Month: September 2003

I’m not so much a football fan that I watch games involving teams I neither care about one way or the other nor expect to fare all that well this year (in terms of making the playoffs), so I didn’t watch any of the NFL season opener last night between the Jets and Redskins, aside from a handful of plays. I did watch, for about three minutes, the debate between the nine Democratic candidates for President, while waiting for last night’s rerun of Scrubs to come on. I’m not as big a political junkie as I used to be. I’m content to read analysis and watch the major speeches – – States of the Union, Inaugurals, convention acceptance speeches, and the like. Debates don’t do much for me at all, because they’re always pretty lame.

In their construction which is specifically geared to the sound bite, they tend to make all candidates look bad. The only specific times I can ever remember a candidate really looking good in a debate were the 1988 Vice Presidential debate when Lloyd Bentsen wiped the floor with Dan Quayle, and the second Presidential debate in 1992 when Bill Clinton showed off his mastery of the “town hall” format and then-President Bush got caught looking at his watch, a non-faux pas if there ever was one. Debates don’t encourage policy discussion. You get “policy McNuggets”: the name of some idea, just tossed out there, with no exegesis or exploration of how it would work. And you get manufactured quips and pre-conceived one liners. Yeah, Edwards’s use of “Hasta la vista” last night was really spontaneous. Sure. These kinds of lines always sound like what they are: precrafted bon mots which are memorized by the candidates who then wait for the appropriate time to drop them into conversation.

Debates, basically, are next to useless. They’re like preseason football games – – fun to watch if you’re really caught up in them, but not really indicative of anything substantive.

And besides, Scrubs is just a funny, funny show.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A forest fire, courtesy NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

I spotted this stunning photo over on City Comforts, and my jaw just dropped. This is one of those moments when I was convinced I was looking at a painting, or a digitally-enhanced or manipulated image. Somehow, this image combines a sense of nature’s cycles and one of impending doom that is arresting. Wow.

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Aaron answers his five questions.

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Cheap Shot time: she’s ugly and stupid, too!!!

(I know, I know. I’ll do proper pennance later. Or not.)

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Political Robotics

(with apologies to Dr. Asimov)

I’ve seen some liberals, online and off, acting with incredulity at the ongoing tax-cut fetish afflicting conservatives today. “Surely,” the liberals will say, “they remember the explosive deficits after the 1981 Reagan tax cuts. Surely they know that the tax cuts will not increase revenue and that the budget will not balance by virtue of taxes having been cut.”

I was considering such a question the other day – – I can’t recall which blog or news article I read it in; it doesn’t really matter because it’s quite common – – and I recall some nameless conservative I saw once on Bill Maher’s old show. This person was railing against Bill Clinton, claiming that in eight years Clinton did not accomplish a single positive thing. Not one. Maher, of course, pointed out the balanced budget and the long economic boom, and asked, “If it wasn’t Clinton, then who got those things done?”

The response? Ronald Reagan. This conservative (who I only saw on the show once, because I was a sporadic viewer, and have never seen again) actually claimed that it was Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 that eventually led to the economy of the 1990s and the budget surpluses and all the rest of it.

This led me to formulate the following calculus to which all conservatives seem to adhere:

One: Anything that has happened since 1981, that we like, is to be credited to President Reagan.

Two: Anything that has happened since 1993, that we dislike, is to be blamed on President Clinton.

Three: If necessary, we must define what we like and what we dislike so as to conform to the first two Rules.

The left has its share of robotic shibboleths too. We saw this during the recent blackout in the northeast. When I turned on my computer the next morning and started checking the news and blogs (even though I had not lost power at any point, I had turned the computer off), it didn’t take long to see deregulation blamed for the blackout, even though the authorities still aren’t entirely clear on why the blackout happened, as of this writing. Now, I’m pretty firm in my liberal beliefs; I’ve long since abandoned the idea that the free market is the solution to all problems (or, failing that, preferable even to solving any particular problem). But it seemed to me that perhaps we might, you know, wait a while before we started judging to what degree deregulation played a part in the blackout.

Clearly, I haven’t spent nearly as much time identifying the “Liberal Laws of Robotics” as I have the conservatives, because, you know, who wants to sit around identifying the faults of those with whom he agrees? Not me! But one that I have seen is this:

Anything good that has transpired since January, 2001 is the result of Clinton policies that President Bush hasn’t mucked with yet.

This, of course, is pretty similar to the “Three Laws” as formulated above.

The existence of these shibboleths, on both sides, is probably unavoidable. But it also tends to facilitate the reduction of political discourse to a kind of shorthand where ideas are never exchanged or evaluated. Be careful about such things.

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Casinos in Buffalo, update:

The Seneca Nation of Indians recently made a decision about where they were going to put their second casino in Western New York. They’re going to build it in Cheektowaga, which is one of Buffalo’s biggest suburbs (and second to Amherst in terms of economic power). Cheektowaga happens to be where the Buffalo Niagara Internation Airport is located, and if the reports are correct, the casino will be built a few miles right down the road from the airport itself. Residents in that area, of course, are not entirely thrilled, mainly because the Genesee Street/Transit Road corridor happens to be a very heavily traveled road in these parts already, and would presumably become even moreso if a casino were in the offing.

Now, I’m not wild about casinos in general, because I don’t think they generate much economic activity beyond the actual jobs within the casino itself. I refuse to believe that a casino will spark the building of a whole bunch of restaurants and whatnot nearby, since casinos are specifically designed to lure people indoors and keep them there. That’s why they never have windows and why you have to negotiate a maze between entering the front doors and actually coming out onto the gaming floor. And in the case of the Seneca casinos, the vastly greater portion of the profits will go to the Senecas themselves, so it’s not like this is some great tax-revenue cash cow. The state and the county get a small cut, but that’s about it.

However, casinos are a done deal, pretty much. They’re coming, and the powers-that-be around here wanted to put on in downtown Buffalo, which struck me as a terrible idea. Doing so would not spur new development downtown, and even worse, it would take a building or set of buildings off the city’s tax rolls entirely, which is not what you need in a city where the budget gaps are a constant scene of disaster.

Besides, Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde recently made an interesting point: putting the casino near the airport might strengthen the need for a new mass-transit connection between downtown and the airport area, perhaps even by adding a new Metro-rail line. Metrorail is Buffalo’s subway/light-rail system, which runs along Main Street only and stops right at the city limits, as opposed to logically going into Amherst and all the way to UB’s North Campus. (This is due to resistance by Amherst, Buffalo’s richest suburb. I suspect they don’t want to make it too easy for them downtown criminal-types to come out to their fair city. A great example of regional thinking, that.)

If we gotta have this thing in our neighborhood, Cheektowaga makes a lot more sense than downtown Buffalo. And who knows, maybe when they build it I’ll get a job dealing cards there.

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A Theory.

A little while back, in the course of announcing his new AOL journal (to provide AOL’s new blogging service a big-gun introduction), John Scalzi discussed the September effect. This was back in the days before the Web took off – – pre-NCSA Mosaic era, when Gopher and Usenet were the main Net tools. What would happen is that each September, when thousands of freshmen arrived at colleges and universities and thus got what was then their first whiff of connectivity, these new Netizens would plunge into Usenet newsgroups and generally pay little attention to things like learning Netiquette and reading FAQs and getting the lay of the land. For example, on the Star Wars newsgroup I read at the time, one could count on messages like this every September:

“Hey, I really like Satr Wars! Do you think Lucass will make anymore? It would be cool if he’d make Timothy Zhan’s books into movies! And in RETURN OF THE JEDI there’s a scene where Han grabs Leigha’s boob!” (Not an exact quote of any one post, but many of them really did scan like this, typos and all.)

Many a flame war started because of newbies rushing in where angels feared to tread back then, because of the “September effect”. Later on, the effect died away as home Net access became more and more common, although I often wondered if the September effect might have been replaced by a similar December effect, as all those new Christmas gift home computers were plugged in for the first time. And now, I see a new kind of September effect possibly emerging, although it’s not as annoying as the old flood of Usenet newbies could be. (And I never participated on the really high-traffic newsgroups where the September Effect earned its place in Net lore.) In fact, since it impacts blog traffic, it’s actually a bit endearing.

What’s happening now is the sudden uptick in Google hits on blogs. Alexandra commented the other day that she’s seeing a ton of Google hits to her site based on the search term “Lascaux”, which happens to be one of the words in her blog’s title, Out of Lascaux. I suspect that college kids enrolled in Arts 101 classes are being instructed to write two-page papers or some such thing on the cave-paintings of Lascaux, which is a logical starting point for an introductory arts class. So the tykes are rushing to Google, plugging in “Lascaux”, and arriving at Alexandra’s blog.

This happens a lot here, as well. Just in the last week or two, coincident with the beginning of the new college school year, I’m seeing a lot more Google hits for the poems listed under “Poetical Excursions” in the sidebar. (ASIDE: I need to do more of those…I always enjoyed writing them.) Sometimes I can even glean a bit about the student’s assignment just from their search terms, because in addition to the title they’ll include a term like “allegory”, which leads me to believe they are under instruction to “Describe how Rosetti’s poem ‘Uphill’ is an allegory.” And then there are the ones like this, in which the student has apparently plugged their entire homework question right into Google. These folks are probably under the impression that Google uses a natural language interface, kind of like AskJeeves.

I wonder how many students are instructed, in a Freshman Comp class, to write a brief position paper on, say, Iraq…and how many end up handing in something that sounds quite a bit like SDB. Probably a lot. I have to admit, though — if there’s a college student who’s ripping off my defense of Attack of the Clones for a class, I’m only half-angry about it.

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I wasn’t going to write anything yesterday about the Bills’ signing of former Patriots safety Lawyer Milloy until he was, you know, actually signed. Now that he is, my reaction is:

YES yes yes yes boo-yeah that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Milloy might be on a bit of a decline – – his stats last year were off – – but even so, he’ll provide veteran leadership in the Bills’ secondary, which is talented, athletic, and very young. And he was a team leader for the hated Patriots, so anything that hurts them is good news for the Bills.

And speaking of the Patriots, this provides yet more evidence that Bill Belichick just isn’t the wonder-genius that everybody thinks he is. That’s twice in two years he’s allowed an upper-echalon player to go to a division foe. In a Buffalo News article today, writer Jerry Sullivan — never one of my favorites — blathers on a bit about Belichick’s “legend”, presumably because he often seems to have the Bills’ number. Fair enough, but the guy’s just not that impressive on the whole, as far as I can see.

Look at his lifetime stats as a head coach: In eight total years, he’s still under .500 (61-67). He’s had only two postseason appearances. He’s had only three winning seasons. His best regular season record, done twice, is 11-5. Belichick’s reputation as a head coach is over-inflated, I think, by his improbable Super Bowl season two years ago. And his “dominance” of the Bills is understandable given how bad the Bills were two years ago, and how they were still a young team on the rebuilding path last year.

Let’s not use words like “legend” to describe Bill Belichick, OK? One year does not a career make. He’s got a long way to go before he’s a legend. Right now, Jon Gruden and Dick Vermeil have far better claim to that title.

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Words fail me.

What really terrifies me is that I did in fact read that comic for a time. This was during the 1980s, when every Marvel title had some group of aliens or supervillains or somebody who was the Greatest Threat to All Life On Earth Possible, and yet, only that book’s title character ever really went up against them. Weird.

Anyway….

(link via Paul Riddell.)

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Scott comments on my post below about Tulsa, Buffalo, and urban-renewal pitfalls.

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