Month: August 2004

TBogg links some guy wandering around NYC mocking the folks protesting the Republican Convention. This bit caught my eye:

Perhaps the most popular sign was one that read, “End the Occupation in Iraq.” We did. Two months ago.

Oh, really? What are all those troops of ours still doing there? Checking real estate trends? Enjoying that wonderful Middle Eastern coffee? Changing the name of a condition doesn’t change the condition, folks. It’s an occupation.

And why the hell does the media even bother reporting stuff like this? I mean, what’s next? A headline reading “Pope John Paul disses Satan”?

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Here are some quotes from my journeys around Blogistan whilst following my strict regimen of not posting. These are partial quotes; to get the context, you gotta click through. Which you should. Because to my immense consternation, Blogistan didn’t grind to a major halt in my absence. Betrayer most foul, says I!

Er, the quotes…

Alex Ross on Film Music:

The my-time-will-come mindset was especially widespread in the twentieth century, with composers believing that if they invented a new sound or came up with a “big idea” they would win their place in history. The result was a great deal of superficially difficult, emotionally disposable music, whose ultimate historical value is now very much in question. By contrast, it seems certain that in a hundred years people will still be talking about Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, Goldsmith’s Chinatown, Raksin’s Laura. They have gone down in history, because they found a way to make their music matter.

Greg Sandow on problems facing classical music:

Why doesn’t classical music get closer to pop?

Yes, some pop is cheap and commercial. But some of it is deeply serious.

And if we don’t understand that, we don’t understand the modern world, and we especially don’t understand the new audience we’re trying to attract. Smart, serious, educated younger people listen to serious pop, and we won’t impress them if we insist we’re the only artistic music around.

Lynn Sislo on fashion:

First of all, why does everyone always pick on the 70’s? How were the 70’s any worse than the 60’s or the 80’s? What did people wear in the 80’s anyway? I can’t remember. Starting around that time, fashion, for me, became nothing but one long, undifferentiated blur of empty trendiness. The latest fashions are always tasteless. The very idea of fashion is tasteless, not to mention, slightly creepy.

Michael Lopez on Wal-Mart:

I boycott Wal-Mart, too. I boycott Wal-Mart because it doesn’t represent what is good in America. It represents what is expedient in America. Messy shelves strewn with boxes and bins of cheap trinkets for the purchase at basement prices. Employees who are given a bare subsistence wage and kept just under the legal limits for the provision of benefits. I boycott Wal-Mart because I distrust centralized power, and I don’t want to see anyone ultimately win the great economic competition.

(And follow Michael’s links to earlier posts in which his co-bloggers had a lively debate about Wal-Mart.)

Bill Altreuter on participating in a mass-nude photograph in Buffalo:

If we were all naked all the time we would all have better posture. If we were all naked all the time, we would all feel more beautiful, I think. Everyone in there looked great.

Kevin Drum on the Swift Boat Veterans:

They were either lying then [when many of them praised John Kerry in years past] or they’re lying now [when they’ve suddenly all recovered their suppressed memories and attacked Kerry]. Take your pick.

Yup.

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John Scalzi on his decision to abandon political blogs for a while:

Going into a political blog these days is to be transported into a room of people who get off on smelling their own farts; the musty self-pleasuring scent of people too pleased with the result of their digestions to crack a window and let in some air. Well, mazel tov, kids. Have fun and see you after the election.

After the election? You might want to wait until after the Inauguration, seeing as how one of these two sides will be puffed up in all manner of insufferable triumphalism. It’ll either be “At last, maybe the Republicans will return to sanity and the world will like us again! Huzzah!” or “See! The Democrats are now doomed to historical failure, like the Whigs! Hooray!”

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Mary gets to play with the cool toys. Jealous, am I.

(That’s what I get for majoring in Philosophy. There’s no big-ass “Truthinator” machine. But come to think of it, why isn’t there a big-ass “Truthinator” machine?!)

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Lynn Sislo links this rant about something webmasters do that’s really annoying: disabling the right-click. I totally agree. I hate it when people dig into the “bag of tech tricks” to muck around with the way things are supposed to work.

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Effective immediately, the only way I want to hear about Presidential candidates and their “flip-flops” is if I happen to reading a story about the footwear they bring on a vacation to Myrtle Beach. Otherwise, I don’t care. I just logged into AOL and saw a headline, “Bush flip-flops on War on Terror?”

I know, he said something like, “I don’t know that we can win the war on terror”, which does on first glance seem a fairly odd thing to issue from his lips, but I have an idea of what he was getting at, and it’s not that big a deal and I don’t think it’s exactly a “flip-flop” in the sense that he believed one thing yesterday and now proposes something exactly the opposite. Now, if he’d said something like “I think Bin Laden should get a pardon”, that would be a “flip-flop”.

So much of all this “flip-flop” crap is all artificial, anyway. It consists of poring over every word and every act in a candidate’s public life, looking for any instance when Action A can be interpreted as being at odds with Statement B. Well, you know, we all do this. Nobody is perfectly consistent from one day to the next, and I’m sick of all the stupid political gamesmanship inherent in pretending that our guy is resolute whilst the other guy is an amorphous blob of poll-driven “beliefs”.

Besides, sometimes you actually need to flip-flop. If I am resolute in my belief that a ten-pound Thanksgiving turkey should be baked for nine hours at five hundred degrees, well, I’d hope that my family members would be praying to every God, Saint, Eath Mother, and Cosmic Power that might be listening for me to “flip-flop”.

I know, a lot of this is just political gamesmanship, like attack ads; but it would be really nice if our media would quit following the bouncing ball so eagerly. Our press corps reminds me of the sheep at the end of Babe, with the winning candidate being whichever one manages to yell “Baa! Ram! Ewe!” the loudest.

Ugh.

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In this post, Alex Ross identifies a place in New York State called the Rodgers Book Barn, which looks like one of the niftiest used-book stores in existence. I gotta get there.

But to pick a brief bone with Mr. Ross, he identifies this bookstore thusly: “…the other chief cultural destination in upstate New York”. (The first being, I assume, the Shostakovich Festival to which he refers earlier in the same post. Italics added.)

Given that Buffalo is generally held to be in Upstate New York, I find it distressing that apparently Buffalo doesn’t have any cachet as a cultural destination. I mean, we do have our own Philharmonic, our own highly regarded art gallery, and a pretty good theater and music scene. And we manage to have it all in an economy that’s still waiting for the George Bush jobs bounce. (George Herbert Walker Bush, that is. I don’t know if there’s a place in the United States that managed to so completely miss the Clinton Boom the way Buffalo did.)

To invoke an oft-used Usenet expletive, Hurg!

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This came through a while back, actually, but I had to file it away for future reference: I used to be the number one result for this. Now I’ve been displaced. Fire! Foes! Awake!

As long as I’m on about search engine stuff, I should help out with a Googlebomb: No, John Kerry is not the most liberal senator. I know, Republicans like to claim that he is, but he’s not. (I expect this claim will be advanced a lot this week.)

(And heck, might as well remind people who the real Buffalo blog is.)

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Matthew Yglesias wonders, fairly early in the day, why the air conditioning is so aggressive at the Republican National Convention. Later in the day, he gets his answer, which anyone who’s worked in restaurants or retail will know: when you pack that many bodies into an enclosed space, heat goes up quite a bit. If you want it to be any semblance of comfortable toward the end of the day, you have to blast the A/C early, or else the system will never catch up to demand.

This effect can really become pronounced in the high heat of summer. I’ve read that at Walt Disney World, the employees managing the lines at some of the more popular indoor attractions (such as Space Mountain, which has a crowd all day long) will employ something called “line stacking”, which involves stopping the lines at one of the entrances, so that the number of people inside the building itself doesn’t become so high as to overwhelm the air conditioning. I also recall vividly the scene at Super Bowl XXXI (Packers versus StuPats), at which the NFL did a doubly stupid thing. First they covered the A/C ducts around the middle of the New Orleans Superdome with cloth banners displaying NFL emblems and the like, and then they had indoor pyrotechnics at halftime. The result was that the smoke never really cleared after halftime, and the temperatures on the playing field soared. I remember the TV people showing closeups of the banners “breathing” as the air ducts tried to pass air through them, and John Madden circling the image wildly with his Telestrator and yelping, “There’s no air gettin’ in here!”

Of course, as a former restaurant manager, I used to employ the A/C to my own nefarious purposes. During the dinner hour, when we were full with a line at the door, we’d have to run the A/C continuously just to keep things moderately comfortable, but then when the place emptied out a bit, the temperature in the dining room would drop significantly and quickly unless we were on top of things. This fact — the A/C system’s ability to very quickly bring the dining room to frigid levels — coupled with the fact that little old ladies occasionally liked to set up camp in the dining room after closing and not leave, instead demanding refill after refill after refill of coffee allowed me to “encourage” them to leave by blasting the A/C, starting 45 minutes or so after closing. I know, I know, it was mean. But any port in a storm, you know. I’d never do that now. Heh.

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I woke up today to the news that little Quinn finally starting urinating last night and continued through the day, requiring a number of diaper changes. This indicates that his kidneys are starting to do what they’re supposed to, which is in turn good because now his body should theoretically start to rid itself of the anti-seizure medications he was doped up with shortly after birth.

Better news: he was stable enough that the nurses were able to contrive to allow the Wife to hold him, for the first time.

May the Force be with us.

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