The Euro Debt Crisis - Explained

It’s one of those moments in my life when people around me ask the same question over and over again. This time, it’s, “What’s wrong with the euro?” Since there are only so many hours I can spend explaining my version of the story, here is an article about it, and I hope this will answer some questions.

What Was Before the Euro?

I grew up in Europe, a child of a mixed marriage between an Italian and a German. They were not just citizens of their respective countries: my father and mother came from families that were deeply embedded in their cultures. When my parents fell in love, there was strong resistance to the marriage outside the culture. I can imagine the surprise that everyone felt when the marriage actually worked perfectly well for over twenty-five years, until my mother passed away.

Did Jesus Bless a Gay Couple?

This is a post in a series expanding themes encountered in the novel, In the Mission

There were many passages in the Gospels that I didn’t understand, as a child. I would read them with my mother, she would explain them, and they still didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I decided that I’d just have to wait to understand them, just like when the adults talked about sexy things. There was going to be a time when I’d understand all these things that were adult-only.

Mall of America Security - a Witness Account

Several news outlets (for instance, PBS here) have reported that Mall of America has taken suspicion a little too far and has created terrorism reports on visitors performing nothing but routine visiting. Some of these visitors have allegedly ended up on counterterrorism lists. Here is my first-hand account, sent to friends a few days after a bizarre incident occurred to me. It’s a first-hand account, unmodified (down to the very lazy all-lowercase spelling):

Work Has Started

Fresh from the success of In the Mission, I decided to start working on the novel’s successor. There were so many loose ends in the first installment, it almost felt like the first Matrix movie – the story and the plot made sense on their own, but you just wanted to know what happened after that.

It’s funny how every reader seems to pick up on a different “loose end:” There is the story of the Archbishop who proposes an exchange because he thinks the kidnappers are really after him – one reader wanted to know what happened with that before any other comment. Another reader was wondering why the storms happened three days ahead of the lady’s death, and how she would have known to cause them, or them to need to be caused. My copy editor’s last comment was that she wanted to know who gave Paul the riddles.

The Two Numbers We Need

I have spoken with many friends about super-taxing the super-rich (according to the Democrats, that’s anyone that makes more than $250,000 a year after deductions). I have heard many different opinions as to why that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In the end, I decided I need more information to make a decision; in particular, I need two numbers.

The first number is an easy one to get: What percentage of the wealth of the super-rich is invested outside this country?

Why is Duck Diving so Hard?

I am not the fastest learner when it comes to surfing. I have been slogging it up for the past 8 months, inching forward, looking admiringly at the divinities of surfdom that treat a mass of water like I would a snow-covered slope. But no, things have to be figured out piecemeal, and while every time I go I feel a little better, I feel a lot like my aunt: recovering from a stroke, she gained her mobility day by day, but while the differences were very noticeable every time I visited, she was frustrated because it was too slow.

Blocked IP Addresses

This is an ongoing post, in which I record the IP addresses I had to ban on this server because of serious abuse/spam. I am posting this mostly so that I have a backup in case I reboot the server – but I sense that more people will find this list useful.

The following is the output of iptables -L -n on this server. Updates as required. Each IP address in this list has submitted more than 1000 requests for comments in RSGallery within a single day. The IP addresses and the servers behind them may be perfectly innocent, but in each case, the ban resulted in a sudden drop of comments. Also note that the comment feature has been disabled on this blog.

Stingray Sting

[Image hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons]

So, last year, in my continuing quest not to be San Diego’s Worst Surfer, I took one step too far. In particular, the step led me onto a stingray, a lovely little creature that (understandably) is not too fond of being stepped on. Unfortunately, it decides to make its point by stinging (hence the name) and injecting a venom into your flesh.

It all happened very quickly, yet felt like a slow motion movie. I stepped into one of those sand cones that form in agitated waters. My foot moved into the center of the funnel, and there it felt something squishy, and then something that felt a lot like a bite. After a short period, another thing that felt like a bite. Then I fell backwards into the water and stumbled back to shore.

New Digs

What do you know? I will have to move again. Sick of living near UCSD (mostly because students don’t typically make for good neighbors), I am moving with all the belongings to Pacific Beach, the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of San Diego right South of tony and zany La Jolla.

Why Pacific Beach? I hadn’t set my mind and was open to any neighborhood close to the ocean, and Pacific Beach just had the best combination of places for me. It wasn’t impossibly expensive, and a townhouse there can be pretty sizeable and yet “affordable” (as Southern California goes).

The Most Overpriced Gadget (tMOG): Denon Ultra Premium Link Cable

Ah, what a pleasure! If I feel down one day because the weather is bad or because my novel didn’t sell as well as I thought, I just go to the nearest electronics store and laugh my behind off looking at the phony prices for accessories there. I mean, seriously, you expect me to pay $40 for the case to a phone that barely cost $100? That’s ludicrous!

Well, Slashdot had an article about HDMI cables and how even retailers are now starting to crack the scam barrier there. You must know that HDMI cables are digital cables and that quality is largely immaterial – as soon as you get a picture, you get a picture. There are some minor differences for very long cables, and some cables aren’t able to transfer a high-def picture, but they are cables: they should cost significantly less than $10. Anything you spend above that is like the $40 you pay for a faux-leather cell phone case: gravy for the manufacturer.