For reasons unknown (alien invasion?) KUOW ran next week's WNYC-produced Radiolab, a live show recorded in front of a loving audience in Minneapolis, tonight.
The show uses Radiolab's signature overlapping audio, which to my ear derives most directly from Altman and Firesign Theatre, to explore the production and legacy of the storied Mercury Theatre on the Air "War of The Worlds," to great and personally moving effect.
I have been familiar with Radiolab, and its' leading light, Robert Krulwich, for years. While generally I have admired both Krulwich's reporting and his commitment to puyshing the mediujm as an aspect of his reportage, Radiolab did not sell itself to me. Overlapping found and reported audio accompanied by well-informed commentary was, it seemed, not enough for me.
Given that Krulwich's grail is indeed as it has seemed to me for some time the transformation of the reported story into dramatic and audio entertainment, it's only natural that one would expect him to explore the October 31, 1938 Mercury Radio Theatre on The Air broadcast of their adaptation of The War of The Worlds.
Without going into detail, it is clear to me that the show I have just listened to achieves the goal of transforming reportage into something new, not news, not drama, not anecdote. The show conveyed new information regarding something I have been fascinated with since childhood, entirely new and unexpected fallout from the broadcast, and direct, thoughtful commentary from the hosts on the topic at hand.
It was fantastic, and if Krulwich can find the correct choices to address moving forward with the show, new ground has been broken in three disciplines: radio, journalism, and drama.
I suspect that this may be what the guy's been after for umpteen years. I've been listening, and I never heard it click previously, although I always appreciated Krulwich's aggressive pusuit of the edge.
Following a heated shouting match several years ago with the Flexcar founder and CEO over the meaning of 'lifetime,' I conceived in my heart a vicious hatred of the company, a shiftless excuse to milk the public teat under the guise of environmental sensibility not equaled until the dawn of ecofuels.
During the operation's recent endgame, the con-artists sought to protect a set of tax breaks that made them a more attractive acquisition target, and, surprise surprise, were bought out by East Coast-based carshare operation Zipcar.
Hey! What's this? It seems, according to Slog post Zipcar Responds, that they are staffed by a higher grade of evildoer than the home-grown operation.
This should come as no surprise, if one considers the predator pyramid. The only question, really, is whether or not Zipcar employed mind-controlling earwigs to drive the tax-break-protection lobbying, or if the Flexcar drones acted of their own free will.
So - recently my home-hosted Mac server's boot drive took a powder, and needed to be hosed and rebuilt. The server functionality has proved significantly more difficult to rebuild than in the past, primarily a function of orphan docs clogging Google search results pertaining to this or that combination of this or that system and server software release.
At about the same time, AT&T cut off my phone's data plan with no notice, something which I learned after an increasingly aggravating three hours on the phone with various personages in customer service and tech support. In AT&T's case, the cutoff was the result of a policy rather than a functional issue - my Treo, which I have used with an AT&T $20/mo plan called MediaNet, is apparently not eligible for the plan, even though I have had the plan for three years and was initially set up with that plan by Cingular's CSRs in the first place.
Cingular, for future readers, purchased the juddering, smoking ruin of AT&T mobile and rebranded. This is something which confuses the shit out of me when I go to pay the bill online. Each time, I struggle to remember that Qwest, my local landline provider, which was once AT&T, is not the new Cingular. My bill pay service won't let you change the names of the accounts once you have it set up, so this is likely to get worse as, oh, gas companies purchase municipal utilities and are eventually absorbed by corporations owned by leathery-skinned ETs who arrive from Sirius five years from now.
Anyway, fuck AT&T, and I'm ready to move on. Being of conservative mien with regard to functioning hardware, I just want to swap SIMs in my current cell phone farm, which kinda-sorta limits me to T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the US. Naturally, figuring out T-Mo's plans and options is an undertaking akin to parsing Pentagon and TSA press releases regarding 'progress' in making America more 'secure.'
Complicating matters, on Monday, T-Mo rolled out a $10/mo VOIP landline add-on for extant customers, which, once you really wade through the details, requires either DSL or cable, so your landline is likely to remain in place unless you know enough to buffalo your Qwest rep into dropping the charges for the POTS line while keeping the DSL in place.
Meanwhile, my server rebuild project keeps getting shorted time.
I really hate all of this needless complexity. As implemented in our culture, it's effectively a non-governmental tax on time, and I resent the shit out of it. I suppose I could just Craigslist my phones and my computers, and transfer the mercury and lead disposal burden to shiftless cheap-ass hippies.
Come to think of it, there is a certain appeal in that idea.
On arriving home tonight, I was greeted by the conspicuous absence of attention-hoggery and tailwagging from Rocket which inevitably means something has been thoroughly chewed to bits. In normal circumstances, this affects shoes, and consequently Viv, more than me. We've adapted by locking the shoes up.
Casting my eyes about what should I see, but THIS:
That is what remains of the book I wrote about fondly yesterday. It should be noted that the damage is largely restricted to the cover and table of contents, and one piece of the cover in particular appears to have been chewed for some time like a piece of gum.
That is of course the section of the cover that I held for the longest period of time last night as I played from the book. Apparently my dog loves me so much he just wants to eat me up, or at least chew me like gum.
The Best Bus Driver in the World (weblog wafted away on the digital winds), acting on a ukelele-inspired whim, bought me a copy of Pete Seeger's well-known American Favorite Ballads, figuring that since he was buying himself a copy I might be interested too.
Happily, the book appears to be the source for several old faves of mine, introduced to me for playing by Greg via xeroxes back when we were in the Boxers.
At around midnight between Monday and Sunday, AT&T (formerly Cingular) started blocking internet access on my cell, which is currently a Treo 680. After a couple hours on the line with their nerds and sales goons, it was established that the company had programatically excluded MediaNet users based on 'unapproved hardware,' such as my 680, which is not an approved model of phone for the old plan.
I have used the plan for about three years across a variety of phones, so I'm pretty pissed off. Downgrading from my current 2-line plan to the cheapest 2-line plan offered will mean a revenue loss to AT&T of about $40 to $60 per month.
Despite this, no negotiating tactic employed would budge them to simply restore service. At one point, I began to use the milkshake line from There Will Be Blood; at another, I slowly counted off the dollar cost to AT&T of their idiocy, "One, two, three..."
I was wildly obstreperous, incredibly obstinate, intensely articulate, and wholly incredulous. I tried to be right, abrasive, and entertaining all at once.
Well, fuck 'em. Interesting to note that Verizon has a $100 flat-rate cell-and-land plan. Time to shop around.
Come on, come on, there's a hundred-bucks-plus a month on the table. Who wants my money, assholes? Come on and tell me why you deserve it, come on!
Most of my day today was spent loading a solid half-cord of well-seasoned but mossy and buggy cedar rounds from some craigslister's backyard, followed by a dump run to the astonishingly clean and sort-of science-fictiony Shoreline Transfer Station.
For my sawbuck, I had been expecting a quarter-cord at the most of iffy wood, not the really decent stuff I ended up loading, to my arms' and my back's chagrin. Having borrowed Greg's little half-ton Chevy truck, I felt it was only thematically appropriate to bring the dog everywhere with me as I wrestled the recalcitrant truck into submission. He was very well behaved if a bit puzzled, since riding around usually means a visit to the dog park.
Of course, all this manly activity did nothing to advance my data recovery project, and I have been working on that since I returned. I have managed to get apache to boot and the base content is in place, but MySQL needs to be fixed, and there's this and that Perl doohickey to wedge into this and that data crevice and yadda yadda yadda.
Time to reheat that ol' pasta sauce, I reckon. I'm still a bit peeved that the data emergency has stolen some of my goals from me this weekend, but hey, at least I didn't freak out about the problem and it looks like all the contributed content will be fine, one way or another.
Dammit, I forgot to call my folks. I knew there was some midday thing that would get eaten by the time monsters.
Happily for me, I did not come across David Denby's much-better-worked-out thoughts on No Country For Old Men until I had recorded mine, fragmentary as they are.
Interestingly, he seems to get to roughly the same place as I, wondering at the spectacle of such plainly apparent technical mastery deployed in the service of what he, too, characterizes as nearly nihilism.
I left out Lebowski the other day, primarily because its' themes are sufficiently distinct from No Country that I didn't want to drag the Dude into the discussion.
Denby doesn't leave him out, and rightly so.
(In passing, I find it amusing that parts of Lebowski, like There will Be Blood, were shot at Greystone Mansion.)
In Lebowski, Walter dismisses the comic badmen that have hassled the bowlers, later also describing them as cowards:
"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of."
It sure seems unlikely that the Coens intend the ineffectual clutch of Eurotrash as a self-portrait. Yet it certainly does not seem outlandish to assume that they have wondered about their own work's relation to nihilism, even if one assumes they would, like Walter, dismiss the idea.
Oh happy day! My long-term home-based webserver appears to have sufferred a monumental drive failure and thus my weekend plans must be deferred in the service of data-recovery and transfer.
Joy!
It's time to get my mind around No Country for Old Men, which of these three films remains for me the slipperiest. I'm a long-time admirer of the Coens' work, Raising Arizona excepted (note adoption subtheme! interesting!).
No Country feels materially different from all their preceding films, a result of the filmmakers' easing off their previously aggressively mannered style. Despite this major shift in approach the film retains themes and moods from three precursors in particular: Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo.
Blood Simple, the Coens' first commercial feature, shares the Texas setting and the sense of unsavory doins coexisting with an everyday sunlit world of small towns and big spaces. Miller's Crossing, possibly the filmmakers' first attempt at a major work, is focused on a power struggle between 1920s gangsters in which the gangsters' nighttime world of firefights and speakeasies actually completely trumps the day-to-day world. Fargo, of course, presents a Minnesota sherriff struggling to disentangle a botched and ill-starred kidnapping plot.
All three films share with No Country (as well as the majority of all the other films by the team) a deeply misanthropic view of the world, which endears them mightily to me. However, all three present a traditional resolution to their events even as the films clearly present a disturbing and amoral outcome of the plots they convey. In No Country, the assassin's unexpected wreck fills the role of the moral resolution, even as it remains ambiguous. Tommy Lee Jones' retiring sheriff sits at his table and recounts a dream of his father leading the way to the underworld over a mountain pass, and the string of killings remains unresolved by the lawman, who has come to feel that he cannot bring justice to a world he believes he cannot understand.
Of course, the sheriff's loss of faith is tragic precisely because we are shown that he does grasp the task he faces, even as he fails to protect his charges. He just doesn't realize that he sees the pieces to the puzzle even as he tells others about them. In particular, when he muses out loud, distractedly, about the cattle hammer, we can see that his mind has assembled the parts of a puzzle we know he's been thinking about, yet he never proceeds to an 'aha!' moment.
This aspect of the sherriff's character is reflected in the way the film sits in my mind. When I try to work out what I think of it, it slides around in my head, and I can't quite grasp it. Specific technical elements of the film were very impressive and effective indeed, notably the nighttime duel in the streets of Eagle Pass and Jones' sympathetic performance.
I'm kind of trying to figure out what this means with regard to my affection for the Coens' earlier work. It would seem to imply that nihilism as an aesthetic philosophy is most easily enjoyed when presented in a stylized manner, and that the less visible style overlain upon the viewpoint the more difficult it is for me to analyze and describe how or why the film was effective for me as a viewer.
Clearly I missed giggling in delirious approval over this or that outrageous and unexpected filip of irony or improbable stylization, and the lack of that endorphin has paralyzed a part of my critical faculties. Perhaps this is how the Coens have chosen to show me something of a life of the mind.
As noted recently, I clubbed Viv across the head and dragged her by her hair to attend a suite of Oscar nominated films this past weekend. I've already treated of There Will Be Blood, my pick for best of the three. I will ho'd off on No Country For Old Men as the film provoked the most complex, postmodern reactions in my mind and I'm not done thinking about it.
Juno, on the other hand, lived up to its' rep and my expected response. I don't think I have anything in specific to contribute to the critical literature on the film, but I wanted to get my own experience down so that a few years from now, I can consult my own record.
The film first came to my attention on seeing the flat-out terrific first trailer sometime this summer, possibly preceding Ratatouille or Knocked Up. I actually forced everyone I work with to watch the trailer, something I avoid in general, being quite aware that the quality of a trailer has literally nothing to do with the quality of the film it advertises.
When the film opened, I was interested to read and hear some of the press work associated with the film's publicity, interviews with the scriptwriter and director, that sort of thing. When I gained a sense of the narrative arc of the film - teenage pregnancy ends in smiles thanks to the miracle of adoption - my interest in the film plummeted to near-zero.
Now, I am an adopted person and one with a specific rage toward my birth parents, who will remain forever anonymous to me by personal choice (not that I've been contacted, but in closed adoptions the parties must both agree to contact as adults and I would not agree if contacted). While aware of this, I am not convinced that my drift in interest stemmed from my own background as much as it did from a sense that I had already seen the film, in Knocked Up.
Of course Juno is very different from Knocked Up. But both films treat a real-world problem - the unexpected and unwanted pregnancy - with previously unseen psychological delicacy, sympathy, and lightheartedness. Sadly, from my perspective, it appears that this particular approach is one which I find tiresome after a mere two outings. Give me angst and rage or cartoon melodrama over comedy which includes realist characterizations when babies are involved, apparently.
I feel that both films artificially resolve complicated situations that, until the falsely-happy plot resolution, are presented with sympathy and complexity. I did not find these resolutions convincing or satisfying.
Returning to Juno in particular, I specifically found the adoption plot element disinteresting as I watched the film. My attention wandered in the scenes which directly involved the adoptive couple and which were more focused on the mechanics of the impending adoption than on Juno's impeccable taste in rock music. This is interesting to me, because I don't think it was due to poor scripting or direction or cinematography.
I think it was psychologically defensive boredom stemming from a desire to avoid time spent in the company of my own emotions regarding my adoption. I do think I have a handle on my adoption, and it runs like this: the parents that raised me are my real parents. I love and honor them.
The parents that bore me are of no interest to me, and I bear them considerable ill will. Is that ill will based on rage at abandonment? Or is it based on coming into being? I know what my own answer to this question is, and I know that literally no-one in my circle of social relations either believes or respects my own self-analysis in this matter, something that strongly contributes to my ongoing social withdrawal.
As noted earlier, we stopped by the EMP-slash-Science Fiction Musuem or whatever it's called this weekend, and much to my surprise, shoehorned into the corner and basement of the Gehry Blob, it's a superior museum and display experience to the EMP.
I'm not fully sure why this is. Partly it seems to be a reflection that SF fandom has always emphasized the cult of the physical object - the book, the zine, the prop - over the act that sacralizes the object - wearing the costume, writing the book. Thus, seeing vitrines filled with mixed stuff - book cheek by jowl with prop and poster - is of greater interest to me than the act of gazing on Greg Ginn's now-mute plexiglas SG.
Additionally, it was interesting to see several books currently in my archives on display in editions suspiciously similar to those I own. Among these were mid-seventies editions of both Delany's Dhalgren and Brunner's The Sheep Look Up.
Of course, the original command chair from TOS Star Trek is on display, and that was cool to see. But my very favorite props were small. One was a can of Leopard Lager from Red Dwarf, which caused me to reflect upon my foolishness in giving away the Red Dwarf series one 'baby girl scutter' prop that a coworker once gave me. She'd received it as a going-away present from the show's propmaster just before moving to the US. For a few years it was a totemic presence in my living room during the KCTS-9 Red Dwarf marathons.
The other item I relished as if it were tranya was the 18-inch molded-plastic AMT Enterprise model used in a scene shot for The Trouble with Tribbles. I had long heard that this kit was used by the TOS effects team, and having built it myself around 1974 or so I was charmed beyind measure to see the tiny ship, painted grey and decals flaking, mounted at kneecap level.
I've been asked about this a few times today, so here's the standard reply, which is a straight-up party-line Cuban-American family reply:
Fidel's retirement doesn't really change anything, today. It might, if Raoul actually creates programs to change various economic or even political practices. But Raoul's track record is not such that one anticipates big change.
On the other hand, maybe the family is really getting ready to step aside, and if so, who knows?
Here in the US, it can be tricky to talk about this stuff in our families, precisely because it evokes such strong emotions. Personally, I surely hope the US embargo is lifted shortly, as it has clearly not resulted in meaningful political or economic adjustments to U.S. or Cuban-exile demands. Likewise, I surely hope that the various on-island cultural, political, and economic pretzels Cubans and others have bent themselves into can be unbent with lissome Carribbean grace and good sense.
A major feature in today's P-I profiles indie-music stalwart Calvin Johnson and his career in tyhe wake of a serious 2003 accident. As befits the subject, the piece is self-evidently heartfelt. Written by one Travis Nichols, it's clearly the work of someone who is deeply familiar with Johnson's work. I've noticed Nichols' byline here and there lately; more power to him, and I can't wait until he starts writing about people and things he hasn't cared about at all in the past, because I believe that is when one takes one's measure in gigs such as the ones he is pursuing at the moment.
I remain amazed to see a major, front-of-section feature in ANY daily on artists that matter to me, as Calvin does.
As noted, among other films this weekend Viv and I took in There Will Be Blood. For me it clearly seemed a step up from Anderson's other ambitious films and while to claim I enjoyed watching it would be inaccurate, the film was clearly great.
In the ending sequences of the film, the oilman character played by Daniel Day-Lewis is living in a sprawing neo-Tudor 1920's mansion, and I was struck by the interiors, which seemed exactly right for a late-20's Tudor-revival construction. This style is familiar to me as I lived in a 1928 Anhalt building here in Seattle for thirteen years, and the interiors in the film seemed too detailed and persuasive to me to have been sets constructed wholly from scratch.
A bit of the old googly-moogly led me to the entry for Greystone Mansion, apparently a city park smack in the middle of Beverly Hills. The house was constructed in 1928 for the son of Orange County land baron and oilman Edward Doheny.
A prominent Orange County coastal feature in OC is named for the family, Doheny Point. coastal park in the city of Dana Point is named for the family, Doheny State Beach.
In the film, Plainview constructs an oil pipeline through from the interior to the sea in Central California, "near Santa Barbara," according to the Wikipedia entry for the film. I myself heard reference to San Luis Obispo, which is just inland from Morro Bay, south of Carmel and north of Oxnard and Ventura.
Having long heard the Doheny name on visits to my in-laws, I was fascinated to learn of the connection to a real-world oil tycoon, and began to read the Wikipedia article on the house with relish. Imagine my eyebrows, if you will, as I read these words:
"On February 16, 1929, four months after Ned Doheny, his wife Lucy and their five children moved into Greystone, Ned died in his bedroom in a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunket.[3] The official story indicated Plunket murdered Ned either because of a "nervous disorder" or inflamed with anger over not receiving a raise. Others point out that Ned's gun was the murder weapon and that Ned was not buried in a Catholic cemetery with the rest of his family, indicating that he had committed suicide. Both men were involved in the trial of Ned's father in the Teapot Dome scandal."
Additionally, the character of Daniel Plainview comes from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, we learn in the film. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the elder Doheny:
"Doheny was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin."
A bit further down the page, in reference to the Teapot Dome scandal reference above:
Doheny faced criminal charges over the incident but was cleared of all charges. The scandal is also the inspiration for Upton Sinclair's novel, 'Oil!', based in part on Doheny's life.
Although my understanding is that Anderson and his filmmaking team have only loosely adapted Sinclair's novel, they sought opportunities to closely relate Plainview and Doheny.
This weekend viewed, in theater:
Juno
There Will Be Blood
No Country For Old Men
Misc other:
Visited EMP and SF museum
Chores completed:
Vacuuming
Dishes
Veterinarian visit for dog
Long dog walk
Grocery run
Pantry straightened up, old food tossed
Straightened up both living rooms
Passport applications filed
Online housecleaning and updates finished
Today while out and about we passed a man lying on his belly on the sidewalk in his underwear. He had quite clearly just shit his pants. It was quite cold, and a pair of missionizing, tie-wearing young men were unfortunate enough to be the first people to walk by the man.
Given their current metier, they were compelled to engage the man in conversation, presumably an oveture to an offer of aid or a phone call to the police.
We did not remain in the vicinity long enough to determine which it was to be.
Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database: "There are currently 1,703 Blueprint Sheets Online."
Apparently, the online world of Trek fandom has sprung up again in the wake of Paramount dropping intimidation lawsuits as a fan-retention strategy. This site is only a partial node of the parent site, which appears to be devoted to making out-of-print Trekanalia available online, as is the case with this really quite incredible collection of Trek blueprints.
Back in the 70s, I had hard-won early editions of the Franz Joseph / Bantam Enterprise blueprints and Starfleet Technical manual, which inspired a limitless array of variously professional and otherwise interpretations of Trek tech as envisioned by your shop teacher.
Still, these documents were among the aspects of Star Trek that drew it closer to me than the Star Wars universe. Star Wars fans made and make obsessively accurate and cinematically detailed costumes; Trek fans produced obsessively detailed and quite uncinematic blueprints. Star Wars fans thought they were creating for the camera; Star Trek fans thought they were creating for a new world.
I wonder what the shift to embrace fan-created and fan-inspired content means for Star Trek? After all, the upcoming film is generally thought to have been greenlit based on the presence of competing fan film projects that used new actors to portray Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al.
I have a hard time imagining that it would result in the fictional world of canonical Star Trek suddenly embracing the anarchy of a copyright-free sci-fi souk. No, the appeal of the series - especially the first series - is specifically authoritarian, and the fan content seen here adopts that rhetorical tone.
These documents are savory precisely because they adopt the voice of authority as camouflage, of NASA technical documents and NORAD strike plans, and the particular thrill of these items was always that they never dropped the pose by inserting the Paramount logo or a special guest appearance by, oh, Lucille Ball into the apparent documentary evidence for a better future.
The pose is, I must admit, something I personally savor and have a bit of experience of.
FSS speaks truth: who or what the hell is FSS? And where the fuck are my editors over here? Geez!
Fake Steve Jobs: "...a great deal of what I've developed over the course of my career has been aimed at enabling people to avoid other human beings."
It seems clear to me that this is an underlying principle of both computer demand and design since well before the microcomputer revolution. Mediated social experiences which are rendered brittle and disposable are the primary selling point of the technology.
Tonight's dream spectacular featured me, drunk, unable to put the car out of reverse and consequently executing careering donuts up and down the lawns of an unfamiliar and well-to-do suburban neighborhood. I was of course seized by a mob of wealthy teenagers who beat the holy fuck out of me. It is the beating part of the dream I recall most vividly.
In other dream-related news, I have been awakening once a night from a foreclosure nightmare. How I hate home ownership.
I dreamt that Viv and were traveling through china by train, and on debarkation, became separated. I awakened as, in the dream, I scrolled through my cell phone's contacts, looking for someone to call or text for help.
Far too much to do today.
Dropped a pair of cat-pee carpets off for cleaning, an exercise in the defeat of yankee economics and a clear demonstration that end times are at hand for the US: it would have been cheaper to actually just buy new rugs.
I went forward with the cleaning as one of the rugs had sentimental value to me, having dumpstered it some decade past.
Clearly, I don't understand, and may actively hate, my native culture's system of economics.
Went to the Crumb show at the Frye, which I must say is really worth hitting, especialy considering it is FREE. They have some real grails of Crumbology on display, such as the famous bathtub orgy late-60's Fritz the Cat sequence and two or three original, unpublished childhood Arcades.
The real revelation, though, and I don't think I'm alone in noting this, is Bob's extraordinary sensitivity as a colorist. It's consistent - the Arcade covers from his teenage youth show it, and he's still executing these incredible technicolor miniatures fifty years later.
The highlight was overhearing some sixty-year-old Jersey transplant explaining to his eighty-year-old deef ma why Crumb's explorations of sex and misogyny were so important. I think she kept going "huh?" to the guy just so he'd have to yell out why Angelfood McSpade's gargantuan ass was in fact a mitzvah, and a liberation.
The most interesting moment was coming up to the aforesaid Angelfood McSpade strip just as a fifty-ish African-American church-lady in a pink pantsuit came over to look at it. I couldn't read her reaction, but I'm sure that she was having a more complex set of personal responses to the strip than I ever could.
NYT: "safety experts say the influx of electronics is turning cars into sometimes chaotic — and distracting — moving family rooms."
Who, I say, who will provide me with a little EMP keyfob that nukes the DVD of lane-drifting fool ahead of me or alters the windshield-mounted, blindingly bright GPS navsystem such that the shortbus-promoted driver ahead turns off?
America awaits!
Mid-City residents finish their rebuild: Bart and Christie are finished with their post-Katrina rebuild. The Times-Picayune rightly chooses to celebrate the event with not-terribly-subtexted images of fecundity and fertility, Christie being pregnant and the twain the very personification of a hoped-for rebirth of the Crescent City.
It should be noted that New Orleans remains a place with such deep-rooted dysfunction as to boggle the mind, and that Bart and Christie's neighborhood remains plagued by gun violence and, like much of the city, abandoned and half-destroyed buildings. For all of Bart's chipper attitude and the Times-Picayune's boosterism, the couple's choice is one which at a minimum requires personal bravery and epic quantities of positive thinking.
I corresponded heavily with Bart in the aftermath of Katrina and what I thought at the time remains true: as goes New Orleans, so goes the nation. If post-Katrina New Orleans can effectively transcend our shattered and oligarchically burdened means of governance and commerce, so can the rest of the country. If New Orleans fails, so will the rest of the country.
Bart and Christie have chosen to work for the renaissance of New Orleans, to work to save and cherish the American heart. They are both patriots and heroes, and I feel sure either would be discomfited by my take on this. I admire their choices.
publicdimension.ch points out how to kluge a local real-time transcoded stream with the help of VLC. Not quite what I need, but interesting nonetheless.
Party CAUCUS: The word and its history.
My summary: despite the greco-latinate spelling and first recorded use in the diaries of one John Adams, ain't nobody whut knows whar it come from, 'ceptin that it's 100% Amurrkin, and thar's them what say it's a word we 'uns come to borry fum the Algonkians er other percursory native types hereabouts.
Among that them, it should be noted, is the linked article's author, someone better qualified to judge the evidence than I, I'll warrant.
Lately, having a forethoughtless moment hereabouts, I realized I was without any species of vermouth. The situation threatened to crimp my daily martini intake, which is the ethnically-prescribed one on arriving home from work.
Happily, I have found that a decent midrange sake does the job, and frankly, even improves upon the original.
1 oz sake
2 oz gin
Shake over cubes until you fear frostbite in your extremities. Decant over one, preferably Goya, pimento-stuffed green olive.
Treo Games pointed out Crosswords, an open source Scrabble clone, which I am pleased with!
Recent news of mortalities hither and yon - tard bombs, a suicide, another suicide, two or three recent murders, a pet put to sleep - has me musing on my relationship to my own dead. I am told I spend more time with these shades than others do, than is socially common.
I don't have a useful means to evaluate these statements, so I mostly interpret them to mean "you're a downer, and harshing my mellow," and appropriately ignore them.
From my perspective, I spend no measurable time with my dead, they being, er, dead.
Yet I do miss them terribly. I feel them standing behind me as I walk around, massed in the blind spot behind me, crowding together so as not to knock shit off my shelves.
Additionally, on hearing news tying electrode brain implants to involuntary hallicinatatory real-time immersive memory experience, my first thought was that I will be able to see my sister again before I too pass away. And that is a happy thought, infected brain lesions excluded from the wetware calculus for the nonce.
On my way into Costco for gas tonight, I was amused to note a brand-new Smarte car, one of those two-seat ultra micro cars that are just in distribution in the US, parked prominently near the entrance to this temple of American hugeness.
Surely the driver only swung by to pick up a single twenty-four pack of toilet paper, maybe with an impulse-buy forty-pound bag of coffee.
Having enabled streaming audio on my Treo, the primary current discontent is, naturally, format wars. Pocket Tunes is advertised as .wma compatible, yet accessing an 'mms:' URL produces no output, alas. Likewise and unsurprisingly, there's no .ram support.
Of course, a key station in my transistor of the future (and past) relies solely on these two formats, and as the internet has 'progressed' in the past few years, the former practice of directing an audio stream to a free simultaneous transcoding service appear to be as dead as any realistic hopes for $1.29 gas or a speedy withdrawal from Iraq.
Those fuckers.
