Curse of the Day:
• May you find a rodent in your canned goods.

The movement from camera to computer couldn't be easier.  I just plug the wire in from the USB port on my computer to the slot on the side of the camera, and without even installing anything on my system, WinXP pops up a folder showing the shots on the camera in thumbnail form.  I can choose to download them, and even have windows erase them from the camera as it does, which is quicker than doing them one at a time on the camera itself.  Once they are on the computer, I just drag them into Photoshop and do some cropping and resizing, and that's that.   The camera takes pics in an amazingly high resolution, 1760x1024 or something like that, so I have to crop and reduce in size like 70% each, and they are still pretty large.

I took about two dozen shots of my apartment, some of the rats and snakes, decorations, etc, and I'll be posting a few of those tomorrow, and then probably some each day for a while, until the thrill of the new camera wears off, or I exhaust the possible photos in my apartment.

I suspect the latter will arrive first.

This is a wall decoration in my apartment.  It's a reproduction of gravestone carving from Marblehead, Massachusetts.  The carving was chosen by Henry Christian Geyer for his deceased wife, Susanna Jayne, 22.  The card on the back of the cast doesn't say why he chose it, but it does have other interesting information.

The wire across the right side of it is my stereo FM antenna that I wasn't clever enough to move before snapping away.

This is by far the classiest thing on any of my walls, so don't get your hopes up for anything other than crappy posters and pages torn from magazines, for the most part.  Everything decent I own was a gift from someone or other, usually my parents.  I've lived the last 8 years in one crappy apartment or another, never one with any decorations I'd have chosen, or any furniture other than the functional but mismatched junk I own.  So there's never seemed much point in decorating.  You can't polish a turd.

The wall behind the carving pictured above is the cheapest, 70's reck-room-looking, orangish wood paneling you can imagine, so I mostly try to hide it with lots of pictures.  I wanted it gone when I moved in, but the apartment wouldn't allow it, and I certainly wasn't going to pay for it myself.  I just stare at the monitor all the time anyway.  With good reason. 

One more, just because I've got about 20 and can't resist.

This is the youngest, smallest, and probably cutest of my current pet rats.  She's about 2 months, and is cinnamon in coloration, with a typically white splotchy belly. Her eyes are dark purple, the red is from the camera flash.  She's been deposited in the cupboard for a moment while I open up a new can of corn for she and her comrades, and she's eager to get back on my shoulder, as she doesn't quite have the hang of walking on slippery wood yet.

I know, it's not exactly a winner on RateMyKitten, but it's a rodent, what do you want?  I'll try to get some better pics of them in the days to come, ideally in the daytime, when the flash won't be distorting colors quite so eagerly.

Here's some news.

• This is weird, and also stupid.  A hotel wouldn't let some guy in without shoes, so he went out and tied pork chops to his feet, and they let him in then.  He had won the cuts of meat in a raffle or something earlier.  The dumb part is that the greasy trail he left as he staggered around wasn't cleaned up, and some other guy slipped and fell, managing to break his arm badly.  The broken arm guy sued the hotel and won $34,817 in damages.  This happened in Australia, perhaps needless to say.

• Photo of a 15th century fresco in San Petronio basilica in Bologna, central Italy.  The fresco depicts numerous scenes of terror and slaughter, images from hell, including one that is supposed to be Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.  There's no way you'd know that by looking though, I mean that you'd know one was Mohammed.  Just another naked guy being gnawed upon in the art.  I love that type of painting, the whole Hieronymus Bosch demonic torment, in the archaic style of art.  Well, it's not an archaic style, it's 600 years old, that's how they drew then, but I like it.

In Islam, any depictions of Mohammad or Allah are forbidden, and you can't write about either of them in any way other than utter reverence.  I'm sure there are a lot of other taboos I'm not aware of.  So nothing like Jesus Christ Superstar, and even dreck like Chick's cartoons would probably be worth a death sentence (hard to argue with that one, actually).  That's what Salman Rushdie got in trouble for years ago, by writing a novel with Mohammed in a fictional setting, and behaving like a real person (as best I recall, I never read it).

So needless to say, a painting of the Jesus Christ of Islam, being devoured by demons, isn't going over real well with Muslims, 500 years old or not, and there have been terrorist threats, in this day and age of radical Muslim insurgency.

orporate welfare is not a real hot issue in the US, other than among various lefty columnists and cartoonists.  For some reason it's a huge national debate whether a poor woman gets $400 a month vs. $500 a month, to take care of her 3 bastard children, but when some US industry is bilking the government (I.E. our tax dollars) for billions, it's barely even a business story.  You'll hear now and then about some rich farmer or celebrity who owns a farm who is getting kick backs in the form of farm subsidies to not grown some crop they had no intention of growing in the first place, (as part of price controls, I.E. limiting the quantity of a product to push up prices, so that the farmers who do grow it can sell it for a better profit) but that's about it.

Molly Ivins has a good column about it today, in regards to the Insurance Industry, and their perpetual "tort reform" laws.  Tort reform is the code name for "law prohibiting a consumer from taking appropriate legal action against a company that has screwed him/her horribly, possibly even ruining his/her life".

What this boils down to is you get the wrong ball removed in cancer by an incompetent doctor, or a machine in a factory malfunctions and rips off your arm, and when you complain you get lip service, or a small payment.  Your legal recourse is to sue them, and try to get a financial return for your suffering. Juries tend to be sympathetic to gross corporate chicanery, and reward people who were wronged.  Companies of course hate this, and try to limit their liability by buying off legislators to pass laws limiting the consumer's ability to go after a company that has wronged them.

That sort of thing is also the only way most companies will make changes for the better (from the consumer's point of view).  They're quite happy with employees dying in their factories, as long as it doesn't cost them a lot of money.  When it begins to, they make changes for safety, since that's cheaper than lawsuits.  Of course in the US we have various government agencies that look into this sort of thing as well, though Republicans, who are even more owned by business than Democrats, are always trying to gut OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and others.  Of course the industries always present this sort of thing as frivolous lawsuits, some woman who broke a nail suing for $50,000,000, and they claim it will drive up costs for the consumer.

There are certainly frivolous lawsuits, from people who are as unethical as most corporations, but since it costs money and time to file a lawsuit, and a jury has to be won over to award anything, it's not as if there isn't a checks and balances system in place already.  Also, we look at someone else's case as frivolous, but when your sister's ob/gyn screws up her pap smear and she has to get a radical hysterectomy at 26, or your mom breaks her ankle on a slippery floor in Denny's that didn't have a warning sign, (both hypothetical examples) they become a lot less frivolous, in your opinion.

The Molly Ivins column of the 25th, (the link works for now, but they only keep the last 3 columns, so it will become unavailable after a week or so.) is about insurance, and the real reasons their profits are down and they want more tort reform.

What they want this time is to restrict the rights of injured patients to sue malpracticing doctors. In April, the Center for Justice and Democracy released the report, "Shakedown: How the Insurance Industry Exploits a Nation in Times of Crisis." This follows the center's equally useful 1999 study "Premium Deceit -- the Failure of 'Tort Reform' to cut Insurance Prices." Limiting the great American right to sue the bastards didn't work the last time, didn't work the time before and didn't work the time before that to reduce premiums -- so of course the insurance industry wants us to do it again.

Here's the deal: The reason malpractice rates are skyrocketing is on account of the insurance industry's own pricing errors and lost investment income. In a useful summary of the situation, The Wall Street Journal reported this week: "While malpractice litigation has a big effect on premiums, insurers' pricing and accounting practices have played an equally important role. Following a cycle that recurs in many parts of the business, a price war that began in the early 1990s led insurers to sell malpractice coverage to ob-gyns at rates that proved inadequate to cover claims.

"Some of these carriers had rushed into malpractice coverage because an accounting practice widely used in the industry made the area seem more profitable in the early '90s than it really was. A decade of short-sighted price-slashing led to industry losses of nearly $3 billion last year."

This is about how it goes with every industry, you can just change the names and dates.

The industry's last "crisis" was post 9-11, you may recall, when it announced the economy would collapse without a federal insurance bailout by Dec. 31 of last year. They demanded a multibillion dollar "backstop," basically capping the liability of insurers in case of further terrorist attacks. The economy did not crumble and in fact there has been a capital flow to the industry, which is recovering nicely on higher premiums. Nevertheless, the Senate, with its usual impeccable timing -- and the usual campaign contributions -- approved a bailout bill last week. The House version is, of course, worse -- the government picks up 90 percent of the cost for at least a year -- and now the bills go to conference.

Keep this in mind next time you wonder why we have budget deficits, and why politicians and corporations are so opposed to any sort of caps on campaign contributions.  Corporations are deeply-opposed to campaign finance reform, since after all, they can now turn a few million in donations into billions in tax breaks, government contracts, and just a general lack of oversight, making it easier for them to screw the consumer.  That would be us.