Month: March 2006

Drew Vogel has decided to stop posting at Terminus, a blog that’s been on my radar screen for very nearly the entire time I’ve been maintaining Byzantium’s Shores. That’s a shame, but I can’t quibble with his reason. He basically says that he just decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore, and in the end, that’s the only real rationale for abandoning a blog that makes sense.

I have to admit that I have occasionally considered closing things down here, but the idea always vanishes fairly quickly, as I inevitably come round to the realization that I’ll still have stuff to say and I’ll still want an outlet for it all, and since I’ve invested so much time in this outlet, it makes sense to keep it going. I have abandoned any pretense of daily blogging, of course; it’s not the worst thing to just not post anything if I don’t have anything to say. I also find this particular medium a lot more personal than, say, the Usenet of old, when the only binding tie between one and the people with whom one interacts is an interest in the subject matter of the newsgroup in question.

Anyway, best of luck to Drew in his future endeavours. I hope he sticks around as a reader!

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I just found this comment, by this guy, in this MeFi thread which discusses yet another example of the Bush Administration’s insistence of its own power trumping all:

That Americans haven’t risen up in protest is just too depressing. We’ve accepted warrantless searches. We’ve accepted massive debt. We’ve accepted an endless war on an unidentified enemy. We’ve accepted a presidency that is unaccountable and above the law. We’ve accepted that manufacturing, biotech, and computer technology will all go to other countries. We’ve accepted that the government won’t save us from natural disasters. Basically, we’ve all just given up.

So this is how it will be? We’ll talk a good game, but when we actually do something we’ll screw it up. And eventually we’ll just lack the resources to do much at all. We’ll brag about democracy, even though we loath our government. We’ll shake our fists at those damn terrorists, but we’ll know in our hearts we aren’t doing much to about them. We’ll blame it all Clinton and the media, because we’re too ashamed to admit we just sat on our ass and watched Bush piss it all away.

One of the things that brought down the U.S.S.R. was the Moslem “dead-enders” in Afghanistan who didn’t realize they couldn’t beat a nuclear superpower with small arms and improvised explosives. The Soviets failed to put enough troops on the ground, failed to win hearts and minds, and just kept pouring money into the war until they ran out of money.

And here we are in Iraq, fighting Moslem “dead-enders” who only have small arms and improvised explosives. We failed to put enough troops on the ground, failed to win hearts and minds, and we just raised the debt ceiling so that we could borrow more money from China to keep the war going.

Do people even think about that? We can’t keep fighting the war in Iraq unless we borrow more money from China. Right? And in Iraq we’re fighting the same people who beat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Right?

And we all sat on our asses and watched it happen.

I can’t deny that on my worst days this is pretty close to how I feel about things.

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The other day I linked Matthew Yglesias’s attack on the NCAA Tournament, and solicited responses to it, since I just don’t have a dog in the fight. (Or maybe I do, but my dog’s one of those yippy Pomeranian things that no one in their right mind admits owning.) The Indestructible Mr. Jones responded on his own blog; and so too did Jason Zengerle of TNR. Zengerle seems to leave less spittle on his monitor than Mr. Jones, but they seem to be coming from roughly the same place.

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In the course of a grab-bag post, John Scalzi says that he doesn’t see the big deal with the recently revealed list of requirements placed on hotels at which Vice President Cheney stays. And it probably isn’t, except for two things that I hold to be extremely revealing about the character of our Vice President and the type of being he is.

First, the list does not specify the availability of a portable defibrilator.

Second, the list specifies that the TVs shall be pre-tuned to FOX News.

Now, it’s not surprising at all that Cheney would watch FOX News. His choice of channels doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is the insistence that the TVs already be set to that channel when he walks into the room.

This means that Cheney’s immediate impulse, upon entering a hotel room and flopping down on the bed or into the chair, is not to grab the remote and start flipping.

These two pieces of evidence convince me that Vice President Cheney is, in fact, not a human being at all. He has no heart, and he has no hint of the male compulsion to channel-flip when presented with a new TV and an unknown set of available channels.

The lack of a defibrilator, for a guy who has been reported as having “heart trouble” in the past, implies that he has no heart trouble at all. This makes me suspect that his previous hospitalizations for “heart trouble” were, in fact, treatments to maintain the appearance of his syntho-skin, in order to maintain his appearance as a human being as this nefarious being infiltrates our planet.

And I’ll bet his “undisclosed location” isn’t even on our planet’s surface.

It’s all becoming clear, now.

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I’ve found the whole Washington Post conservative blogger thing just plain strange in so many ways, and now that it’s over in surreal fashion, I just have to note the last graf of Michelle Malkin’s post in which she decides that the guy had to go:

The bottom line is: I know it when I see it. And, painfully, Domenech’s detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone.

Well, I suppose she’s right — it would certainly be unseemly for the Left to do any gloating over this. Domenech is gone, and that should be that. His name should never be sullied by the left again.

And having established that, I’m sure that the Right will never ever mention Dan Rather’s name again.

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Right now one of Buffalo’s local stations is playing the series finale of Seinfeld, and I’m once again struck by the vast difference between the potential hilarity of the episode’s concept and actual hilarity, or lack thereof, of the actual episode as filmed. There was, perhaps, legendary comedy gold to be mined from the legions of memorable characters from the show’s years coming back to gain some bit of revenge for the various ways in which they were wronged. Too bad the producers failed to actually mine any of it. Weird.

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Wow — over at BFLOBlog, the guys have been picked up by Fark one day (for this post, and then they have a guest post by one of the sports-talk hosts in Buffalo. (Howard Simon’s OK, but I like Schopp and the Bulldog more.)

They also have a post detailing some poor behavior on the part of ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd. I can’t stand Cowherd’s show, personally; he has a very grating voice and he tends to pound his fairly pedestrian sports insights (or, in sports-talk radio parlance, “takes”) into the ground with lots and lots and lots and lots of repetition. The guy generally strikes me on the radio as a jerk, so I can’t say as I find this totally surprising.

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I just don’t have much to say today, so I’ll just swipe a bit of the Government’s bandwidth and show off a nifty bit of astronomy:

Info here.

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Via Alex Ross I see this collection of utterances offered during orchestra rehearsals by Finnish conductor Lief Segerstam. Here are a few samples:

More grease in the pianissimo.

Use parabolic crescendi. . . they are more animalic.

We will enter in the right times, so the shortening is to the left.

I have to be the bumper to take all these colleagueual comments to the playing trumpets.

Don’t make it sound as brutal as my left hand, please.

You are still mouldering (to the percussion).

We still have a pleep.

I can only imagine the plight of those poor musicians. I’m reminded of anecdotes about film director Michael Curtiz, who once directed his stagehands to “Bring on the empty horses!”, and said, upon accepting a Best Director Oscar after losing out a number of times before: “Always a bridesmaid, never a mother.”

(And I can’t help but think that there’s a great pickup line in “I will look at you stoppingly”.)

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The other day I posted about how I don’t like the NCAA Tournament because I’m not much of a basketball fan. Now, I’ve been reading Matthew Yglesias for ages, so I know he is a basketball fan, so I was a bit surprised to read that he doesn’t much like the NCAA Tournament either.

If April is the cruelest month then March is the most frustrating. My favorite sport — basketball — is still in full swing but, at the same time, mercilessly pushed out of public view in favor of the NCAA Tournament. College ball is, simply put, basketball played badly, and America’s obsession with that game’s absurd method of determining a national champion is the true madness.

Now, I just don’t have the chops to really judge Matthew’s argument here, but something faintly smells about it — maybe it’s my vague sense that the NBA does not, actually, represent “the game as it’s meant to be played”, especially if the disastrous Team USA performance in the 2004 Summer Olymics can be held as an indication of the current style of NBA play. But as I note, that’s just a vague sense of mine, and I may well be full of crap.

So, basketball fans, let me know if and how Matthew’s argument fails.

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