For no particular reason, I provide here a link to the American Top 40 pop charts from the week I was born.

All told, there’s not a lot of quality there, especially #1, which straddles the line between hokey and oddly creepy pretty well (though I suspect there were at least a few jokes cracked along the way). Otherwise, it’s really not very good. Sure, you have Clapton there at #5, but really, for my money, you have to get all the way down to #24 before you encounter something with any real staying power, Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”.

Seriously, the mid-70s were not a very good time for popular music.

There’s really no meaning here, but something pointed me to the chart archive, so I now point to it as well. Never say I don’t pay things forward.

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* – somebody gets this, right? If not, here. I simply could not bring myself to quote lyrics to the song in question; as it’s really, really awful.

So, yesterday was the day that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax returns. Sure, this sort of thing isn’t a requirement, but it’s one of those things that you do as a candidate, because it’s an indication of trust and openness (“hey, I have nothing to hide!”) and because it gives voters a bit more context about you as a person – lifestyle is, to a large extent, commensurate with income; and it also gives a sense of what you value, via charitable contributions.

Of course, Romney, through his initial reluctance to take part in this rite of electoral passage, has made this a bigger deal than usual. And, you know, it might be, especially given the importance of the economy and class in today’s political climate.

Romney made around $21 million in 2010, virtually all of that from capital gains; that is, dividends on investments. What that means is that although he “made” $21 million, he already had a much larger pile of money sittting there doing nothing but earning interest and dividends. Mitt’s effective tax rate was around 13%.

For comparison, my effective tax rate, based on a much lower income (according to this calculator, Romney made as much as I do in about a day and a half), which came mostly from wages (I made a little over a hundred bucks in dividends from a few stocks I own), was about 16%.

Now, I do pretty well for my community (according to recent statistics, I make a few pennies less than twice the average household income for my congressional district) and I have had the benefits of being able to write off mortgage and student loan interest, and can free up some coin for deductable charitable donations (though not as much as I’d like). This brings my effective tax rate down a bit from the base (last year, my marginal rate was 25%). A lot of people don’t have the means to take advantage of those benefits, many of which require at least some buy-in cost, such as a down payment on a house, which a lot of people simply can’t manage.

But the best kind of advantages go to people who get most of their income from investments and dividends – people like Romney and, say, Paris Hilton. My sixteen percent comes from taking deductions to the marginal tax rate, which is largely based on wages. Romney, had his income been based on wages, would have started at the top bracket of 37% for the bulk of his income, but he really didn’t – the maximum rate for capital gains income in 2010 was 15 percent, then he deducted things like mortgage interest (the guy has more than half a dozen houses) and charitable deductions from his income to get to his even lower actual rate.

I can barely get my mind around the idea of having a net worth of around $20 million; having a net worth so high that your investments can earn that much in a year (especially given the fact that interest rates are so low right now) is a concept beyond my ability to grok. For people at that level, I imagine money ceases to exist as a concept; if Mitt Romney wants something – anything – I’m pretty sure he can just have his people go get it; I have a hard time believing that even the most imaginative, high-maintenance “only the best” person there is would be able to come up with a way to seriously dent that kind of treasure horde. There’s no way that a person with the wealth of Mitt Romney could possibly understand the economic realities of someone like me, let alone someone who’s skating across the poverty line, any more than either of us can really understand his.

But, that’s not really my point. What I really don’t get is some of the stuff I see from my more conservative acquantences on social networking services, immediately leaping in defense to assert the reasonableness of Romney’s tax burden, since so many lower income people (allegedly 47%) “don’t pay taxes at all”.

First of all, the “don’t pay taxes” is flatly wrong; they may not pay “income tax”, but they pay a much greater percentage of their total income to all those other taxes, of which I provide a few examples below:

• the Romney household pays pretty much the same for a gallon of milk in Boston as you would (probably less, as his accountant has probably found a way to deduct the cost of the milk as a business expense) – who do you think feels the 6.25% sales tax that Massachussetts charges more, him or you?
• Romney’s driver pays the same for a gallon of gas as you do at the pump – who feels the cost of the 18.4¢/gallon federal excise tax more?
• Assuming Romney drew a paycheck, he’d pay the same roughly seven percent on Social Security and Medicare. You and I can’t help but see it when when we see all those deductions on our pay stub – would he even notice?

So yeah, even if your income is low enough, or you’re able to claim enough deductions that you effectively pay “no taxes” on income, you’re still hit with all these other taxes; taxes that tend to have a greater impact on people with lower income than on the wealthy.

Yet, people who are truly struggling continue to vote for candidates whose policies continue to reduce the relative burden on the wealthy while increasing it for the rest of us. Why? I think it’s two different things (and a lot of this I swipe liberally from Thomas Frank’s wonderful and insightful book What’s The Matter With Kansas?):

• By paying lip service to (but never actually doing anything about) conservative “values” issues like restricting abortion and gay rights, these candidates are able to shift anger away from economic inequality and toward “liberal elites” who supposedly look down on “Real Americans™”
• Through clever use of salesmanship and the media, politicians who either are, or are backed by wealthy interests, have convinced the low income that although they may not be rich now, they might be someday. This ties in with refrains of “hard work and integrity” and the whole “prosperity gospel” business. It also plays on the common fantasy that playing the lottery is a sound investment strategy.

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t really work that way, at least not when the burden of taxation is getting pushed farther onto the lower and middle classes and off of the upper classes through things like capital gains tax cuts. Conservative economic policy, which was sold by virtue of claiming it would create jobs by spurring investment and business expansion, really hasn’t – it’s kind of stacked the deck in favor of people who already have money getting more, and shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class.

That statement, as well as all of this, really, is a gross simplification, but it’s kind of the way it’s working right now. And I wish more people could see that.

In any case, my point, and I really think I did have one when I started this piece, is that people who are looking to cut Romney slack for paying a “reasonable” amount of taxes (as compared to the rest of us) really need to look a little closer at the way the system works in terms of the way the relative tax burden is distributed, and understand that it’s not in Romney’s best personal interest to change things very much, and that he (or the eventual Republican nominee*, who will, to one degree or another, be of the same economic ilk) will spend a lot of time trying to deflect voters’ attention away from that fact in order to improve their bottom line to the detriment of yours and mine.

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* – yes, yes, “Democrats are the same”, “bought and sold to corporate interests”, etc etc. I know. Nothing’s perfect. Obama could be more progressive economically and otherwise. But then, as they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good, an I’ll wager that the candidate who didn’t grow up as the scion to the fortune that the AMC Gremlin built has a better understanding of how the middle class lives, and will at least factor that understanding in their consideration of economic issues.

Because I always link this, here’s the State of the Union Drinking Game for your imbibing pleasure.

I’m not sure I’ll be watching. I’m really tired.

I did a bit of sleep deficit spending this weekend; such is the toll of a busy weekend followed by a week during which rest did not come easy, followed by another busy weekend.

Mostly it was Saturday that did me in. It was really the two-pronged assault of (1) the labor involved in helping a group of young people I’m quite fond pull off a successful fund-raising event featuring decorations, music and a chocolate fountain; and (2), coming to realize that I’m having more difficulty dealing with a particular long-term stressor than I had hoped I would, despite my efforts to just stay the hell out of the way.

In any case, the fund raiser raised a tidy sum of funds that will fund many worthy service projects (I’m really quite proud of the kids for pulling it off, as it was really their show), though caused me to look a bit like a zombie in a stylish three-button suit by 9pm Saturday night. I then spent a bit of Sunday dealing with some of the stress from point (2) in ways I’m not entirely proud of.

So, I’m hoping this week will be a little quieter and give me the chance to catch up on my rest and maybe process some things.

I also have to do a little bit of planning because, things never ever ending, I’m hosting a dinner and games thing on Saturday and I haven’t figured out what I’m cooking yet (the game, though, is largely planned).

I knew someone had to be looking at this, but nobody really knows why approximately one in four people (including me) experiences photic sneeze response; that is, sneezing when the sun gets in one’s eyes. There have been several different theories about why this reaction exists, and several of them have been considered and abandoned over the years, and at this point (largely because there are so many other things to look at), this particular “mystery” remains largely unsolved.

And that’s kind of the beauty of science – it’s all about observation and drawing conclusions based on that observation and experimental evidence, and can end up being kind of messy. Nothing is ever truly certain, in the sense that no idea is immune to criticism. Sure, there are some things science is pretty damned certain about, but at the same time, “certainty” only goes as far as the available evidence. Learning and understanding is never over, and our understanding of the universe is always developing and deepening based on our cumulative experience.

I actually kind of find that idea comforting. But, back to the sneezing:

I kind of like the current theory that the optic nerve crosses close enough to the trigeminal nerve (the one that causes sneezing), and occasionally overloads it, causing sternutation (sneezing): I’m fond of the fact that this little weird genetic artifact that causes me to sneeze violently when I go outside on a sunny afternoon is essentially the same as the electrical wiring problem I once had with a car – the wiring arrangement was such that the occasional hard left turn would bump two wires against each other, resulting lots of things lighting up on my dash that weren’t supposed to. It really shines a light on how weird and haphazard evolution sometimes is; that the human body isn’t any more intelligently designed than a poorly-engineered mid-90s coupe.

My personal wrinkle is that the whole photic sneeze reaction is related to eye color – I’ve never known someone without blue eyes to experience it (though one only has to go as far as the comments on the article linked to find anecdotal evidence of brown-eyed people doing it…so much for that theory!).

Today this site, along with thousands of others across the web, is going dark (from 8am to 8pm) to protest SOPA & PIPA, two bills currently flying through congress which will have wide-reaching consequences regarding security and freedom of expression online.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please visit American Censorship dot Org, where you can find a wealth of information, and add your voice to those opposed to these harmful bills.

-chuck

Apologies up front for the almost-certain crap quality of this post; I woke up this morning feeling, shall we say, pretty awful, and that will probably color just about everything I produce throughout the day, at least.

So, sorry.

Still, stuff and adventures and things happened this weekend, so I feel I ought to chronicle them here while they’re still freshish in my mind, because that’s what I do here.

Overall, Marscon was fun, more due to the presence of friends and such rather than the quality of the programming. I knew going in, given my advance read of the panel schedule, that I’d be spending most of my time haunting the game room. And, that’s pretty much what I ended up doing. They can’t all be programming winners, or, more likely, they can’t all be programmed in line with my needs, wants and preferences – I’m sure a lot of attendees got a lot of enjoyment out of the panels presented.

One exception to the programming end was the music/filk stuff. It’s amusing to me, though not particularly surprising given my background, that I’m drawn to this sort of thing, given that it’s a fusion of at least two different life-long interests. When I see the astounding right-hand guitar gymnastics of Jonah Knight, for example, I’m both inspired to go out and write my own songs, damn the steam-driven torpedoes and my limited singing ability, as well as a little intimidated by the fact that I simply don’t have the manual dexterity to do that, not that my theoretical output would resemble his, in any case.

Leaving that bit of self-doubt aside, I enjoyed seeing Jonah perform again, and engaging in a bit of con acquantance chit-chat over the table while handing over my cold hard cash for a copy of his latest disc, The Age of Steam: Strange Machines, which is impressive and haunting and virtuosic and more than a little bit hauntingly beautiful, and includes the fun and creepy track “King of Nebraska” at the end.

Sitting at that very same table, and performing on some of the same stages was “comedy rock star” Mikey Mason, whose stuff I hadn’t encountered before (although given the internet circles I run in, I must have simply been looking the other way when this made the rounds last spring), but I soon found myself humming along with the entire weekend. Mikey’s funny and gracious and gregarious, performs a note-perfect acoustic rendition of the “Muppet Babies” theme song with all the voices intact like nobody’s business, and wrote what’s probably my favorite song (not favorite “geek song”, favorite song) of the year so far (or heck, last year even), “Me and Alan Moore’s Beard”.

Otherwise, like I said, I spent most of my time in the game room, rolling dice and flipping cards with our friends from Steve Jackson Games (who also constitute most of our semi-regular Sunday afternoon gaming group). We played ‘em all, particularly GURPS (I almost died dramatically in a post-apocalyptic Richmond, though I only heard the legends about The Pope of France defeating an Elder God by removing his pants), Munchkin, Give Me The Brain, and the non-SJ product, Kittens In A Blender, which, nonetheless became the viral hit of the game room, causing a near-immediate sell-out of copies from the dealer’s room Saturday afternoon.

So yeah, that’s how I spent my weekend, more or less. I wouldn’t call it wasted.

Although I’ve been “blogging” in some form since 1995 or so, well before the word ‘blog’ was coined in 1997, in the form of various crappy personal “home pages” and a relatively popular unofficial fan-page for the band The Badlees at the height of their commerical success, the project which you find yourself currently reading has been on-going, more or less continuously, since 2002.

Since January 14, 2002, according to the pre-wordpress archives. That means, dear reader, that I’ve been doing these relatively unfiltered brain-dumps to the web for exactly ten years.

I suppose I should honor that anniversary somehow. When John Scalzi hit that milestone, he released a successful, Hugo-winning book collecting a selection of entries from the first ten years. However, he’s a bestselling novelist, and, you know, has a market. I get as many hits in a year as he gets in a couple of hours. I can’t imagine I’d sell any except the copy I printed for myself.

Plus, you know, putting together a book requires stuff like preparation and copy editing. I haven’t done any of that. Doesn’t mean I won’t try someday; print-on-demand, self-published books are a totally doable thing now. Even without the need for up-front inventory costs, it would still probably a losing proposition, if I’m to be honest with myself .

Lacking a ready-to-sell product coinciding with the anniversary (I hated taking those business classes, can you tell?), I shall have to fall back on my usual means of acknowledging things – by going on about it in a text editor. I am nothing if not consistent, in practice if not in content.

Looking back at the first couple of pages in the archives, I can say for certain that I have been anything *but* consistent in terms of content – there’s a definite evolution. I’ve gone into examining this phenomenon before, recently in fact. In that post, I broke my output down into discrete eras, which I admit, is rather self-indulgent (at least I didn’t name them). But then, what personal blog isn’t self-indulgent? That’s kind of the point.

In thinking about this milestone, I read the first couple of pages of the archives over again, something I haven’t done in a while. What I noticed more than anything else was the fact that the writing pretty much sucked. Almost all of it is exceedingly enthusiastic and superficial, with way too many exclamation points. Sure, during those first months of this project, I had a lot on my plate: dealing with the impending birth of my son, the drama inherent in that birth (which still occasionally raises nightmares – funny, I never really talked about how scared I was in the blog), the immediate aftermath of said birth, and the subsequent stress and excitement of almost immediately starting a new job (it was a full three months or so), so I can understand why the writng wasn’t up to par (doesn’t excuse some of the middle years, though). I suspect, early on, I was trying to convince *myself* that I was that enthusiastic about everything in my life as much as I was trying to convince everyone else.

That’s one thing I’ve noticed in reviewing the decade; eventually, the mask I tried to project slips a bit, revealing the face underneath – which, honestly, is another mask (everything we present to the outside world is really a mask – no one knows the real “us” except us, and often, we’re pretty good about fooling ourselves), but probably one closer to the real individual behind it.

Of course, I’m not the same person I was ten years ago, either, but that’s to be expected. In any case, I think I’m more comfortable with the person I am now, and having ten years’ worth of journals to track my personal evolution has helped me to see how I arrived at that comfort.

So, one day I may do that book – I don’t care if no one reads it but me; having such a record of personal evolution in a tangible, seemingly permanent (if flammable) record would be an interesting thing.

Heading out to the convention for a couple of days. Don’t wait up.

MarsCon Ho!*

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* – for the record, my body is not for sale at the convention…unless your offer is really good.

Presented forthwith are several short notices of a personal nature. Feel free to enjoy:

– Thanks to the kind reminders from my amazing convention friends via the various social networking services, my head’s kind of been in con space all week. As it stands, there are only 36 hours or so until I arrive at Marscon. I suspect there’ll be more to say on this later.

– If you have the means or lack the scruples, I highly suggest getting your eyeballs on a screening of last weekend’s episode of the BBC’s Sherlock, “The Hounds of Baskerville”. In my humble opinion, the best episode of the programme thus far (which is always good, thanks to the great work from the lead actors), pushed over the top by the spot-on “X-Files” vibe throughout.

– One of these days, the middle child will figure out how to apply attention to detail when attempting to conceal crimes and transgressions from his parents. Until then, we’ll just have to marvel at the audacity of his failed schemes. However, once that point arrives, I hope he chooses to use his powers of intellect for good rather than evil.

– I will get through A Game of Thrones before the first HBO series gets released to disc. This I vow. It’s a vow I believe I shall be able to keep – I have less than a hundred pages to go and until the beginning of March to manage it.

– I finally broke down and purchased a digital download copy of Miracles of Modern Science‘s Dog Year this week, which I’ve been listening to in the car for the last couple of days. As I suspected since I heard that NPR piece a couple of weeks back, it’s pretty damned amazing and eminently listenable. I’d been unable to track down a physical CD of the disc in any of the usual venues (and a few of the unusual ones), though the miracles of modern technology (hah!) have allowed me to create one. Sadly, though, I lack liner notes, which in this case would be rather important to me, as they would save me some time in figuring out the exact instrumentation used on this rather exceptional record. It turns out you don’t need guitars to rock pretty damned hard.

– I kind of love the process of writing adventure plots for role-playing games. It’s a shame that the current D&D scenario I’m writing is probably going to be just a one-shot, as I’ve ended up planting a bunch of hooks that could totally be the start of a really enjoyable long-term campaign.

– I think I slightly pulled something important during my weight training yesterday afternoon; the right elbow’s a little sore this morning. I suspect it probably had something to do with that sharp, sudden “test” of the building PA system that surprised me and caused me to momentarily lose my grip on the lat pull-down bar. Whatever the cause: Ow.

Thank you for your attention.