Today is the 25th anniversary of my bar mitzvah. I could have gotten through today quite nicely without realizing this.

Was it just me, or did anyone else burst out laughing when they heard our Commander-in-Chief say the following?

I spoke to President Musharraf right before I came over here to visit with President Sarkozy. And my message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform. You can’t be the President and the head of the military at the same time.

So here we have the man who was elected through the result of not one, but two disputed elections, giving advice on democracy to a man who took power through a military coup and is now extending his rule via martial law.

But that’s not why this was funny. This was funny because no president before Bush has been so damned clingy to his role as Commander-in-Chief, using his titular role as head of the military to construe criticism of him as criticism of “the troops”. His presidency is all obout being president and head of the military. He’s the first English-speaking politician to wear a codpiece since Blackadder. And obviously, he had all traces of irony surgically removed at birth.

Making plans for an upcoming trip to Canada, and for the first time it hit me just how strange this is:

It took me several weeks of staring at this graphic on my screen (taken from iTunes) before I realized quite how amazing it was:

An icon of my iPod — no big deal, right? Except that they got the color right. Which means two things: first, that iTunes is shipping with icons for all iPods it might encounter. That’s nothing special. Second — that Apple took a purely cosmetic feature and coded it into the hardware so the iPod could tell iTunes, “yes, I am indeed a red iPod,” and post the correct graphic.

Tip o’ the hat, Apple.

Many of my blog regulars know that the reason the postings have fallen off of late is because of my father’s recent illness. He died in his sleep early Sunday morning; my heartfelt thanks to the many people who have helped me get through a difficult time.

A brief FAQ for the questions I’ve heard most often this week: yes, I am keeping both my Dad’s apartment and my apartment in Washington, with the expectation of dividing my time between my two homes; I am unsure what I’m going to do with my Dad’s candy store, but I’m inclined to keep it going as soon as I determine how; and yes, I’m doing pretty well this week, but email is always welcome.

Below I’m appending my father’s obituary and my eulogy for him, in part because I feel he deserves a semi-permanent tribute, and this website is about as semi-permanent as anything in my life.

David Porten, 74, a business owner known as the “Candyman” on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, died in his sleep Sunday. A native of Philadelphia, he was well known to many people through his series of stores in Philadelphia, Wrightstown, NJ, and for the past 12 years, Atlantic City, as well as his regular activities in local Jewish communities and chambers of commerce. His lifetime was marked by his unwavering devotion to his mother, Ida; his wife, Lois; and his surviving son Jeffrey. Memorial donations may be made to UPHS, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, 3400 Spruce Street, 5 West Gates, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Eulogy, October 30 2007, 18 Heshvan 5768

Many of you already know that I’ve been here in Atlantic City for the past few months. Shortly after I got here, I learned something that I hadn’t really known before.

It wasn’t exactly a shocker that it seemed like everyone who has ever set foot on the Boardwalk knew my Dad — even if they called him the Candyman without knowing his real name. But what did surprise me was that, over and over, the people who I met — who only casually knew my father — didn’t merely like him. They actively cared for him. I’m talking about a hundred store regulars whose names I’ve forgotten, the postman, the UPS guy, the guys with the rolling chairs, the cops on bikes, ninety percent of the Tropicana workforce; even the folks I met in the Atlantic City Mercantile department.

Every time, I expected to see, perhaps, polite familiarity with my father. And every time, you could tell by the looks on their faces and the tone of their voices that they weren’t just asking after Dad to be polite to me.

If this is the effect he had on casual acquaintances, is there any wonder about how powerfully he affected the people in this room, the people who loved him? We loved him because he loved us, with unwavering intensity. And despite the constant sarcastic jokes my Mom and I both made about how the little white dogs came first—believe me when I say that we never spent a minute doubting that we were the center of my father’s life. He made that a wonderful place to be.

I had a great friendship with my father, and I once asked him how he had learned to be who he was, and especially how he had learned to be such an excellent father to me. He gave all the credit to his mother and to my mother, and refused to take any of it for himself. Which may come as a surprise to all of us who have trouble putting “humble” and “David Porten” in the same sentence.

But it’s true, and I spent many years telling him repeatedly what I’m about to share with you now, in the hope that when he hears it today he’ll finally, truly accept the honor due to him. So Dubbie:

for persevering through adversity and always, always coming through with that raw confidence you had in yourself;

for the number of times you achieved the impossible, because your self-confidence was so damn well justified;

for being a much better dancer than I’ll ever be;

for epitomizing and showing me what it means to be a true mensch and gentleman;

for being simultaneously the strongest and the most tender man I have ever met;

for all of these reasons, Dubbie, and many more, you are my hero, and you always will be.

6, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4, 7.

For some of us, born between, say, World War II and Y2K, these numbers were memorized in our childhood. I just typed them from memory (unlike most of my posts, which require a trip to Wikipedia for confirmation before I can sound erudite), although it’s been at least 20-odd years since I’ve had reason to reference them.

They came back to me now because I finally made time to watch The Chronicles of Narnia. Those numbers are the internal chronological order of the seven novels, a key thing to learn if you’re ten years old and intend to move your imagination into Narnia full-time for a few years.

(At least, they were the order of the novels, until recent editions of the series reordered the books to make them match the chronology. There are some of us who consider this to be blasphemy on the order of a child being forced to watch The Phantom Menace before being allowed to watch Star Wars. For both Narnia and the Lucasverse, the order of consumption is obvious: first-time readers and viewers should watch them in the order they were created; after that, the next 100 or so repeats can be in any order desired.)

Those of you who have neither read the books nor seen the movie should be spanked and sent to bed without supper. That way, you can’t read this, as this post is nothing but spoilers from here on in.

It was a strange experience watching the movie, in that it’s no exaggeration to say that I read the Narnia books upwards of 40 times as a kid. The thing is, I have an awful memory for fiction—I sometimes have to read a novel most of the way through before I have the slightest idea that I’ve read it before. So even though I memorized the books so thoroughly that I can still picture the cracks I put in their spines, if you had asked me three hours ago what Lion was about, I’d have said, “Um… big lion, some English schoolkids, and there’s something about a candy called Turkish Delight.”

So prior to the movie, I was wondering if I’d get the same sort of childlike glee that came in brief doses during Superman Returns. (Largely due to its soundtrack; the rest of the movie, not so much.) Turns out that I’m not twelve anymore, and the wall is now pretty damn solid in the back of my wardrobe.

Sure, the movie has its merits. It’s beautiful to look at, and even under the thrall of the White Witch, Narnia looks like a more pleasant place to be than Middle-earth. I’d personally nominate the film for the Academy Award in Best (and Damn Near Only) Actors and Screenplay Where The Children Actually Act Like Children. And credit where credit is due to the actors and director, as throughout the first half of the film I wanted to drown Edmund with the same hateful fury I felt towards him twenty-five years ago.

But the thing is, back when I was twelve, I kinda missed that whole Jesus thing. Yeah, I know, it’s a big thing to miss, but hey—I’m Jewish. And there’s something about video allegory that just makes it much more honking obvious than it is in print. Not that Narnia laid it on too thickly, in my book; for that, I’ll refer you to Matrix Revolutions. But there’s still something, well, insidious about feeding subliminal messages to non-Christian children that Jesus is a superhero.

The Guardian said it much better than I can:

[H]ere in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America—that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason.

Actually, to me, the crowning scene was mainly notable in that it was so similar to Star Wars I expected to see C3PO and R2D2 in the audience.

That’s really what got me. Four human children (or to put it more accurately, four white Western human children) show up in fantasyland. Humans are a special breed there, everyone else being nonhuman. Actually, since all of the humans are immediately royalty, you can more accurately say that everyone else there is subhuman. One of the humans, who maybe started shaving last year, is made a military leader and outranks what appears to be dozens of field generals and colonels. His next action is to lead an outnumbered and underpowered army into a head-on attack, in a textbook example of what not to do when you’re outnumbered and underpowered. Of course, he wins.

Am I reading too much into this? Possibly. Like I said, I spent much of my childhood in Narnia, and I joined neither Jews for Jesus or the College Republicans. But ever since I read David Brin’s scathing essay on the lessons of Star Wars, I’ve given a lot of thought to cultural myths. It doesn’t take a great leap from the feel-good warm fuzzies of the Narnian war of liberation, to the mindset of Iraqi invasion in 2003—and perhaps to a lesser extent, to the mindset that we don’t torture people because we’re the good guys, so anything we do is presumptively not torturous. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one hell of an allegory for Westerners being greeted with flowers and parades by their intellectual and genetic inferiors; no wonder that it’s such a popular British import.

Read Brin’s essay if you haven’t already. Then, if you feel like it, watch some of your favorite American mythological fiction, and see how you feel.

I’ve been playing around for a few days with fluther.com, which seems to me to be a sort of useful Twitter. Log in and post a question, and Fluther matches the question with people whom its AI has deemed to be experts. Q&As all seem to be short and to the point. I haven’t used it yet for a personal question, but I note that the answers I’ve read all seem to be accurate, and most of the time people beat me to writing the brilliant response I would have had. Might be a very useful site, especially if the userbase hits critical mass and we start seeing Twitterific-style adaptations to make it more integrated into the desktop experience.

NJT bus through North Jersey, and running my multiple monitor setup at their native resolutions of 1280×800 and 1440×900. Just because I can.

What he said.

Okay, since this seems to be my day of embedded video, I’m just giving in entirely.

Amazing Card Trick Revealed! – video powered by Metacafe

Can Trick – video powered by Metacafe

This was originally released on January 1st, so I must have been too hung over too busy to catch it the first time around. Purported to be an internal Kodak promo video that was officially released because it was so damn good. NSFW, in the sense that uncontrollable giggling is generally looked upon askance.

Google continues to seriously rock.

I’m in a Sicko-inspired debate over on Brian’s ISBS, which led me to the following thought.

It’s been repeatedly established that American health care just ain’t all that and a bag of chips. Meanwhile, medical tourism seems to be thriving—and importantly, provides an interesting free market window into the prospect of how people would manage their medical care if they had the freedom to do so.

As I see it, there are three things that would artificially depress American medical tourism, lower than what might be considered a rational norm:

1. The widespread and erroneous belief that American medical care is the best in the world; if you think you’ve got the best in the world here (even if it’s being denied to you), why would you look for substandard care elsewhere?
2. The low percentage of people who leave the US for any reason in their lifetimes. Partially a geographic effect, partially cultural; we are, after all, the physical size of Europe. Almost all of us have been to other states, but most people are taught that it’s silly or expensive to go to other countries. That’s a high psychological bar, especially for sick people.
3. The internalized and externalized costs of medical care. People are used to paying thousands of dollars for insurance, and then minimizing their out-of-pocket expenses afterwards. A flight to Thailand for surgery is entirely out-of-pocket, even if the entire cost is far cheaper than similar surgery in your neighborhood.

So my question: how about an insurance company that leverages these differences to provide top-notch health care at very low cost? As follows:

1. The company provides all of the advance research necessary to make you fully-informed about the care you’re getting, and that it’s as good or better as American care. When American care is the best and the most economical, that’s what you get. But you don’t have to do the 1,000 hours of research necessary to engage in medical tourism or shopping around for medications.
2. Your meds are purchased by the insurer and drop-shipped to you; they get them at the best possible cost. You get what you need with no exclusions and a low deductible.
3. When you need hospitalization or outpatient treatment, and it’s far too expensive in the US, the company pays complete costs for travel and lodging to ensure that you get the treatment you need, wherever it’s provided. Again, you’re provided with ample documentation to show that you’re getting US-equivalent or better care.

It seems to me that the costs for this company would be far lower than other insurance companies, which translates into lower premiums, wider coverage, and lower (or no) deductibles.

So—why doesn’t this exist?

It’s vitally important to trademark all of your blog ideas before your competitors friends borrow them.

Bob, Bob, Bob. It’s less than 24 hours until T-iPhone-0. Is this really a good time for you to alienate your best customers?

I went to your retail store to spec out the Nokia UMA phone, or as you guys call it, the Hotspot@Home. Talk about a phone UI that made my eyeballs bleed; to think there was a time when I was an admirer of Nokia design. But I decided to grit my teeth and hope that I could strip out enough of your ill-advised graphics to make the phone workable.

But the real problem came with the sales experience—or rather, the complete lack of a sale that accompanied your sales experience. I was pretty much ready to just buy the damn phone provided you had a decent return policy. Too bad your sales rep talked me out of it.

It was bad enough that it took me a while to derail your rep from the network promos to the phone I had come for—he quite literally wouldn’t stop until I said, “Look. Phone first. Network next. Maybe.”

Seriously, Bob, you’re selling me a phone that lets me use Wifi instead of cell minutes. Do you really think it’s a good time to try to lock me on a new contract right now before I’ve had a chance to see what this phone does for me? What exactly is the mean IQ of your customer base?

But then came the breaking point:

Me: (pointing to the demo phone, which is now showing “Application Access Not Allowed”) I read in an online review that T-Mobile was blocking access from Opera Mini, so I tested it out on this phone.

Sales rep: What’s Opera Mini?

Me: Full web browser, the most common application I use on my current Motorola.

Sales rep: Oh. Right. Well, that’s the demo model. They frequently don’t install the entire OS on the demo models.

Bob, I could relay for you the rest of the conversation, but that would really just be a waste of time. Because when one of your employees first demonstrates that he is less knowledgeable than I am, and then proceeds to try to drop me into a steaming bucket of horseshit, you’re not just losing a phone sale, you’re poisoning a customer relationship.

Point 1, your staffer lied to me, Bob. Point 2, I’m the kind of guy who gets pissed off by that, partially because it annoys me that you do that to other customers who don’t have my expertise. Point 3, not only are your hardware offerings weak, but now I have to stop telling my clients that T-Mobile has a track record of not crippling phones. You’ve crippled the one I was going to buy, in a way that makes me not want it anymore. Point 4, I’ll remind you that EVDO is faster and AT&T has the iPhone.

I can think of one and only one reason why I’m a T-Mobile customer today, Bob, and that’s your hotspot network. But I’m looking pretty hard at Boingo now that they’ve got that free global roaming in place. I’m sort of running low on loyalty options. Planning on addressing that?

In the category of “things that surprise me more than they probably surprise anyone else,” I’m actually considering an iPhone. Yes, those new videos look pretty damned cool. But it was another calculation that really got me thinking along these lines.

To wit, I’m in the market for an iPod nano (ballpark $200-$250), and I’ve been dying to replace my crappy dumbphone for a really long time. That’s $500 right there.

So the only thing standing between me and an iPhone is Apple’s incomprehensible (to me, anyway) decision to lock it to AT&T.

It seems like a fairly simple matter for other companies to pry it open, although I’m not holding my breath. Therefore, there are two bits of news I’m looking for starting at around 6:03 PM tomorrow:

1) does the iPhone support dial-up networking? That is, can you use the EDGE connection over Bluetooth to provide Internet connections to your laptop? That’s why I bought my dumbphone two years ago, and it’s a dealbreaker for any phone that doesn’t have it.

2) how quickly will someone publish a SIM hack to get their T-Mobile card working in an iPhone?

I’ve also been watching the new T-Mobile wifi calling rollout; would sign up for that immediately if their phones on offer weren’t so blah. But my reluctant conclusion is that I’m probably best off waiting for T-Mobile 3G to roll out before making any changes. Nuts.

Tomorrow is the deadline for submitting comments to the Senate against the proposed nationwide identification system, REAL ID. Mine was fax #14,394:

In 1990, I had the opportunity to visit Leningrad for a student conference. I’ll never forget how shocked I was when the Russian students at the conference showed me their internal passports, which were required for traveling around Russia.

There was once a time when Americans were proud of these freedoms. Today, since I have never learned to drive, I have to carry around my US passport for routine identification. Perhaps you can tell me when America started thinking of Communist countries as a good-enough model for our own freedoms.

Hey, Bob. Jeff here, a T-Mobile customer who rocks out your hotspot network regularly enough that I’m strongly inclined to stick with your service. You’ve also generated some longterm loyalty from me by being the first provider on the block to offer a cheap, unlimited data plan.

Thing is, there’s this new phone coming out, and I hear that your industry is nervous about mass migrations to AT&T. Sprint and Verizon are about to discover that CDMA stands for See De Masses Abscond. But you’ve got GSM, and I’m thinking it’s about time you made that mean Got Some Mojo.

Here’s the deal:

1) With the unlimited data and Starbucks hotspots, you’ve got yourselves a nice geek community ponying up to you monthly—at least, everyone who didn’t get tired of waiting for your 3G service. But the people who switched to EVDO can’t use an iPhone, can they? So perhaps they’ll be coming back to a GSM carrier.

2) You can’t sell the iPhone, so a lot of your customers are going to be looking at AT&T…

3) but your network works just fine with the iPhone, provided the phone is unlocked.

4) In case you haven’t noticed, it’s illegal for Apple or AT&T to prohibit unlocking the iPhone. There’s a specific exemption in DMCA for this.

5) So the only real barrier for the unwashed masses using their iPhone with T-Mobile is a service to unlock their phones…

6) and the $175 service fee that AT&T will charge for buying an iPhone and immediately canceling.

7) $175 is what, 45 days’ revenue from the sort of heavy cellular user who would consider buying an iPhone in the first place?

8) Do you see where I’m going with this yet?

The iPhone ships at 6 PM Friday. So I’m thinking that on noon Thursday, you announce that any T-Mobile subscriber, old or new, can walk into any T-Mobile store to have their iPhone immediately unlocked, and receive a $175 credit on their account.

And if you’re not doing this—why the hell not?

Amtrak’s continuing record of excellence: employees apparently unable to spell either “Amtrak” or “Acela”.

I was giving serious thought to signing up for Earthlink Wifi for the Philly municipal network, but their web site, oddly enough, apparently doesn’t provide a form in which I can pay them money. So I figured I’d just grab a login screen at 30th Street this morning. Seems that 30th Street is not a sufficiently trafficked location for them to have covered it.

I already have wifi access in Philly at any Starbucks, Kinkos, Borders, and the airport. I’ve got slower access anywhere via my cell phone, which is working just fine for blogging from this here train. I’d consider spending more money to get my work done in more places, but if you’re not going to cover the train station, you’re not exactly raising confidence about your footprint elsewhere.

Is it just me, or is Earthlink just not serious about attracting my business?