One of the advantages of living in a tiny rural town is that I really don’t worry much about having packages stolen off my porch — I did once have a package fail to show up on time, and we wondered what had happened to it. It turned out that a new deliveryperson had put it on our front step — we almost never use our front door, preferring the door that opens up to the driveway and has a kind of mud room (do houses in other parts of the country have mud rooms?), so we just didn’t see it. It sat there in plain sight to anyone passing by on College Avenue for about a month, getting rained on. You could have stolen it and we wouldn’t have even noticed.

I understand it’s a bigger problem in the suburbs of big cities, and can see how it would be infuriating, especially around this time of year. This one guy took an extreme approach to handling it, though, building a combination glitter bomb/stink bomb with a GPS and multiple recording cameras to catch people in the act of theft.

I guess I’m supposed to be impressed with the elaborate, over-engineered contraption, but what struck me most was the thieves — these were ordinary people who would just casually rob others with no qualms at all. Multiple people. Not organized rings of criminals, just passers-by who would steal from their neighbors without regret, people with nice cars and nice homes. What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t your mothers teach you anything?

This is the question that is dominating social media right now. Should it be banned? But that’s censorship! And then the usual free-speech babble is combined with terrible in depth, word by word analyses of the lyrics to show the interpretation is malleable, depending on the views of the analyzer. I hate it all. I hate the song.

The only fair thing to do is ban all Christmas carols. Use objective methods to measure the frequency of play of certain songs, and if they show an unusual annual peak, no matter when, they are clearly not good enough to be enjoyed except in very narrow contexts, and therefore are abominations that should be prohibited. If you don’t want to hear it in July, why do radio stations think it’s desirable to inflict them on us in December? Just kill all the mediocre music.

I’m also considering a prohibition on all media that has “cold” in the title, which seems to be a cause of serious conflict. This would have the benefit of also abolishing all those endless arguments about Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, which used to take over certain nerd conversations, once upon a time.

I arrived late last night, so we couldn’t see much…especially since we were blinded by the radiant light shining from a certain grandchild. But today we’ll get out a little more, maybe. More likely we’ll be mesmerized by a certain baby girl.

I’m in an airport. I’ve been in an airport all afternoon. Airports are terrible places, vacant and uninteresting, where people only go to get out of them as soon as they possibly can, and the height of misery is being compelled to stay in one longer than planned. But I find a moment of grimdark happiness in reading an article by Laurie Penny, in which she is trapped in an even worse place: a cruise ship. And just to double-down…a cruise ship full of cryptocurrency fanatics.

On this half-empty passenger ship with its swirling ’80s carpets right out of The Shining, there is very little sober talk of blockchain’s obstacles or limitations. Nobody mentions how wildly ecologically unsound the whole project is—some estimates have bitcoin burning as much energy as the entire nation of Ireland for a relatively small pool of users. Instead, the core and only existential question is which of the various coins and ICOs (initial coin offerings) will make you the richest the fastest before dawn.

Freedom here means freedom of money, and only freedom of money—and what freedom of money means is the freedom to amass great stocks of it without being taxed or traced. Occasionally, people even talk about this on panels, though nobody is really here for the conference part of the conference.

At least nobody in this airport is talking incessantly about money…or rather, there are such people, but they roam the place like Martians, easily avoided because they wear bluetooth ear-pieces and their mouths constantly move as they prowl about, focused entirely on the conversation they find so important. Nobody talks to much of anyone here. They move. They squat next to precious electrical outlets. They hover morosely over luggage they’ve been warned will be confiscated if they leave it untended.

Another thing we lack, mostly, in airports is women in obvious bondage.

One of the ways men bond is by demonstrating collective power over women. This is why business deals are still done in strip clubs, even in Silicon Valley, and why tech conferences are famous for their “booth babes.” It creates an atmosphere of complicity and privilege. It makes rich men partners in crime. This is useful if you plan to get ethically imaginative with your investments. Hence the half-naked models, who are all working a lot harder than any of the guys in shirtsleeves.

The cruise’s panelists all tout decentralization’s promises of shared responsibility, community, and freedom, but the version I see here means that nobody knows precisely who is responsible for all of this. It’s nobody’s specific fault that we’re trapped on a floating live-action walkthrough of how un-trammelled free-market capitalism can be bad for women, given that money and power are things women tend to have less of.

See? It could be worse, I tell myself, while checking the clock again for that moment of transition when I get to leave the land of dull carpet and interminable chairs to be confined in a tube with virtually no freedom to move for 3 hours.

48 minutes to boarding, O Blessed Sweet Relief from Waiting.

No, I don’t want a lecture from John McAfee to ease the boredom.

A lesbian metal song about kittens? Yes please.

We’re going away for a week, to Boulder, Colorado. The end result: to observe this exotic creature in her natural habitat. The blog isn’t going to go silent — apparently, the otherworldly organism does take occasional naps — but I’m going to be distracted for a while. Behave yourselves, and trolls, I’ll have my eye on you.