The CRAP Solution.

In April 2010, the Library of Congress announced that it will be archiving the entire history of Twitter. Many believed that James H. Billington, the current Librarian of Congress was high. Really, really high. Like at a Jethro Tull concert high.

But the Library of Congress never had any intention of storing all those inane tweets, especially any about Justin Beebaboody, or whatever the hell his name is.

The reason the Library wants the tweets is for National Security.

This news story says, "The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress many times over..." to spies.

Spies. Back in the pre-innernets days, spies had to travel to steal American secrets. They had to learn English and get jobs in secure locations and learn about baseball. One mistake about Sandy Koufax's ERA could blow your cover and put you back on the first submarine to Siberia.

But today everything is done online and twelve-year-old kids are stealing our nation's secrets. This is where Twitter and the CRAP Solution fits in.

The CRAP Solution or the Cyber-Redundancy Automated Protocol Solution is to disguise America's useful data by surrounding it with crap.

When the Library of Congress acquires all the tweets, they won't go into storage awaiting future researchers; no, they will be used as the batter in our CRAP dessert. Then the various governmental agencies with real secrets will hide that data within.

Cool idea, huh. You can thank Justin Barbaby.

Gran Torino as a snapshot of America

If you haven't seen the movie, Gran Torino, I won't spoil the ending for you here, but don't read too much further because it gets spoiled in the last paragraph.

So, I don't know what you thought, but I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending. I think it's because whenever I saw this movie in the past, like in the 1970's with Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, it had a similar violent conclusion, but flipped 180 degrees.

Now that it's the new millennium, you can see how Gran Torino could represent America's place in the world. At one point, Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is given a reading by a Hmong holy man and he is told that no one likes him or respects him and that he's done things in the past that he regrets. If Clint didn't represent America in the year 2009 in that scene, I don't know what else he was supposed to be.

So I started to think about that lone gunman myth of the American Western, like in High Noon or Shane or even The Shootist, and how the bad guys need to be punished. But these days, we know that violence doesn't always solve the world's problems. It might again in the near future, but not today. So how would Gran Torino have ended if it were made twenty or thirty years ago?

If Gran Torino had been made in 1975, it would have ended with a gunfight, with Walt standing "mano-a-mano" and shooting from the hip to kill all the bad guys.

If Gran Torino had been made in 1985, it would have ended with a firefight, with the titular vehicle fitted with a hood mounted .50 caliber machine gun or towing a small cannon or Howitzer to blow the criminal's hide-out to splinters.

If Gran Torino had been made in 1995, Walt would have called in some help from an ex-Army chopper pilot who would have swooped in with an Apache attack helicopter, chain-gun, and Hellfire rockets to vaporize the building.

But in the post-Iraq-Bush world, America is supposed to play nice and let the proper authorities dispense justice. We can act tough, but that's it.

So this leads to the real end of Gran Torino when we hear a police officer say, "This time we have witnesses" and we watch as the young thugs get hauled off to jail.

Which leads me to speculate on a follow-up film, Gran Torino 2: Toad's Revenge. Because when the thugs get their lawyers to have them released on bail, they return to the neighborhood to terrorize the witnesses into forgetting what they saw. And Thao mans-up enough to take them on. Using tools from Walt's garage, he gets "medieval on their asses." And maybe Sue gets some hot kung fu babes to help. Sounds good, huh? Yeah, I'm smelling sequel. Someone get Michael Bay on the phone.

Race and the Presidency in America.

Sorry. I am going to piss you off when you read this. Sorry.
I don't mean to detract from Barack Obama's accomplishment of rising from relative obscurity to become President; hell, I even voted for him, and I really like McCain.

I was going to keep this to myself because I'd had two days without reading or hearing about the Historic Presidential election we just had in the U. S. A., but then I saw one more story that used the term historic, so I have to say this, regardless of how you might feel. So here it goes:

Why is this historic? Is it that he's black? Why should the color of his skin matter? It doesn't seem to matter to Obama, who referred to himself as a "mutt."

And then I realized that if it doesn't matter to him, then it must matter to us. When we say this election made history, we mean we made history.

WE made history by being the first generation enlightened enough to elect a black person President. Sure, the Greatest Generation fought Nazis and defeated Hitler, but we voted for a black man. And the "founding fathers" fought for independence from a foreign power, but we voted for a black man. The North fought The South and Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, but we clicked on a website to donate some money to a political campaign and brought real change.

So now I understand everything. When I voted for Obama, I didn't give him my vote because I thought he was the marginally better candidate, I did it to prove that I'm a better person than every American who has ever lived before me.

So when I read about this Historic Presidency, I know now that it was I, who made history.

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But if you want to focus on race, don't forget that Shirley Chisolm ran back in 1972. If she'd had the Internet, who knows what might have happened. (But she did have her own trading card.)

Why the.effing.librarian is an undecided voter.

The.effing.librarian has not yet chosen either of the two major party candidates for President of the United States of America mainly because I continue to hear answers like these:

First sample debate question: What is your plan for fixing America's economy and rebuilding the middle class?

Candidate #1: "America's next administration should have an effective prudent pragmatic expedient decisive thoughtful feasible sound constructive sensible bipartisan plan for change."

Candidate #2: "I remember when going to the movies cost a nickel."

Second sample debate question: As President, what would be your plan for dealing with runaway energy prices particularly with winter approaching?

Candidate #1: "America's next administration should have an effective prudent pragmatic expedient decisive thoughtful feasible sound constructive sensible bipartisan plan for change."

Candidate #2: "I like to wear a wool cardigan and sip hot cocoa."


As soon as I hear something different, I will choose a side.