn't request anonymity, I'm concealing his or her identity, just in
case.
>From the
article you link on your post this morning:
Its
Georgia counterpart, meanwhile, is fighting a suburban Atlanta
district’s decision to include a warning sticker in biology textbooks
that says evolution is “a theory, not a fact.”
The fact that
they would include such a sticker should tell you all you need to know
about how much of the scientific method is taught in schools - public
or private. I'd venture to guess that most of the students who
show up in my class don't know the scientific method. The good
students know a lot of facts, techniques, and can work a variety of
problems. But they don't know what it is that a scientist
does. These are the good students. The result is a populace
that thinks calling evolution a theory is a terrible criticism.
Ugh. I have no problem with a person of faith having and
expressing that faith. But it isn't science and attempts to prove
God using science insult both God and science, as far as I'm concerned.
I hope those
folks die of an antibiotic resistant infection so that they get an up
close demonstration of evolution.
Which is a pretty scary commentary on the students our public so-called
school systems are turning out.
[Top]
Thursday,
2 December 2004
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{Five
Years
Ago Today]
08:26
- Barbara turns twenty-thirty today, or, as I prefer to think of
it, 32(h). We'll go out to dinner. Tomorrow night, we'll go out to
dinner again, this time with her family.
We went out observing last night. Barbara and I are both working on the
Astronomical League Deep-Sky
Binocular list. While she was away on a trip with her parents
recently, I was able to get out and log several objects that she hadn't
logged, so last night was catch-up time for Barbara. She got the nine
objects that I'd gotten in her absence. We now have only 10 of the 60
remaining, one in Coma Berenices, three in Puppis, and six in
Monoceros.
Those constellations are all visible this time of year, but they're not
favorably placed until about 3:00 a.m. Because there are 24 hours in a
day and 12 months in a year, the sky changes at about two hours per
month. Stuff that's favorably placed at 3:00 a.m. on December 1st is
favorably placed at 1:00 a.m. on January 1st, and at 11:00 p.m. on
February 1st. So we'll just wait two or three months to bag those final
ten objects. In the interim, we'll get back to work on the Herschel
400 and several of the other lists we're working on.
Dr. Mark Huth responds:
-------- Original
Message --------
Subject: Hard
Science
Date: Wed, 1
Dec 2004 18:48:47 -0800
From: Mark
Huth
To: Robert
Bruce Thompson
Bob,
I'd like to
make a comment on the Professor's note about teaching students hard
science at a major university....I think it hogwash.
I taught what
one might consider medium hard science (physiology...hard science in my
book translates to physics) at two major universities over a more than
10 year period. Now, I didn't teach at the undergraduate level,
rather at the graduate and postgraduate level, thus I may not have been
as exposed to the "general" student body. That said, I'd suggest
that the current generation of scientists is at least as able as the
prior generation. I'd suggest that they are better educated in
science than I was and that I was better educated than the prior
generation. Further, they have, as a group, better analysis
skills than my group had and we had better skills than the previous
generation (not fact, but biased opinion...shared by a great number of
excellent scientists I've known.)
I've great
hope for American science based on the people. I'm less
optimistic about American science than I used to be however. That
is the result of continued government meddling with science and
government "cost cutting" in funding basic science research.
We are seeing
a turning away of the best and the brightest from science because of
the need to earn a living at science. Bright people don't want to
be paupers and don't want to feel that they have no chance to be funded
to do research. In my view, one of governments' primary
roles is to provide funding for vital research that isn't fundable by
anyone else. Our government keeps savaging scientific
budgets. (Note that I no longer have a personal ax to grind in
this discussion as I'm out of the government funding game
now. I do continue to do research for private
industry).
I'd agree
that there is a problem in public education in the US, but there are
stunning numbers of fantastic students available. If the system
were better, there might well be more students. Methinks the
professor is exaggerating to make a point.
Sorry for the
snarling...
http://public.xdi.org/=mark.m.huth
Well, I'm not really entitled to an opinion, because I've never taught.
It is my impression, though, that both of you make valid points.
Perhaps it does all come down to the difference between undergraduate
and graduate students. Our best and brightest will always succeed
regardless of the burdens put upon them by our current educational
system.
But I do side with my anonymous correspondent in believing that our
public schools are failing to educate students about science. I don't
doubt his/her assertion that most incoming students don't understand
what the scientific method means, for example. In 1971, the freshman
class of chemistry students of which I was a part could all have
defined the scientific method without exception.
But it's more than just a failing educational system. It's changes in
society as a whole. Recently, I had an interesting discussion with a
young woman who is a Ph.D. chemist. She's in her mid-thirties, and we
talked about the things we'd done when we were young. Both of us had
done things then that would get us arrested now, if not hauled off by
Homeland Security and stuck in Guantanamo. We talked about chemistry
sets, which then were real chemistry sets and now are a Bowdlerized
pale shadow of what a chemistry set should be. Geez, if I launched one
of the rockets now that I used to launch routinely then, the
authorities would probably call in an air strike.
I've said often that I fear for the future. I wonder where our next
generation of scientists and engineers will come from. When I was
young, technically-oriented kids *did* things. We built ham radio sets.
We ground mirrors and built our own telescopes. We blew things up,
launched serious rockets, cultured bacteria, tapped our girlfriends'
phones, had home darkrooms, tore down and rebuilt car engines, and
otherwise kept ourselves busy learning new things. Heck, if we'd had
access to fissionable materials, we'd probably have built our own nukes.
We were good at not getting caught, too, which is a valuable skill in
itself. I remember how pleased my mother was when I started my own
flower garden. Finally, she thought, I had gotten interested in
something harmless. Of course, she didn't realize that my little flower
garden contained only plants that were the source of deadly poisons...
Nowadays, kids don't actually *do* much of anything. They're too busy
playing Doom 3 or listening to their iPods. I really do wonder where
our next generation of scientists and engineers will come from.
10:05
- Anonymous responds:
Cool, I'm the
subject of your journal! I agree with Dr. Huth completely in the
respect that there are fantastic students available. If he's
never taught at the undergraduate level, he is missing something in
this conversation but, please note, I never intended my comments to be
anti-student. I have a group of 30 or so this semester and there
isn't a whiner in the bunch, they work very hard, are very interesting
to talk to, etc. My problem is with /their/ teachers (of which I
am one). After making my spontaneous post yesterday I asked the
next five students to show up at my office if they had been taught the
scientific method and, if so, when was the last time they'd had a
lecture on it. Of the five, four had specific memories of being
taught the scientific method but none had had it taught since grade
school. Perhaps that should be enough, but I fear we educators
forget fundamentals in lieu of dramatics. I'm now considering a
seminar course on the scientific method - for my own benefit as much as
theirs. Of course, I'll still just be reaching science students and the
mass of non-scientists will still think "theory" is an insult. If
only any of my half-baked hypotheses ever evolved to the level of
theory!
I will also
add that it sounds like Dr. Huth taught in a medical school; if so, he
taught self-motivated students who had already survived college and all
that entails. Plus he had maybe 15 or so contact hours per
semester (I'm again generalizing, sorry). I would submit that
teaching in a medical school isn't anything at all like teaching at an
undergraduate institution. If he taught in a graduate school, he
has a better idea, but is again teaching students who are (hopefully) a
long way from the freshmen and sophomores I teach. At least, I
find a great difference in teaching graduate students and undergrads.
However, his
comments generally are bang on. We (the US) have excellent
kids. There are loads of bright, interested, ambitious children
and young adults out there. I'm not sure our society is serving
them very well. I also agree with his comments on funding.
Far from funding otherwise unfundable ideas in the interest of pushing
back the frontiers, we focus on lots of me-too ideas and too much of
our publicly financed science turns into the foundations of startups
and goes to line the pockets of industry. The lack of interest
and funding of NSF relative to NIH is also troubling, I think.
Anyway, thanks for keeping my name out of it.
I doubt that one person in a hundred could explain the difference
between a hypothesis and a theory. Perhaps not one in a thousand.
More's the pity.
As far as keeping your name out of it, I realize that academic freedoms
would probably protect you, but I also realize that the hard science,
math, and engineering departments are the last bastion of hope in our
universities and that even they are increasingly under the gun from
politically correct administrators and faculty from non-rigorous
departments. Although you did not request anonymity, I didn't and won't
publish your name or your university affiliation if there's any
question in my mind about what you've written unless you tell me it's
okay to do so.
[Top]
Friday,
3 December 2004
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{Five
Years
Ago Today]
09:55
- Cool. I love getting mail from readers of foreign editions of
our books. Apparently, PC Hardware
in a Nutshell in Russian is Iron
of the Personal Computer: The Encyclopedia.
-------- Original
Message --------
Subject: With
the best regards from Russia!!!
Date: Fri, 03
Dec 2004 11:17:54 +0300
From: Соколов
Андрей
To: Robert
Bruce Thompson
Many thanks
to you for a spelling and the edition of the book " Iron of the
personal computer. The encyclopedia" The book really contains a lot of
helpful information!!! I am engaged in iron of 5 years, web-design,
programming in Borland Builder C ++, I have the maximum medical
formation
Russia, the
city of Tver
Barbara and I went out to dinner for her birthday last night. Tonight
we're going out to dinner for her birthday again, this time with her
parents and sister. After dinner last night, we headed home to change
into our warmies and then over to Paul and Mary's house to see what
their yard would be like for observing.
As it turns out, it'd probably be pretty good except that their
backyard adjoins a city park that has lighted tennis courts. Paul and I
wandered over to the courts, which were vacant, to see if we could turn
the lights off, but couldn't find any way to do so. There's a push
button that looks as though it should run a timer, but Paul says once
the lights are on they stay on. Oh, well.
We'd planned to do a short session, working on our Urban
Observing lists. We're at a stopping point on the Deep-Sky
Binocular list, with 50 of 60 objects logged, but the remaining 10
objects are in constellations that don't rise until the wee-small
hours. We'll get those in a couple months, when they're up at a more
reasonable hour. We're also working some other lists, including the Herschel
400 and the Caldwell,
but those require a trip to dark skies, and all we wanted to do last
night was quick session.
Right now, only astronomers care about light pollution, although I
suspect it'll become an issue among the general population eventually.
I'm old enough to remember something that few people experience
nowadays. Dark nights. In the mid-1960's, when I was a teenager in a
Pennsylvania town of about 35,000 population, it was actually dark at
night. I could walk out into the backyard, look up, and see the Milky
Way. Nowadays, only rural residents can do that.
Those of us who live in cities and towns can see only the
pinkish-yellow night sky that is created by millions of unnecessary
lights spewing their pollution skyward. We astronomers dislike all
external lighting, but what really drives us nuts is poorly designed
lighting that accomplishes nothing but adding to the light pollution.
For example, in the past, billboards were lit by fixtures along the
top, pointing downward. At some point, billboard companies decided it
would be easier and cheaper to maintain their billboards if they moved
the fixtures to the bottom, pointing upward. The result is that much of
the light is wasted, pouring directly into the night sky. The same is
true of many streetlights, which direct much of their output upward,
where it is useless. Something as simple as full-cutoff fixtures, which
direct the light downward and cut off light from the horizon upward
would do a lot to reduce light pollution. They're also less expensive
to run, because all of the illumination is directed downward, where
it's needed.
Most people are shocked to learn that we in the United States waste
literally tens of billions of dollars per year sending light into the
night sky, where it accomplishes nothing other than adding to the
general light pollution. Those few enlightened (arrrggghhh) cities that
have implemented light-pollution control measures such as installing
full-cutoff street lighting have found that it pays for itself quickly
in lower electricity costs. Full-cutoff streetlights also do the job
better, because they eliminate the glare that makes standard street
lighting not just inefficient but actually counterproductive.
Then there are the health issues. It may seem extreme to refer to
gratuitous lighting as pollution, but there is mounting evidence that
ubiquitous nighttime lighting isn't good for us. It's long been known
that light pollution has bad effects on various wildlife, but several
studies have established a correlation between light pollution and
human health issues, including sleep disorders and stress. I've read
only the summaries, not the studies themselves, so I don't know how
strong the correlation is, but it seems reasonable to explore this
matter further.
A couple million years of evolution has prepared us to live in an
environment of sunlit days and dark nights. Most of us no longer have
those dark nights, and I wonder just what the effect of that might be.
I've seriously considered installing dark blinds in our bedroom so that
we can sleep in pitch blackness. I may still do that.
[Top]
Saturday,
4 December 2004
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{Five
Years
Ago Today]
11:09
- Gerald and Stephanie Hardy, our new next-door neighbors, moved
in a couple of weeks ago. They're a nice young couple, or perhaps I
should say Stephanie is nice. We haven't seen much of Gerald. He
installs cabinetry and has been on the dead run since they moved in. He
leaves early in the morning and comes back late in the evening. I guess
this is his busy season.
They have two small children. Emma is two and a half. I know because
when I asked her how old she was, she held up two fingers and said "and
a half". Olivia is a year old and doesn't talk much, at least to me.
Stephanie is a stay-at-home mom, so I see her frequently when I have
the dogs out during the day. Stephanie is very friendly and outgoing,
so we frequently end up chatting.
This morning, Stephanie was out searching the yard for her car keys. I
mentioned that to Barbara when she returned from the gym, and she said,
"Yeah, that's a female trait." In defense of women, I don't think
that's fair. Although women indisputably lose their car keys much more
frequently than men do, I don't think it's a secondary sex
characteristic. I think it's a clothing issue. Men's clothing has
pockets. Lots of pockets. Women's clothing doesn't, for some reason
I've never been able to figure out.
Of course, in fairness, most men don't carry purses, although I used to
when I was in college. With my long hair, beard, and purse, a lot of
people mistook me for a liberal. Women think men don't carry purses
because we're afraid we'd appear effeminate. The truth is we don't
carry purses because we're afraid of them.
Just watch any man when his wife asks him to retrieve something from
her purse. He acts like there might be a rattlesnake, a tarantula, and
several scorpions lurking there. We have no idea what women carry in
their purses. It wouldn't surprise us to find a mass spectrometer or
the Philosopher's Stone in there.
And a lot of the stuff in there is truly mysterious. Although Barbara
is much better than most in that respect, I have in the past watched
women dump out their purses looking for something and wondered what
many of the items were.
I remember years ago watching a woman I was dating dump her purse. I
recognized her wallet, car keys, sunglass case, a Star PD compact .45
Auto pistol, a breath spray, and a tampon case. That was it. About the
twenty or so other items, I had no clue. She had several items that
looked like tiny carabiners. Are women prepared at all times for
impromptu rock climbing sessions? She also had something that looked
kind of like hemostats, but they
had a semi-circular structure on the end of each blade. What the hell
were those for? She had a little kit that I'd swear were a set of
lock picks. Do all women carry burglar tools? Female technology is a
mystery to every man I know.
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