What Makes a Fuckhead?

Someone who calls himself David R. Kendrick sometime prior to 2004 wrote an essay titled "What Makes a Fuckhead?" I found the essay here, on the site of David Gerard. I found David Gerard because he's the author of "Attack of the 50-foot blockchain" which my son-by-marriage John, recommended to me. I found John because my daughter, Mira married him. Actually, I knew John before she married him, and I may be an accessory before the fact of their getting married.

Anyhow.

The page where Gerard hosts the essay has a link to the site of someone named David R. Kendrick. I deem it probable, but not certain, that the person who has the website is the essay's original author. Later I will provide some data that supports this hypothesis.

The essay begins: 

But what makes a person a Fuckhead? You cannot tell a fuckhead just by looking at the e-mail address, or the Web site, or even by the newsgroups the individual frequents. A fuckhead is a person who, through the pattern of repeated behaviour when dealing with other Netizens in IRC and Usenet, demonstrates certain characteristics and a repeated inability or unwillingness to change or modify his/her behavior ...

Here are the sections of his essay:

• A Fuckhead Must Have An Exaggerated Sense of His/Her Own Importance
• A Fuckhead Must Refuse to Abide By Common Social Rules
• A Fuckhead Must Never Back Down When Caught In A Lie
• A Fuckhead Must Keep Coming Back Without Mending His/Her Ways
• A Fuckhead Will Change His/Her Beliefs To Suit The Situation

You can read the whole essay for his elaboration of these Fuckhead characteristics. 

The essay concludes:

The Fuckhead may display all of these characteristics, or some of them, or only one. Some may love a Fuckhead like a brother, some may think their brother is a Fuckhead. What is incontrovertible is that for all of humanity, there are people that you would rather not have to deal with, and those people, throughout history, are the Fuckheads. 

Does this Fuckhead behavior remind you of anyone? It reminded me of someone. Still does. It might remind David R. Kendrick of the same person. But possibly not, because on his about page he says (my emphasis added)

It bothers me that we have actual live Nazis living in the United States in 2017 and the President I voted for won't tell them their support isn't required.

So maybe he does not have the same Fuckhead in mind that I have. After all, who would vote for a Fuckhed?

On the other hand, voting for a Fuckhead does not violate any law of physics. It does not violate any law of the United States, at least as far as I know. You can think someone is a Fuckhead and vote for them, and even have good reasons for voting for a Fuckhead. If you can't imagine doing that, it's just a failure of imagination.

David R. Kendrick seems like a pretty smart guy, and I like to communicate with smart guys even if I don't agree with them. Many times even because I don't agree wth them. Who knows? I might learn something.

It turned out that David R. Kendrick had a contact link on his site. (Probably still does.) I wrote a message asking him if he was the author. Whoever answered the site's email said yes.

I believe that there is a high likelihood that the person who responded was, in fact, the author and that both are the same David R. Kendrick. I wrote him back:

I thought it was amusing. It seemed that the whole set of characteristics match a particular type of person--and the example that immediately came to my mind is probably the person that your About page indicates that you voted for. 

Always interested when smart people see things very differently. I assume that you know to whom I refer. Do you see him as matching that type? Or not? 

The probable David R. Kendrick wrote back (and kindly permitted me to quote him):

Here is my take on President Trump. He is absolutely the kind of arrogant fuckhead I described. He is not welcome by anyone’s campfire by now and aside from getting rich and annoying everyone he doesn’t seem to have had any agenda in life.   

That though is part of why he was elected. Americans are tired of being scared of terrorists, being afraid of federal interference in their lives, afraid to have the economy in the hands of people who have never successfully managed it. Trump, being a bellicose outsider, wasn’t going to knuckle under for tit-for-tat politics or bow to special interests because as an outsider and fuckhead he wasn’t beholden to any.  Think of a less pious Jesse Ventura.  

I’ve met Hillary Clinton, and trust me, as President she would be far, far worse. If she hadn’t rendered herself irrelevant she would be absolutely indicted or impeached by now for looting the Clinton foundation, cooking the books against Bernie Sanders, etc etc. Remember that a fully Republican Congress came in with Trump; Clinton would never have had a chance 

I hope that answers your questions and I look forward to reading your article. 

Thanks, David R. Kendrick for your original essay and its clear definition of a Fuckhead. Thanks for your responsiveness. Thanks for letting me quote you. I hope you enjoy the article.

PS: I love the Internet.

Hamilton, genius, and genius.com

I've been obsessing on the musical, Hamilton, for a couple of weeks. Amazon Prime Music has the whole album streaming and downloadable. Now whenever I go for a drive I put it on and play it. Top volume.

I had forgotten about Genius.com, but a search for a phrase in one of my favorite songs in Hamilton took me there and reminded me. Ahh! Internet. How I love you!

Genius.com bills itself as "the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and crowdsourced musical knowledge." People put lyrics on the site, and others annotate, comment, and discuss. It's kind of wikipedia for lyrics.

So here's the page for "It's Quiet Uptown" the song that led me there, and my favorite from the show. (I have yet to hear it without bursting into tears.) If you go to the link, and click on the highlighted lines in the page (better on desktop than mobile) you'll see the annotations.

For example, the annotation on the line "there's a suffering to terrible to name" says this:

"There’s a saying that while a person who loses their spouse is called a “widow” or a “widower,” and a person who loses his parents is called an “orphan,” there is no word to name the person who loses a child because the grief and loss is unspeakable."

Also commentary says:

Some possible influence from the line “There’s a grief that can’t be spoken” in “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Misérables.

Reading Genius is like reading the book "Hamilton, The Revolution" by Lin and Jeremy McCarter, but with hyperlinks instead of beautiful bookmaking. 

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a contributor to genius.com with a verified account. His comments on Hamilton are highlighted specially. For the line I'm only nineteen but my mind is older" he says:

It was a no brainer to put that line in because that is something Hamilton would absolutely say. There’s a lot of ‘90s references in that opening tune; it’s the stuff I grew up falling in love with.Hamilton is just like a ‘95 Prodigy. “Shook Ones Pt. II” by Mobb Deep is one of my favorite hip-hop tunes period.

And the line taken from that tune.

Other discussion that leads to the letter Hamilton wrote about the hurricane that led to people paying for him to leave the island and go to New York.

Ahh! The internet!

I love Google, Part N+1

I'm enrolled in a colloquy, titled: Examining Public discourse in the Age of Technology. One of the books that we're discussing argues that our public discourse is being dumbed down by the media; that in the old days people listened to debates by articulate individuals that sometimes lasted for hours.

This is part of a pattern that I'll call "romanticizing the past." People have things that they hate, paint a picture of a time before that hated thing existed,  and claim that the world was so much better then.

Sometimes it's true. But more often than not it is not. But that's not what I want to post about. I'll rant on that subject another time. Right now I want to talk about how cool Google is.

In response to discussion in the class I was inspired to write a blog post, here, about the way that the past is romanticized. I wanted to refer to a book that I'd read but I could not remember its name. What I did remember was:

• He'd described the fact that even though computers regularly beat grand masters at chess these days, that humans and chess-playing computers, working in collaboration, beat both the best humans and the best computers, when working alone. These computer-human teams he called "centaurs"
• He'd described the fact that in the past people were readers, not writers. Once they finished school they did relatively little writing because most jobs were manual labor--in farm and factory. Today people write more than ever before--and even if much of it is short, and trivial, it's still writing. He cited the enormous number of words per day written on Facebook.

So I Googled for "book with centaur playing chess internet facebook"

The first result, was the one I wanted:

Excerpt | Smarter Than You Think

smarterthanyouthink.net/excerpt/

The Rise of the Centaurs. Who's better at chess—computers or humans? ... Together, they would form what chess players later called a centaur: a hybrid beast ... BUY THEBOOK ... Twitter · Facebook · Collision Detection (Clive's blog) ...

Missing: internet

Yay Google.

And yes, I cheated and backdated this post.