Prominent Chen

"Aw shit, they let anybody into this century!"

2007-09-27T17:57:00.000+01:00

Matt Yglesias has some interesting thoughts on the Demolition Man-ification of America. I don't know if he's entirely correct, but the idea of employers encouraging health in employees so they don't jack up costs seems silly. Are smoking bans really the supreme moralizing of government? I dunno, but certainly I can see the Demolition Man analogy. One hopes that Wesley Snipes isn't masterminding something as we speak. Oh wait...

What's in a Southeast Asian nation's name? Jonathan Foreman at the Corner seems to think that referring to Myanmar is de facto endorsement of the regime. Obviously, the NYT isn't actually endorsing the regime, as evidenced from their story standing sympathetically with the monks in the streets. Jon Stewart, though, makes fun of Bush here for still identifying Burma as a country. Is calling Myanmar Burma a political statement? Or a factual error? If someone called Israel Occupied Palestine, wouldn't they be in for a load of trouble?

Matt Bai talks about his book The Argument, about bloggers and the intellectually bankrupt Democratic Party, on TPMCafe's book club. He actually responds to the commenters, leading to a quite lively discussion. Worth the read. (Reviews of the book here and here. I've yet to read it, but I've read a decent amount about it.)

Um, does anyone know what just happened in Syria? Cuz I don't.

Not as good as the Harvard-Yale game hacks, but this one's pretty good.

It's a ninja crime spree!

Heh, Reddit's front page has Cracked's list of the 8 most unnecessarily detailed Wikipedia entries. I particularly like the entry on Universe of Metroid Video Game. Boy howdy, that's long.

My roommate is a dick [dot com]. Heh.

OK, I'm not one to defend Bill O'Reilly, but this story seems like it's being blown out of proportion. Yeah, he went to a restaurant in Harlem, and then professed his shock that black people were not all uncouth, gun-toting, profanity-spouting gangstas. The liberal blogosphere has predictably used this as a moment to laugh at Bumblin' Bill. Still, here's a guy, going to eat a meal with Al Sharpton, being taught a lesson or two in how deep his ignorance of blacks was, and immediately here comes the (mostly white, mostly upper-class, mostly male) blogosphere to pillory him. Certainly there's a cultural image projected of "blackness," which remains the only form that O'Reilly or the ruling elite actually see (despite living in Washington, D.C., the blackest city in America). If anything, Bill O'Reilly is trying to become enlightened, and we're smacking around him for it.

Long piece worth reading: Life is more than a moment. Elizabeth Eckford walked to school in Little Rock. Hazel Bryan taunted her. Elizabeth was black. Hazel was white. The moment was captured here, Labor Day 1957. What happened afterwards became a story of unlikely friendship and the hope that all of us have to change and better ourselves. It's not often that you hear a story of good rising up from the depths of hatred. This is one.

Bed-wetter nation. More response to Ahmadinejad's visit, in comparison with Khruschev in 1959.

Great, this is still a story, kept alive by CNN, the new National Enquirer. Honestly, has anyone else noticed just how lame CNN's website has become? Yeesh. See my take on "FUCK BUSH" here.

Ian Parton of the Go! Team has a Guest List on Pitchfork. (Video: The Go! Team - "Doing It Right")

Schmidtty reminded me about DerrickComedy so I checked out the website again. They're still pretty funny, even if not quite to the extent of "Bro Rape."

2007-09-25T13:47:00.000+01:00

Discussions about the future of Internet discussion at the U.Chicago law blog, (with Instapundit!).

Congress is investigating foul mouths. Again. Why haven't they brought our troops home yet?

Heh, other stuff Bill O'Reilly might have noticed that are similar for both white-run and black-run restaurants.

The Legacy of Little Rock at WashPo.

There are no gays in Iran. None. Zero. Nada. We certainly don't execute any of them because they don't exist!

Is cable covered by the FCC?

Heh, outsourcing is so good, even the Indians are doing it! Eventually, the jobs will get back around to America, right?

Monk power! If any group in Burma can fight the junta, it's these guys. No one's got more respect among the populace.

Hah. A meeting of giants.

ZOMGZ HOW TO BREAK THE INTERNET! Remember, with great power, comes great responsibility.

Throwbacks

2007-09-24T15:36:00.000+01:00

Did anyone else watch the Eagles game yesterday? Or more importantly, see those atrocious uniforms? (pictures courtesy of Uni Watch) The Redskins throwbacks were much nicer.

Duck Hunt! Consider at least an hour of your day gone.

Speaking of throwbacks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the New Adolph Hitler, is speaking at Columbia University! Somebody stop him before he converts all of those liberal academic snob elites into his fold of evil... IF HE HASN'T ALREADY! But seriously, folks, I don't think Ahmadinejad is a nice guy, but come on, the whole reaction to this from the conservative press seems rather infantile. I think the real problem is that Ahmadinejad is not an ogre; he's a politician. When people see him, they'll realize he's a person, not a monster. And that's more dangerous for the conservative base than anything else.

Sigh.

Speaking of the war in Iraq, how much is it costing you? All you need to do is compare that spending to this hilarious chart making the rounds online... "List of countries by current account balance." (Scroll to the end for effect.)

Is porn immoral? This guy sez no way.

Slate has another funny slide show: History of the laugh track.

STOP! TASER TIME!

IN RELATED HAMMER NEWS,

Some record reviews I wrote for IDS Weekend

2007-09-22T17:23:00.000+01:00

Yeah, so I wrote a couple reviews for IDS Weekend, but because of space, they have not yet been published. So I'm going to put them up here. I reviewed Chamillionaire's Ultimate Victory and Northern State's Can I Keep This Pen?

Don't Keep It

Northern State – Can I Keep This Pen?

It’s impossible to hear Northern State without thinking of them as the female Beastie Boys. The three “Lon Gisland” girls, Hesta Prynn, Spero and Sprout, punch the last beat just like the Beasties (“Knock knock. Who’s there? Prynn, how you BEEN?/ Do you still have my copy of Huckleberry FINN?”). They dabble in rock and experimental production just like the Beasties. They’re white, bright and geeky just like the Beasties.

And just like the Beasties these days, they suck.

Despite critical love, Northern State sounds like a bunch of privileged white girls play-rapping for a summer camp talent show. While they should have unique perspective in a hip hop world dominated by lewd misogynists obsessed with their own greatness, they simply cannot rap, reminding me of Blondie’s “Rapture,” with equally comical lyrics.

Take these sample rhymes from the highlight on the album, the Seussically suggestive “Things I’ll Do”: “Call me any time, I’ll manage your damage/ I’ll balance your budget then make you a sandwich.” Ugh. While the production behind them evokes a funky double-dutch, the three girls’ flabby rapping fails to illuminate their admittedly humorous, political perspective. Rhyming “2008” and “candidate” seems like the domain of local campaign staffers, not purportedly professional musicians.

On their third LP, Northern State has produced a record that spans genres and styles from the post-punk rock-out of “Cold War” to the old school wiggles of “Sucka Mofo.” Each track begins with exciting sonic territory, but then these amateur karaoke-hour hacks sadly enter the stage. Ad-rock’s production provides the Beastie blessing on boards, and their admirers are many: they’ve toured with De La Soul, Le Tigre, and Tegan and Sara. With pedigree like that, I want to like them a lot – but just because they’re the best rapping liberal Whole Foods intellectual girl group doesn’t mean they’re any good.

Grade: D

God, they suck so much. Here's "Better Already" one of the tracks on the album where they "sing."

---------------------------------------------

Ponder like a rockstar

Chamillionaire - Ultimate Victory

After naming your album Ultimate Victory, anything less than that seems like a let-down. Chamillionaire, Houston’s latest hit-maker, should’ve solidified his position as a rap star after mainstream success in “Ridin’ (Dirty).” Alas, despite high hopes, this album stands as an admirable preachy failure.

Cham’s had enough with bling’n’bitches and tries earnestly to inject true politicization into a genre that has only dabbled occasionally and laughably in social criticism (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” “Vote or Die,” etc.). His sincerity even makes him swear off swear words and abstain from the N-word, staples of the hip hop world.

It’s hard not to applaud him for his attempt, but sadly, Chamillionaire’s commentary can’t sparkle like his more traditional tracks, including two great collaborations with each member of UGK: the one-hand-on-the-steering-wheel low-rider “Pimp Mode” with Bun B and the menacing bass line Southern anthem “Welcome to the South” with Pimp C.

In Cham’s solemn sermon on media bias (seriously) “The Evening News,” he commits some rhyme atrocities to fit his nonsensical observations (Does “one” rhyme with “him”?). Despite capable beats and a neat violin hook, it turns out that criminal lines like “The White House is gonna stay white/ even though we know that Obama’s black” sound terrible regardless. From 9/11 conspiracies to Flava Flav, he sounds as self-righteous as a hip-hop Art Garfunkel – “7’o Clock News/Silent Night” with a drum machine.

Other than his unfortunately popular “Hip Hop Police,” the track on the album that most epitomizes the face-plant of this audacious experiment is “Rock Star,” featuring Lil’ Wayne, the wailing guitar-crunk sound from “Party Like A Rockstar,” the thumps of “We Will Rock You” and meaningless idiotic rhymes. At once meditative and blustery, bashing materialism while basking in its spotlight glow – and rapping poorly – Cham can’t quite tie together this mixed bag, but damned if he doesn’t try.

Grade: C+

Here's Cham's aforementioned well-intentioned debacle, "Evening News." Reading other reviews of this album, you'd think the lyrics were revelatory or "heavy" or "reflective," but really listen to them. They're just incoherent babbling.

Hopefully these appear in the Weekend soon, but I have no guarantees, since they're growing less timely by the minute.

Worse than you think

2007-09-22T04:36:00.000+01:00

First up, Daniel Gross goes over why drastic price-cutting spells problems for the U.S. economy. By heavily slashing prices, they're essentially forcing themselves to make more price cuts for future products (see: American automakers).

A Russian missile commander saved the United States from horrific destruction. No one knows about it.

So maybe this isn't a great idea, but damned if it isn't true.

John Paul Stevens: conservative. Why does he look so liberal then? Oh, because every Supreme Court justice has been replaced by a new more conservative justice. Who appointed Stevens again? Oh, yeah. Gerry Ford. Who's his judicial hero? Oh right, Potter Stewart. Sadly, the reason he's so liberal to us is because we're more conservative than we were 30 years ago. Isn't that terrible?

Speaking of which, hey Democrats? Know what shows that you're ballsy? Being ballsy.

A great indexed.

Oh, shit! A young, pretty, professional woman has gone missing! Oh wait, she's black? Fuck it, not a story.

What's worse than dogfighting? PETA has decided to take on the Orthodox Jew practice of swinging around a live chicken to get it to absorb your sins. Yeah, I didn't know about this either. PETA video here. Not safe for work at all.

YATTA!!!

If the Dylan show in Bloomington is anything like this, I'm going to shit a brick. Or seven.

Video, from Weeds. Priuses. Great for sneaking up on muthafuckas.

Breaking news: Ad put in newspaper

2007-09-20T22:06:00.000+01:00

As many of you know, I am loath to openly Bush bash for no reason other than to Bush bash. I assail liberals and conservatives who go after the easy flubs, the mistimed jokes, the perceived stupidity. But honestly, Andrew Sullivan says what I would:

What a fucking disgrace this man and his journalistic lackeys are.
Excuse my language. But I can't take this any longer. We're at war; and he's still playing Rove's game.

Have you noticed that more ink has been spilled on the Petraeus MoveOn ad than actually, you know, defense of the war? Why's that? Oh, because America has finally had it with Bush's war propaganda. So he goes after an advertisement that someone put in the newspaper. This man has devastated the office of the President and needs to be out of office as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to kowtow to Bush's "authority" despite endless claims that things would change in September (Atrios covers their fraudulent earlier claims fervently). Fall comes on Friday... so where's the withdrawal?
These jokers all make me physically ill, with their tenuous, feckless maneuvering. More senators voted to condemn an advertisement than to protect their own troops from extended tours of duty. So much for courage. While Bush is fighting off advertisements at home, our troops are fighting abroad. As if to make himself even more outrageous, now he's threatening a veto against a Democratic bill for child health care. Because if someone in America deserves health care, it's our lawmakers, not our children. Respectfully, Mr. President, shut up.

Moving on to things that piss me off slightly less, have people been following the Jena Six? There was a significant protest on campus today on Dunn Meadow (as well as Jena), and a lot of ink has been spilled defending the young men on trial. Yet, it's important to note that the attempted murder charges have now been changed to a lesser charge (assault) and the one convicted suspect, Mychal Bell, has a criminal record and was only convicted of second-degree battery. In that sense, didn't the protesters already win? I mean, they're still on trial, but that's because they beat a guy up. When you beat a guy up, it's still a crime. Racism still exists, but the law has rectified its mistake. Should the white dudes have been charged for putting up the nooses? Probably, but the statute of limitations may well be past (I'm not sure). Still, what further action really needs to be taken? The charges have been reduced to something reasonable for a beat-down, and Jena now looks like the racistest town in America (not to mention, the school itself actually burned down). I'm sure that racism existed in the case, but because of all the noise surrounding the case, it's hard to get a good read on what action should be taken now.

Remember that thing about the weak dollar? 1 USD = 1 CAD. Insane.

A bunch of college graduates from various universities took a basic civics test. They sucked. A lot. Some would argue that memorizing facts and dates is irrelevant to understanding history. I would argue that facts and dates are supplementary information and that they are fixed into place by purpose, but if you don't know the facts, then you know shitty history. Take the quiz here. (Disclosure: I got 3 wrong. WTF bonds?)

Thoughts from the Heritage Foundation's Nathaniel Ward on DC Statehood. Here's an idea: if you don't like Taxation without Representation... let's get rid of the taxation. DC will run itself, and as a non-voting territory, will not be subject to federal income tax. I still think DC should be a state (along with Puerto Rico) but that's just me. When did we decide to stop adding states?

An interview with the one, the only, Uwe Boll.

CUBS WIN CUBS WIN. 1 game ahead in first place. One day off before the home stretch. Looks like our pitching is in place for the rest of the schedule.

Today's video is in memory of the senators who voted against the advertisement, or who, like Obama, refused to show up for a cheap political stunt denouncing a newspaper ad. This is an example of the shit they don't have to deal with when riding in their cars to the Hill, and a reminder of the danger facing our troops while they decide whether or not an advertisement was nice or not.

What's a pirate's favorite vegetable?

2007-09-19T14:17:00.000+01:00

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRtichokes!

Yeah, you know what day it is.

Anyone else here see the rate cut as a big problem rather than a boon? With the dollar crashing, shouldn't concern for inflation override the pains of those who are going to lose their homes? A recession sometimes has to happen; it's the nature of financial cycles. People keep stocking up on dollars for the foreseeable future, and no one's just going to dump them without a thought. Still, just because the Dow jumped 300 points doesn't mean a rate cut is a good thing. Besides, points ain't what they used to be.

A new neat WashPost feature: FactChecking the candidates. Should be fun. Should also be fun watching them all deny lying.

What special relationship? Geoffrey Wheatcroft has a great "Hey, wait a minute!" column about how the UK and US "special relationship" is a load of bull.

"Viral" civil rights in Jena, LA. Think this is a fluke? Just take a look at the U-Florida Taser incident.

A new Digg? Apparently it has "MySpace-like features." God, I can't wait.

Revolutionary anti-AIDS drug released. They prevent the virus from entering T-Cells rather than attacking the virus itself.

A fun list of favorite songs with Alf Clausen, the songmaster at The Simpsons.

High-definition politics. How HDTV will affect candidates.

For today's video selection, a salute to the finest work of Alf Clausen, Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off or the Planet of the Apes musical from "A Fish Called Selma."
Planet of the Apes musical from the Simpsons

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Wheels within wheels

2007-09-17T15:27:00.000+01:00

Hey, guess what old fogeys? It's not "those durn kids" who have irresponsible behavior. It's THE OLD FOGEYS, or more accurately, middle-aged men. So really, it's just "those durn kids" from 20 to 30 years ago, the tail end of boomerdom, who never stopped their risky behavior.

The Iraqi government has kicked Blackwater out of Iraq. While this is a promising sign, in that our mercenary army has been renounced by a "country" that we're occupying, but with the way our military budget is allocated by the military-industrial complex, I have a feeling that Blackwater and its brethren will be with us for a while yet.

Guess who's running for President? It's my favorite!

Speaking of Presidential longshots, take a look at this video from WashPost about former Sen. Mike Gravel. He's never gonna win, but God, it's great to watch him try, isn't it? Everyone thinks Hillary, Obama, Edwards and whoever else are liberal, but they obviously never met this guy. Here's a man who deserves to have his message heard, but the netroots remain quiet about Gravel. Too bad really. So I'll do my part: read his issue profile here.

Oh, great. Now I'll never finish Wheel of Time.

Next time you build a football stadium in Florida, make sure you include the water fountains.

Crooked Timber riffs on Matthew Yglesias to link TV show "Long-Arc" problems with the war in Iraq. Crazy? Or inspired?

1997: it's the new 1967.

Video time! Normally I avoid Reddit's videos, as they tend to suck. But this was too good to pass up because of the music. They put a camera on a trolley, then watched people turn into it. I think I'm going to get a bike helmet for sure now. If people can't see a giant trolley, I'm not too confident in their ability to see me.

Whitewashing

2007-09-17T00:32:00.000+01:00

Ali G, I'll be honest. Now's probably not the best time to be releasing your book and accusations about irresponsible GOP government. Y'know when would've been a good time? WHILE YOU STILL RAN SOMETHING IN THE GOVERNMENT. Just like all the ex-Bushies who now throw up their hands (Powell... I'm lookin at you...), he could've done something while still in power. Now he can't. Way to go, schmuck.

More on why the war on drugs is idiotic. Guess what? Morphine isn't that expensive, but it's hard to get because of drug-war bullshit. Y'know how this could be fixed? Ending an outrageous offensive against patients in pain.

Michael Kinsley explains why the student loan industry is a joke. After reading this, the notion of a student loan scandal seemed downright inevitable. A decent rundown of the scandal here.

The 20 best pics from Google Streetview. This is a bit dated, sure, but it's still pretty awesome.

A cool slideshow of the haunts of Raymond Carver.

And finally, Marie Claire asks: Is anal bleaching for you?

OK, boys and girls. Time for the video. Everyone, by now, has seen Britney embarrassing herself and this kid freaking out about it. If you want to watch'em go ahead, but I won't directly add to their views. Instead, I offer the best of the responses to Chris Crocker, Seth Green's rendition of "LEAVE CHRIS CROCKER ALONE!"

You are here.

2007-09-15T22:38:00.000+01:00

The first pictures of Earth from another planet (Mars Spirit Rover). (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Texas A&M)

Due to popular demand (read: heckling from my asshole friends), I will update the blog despite being ass-busy. But here's my idea. I'll post at least 5 links a day. That way you'll all get regular posts, but I won't actually have to eat up that much time. Certainly I read at least that many articles, see that many picture posts, etc. Maybe a lil' commentary here and there, but nothin too big. Oh, and one video. We'll see how this goes.

Great, yet another reason to subscribe to the New York Times. Ugh, I just can't justify spending that much money on a newspaper I'll only read half of every day if I'm lucky. Still, I <3 Daniel Clowes. So who knows?

Hah! Bundys in Russian! An article I saw in the NYT a few days ago talked about Married... With Children in its phenomenally successful Russian incarnation. It uses basically the same scripts as the original show, but in Russian. God Bless America.

Disagreeing with Israel: finally allowed for American Jews. Unless you're this guy.

For all the bellyaching going on about Petraeus SHOCKING report that we're doing so well that we must stay forever, here's a great post by Greenwald about how America's war culture works, and here's a hilarious post from Duncan Black about the importance of September 15th in the GOP datebook. I'm sure they'll follow up, right? Right? Guys? ((crickets))

Taking apart an iPod Touch.

Lastly, this is for two musical giants that the world lost this year, and one of the weirdest meetings between musical giants since Neil Young played in a band with Rick James. RIP Pavarotti. RIP Brown. Pour one out for your homeys.

Presidential candidates, Disney movies, Petraeus' report to Congress, and other things to find on ice

2007-08-16T18:42:00.000+01:00

Okay, lots of links, so I'll keep the commentary short.

First up, I hadn't sat down to read Giuliani's piece in Foreign Affairs yet. And now that I have, uh... he's crazy. Perpetual war for perpetual peace: the Rudy Doctrine. All enemies who happen to be Muslim = Islamofascists. Peace = bowing down to American military might or being crushed. Yglesias has perhaps the most succinct thoughts ("this man is batshit insane"). Jim Henley and Dan Drezner have their own thoughts, which are fairly concurrent. (For a contrast of "Foreign Affairs" articles written by presidential candidates, try reading Edwards' vision here. He may be wrong on trade, but at least he's not a bumbling/maniacal warmonger.)

Yglesias also has this neat shout-out to a competent reporter actually questioning the boilerplate spin given by the federal government.

At least Giuliani has these guys standing with him. Oh wait...

In other campaign news, Hillary: The Play! Next up, Hillary on ice! (Hilariously, Priscilla Barnes plays Hillary. Yeah, that's right, Terri from Three's Company)

Picking a major in high school: good or bad? I'd lean towards bad, just because I've been gleefully listless since whenever, but I bet it'd be good for a lot of kids to stay involved in their studies. Still, picking your job at age 13 seems like a stretch for ending systemic school failure.

WashPost has an excellent look at the underbelly of pro wrestling. And here I thought it was all underbelly.

Wroops.

America gives Israel $30,000,000,000 in military aid (a 25% increase). At this point, does Israel really need aid? I don't think Israel is existentially threatened any longer. Sure, it was in 1973, but these days, I think they can manage with their booming defense contracting industry. (not to mention, you know, their nuclear bomb).

Oh, that whole surge report thing? Yeah, turns out Petraeus won't be giving it to Congress after all and the White House will manage the language and the report. But, says White House spokesperson Dana Perino: "The Congress asked for these reports from the President." Yeah, except that's not what they asked for. BarbinMD at DailyKos has the rundown of what they asked for: a report from General Petraeus, who looks to be increasingly expendable for the Bush Administration, in his call for (gasp!) troop reduction. But I thought Bush was the Commander Guy!

Speaking of Iraq, looks like there's a new coalition. With no Sunnis. Let's see how long this can last.

Do we need a draft?

Top ten newspaper websites. Sorry LATimes, you get pwnd.

A ridiculous picture and video of a crowded wave pool in Tokyo. Yes, there is water in that pool somewhere.

A long but worthwhile essay from Glenn Loury on why America has become an incarceration nation and its long-term effects. Bottom line: upper- and middle-class America benefit from state violence in the punitive justice system, but society on the whole suffers. At what point, then, are we culpable?

SomethingAwfulites will have already seen this, but I just saw it on Reddit today, so sucks to your asmar. It's a 435-foot slip-n-slide.

German physicists claim to have violated special relativity. I'm skeptical. But if they've really broken the speed of light, then Alpha Centauri or bust!

A great series of movies on the making of the Muppet Show. Damn, that's complicated. Oh, how I love the Muppet Show.

Freakonomics author Steven Levitt wonders in his new NYTimes blog how to best attack America. Homeland Security begins its surveillance.

Clicked has a good run-down of Peru earthquake news and information.

This movie looks awesome.

Oh, boy, it's High School Musical PART DEUX! (High School Musical also available on ice.)

In more important music news, it looks like Springsteen is reuniting with the E Street Band for his next album (due for release right near my birthday). In less important music news, Counting Crows is also recording again.

The decline of a great brand: Jaguar.

And finally, just in from CNN, massive miscarriage of American justice system takes place. Dahlia Lithwick tracks Padilla's journey of mistreatment here, here, here, and here. Full coverage of the saga from MotherJones here.

OK, video time. That Muppet Show thing reminded me of how much I love those wacky Muppets. It's one of the Great Summits in American pop cultural history and two of my favorite performers: Johnny Cash meets Miss Piggy.

mini-update

2007-08-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

Because Anna's here, I'm not going to make a full post, but I figure a lil' one will do. So, no commentary, just links.

NYTimes Sunday has all sorts of good stuff. A great slide-show on highway signs, a feature on couples group therapy, why Elvis wasn't a racist, and the one every blogger is linking to this morning, an expose on the failure of the war in Afghanistan (mostly thanks to the war in Iraq taking resources away).

So, uh, troops? You hate the troops.

Speaking of troops, LATimes has surfing veteran amputees.

Wayne Barrett takes down Giuliani with no mercy in this Village Voice piece. Incendiary.

Jack Balkin refuses the Administration's spin of the FISA bill. Of the anti-authoritarian bloggers, Balkin has been most closely following the tricky legal grounds of the law. His other posts on the subject are definitely worth reading.

When Republicans leak state secrets, it's OK. I guess that's not really news.

Are 10% of people really gifted? British teachers say, eh...

Is virtual marital infidelity as bad as real marital infidelity?

James Fallows has some perceptive takes on China's largely incompetent attempts at censorship. Here's the umbrella post that has interior links to the others. It helps put an article like this in perspective.

Work faster, cows!

People in Jordan and Guam can expect a longer life than Americans. I suspect both our girth and crappy infant health.

This kinda thing irritates me to no end. Once they're ex-employees, they criticize to no end, but where are they when this stuff is actually going down? Where's the outrage when they're still on payroll? Colin Powell, I'm looking at you.

Formin' like Voltron!

Stephen Hunter sucks.

Could this story be any more ridiculous? He rented a plane to hunt down his stolen boat! Straight thuggin.

Speaking of thuggin', please please let this be true. Kanye, do whatever it takes.

Spider-man breaking up with Mary Jane? MJ dying? Gimmicky comic book non-event? Yeah.

Video choice today is a classic: the greatest cartoon short of all time. "What's Opera, Doc?"

Wait till I get my money right

2007-08-06T21:40:00.002+01:00

I can't believe I've missed this. The surrealest video ever. Zach Galifianakis + Will Oldham + Kanye + farm work + Amish Paradise = GENIUS

Higher quality version on Kanye's own website. Check it out. The lip-syncing is uncanny.

My favorite moment is the blotted out tractor logo. Nothing short of brilliant.

Broken promises... so what else is new?

2007-08-06T15:55:00.000+01:00

To begin, I am more angry at the Democrats now than I was at the Republicans. Because, face it, I pretty much expected the Republican Congress to blindly enable the Bush Administration with shameless kowtowing to the unconstitutional expansion of executive power. They've been loving that since Nixon. But before I lament the spinelessness of the feckless Democrats (notice how the words applied to the Democrats are -less words? Powerless, careless, worthless. Less, less, less.), let me go over the surveillance law a bit.

It's important to note that the activities allowed by the law basically already happened, but had been ruled illegal by the FISA court (see previous post). Also, the law's ostensible intent is reasonable. After all, with the routing of most international calls through the great fiber-optic switches in the USA, it makes sense to listen in on calls within the country, as long as the two parties who make the call are non-citizens and out of the country. This law is nothing of the sort.

Reasons why this law blows:

1.) It EXPANDS the Attorney General's power. Yeah, that's right. This guy. Rather than leaving the surveillance oversight in the hands of an external court (the FISA court), the attorney general and director of national intelligence get to approve spying.

2.) This law permits wiretapping as long as the party being investigated is out of the country at the time. That is to say, if an American citizen went overseas and called back to another American citizen in the United States, that call could be monitored, violating both of their Fourth Amendment rights.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

3.) The Democrats and Bush's National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell had already struck a deal for wiretapping that closed the loophole without giving all the oversight to the most dysfunctional Cabinet Department ever. Bush nixed the idea and with more fearmongering, bent enough Democrats to get what he wanted.

It's disgusting to see the Democrats submit to pressure, since they're afraid of being viewed as "weak on terror." Guess what? Something tells me that the Republicans will STILL call every Democrat they can "weak on terror." You know what else makes you look weak? Doing everything the President tells you too, because you're so scared. Want to show you have guts? How about doing something you believe in every once in a while? How many non-binding resolutions must the American people endure before this Congress takes real action? ARGH.

More (and better-worded) reactions from Balkinization, Greenwald, and Dover Bitch.

OK, on with the linksesses...

More broken promises from the Army Corps of Engineers. Looks like the 17th Street Canal, supposedly built to withstand a storm surge of 13.9 feet, can't even take a 6.3 foot storm surge. It turns out that if you have a levee which can withstand a high storm surge at almost all points except one, the storm surge still busts the levee. (More about Army Corps incompetence in this long Time magazine feature.)

Sarkozy keeps it real. Mad real.

Imagine my surprise that flooding Iraq with weapons in an attempt to spark the ragtag security forces turned out to be a bad idea. Still, 190,000 firearms? Sweet zombie Jesus. Hey, it goes with the NRA position here... guns don't kill people, after all. Guns defend people from people with smaller guns.

George Bush, master of history.

This long piece on one family's experience in open adoption in the LATimes really touched an emotional chord with me. I hope you all take the time to read it. I guess in the age of open adoption, the birth parents can suddenly decide to play a much bigger role, but the strain it puts on a child seems extraordinary.

Looks like Soriano is injured. Time to trade for Griffey.

A great piece in the Sunday Trib about the mighty 7-Elevens in Taiwan. If Taiwan had a true national symbol, it would be a 7-Eleven. Or more accurately, it would be an unending row of 7-Elevens down the entire street.

LCD Soundsystem has a great interview/in-studio performance on NPR's World Cafe.

Apparently, getting rid of a pheromone sensor turns female mice into raunchy dudes, "complete with mounting, pelvic thrusts, and the ultrasound calls that males use to attract a mate." Good-bye sewing circle, hello Foxy Boxing.

Via reddit, it's Damn Interesting hunting for the source of the word "thug." I always knew Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had something to do with it.

Jimmy Wales refuses to submit Wikipedia to the censorship in China that Google has undergone (and downright complicity in repression in which Yahoo has participated). It's a tough line to toe, but I think Wales can do it. Long live Wikipedia!

There's no stopping the wave of dangerous Chinese goods. There's just too much of it. So comes the true high cost of low prices... sometimes the products kill you.

More on the issue of the social contagion of obesity. Here's the original article in the New England Journal of Medicine, with some interpretive riffs in Time. The general idea is, as one person got fat, the chance of his/her friends increased significantly. Therefore, obesity can be 'spread' through social networks. There is, however, a dissent coming from children's health advocates like Dr. Neil Izenberg, whose letter in the NYTimes describes the problems of 'quarantining' fat people. I agree that attaching an additional stigma to being fat can aggravate rather than improve the situation, but it's hard to argue against the fact that friends and family strongly influence eating/exercise patterns. Here's Izenberg's interview in Alternet.

Final note before the video, Lee Hazlewood, great American musician, died over the weekend. While there are a few tributes here and there, the best tribute I could find was this NYTimes article (Select only, folks) from January of this year. Priceless.

Ok, video time. This is terrible. Awful. Horrible. Maybe the worst commercial I've ever seen. Talking sandwiches, saying Filet o' Fish. In different accents. For a whole minute. It's godawful and had me staring in dumb disbelief that such an abomination was ever made. And that's why you should watch it.

Secrets...

2007-08-03T16:24:00.000+01:00

So, it turns out that a FISA court overturned part of the Bush surveillance plan as illegal, which is why the Bushies are scrambling to expand surveillance. Wait, but why didn't we find out about it until now? Oh, that's right, like all things dealing with this hilarious Administration, it's a SECRET. You know, like this guy's job description. At least, it's only a secret until the Senate Minority Leader reveals it all on Fox News. Then it's not a leaked secret, just a sincere cry to fix our intelligence gaps. Right. In any case, the Post spends a lot of time talking up the potential Boehner leak, but to be honest, what's most disturbing here is the attempt to circumvent FISA through even broader legislation. Overreaching, Big Brother surveillance, and sneaky media manipulation? Check, check and check. Just another day in the life for this farce of a White House.

Not that Congress is much better. Here are the sober lawmakers having a raucous spat over whether the Democrats counted the votes wrong. Or something. I mean it could be worse... but not much. At least the public approves! I hate to say it, but I liked Congress better when it was Republican. Then at least my hate for it could be uncomplicated. With this Congress, I have to accept that my own party may be lamer than I ever imagined. Sheesh.

The other failed invasion/occupation. Ethiopia in Somalia and the destabilization that it has brought. (Free registration required)

Gates testifies bluntly about Iraq's deteriorating political situation. As others have noted, no matter how good the military news is, it's impossible to separate the military aims from the political ones. And the rest of the situation remains terrible.

Commander Obama toughens his stance, while everyone and their momma chews him out. I don't necessarily see hypocrisy in wanting to talk to North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran, while wanting to attack camps inside Pakistan. If you can't control what's going on within your own borders, and those people have directly threatened the United States, why not invade? Obama's "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" shtick on Iraq only makes sense if there is a right war at the right place at the right time. Yet, in the context of the failed Iraq war and the ailing efforts in Afghanistan, we would do better to exercise caution than fling ourselves into a country teetering on the edge of serious civil unrest. I find this to be another troubling example of an Obama campaign more fixed on shrewd political maneuvers than on speaking uncomfortable truths about American policy and bringing about sweeping change. I'm still backing the Barackmobile, but I'm skeptical as ever. Regardless, everybody should seriously consider the remarks by Obama in his sweeping foreign policy speech (Read it in full here). The question of how we construct a substantive foreign policy out of the Iraq debacles must be brought to the forefront. No one but Obama and Paul (in his ultimate isolationism) has proposed anything of the sort.

It turns out that taming the Yangtze doesn't mean taming flooding. Ten percent of China's population (120 million people) were affected by this year's floods, anyways.

Is this creepy to anyone else? I mean, I understand that we want to market things younger and younger. Also, I know that everyone knocked TV and radio and comic books for kids because it was lurid and whatnot. But isn't social networking for kids a little (a lot) dangerous? Despite assurances that strangers can't get on these sites, come on, it's not that hard to be anonymous online. I dunno, call me old-fashioned, but I think there are enough dangers in the world without adding virtual ones, and the parental units are always so behind the times that online dangers may be the most difficult to detect.

Uh, how is this not bigger news? Reporter has affair with Mayor of Los Angeles... who she is reporting on while the affair takes place. I'm pretty sure the Los Angeles case even worse than this. Maybe I just haven't been watching the news enough to see more of it.

A totally ridiculous Ask Metafilter question. Worth reading the whole thread.

Note to IU football players: If you throw a water balloon at the driver of a car at a stop light, make sure it's not an IU Police Officer.

I'm fairly certain that this is sorcery. (I know, I know, I always blame wizards, but it's the only reasonable explanation)

See, this is the part where the NAACP says, "No, we don't want the PR nightmare of publicly defending a coddled athlete who probably hosted vicious dogfights in his home. We learned from the Duke rape case that jumping to the defense of the black person in the situation just because he or she is black, is probably a bad idea." Wait, they're defending him because they're bowing to community pressure rather than doing what's right and staying out of it? Oh, well scratch that last part then. I swear, Chappelle wasn't entirely wrong.

Are there too many heroes? A worthwhile point; we worship people for just doing what they're supposed to do.

God Bless America. A story of the most glorious shit in the history of the world.

Weird hidden photoshopping in al Qaeda images and tapes.

After Internet 2.0, are we just going to have Bubble 2.0? It certainly seems reasonable. After all, the hype about social networks and user-generated content are outpacing any actual business these people do. Isn't it? Doesn't this sound familiar?

Hey, maybe we just execute people because we really like executing people. No amount of forensic technology improvements can hide the fact that prosecutors, police, and citizens all want to see suspects arrested, tried, sentenced to death and killed.

Speaking of murder, here's a disturbing piece in the New Yorker about how a U.S. Attorney wanted to solve the murder of one of his subordinates and ended up axed by the Bush Administration, while the killer of Tom Wales is still at large. It's long and covers the rather unseemly trail of murder, but the worst part is its open-ended ending.

J-Pod reviews the Simpsons Movie for the Weekly Standard. A strange, if not entirely wrong-minded review. Probably the best negative review of the movie I've yet seen.

Another long piece, available without subscription temporarily from the Atlantic archives, about why Americans hate the press. Come to think of it, Fallows has some pretty good reasons: The media is out of touch with America, largely accepts the powers-that-be spoonfeeding them, and is so eager to talk about itself with meta-reporting that real issues get avoided. "Bias" isn't why people distrust the media. Laziness is.

An unbelievable story about how a teacher quit his job after a failed student was passed by administration to boost graduation rates. Just goes to show that the goals of public schools in America have very little to do with education, and a lot to do with being holding pens and getting public dough.

Say it ain't so! Roy Pearson, the judge of the famous dry cleaning pants case, is going to lose his job. Poor Roy; those malicious Asiatic dry cleaners ruined his pants, his reputation, and his job!

You may notice there's nothing here about the Minneapolis bridge collapse. Frankly, there's enough out there that you can find it on your own, but here's a video anyways.

AT&T may be run by Satan, but this Blue Room Lollapalooza live webcast should be pretty neat.. Bookmark it for the weekend here.

Gary, Gary.

Ha, these guys are blogging about breaking absurd laws that are still on the books. Pretty funny stuff.

The Real Or Fake Breast Test. Uh, NSFW, kids. I got 14/20. That shit is tricksy!

A pretty neat trick: solar panels + Stirling engine = 500 megawatts of power with no pollution.

Oh, also, the Cubs are in a rather unbelievable first place, but I don't think it's gonna last too long with a three-game set against the Mets. Hope Big Z is lights out today. Otherwise, it's gonna be a long series. Let's see some power. Where da HR's at?

iPwnd. Apple must change its design for its iPhone battery or get class-action lawsuited.

Video o the day. It's CHROMEO TIME! The pimpest pizza deliveryman ever chills with Chromeo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.

Things to do in the Philippines when you're imprisoned

2007-07-31T15:58:00.000+01:00

First up and the must-read: Glenn Greenwald demolishes the O'Hanlon/Pollack NYT Op-Ed (read it here). Really, though, what Greenwald demonstrates here is that neo-conservatism is essentially the active, vigorous foreign policy of liberalism. No wonder the Pollacks and O'Hanlons of the world gleefully continue to cheer the war. This is, in many ways, exactly the war liberals wanted to fight. Let's not forget that mainstream liberal luminaries like Paul Berman and George Packer supported the war, and that the likes of Pollack, O'Hanlon, and Hitchens continue to support the war. It was Bill Clinton who signed off on military action in 1998 and pushed the Congressional "regime change" Iraqi Liberation Act. Greenwald strikes down any notion that liberals can be "Administration critics," simply based on their credentials as "liberals." I would say that I'm shocked, shocked to find out that the media is irresponsibly reporting bullshit, but then, no, I'm not surprised at all.

Speaking of Iraq, it looks like the Brits are so super-confident in the Bush surge's efficacy that they are planning to pull troops out regardless of what happen s. Strange that amidst the brouhaha over the Bush/Brown summit, few news agencies ran with this seemingly significant story. Fake "results" or no "results," the Coalition of the Willing looks like it'll just be us and Estonia. (Also, looks like Iraq's parliament is going on vacation anyways!)

OK, I agree mostly with this op-ed piece espousing containment as opposed to war, but how did a ragtag band of criminals become the necessary target of a whole new Cold War? Osama bin Laden is probably dead, and the damage these guys do is not crippling in the least. The global economy is chugging along regardless, and terrorism in the West has become more "aspirational" than anything. Compare the London car bombs to the subway bombings just a few years ago. I'm just wondering whether these criminals deserve a whole new Cold War, and I wonder how a Cold War against terrorists would even work. Anyways, count me a skeptic.

Could this slippery and/or incompetent and/or evil huckster lose his job already? Please?

Looks like colleges have found a way to stop file-sharing without banning it. Just make it really, really slow.

Zimbabwe, please, just stop. 100,000 percent inflation?!?! How do states fail? Someday we'll look at Zimbabwe as a textbook example.

OK, this is from Drudge, so a caveat applies. Also, I don't know how "big" this phenomenon is. If this is like that choking game idiocy last year, it's nothing that's been overblown by media. Right, so vegans are refusing to have sex with meat-eaters. I guess if you saw it as a defining moral issue, you couldn't do it any other way.

A cool photo essay on life under Antarctic ice. Those penguins are awesome.

Why The Simpsons is mankind's greatest achievement. Thanks, AV Club. The movie's a B+, by the way.

GM is mysteriously making money again. Alas, this means their UAW negotiations can't go anywhere but south.

I never saw the documentary The Bridge, and had almost entirely forgotten it. Then, this LATimes article reminded me about the Golden Gate suicide debate. I'd say the numbers need to be publicized so they can build a barrier. For San Francisco, nanny-state of all nanny-states, to say that they can't build a public safety barrier for "aesthetic" reasons, then cover up the suicides, is quite ridiculous.

My Super Sweet 16 (or My Super Sweet 2) India-style.

There are only 12 types of ads in the world. Seth Stevenson details them all.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! FUCK!

Also, in NOOOOO! FUCK! news, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni die one day apart? A tragic loss.

Remember the AFI re-100? Take a look at the Internet film community's top 100. Yeah... I'd rather have the AFI's, thanks very much. As Schmidtty has noted before, the Internet's top 100 is just a testosterone-loaded, younger AFI100 with its Die Hard (#30) and Spielberg action (Raiders and Jaws in the top 10). I suppose it makes sense, but it's unfortunate that the online film community is so... what is the word? dorky.

My meta note of the day is on America's incarceration crisis. We've got a country which incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizenry than any country but North Korea, with some states' prisons are so over-crowded that they're now sending them across state lines. Meanwhile, it turns out that after getting out of jail, you're not really out of jail, whether it's through sexual offender databases or pot-smokers being prevented from voting. The result of "tough on crime" for years has just ended in prisons crammed with non-violent drug offenders, and no end in sight. We'll commute Lewis Libby's sentence, but mercy for Texas criminals who don't have ties to the President? Eh, screw it (TimesSelect). I'm just a bleeding-heart liberal crazy. Can we get rid of mandatory minimums, please? I wonder what polling information would reveal about the public's view of the prison population.

OK, it was hard to pick a winner for today's video, so I'll include the two other links I would've put on. First, the internet phenomenon of the Filipino prison "Thriller"... so I guess there's something you can do with prison overpopulation. So You Think You Can Dance: Prison Edition! Second, this remarkable video of a man asking a pertinent question for anti-abortionites... so if abortion should be illegal, what should women who abort their fetuses get as punishment? Uh, turns out, no one's been thinking about it. Huh. How 'bout that? Pro-lifers not thinking things through. Whodathunkit?
But the winner today is an older video, Nina Gordon singing "Straight Outta Compton." Even better than Ben Folds' "Bitches Ain't Shit." The incongruity is even greater.

TOONCES LOOK OUT!

2007-07-19T18:43:00.000+01:00

First up, the must-see of the day is a documentary by a Guardian embedded photographer named Sean Smith who follows a group of American soldiers. It’s short, graphic, and a tiny glimpse into the challenges facing our troops (and really, any troops in a war). If you’ve read the quote about challenging the President and members of Congress to sit with a company of soldiers for 15 months, it comes from this video. Every American should watch this video, then look at the now-faded “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back of their cars, and then think about what that phrase even means.

Pakistan, our most important ‘ally’ in the War on Terror, seems to be well on its way to hell-in-a-handbasket (BTW, my spell check informs me that “handbasket” is not a word). If Musharraf no longer has control of the military and intelligence services, he’s not going to have control of his country much longer. The suicide attacks and the recent Red Mosque shootout dovetail with this story on the ‘disappeared’ under the Musharraf regime, and demonstrate the bizarre dynamics of a war as poorly conceived as the ‘War on Terror.’ Who exactly are we fighting? Who should we be fighting?

Tasers: now in pink! Quote from one of the makers: ‘The brothers, inspired by “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” thought to themselves, “Why can’t we make a phaser,” Mr. Smith said.’ Great.

Eating beef is less green than driving. Eat a steak, raise earth’s temperature. It’s notable how the global warming problem is changing our ethical worldview. Really though, it’s not that different than traditional morality: we have to give up some personal pleasure in order to promote a greater good. Yet, in the climate of selfishness imbued by the roots of capitalism (I’m not going all proletarian here, just stating the fact of the matter), it’s tough to convince people to give up their hard-earned monetary and material gains (like a tasty Big Kahuna burger) for something as abstract as ‘the planet.’

If the White House thinks that you have “a significant risk of committing an act of violence” (whatever “significant” means), they can take away your stuff. I don’t think it’s nearly as dire as redditors are making it seem, but it is just another example of Bush overreaching to expand his own executive power. What seems like a judicial tool to freeze assets is actually a dangerous move that suggests that anyone who tries to “destabilize” the world doesn’t deserve to hold property.

Firefox 3 preview. Bag o’ dimes.

I think Petraeus is a fine soldier, but when you appear on Hugh Hewitt’s show for a big interview, I think your words lose credibility. If he had given this interview on, say, 60 Minutes or 20/20, this would be front-page news. As it stands now, he’s just another puppet of the right-wing propaganda machine.

So Trix is too sugary to market to kids any more, but Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs... that's still cool. Seriously, could this be any more disingenuous? If you're making a cereal with a cartoon rabbit as its mascot and a motto like "Trix are for kids!" I don't think stopping a few commercials is going to change your target audience.

Hah, Leahy sends his questions to Gonzales beforehand so he can’t forget the answers. I’ll bet he still refuses to answer, can’t remember, doesn’t know, and keeps his job.

A visual representation of every girl this guy’s hooked up with for the last 27 years. The best part is the cryptic little graphic in the stop sign that indicates why they broke up.

40 Years of Eric Carle: Watch the audio slideshow. If you don’t like Eric Carle, go sit in the corner.

Today's video selection is an oldie-but-goodie from the SNL archives. Actually, did I say goodie? I meant terrible. Still, Toonces makes me laugh every time.

Belated blogiversary

2007-07-18T17:15:00.000+01:00

Happy Blogiversary! Yeah, I’m late to the party, but anyhoo, Ross Douthat has some thoughts on the blogosphere being ten years young. I agree with the first half of Douthat’s post that blogging is good for punditry, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily bad for deeper writing. Yes, editorializing is probably not a great way to start writing novels or even long-form news analysis. For example, take a look at Glenn Greenwald’s new book (excerpts here and here). It reads (surprise, surprise) a lot like his blog, and yes, many of his prose tendencies show up in droves (too many block quotes in a row, long, convoluted sentences, and a bit too much eye-rolling). Regardless, it is a book and has long-form prose that works. Sure, it ain’t Anna Karenina, but why should it be? I would venture that very few bloggers are actually looking to write philosophical treatises and novels. Or more importantly, to counter Douthat, that very few people looking to write philosophical treatises and novels are out there writing blogs.

Something I’ve been curious about… what ever happened to the war czar? It was such a big deal maybe three weeks ago, and now, Gen. Lute is nowhere to be found. It’s all Petraeus this and Pace that. Lute appears to be meeting with lawmakers, but he’s nowhere in the public eye. A search on GoogleNews registers 33 stories for “war czar” but over 9,000 for “Petraeus.” Wasn’t Lute supposed to be the point man on the war on terror? How strange that he’s an invisible media figure…My theory? He’s a mild skeptic of the surge, and therefore unfit as a non-true-believer to be displayed before the media, lest he give his actual informed opinion.

That ‘new’ bin Laden tape that everyone was crowing about? Turns out it’s not so new. In fact, looks like it’s five years old. Wroops!

The FDA is a ham-handed, ineffective piece of government bureaucracy. At least now everyone knows it.

Watch Barnaby Philips’ report on Turkish Kurds here. It’s just a hint of how hard it could be to simply retreat to “Kurdistan” in Iraq (the preferred strategy of Andy Sullivan).

A weird LATimes story that was inexplicably at the top of their e-mail newsletter, with an intriguing title that should please everyone: ‘Nudity, explosives, and art’.

Duke Cunningham talks bitches and hos with the FBI from inside the joint. Scroll down to the bullet points for the true hilarity. It’s a riot.

Rating squirt guns on Slate. No Oozinator, though.

A new Smoove B column!

If you saw this xkcd comic a while back, you’ll love these photos. Chess on a rollercoaster!

Art Brut meets Harry Potter. ‘Nuff said.

Should we watch movies with actors in drag?

OK, so you know how I love well-told stories. Well, here's one that I watched a while back that's definitely worth watching if you haven't yet. The punchlines are incredible.

An update for Glen

2007-07-18T07:03:00.000+01:00

OK, I’m back in America and should seriously start updating again now that I have nothing but time on my hands. I’ve decided to write the updates in an open Word document all day and then just copy and paste them into Blogger whenever I feel the posts are long enough. So here goes with today assorted internet stuff.

Apparently, it’s a good thing that guys don’t do all that communicating. When chicks do it too much, it gets ‘em down. Grunting and muttering about sports is enough for us, thanks. Quote: “Getting people with issues together doesn't always make things better.” I’m looking at you, LiveJournal…

While Conrad Black awaits his hearing on his flight risk, Chris Hitchens gloats about it here. It’s worth the read if only because there’s nothing more fun than reading Hitch tear someone to shreds.

Steve Brodner explains Bush foreign policy in cartoon form. Explanation only slightly less convincing than Bush’s own National Intelligence Estimate. So, we’re supposed to believe that our strong offensive against terrorism is working, even though we’re also told that al-Qaeda is as strong if not stronger than ever?

Speaking of Iraq, the Democrats are pulling their all-nighter Senate slumber party to kick-start the Iraq war debate, but I don’t think the GOP is biting. These guys drive me crazy. Like Arlen Specter on the Judiciary committee, these guys moan and groan about how shitty the Bush Administration policy is, then do nothing to change it. Not that the Democrats are any less worthless. Still, complaining that the event is a mere stunt has been soundly rebutted here by Dick Durbin. Watch the whole video if you can. The transcript is unreliable at best.

Hah, American software firm punks Iran.

So, while Drudge today trumpeted DOW 14K from its front page, David Leonhardt at the IHT reminds everybody that 14,000 ain’t quite what it seems like, thanks to inflation.

I just attended the Pitchfork Music Festival this weekend, and it kicked eight kinds of ass. Despite minor quibbles about sound cut-outs and a tad bit of overcrowding (the Chicago Fire Department shut down Girl Talk’s set early), the music, atmosphere and price ($50 for 3 days?!) were just right. Good recaps here and here. Best sets of the weekend: Clipse, Battles, Of Montreal, Jamie Lidell, De La Soul, Menomena, and Sonic Youth performing Daydream Nation.

Vote for the best sports mustache of all time. If you didn’t vote for Rollie Fingers (or write in Rod Beck) then you’re not a true American.

Learning to like like. Like, totally. A linguist’s view at a linguistic quirk.

When your ex-employer pisses you off, sometimes you have to destroy their property with a tank.

The end of paper? Scripps closes down Cincinnati and Covinton, KY papers, while BusinessWeek wonders how long to keep the presses running. At some point, isn’t a major paper going to have to axe its print product? And if it doesn’t survive, will that spell the end of newspapers in general?

Real men dig The Fifth Element. Oh, Ruby Rhod.

In honor of both the Clipse and the old-school Transformers movie, here's an amateur music video of Wamp Wamp with clips (pow!) from the movie. It's not particularly well done, but to see the chorus is worth it.

AFI re-100

2007-06-23T12:47:00.000+01:00

OK, one more movie thing. Schmidtty pointed me towards the re-evaluated AFI rankings of the top 100 (American) (narrative non-documentary feature) films of all time. Only one movie from the the Aughts is in the new ranking (versus seven from the 90s on the 1997 list). That movie is LOTR: Fellowship of the Rings. A decent choice for the epic Aughts, but I'd think Eternal Sunshine and maybe Million Dollar Baby or possibly even Requiem for a Dream would deserve some mention. I'd put movies like Waking Life, Spider-Man 2 or Memento on my shortlist of consideration too. Let's not forget that they put Dances With Wolves on the list last time (a movie that has not aged well at all).

Right, things about the list I'm happy about: the rises of Raging Bull and American Graffiti as well as the inclusion of Nashville, Shawshank, Do the Right Thing, and Blade Runner. The descent of Forrest Gump (but not far enough!), the near-removal of Ben-Hur, and Gone With the Wind out of the top five.

Removals that blew my mind: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Third Man, (come on, when we talk about "most influential," how can we leave that out?), Jazz Singer, Doctor Zhivago, Manchurian Candidate, and Fantasia. Also, Fargo. Come on.

Additions that blew my mind: Titanic (higher than Pulp Fiction?! higher than Do The Right Thing?!), Intolerance replacing Birth of a Nation (by the AFI's standards, Birth certainly had more influence, historical impact, and long-lasting popularity. I like Intolerance more, but Birth is more justly Griffith's American "classic"), Cabaret (this one doesn't blow my mind so much as I didn't like it), including Toy Story at the expense of Fantasia. (Does a list of great American movies only deserve two animated ones? Not that I don't love Toy Story, but why couldn't they have made room for both?), Sixth Sense (I'd give it another decade), Saving Private Ryan (same).

Undeserved bump-ups: The Searchers (Is this really going to be canonized as the great American western? God, I hope not. It's not bad, but there's plenty better, even on the list.) The Sound of Music. (I love this movie to death, but really, #40?) Rocky. Yeah. No. (Can anyone believe that Stallone was nominated for the screenplay Oscar?

Undeserved knock-downs (there were a lot): On the Waterfront down 11 spots, Clockwork Orange down 24 spots, and French Connection down 23 spots. One trend was that movies which once set the bar for "edgy" (Bonnie and Clyde, Jaws, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Clockwork, Manchurian, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Taxi Driver, etc.) were deemed somehow weaker after the passing of time. (There are exceptions: Deer Hunter comes to mind.) I suppose it's fair that since we see the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the sex taboos of The Graduate, or the psychosis of Taxi Driver magnified enormously in rather bland contemporary studio movies for the masses, it's hard to find it shocking any more, which admittedly lent much of those films' power.

Also, knocking It's A Wonderful Life down 9 spots? Not cool.

Movies that continue to be excluded for reasons passing understanding: Anatomy of a Murder, Night of the Hunter, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, any Lynch film (Eraserhead? Blue Velvet? Mullholland Drive? Take your pick.), L.A. Confidential, Saturday Night Fever (yeah, you read that right.), Lady from Shanghai, Dog Day Afternoon, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Red River.

OK, that's my spiel. Obviously, as Schmelee says, these lists are best for consideration by others and inspiring debate. I definitely give the list props for accepting changes and searching further rather than defining film greatness concretely. Still, many of the weaknesses of the first list remain, just updated for newer films.

P.S. Here's the grand Canonizer Ebert's take on the AFI list.

An update

2007-06-23T11:51:00.000+01:00

OK, folks, I'm back, after sloth and vacation. I was just going to wait till I go back to the States to update again, but there's enough that I'm reading that it's worth mentioning.

I wonder whether I should go with smaller items. Oh well.

First off, another week, another Bush administration resignation. What was that old Freedom Movement poster?
"There's a street in Itta Bena called Freedom. There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There's a department in Washington called Justice."

Justice, it appears, is only the name of the department, not of its profession, which is obfuscation and denial.

The noise surrounding Guantanamo closure seems genuine this time, despite White House denials. Still, I'm not holding my breath. Let's not forget that over a year ago, Bush said he'd "like to close Guantanamo, but..." Deferring again, this time to the military, Bush eschews responsibility that belongs to him solely. Way to lead.

Religious students have abducted foreign nationals in Pakistan and are holding them in a mosque for "immoral activities." Say, there seems to be a deafening silence from the Pakistani Parliament on this injustice, right after they condemned England's knighthood of Salman Rushdie. Irshad Manji nails the hypocrisy of demanding "tolerance" towards Islam while its extremists use it to justify the greatest intolerance.

If you haven't seen the trailer for the Coen Brothers' new movie "No Country for Old Men"... you should. Javier Bardem is a bad-ass. If you love Westerns, blood, or Cormac McCarthy, this is the movie for you.

(Speaking of which, I'll blog soon about the last two solid films I've seen, Persepolis and Death Proof, which was released in France separately from its Grindhouse partner, Planet Terror.)

Google's solar panels. Pretty neat business.

Um, isn't photography legal? I guess not.

NPR runs down some helpful facts and analysis on health insurance to think about surrounding Sicko, the new Michael Moore feature.

Good news from Iraq? I hope so. Instapundit notes that this has been weakly covered by MSM, but let's be fair, we've heard this "good news" spiel before. It only goes to further emphasize how September is a meaningless date. When Petraeus and the new commanders testify before Congress in September, the "We're Winning!" spin will just keep on coming, while people continue to die unnecessarily. Anbar has been subdued, but the top al-Qaeda commanders slipped away in Baqubah. We squash one insurgent group and another one rises up. And, surprise, surprise: the political situation is still a mess, with the sectarian tensions not weakening.

Slate's slideshow of (really) early movies is worth a gander.

Noel Murray and Scott Tobias do AV Club crosstalk about the efficacy of the MPAA's rating system. Worth the read if you've got time.

Ridiculous. 78 in a 55 zone in Virginia = 1,250 bucks. It's another perk of being rich... you can afford to speed.

Must-read: Seymour Hersh's piece on Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (Ret.), who wrote the report to investigate prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Essentially, he was sold out for doing his job and having integrity. As we've learned in this Administration, being a good man and a good foot soldier are incompatible. Taguba has some harsh words at the end:
“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”
For today's video selection, I really wanted to pick the International Players' Anthem with UGK (ft. Outkast), just because it's so nice to hear Andre rapping again with some great beats and a solid video. You can see it here. The winner, though, is the video that has taken the internet by storm, a five second, erroneously named clip that shouldn't (and isn't) funny, which of course didn't stop me from laughing at it. Here's "Dramatic Chipmunk."

At least the Bush Administration can say it's best in one respect

2007-06-06T11:26:00.000+01:00

...Most Ironic Administration In History

Adding to his various ironic schticks (the emphatic "I'm the decider/commanderguy" bit, the "We do not torture" while torturing, the "Freedomerica" while breaking down our freedoms... the list goes on), here's Bush in Prague with the Czech President yakking about press freedom (scroll to the last blurb). Seems that the press conference was one of those where the press don't get to ask any questions. Bush at the end thanked the media for a "chance to discuss these issues with the media." Apparently, "discuss with" now a synonym for "force-feed to". On the one hand, I should love it because of the irony... but on the other hand, I'm dying inside because this guy is my President.

Meanwhile in the race to replace the guy... uh, what the hell planet is NRO on? I'm sorry? There's so many things wrong with this idiocy. First, the "winner" of tonight's debate if there ever was one was McCain. He stood his ground, held unpopular positions, and reminded Republicans why they liked him in the first place. But second, and most importantly, Levin posits that Giuliani, Thompson, and Romney are "Presidential" while the three leading Democrats, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are not. Really? Where the hell is this guy coming from? This is a perfect demonstration of the Republican conflation of testosterone and leadership. Note that the three Levin picks are the three best conveyors of testosterone... Giuliani the presumed 9/11 hero, Thompson the actual actor, and "Double Guantanamo" Romney the game show host. Never mind that McCain actually fought in a war. These guys have "guts." These are the "dream" candidates?

While the Republicans distance themselves from Bush precipitously, they are all still descendants of his legacy: on torture, on foreign policy, on big-government "conservatism," etc. Greenwald fairly well dismantles the right's supposedly sudden discovery that Bush is not a "true" conservative just as soon as he's not popular any more. Now, as Atrios suggests, the Republicans can go embrace a new Leader to replace the disgraced one. As soon as he's unpopular, Bush is no longer useful to "the movement." These guys drive me nuts.

With all the Rome/America comparisons floating about, here's a more in-depth piece in Vanity Fair excerpted from Cullen Murphy's new book on the subject. Murphy identifies the problem of private contractors and government outsourcing as the source of the downfall of the "empire" as it were. I'm not sure if I entirely agree, but no doubt, Murphy succinctly breaks down the problems of the contractor-based system.

So the Second Circuit ruled that if the words "fuck" and "shit" are used on air in an off-the-cuff comment, the station can't be fined if they reach the audience's ears. A victory for the First Amendment! But wait! FCC Chair Kevin Martin doesn't think so, releasing this press release... which contains the dreaded words "fuck" and "shit" themselves. So... in Martin's world, if CNN broadcasts his press release, can they be fined? Should they? Hey, Kevin Martin. Fuck you.

The New Republic (free registration) has a series of pieces on Bernard Kouchner, France's new Foreign Minister. It's definitely worth a read, since Kouchner will no doubt be the new global face of France and has almost no previous exposure in America.

Am I the only one who finds the "PARDON SCOOTER" talk a bit silly? Isn't this the same party that thought that perjury was a high enough crime and/or misdemeanor to impeach Bill Clinton? And, not that it matters when it comes to perjury, but Clinton's was about a blowjob, and Libby's was about the outing of a covert CIA agent. While Libby's defenders may fight to make the public think that Valerie Plame was a desk jockey, make no mistake. She was a covert agent. So covert that the CIA won't let her disclose information already in the public domain in her memoir. This guy broke the law and lied under oath. Where are all the "law and order" guys now?

In memory of great "Hey! It's That Guy!"s, Cracked has a list of the 20 best "That Guy"s. Amazed that Walsh isn't number one, though. And I don't think Cromwell can count as a "That Guy." He even had a starring role in a short-lived family drama.

Bye Bob. You made so many summer weekday mornings Righter.

I bought my ticket to go see the sneak preview of Persepolis Friday night. If you aren't familiar, Persepolis was originally a French language graphic novel in four volumes by Marjane Satrapi, detailing her flight from Iran and consequent interactions with her homeland, her family who was left behind, and various historical events like the Iran/Iraq war. It will be remembered as a monument to the 21st century autobiographical graphic novel, and I love the book and its sequel Persepolis 2. That's why the thought of a movie was so intriguing. I had no idea they were making one until it won the Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Needless to say, I'm pumped. Plus, the filmmakers will be there! And possibly Satrapi, too (although I'm not sure on that one... it may just be the other animation director).

Gas prices pimpin all over the world.

Hah. Amp'd Mobile goes under, because almost half its subscribers don't pay their bills. The danger of approaching the youth market rear their head. We are irresponsible fickle bastards.

OK, that's it for now.
Video clip. It's the Human Slinky! Not that difficult to figure out, but hypnotizing to watch.

Lurn to spell edition

2007-06-02T10:02:00.001+01:00

I really like the idea that the guys who bust these kids' balls and brains over the spelling of diverse English arcana can't spell Maryland right. Apparently, they misspelled Virginia as "Virgina," too. I normally have few qualms about spelling errors. Whatever. Even elementary fleas do it. But when you're holding spelling as this idol to be worshiped and slaved over, you'd better spell the names right. Yeesh.

Speaking of spelling bees, do spelling bees work in other languages? Slate says... sort of. I actually participated in a "word memorization" competition in Chinese school for a few years. You were given a word and then had to give a number of phrases which used the word. This was easy up until they started to get obscure, and in a language with tens of thousands of characters, it's not hard to do.

On the topic of consistency, we return as always to the Bush Administration and its war-cheerleader base. So, maybe you've heard about the al-Qaeda torture training manual (warning: NSFW, graphic, cartoonish depictions of violence)? Well, maybe you haven't. Probably because it hasn't been heavily reported by mainstream media... because the fact that al-Qaeda tortures people is not news. We know they do. They're a fanatical, amoral, nihilist group of killers bent on destroying Western civilization and employing any means to do it. That's why they are bad guys. The right-wingers, however, are riled up. How dare the mainstream media report every piece of news where Americans are accused of torture, but sweep under the carpet this (in their deluded eyes) equally important story? Let's note that the manual is a little shady on its own... if you're al-Qaeda do you really need Tarantino-esque bloodspurting? But let's suppose it is authentic and surprise! al-Qaeda tortures people. Do these guys listen to themselves when they talk? This is their basic question: why is it news when we torture and not news when al-Qaeda tortures? And the simple response is... because we're not supposed to. They want to accuse the media of "boycotting" the al-Qaeda torture story? Fine. But torture is now the policy of my government, and it undermines the ideals of our nation. The only reason our global dalliances were justified was our moral standing as an extraordinary nation, that never tortured, that valued human rights, that invoked the "Four Freedoms." Now, we're trying to be the moral equivalents of al-Qaeda. What a long way we've come. (I was thinking this yesterday and mentioned it to someone, then came home and read Greenwald. And what do you know? Greenwald basically says the same thing I do, but, you know, better. Man, that guy's a hoss. Also, you should read Andrew Sullivan's piece on "enhanced interrogation." It's among his finest work.)

A side note: the right-wing is always accusing us lefty academics of being wishy-washy "moral equivalence" relativists who don't mind women being subjugated so long as it's done by another culture. Because we have to "respect cultures" and whatnot. But the greatest "moral" leader of their side (who they now run away from as if he was carrying antibiotic-resistant TB) has led America into the worst depths of morally ambivalent behavior. Never mind natural laws, or the rights of man. We can hit them because "they" hit us, and sometimes even before "they" hit us. We can torture because "they" torture. We feign outrage at China blowing a satellite out of the sky even though we're trying to do the same thing. We feign outrage at Abu Ghraib prison photos while the horrors depicted within become our policy. We feign outrage at clamp-downs on the press in the Sudan, while Cheney kicks the reporters out of the room. I think we're still suffering whiplash from the last 7 years, and everything that we have lost. When all the Republican candidates for President stand up to out-Rambo each other on how much they'd like to torture people, and the crowd cheers, you know you must be in America... or Pakistan.

ARGH FIRE HIM FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

Onto lighter things, here's a website at which I wasted about ten minutes. It's called Celebritymustache.com and it's exactly what you think it is. Celebrity faces + drag-n-drop mustaches. Awesome.

Surprise. David Hyde Pierce is gay. You don't say.

I really want to see this movie. Why, oh, why does France have to release it three months from now? The New York Times Magazine feature last week on Judd Apatow is enlightening, too.

Finally, here's an intriguing and disturbing paper I read from Bryan Caplan at the Cato Institute. It's an excerpt/adaptation of his new book about why democracies choose bad policies. The intriguing stuff: voters often pick dumb policies and misunderstand basic economics with systematic errors and biases. The disturbing stuff: the only way to eliminate such problems is to leave things up entirely to markets (what a surprise coming from Caplan). But I've been chewing on this for a while. After all, democracy shouldn't be the be-all-and-end-all of governments, right? We should always keep improving, and what comes next? Also, I found his thoughts about anti-market bias as rather thought-provoking... are we who don't understand economics worse for our country? Maybe we should be teaching economics in high school, eh?

And today's video selection has a special place in my heart... from the dear old Chicago Cubs clubhouse. Looks like business as usual. GO CUBS!!!!!1111one1won11!two

Take out the trash edition

2007-05-31T14:50:00.000+01:00

First off, the Naples trash crisis is getting pretty fucked up. IHT reports, pics here.

Want to buy the set from Family Feud? You can on eBay! It only costs a few hundred bucks... plus the estimated $5000 to move... but the chance to stand in Louie Anderson's shoes?!? Come on. Priceless!

A debate with Kucinich, Gravel, Biden? This could get to be the most hilarious debate in recorded history. Certainly more entertaining than the last one...

Slate notes just why the Supreme Court gender-pay ruling is so ridiculous. Short summary: Suppose your employer was stealing from you for years, but you didn't find out for ten years. If you think you're entitled to something, you're wrong. If you think you should complain within the first 180 days, you're in the majority of the Supreme Court! And if you're a working woman, you can go screw yourself (or allow your employer to keep screwing you)! You've come a long way baby... or not. Sometimes the best option is the Dolly option.

This article in NYT makes it sound like just finishing a marathon is better than actually, you know, running in the marathon. It's healthier, less stressful, "everyday Everest," etc. But I'm not sure. I mean, it certainly seems like the distance alone is dangerous if you're not properly trained. And it feels to me that a really slow marathon participant (I'm lookin at you Mike Skinner) could be doing himself more damage if it's just a one-off deal.

Someone voices my evil McGonagall theory about Harry Potter. I think it's fairly persuasive... and worrying. I hope it's not true, but no one is above anything in these books any more.

How Ted Kennedy kicked Mitt Romney's ass. HuffPost has the ads. It's pretty brutal.

Today's video comes via YourDailyAwesome. Midgets were the first ghost-riders, it turns out.

Memorial

2007-05-28T00:58:00.000+01:00

Andrew J. Bacevich has been one of the war's most fervent academic opponents and has written at length about American militarism and the dangers it poses. He was a soldier in a brutal, unpopular war, and a conservative in many traditional aspects of the word. As a sharp critic of the Bush Doctrine, he has noted that neither Democrats nor Republicans have acted in America's best interests, and as a scholar, he has helped lend credence to his brand of paleoconservative isolationism as an alternative to the Iraqi slaughterhouse.

He is also, more importantly than all those things, a father. His son, a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Cavalry, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 13, 2007 south of Samarra. No matter your political leanings, I implore you to consider exactly what it means to "give one's life for one's country." Instead of offering my weak words to honor the dead, I hope that Bacevich's words will suffice (read the whole heart-breaking piece here):

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.
This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.
In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.
I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

But there may be hope that this ungodly war will end, and that Memorial Day next year will not have fresh graves to mourn.

Zombies ruin everything

2007-05-27T21:36:00.000+01:00

Zombies eat up an Apple Store in San Francisco. Also, they make me laugh at this probably iffy movie with an amazing trailer. Zombies really do ruin everything.

Remember that whole thing I was going on about with Google and privacy? Looks like the EU is on it. Yay government overreaching!

As I've said before, support the troops. PAY THEM. "Support the troops" cheerleader rhetoric, especially with Memorial Day right around the corner, has worn particularly thin on me ever since Joel Stein's "I Don't Support The Troops" op-ed came out, to much outcry. Whenever a platitude, truism, slogan, etc. becomes so ingrained that it is untouchable, it loses all meaning and is bent to whoever speaks it. (Witness the Giuliani-9/11 phenomenon.) "Supporting the troops" apparently means sending them with no clear mission other than "victory" (whatever that is), not ensuring their supply lines, paying them poorly, and then abandoning them afterwards. No one who endorses keeping soldiers in this hellhole "supports" anything but their own empty rhetoric. In the meantime, they enjoy "obscene amenities" such as this. Happy Memorial Day. I honestly don't know how the Bushies live with themselves.

Speaking of which, Bush is allowed to invoke children, but we're not allowed to invoke his. Wu-Tang is for the children way more than Bush is.

Argh! Cheney doesn't quit! Neither, apparently, does any other Republican. Many argue that the Democrats aren't going to change the culture that spawned the Bush monster. But at least they should be better than these bozos... right?

I want to note here that the news depresses me more than ever these days. On the way back from Monaco with Anna, I read through the Herald-Tribune, and as much as "there's no news like bad news," I've rarely felt much worse about current events as I do these days. I don't know if our times are necessarily darker than those in the past, or if us news junkies have just become more aware of, and consequently jaded towards, the events of the world. In today's edition, I saw violence continuing in Iraq, Aung San Suu Kyi confined to another year's house arrest, escalating violence in Lebanon and Israel, and a snotty article by Tyler Brule. To watch the forces of what can only be described as evil rising on both sides with the Islamofascists facing off against the militarist American Great Leader complex on the other, and all manner of despots and crackpots in between, one wonders how much longer our humble race and blustery country can keep on putting.

Which is why I'm really hoping for this. Maybe it's a dopey hope that won't be fully realized, but better tarnished hope than assured despair. Who knows if any true changes will come to pass? For now, I've got the audacity to hope.

The difference between journalists and technologists, and what needs to be done to update journalism for a world that has advanced without it.

More on lolcats, Fark on lolpresidents. My favorite is probably William Howard Taft with "I can has cheezburger?"

All right, time for the video selection. Gotta go with some classic Wu-Tang. It's a blast from a past... 2,000,000 B.C. that is. Wu-Tang always had such awesome videos... and no airplay. Ninjas + dinosaurs + caveman attired video girls + overly furry jackets + Ghostface = genius. Back, back, and forth, forth.

A few notes

2007-05-25T17:03:00.000+01:00

Seriously, haven't we had enough creepy kid movies? Here's a new one. At least it doesn't star this kid.

After the Gravel article in Radar a while back, here's a New Republic piece on Ron Paul. Should Republicans really be worried? Maybe not... but with the weakness of their field (only 38% of Republicans are satisfied with the debate field), I wouldn't count anyone out.

Where are all the TV viewers? Maybe the product just sucks.

Support the troops. Get them equipment and food, not just rhetoric. Kthxbye.

Trafalgar Square covered in grass.

Finally, video choice, the amazing song "Cartoons I'd Like to Fuck". Yeah, they're mostly "underage"... but they're also animated. So it's all good. But as you know, in my book, hilarity trumps almost anything. OK gone for the weekend. Hope y'all bang the Sun-Maid raisins girl.

not much time

2007-05-24T23:40:00.000+01:00

OK, a quick review, as I have to study for a couple of exams tomorrow, and then I'm gone for the Monaco Grand Prix.

First off, read Andrew Sullivan's reaction to an Obama rally. He describes Obama as a possible Reagan of the left, and I'm inclined to agree, what with all of Obama's cross-over appeal and a demand to the end of scorched-earth politics, along with pragmatism on serious issues. "This is not who we are." No, it's not. Obama could unify the nation and create a true national consensus on our most dire problems. But he has to get to the general first, and beat the best-funded, best-connected, most-established nonincumbent candidate in history. Game on.

An unusual effect of high wholesale gas prices: Gas stations that just sell gas can't make any money and are shutting down.

Warning: this al-Qaeda torture manual is graphic and disturbing. But the fact is, I can't find the outrage I once would've had, because what with our secret prisons and torture outsourcing, I'm sure the United States is committing similar torture, if not on its own then through proxy.

Yes, George. Terrorists are a threat to our children. So is this.

Ross Douthat to alarmists on America's decline: Don't have a cow.

Speaking of alarmism, I don't know which to believe, William Langewiesche's new book on nuclear proliferation (mostly culled from two Atlantic articles) or Michael Hirsh's article against it. I enjoy Langeweische's prose, but not being a nuclear weapons expert, I can't say one way or another. I'm more inclined to believe Langewiesche's assertion that nuclear bombs have ceased to be the power of large nations. Our weapons are unusable; only a "small" nation or non-state actor would dare use one today.

OK, non-politics shit... this site compiles mash-ups of indie rock artists and mainstream hip-hop. It is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

Ain't no party like a Scranton party. Kevin and Angela from The Office visit Scranton.

Wroops.

Finally, video time. If you don't love MXC, then you don't love xenophobia and schadenfreude. And if you don't love those, then get the hell out of Freedomstan. 25 most painful MXC eliminations. God bless Japan and God bless America for making fun of them.

sorry sorry sorry

2007-05-23T23:23:00.000+01:00

Yeah, anyone out there reading this, I haven't updated in a while. So much for updating daily. I was doing so well until I told people that I was updating daily. Nuts!

OK, here we go with a run-down of today's reads and whatnot.

First off: I don't think Democrats get it. They were elected to end the Iraq war. The reason that their approval is in the tank is because they refuse to push back at Bush. We forget that the Congress is more powerful than the President. Meanwhile, as the Democrats shrink from a fight, THE fight, THE moral question of our government today, the Bush Administration plans yet another surge. Because the one we had was working so well already. Don't look now, but the new Iraq strategy looks an awful lot like the old one...

Speaking of Slate, if you haven't seen their slideshow on lolcats, you should do it now.

Emo: SERIOUS GODDAMNED BUSINESS.

Obama and Edwards are trying to harness the power of the interwebs for their campaigns. I understand the appeal of the netroots, and in particular, the fundraising potential. Still, I can't help but disbelieve the voting base. Take a look at the discrepancy between the online Ron Paul/Mike Gravel phenomenon and compare it to Gallup. A net phenomenon doesn't necessarily equal a good campaign. One need only look at Obama's less-than-buoyant numbers to see that youth power and cool cred will not bring the bread-and-butter union, elderly, and minority voters out for the Democratic primaries. Besides, there's always the risk of something dumb.

Does IU do something like this? I just have memories of couches and Foreman grills littering the streets of Bloomington. We should totally have a yard sale out on Dunn Meadow.

While this will probably end up being lame, the possibility of a Daft Punk-Kanye West collaboration has too much awesomeness potential to ignore.

Mmm, car cake. It takes 100 kg of sugar to bake a pretty cake. Tasty. See more pics here.

Yesterday, the earth officially became more urban than rural. Does concentrating our carbon (and other polluting) impact in cities help or hurt? I was thinking about this myself. On the one hand, there's less waste in buildings, but on the other, buildings leave their lights on more often, and the direct effect on residents is much worse. I don't really know. But a significant milestone has been passed, and no one noticed.

Google: doing no evil? Geez, I'm kinda scared. Think about how much information of mine Google has. All my e-mails (full of private information and surely off-color, racist, sexist, etc. remarks) are on their servers. Everything I've ever typed into Google is on their servers. If this is the future of Google, shouldn't we be scared? Or should we just forget about it? I'm inclined to just shrug for now.

Yeah, I know I always point to Greenwald. Still, a good read. All that talk of the "surprising" number of American Muslims who support attacks on civilians is rather vapid, as a decent number of white Christian Jack Bauer wannabes also support attacking civilians, like I dunno, this guy.

And finally this video (NSFW.. violence): RAMBO IV! Decapitation IN-TRAILER! Washed-up action stars, for the win!

Ha! Worth a mention.

2007-05-18T17:34:00.001+01:00

Tinky Winky responds to Falwell's death. I lawled like a child.

FIRE GONZALES

2007-05-18T15:31:00.000+01:00

Come on. Seriously. Fire him. Have him resign. Impeach him. I don't care.

It's now increasingly clear that this man helped to destroy the rule of law in America and subvert justice into the hands of an opportunistic partisan executive.

The guy makes me nostalgic for when John "Lost to a Dead Guy" Ashcroft was Attorney General. And who ever thought I'd be saying that?

The latest: Gonzales lied under oath, tried to make everything the President does legal simply because he's the President, and had nothing but contempt for the Justice Department before going on to run the Justice Department.

As Dahlia Lithwick puts it ever so lucidly: "The bad guys were winning for a while because they picked the teams, set the rules, sidelined the referees, and turned off all the lights in the stadium. Congress has some work to do. It needs to drill down on what this mystery eavesdropping program was (and which worse mystery eavesdropping program it replaced) and to get to the bottom of the Yoo memos and what else they've authorized. Let's call the Comey testimony the halftime show. With the refs in and the lights finally on, this might just prove to be an interesting game after all."

That is to say, this scandal need not be a sad chapter in American justice, but can instead be a turning point, where the law comes back out of the shadows and into its proper role as guiding light for our country. First things first: Gonzales out. Either the Senate should impeach or he should step down. In any case, why does this joker still have a job? Get his chair at the Hoover Institution ready.

Today's articles

2007-05-13T13:03:00.000+01:00

An Esquire writer impersonates his gorgeous 28-year-old babysitter on an online-dating site, Cyrano-style. Sweet, funny, and enjoyable. Life from the other side of the computer screen from freaks, geeks and creeps...an insightful view into what it's like to be a beautiful woman.
Yeah, we know everything and everyone is going to die. But 50% of species on earth? Doesn't that seem a little high? This article in Mother Jones, if everything in it is accurate, scares the living shit out of me. Because if anything, 50% seems low. Reminds me of this essay by David Quammen a number of years ago. Is our planet really becoming a planet of weeds? And are we one of them? What is it Carlin says? "The planet is fine, the people are screwed."
Almost as an addendum to the Josh Bell experiment a while back, Washington is having real auditions for Metro entertainment.
I really had to pee! Tommy Thompson continues to make his case for being leader of the free world. He's more unbelievable than Tancredo... OK, not quite, but close.
Why has everyone kind of decided that Gonzales has somehow saved his own skin? This kind of story drives me nuts. If Bush won't fire him and he won't resign, we need to impeach this guy. "Deflection"? Please. Only if deflection means refusing to answer/remember ANYTHING. This is the guy that said, "I think I may be aware of that." He's a schmuck. Either he actively tried to put Bushie loyalists in U.S. Attorney positions, or he's so incompetent that he doesn't know what happened, what got approved, who on his staff did what, and which lawyers approved what for him to say about things about which he knew nothing. This is the guy running the federal justice system? Geez. Get this guy out of office right now.
Cubs have dropped two in Philly. This is gonna be a long stretch. Shea doesn't look promising.
9/11 begins to creep into our normal artistic worldview. Don DeLillo's 9/11 book, Falling Man, is right around the corner. I wonder how 9/11 will look in the rearview mirror ten years on.
This guy catches sunglasses with his face. The video's good, but it's the funk soundtrack that makes the YouTube. Pimptastic.

Sunshine, lollipops, and Alzheimer's

2007-05-13T12:26:00.000+01:00

A couple of movie reviews:
(Image via RottenTomatoes)

Sunshine: This is Danny Boyle's latest movie, coming out in France a few months before in America. The studios are trying to get it into Oscar and awards contention, I think, by putting it in September. I wouldn't hold my breath, Fox Searchlight.

OK, first, the concept seems really lame, especially if you remember The Core, which produced among my favorite movie trailers of all time ("How do we fix it?" "We can't." "What if we could?").

How similar are they in concept? The Core: core of earth has stopped spinning. Diverse oddball crew has to drive a bomb into it to restart it. Save mankind. All that jazz. Sunshine: Sun has stopped shining brightly. Diverse oddball crew has to drive bomb into it to restart it. Save mankind. Etc.

Yet, while the concepts are the same, the actual movies are vastly different pieces of work. For The Core, the core of the earth is a mulligan, a plot device, a piece of scenery for whatever rescue mission. Sunshine is really about the sun. Its characters, the humans, are the plot device, revolving around the fiery, petulant, god-like, screen-blinding sun. The movie kind of wearily ports the luggage of sci-fi visual stunners like 2001, but that means we get some amazing Danny Boyle moments of image mastery. We rarely feel the power of a flaring white screen quite like we do during this movie. So many "important" movies play in varying shades of dark and darker that we forget the oomph a fade-to-white can bring in a shadowy theater.

We get the ragtag crew (the closest thing to a protagonist we get is Cillian Murphy's wide-eyed, bomb-tending physicist) with all its requisite types: the sensitive female, the hothead male (Chris Evans, trying to gain serious acting cred I guess... still can't not think of him as Jake from Not Another Teen Movie), the overworked engineer, the snotty first officer, the dutiful captain, etc. Probably worth noting is the international makeup of the crew: Malaysian Michelle Yeoh as the biologist in charge of the oxygen-producing garden, Japanese Hiroyuki Sanada as the honor-bound captain, New Zealand Maori Cliff Curtis as the increasingly sun-obsessed psych officer stand out.

Still, despite good performances, these guys never transcend their prescribed roles, because as mentioned above, they aren't supposed to. The movie doesn't try to break the mold as, say, 28 Days Later tried to bust up the zombie-movie genre. Boyle plays the thrill-ride for all he can (a crucial decision, things start to go wrong, problems layer on top of problems, tempers flare!), just to the point in the movie's last act, where the genre's silliness takes the film off the rails into an eye-rolling "climax."

OK, mild spoiler (not really... cuz it ain't ruining nothin'): the film devolves into a "slasher" last act, which many will believe was tacked on for appealing to a teen audience expecting a thrill, but despite its total unbelievability, I find the mistake of its inclusion to be telling. Boyle needed that extra shot of lunacy, to hammer home his point that the characters barely matter and the bright god-like sun which dominates the movie can drive us out of our minds and out of our humanity. The massive power is dehumanizing and debilitating to those who dare stand before it. The ending is not incongruent with its opening.

Inelegant? Jarring? Eye-rolling? You bet. But in the end, Boyle doesn't care.

From my criticisms, you may think the movie is not worth seeing. But I emphatically encourage it. Boyle is a craftsman; he makes movies. To feel one's cynical heart race at a seemingly ludicrous amassing of errors makes one appreciate the skill of the filmmaker, and honestly, the first two-thirds of the movie are about as enjoyable as sci-fi movies get. You'll thrill, you'll chill, you'll roll your eyes! But in the end, when you leave the theater, I think you'll find you're better off for having taken the voyage.

Away From Her:
Uh, short synopsis. I called this "that depressing Canadian Alzheimer's movie," and I suppose from an oversimplified angle, that's what it is. The only misleading word there is "depressing," because it doesn't really depress the viewer in the way that, say, Brian's Song or any number of CBS Hallmark Sunday night movies do.

The story concerns a husband, Grant, (Gordon Pinsent) and a wife, Fiona, (Julie Christie) in their early sixties who suddenly find themselves facing a foreign problem: Fiona is "losing her mind" as she so eloquently puts it while searching for the word for "wine." Alzheimer's starts eating away at her mind, and they make the decision to put her into a care facility. One requirement of the care facility is that Grant must leave his wife at Meadowlake for thirty days without seeing her, a tall order for a man who has spent the last twenty years alone in a spacious house with his wife.

Here's where things get complicated, and where the film takes its turn for the truly searing. We learn that Grant's past with his wife is not as perfect as the opening "tender" moments would have us believe. When Grant returns to visit his wife, Fiona has fallen hard for a companion at the home, barely remembering his face. Her reaction ("You certainly are persistent, aren't you?") is heartbreaking and the anguish on Pinsent's face is alien. Is she just fooling with him? Is she just instigating a little tryst with another resident to get back at her husband's earlier improprieties? What is Grant to do but keep coming back every day to visit? "I never wanted to be away from her."

Let me get my minor criticisms out of the way first. The dialogue occasionally takes on a preachy, soliloquizing tone that no one would ever use in real life, the kind one only finds in moralizing movies. The pacing is slow, even for a small movie of 1:40 length. If you dislike films with long close-up shots of people "coming to terms" with devastating realities, uh... go watch this instead. But seriously, if you were going to make a parody of "art movies" that critics love but the rest of us find inscrutable, it might look a little something like this.

That said, this is almost as perfectly a constructed "small art movie" as you could possibly want. The script -- loyal to, yet expanding from, a short story by Alice Munro called "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" -- rings true with the stilted conversation of reservation and the subtle cracks that we hide beneath the simplest language. Two marvelous actors, Gorden Pinsent (whose work I don't know) and Julie Christie (whose work I do), put in finesse performances like you wouldn't believe. They don't have to chew up the scenery or dress in period garb (I'm lookin' at you, Forest Whitaker) to produce jarring emotion. The direction, too, gets out of the way and lets the actors do the work they were meant to do.

Certainly, I should make special note of Sarah Polley, the actress who adapted the short story to screenplay and directed the film. A quirky actress, but now, demonstrably, a talented and reserved director. You'd never think that this quiet, perceptive film about aging, loss, memory, and love would come from a woman in her twenties.

A few short notes about things I loved...

Flashbacks: Most of the time, flashbacks are predicated by a fade-out, a sign of the times, whatever. But in this film, they cut seamlessly back and forth from present to near-present, to a grainy past in Kodachrome, all floating around a haunting, crackling, smiling eighteen-year-old Christie. In the way that a true Alzheimer's patient would lose her mind and lose her way, so do we too lose ourselves in the sometimes-repeated, sometimes-evocative images that we can't quite place.

Disease-movie-syndrome: The movie deftly avoids being "about a disease." It's not maudlin or cloying, doesn't play the disease for "crying moments." The Notebook, this ain't. Rather, just as a good horror film eschews the big scare for the overall feeling of dread, Polley wants to see things in the long term. So we get Grant's black pickup truck cruising back and forth over familiar terrain, the long ruts of cross-country ski lanes, the signposts of time passing; all letting us know that time will erode us but that it also flattens the beds of rivers and bends the boughs of trees. This is where that pacing I mentioned earlier wins back what it loses in occasional plodding. The movie isn't as depressing as you'd think it would be, because we feel the gradualness of it, the long goodbye still anchored by the deepest of human emotions. As Christie comments in the movie, the love of youth is too demanding, a "liability." That slow gentleness just holds us close and refuses to let go.

Olympia Dukakis: Yeah, that's right. This ol' broad comes at you with a feisty but deeply human performance in a smaller role that will stick in your mind as much as the two principals (who as previously mentioned, are outstanding)

All right, that's all I've got. If you get a chance, see both these movies. High quality.

First post in a while

2007-05-10T13:26:00.000+01:00

Sorry, I've been neglecting the blog. I'll put an RSS feed up soon, since I know Atom is kind of annoying for some people.

Uh, so I'll just post a few thoughts that are neither here nor there, then post a couple items I've been working on, one about Sarkozy, and another about Sunshine.

But first, the bullshit.

A Radar Magazine profile of Mike Gravel hints at the bizarre media frenzy over a man willing to actually, you know, debate things. He's the darlings of the web these days (3 front page stories on reddit), with hordes waiting to rig every online poll they can find. Yet, here comes the Washington Post to spoil everyone's fun, with a fairly disgusting unsigned editorial about how "fringe" candidates should be excluded from debates, that they're not "serious" enough. But if not for these "crackpots," no one would actually have to debate anyone and the Democratic debates would've just been a bland communal circlejerk between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards (yeah, get that image out of your heads). OK, so here's a guy who has said he's not running to win. He's running on issues that he wants people to hear. Isn't that admirable in our society, a society full of lemmings following blindly behind so-called conventional wisdom, a man stands up and says "You don't get to be President without speaking to my issues."

Let me be clear that I'm no Gravel maniac. I still have deep man-love for Barack Obama. But if Obama refuses to show guts on his issues, I'm going to be forced to abandon him. As much as the testosterone-fueled macho-fest of the Republican debates, not to mention the whole Bush presidency, has demonstrated how useless the strength=stubbornness=strength axiom is, no Democrat has emerged whose moral drive matches her/his issues platform... except for Mike Gravel (and Dennis Kucinich... but Denny's time as fringe candidate du jour has passed).

"Then we kick the press out." -- Vice President Dick "Civil Liberties" Cheney
Speaking of Republicans, when you see David Frum (you know, Mr. Axis-of-Evil himself) writing a piece about how useless the Republican Macho Man show of force is... you know the party's in trouble.
Goddammit, AP headline writers.
OK, one last thing, I realize that if I link to this, I'm only further promoting Patrick Buchanan's continued paleoconservative xenophobic screeds. But I don't care. People have to read just how repellent this man is. Buchanan has things to say about "The Dark Side of Diversity." You see, Pat figures that since sometimes, immigrants kill people, diversity must be the overall impetus behind these killings. Because white people never kill anyone. Especially not other white people. Before 1970, everyone was dandy. Like this guy.

The repellent article made me want to pull my hair out. But to understand just how deranged the xenophobes have become in America, you really do have to read it for yourself.

And a video... PROOF! I hadn't seen this; apparently it's pretty old. But after this, I knew I had to include it. ATHEIST'S WORST NIGHTMARE!!!!111onewon

President Sarkozy

2007-05-06T19:36:00.000+01:00

Yeah, it's official. 53-47 Sarkozy. Years of fun await France.

Looks like Sarkozy's gonna win

2007-05-06T18:29:00.000+01:00

Latest reports have UMP supporters ready to celebrate.

More at 20:00, when first estimates will come in. Looks like 7-8 point spread. Also, looks like more than 80% turnout. That's fuckin crazy. Maybe if we got rid of the electoral college we'd have some higher participation too.

Pretty close election, but in the end, I think everyone knew this was coming. Time to see what the backlash is... (Personally, I think it'll be quite limited, but living in Aix, that kind of impression could be from a quite limited scope.) Looks like the centrist vote broke hard right.

We'll have more solid numbers in not too long.

Funny how TIME slips away

2007-05-06T12:20:00.000+01:00

UPDATED BELOW

There seems to be a decent amount of hubbub over Time Magazine's Time100 (most influential people) not including George W. Bush, but including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the likes of Rosie O'Donnell and Angelina Jolie. Needless to say, right-wing blogs are fairly up in arms over this perceived snub.

At first glance, I'd say that fear of Time's collapse is greatly overblown. I mean, they probably didn't pick Bush to be on the list, because frankly, they like the idea of picking new people every time. After all, Bill Gates didn't make this year's list either after making it many times in years' past (including co-Person of the Year), and it's not like he's gotten any less philanthropic, or that his software isn't still flying off the shelves. Still... Oprah's made the list every year since its inception. And with turmoil continuing at the magazine, I don't think it's just right-wingers who have reason to complain. (For more on the back room shake-up at the magazine, read this New York mag profile from a while back.)

For example, the week that the first wave of revealing documents in the U.S. Attorneys scandal broke, Time had exactly zero articles about it. Not even a blurb on what may be one of the most damning scandals to befall a Justice Department since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI. I guess they decided it wasn't quite news. Then, before you know it, they come back swingin' the other way, suddenly champions of the cause.

I suppose this whole situation illustrates the state of traditional news media: smacked by the left (Greenwald, TPM's Josh Marshall, et al.) for coddling the establishment, and smacked by the right (The Corner, FOXNews, et al.) for showing their "liberal bias." Meanwhile, they have to get dragged kicking and screaming by the Marshalls and Politicos to the important (in Marshall's case) and frivolous (in Politico's) stories of the day.

With the speed of new media, what does Time provide? It should be a helpful compendium for those unwilling or unable to spend hours reading newsblogs and mainlining CNN, a week-in-review and week-ahead with analysis and opinion that makes an impact on our lives. That was the idea from the start, and that should still be the idea now. If anything, its mission should be even easier to accomplish... there's so much more news out there to collect, frame, and consider that the public would otherwise ignore. While CNN blathers into its 18th hour about the contents of Anna Nicole's fridge or which computer games the Virginia Tech murderer played, Time (CNN's partner in print) could provide something America desperately needs: a voice of calm authority on news stories and a powerful searchlight to shine on stories out of the limelight.

Whereas this goal is noble, the yearly Time100 has made a perversion of it, reducing important figures of the day into blurbs written by "ironic" or "fitting" authors (Petraeus by McCain, Dawkins by... Behe???). What makes its list any different than People's "Most Beautiful"? Obviously, no one is getting more or less beautiful (or at least, not by much) in one year. It's one thing to name the top 100 for a century (which Time did quite well, I think... despite their inclusion of Princess Di and the usual fluff). It's something else entirely to come out with a new list every year, as if people somehow lost influence in a year or gained it back. The conceit is so ridiculous that the results are bound to be loopy.

Stengel claims that he wants to emulate the Economist with Time. Which is all fine and dandy, I suppose (except that the Economist's readership is teeny and has no mass appeal). The Economist rightly calls itself a newspaper, and Time has a lot more magazine tools at its disposal. I know, I love the Economist's endless columns of text and wry wit, but Time provides the big picture, with easy-to-understand graphics and writing that unfolds briskly for someone plopping down on the chair at the dentists' office.

Time's whole reshuffle to "get back to basics" and bring in the old graybeards of the Beltway to replay the past is totally at odds with their reshuffle to jump into the electronic world with bloggers like Ana Marie Cox. I dunno, it just feels like Time's multiple personality disorder is starting to show in many ways, alienating the left, the right, and all the news junkies. When you pull a stunt like this, it's hard to get anybody back on board with you.

UPDATE: Here's just another example of the Time 100's pallid boring bullshit. As I mentioned, Michael Behe wrote Richard Dawkins' blurb. Predictably, it's colorless and fairly transparent. Yet, Behe has released the full text of what he wrote for Time, and notes that they added several phrases ("deeply unsettling to proponents of intelligent design" and the like). Just goes to show you how useless the Time100 is, and what an indicator of Time's current doldrums the list indicates.

An acceptable level of violence

2007-05-04T11:20:00.000+01:00

"What's an acceptable level of violence in Iraq?"

"That's a very good question and I don't have an answer for that."

Last notes

2007-05-04T00:01:00.000+01:00

I realize I haven't said anything about the big showdown debate from the French election last night. Eh, I'll talk about it later. If you speak French, you can watch it here. They're numbered.
I'm a Democrat like you wouldn't believe, but I find hate crimes laws to be fairly ludicrous. Isn't policing thought among the worst things we can do? (Plus, how do you prove it in court?) It's an impossible-to-enforce, difficult-to-justify law, which doesn't necessarily do anything to end the problems it attacks; it just punishes them. Now, the Democrats in Congress have passed an even stricter (and equally difficult to prove) revision. Honestly, I don't want my government wasting time on it, frankly. Or maybe I'm a racist, homophobic bastard. Who knows?
For all you StumblersUpon, there's a new StumbleThru which is site-specific. So you can StumbleThru Wikipedia, Flickr, or Blogger. Options are limited, but it is kind of fun.
Heh. NOT CRAZY ENOUGH.
The more Glenn Greenwald I read, the more awesome he becomes in my mind. His voice is a necessary, lucid voice in dismantling the disgusting, tyrannical, right-wing lunacy which has trampled past the American populace, and towards which the media shrugs, turning its attention to much more important things like John Edwards' haircut or Don Imus' big mouth. Greenwald is a voice that American media needs to hear, and instead, they all flock to Drudge to see what story-of-the-week to follow this week. His latest piece is on an op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal entitled (no joke): The Law and the President -- in a national emergency, who you gonna call? It just gets worse from there. Read the Greenwald here. This is the logic that runs our country. It seems like Greenwald's one of the few left to call them out on it.
From RollingStone, selection of President by continual humiliation. That's how the 08 primaries are gonna happen, folks.
C'mon LAPD... never beat someone who buys ink by the barrel. In fact, just never beat anyone ever. Way to fight the stereotypes, guys.
One last thing: Why hasn't Alberto Gonzales resigned yet? What gives? Does he have to not remember a lot more things under oath? Are there other things he totally agrees with, takes responsibility for, and doesn't remember? Another top Republican demands his removal. QUIT ALREADY.
I read a story about how secret music had been found encoded into the patterns on the wall of a chapel in Scotland (henceforth to be referred to sadly as "the Da Vinci Code" church). Here's the video:

A quick review of SPEE-dare-MAHN

2007-05-03T22:53:00.000+01:00

Thanks to the paradigm of the current movie market, where global revenues are larger (but more spread out) than domestic ones, we in France had the benefit of seeing Spider-man 3 before all you American chumps. Deal with it.

Anyways, I'll try to review the movie briefly without giving anything away... not that too much is left to give away.

OK, better than Spider-Man 1 (although I admit, I was not much a fan of the first... likable but not lovable... a bit too clunky in construction... other things). But just barely. It felt like they were trying to cram too much in, and maybe going through the motions. There seemed to be a strain on the cast, as if this was just an exercise to garner endless showers of cash.

For example, the Sandman storyline (it's in the trailer; I'm not giving anything away) is kind of a throwaway: interesting on its own, but wholly unnecessary for the plot, especially for a comic book movie at 140 minutes. It was like he was added in just to have the (admittedly) cool effect of the Sandman in the movie. More SpiderSpuds to sell, after all!

And more Sandman story means less Venom, who was sadly underdeveloped. As one of Spider-Man's most frightening and pathological nemeses, he could've really provided a deeper exploration of all that "OMG THIS SHIT IS DARK" marketing that has been used for the movie. (Side note: Apparently "darker" just means "emo" complete with dark bangs covering eyes. I'm surprised he didn't bring back the glasses with thicker frames.)

Perhaps most worryingly, the great ensemble cast, wrangled into working together on one more feature, get essentially cameo roles. Jameson gets a couple laughs, Aunt May makes brief "Peter, you need to find yourself" moments, and random characters pop in and out, but they appear as dangling attachments rather than supporting actors.

(Also, there is one scene, which, like the lovey-dovey scene in Casino Royale, which must have been written by a twelve-year-old... or just a bunch of idiots.)

OK, I'm ragging on the movie a lot. A whole lot. But in the end, despite having really fucking high expectations, I still really enjoyed it. Sure, the movie will make a bajillion dollars (my estimate) and that's what the studio wanted from it, but Spiderman 3 is worth seeing, without a doubt. There are a couple spectacular action scenes. The direction, as always with Raimi, is superb, with its Technicolor palette and wry winking cheesiness. Even Dunst-McGuire, which may have seemed awkward in the first film, has developed into a relationship with believable chemistry. If I was handing out stars, I'd give it 3 out of 4. But maybe I'm just let down, because I could be giving it 4.

Save net radio

2007-05-03T18:29:00.000+01:00

If you haven't yet, DO IT.

The increased royalty rates don't help artists (not enough revenue from Internet radio) and don't help listeners (homogenized bullshit). Save net radio. It's worth it.

Oh I'm back

2007-05-03T15:15:00.000+01:00

I returneth to the blogosphere after days of vacational whimsy and paper-writing. Let's get right to it shall we?

First up: the Digg wars... I don't care. What I did want to comment on was the tone used by mainstream media regarding the "news community site." The New York Times sees the Digg revolters as "sophisticated Internet users." Forbes analyst sez: Adolescent males putting up "graffiti" and "vandalism". Which is it? Judging from Digg... probably more like the latter. Still, a warning to the wise about "living by wisdom of the crowds"... you also die by it.

Speaking of bloggy business, The New Republic, long since regarded to have sold out by many in the lefty blogs (Kos and Atrios come to mind), has published a number of pieces about the netroots recently. You can find the most recent here. The point about the lefty hysterical paranoia is that, sadly, during this Administration, they have been right more often than not. I still don't buy that "No Blood for Oil" crap, and Dick Cheney didn't order 9/11. But the fact is, all these lefty bloggers who were branded extremist nutbags by the right, and even by centrist liberal thinkers like those at The New Republic, were right about Iraq and this Administration's disdain for the rule of law. (Tom Tomorrow's cartoon sums up the idiocy pretty well...) Yet, the country remains mostly immobilized and apathetic. Maybe a little paranoid hysteria is what we need, eh?

The LATimes' weird piece about Chinese honey... worth the read, though. Illustrates that change in China may seem like it's going by fast in the cities, but the countryside will be a tougher sell.

Whither the miliblog? What a bad PR move by the Army. Yeah, I know, giving away enemy positions and everything... it's like blacking out letters before sending them back to the States. Still, cutting off the soldiers' ability to blog could backfire. No one is more supportive of the military than, you know, the military.

A picture from my trip... bombed out churches make me think of Wolfenstein:
That's all I've got for now.

vacation vacation

2007-04-14T11:25:00.000+01:00

I'm on break, so any updates will be sporadic and likely useless. I leave you with this excellent routine, from Billy Connolly (via Videosift). Wait for the punchline...

Later folks!

Protest edition

2007-04-12T12:05:00.000+01:00

Geez, some protestors. Chickened out after threats of suspension, which aren't you know, unreasonable. Thoreau spent time in jail for his civil disobedience. These kids are in tears over a potential suspension? Something an administrator said in the article should hit it home:
"If people do want to engage in civil disobedience, there are consequences that come with civil disobedience."
"Unusual and extreme tactics"? I am ordinarily an anti-establishment sympathizer, but the administration tactics don't strike me as particularly diabolical. No threats of physical violence, no cops. Yeesh, get over it.
Meanwhile, here's a protest that really matters. A librarian stands up for civil liberties before Congress.
Wait, you lost the e-mails? Just, whoops! Lost! As much as I cringe when I hear lefty bloggers refer to the Bush Administration as the "Bush Crime Family," the Bushies aren't making it any easier for themselves. The cover-up is growing worse than the crime. Why does Gonzales still have a job? Fire him.
This story of concern over an Asian supermarket is kind of inexplicable to me, just because I can't imagine why it's such a big deal. I mean, we have Diho Market just over in Westmont, and I have a feeling that Southern California has long had more experience with Asian presence than the west suburbs of Chicago. Needless to say, the veiled xenophobia is still clear. A quote from Larry Blugrind, a protestor quoted in the Times piece:
"My worry is that 99 Ranch could be a steppingstone for [our community] to become all Asian," he said. "I don't want another Hacienda Heights."
Translation: I liked it better when you were "diverse" window dressing, and white people were still in control. Also hilarious in the story, they cite as part of the "changing face" of the community... "a karate studio, a Chinese buffet and Thai restaurants." Gasp! Shock! I'm pretty sure you could find those almost everywhere in America. The real question is, how did Chino Hills avoid them for so long?
OK, I wasn't going to comment on the Rudy bread "gaffe" (if it can be described as such), but since HuffPost still has it on its frontpage, I thought I'd mention it. Honestly, it seems like much ado about nothing. So what if he doesn't know how much a gallon of milk is? That doesn't mean he's "ouf of touch" with the people. Most people do not spend most of their money (or even their food budget) on bread and milk. (And, btw, despite national averages and whatnot, I remember buying bread for a buck a loaf at the Kroger.) In any case, running for President is not the Showcase Showdown. There are plenty of reasons not to vote for, or even like, Rudy Giuliani. Plenty. This is not one of them.
AltHouse on campus free speech. We can't all be nice folks, especially when it comes to heated topics, and I don't think a university should civility upon people. Let'em say what they want. Also, what the hell is with those "free speech zones"? I'm pretty sure the whole campus is a free speech zone. Or should be, anyways.

Kilgore Trout's grave

2007-04-12T11:02:00.000+01:00

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. What a goddamn loss. What many don't realize without reading Vonnegut and only hearing of his "dark humor" and "morality" is that his books aren't really mean-spirited or bitter. Like the Midwestern charm that pervades his character, Vonnegut's books are tinged by a certain geniality, even in their profound pessimism, like some sort of demented tale out of Lake Wobegon populated by aliens and mad scientists. And despite the appeal of "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," Vonnegut's stories have an urgent message for us today. We live in darkening times, times where Vonnegut's moral directive that men must act is of paramount importance. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed. So it goes. Scores were killed in suicide bombings in Algeria. So it goes. The American cult of Apathy gazes at its TV screens with a shrug. So it goes.

Today, Kurt Vonnegut is dead. So it goes.

More on Hillary hate

2007-04-11T16:14:00.000+01:00

So if you read the article yesterday, you know that Hillary hate across the entire political spectrum has to do with her presumed fence-sitting on every position she's ever held in order to get ahead. As a result of her personal and political evolution, however, she can be a target of every attack and every accolade that anyone can dig up. Yet, she is just doing what every self-proclaimed feminist of the 1970s said they would do: she's getting what she wants, what she believes she deserves. The Jack Hitt piece backs Hillary up on her feminist ambitions, but I think the root of Hillary hate is the route to power, not the movement she embodies.

I've got Hillary hate myself, not as much vitriol as most, but still enough to not want to vote for her. This will no doubt be her biggest liability as the Democratic candidate... everyone already has a pre-formed opinion of her. Even if she appears as the embattled woman fighting off chauvinism, she'll still have a tough time fighting preconceived public conceptions. At the same time, she won't have to go through the trouble of "defining" herself... she's already done it so many times that we know the refrain.

I find the Hillary hatred to be particularly notable in America, because of the Ségolène Royal phenomenon in France. I believe that if Royal loses, it will be because she's a woman. France is still chauvinistic but that's not why her sex plays such an important role. As a woman, she's had to define herself unusually to gain entry into male-dominated politics. Many see her, like Hillary, as a political opportunist, using the power of her husband, Socialist Party elder (well, life-partner) François Hollande, to take the Socialists by storm.

Her campaign has been defined by fending off attacks based on her femininity. How many men would have to do as much chest-thumping flag-waving as she has? Of course, her problem of indefinition is exactly the opposite of the Hillary problem. Still, note that both of them aren't known by their last names so much as their surnames. Ségolène's nickname is Sego; Sarkozy's is Sarko. Hillary and Ségolène have to take on all these multiple roles because society expects it. They have to be feminine and masculine, devious schemer and naive newbie, domineering and submissive, national mother and national father. With all these identities, it's no wonder that everyone can find something to hate.

Bee Gees ruin music history again

2007-04-11T15:44:00.000+01:00

The late Johnny Cash's old house burned to the ground (pictures on right). The house was bought in early 2006 by Barry Gibb, of BeeGees fame, to be used as a summer home. On the one hand, it's unfortunate that such an essential piece of music history (where Cash wrote many of his songs) has been lost forever. On the other, it's probably for the better that Barry Gibb didn't write any songs in that fabled house.
How to rule Iraq? Divide and conquer, essentially blocking off Baghdad into smaller, more manageable pieces with checkpoints and whatnot. Perhaps it will work, but I don't see what makes this fundamentally different from the clear-and-hold plan for Baghdad. The mythical counter-insurgents who can work like surgeons have failed to materialize, and as Petraeus himself must know, a successful counterinsurgency takes a hell of a lot longer than six months.
Speaking of Iraq, Bush wants a "war czar." Is this guy serious? I mean, really? Unless I'm mistaken, we already have a war czar. Already has a pretty good title, too: "Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy." Oh, that's THE PRESIDENT. We already have a war czar, and he's been passing the buck since things in Iraq stopped looking absolutely perfect. Who's fault is it that Iraq hasn't gone well? Is it Defeat-o-crats? Or the Iraqi people? Or the incompetent generals? Or the Iranians? Wrong, jackass, the buck stops on your desk. Yeesh, do we really have to keep this schmuck for two more years?
Man, this college loans scandal looks shady as hell. What's surprising is that the "preferred lender" charade was performed at so brazenly for so long at so many schools. I guess it was an acceptable form of graft, since it made money for everyone and only screwed poor students. Although, as universities become more like businesses, we can't exactly be surprised when they take cash over their obligation to their students.
President Bush: soft on crime. Take that one to the bank. His Justice Department systematically defunded the divisions of the FBI that go after fraud and civil rights violations, as well as white-collar crime in general, to convert the place into counterterror mode (which mostly means... a violating civil rights mode). A lengthy but important article, if you have the time.
Winner of Best Headline of the Day: "Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It." Heh. Neat article, too.
Come on, people let's buy the Cubs! Contribute your pocket change! They'll be hella cheap after they implode this season!

Why we hate Hillary

2007-04-11T03:29:00.000+01:00

Short answer: because there's so many of her identities to hate.

More on this tomorrow. But right now it's late-ass, and I'm hittin the hay.

More thoughts on the (Joshua) Bell experiment

2007-04-10T23:32:00.000+01:00

So a few days ago I linked to this piece on Joshua Bell's subway performance in L'Enfant Plaza.

Well, David Marchese, music critic at Salon, thought the whole piece was another salvo of elitist bullshit surrounding classical music. Since I linked to it first, I obviously think otherwise, so let me engage a few of his points.

1.) The apathy of the public comes as a surprise to Weingarten (the writer of the original piece). Not so to Marchese, who notes the obvious: "hello, they had jobs to get to." Still, if Jasper Johns was painting, or Wynton Marsalis was playing trumpet, I'm not sure it would've gotten people's attention either. I don't think the piece was as condescending as Marchese does, but then again, maybe I'm one of those elitist snobs of classical music that Marchese decries. Rather, I feel that the apathy of the public to great rough art (not necessarily classical) was the point. The note about the children (who, as Marchese notes, are as fascinated by eating their boogers as listening to Joshua Bell) needing to be dragged away by parents isn't just a re-hash of the old "kids are innocent, great engines of awesomeness!" argument. Instead, it's an indictment of our collective loss of curiosity. Wouldn't you at least give it a passing glance? A thought? "Who is that?" But we all just file past.

2.) Yes, the primary hurdle of classical music is its high-brow attitude. Skyrocketing ticket prices, a lack of interpretation for new listeners, and the prevalence of the Josh Grobans and Il Divos of the world have turned classical music into an ossified genre of tuxes and snores. Instead of reading this as a patronizing display of scoffing at lesser folks, the Joshua Bell experiment was an attempt to strip down classical music of its pomp and bring it free to people who wouldn't necessarily normally hear it. If anything, it shows how much classical music needs more shows like this, rather than less.

3.) I understand Marchese's contention that shaming people into paying close attention to street musicians won't actually help the ailing classical music industry, which is bucking itself up with those airy assholes I listed above. I'm not sure what will, and at least part of the blame belongs at the feet of a recording industry that demands megahits. I think people really do want to listen to classical music; it's just hard to access it in a non-pretentious way (or a non-schlocky way... the Fur Elise ringtone comes to mind...). For example, I think IU does a great job of spreading the appreciation of classical music: tons of free concerts, cheap opera tickets, etc. Yeah, I know IU's a special case, but as Charles Rosen said in his Patten Lecture dinner, classical music has plenty of audience, and terrible P.R. I'm inclined to agree. The reason for Bell's failure to garner attention was the lack of proper framing, as the article duly notes. I'm talking about getting booked at major eclectic music festivals, better marketing of public performances, lower ticket prices at major symphonies, etc.

Anyways, I agree that Weingarten does have his fair share of elitist snobbishness, as do I. But I don't think the "experiment" was an attempt to humiliate the passersby. Rather, it was a gauge of art's importance without context, and in a world drenched in context upon context, seeing Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas stripped bare as the lowest of ignored arts was a valuable lesson. Or at least, a more valuable one than this one.

Can we just call this the Tank Johnson rule?

2007-04-10T13:42:00.000+01:00

USAToday reports on the NFL's new discipline policy, or at least discussions about it.

Maybe we should call it the Pacman Jones rule? The whole damn Cincinnati Bengals rule (no team shall have more wins than arrests)? In any case, new NFL disciplinary policy is on the horizon. Will the backlash be anything like the NBA anti-thug dress code?

I think we can all agree that forcing players to stop looking like thugs and forcing them to stop being thugs are two different things, and that the latter is far more important. It's nice to know that they're getting player input though.

How we caught Zarqawi

2007-04-10T13:13:00.000+01:00

If you have time to burn, read the Mark Bowden (of Black Hawk Down fame) article in the new Atlantic about how the U.S. military hunted down al-Zarqawi. It's a remarkable story of an operation that worked in Iraq, and makes you wonder how we couldn't and still can't catch Osama bin-Laden. The article shows post-Abu-Ghraib military interrogators working within boundaries and getting key information, with at least a little bit of luck. Rather than traditional Bowden fare of commando raids and firefights, this reads like a police procedural, Law & Order: Baghdad. Riveting stuff.

Clearly, though, our military is not incompetent, nor is the local population entirely indifferent to the insurgents. The problem lies in politics, organization, and public relations, and in all those respects, this administration has utterly failed.

If you don't have an Atlantic subscription... uh, tough luck. But they only cost $15 a year at the special rate found here, and the internet login lasts forever (as Schmidtty and I discovered). Not to mention that it's the best monthly (ok, 10-issue) magazine in America. (Sorry, National Geographic.)

Five minutes before class

2007-04-10T06:43:00.000+01:00

Just like the title says, ten minutes of reading + five minutes of writing = this post.

Don't steal a whale's teeth... or at least don't bang them endlessly with a hammer.
Richard Holbrooke's had enough bullshit about Nancy Pelosi's Syria trip.
Re: Sol LeWitt. Here's a better photo gallery via WashPost.
Uhh... you sure 'bout that, Barry? VP's not a great gig, but it also makes you the gimme candidate next time around. If this gig doesn't work out, you're always going to be "failed Presidential hopeful."
Chris Hitchens stops angrily defending the Iraq War to angrily commenting on the rise of the "You" generation. Engaging, as always, but maybe a little late to the party.

Pre-dinner thoughts

2007-04-09T17:29:00.000+01:00

Must-Read o' the Day: Tish Durkin's piece on ambivalence in Iraq. She highlights the danger in just tossing blame for the war to the dark forces of the Bushies, in that it exculpates the rest of us from responsibility in the matter. As many on the left (including myself...) cheer on the implosion of a country, the historicizing of the Iraq war keeps trying to stuff it into clear-cut models, but as the Iraqi responses show, this war has been more complex than anyone bargained for.

Other piece floating around, Balkinization's discovery that an emeritus professor at Princeton has been put on the no-fly because of anti-Bush comments. Pre-Bush, such a case would be inconceivable. Today, it seems like business as usual.

Finally, this USAToday piece touches on something I've talked about for some time. That is, a college degree is more an indication of hereditary fiscal solvency than any bearing on intelligence. The piece of paper I get when I graduate is worth something not because of the classes I took or experiences I had in Bloomington. It's worth something because my parents (or someone else) was willing to foot the bill for me to spend four (or more) years doing nothing. ("D's Get Degrees", after all.) As colleges market themselves as a step towards a higher income bracket, the value of the degree as an educational tool keeps getting diluted. If I'm going to college to earn more money in the future, rather than expand my mind, then who cares what the hell I learn? If the college degree is worth more as a status symbol than an educational tool, then it's no surprise that prices keep skyrocketing and the college population keeps getting richer. I dunno.

Morning Major Sources

2007-04-09T11:41:00.000+01:00

So, already taking a few suggestions into account, I'll try to separate the content into smaller chunks, for easier digestion. Here's some of my morning reads, newspapers and MSM stuff that's worth your time. It'll change daily. NYTimes & WashPost one day, ChicagoTrib and CNN the next. Maybe I'll do one newspaper, one of CNN or MSNBC, and one French? I dunno. I kind of worry that this will end up too much like Slate's Today's Papers.

NYTimes:

First off, al-Sadr is calling on Iraqis (mostly Shi'ites) to band together to fight American troops in Diwaniya. Remember when I said it was only a matter of time before the Mahdi Army and the Shi'ite community explodes? Well, al-Sadr is pretty cranky, and he's trying to re-assert control over his followers... but I'm not totally sure it'll work. As almost every major leader with a finger in the Iraq pie (pirhana tank?) right now is learning, nothing in this country is as simple as it seems.
Civility on the web? The idea of blog ethics is still nebulous and with the freedom available on the web, any code would be so easily broken as to be non-existent. Internet sages Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales seem to be pushing for some sort of general ettiquette, but that kind of removes much of the appeal of the internet. More commentary in my IDS column from last week. Also, if you have extra time, Reason Magazine did a nice overview of the general problem here.
Sol LeWitt died, at age 78. A quite virtuostic conceptual artist, proving that Modern Art doesn't have to just be thumbing its nose and winking all the damn time. See some of his work here.

WashPost:

Speaking of Internet ethics, this gets the award for best headline all day: "Mexican Drug Cartels Leave a Bloody Trail on YouTube". That's some creative use of YouTube for sure... intimidating rival drug gangs. An almost surreal article... could you imagine reading this five years ago?
You know, the cost of cutting CO2 emissions may be pretty damn high. I mean, the Kyoto Protocol, well, that's goofy because it'll never work. The biggest hurdle in the "cap-and-trade" CO2 emissions model is companies that don't like being capped, like utilities, who are charging all of the CO2 allowances to the consumer, rather than the marginal cost they were themselves charged. So, much as Al Gore is jumping up and down saying that we have to do something... it appears that doing something may have profound effects on industry, labor, and global competition. Especially since no one in the developing world will be taking any of these steps. Doing lots of things may be less important than doing the right thing.
Oh, and AMERICAN SUMO!!!! Enjoy. Best line: "They carry heaping piles of noodles, very popular, as they strut-waddle around in their bathrobes like Tony Soprano going down the driveway to get his morning paper." I lawled pretty good at that one.

Finally, a rundown of other stuff I found interesting in the papers:

LATimes has a piece on "wage insurance," a kind of stopgap to prevent people from having to receive unemployment insurance. I am skeptical, but it seems like a reasonable free-market solution to unemployment in America. Still, it seems to be shuttling people towards low-wage, low-skill jobs, when at least some of these guys must have mental faculty for something more interesting, given proper training.
For any French readers, the French presidential campaign is officially off to the races! At 0h01 last night, everybody's designated TV time, posters, etc. began. Two weeks left, first round, Sunday, April 22. Here's an AP piece in English. Despite the fact that only 29% of people say they'll vote for Sarko, 59% (!!) think he will be the winner. Yikes.
A dissenting voice on climate change from Richard Lindzen in Newsweek.
IU costs rise again.
Zimbabwe in crisis. BBC's got the bishops warning of uprising (as does AP), but Mugabe could seriously be losing his grip. Still, it might be worth pause. None of his replacements look much better. The New Republic has a good overview of Mugabe's situation here (subscription required).

Sparse Easter offerings

2007-04-09T00:29:00.000+01:00

Mutant bedbugs! Not just for the Third World any more! Although in many ways, America seems eager to join the Third World. More on that later.
Are Chicago's historic buildings losing their souls to become shells for modernist swill? Or are they being appropriated for new works of art in the way of mash-up culture? I'm not really sure. The Trib seems to have made up its mind anyways.
I was going to write my song of the week bit today, but it's too late. It'll be on "Surprise, Honeycomb" by The Wrens. I'll probably do it tomorrow.
How much compensation should an ex-spy get from his government? I guess it's hard to say. After all, serving your country, you probably should've been doing it out of duty and not money. At the same time, it's pretty dangerous to have your spies be low-paid.
All traffic woes solvable... as long as you're willing to pay. Everyone complains about the traffic, but are there bigger problems? Maybe not in L.A. Still, in a country that actually has the resources to implement large-scale infrastructure changes (unlike, say, the Philippines, which can do little to nothing about Manila's day-long traffic jams), maybe we should work to become more efficient. But as time has shown, the wider you make the roads, the more full they become. Every gridlock fix we have inevitably led to more gridlock.
I don't think the Brits selling their stories is that out of line. Their government didn't protect them in hostile waters, sending them out in a glorified dinghy into a disputed border zone, at a time when Iranians were being rounded up in Iraq by the barrelful.
Finally, to round things off, via Dave Barry, a heart-warming story about the true meaning of Easter. Wait, not that one. This one.

Everybody's a critic.

2007-04-07T20:54:00.000+01:00

So much for two posts a day. Yeah, no such luck. Although, maybe one long post a day is preferable to two. As this blog is still in its nascent stages with (I imagine) very few readers, I'll keep fiddling around with format and whatnot. Any suggestions from my meager readership are encouraged.

So, in actual French news, Royal has taken a hit in the latest Figaro poll. Not that French polls are a decent metric of French public opinion. Still, Sarkozy still holds comfortably onto the biggest chunk of the public with a sizeable lead. I'll write more about the actual election later, as actual Election Day draws nearer.

In the meantime, here's a neat piece from Figaro (in English) about how Internet video is affecting French politics. I'll note that it's still way behind the impact of, say, "macaca" in 2006. The bulk of gaffes and public appeals have been distributed in papers and television. Still, the rise of Bayrou in the last few weeks may have as much to do with his Internet blitz as traditional French indecision.

Disney OKs gay marriage. Good for business = Good for America.

A symbolic reminder of the culture we inhabit. If you have time, you should definitely give it a read and consideration. Would you stop and listen? I'm honestly not sure I would. We're all fixed on our goal to just get through the day that we miss works of unimaginable beauty around us, even when they're right in front of our faces. In other Joshua Bell news, that down-home Indiana boy has gone and won himself the Fisher Prize... a prize that no one has won in three years.

On the topic of cultural expression, here's a NYTimes piece about heckling culture. As criticism has become art sometimes superior to the art itself, have we become so callous that we're more willing to pan than exult? Has the internet turned us into this? I chew on this one quite a bit, because honestly, I'm exactly the snarky, ironic, critical asshole that may be killing creativity, or at least, making a caustic environment for new art. Is there such a thing as smart heckling and dumb heckling? Is the defensive response to heckling simply the result of coddled artists who need a cold dash of reality?

Heckling has a storied history (The Rite of Spring comes to mind), and we need strong criticism to keep established acts in check. Yet, that's exactly the opposite of how heckling works. We heckle no-name bums in comedy clubs, not Dane Cook (though we should). No one who pays hundreds of dollars (or more) to see the Rolling Stones is going to boo them for not playing "Wild Horses." Yet, during this time of unbearable peanut gallery displeasure, creativity seems fertile as ever. The Internet and cheap editing software, which have spawned idiocy on a mass scale, have also spawned a new wave of mash-up culture and small masterpieces. Who's to say that more voices aren't degrading the cultural water, so much as they are creating adversity necessary for any great art? Then again, if Emily Dickinson had posted her weird poetry on LiveJournal, she'd probably take hell for it. (I can see the comments now... "Jesus, more emo poetry bullshit. Cheer up or slit your wrists.") What if it stopped her from going on? Anyways, something for us wise-ass bastards to think about.

David Heimann is traveling to 365 Catholic churches in 365 days. He blogs about it here. A remarkable journey of faith. Worth the read during Holy Week, even for us heathens.

In more hilarious Easter stories... SOYLENT GREEN IS PEEPS. It's the Washington Post Peep Diorama competition. And since it combines three things that I love (the Washington Post, Peeps, and dioramas), it is officially a bag o' dimes. Look at them all, but Soylent Green is #17. Sorry, no direct link.

Giuliani's presidential candidacy better implode soon. He's driving me crazy. Quote to remember:

As for Iran, Mr. Giuliani said that “in the long term,” it might be “more dangerous than Iraq.”
He then casually lumped Iran with Al Qaeda. “Their movement has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he said.

If America's Mayor becomes America's President, seriously, I quit.

Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg talk about Hillary Clinton. Beinart's mic is scratchy, so it gets a little aggravating, but they do get at some important points. Goldberg points out that Hillary is in many ways a "compassionate conservative." (Sadly true.) Beinart points out that Hillary's not an opportunist, but is careful about how she broadcasts her views, and that power-hunger is natural in politicians. Calculation is all good, but thinking back on the mistakes of the Bush White House, it's not entirely clear to me that Hillary Clinton, in the same position, wouldn't have made the same or similar decisions (war in Iraq, Patriot Act, wiretaps, etc.).

CUBS WIN CUBS WIN. Cubs now over .500 for the first time since May 4 last year. Can we stay afloat? Eh, I'm not holding my breath.

Finally, the greatest war movie this side of All Quiet on the Western Front. Yeesh, not even Trejo can save this trainwreck.

Make your Hillary face, everyone!

2007-04-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

Short entry today:
Damn that's scary. SomethingAwful got a hold of this picture. Needless to say, goons are going hog wild. Pretty funny Photoshop Phun.

Some neat photos, particularly the smoke pics.

If you haven't read Slate's series on African oil, you should.

Rundown of the year's American music fests, via Rolling Stone (No Rock The Bells, though... could that lineup be any more ridiculous?).

Man, O'Reilly comes off pretty awful in this video... but I kind of wish Geraldo and Bill O'Reilly will fight each other and destroy each other in a blinding flash of idiocy... but I don't got that kinda luck. I guess all we can do is bask in the retardation of this glorious clip. O'Reilly seems to be taking most of the online heat (because, of course, lefty nerds always want an excuse to hate O'Reilly), but come on, Rivera doesn't exactly make himself that admirable.

Yes, bringing up the illegal immigrant part is silly of O'Reilly, but the sensationalizing of the incident at all depends solely on the guy being an illegal immigrant. Not that Geraldo has any problem with sensation.

After forgetting that the attorneys scandal exists, Time magazine puts out a scathing piece on the "epic collapse" of the Bush Administration. Talk about making up for lost time.

No screaming on the Screamer. Kinda makes me think of this.

In closing, Live Free or DIE HARD. BRUCE WILLIS SAVES A MAC. This trailer is so ridiculous... I don't even know what the fuck. I will probably still watch it despite god-awful reviews. Yippee-ki-yay.

Help control the pet population

2007-04-05T23:03:00.000+01:00

God bless this kid. Enthusiastic people deserve to win the Price is Right.

A small collection of links...

Bob Barker's retiring... so YouTube's having a tribute to him. None that worth seeing yet, but I really like the concept. Mad props, Bob. Mostly for punching Adam Sandler.

What if the Washington Post remade its website both as a wiki and to unify with the print edition (unlike its unfortunate new makeover)? Have to admit that it looks quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the current one. The side-by-side comparison really brings the point home. (via journerdism)

It's OK if you go to Syria and negotiate with evildoers, and kowtow to evil Islam in fashion statements, as long as you support the Iraq War. So spake Mitt Romney. The only thing worse than this cockamamie garbage that the Bush Administration spews is that the major news outlets buy it. War supporters in headscarves? Republicans in Syria? Eh, that's cool.

A few thoughts on Iran/Britain sailors... I feel a little bit like the Independent. Still, I think one thing we can learn from this is that diplomacy can still trump war-cheerleaders, and that having an embassy in Teheran is preferable to, you know, not. Clearly, the most important outcome was to get the sailors home. Period. Ahmadinejad can have all the showboating he wants, but I strongly disagree with the Andrew Sullivan assertion of "humiliation." A blowhardy standoff with Iran raises Ahmadinejad's hard-line nutcasery to a new level. Yes, Britain doesn't come out of this smelling like a rose, but the guys are home.

Also, the EU didn't exactly leave Britain "in the lurch." What were they supposed to do? Impose sanctions? That would've made matters far worse. If the waters weren't disputed (they are) and if we had any moral high ground left (we don't), we could correctly fight back with conviction. As Sullivan correctly points out, though, it is Bush's Iraq policy that has led us here. The greatest thing we have lost in our Iraqi adventure, greater even than the thousands of soldiers who have died and billions of dollars lost, is our principles. We have always been a pragmatic nation, but even the most utilitarian among us must realize that reputation is a useful tool to have, and the most potent one we have lost.

OK, last note, an amazing retrospective on Obtusity about the many videos of Michael Jackson. Worth a watch if you've got a couple hours to burn. Or just watch your faves. Hearing Jackson say "your butt is mine" is more than a little disturbing, though.

Something brilliant about this

2007-04-04T16:53:00.000+01:00

(via digg):

It's inexplicably funny.

Dad-Snorting edition

2007-04-04T13:01:00.000+01:00

First off, Keith Richards ground up his dad's ashes with a little cocaine and snorted him. Oh, Keith. You cad.

Oops. A hilarious construction accident.

Classic Python. Oh, the argument sketch. "Wait a minute! It's a fair cop!"

Buy KITT. Costs significantly cheaper than the Chicago Cubs.

Speaking of the Cubs, near the end of this fairly banal piece about new Tribune owner Sam Zell, there's a quote that kind of worries me.
On the issue of the sale of the Chicago Cubs, Zell confirmed that he may seek to sell Wrigley Field separately. He acknowledged that Wrigley, because of its landmark status, is a tricky, single-use piece of property.

That's scary... a Cubs without WGN TV, Pat & Ron, or Wrigley Field? That's hard to imagine, and even harder to stomach.

Greenwald goes off on Giuliani's frightening comments about Presidential power. You really think Giuliani won't try to run the place like a king?

Via reddit, If we taught English the way we teach math.

A few thoughts on college sports, since Florida beat Ohio State for the national basketball championship just as they beat Ohio State for the national football championship. Some pundits are bemoaning that such a repeat performance means that the tournament's unpredictability has been lost. I wouldn't say that, necessarily. After all, the tournament has always at least been a little predictable. No team from a small non-power conference will win the championship. In fact, they'll be treated as giant-killers if they even make the Final Four. Alas, despite all the parity talk of sportswriters the last few years over the rise of the MVC, Big West, and WCC, among others, the dominance of power programs has never been stronger in the two major college sports. George Mason is the increasingly rare exception, not the rule.

Sure, it's great for the sponsors, great for fans of the big schools (Indiana included), great for the broadcasters, and great for the pocketbooks of those universities lucky enough to succeed in the cutthroat environment. The problem is that the losers are the players (essentially two- or three-year mercenaries being exploited before busting loose for the NBA or NFL), who never get the education they deserve, and all the universities who can't find success, particularly smaller Division I schools who have to pump cash into money-losing athletics departments. The NCAA's scholar-athlete tradition may still apply to, say, swimming and diving or wrestling. In football and basketball though, the presence of two dominant professional sports leagues, and the requirement that players go through at least one year of college first, has produced a high-stakes gambling operation whose goal is first and foremost the production of entertainment. The big secret of the "rise of the mid-major" is that they've risen not through any harder work or dedication than big programs, but through the same back-handed tactics that major programs use.

My suggestion is two-fold and ultimately an impossibly tough sell.

1.) NFL and NBA must get rid of college requirements, and create real minor leagues. This hopefully rids the college game of at least some of its crazy atmosphere of Greg Odens and Kevin Durants. That way, no one will plan on coming to college to be one-and-done, and the recruiting of such players will become way less important. They'll be going where the money is anyways.
2.) This one's the tough one: essentially convert all college sports into Division III, and destroy their quasi-independent status on campus. Here's a definition:

"Division III athletics features student-athletes who receive no financial aid related to their athletic ability and athletic departments are staffed and funded like any other department in the university. Division III athletics departments place special importance on the impact of athletics on the participants rather than on the spectators."

We've forgotten that these athletes must be students first, and that education should be the primary goal of a university. People claim that athletics raise a university's profile and raise booster cash. That's crap. So many schools have money-losing athletics programs that it's crazy, and the marketing (of Indiana hats, jerseys, oven mitts, etc.) wouldn't just stop because IU sports would be on a smaller level.

And why do we root for IU teams in the first place? Because they say INDIANA right there on the uniform. Those guys are our guys. One linguistic quirk of talking about sports teams is that us fans will use the plural subject "we" to describe the team. "We need to make the playoffs this year." "We should've signed Alfonso Soriano." "We gotta make those high percentage shots!" We appropriate the team into ourselves. And won't that be a lot easier knowing that the players are actually students like us, and not entertainment mercenaries?

The biggest problem with this plan is that it screws over the group of athletes too unqualified to make it into a university on academic and otherwise credit alone, but not good enough at their sport to play professionally. They won't get a chance to go to school, but maybe another better-qualified student from equally deprived conditions will take their spot? After all, how will we ever get the culture of "PLAY SPORTS TO SUCCEED" to change without, you know, actually changing it?

Left behind in Wrigleyville

2007-04-03T10:23:00.000+01:00

First thing: The Left Behind series, which has now sold upwards of 65 million copies so far, is finally coming to a close (although with the franchise it has built.... not really). Whether or not it's truly over, the sixteenth final installment of the series, "Kingdom Come" is ready to ship. After detailing all-American pilot Rayford Steele's (yeah, I know... he sounds like a tv private eye) battle against dashing foreign-ass secretary general of the UN Nicolae Carpathia, and the installment of Jesus in his thousand-year reign, the breathless thriller-style telling of the Book of Revelation is over.

Having read but two of them, I can't say I'm a total expert on the series. Nevertheless, I found its formulaic thriller tropes to be a bit too familiar. When you're retelling arguably the coolest book of the Bible (when the writers go absolutely mystical bonkers with wild visions), you should probably try to give it a bit more polish than a tossed-off frivolity populated by characters named Buck Williams and Mac McCallum (seriously). Left Behind demonstrates the danger of turning the Bible into pop culture, like Christian rock and The Omega Code. In doing so, the reverence for the original material is lost, just a momentary fad in a wave of "Jesus is my homeboy" pop Christianity, but with a hint of apocalyptic milleniarianism.

Maybe I don't have much of a say on this topic, not being a Christian and all, but I can tell you that this genre of pop Christianity doesn't exactly make me want to rush to church. May the Left Behind series rest in peace. Hopefully, its passing marks the end of an era of evangelilcal hysteria and not the beginning of a longer trend... but I'm not holding my breath.

OK, on with the bullet points:

In French news... Yeah, THAT'LL show 'em. A half-day strike by Airbus employees to protest job cuts. News flash: if Airbus didn't fire a bunch of people, it would've gone under. Then everyone loses their jobs. Yay! In fact, because of the international cooperative nature of EADS, they worked really hard to make sure job cuts didn't hit one country more than others. So, instead of pissing off one country's workers, they pissed off everyone's workers. Great. Oh, France.
Cubs start season in last place. At least we're tied with St. Louis. Cubs are also to be sold after 2007 season... I'm at least a little concerned. Not so much about the new Cubs owner, because, whatever, MLB won't just let some schmuck buy one of its most profitable franchises. What I am worried about is that despite its current long-term contracts with WGN and Tribune, the Cubs may one day soon no longer have the nationwide coverage of WGN's Superstation or the home team call of Pat & Ron. And that would make me sadder than a Jew left behind during the Rapture.
Rep. George Miller (D-California) wants to reform higher education. Most of the interview is standard Democratic boiler plate (more money for loans, more pell grants, etc.). Probably the most important reform that we hear about rarely is the necessity of reforming the byzantine system of securing FAFSA money through loans. Maybe we don't need to give more money away so much as we have to make it a little easier to get.
Watch as the Bush Administration keeps dragging its feet on this one. A Supreme Court ruling has never compelled the Bushies do much of anything.
So remember when Bill O'Reilly cut the mic of a guest on his show was "saying it's America's fault" that British soldiers were captured in Iran? Well... maybe it is our fault. You try to kidnap our nationals? We'll kidnap yours. Sheesh.
Speaking of Iraq, when does the Mahdi Army snap? LATimes story today says soon. This is particularly worrisome since the bulk of the "surge"'s limited success has been based on keeping the Shi'ites reined in despite a Sunni offensive. At some point, not even al-Sadr will be able to hold back his followers, and all the success of the surge will have been lost. We can only hope that doesn't happen.
The upside to colorblindness? Speculation for sure, but maybe Trevor will be really good at hunting out guys in camoflague. (via reddit)
Scott Karp writes about the importance of journalism in the blogosphere world of innuendo and rumor. It's basically my column in the IDS for Wednesday, but, you know, better. Key quote:
What I AM saying is that without clear and consistent principles, there is no chance for trust, and without trust, you’ve got nothing — or worse still, the downside can exceed the upside. So, yeah, it’s great that blogging software has empowered so many people, but with power comes responsibility. If bloggers want Journalism to get down off its high horse and take them more seriously, they need to demonstrate that they can first, do no harm.
From the latest drawergeeks about The Sandman (Marvel), a fake movie poster that isn't that funny, but at which I laughed a lot.
And finally, the video that's sweeping the web, Alanis Morrissette sings "My Humps." What will you do with all that ass, all that ass inside them jeans? (Good God... one is reminded of Hua Hsu, who said that "My Humps" was "so bad as to veer toward evil.") Anyways, this is Alanis' attempt to at least use its parody for good.

Hot hot green text on yellow action

2007-04-02T12:44:00.000+01:00

Bullet points in the morning:

According to this study, green text on yellow background is the easiest for people to read. So, like a good sheep, I'm following along. I'm not willing to put it in Times New Roman and make everything italicized, but I'm willing to try this out.
Hey, Republicans, you wanted a true conservative candidate? Take a look. Just as Le Pen makes the French gaze into their national soul and consider what they've become, so should the rise of Tom Tancredo in America make us ponder what we really are, that the paragon of one of our national parties should be a xenophobe who calls Miami a Third-world country. Glenn Greenwald notes the true character of the post-Bush Republican party (way better than I could) here.
Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.
What kind of American isn't just instinctively repulsed by the notion that the President has the power to imprison Americans with no charges? And what does it say about the current state of our political culture that one of the two political parties has all but adopted as a plank in its platform a view of presidential powers and the federal government that is -- literally -- the exact opposite of what this country is?
CARDS LOSE CARDS LOSE! Cubs now 1/2 game ahead of Cardinals for first and probably only time in the season.
Tribune bought? At $34 a share? What does this mean for the Chicago Trib and LATimes? What does it mean for the WGN Superstation? And most importantly, what does it mean for the boys in blue at Wrigley Field? I demand that the first question for Zell at the press conference be: "Will the Cubs go all the way?" (EDIT: Cubs for sale! Anyone have $440 million to spare? We'd better start pooling now; Cubs go on sale as soon as 2007 season over.)
Can France stop pandering to dictators? Eh... probably not. Still, a look at the bizarre relationship between France and Sub-Saharan Africa at the BBC.
I'm a straight-up Democrat, and Bush's horrendous legacy needs to be dismantled. At the same time, I find these bills to be counter-productive. Bush will no doubt veto them, and the Democrats won't be able to override. Meanwhile, as the HuffingPost is busy trumpeting the story as its top headline, the Democrats are going to continue squandering their post-election political capital on impossible wins. The Democrats' primary concern should be where it always has been: domestic programs that help working Americans. Presidents look best when fighting Congress, unless you can sell it as against children, against the elderly, and against everything good in America. If all the Democrats manage to get done is a bunch of symbolic bills that all get vetoed, we'll be looking at a Republican Congress next time around. And Bush's legacy will stay that way.

baseballbaseballbaseballbaseball

2007-04-01T14:24:00.000+01:00

Oh damn. It's here. Baseball. For real real. Not for play play. Five thoughts:

1.) Predictions for my Cubbies
Realistic Predictions: Cubs finish 84-78, 2nd place behind dominant offense, mediocre pitching and disastrous defense, miss playoffs. Hendry still loses job.

Dream Predictions: Cubs finish 101-61, best record in baseball, win World Series (preferably defeating White Sox, but any team will do). Derrek Lee wins the MVP that escaped him in 2005. Albert Pujols injures self in combination sneezing/hot-tub/deer-meat accident.

2.) Since everyone is picking the Brewers to do some damage in the Central...
I will predict another 3rd place, near-.500 finish.

3.) Japan Leagues
With the high-profile arrival of Daisuke Matsuzaka and others (Kei Igawa, Akinori Iwamura, etc.) some in Japanese baseball lament that their greatest players abandon the island for America. In fact, the Japanese leagues, unlike the American ones, have never been profitable on the whole, and are unable to put up the ridiculous salaries that even lower-tier American clubs can (see: Iwamura's signing with the Devil Rays). Yet, the relationship between American and Japanese baseball currently produces the obscene posting fee system, and washed-up Americans in Japan (i'm lookin at you Jose Macias...).

So, here's my idea: have MLB buy the Central and Pacific Leagues in Japan. They could be just like the American and National Legaues pre-inter-league-play. They've always been more advertising ornament than stand-alone institution in Japan, so let's make'em real teams. There'd be revenue-sharing just as in the American system, and no arcane posting fee bullshit. American players would be as free to go to Japan as vice versa. Or, the Japanese Leagues could act like a second-tier to the American teams, like the tiers in European soccer leagues. Of course, the Japanese with all that "honor" crap probably wouldn't sell in any situation, but it is worth thinking about.

4.) Farm system blues
The Cubs farm system has slowly slinked into the bottom half in baseball, having been raided in trades and having a number of solid young pitchers no longer eligible for minor leaguer status (too many innings in the majors). Home-grown talent is obviously important (Carlos Zambrano anyone?) and the Cubs' win-now strategy has forced the off-season buying bonanza. If my prediction holds true, and this is the end of the Hendry era, I think it's time to seriously dump money into the farm system, not in scouting (which the Cubs have always been good at) but in the actual development. After the K-orey Patterson debacle, over-cautiousness has led to "over-seasoning" if you will. A happy middle path will do all these guys a lot of good.

5.) Baseball blogs vs. "real" sports journalists
There's a lot of hate towards baseball bloggers as cold mechanical stat heads who hate the actual playing of the game or untrained partisan hacks who simply enshrine their own team and rain hate upon any disagreement, most of the time from guys like Murray Chass at the NYTimes, or Shaughnessy at the Boston Globe, or any number of "old-school" sportswriters who see bloggers as a threat. That's crazy. Blogs are just a different medium, like any medium. These reporters act as if the blogs are isolated nutjobs in their parents' basements, but the fact is that reporters are increasingly more isolated than the bloggers, reading less sources, watching fewer games, believing groupthink conclusions like "A-Rod needs to become a true Yankee" or "Statistics that I can't physically count during a game don't matter." Rather than write off sports blogs as lower-class competition, maybe these guys should start considering just why these blogs are popular, especially those that rag on old-school sports analysts. This change in medium just means that sportswriting is no longer the realm of ivory-tower AP-approved writing, but the down and dirty reporting and opining that made sportswriting an exciting genre.

Last thing: is this the LATimes April Fool's story? Or is this for real? Cuz seriously, I could SO be a butler.

Other April Fool's gags, Wikipedia, and Google. Hee!

Back Track

2007-03-31T16:42:00.000+01:00

I'm going to try a little feature here on the bloggy blog about songs/albums that I like. Since I'm here in France with a (relatively) slow Internet connection, I've been somewhat isolated from new (American) music. As a result, I've delved into my vast -- and in many spots sparsely-listened -- music collection. I'll write here about songs I've re-discovered or re-considered, and try to give them more detail than they normally get.

To start off, I'll do a not-so-obscure song, by a not-so-obscure artist... I'll try to do better next time, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for the classics.

"Backstreets" - Bruce Springsteen

Born To Run represents the moment of Bruce Springsteen's arrival. From the harmonica flourish to open "Thunder Road" to the piano and strings uncertain cadence under Bruce's moans in "Jungleland," it's a classic. Alas, it's the second epic song on the album that gets ignored so often. "Backstreets," though, points the way most directly to the broodier Springsteen who was to follow.

"Backstreets" seems to fit the pattern of fellow epics "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland": piano theme to introduce the themes, then repeated by other instruments, followed by explosive, fist-pumping bridge, before fading into the sunset, all under the watchful, mournful cheerleading of the Boss. Yet, its topic of betrayal gives the first hint that the explosive beauty of Springsteen's dream-vision of escape onto the backstreets of the American continent -- into the dark fields of the republic, if you will allow some Gatsbyizing -- may double-cross us. We feel the deception of friendly C Major family chords and the ugly undertones they mask.

From the slow rumble building into the second uptake of the theme by the other instruments to that very opening line, "One soft infested summer" (what a line!), we understand that these otherwise cliched nostalgic glimpses are "infested," that their corruption has forced us to seek escape on the open road. The drum beat mimicking a heart beat on 3 leading into 4 keeps our fists pumping, but it's a little off. As he will later perform to great effect in "Born in the U.S.A." and on his entire The Rising album, Springsteen turns the heart-breaking anthem into an uneasy foot-tapping sing-along. That heart-thump drum beat lets us know that despite it all, these forgotten kids are still alive. There is pain in the past, but there is joy in survival.

As Greil Marcus said, "you’ve never heard anything like this before, but you understand it instantly." And that's just the thing. No emotion is elicited in this song that isn't found in, say, the Shangri-Las in "Out in the Streets." In fact, in many ways, this song is like a counterpart, a book-end on an era. Unlike "Thunder Road" or "Born to Run" or even "Jungleland," this song's possibility has already parted. Its primary flight is past. And all the howling betrayal we hear in the song is only further ironized as Springsteen mentions the "faithlessness" almost in passing, sliding it in between memories of old. It's like the pair of exes who keep talking about remembering the good times, but can't hide the deeper pains.

None of this is that profound, but Springsteen has never really been about profundity. For all the talk of Springsteen as heir to Dylan, his lyrics are nowhere near Dylan's cerebral linguistic gymnastics. Yet, in their simplicity, they speak a universal language that courses through our veins as rock'n'roll. When Springsteen wordlessly screams after "I hated him and I hated you went you went away," we feel the primal force of the jilted teenager in all of us.

One side note: I've often heard that Terry is meant to be an androgynous figure. After all there's no forced indication of gender, and some moments seem to indicate a masculinity in Terry ("trying to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be," for example). I'm not sold on the androgyny of the Terry character, but I think the ambiguity allows for further universal contact. Terry has become not a person so much as an empty shell upon which the singer has layered all his nostalgic energies.

When someone told me recently that no one he knows really likes Springsteen, I was dismayed but it seemed normal for the indie rock crowd to deride. All that unironic earnestness, dreaming about rock'n'roll giving Jersey kids salvation, was just too damned sincere for the post-punk era. Yet, here we are, and Springsteen's back. From the keyboard riffs in the Hold Steady to the inflected screams of Okkervil River, that old symbol of rock'n'roll corporatism has come back as the symbol of the purer rock'n'roll. "Backstreets" was the first step towards the darker Springsteen of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska and even to some extent Tunnel of Love and The River. Where "Born to Run"'s suicidal exuberance turns off the shoe-gazing crowd, "Backstreets" points the way back.

Sure, the song's not perfect. Sometimes those little organ ornaments make me want to punch Danny Federici, and the maudlin guitar solo could've been better fleshed out, but like much of Born to Run, these signs of amateurism would sound lame and weak-ass if not for the orchestrating, song-writing and singing might of Bruce Springsteen. He ain't the Boss for nothin'. Somehow Bruce's pathos rings truer than the emo wails of his lesser imitators. "Thunder Road" and "Born to Run" are without a doubt the choice cuts from this album. But damned if "Backstreets" isn't my favorite.

"Backstreets" at the Hammerstein, 1975:

Bruce Springsteen - Backstreets mp3

Morning (well... afternoon) thoughts and reads

2007-03-31T11:27:00.000+01:00

A pretty goddamn neat instrument. Multi-user, interactive... next thing you know we'll be having holophonors.

An unusual and clever way to attack TurnItIn.com... "Copyright violation! You're stealing OUR papers! I never consented to adding my papers into a giant for-profit company's database!" Pretty sneaky. Volokh guesses that Turnitin "would and should win," but I'm not too sure.

The real reason the Bush Administration's attorney firings are important. I read this Salon feature yesterday, and now it's on DailyKos front page, so I figured it's worth the read.

{snip}

"Put simply, the Department of Justice lives on credibility. When a federal prosecutor sends FBI agents to your brother's house with an arrest warrant, demonstrating an intention to take away years of his liberty, separate him from his family, and take away his property, you and the public at large must have absolute confidence that the sole reason for those actions is that there was substantial evidence to suggest that your brother intentionally committed a federal crime. Everyone must have confidence that the prosecutor exercised his or her vast discretion in a neutral and nonpartisan pursuit of the facts and the law.
Being credible is like being pregnant -- you either are, or you aren't. If someone says they "kind of" believe what you say, they are really calling you a liar. Once you have given the public a reason to believe some of your decisions are improperly motivated, then they are going to question every decision you have made, or will make in the future. That is a natural and predictable phenomenon."

Just goes to show you that the Bush Administration's moral and ethical corruption isn't necessarily illegal. Most of the time, they play just in-bounds. But each lapse, from torture to extraordinary renditions to lobbying cronyism to fudging the Iraq evidence, and now, to attorney firings, destroys the credibility and good faith in which people hold the government. The loss of that good faith, that credibility has become the more glaring negative legacy from the Bush presidency (as opposed to our loss of civil rights... which is linked, but different).

Cheerleading: serious business. More than half of life-threatening womens' sports injuries come from cheerleading?? Hey, I've got an idea... how about some serious safety measures? Hockey players have pads; football players have pads. Get some helmets on these girls. Otherwise, get them the hell away from these dangerous-ass stunts.

Ugh, Charles Krauthammer. How can you be so smart... yet so dumb? First off, the "War on Terrorism" in strategic terms is goofy to begin with, as terrorism is a tactic, but that's a battle for another day. The real weakness here is that Krauthammer seems unfazed about fighting a war for no justification other than "cuz we want to." He refers to the Democrats' desire for casus belli and morality as "nostalgia" (not unlike Gonzales referring to the Geneva Convention as "quaint"). Also, of COURSE al-Qaeda wants to keep the fighting in Iraq. It keeps American soldiers from actually, you know, capturing its leaders. "Yeah sure, stay in Iraq. That's where the REAL terrorists are. ::chortle chortle:: Allah be praised, I can't stop laughing at these morons!"

Homeland Security! KEEPING US SAFE!
("Checkpoint security screeners at Denver International Airport last month failed to find liquid explosives packed in carry-on luggage and also improvised explosive devices, or IED's, worn by undercover agents")

Health care! KEEPING US HEALTHY!
($12,000 for 15 minutes in a hospital)

Michelle Malkin! KEEPING BROWN PEOPLE SCARED!
("Can you sit down and type, "I will not submit to your will," to a hypothetical Arab teenager and not feel a little ... silly?")

Good thing my readership is small... otherwise, someone might threaten to kill me. And all this, right after Stop Cyberbullying Day. Violence is not the answer, friends!

Oh, come on. Sorority countersues about bad press. Hey, want to improve your image, DZ? Quit being such total bitches.

And, because baseball is here in less than a day and a half...

daaaaaaaaaaamn. are you ready?

Are YOU on the list?

2007-03-30T12:18:00.000+01:00

All three major papers front news about former Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson's testimony on the Hill, and all invariably point out that Sampson contradicts his boss's account of things several times. And this seems like a big deal. After all, it looks like Gonzales called a big press conference to deny that he had ever been in any meetings about the attorney firings, when, in fact, he had. Also, everyone is ballyhooing the line: "the decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president."

Here's my thing, though. Sampson mentions that he was the first to name-drop Patrick Fitzgerald as a potential firing target. But what about all the other names on the list? Who picked these names? And who chose to cover it up? (I think the answer to the 2nd one is clearly Gonzales.) Sure, he makes clear who the decision-makers were, but he never answered who did what.

BTW, did anyone catch video of the Sampson hearings? He looks... tired. Used up. Beat up. This is what happens when people are given too much power and too little oversight. The cocky guy from inter-departmental e-mails who was amped up to take down these attorneys is now just a regretful, sad man on C-Span, testifying to Congress. The founders were right, in that centering the responsibility of government in one place leads to abuse. It's not necessarily with bad intentions, but this is the natural result.

Now, the question is, how high did it go? Who made the list in the first place? And how long until the Bush Administration does the right thing and axes Al Gonzales?

Séséséséségolene!

2007-03-30T00:38:00.000+01:00

Ségolene Royal... she may not have the policy, or the charisma, or the experience. But I'll be damned if she doesn't have a great song.

When Ségo (am i the only one who thinks "sonic the hedgehog" when i hear "sego"? ..probably) was in town, they had these giant speakers blasting the Ségo song. It has slowly wormed it's way into my brain and refuses to leave.

So now, I foist it upon you. Go to 0:50 for that irresistable chorus. Shit, if Kerry had a song like this, he totally would've won.

Sample lyrics (translation mine):

L’imaginer
A l’Elysée,
La plus belle fille du parti
Et la plus savoureuse aussi

C'est tout cela, Ségolène
Et plus que ça, Ségolène,
Elle est géniale, Ségolène
Et même Royal, Ségolène…

my translation:

Imagine it
At Elysee (palace... the french white house)
The most beautiful girl of the party
And also the tastiest (this one escapes me... "savoureuse" also means "juicy" like a piece of gossip, but that doesn't seem to fit either. maybe we are planning on cannibalizing her? mm.)

She's all this, Ségolène
And more than this, Ségolène
She is great, Ségolène
and even Royal (PUN! POW!), Ségolène

A masterwork in political songwriting. A more sober French election entry may come later.

Melt it down to make trailer parks

2007-03-29T17:56:00.000+01:00

So, the St. Louis Cardinals are in a bit of a pickle. Not concerning the impending season or anything, but about a silly little thing they did. You know how the United Center has a giant statue of Michael Jordan in front? Well, the Cards commissioned this statue of Mark McGwire right after the 1998 home run chase, but with all the steroids hubbub, they've got a 3/4-sized (3/4-life because an 8 foot steroid-pumped Incredible Hulk might scare the kids) bronze Big Mac statue with nothing to do. So it sits, in the warehouse right next to the Ark of the Covenant and the Elephant Man's bones.

Hilarious quote:

"Weber is responsible for all the sculptures outside the stadium, and also has cast Thomas Jefferson and a few notable hunting dogs."

Actually, that's pretty much the Cards right there. Imagined Jeffersonian past, hick present. All in giant bronze statues.

I wonder if they'll ever put it up. All kidding aside, they should. It's their history. Just like when Sammy retires, I hope they retire his number at Wrigley.

Baseball starts Monday! Allons-y Cubs!

BREAK IT DOWN MC ROVE

2007-03-29T14:58:00.000+01:00

..............................wow. i mean.... wow. just... wow.

karl rove drops it like it's hot at the correspondents' dinner.

hahaha i don't even know what to do. i am literally in fits of laughter. i demand that people the world over begin doing the karl rove dance.

he should be impeached just for that. goddamn.

This better not be like "I STILL Know What You Did Last Summer"

2007-03-29T13:52:00.000+01:00

Aww daaaaaaamn. Trailer for 28 weeks later.

Zombies and shit. Anti-government paranoia. Gotta love it. Although I'll admit, this one looks quite a bit lamer than 28 Days, what with all the explosions, gunfire, and more typical zombie movie thrills.

Not that there's anything wrong with zombie thrills.

Re-entry pains

2007-03-29T11:32:00.000+01:00

So here I am, back in the blogosphere, after God knows how many failed attempts. Mostly because no one really reads this kind of shit. But I feel like these days, I just need an outlet to put out all the dissociated nonsense in my head down on paper (or hypertext).

This will serve as a sort of aggregator of links and whatnot that I find compelling/hilarious/disturbing and give me some latitude for commentary. We'll see how it works.

Well, let's start things off with something that strikes me as odd: the presidential odds of Fred Thompson.

Is the theoconservative movement in America in such disarray that it really needs Fred Thompson to swoop in and save it from the evil clutches of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani? As an Obamaniac myself, I understand the appeal of the outsider candidate with great communication, but the potential shortcomings are clear enough (inexperience, most prominently). I guess I don't understand this bickering about getting a "bona fide conservative" candidate (just as I don't understand lefty bickering about Hillary's war vote or Obama's religiosity). By creating this unreasonable hurdles for candidates to jump over, they're going to get stuck with either a.) a far right candidate who has no chance of getting elected in the general, thanks to the Bush "compassionate conservative" debacle, or b.) a far right candidate who can't even get elected by Republican primary voters, thus further weakening the "base."

Sure, politics changes over time, and no doubt, America is still moving rightward. Just as Reagan-appointed judges aren't conservative enough to be Supreme Court justices, so is Reagan now essentially not conservative enough to be President. A California governor from godless Hollywood, whose tree-hugging prevented a major highway from being built, who raised taxes ceaselessly to (gasp!) balance the budget, and who had done nothing in the way of instituting religion into government... good luck getting that guy past the "bona fide conservative" peanut gallery. My point is, sitting there with a score-card waiting for "Mr. Right" (pun intended) to come along is counter-productive for your movement. Their undying fidelity to dogmatic ideology (btw, Dobson is already saying Thompson isn't a TRUE Christian... whatever that means) undermines what made their movement so powerful in the first place: pragmatism.

That said, nothing would make me happier than to watch the theocons marginalized. Lot of good they've done. Yeesh. Now, theolibs... that could be interesting.