Month: June 2004

Kevin Drum has a pretty fascinating post about recent Vice Presidents of the United States. It’s a good thought to keep in mind, as Democrats like myself watch John Kerry mull over a running mate: to a large extent, a Vice Presidential pick can steer a great deal of a party’s future. The best example, to my mind, in recent decades is when Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush in 1980 (after briefly considering former President Gerald Ford for the post). Had that ticket failed, or had GHWB then lost in 1988 to Michael Dukakis, I very much doubt that come 1994 the name “George W. Bush” would have been all that enticing to the Texas Republican party as it looked for someone to run against then-Governor Ann Richards. Reagan’s often thought of as the paragon figure of contemporary Republican ideology, but in a real way he also managed to create the dominant contemporary political dynasty in the Bush family.

This also casts a bit of aspersion, not unfairly, in the more common use of Vice Presidential picks to shore up certain areas in which the Presidential nominees see their own credentials as being a bit lacking. As much as many on the right, if not all, admire Dick Cheney, it’s frankly very hard to see him as any kind of “future of the Republican Party”; likewise, as a Democrat knowing what I now know about Joe Lieberman, I’m glad I am not faced with the likelihood of him heading up the Democratic ticket in 2008. And for right now, there’s yet another reason why I hope that when the final list of names is drawn up in the Kerry HQ, the name “Richard Gephardt” has a big, fat black line drawn through it.

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NPR’s Talk of the Nation did a show about blogs yesterday; audio link is available here. I’m playing it right now, and it seems a pretty good introduction to what blogging is and why it’s cool. At about the eight minute mark, a caller singles out Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light as a good example of the richness of blogs, beyond the rigid political “big heads” of Blogistan. I found that pretty cool, since the second or third blog mentioned by name on the show happens to be one whose blogroll links Byzantium’s Shores.

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Matthew Yglesias’s mother has died. Condolences to him and his family.

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So I was told by a music teacher in grade school when he enlisted me to help with a sound check of the microphones in the auditorium, a day or two before our yearly band concert. I just shrugged, if I recall correctly; after all, you always see people blowing into the mike. But did he ever “spazz out”, in the parlance of the day.

Anyway, just a quick post here to keep things alive while I entertain — the blogging equivalent of waking up long enough to stick a log on the campfire. The Burst of Weirdness and the Image of the Week will appear Tuesday instead of today, for those who are hopelessly addicted to my regular features (and who, by being thus addicted, are demonstrably in need of some finer stimulation!). I doubt I’ll be posting anything tomorrow at all, but you never know. For now, here’s a bit of linkage:

:: Jostein links an interview with director Paul Verhoeven, a guy I’m not big on but who’s done a few films I liked a lot.

:: Roger Ebert on Michael Moore:

The pitfall for Moore is not subjectivity, but accuracy. We expect him to hold an opinion and argue it, but we also require his facts to be correct. I was an admirer of his previous doc, the Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine,” until I discovered that some of his “facts” were wrong, false or fudged….Because I agree with Moore’s politics, his inaccuracies pained me, and I wrote about them in my Answer Man column. Moore wrote me that he didn’t expect such attacks “from you, of all people.” But I cannot ignore flaws simply because I agree with the filmmaker. In hurting his cause, he wounds mine.

I agree wholeheartedly.

:: Dominion celebrates two years of blogging. Actually, I’m a bit late on this one, but still, congrats to him. It’s a dirty job, being on all those right-wing mailing lists, but somebody‘s got to do it….

:: Go SpaceShipOne!!!

:: Would it have killed them to build this in Buffalo?!

:: Oh, and I’ve just seen via Redwood Dragon that a new post has just appeared on a long-dormant blog I hadn’t read before. Here is why Jeff Cooper stopped active blogging, and here is his update on the state of affairs. All my hopes to him and his family that it all works out for the best.

UPDATE: Welcome aboard, Making Light readers, and feel free to stay a while. To paraphrase Willy Wonka, “There’s so much time, and so little to read — wait. Strike that, reverse it.”

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George R. R. Martin has updated the part of his official site where he reports his progress on A Feast for Crows.

The short version: it ain’t done yet.

The worse version: it ain’t done yet, and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any time in the immediate future.

The testy version: it ain’t done yet, and you folks who are sending GRRM mean e-mails about can bugger off.

My speculation: At some point in the crafting of his tale, GRRM suddenly realized he had killed off each major character and had nobody left to write about.

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I haven’t checked in with SDB lately, so I thought I’d give it a whirl today. In this post, he attacks historian Howard Zinn, saying this:

In the “new” “enlightened” approach to history, you don’t study historical events in order to learn the consequences and results of certain kinds of decisions and policies. History is a source of lessons, but you don’t study history and derive lessons from past events. The lesson comes first. The conclusion is already known. You study history to find justifications for that lesson, but you already know the lesson is right before you begin that study.

If history doesn’t actually give you the justification you require, then you modify it as needed so that it does. That may mean you ignore some of it and emphasize other parts, or it may require you to rewrite it so that it happens the way it should have happened. This is a fundamentally teleological approach to history, in which the esthetic beauty of a conclusion, and the fact that we strongly want it to be true, are more important than whether it is empirically correct. If not, then the universe must change, because the mind and the concept are the most fundamental realities of all.

And this is all before SDB ultimately refers, at the very end of the post, to Zinn’s writing as “rubbish” and jokes that the act of reading Zinn may be harmful to the brain. Which may certainly be true, if Zinn really is in the habit of ignoring facts and making stuff up when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Only except that in the paragraph immediately preceding the quote above, SDB says this:

I have not read Zinn’s history and have little interest in doing so, but from what I’ve heard I’ve come to the conclusion that it bears only a slight resemblance to history as it actually happened.

I wonder if Howard Zinn has ever pontificated at length about a book he hasn’t read, basing his pronouncements instead on “from what I’ve heard”? Having never read Zinn myself, I wouldn’t know.

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I’ve added a few links to Buffalo-related websites in the sidebar (filed under “The Home Port”).

First, I added a link to Buffalo’s classical music station, WNED, which has streaming audio available online, so if you’re on the prowl for a decent classical station and your neck of the woods doesn’t have one, you can give ours a try. A cool thing is that at 11:00 am on weekdays (Eastern time), they run the fine program “Adventures in Good Music”. Of course, I’m always working and thus can rarely listen to this show, but I like it a lot. (WNED is part of a triumvirate of broadcasting stations using those call letters, incidentally; WNED FM is the classical station. WNED AM is an all-talk NPR station that carries different content from Buffalo’s FM NPR station, WBFO. And Buffalo’s PBS television station is also WNED. So that site can get a bit confusing.)

Second is The Shrinking City, which is a site devoted to fostering a sort of “citizens uprising” in Buffalo by which our much-agrieved city might finally pull itself up by its own bootstraps and stop watching as the rest of the country (Pittsburgh excepted) surges into the twenty-first century. I haven’t dug much into the content here, but I mean to. The site was launched in conjunction with a series of fine articles advocating Buffalo renewal through small and intense local efforts that have appeared in The Buffalo News over the last year.

Thirdly, Buffalo now has its own entry on Craig’s List. There doesn’t appear to be much there, but here’s hoping this site fills up with nifty things like, oh, job ads for writers. (This one comes to me via The Grey Bird.)

Fourth, this one’s not new to my sidebar, but Buffalo’s alternate news weekly paper, Artvoice, has recently revamped and relaunched its website. It now sports a lot more bells-and-whistle type stuff than I typically like in a website, but I love Artvoice and read it faithfully, so there it is.

Finally, I’m always on the prowl for new Buffalo blogs, so if you’re a Buffalonian and you have a blog, feel free to drop a line or leave me a comment and I’ll link you in that section of the sidebar (“Ships flying the flag of Buffalo”). Just as long as no one forgets just what the definitive Buffalo blog really is.

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Those who know me well know that the single holiest food substance in existence is Coffee Haagen-Dasz ice cream. I’ve tried nearly every flavor of specialty ice cream out there, and many have come close, but none has ever quite managed to equal to flavorful goodness of Coffee Haagen-Dasz. (True story: I once accompanied some college friends on a 1:00 am run , involving a forty-mile round trip, for a pint of the stuff.)

Well, last night, I discovered the ice cream that comes closest yet, although it still isn’t quite equal, either. It’s Ben&Jerry’s Dublin Mudslide. And it’s amazing. Get some before they stop making it.

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Thanks for checking in regularly, everyone. Posting will remain light until Tuesday, as that’s how long our guests are staying for. But there may still be the odd posting here and there, and the only way you’ll know is to keep checking back. Heh. Indeed.

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I read the name “Dave Winer” today for the first time, and thought, “Who’s that?” Anyway, it turns out that he’s got something of a reputation for being a bit of a jerk, as well as being some kind of father to the whole blogging concept, or something like that. Today’s story is that apparently Winer — who is the guy behind Weblogs.com — had been hosting something like 3000 blogs for free, but then apparently decided that he could neither afford to keep doing this nor muster up the desire to operate his own hosting business, so he made the decision to close that all out. All well and good.

Except that he didn’t tell anybody beforehand. He simply pulled the plug.

Comment on this seems to flow in two directions: one, that anyone who uses free services runs this kind of risk, and two, that even if the service provided is free, one still has a moral obligation to fill them in on substantial changes. I fall in the second camp, personally. And I can’t really feel that much sympathy at all for Winer. Even with my low level of tech knowledge, I’m aware that hosting gets expensive, and Winer’s the one who took on 3000 bloggers. No one may have held a gun to anyone’s head to accept his services, but likewise, no one held a gun to Winer’s head to offer them.

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