Month: January 2004

Long-time readers know that I just love it when Presidents, and candidates for that office, are caught in moments of decidedly non-Presidential behavior. Watching the Leader or Would-Be Leader of the Free World in such moments, such as President Bush tumbling off a parked Segway or former President Clinton being knocked to the ground by an exuberant dog just crack me up.

So, I just have to say, I think that Howard Dean’s “barbaric yawp” the other night may be the single funniest moment relating to the American Presidency ever. I do hate to see a viable candidacy so nearly derailed by so silly a thing, but geez, that speech is utterly hilarious. I just think about it, and I start giggling.

And that’s just the “Yawp” itself, in all its glory. I haven’t even gotten to the remixes yet. (via Dead Parrots)

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Well, I spent an hour downloading iTunes last night, on my measly little dial-up connection.

And it wouldn’t install correctly.

So, no easy journey to the Millennium music for me….GAAHHHHH!

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Well, my long period of sustained unemployment is ending at long last: I have been hired by one of the local supermarket chains. I will literally be the guy doing the clean-up on Aisle Three, but that’s fine: this particular company has made the Fortune 500 List of Best Companies To Work For several years in a row, even cracking the Top Ten. I won’t be making much, and I’ll be starting off on the bottom again, but it will be with a good company, a growing company, a local company at that. I could have made more money working at a call center, but quite frankly, I’d rather chew my own arm off than work at a call center. The “local” thing is important to me, as well; I’m glad I never got hired by Wal-Mart. And I think I can reliably say that if they ever figure out how to outsource grocery store jobs to India, well, we might as well shut the whole thing down anyway. Less money plus time to write plus job security plus a schedule that doesn’t require us to resort to daycare four days a week seems to me, just now, a pretty decent formula.

I don’t know how my blogging schedule will be affected by working again. Hopefully, not by much, although my postings will no doubt start appearing later in the day, and I may drop back to a five-day posting regimen. But I’ll have more peace-of-mind, so my postings won’t be so caustic and bitter. (Except for when I’m responding to Nefarious Neddie. He gets all the causticity and bitterness I can muster.)

One last item on this whole topic: the job offer really couldn’t come at a better time, because I happened to exhaust my unemployment benefits this week. (No, I feel no shame in drawing unemployment. I’ve been a worker, and will be again, and I’ve paid my taxes for them.) But, since the new job doesn’t start for another nine days (the earliest available orientation session I could attend, what with the wife’s work schedule) and since I won’t start drawing pay until nine days after that, well, I’m in a momentary tight spot. So, if any of you wonderful readers out there have ever felt inclined to drop a shekel or a gold sovereign or a few Galactic Credits or whatever the standard currency of Gondor happens to be in the tip jar at left, now would be a most welcome time to do it. No, tipping a certain amount won’t get you the PBS mug with the coffee stains scrubbed out before shipping, but it will help us buy food and pay for the bandwidth for a couple of weeks. (Yes, Blogger is free, but my image hosting and dial-up connection aren’t.)

Thank you all!

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In his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column yesterday, Gregg Easterbrook digresses about halfway through to briefly discuss the plot holes in the movie Double Jeopardy, a film whose plot hinges on a gross misreading of the concept of double jeopardy. His objection to that film is spot-on, but what caught my eye here was his illustration of a “triple plot hole” in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Esterbrook writes:

Perhaps the greatest came in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nazis steal the ark from Indiana Jones, and escape in a U-boat. As the submarine dives, Jones leaps off a ship and clings to the U-boat’s side. Now, what is he supposed to do — hang on while the sub is underwater? We see a chart of the U-boat crossing the Mediterranean, then a shot of the submarine easing into its dock at a super-secret base. As the submarine arrives, Indiana Jones is already standing on the dock, disguised as a Nazi. Double plot hole! Not only could he not have survived by clinging to a diving submarine, how did he then get to the base first? Triple plot hole! How did he even know where the sub was going?

Well, taking the objections in order: first of all, the film does not establish that the sub dives, so Indy could have simply hung out on top of the thing. According to a bit of online research I did, U-boats did not routinely cruise underwater; they submerged when actually on the attack; given that the film takes place in 1936 — three years before the outbreak of WWII — the U-boat wouldn’t really have had reason to dive. (However, there still appears to be a partial error here, since I also read elsewhere that U-boats would dive at least once in the course of even a routine voyage, for some reason to do with pressure and ballast. I assume this is just a historical error — Steven Spielberg and company probably knew U-boats generally didn’t submerge for just going from point-A to point-B, as in The Hunt for Red October, but didn’t know that they would submerge for “routine maintenance”.)

Second, Indy isn’t already standing on the dock when the sub arrives – he is there after the sub has already arrived (the “arrival” shot isn’t the sub arriving, but the crate containing the Ark being offloaded). He doesn’t arrive before the U-boat does, he arrives at the same time. Easterbrook is forgetting that Indy has to procure a uniform, and he first does so by clubbing a Nazi guard who isn’t his size. So, the U-boat approaches its base, Indy hops off and sneaks inside the base, and then while the U-boat is offloading, Indy grabs a uniform. The whole sequence is highly implausible, but it’s not a “triple plot hole”.

UPDATE: A commenter informs me that the Sub Captain can be heard saying, in German, “Dive the boat!”. Well, I’m just going to ignore that. Doo dee doo dee doo….

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Two items of intense interest appeared to me this morning:

:: According to Aaron, the first season of Millennium will be coming out on DVD in the US. (It was previously available in Japan.)

:: According to Mickey, eighty minutes of music from Millennium, comprising some of Mark Snow’s finest work, is available….on iTunes. Of which I am not a member. Gahhhhh. This one is killing me — I have wanted a release of Snow’s Millennium music for years, and that’s how they do it. So, I guess I have to look into joining iTunes….unless there is some other, shall we say, means of procurement here….hmmmmmm….

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Tom Burka provides a helpful template for post-SOTU press coverage.

A handful of thoughts:

:: I’m not sure if the President was trying for some kind of effect when he rather dramatically closed his leather portfolio, containing the text of his speech, at the end; but it would have worked better had he not thumped the microphone in doing so.

:: Am I the only person getting tired of that constant smile on Senator Daschle’s face? You know, the “Holy shit, I can’t believe my party hasn’t tossed me out on my ear yet!” smile?

:: Likewise, am I the only person who thinks that Vice President Cheney would look a lot more at home at these kinds of events if they’d let him cradle his white fuzzy cat?

:: Invariably, some headline for the morning after the SOTU will always say that the President wants to “stay the course”. Well, it’s not like the President’s going to ascend the podium and shout, “Full reverse engines, right full rudder!”

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Via John Scalzi, I see that a Russian military operation has been launched to retrieve ten tons of beer from a sunken boat.

Sending the Army out to recover lost beer….there’s got to be a Kim Du Toit essay in there, somewhere.

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Robert Jordan? Really?

(Hey, he asked for it!)

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There was an episode of King of the Hill a year or so ago in which, for various reasons, Hank gets sent unfairly to “anger management” classes, which he deeply resents. While he’s in the classes, he meets a “kindred spirit” who really does have an anger problem: later on, when he’s hanging out with Hank and the boys, this guy loses his temper and starts screaming and gyrating and just boiling-over almost instantly. His voice goes higher and higher and higher, until he finally can do no more than utter an unintelligible gurgle of sound — and then he drops dead of a heart attack.

I’ve been thinking of that episode ever since I heard Howard Dean’s post-Iowa caucuses speech. I’ve been having trouble making up my mind about Dean, and that did not help. I think that Dean needs to realize that the idea of “Mild gaffes are OK because they result in press coverage” has probably run its course.

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Because if you wait too long, Lynn will find it and link it first. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

So, here it is: Winston Churchill had a pet parrot, and apparently parrots have quite the lifespan, because Churchill’s is still talking. And what’s he saying?

“F*** the Nazis!”

I guess this pretty much guarantees that no future President will ever own a parrot. Imagine if Nixon had owned one:

“It’s the damndest thing,” said the curator of the Nixon library and unofficial caretaker for Tiddlywinks, the parrot who sat at the side of the 37th President for much of his time in office. “He doesn’t talk very often, but when he does, he just rattles on for eighteen-and-a-half minutes or so….”

OK, folks, here’s a suggestion for a comment thread: if any other Presidents had owned parrots, what would they be repeating? (Keep it clean, you folks imagining a Bill Clinton-owned parrot!)

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