WHO FIRED THE HOUSEKEEPER?

Man, the dust in this place really built up over the past (nearly) three years. That's the last time we hire legal citizens to do the cleaning. From now on it's all undocumented workers and sketchy homeless people.

Hiya. We've decided to kickstart this old house after a lengthy 'net coma because some events in our recent past (as documented here in the Act Your Old Age blog) suggest we need to get back to living, and fast. The spiffy AYOA condo is meant more for writing; CHATTER will resume its normal programming of this, that and the other thing — a sort of Seinfeld hodge-podge of everything about nothing, which it's been since its start back in 1991 (yes, this blog was born as a daily column in something called a newspaper, an arcane and nearly extinct form of media that was printed on actual paper by tree-hugging liberal types who didn't see the delicious hypocrisy of killing trees to make their bones).

Since that time in the black-and-white days, CHATTER has gone on to dress up and be part of a magazine, and then went all downscale to guest-host an alt-monthly tabloid called THE PULP, before segueing onto the net in 2006 and becoming a go-to place for stalkers and gawkers to try to discern what the hell the Chatterboy was trying to say. We have a hint for you: It's like Gertrude Stein said — there is no there, there. Anyone seeking deeper meaning from a blog called CHATTER needs to locate a life. This place is the equivalent of Springfield-style cashew chicken: it won't kill you, but if you're looking for fine dining, might we suggest Flame?

There's your background. Thanks for stopping by. We'll be renovating the blogroll and updating the curtains in the next few days, so if you have any suggestions, drop us a comment. We'll do our level best to post the bizarre shit that's always been our sweet tooth. Be safe.

AFTER THE DELUGE

Even the shouting is over, and for this we give thanks. The 527s focused a concentrated beatdown on Barack Obama in the final weekend before the election, but it all seemed forced, a rote throat ripping that did little more than nick the skin.

A couple weeks ago we said Obama would probably get 51 percent of the popular vote, and 338 electoral votes. Nothing has happened between now and then to change the perception.

There is always the chance that the expected Obama win will turn out to be the electoral version of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- all blow, no show. But "slim" would be a generous word to describe John McCain's chances of pulling off an upset. It could happen. It probably won't.

McCain supporters are especially fond of bringing up Dewey defeats Truman. Pollsters can indeed be wrong -- especially as they were in '48, when they stopped taking the public pulse a month before the election. No such luck this cycle.

Rational Republicans acted resigned on Monday (the irrational ones are fierce believers and can never be tugged from their convictions). A few voiced the expected fallback position -- economic doom if Obama is elected and taxes go up. It all sounded very familiar to late 1992 and early 1993, when Bill Clinton was a new Democratic president pushing for higher taxes for well-to-do Americans.

Back in those black-and-white days, not one Republican voted for Clinton's deficit-reduction bill. Not one. They said taxing the upper class would send this country into a depression. They were wrong then, a fact to consider when they try to tell us that the sky will soon fall.

LIKE 1968, ONLY BETTER

Forty years ago. The Election of Attrition. A political year of blood and mayhem, with the pitiful survivors of November crawling into an arena frequented only months earlier by the stars of their sport. Lyndon Johnson took a powder. So did Robert Kennedy, literally. Nelson Rockefeller was figuratively killed by his party for being too liberal, too Happy.

Democrats were left to front Hubert Humphrey, the happy-faced, fast-talking vice president. Republicans backed Richard Nixon, a paranoid scowler who'd already blown one bid for the White House. Everyone else got George Wallace, a racist still unaware of the bullet and wheelchair in his future.

We flash forward to four decades later and the circle is closed. The best candidates -- at least on the Democratic bench -- are back to flipping impeachment burgers (Dennis Kucinich) and minding the Senate store (Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton). The Republicans overlooked an optimist and a Mormon.

Who would have bet six months ago that John McCain might beat Barack Obama? Bill Clinton:

"[H]e has some redeeming qualities for a Republican: he doesn't believe in toture, he supported campaign finance reform and he doesn't think global warming is a myth ... So it is not gonna be all that easy to beat him."

The Obama faithful sniffed and barked at the Big Dog for not snapping a stiff-armed salute at their Leader, but the Dog knows the truth: This is politics, not the debate club. Want to implement the ideas, the ideals? Win. Or at least act like you want to win, and try to keep your nutty fan club (relatives, close associates, pastors, pill-popping spouses) in the basement until the polls close in the general election.

Obama should be 10, maybe 12 points ahead of McCain at this point, getting ready to vet the cabinet. Bill Clinton was beating Bob Dole like Balboa beats beef slabs in August 1996. Because Clinton knew it's all about the lowest common denominator. Save the oration for the inauguration.

We said last January that McCain was off-his-rocker crazy -- a clinical term, not tossed around lightly -- and thus unqualified to be President of the United States. He's still all that, but turns out he's fox crazy, too, cunning and willing to use the WASP knife in battle. Hence the priggish Sarah Palin, a meaty bone to the GOP base that can't stand McCain (McPain is one of the nicer nicknames the far right uses).

McCain knows he's using his base to win. He knows he's using Palin, even if he believes she's unqualified. He's already on record belittling wanna-bes:

"I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training. I wasn't a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn't a governor for a short period of time."

Democrats will try to use McCain's words against him, but it won't work. They're too angry at Republican hypocrisy to think straight. They're baffled by the bullshit, belittling Palin at their peril. Wily Willie Brown, the best political animal ever to set foot in California, hailed the Palin pick as a brilliant political move:

"Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don't do well on defense."

Joe Biden has been defanged by the choice of Palin. That attack dog won't hunt. Obama is spending too much time talking about the Republicans' veep pick, not enough time keeping it simple. And raising money, given his flip-flop on public financing of his campaign. He's got to raise $100 million a month to meet his fundraising goals, and he's falling short. While Obama begs for bucks, McCain campaigns.

Democrats don't get it. John McCain wants to win. They want to whine.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH

Mayor Dan -- superb politician, even better friend -- tipped us to this one.

Modern Mechanix has a copy of a November 1968 story about life in 2008. A bit of the lede:

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated.

They got this part right:

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

But this prediction is woefully wrong:

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments —- on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Perhaps by 2048, if the balloon hasn't gone up by then.

SEEDS FOR THE APOCALYPSE

Longyearbyen, Norway. It's a village on the Svalbard archipelago, close to the Arctic Circle. Go there when the balloon goes up.

Seeds from more than 200,000 crops are on their way to an underground vault in Longyearbyen, where they will, in theory, be safe for post-doomsday stragglers to use as they rebuild.

According to last year's news release about the project:

Svalbard’s airport is the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are wrapped in total darkness.

The site was chosen, in part, because the ground is perpetually frozen, providing natural back-up refrigeration that would preserve the seeds should electricity fail. Yet, even here, project architects had to consider how to offset the potential impacts of climate change.

The design will accommodate even worst-case scenarios of global warming in two main ways. For one, the vault will be located high above any possible rise in sea level caused by global warming. The vault will be located some 130 meters (426 feet) above current sea level, ensuring that it will not be flooded.

Four months of darkness, sure, but also four months of the midnight sun, and this part of the Arctic Circle is enchanting.

SCIENTISTS UNLOCK LEVITATION SECRETS

Arise and read what AFP reports:

Physicists said they can create "incredible levitation effects" by manipulating so-called Casimir force, which normally causes objects to stick together by quantum force.

The phenomenon could be used to improve the performances of everyday devices ranging from car airbags to computer chips, say Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin from Saint Andrews University.

Casimir force -- discovered in 1948 and first measured in 1997 -- can be seen in a gecko's ability to stick to a surface with just one toe.

Now the British scientists say they can reverse the Casimir force to cause an object to repel rather than attract another in a vacuum.

"The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano world, in particular in some micro-electromechanical systems," said Leonhardt, writing in the August issue of New Journal of Physics.

No-fun scientists say we're still a long way from human levitation. Dammit.

NETFLIX DROPS PRICES

Locked in a fight with Blockbuster for online movie rentals, Netflix announced on Sunday a $1 drop in two subscription plans -- matching Blockbuster's fees and opening a vein on company revenue. The Associated Press reports:

Netflix will charge $16.99 per month for a plan that allows subscribers to keep up to three DVDs at a time with no limit on how frequently the discs can be mailed back in return for another movie. The price for a similar plan that lets customers keep one DVD at a time will fall to $8.99 per month.

Netflix earned $49 million last year but has already warned Wall Street that earnings and subscriptions are flattening. The new price cuts take effect Tuesday.

Blockbuster is in worse shape -- $49 million lost in the first quarter this year -- but its subscribers can order online and have the option to pick up or drop off DVDs at brick-and-mortar stores. No waiting for movies, a distinct disadvantage for Netflix.

CROWD-CONTROL TASER ON THE WAY

One thing wrong with the TASER is its inability to control more than one person at a time. We're in a multitasking world, kids; we need the ability to zap a crowd into herky-jerky land.

We are in luck. UPI reports:

A multi-shot TASER weapon will boost riot-control capabilities in the United States by controlling the streets through non-lethal means.

The 6-shot Shockwave is designed for military use and can launch multiple electric-shock prongs that will disable even the most determined protesters.

"The TASER Shockwave addresses the need for enhanced area denial and force protection at checkpoints where life-and-death decisions must be made instantaneously," CEO Rick Smith said Monday at the TASER Tactical Conference in Chicago.

Shockwave can launch in a 22-degree arc; it fires darts up to 25 feet. There's also a wireless version that can be fired from a special shotgun.

TASER stands for Tom A. Swift's Electric Rifle. No need for a fake gun, we said, blankly.

IT'S ALIVE!

And we made it. Humankind is on the brink of creating a new form of artificial life. The Telegraph reports:

In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists took the whole genetic makeup - or genome - of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species.

This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process.

The team that carried out the first “species transplant” says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory. ...

Since the 1970s, scientists have moved genes - instructions to make proteins - between different organisms.

But this marks the first time that the entire instruction set, consisting of more than a million “letters” of DNA, has been transplanted, transforming one species of bacterium into another.

Tinkering with what we don't know. We'll never learn.

TULSA TIME CAPSULE SET FOR RECOVERY

Fifty years ago this week, Tulsa bigshots buried a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere in the courthouse lawn. Reason? It was part of an elaborate time capsule, designed to show the weird future people of 2007 what life was like in that uncivilized era known as the Fifties.

Friday, they're digging up the car. In the glove box -- Dad used to call it a "cubbyhole" -- the curious should find a bottle of tranks, according to the Tulsa World. From the paper's June 15, 1957 edition:

The tranquilizer pills got into the act when the committee decided to make the auto typical by stocking the glove compartment with the contents of a woman's handbag.

The pills showed up along with 14 bobby pins, a compact, cigarettes and matches, two combs, an unpaid parking ticket, a tube of lipstick, a package of gum, a plastic rain hat, pocket facial tissues and $2.73 in bills and coins.

There's also a case of 3.2 beer in the Belvedere. Thanks, 1957.

BLUE SKY THE FUTURE

One of Springfield's new City Council members, Dan Chiles, is a thinker, willing to give voice to the audacious. Proof: The Harvard grad and local businessman is circulating a 10-page thumbsucker on policy, "and that includes issues large and small." Emphasis on the large.

He calls it a "partial list" of policy ideas that "certainly do not include every important priority in our town. But it's a start."

His first idea is called a "50-year flyover," a one-day conference bringing together people "from many occupations and backgrounds" to brainstorm the future. Writes Chiles:

"We can't possible make good decisions about the future of our town until we can visualize what Springfield and the surrounding community will be like in fifty years."

There are calls for a new fuels conference; an expansion of CrimeSeen into deeper crime prevention; new transportation strategies; and a city garden program.

We're also psyched by Chiles' call for a new city flag, one that's "bright and beautiful." Finally, a chance to convince the city to adopt the Superman look.

RFID CHIPS AHOY!

Who needs privacy when you can get a tracking tattoo? Computer Weekly has the story:

A US company has launched a chipless RFID (radio-frequency identification) Ink that can be used to track both animals and humans.

Visible or invisible Ink "Tattoos" can be applied to the skin and tracked by RFID readers positioned a few feet away.

The company, Somark, said it had successfully tested its Biocompatible Chipless RFID Ink product.

Most troubling is the fact that some people will think we need this.

ROBERT ANTON WILSON, 74

Last week he wrote on his blog that he had as little as two days to live, adding:

I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.

Thursday, the writer and philosopher died. RAW was a week shy of turning 75.

Thom earns the point. Remember, National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.

FOR CHRISTMAS 2007

Apple Computer is now Apple, Inc., and this may be the coolest piece of hardware, ever.

The iPhone's price point is steep ($500 or $600, depending on how big you want it, memorywise) but will come down as the edge stops bleeding and the device goes mainstream.

A phone, a music and vid player, a web browser. It's not the bundling that's important; the package is bound with a touchscreen version of Apple's OS X, so the interface looks like something you can actually use.

It will be summer before the thing is sold. If it works and doesn't break, it'll be the must-have gadget by year's end. Just look at it.

PREDICTIONS FOR 2007

Some hopes, wishes, fears and dreams for the new year:

•Kit Bond retires from the U.S. Senate.

•Matt Blunt decides against a second term as Missouri governor.

•Springfield Police Chief Lynn Rowe retires.

•The College Station project (the "Car Park and urban entertainment complex") is delayed.

•The Moxie keeps proving that "art" films have a place in Springfield.

•Downtown Springfield loses at least one significant retail outlet, but gains several others, including one national chain store.

•Branson seeks more convention business. So does Springfield. Hardball competition ensues. Some will reconsider the wisdom of the Springfield-Branson designation at the airport.

•Questions are raised about the source of defense funding for the Jordan Valley Innovation Center.

•The News-Leader starts publishing a Christian County edition, but also contemplates newsroom layoffs.

•Local talk-radio changes a host.

•A Springfield radio station finally figures it out and launches a jazz format.

•Talk radio for women? It'll happen in 2007 in Springfield.

•We haven't heard the last from Jerry Jacob.

Your turn.

BRAIN EXPLOSION

Last June, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) showed one of the downsides to thinking old (as opposed to being old, an entirely different experience) -- it's too hard to keep up with the technology. A few of our peers got stuck in the 8-Track Tar Pit. Others were waylaid by VHS. More can't get their heads around the whole iPod thing. Even more will never podcast and never wonder why they didn't.

Comfort over current. Known over unknown. Stevens showed how cold comfort can be when the lawmaker said this about the Internet:

"I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

This week, the talk-show host Larry King had his Stevens moment, when he confessed that he doesn't do the Internet, telling Roseanne Barr:

"I’ve never done it, never gone searching ... The wife loves it. I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?"

Our own Stevens moment has arrived. This map shows what the Internet looks like -- how packets of info travel around the world. Accompanying the map is this fact:

The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China's stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.

BLAM. Our head goes back and to the left, spilling our online life: The TRS-80 running AA batteries, uploading stories at 300 baud. Rubber cups over the phone's mouthpiece and earpiece when the acoustic modem chirped. Up to 1200, then 9600, 14.4, 56k. Broadband. Pics. Vid. Streaming vid.

Now it's all tubes and buttons and things. No trucks allowed.

FUTURE SHOCKS

We wonder:

•Now that Roy Blunt is a member of the minority party in Congress, will he bug out while he can? The soon-to-be ousted majority whip probably won't succeed in a leadership post with the minority GOP; he's not trusted by his own colleagues, and enough of them already think the current leaders (Blunt, Dennis Hastert) are the reason they've been relegated to the back benches.

So what can Blunt do? Lobbying seems a little farfetched right now. With the GOP in the minority, who needs Republican lobbyists anymore? It's more likely that Blunt will fade into the background, emerging only when the coast is clear and he can run for U.S. Senate.

He won't stay in Congress for long, however. That much is certain. Look for Blunt to make this his last term in the House. After taking a pass at challenging Blunt in the 2006 election, southwest Missouri Democrats may actually get a second bite at the 7th District apple. Their chances are improved if, as expected, Matt Blunt packs it in, decides not to run for another term as governor and makes a bid for Congress (after all, he already lives in Springfield). A Matt Blunt vs. moderate Democrat race for Congress would be competitive.

•If the social conservatives of the GOP don't screw it for him, Rudy Giuliani will be the next Republican candidate for president. This AOL poll shows the former NYC mayor running ahead of John McCain, Condoleezza Rice and dark horse Newt Gingrich for the 2008 GOP nomination.

If the social cons don't screw it. Big if there. Because:

•The war for the guts of the GOP is in full fire. Old-line Republicans (the small government/Low taxes kind) say their party lost Congress because it was too focused on pleasing the theocrats. Social cons, meanwhile, say the party lost power because it wasn't conservative enough on issues like abortion and gay rights (and stem cells, dammit, stem cells).

The social cons despise Giuliani and his pro-choice, gay-rights-loving ways. Ditto for the way they feel about McCain. If they have their way, Jeb Bush will be their standard-bearer. Or Mitt Romney. A Dem can only hope.

FINGERPRINTS FOR FOOD

The school district in Hope, Calif., wants to quit using paper and pen to figure out how many students eat lunch in the cafeteria. The Associated Press reports:

The Hope Elementary School District has notified parents that, beginning this month, students at Monte Vista, Vieja Valley and Hope elementary schools will press an index finger to a scanner before buying cafeteria food.

The scan will call up the student's name and student ID, teacher's name and how much the student owes, since some receive government assistance for food.

It is meant to speed up cafeteria lines. ...

Currently, the information is written on paper and transferred to computer so reports can be compiled and sent to the state and federal governments, which reimburse school districts for the subsidized lunches served.

If this came to your school district, would you let your kid participate?

WOBBLE ON THIS

The Daily Mail makes Thursday ever so much gloomier with this little ray of sunshine. Doomsayers, rejoice:

Scientists have found that on average mammal species enjoy only 2.5 million years of life before being wiped out because of the Earth's "wobble."

They say when the tilt and orbit reach key points it can spark dramatic global cooling - and the last time this happened was 2.6 million years ago.

This suggests we are overdue a wave of extinction.

However, before you panic, scientists say our planet has changed beyond all recognition in the last 3 million years.

The new research published in the journal Nature (must keep) however sheds new light on just why individual mammal species seem to come and go with mysterious regularity.

The study, conducted by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, involved looking at 22 million years of data on rodent species to see which ones appeared and died out at key points.

They then studied the pattern of the Earth's wobble, which is caused by two factors, our orbit around the sun and the tilt of the planet.

Both of these can be slightly altered by the gravitational pull of other planets, in the case of the tilt it can adjust by as much as two degrees, and the orbit can vary from a circle to an ellipse.

Lead researcher Dr Jan van Dam said when the tilt reaches a certain point and the orbit is almost a perfect circle it can trigger ice sheet expansion.

This could then lead to colder summers, changes in humidity and significant climate cooling.

He found a clear pattern between the Earth's wobble and mammal species dying out.

There were two distinct cycles of species turnover, one with peaks every 2. 5 million years and the other every million years.

Dr van Dam said the last peak was 2. 6 million years ago.

Van Dam him.

FRIDAY FREE RIDE

A bunch of bullets to take you into the weekend:

•Regarding our earlier post on George Brett's missing head: Said head has been located, according to the News-Leader, in a ditch near Camdenton. The news just makes its own jokes, doesn't it?

•We've been busy doing work for the Doug Harpool campaign. A 100-second video biography of the candidate can be found here at YouTube. A higher resolution version of the vid resides here.

•There's hope for the future. New Scientist reports that solar activity will srcew the GPS pooch in 2011:

A study reveals Global Positioning System receivers to be unexpectedly vulnerable to bursts of radio noise produced by solar flares, created by explosions in the Sun's atmosphere.

When solar activity peaks in 2011 and 2012, it could cause widespread disruption to aircraft navigation and emergency location systems that rely heavily on satellite navigation data.

Once it's disrupted, ditch the OnStar and head for the hills. They won't be able to track you.