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In my other journal, I've been writing about getting my aviation medical back, the death of my very good friend, and my daughter's struggles with anorexia.

My other blog has recent posts about:

• RSS news
  
• My ex-wife's continuing exposing of my daughter to her abusive boyfriend
  
• My friend Maddy's cancer
  
• A list of things that I feel uneasy about as a nominal liberal. (If I was still living in Toronto, I'd guess you'd call me a Rosedale liberal like Bob Rae).
  

And a bunch of other stuff.

When I started journalling, it was an experiment to see if I liked it or not. I do, so now I've installed Movable Type on my home machine and I'm going to start blogging there instead.

I belong to a couple of mailing lists for pilots. One of my favourites unfortunately gets extremely political at times. A lot of pilots are extremely right wing, as you'd expect in a hobby as expensive as flying. You might have gathered that I'm *not* extremely right wing. This has lead to a bunch of blow-ups, to the point where I actually quit the list for several months. But I came back, resolving to avoid political discussions. I also took the precaution of using procmail to filter out any posts by one particular person whose hatred for my politics lead to him attacking, mischaracterizing and outright lying about anything I said, even non political statements. (By the way, Dan, if you're reading this, I'm still waiting for your apology for all the personal attacks because I said that the administration had not proven a connection between the September 11th attacks and Iraq - it appears that recently even George W Bush has had to admit that this is the case)

Anyway, a month or so ago, one of the nicer guys on the list had his plane partner and best friend die in a plane crash in their shared plane. Randy wasn't in the plane, but the loss of his friend hit him pretty hard. One of the bigger idiots on the line started mouthing off about what a terrible and reckless pilot his friend must have been to do an instrument approach in such conditions, and it was all his fault. Never mind the fact that the NTSB hadn't even published a preliminary report, never mind a little thing called tact, he just went on and on with his attacks. Randy left the list because he didn't want to be reading this stuff while he was still burying his friend and dealing with the grief. Most people were pretty mad at Greg for being such a tactless jerk.

A few weeks later, Randy came back. Somebody made some joking remark about how nothing much had changed, but that Greg had learned his lesson. Evidently Greg treated that as a personal attack, and immediately started talking about what a terrible person Randy's partner had been for killing his passengers like that. I told him to shut the fuck up. He emailed me another justification for his actions off the list. I wrote him back telling him that he's a tactless jerk, and why doesn't he just shut up? A few days later, he emailed me and said "So, do we have to do this on the list?".

It took a few back and forths before I figured out what he was getting at. It appears that he didn't get my response, and so he was "calling me out". Yes, evidently if you insult this bozo, he has to strap on his six shooter and spurs, and walk down the main street yelling for me to come out and face him like a man. And if you don't come out and face him, he'll make sure the whole community knows that you're a yellow bellied coward.

I haven't seen Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine", but I understand that his take on the gun problem in the US is due to this cowboy mentality. After watching Greg in action, I can believe it.

Fortunately, I'm strong enough to eventually realize that an argument is not worth engaging in, because neither side is going to learn anything, so it's time to just let it go. Let the other guy think he's scored his points, but don't read his final emails because they'll just made you mad. Who cares if he's being a jerk, annoying or outright lying? Anybody worth caring about will spot the flaws in his arguments without you having to point them all out.
 

Things that are making me angry right this second:

• The conspiracy and complicity between the fashion industry, the beauty industry and anything else oriented towards youth that makes gorgeous young girls think that they're too fat or ugly and have to buy all their products to be beautiful, oh, and if along the way they cause a few thousand or hundred thousand of those girls to have eating disorders or ulcers, that's just too bad. My youngest daughter, Alyssa, is *almost* one of them, but she seems to have realized herself that something is not right and is doing something about it.
  
• George Fucking Bush. And his whole cadre of venal pigfuckers who think they can use the Constitution as toilet paper, trample our rights and dismantle everything good about the US government and do anything they want if it will make their cronies richer, secure in the knowledge that people will continue to swallow their phoney excuses, even if the excuse changes from day to day. I was reading a Tom Tomorrow book with all this cartoons from the George Fucking Bush the First era, and I realize nothing has changed, except I don't think the First thought he was doing God's work.
  
• Spammers and virus writers who have reduced the utility to email, a tool that could be so useful if it wasn't for them. Right now I'd guess that 75% of my home bandwith is taken up by downloading 100 copies an hour of SWEN.
  
• The fucking morons who click on binaries in email, don't update their virus definitions, never run Windows Update, and who buy from spammers. Actually, I hate them more than spammers and virus writers, because without them the spammers and virus writers would go away.
  
• MicroSoft. 'Nuff said.
  

Things I'm extremely happy about:

• That I found a wonderful wife the second time around. Someone who works at making the marriage work, and doesn't just up and leave when it doesn't end up like a romance novel.
  
• That this wonderful woman and I actually got to spend some time together last weekend. I wish we could have more time like that.
  
• That I'm in a good job, doing the stuff I like doing in an environment I enjoy, making tons of money.
  
• That (sometimes) I've got a pilots license, a priviledge that very few people have and which is such a beautiful and spiritual experience.
  
• That for the last week or so the pain in my knees and hips has been at a bearable level.
  
• That while I can't run, cross country ski, mountain bike, orienteer, backpack, or canoe any more, I have a lot of happy memories of those experiences. Like David Wilcox says, "Can't keep it in a camera, not a trophy on a shelf, not a tale to tell your children, not a way to prove yourself".