Month: July 2006

George W. Bush talking in People about global warming:

I think there is a debate about whether it’s caused by mankind or whether it’s caused naturally, but it’s a worthy debate. It’s a debate, actually, that I’m in the process of solving by advancing new technologies, burning coal cleanly in electric plants, or promoting hydrogen-powered automobiles, or advancing ethanol as an alternative to gasoline.

Goodness! First we’re told there’s a debate (even though all but the most deluded of us are aware that there isn’t); then the Prez tells us that he’s solving the debate (as though a debate is a puzzle or something); then he tells us that he’s solving the debate in ways that make clear that the side of the non-existent “debate” that he can never ever ever admit is right actually is right (otherwise, why do any of that stuff?).

And then there’s the wording: apparently Bush is personally advancing new technologies, he’s personally burning coal cleanly, he’s personally promoting hydrogen-powered vehicles, and he’s personally advancing ethanol. He’s doing all that stuff personally, in the same way that Al Gore personally created the Internet. What do you want to bet that Bush’s statement will be read the same way Gore’s was? Nothing? Yeah, that’s the smart bet.

After more than five years of the “Uniter and Decider”, I for one still miss the “Joker, Smoker, and Midnight Toker”.

(via)

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Seeing a post over at Simon’s blog titled “A Fetish of Sorts”, I got slightly intrigued — what possible fetishes could that mild-mannered Canadian have? It turns out that he’s not talking about anything so bizarre as, say, certain forms of workwear. He really likes pens!

Well, I like pens myself. In fact, I’ve just this week returned to writing longhand, having started a new short story using one of my Levenger fountain pens. (The “Gotham” model, which I adore.) I love my fountain pens, and I own nearly twenty of them, by manufacturers such as Levenger, Parker, Waterman, Sheaffer, and Pelikan. The tactile sensation of writing with a fountain pen is just wonderful — it’s this combination of a pleasant scratching and gliding of the tip of the nib that’s really beguiling. Plus, there’s the wonderful elegance of the device, the way the two tines of the nib spread apart just enough to leave a line of wet ink behind.

And really, fountain pens are so much better looking than “normal” pens. Even the cheapest regular fountain pens look nifty, and of course, the higher-end ones that can run for hundreds of dollars leave the realm of “writing instruments” and enter the realm of “jewelry”. (Check out the offerings at Omas, for example. Look at some of their limited edition pens.)

The best metaphor I’ve heard for a fountain pen is that it’s basically a brush, consisting of just two bristles (possibly three, if you’re using a music nib) that are made of metal. Once you get that image, writing with a fountain pen just falls into place: you’re not pushing the pen across the page, but rather you’re using a brush to paint the words onto the page. I wish I could remember where I read that.

Fountain pens aren’t exactly cheap, of course, and even the cheapest ones that are worth buying will be around thirty bucks or so. But I have fountain pens that I bought eight years ago for such amounts, and not only do they still work, but they are likely to continue working for decades more. It turns out that pens are like hand tools (a more recent obsession of mine): yes, you can buy cheap adjustable pliers for seven or eight bucks, and then replace them in a few years when they break, or you can buy a good pair for twenty-five bucks and never replace them. The hand-tool metaphor also offers a solution to people who worry about other folks “borrowing” their fountain pens and never returning them: simply don’t lend them out. If you’ve ever seen the expression of utter disdain in the eye of a mechanic when you’ve asked him if you can borrow one of his Mac tools for a bit, you get the drift. Just being on the receiving end of that look is usually enough to have a person retreating and muttering, “Uhh…never mind…I’ll just go to Target and buy a Stanley wrench or something…we need some more bed sheets anyway…sorry to bother you….”

(For those who still worry about such things, some solutions: first, keep a crappy pen in your pocket that you don’t particularly mind not having returned; or, if someone asks to use your pen, give them the pen but not the cap. This little trick usually works wonders. Plus, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you actually hand someone your fountain pen, they’ll take one look at the nib and stammer about how they don’t know how to write with one of these.)

Simon does have the difficulty of being left-handed, which raises certain questions of grip. A wet line of ink is OK for righties, since the wrist precedes the line, but for lefties, it can be a problem. This is why lots of left-handed people tend to write with their wrists noticeably more elevated than righties: they don’t want to drag their wrists across what they’ve just written, causing smudges.

He also points out that the ink from the disposable fountain pen he tried bled and feathered through the page. That, also, is a problem for fountain pens of all stripes: because they use real liquid ink, as opposed to the gel inks or other varieties of thick, pressurized inks found in ballpoints, and because they tend to dispense more ink than roller balls which also deal with real liquid ink, fountain pens can’t really be used on lesser grades of paper without these things happening. The problem isn’t so much the ink in such cases as the paper. Fountain pens should really be used on finer paper than one will typically find in, say, school notebooks and the like. You need thicker, heavier paper for good fountain pen use. I tend to not buy any paper less than 22-pound.

The “thicker paper for fountain pens” rule isn’t totally binding, I should note. I have a blank-book type of journal that has very thick pages, and still the ink from my fountain pens tends to spread a bit when I write in it. This is because the paper is noticeably more porous when examined with a magnifying glass. The same applies to certain kinds of card stock: my fountain pens write wonderfully on most index cards, but on other kinds of cards, again, the ink spreads. The culprit here seems to be the degree to which the fibrous content of the card stock is visible. For fountain pen usage, the smoother the paper the better the ink will hold its line and not spread.

Oh, and there’s one area of modern pen usage where fountain pens are nearly useless: filling out duplicate or triplicate forms. Fountain pens are not intended for being pressed into the page, which is necessary for such forms. Don’t even attempt it, folks. Pressing down on the nib of a fountain pen is never a good idea. This is a good reason to keep store-bought rollerballs or gel-ink pens around. (I like Uniballs and Parker Jotters, for these purposes.)

And for God’s sake, if you’re using ink cartridges to fill your fountain pens, do not try to start the flow of ink to the nib by tapping the point on the paper! Please oh please! Hold the pen in your hand in the writing position, and then strike your pen-hand wrist against your other wrist, while striking the pen itself against nothing at all. The sudden jolts will help in getting the ink to flow from the cartridges. And better yet, to avoid this problem entirely, don’t use cartridges at all. Get a piston-fill converter (in fact, most fountain pens should come with these already) and fill your fountain pens from good old bottled ink. Generally you won’t be able to find bottled ink at big office superstores like Staples, but good art supply stores will have the stuff available, because calligraphers use it.

But you know what the coolest thing about a fountain pen is? If you get a good one and use it for years, over time the point will slightly wear down in a way that is unique to your grip on the pen. The pen will get to know you, so much so that after a long enough time, someone else attempting to use your pen will find that it just might skip or leave a poor line, when you’ve never once had a problem with it. That’s something that will never happen with a Uniball or a Parker Jotter or, should you be unfortunate enough to have to use them, a Papermate or a Bic!

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Kevin Drum has a pretty odd item from the other day: it seems that in the armed forces, a particular MRE (Meal Ready-to-Eat) has plunged in popularity because, well, it apparently “make you gay”.

Uh…OK then. I found a recipe for the dish the MRE is supposed to emulate here; it’s called “Country Captain Chicken”. Perusing the recipe, I can’t really see anything in there that’ll give a person a case of “teh gay”, so I’m at a loss here.

Maybe it’s just too “gourmet-sounding” for the military guys? Having never served in the military at all, I’m pretty much talking out of my ass here, but “Country Captain Chicken” just sounds kind of non-John Wayneish, if you take my meaning. So maybe it’s not the dish that’s the problem, but rather the name of the dish. I don’t know about you, but I want the guys protecting my freedom to be subsisting on stuff called things like “Pig Slop” and “Shit on a Shingle”.

Joking aside, I found this article on MREs pretty interesting. It includes a list of the MREs that are currently offered, and it’s worth nothing that the Country Captain Chicken is the only one that has a name like that: everything else is simply descriptive, like “Chicken with Salsa and Mexican Rice” or “Turkey Breast with Gravy and Potatoes” or “Roast Beef”. I’ll bet if they just called it “Curried Chicken with Tomato-Currant Sauce”, the stuff wouldn’t have its apparent reputation.

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In recent months, a certain feeling of ennui has crept into my brain, and it’s set up camp on the blog. It’s hard not to notice it: my posting has been more infrequent, my commentary less interesting, and my traffic has accordingly been, well, just less. I’m finding myself with fewer and fewer things to say.

Some might say that this is inevitable after more than four years of blogging, and maybe it is. This is probably the reason so many bloggers eventually end up leaving Blogistan entirely — but I don’t know. I’ve seen lots of bloggers quit blogging, but I’ve also seen plenty who closed one blog and then returned some time later with a different one. So what happened?

The problem for me, I’ve realized, is that I’m doing too much sitting at the computer and robotically clicking links, and too little actual engaging with, you know, the stuff that used to fuel my work here. Not enough reading books, not enough listening to music, not enough walking in the park, not enough writing.

So what does this mean for Byzantium’s Shores? Well, being perfectly honest, I have considered closing the blog down. I wouldn’t do a “Thanks folks, but that’s it and I’m done” post, but I’d have announced a date for closure — a timetable for pulling my troops out of Blogistan, you might say — and tried to end up with a group of posts summing things up and closing it out. I even picked out a poem that would have served as my final post. (For a lark, ten points to the reader who correctly guesses which poem I was going to use.)

But the problem there is that I know myself, and I know that I can’t shut up. And I love having this outlet for things to say; it’s why I launched the blog in the first place. So if I’m not closing the blog, what am I doing?

I’m going to listen to more music. I’m going to read more books. I’m going to go for walks. I’m going to write more. Not here, necessarily — I’m going to write at my other desk, the actual writing desk, on paper, using my fountain pens. I’m going to start reading blogs through my long-underused BlogLines account, and I’m going to start using a timer to limit the amount of time I spend sitting in front of the machine and clicking my way around the Interweb.

So yeah, I’ll be posting less frequently in the future. New material might appear here only two or three times a week, as opposed to four or five. But hopefully that material will be better. It won’t be “all long essays, all the time”; I’m sure that I’ll still get in the playful mood to just link stuff with short comment every so often. The regular features here, Sentential Links and the Sunday Burst of Weirdness, will stick around. (Yeah, the Image of the Week is pretty much dead, mainly because I just kept forgetting to do it.) I will still designate certain beautiful women for ROWR! status once or twice a month; I will still occasionally wax poetic about Star Wars and cyber-stalk George Lucas; come fall I will still take time every Monday to vent my frustrations about the Bills’ offensive line and lambaste the Stupid Patriots; I’ll still trawl YouTube for funky videos and make vague references to questionable non-desert uses for whipped cream. In short, I’ll still be offering the occasional meditations that one would expect from an overgrown hippie who is just discovering the joys of hand tools and who thinks life would be perfect if he could wear overalls all the time.

So anyway, that’s the plan.

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I used to have difficulty with the concept of patriotism.

It always seemed to me to boil down to unquestioning devotion to one’s country — but in a strange way. It wasn’t even so much unquestioning devotion to the country itself, but rather to a certain set of political beliefs. In my high school and college years, those wonderful years in which every question is a mere formulation of a binary state, it always seemed to me as if a person’s “patriotism” was measured by the political equivalent of one of those magazine questionaires:

Do you think children should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Yes or No.

Do you think that the presence of openly gay individuals in our armed services would be inappropriate? Yes or No.

Do you think that Oliver North should be pardoned for his crimes, seeing as how he was fighting the Communists? Yes or No.

[forty-seven questions later]

If you answered “Yes” forty-five or more times, you are True-Blue American Patriot. If you answered “Yes” between thirty-five and forty-four times, you’re on the right track but America isn’t quite ready to trust you yet. If you answered “Yes” between twenty and thirty-four times, we’re OK with you working and paying taxes but we’d just as soon you didn’t show up at the polls on the first Tuesday in November. And if you answered “Yes” nineteen times or fewer, please report to your local Constable for assignment to a Re-education Camp.

Yes, that’s a bit extreme. But that’s how it seemed to me, and even now, I don’t think that the Right in this country has been at odds to suggest otherwise. It’s pretty inherent in their rhetoric. Disagreement with us equals disagreement with America. Voicing disagreement in the vicinity of the President is limited to “Free Speech Zones” which are located well away from anywhere the President’s feet will tread; voicing disagreement in the presence of the President is almost entirely unheard of. The President is continually referred to as “our” or “your” or “my” Commander in Chief, even though that title only pertains to his role with the armed forces, and not the country as a whole. (He is not my “Commander in Chief”; he is my President.) If a newspaper prints information that the President and his advisors don’t want printed, then that newspaper is committing treason.

You don’t love America, we are told. You are objectively pro-terrorist. You are aiding al-Qaeda. You are giving comfort to the Enemy.

You are NOT a Patriot.

Well, I am a Patriot. And I will have words with anyone who says otherwise.

Patriotism is not unquestioning love of one’s country, nor is it adherence to a given set of dogmas laid forth by the extreme commentators on one side of our political spectrum. Patriotism is true love of one’s country. I am a Patriot because I love America.

But how can this be? How can I claim to love America when I am so deeply disappointed with many of the things America has done in recent years? How can love and disappointment be applied at the same time? How can I honestly say that I am disappointed in America of late, and still claim to be a Patriot?

Because love does not rule out disappointment. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: love enables disappointment. I could not claim to love America if I were not disappointed in her as of late.

People we love disappoint us all the time. Our children bring home report cards that indicate a sudden lack of effort, or they lie to get out of the house so they can hang out with the friends we wish they didn’t have. Our closest friends fail to call when we need them to the most, or to follow through on promises they’ve made. Our parents disappoint us. Our brothers and sisters disappoint us.

And yet we go on loving them, despite the disappointments, because we are connected with them and because they make us proud as well.

When we say “America”, we often mean different things. “America” is a country, easily found on the globe, whose capital is Washington, DC. Her people are Americans, and since a country is nothing more than a collection of people who are identified as such, it follows that no country can possibly be infallible. People are imperfect. We make mistakes. We screw things up. And since countries are driven by the actions imperfect people, no country can be perfect. Countries make mistakes. Countries screw things up.

But there’s another sense of “America”, in that America is a notion, an ideal. Here is how Aaron Sorkin described it in an episode of The West Wing:

This country is an idea, and one that’s lit the world for two centuries and treason against that idea is not just a crime against the living! This ground holds the graves of people who died for it, who gave what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion. Of fidelity.

It seems to me that political differences spring from differing notions of what the “ideal” of America really is. For me, it is freedom of a people; it is self-determination with the knowledge that government should always be accountable to us.

The most common thread I hear in the sermons at church every week is that we humans are constantly failing to live up to the ideals God and Christ have set for us. Whether one is Christian or not, it’s still easy to see what this means: the message is that God and Christ love us despite our failure to live up to their ideals. The same can be applied to the idea of Patriotism. When I say that I am disappointed in America, what I am really saying is that the actions of the nation of America has failed to live up to the ideal of America.

I am disappointed that America has committed an invasion of another country on less than honest pretenses. I am disappointed that America has waged a war of such ineptitude that less and less good can honestly be seen to eventually come of it. I am disappointed that the word “Christian” in this country has come to refer in our national discourse to a small subset of extremely rigid thinkers. I am disappointed that science is embraced in some circumstances, but wilfully ignored in others.

But I’m also proud that an American president said “You know, we should go to the Moon” — and less than nine years later, there we were. I’m proud that America took elements of aboriginal African music from its forced African immigrants and developed it into jazz, and I’m proud that this jazz fused with classical music. I’m proud that the American military chose to invest in these gigantic, ungainly machines called “computers” back in the 40s, and I’m proud that a few decades later the American defense establishment worked on getting computers in distant places to talk to one another, laying the basic groundwork for our current Internet. I’m proud that a former Vice President, defeated for the one office higher than that, went on to advocate strongly for a crucial environmental issue, and I’m frankly proud that an American changed my life when he took me to a galaxy far, far away.

That’s why the notion that liberals do not truly love America is so absurd. If liberals were indifferent to America, we could hardly be disappointed in her.

I couldn’t be proud of America if I didn’t already love America, and I couldn’t be disappointed in America if I didn’t already love America. That’s what it all means, in the end. And if your idea of what it is to love America rules out the very possibility of being disappointed in her, then I have to question which of us truly loves America.

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I forgot that I meant to start doing this as a semi-regular feature: taking a far-Right blog entry, or excerpt thereof, and using Babelfish to make it sound either more or less crazy, depending on the hilarious results. Here’s a bit from one of my favorite lunatics, Adam Yoshida.

Here’s a bit from this post of his:

So, this is the situation with regard to the prisoners in Guantanamo:

1) They can’t be put on trial because, in most cases, they probably haven’t committed any crimes under American law and, in any case, it’s doubtful if the evidence collected would stand up to American criminal procedures (to begin with, I doubt if the Special Forces bothered to Mirandaize most of them).
2) They can’t be tried by Military Commission because the Supreme Court says they can’t.
3) They can’t be let go because, in most cases, they’d simply return to terrorism.

So, what is to be done with them? The answer is simple and elegant: kill them. Kill all of them.

Let’s take that from English to French and then back again, shall we?

Thus, it is the situation with regard to the prisoners with Guantanamo:

1) they cannot be put on the test because, in the majority of the cases, they probably did not commit any crime under the terms of the American law and, in any event, it is doubtful if the obviousness gathered would be held until the American criminal procedures (to start with, I doubt if the worried special forces with Mirandaize more they).
2) they cannot be tested by Military Commission because the supreme court indicates that they cannot.
3) they cannot be left go because, in the majority of the cases, they would return simply to terrorism.

Thus, that must be made with them? The answer is simple and elegant: kill them. Kill all.

You know what? I like the translation better. It has this brutish quality that suits the Neanderthalic, “Ugh! Me Westerner, you not! Kill! Ugh!” logic behind all of Yoshida’s thinking. Maybe Adam should use Babelfish thusly to prepare all of his posts before he publishes them!

(Thanks, of sorts, to Robert Tilendis for reminding me about good old Adam.)

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I offer the most heartfelt apology for any mental damage that may result from watching the YouTube videos linked below.

Aaron found (via his sister) David Hasselhoff singing “Hooked On A Feeling”, which might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

It might be…if not for something that scarred me for life in March of 1989.

The Academy Awards. Snow White. Rob Lowe. Quiver, mere mortals.

(And heck, I might as well link this bit of oddity, just because I don’t understand the promotion here. I’m not sure how pie throwing pertains to high speed internet service, but I can be pretty dense sometimes.)

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This isn’t really weirdness in the classic sense, but a mildly interesting bit of comic book history, at least for me. I just bought a copy of The Comic Book Encyclopedia, and in thumbing through it, I read the entry about the Silver Surfer, which in turn reminded me of the character Galactus, which in turn reminded me of a story that Marvel serialized in EPIC Magazine called “The Last Galactus Story”. But EPIC was discontinued before “The Last Galactus Story” actually ended, and the thing sat in limbo for years. So I did a search on it, having not thought about “The Last Galactus Story” in years, and found the answer here, in which the story’s writer and artist, John Byrne, describes how it was to end. More interestingly, Byrne goes on to describe why he’s left every comics series he’s ever departed. It’s interesting to learn that he departed Alpha Flight because he basically thought that Alpha Flight was a bad idea.

I was never the biggest fan of John Byrne’s work; his landscapes were impressive, but every character he drew seemed to have a big lantern jaw. Got distracting after a while.

No, no real point here. Moving along….

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Steven Den Beste looks at the box office take for Superman Returns (post dated 7-1-06; scroll down to find it), and uses the numbers as a lesson that he wishes Hollywood would learn: stop making these gigantic “blockbusters”. Fair enough; nobody would argue dispute the notion that Hollywood blockbuster movies cost way too much to make. But I was struck by this statement of Steven’s:

I have nothing against the Superman franchise as such. I’m not uptight about “the American way” being abandoned. I don’t really care that they’ve decided to make it “relevant” by giving Lois Lane an illegitimate son and hinting that Superman might be gay. I don’t care about any of that.

I’m not sure that Lois’s kid is an attempt to make the movie “relevant”, so much as an indicator of — well, I don’t think it’s really an indicator of anything at all. It’s just there, really: Lois is now a single mom. If this indicates anything, it’s that single moms are a pretty routine thing in society today. The film doesn’t really dwell on this, except of course for the matter of the kid’s parentage, but that’s a different kettle of fish.

But if any of my readers has seen the movie, can you tell me where it’s hinted that Superman might be gay? I didn’t see this in the movie at all. Not once. The guy’s completely in love with Lois, isn’t he? Did I read something wrong? I can’t fathom where this is coming from.

(On a somewhat tangential note, this morning’s addition to Roger Ebert’s ongoing series on The Great Movies is a silent epic made in 1914 called Cabiria. Here’s a key portion of Ebert’s article:

The sets for Griffith’s “Intolerance” possibly grew so large after he saw “Cabiria,” and DeMille was also fond of enormous sets. When a modern film like “Troy” creates a vast Greek city out of digital information, we aren’t fooled. We may be impressed by the visual effect, but we aren’t impressed by the achievement. Watching these silent films, we feel a kind of awe, because we see that the sets are really there, and really that size.

The same reality is true of some of the stunts in “Cabiria.” There is a scene where a city’s walls are besieged by warriors on ladders, and others in a wicker basket are raised high up at the end of a crane. The city defenders push the ladders off the walls, and use lances to overturn the basket. Yes, there are probably piles of straw down below to cushion the warriors as they land, but look how far they fall while they are still onscreen. The risks they are taking are chilling.

This is one thing about the Lord of the Rings films that I find so satisfying: pretty much alone of all the Big Digital Epics of late, those films look the most real to me. This has nothing much to do with SDB’s post, but there it is.)

(Welcome to all of SDB’s readers, and thanks to the one who pointed out a gramatical error of mine. The first graf has been edited for clarity.)

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