My Remembering My Dinner With Andre

Perhaps it is just because it's evocative of my halcyon days at university, you know "those butt planted, heel slamming mornings" (sorry I've drifted off into someone else's poem). Rather: when my intellect was precipating from the academic solution that I was immersed in. Or maybe it was a novel film for 1981, but I've just watched the freshly-released-on-DVD-and-now-available-at-Netflix "My Dinner With Andre". It is surely a remarkable, simple film. You remember, the film that suggests that once in a while you go through a day using only you're left hand (if you are right-handed), just to be sure that you shake your life up a little, often enough. And that maybe flags sewn for a purpose, to fly over your endeavors and your friends and capture their essence for you to hoard, that well, maybe such things can be evil incarnated inanimately -- and the solution is to burn them and bury them, ritualistically. And that maybe we live our lives in a trance and maybe we need an occasional trance to make us live our lives alive. And where you can see Wallace Shawn say "Inconceivable!" six years before he does it again in "The Princess Bride". Ahhh.

US Open Golf at Bethpage Again in 2009

I guess this review is relevant again for the next few days.

Who the Hell is Baylock Matherbee?

Two reviews in one day. I sum this one up with, "like a well-baked potato." It's of an unpublished science fiction short story by a friend.

Franken Still Slogging Forward

I've finally posted a quick review of Al Franken's Lies ... A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Here's a quote: "Sure, Franken uses humor to make his points, but he's largely 'kidding on the square'. "

Experimental Theatre: Contemporaneous Shakespeare

My daughter (12) told me about an idea, while setting the table for dinner the other day, that she thinks would be cool. She thinks someone should put on simultaneous stage plays, like split the stage in half, one traditional Shakespeare, with the "thees" and "thous," and one "translated" into modern English. I liked it too. Archaic language vs. modern idioms. They could have mirror images of the sets and action with the spot lighting bouncing back and forth.

Shakespearean: “Harken! Doth mine ears deceive me?”
Modern: “Say what!?”

Easy to play it for laughs, with some talent it could be commentary on modernity.

Kennedy Family Puts a Dog in the Whitehouse

After failing for decades to put another (human) family member in the Whitehouse, including the tragic deaths of Bobby and John Jr, the unsuccessful candidacy of Teddy and Caroline eschewing even a Senate seat, the Kennedy family has finally managed a different feat -- putting a dog in the Whitehouse.

Young Natalie Merchant and the Poor at Easter

I dug a 25 year old cassette tape out of the center console of my 13 year old truck today while driving to drop a check off at my dentist. (Not quite as painful as a procedure, but a little bit cringe creating even so.) The music was fresh once more, 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe". My gawd, Natalie Merchant, you sound young! Through the magic of recorded media it is a young you; I guess I've lately listened only to recent renditions of your older lyricism. Of course you were young then, about twenty years old twenty five years ago. You're younger than I am so let's not reverse the math to see where we are now, but you are singing idealized lyrics, the promise of youth. Did we change the world, bend it to our better vision? Are you (are we) doing it now, with the election of Barack Obama, the popularizing of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert and, possibly, the election of Al Franken? Along with the rise of the third world from poverty and preventable diseases? Will there be poor always, pathetically struggling? It's a good Easter question, and I'm not the only one who is asking. (See also Matthew 26:11, Deuteronomy 15:11, Mark 14:7, etc.) For now I'll listen to my youth, and to Natalie Merchant's, and to the other 10,000-plus maniacs I have known.

Neil Gaiman Graphic Novel Review

See why I ask whether "a theme was concocted to connect..." in my Creatures of the Night review.

American Democracy vs. Richard John Neuhaus's Kind

I heard this story on NPR on my way home from work last night; it's about recently deceased theologian and author Richard John Neuhaus. Somewhere in the middle author George Weigel lauds Neuhaus as "a genuine democrat with a small 'd'" -- apparently Neuhaus was a proponent of Christianity driving public policy in the U.S. I don't know if he plainly argued against our separation of church and state (or Christianity and State, the way these things tend to be; no one gets much of a hearing who is against the separation of non-Christian religions and U.S. government), but these people continue to miss the most basic point of this tenet of our democracy: codifying separation of religion and government was explicitly done (and continues) to protect the most faithful.

Yes, almost exclusively Christians at first. The founding fathers were not particularly concerned with protecting Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists in the late 1700's. For one thing there just weren't very many around in post-colonial America.

When Weigel said Neuhaus was a "democrat", I thought "No way;" but had to correct myself. Yes, technically a democracy is ruled by the will of the majority. So he can be genuinely democratic -- but that doesn't make him a tremendous supporter of American democracy. True little 'd' democracies, though, are characterized by the tyranny of the majority against the minority. American democracy has a great pillar in our "Bill of Rights", a set of tenets that protect individuals and minorities and that can't be overturned by a simple majority -- they require a strong super-majority to change them, being, as they are, a part of our Constitution.

Protection of the minority (and individual) is in all of our best interest -- sooner or later we all find ourselves as a minority of one kind or another, or standing alone in some predicament either on principle or through unfortunate happenstance.

So unless, Father Neuhaus, you plan to always be in the majority, you and those you would have in your flock, please help us to preserve our protections; to solidify our rights and embrace our separations where they are emplaced to deny tyranny and injustice. If you are comfortably ensconced in your majority, here's just one example of how majority can be fleeting, if you are a U.S. citizen and caucasian you are currently in the majority. Reuters tells us that you likely will not be by the year 2050 -- you'll be a plurality, i.e. less than 50% of the population, not enough to vote your will onto society even in a little 'd' democracy. So if you are under the age of 35, there's a good chance you'll live to be in a racial non-majority. Let's keep the Golden Rule in mind. Let's bring morality into our government as often and deeply as possible, but we can do that without the accoutrements of organized religions.

Rest in peace.

Obama Bandwagon

I'd swear I'm seeing more Obama bumper stickers now than ever before. Right up until the election you really had to keep your eyeballs peeled in order to spot the handfull of cars with Obama propaganda on them. Ever since then it seems the percentage of cars on the road here in Northern Alabama with "Obama '08" or "Yes We Can" (still not many "Alobama" slogans around) has been, it seems to me, steadily increasing. Now even a short ride to the store often contains a sighting.

Not that it's a problem for me. I'm as enthusiastic as ever about our choice for "next President", even if the timing, what with the economy wretching, is a bit of a downer. And I'm psyched to see more and more people jumping on the Obama Bandwagon -- I hope we really do all rally around him and our new Congress and make this a greater country and a great time to be in it. Only a dozen more days until the swearing in!

Losing My Motherboard

A friend sent me a reference to Google Linux.

Yeah, I said, hard to know where to focus forward. Currently I’m resisting modernizing my home computers – the newer one, that my son and I built back in ’02, is losing its motherboard. Leaky capacitors – it’ll still boot if you try several times in succession; I guess the capacitors build up a charge and then acquiesce. I’m going to try replacing the old motherboard with one that came out in ’04 (couldn’t find my exact model) – still using IDE drives and DDR (184 pin) memory. Meanwhile my son is now a sophomore in college and on his second laptop in 3 years….

SILive Island Girl Hat Tip

I got a(nother) mention in Island Girl’s blog.

Not So Bad Christmas Movies and Non-Times-Square Ball Dropping

So we saw the movie Four Christmases this afternoon. Probably wouldn't have except we had some free tickets from a newspaper contest. The reviews I'd read were pretty negative; one critic complained about too much profanity and a disrespectful Nativity play; and that it's not a family film. Okay there's a bit of profanity but the Nativity scene seemed no more or less respectful than many modern farces -- certainly as much so as most local productions of the play "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever". I do have to agree that this is mostly a vehicle for Vince Vaughn, and I'm not a big fan of his -- an anti-fan, really. But there are some legitimate chuckles here and not much that is offensive beyond some swearing and the usual farce ridiculousnesses.

I don't expect Four Christmases to land on many people's annual "must re-watch every year" holiday movie lists; and it's not as clever or endearing as, say, Love, Actually. But as much as I like Love, Actually, it's not a family film eithre, nor is it without ridiculousnesses. Anyway, Four Christmases is about Christmas in California, which is a bit different than in the heartland (or the Bible Belt). They used a Tom Petty Christmas song and everything ("Christmas All Over Again").

And we get the satisfying ending, with a little cherry on top. Family harmony, after a fashion, after all. Since it's actually New Year's Day today, with resolutions and promises to live better, truer, longer lives, I also wanted to point to some family-first wisdom from Dave Winer's site, and just say "Right On" (click through for the full quote):

"A rubber ball will bounce and someone else can pick it up. That's your work life. The glass ball is family, friends, your health. Drop it, and if you're lucky it'll just crack. If you're not so lucky, it'll break into a million pieces. "

Finally, maybe I was put in a better mood for the film by seeing a "First Look" at the upcoming Watchmen film during the previews. I recently read this graphic novel that is on Time magazine's All Time 100 Novels list. I also just loaned my copy to my parents, not only for them to read, but for my Reverend Uncle, too; I think he'll get a lift out of it.

Books for Christmas

I received a few books for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to all of them.
My wife and kids got me:
1) War of Honor (audio book) by David Weber, a science fiction author that I'm unfamiliar with but was recommended by a coworker.
2) Best of Gothic Horror: Edgar Allan Poe Collection, Frankenstein (Mary Shelly) and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Rober Louis Stevenson) (audio book). I'm sure I've read the Poe previously but it's always inspiring. I read chunks of Frankenstein in a college class called Frankenstein to Bioengineering in about 1983, when bioengineering was as much science fiction as science, I think I've only read the Classic Comics version of Dr. Jekyll it should be a fun listen.
3) The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited and published posthumously by his son, Christopher Tolkien). Of course I loved the LotR, dog-earing my copies until I had to replace a couple of them, and enjoyed the Silmarillion. The cover illustration on this one is fantastic.

And from my parents:
A history of the American People by Paul Johnson; this is a tome and I expect to wade through it slowly, but with great interest, especially as the Obama administration gets rolling.

Feline Pharaohed

We put together one of the toughest and least fun yet satisfying jigsaw puzzles I've ever done over the holidays. It's a thousand-piecer, but one of those "mystery story" ones so you don't have a picture to go by -- and it was a lot of brown and tan. It's called "Curse of the Feline Pharaoh" by Bepuzzled. Fortunately I found a picture of the completed puzzle on the internet, although only at a low resolution, at least it showed the layout of the basic components. I really like being able to pick up a random piece, go to the picture on the box, and say "Ah, yes, that is exactly where this piece will go." No way to do that with this baby -- even with a high resolution picture that wouldn't have worked for a lot of pieces -- the colors are too non-distinct.

Also fortunately, my parents came by for a couple days and pitched in, especially my mom who likes working jigsaws on occasion, and she pulled in my daughter, who doesn't like hard puzzles but likes working with Grandma. Here's a picture of some of us near to completing the puzzle; but I'm selling mine on Amazon.

Freedom of Speech

With the impending inauguration of a new President, one that appears to be cut from a different cloth than our current one, maybe a different cloth than any in the last couple decades, it appears that more than just myself are reflecting on Freedom, and the ongoing fight to maintain or regain it right here in the good old USA. Neil Gaiman put down his credo a few weeks back; I could only fail to try to agree more. It's here; and well worth the time.

I often quote from the Alan Shepard speech in the movie "The American President" written by Aaron Sorkin (the full speech is here) when trying to express my own thoughts on our freedom:

America isn't easy. America, is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center-stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

I also hear Al Franken, reading from one his books today, talking about the home of the brave, and how it is a mature love that liberals have for our country, to want it to be better and to own up to its mistakes. It takes a brave people to do that -- and that'd be us.

Straight Talk from Al Franken

As the recount in Minnesota continues, I just started listening to Al Franken's audio book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (from 2003). Now I wish I had more directly supported Franken's Democratic Senatorial bid, we could use the plain talk and fact checking. Man, he rips Ann Coulter up, down, and sideways. I don't know anything about her, but now I know too much (not that I've checked Al Franken's facts, and I really should, but he cites enough examples and sources to be pretty credible). I'll give a rating and brief review whenever I get through the whole thing, if I ever do (I think it's 10 hours of audio tape. As Dave Winer would say, "Oy."

Over Hill, Over Lily Dale: Spiritualist Town Book Reviewed

It was some tough wading, but worth it to me since I once visited and like to see people think outside the main current. My review includes ... one keen observation by a handy man, "I'm sixty-one years old now, and the only thing I know is that ...."
Read the rest here.

Finished Reading a Real, Fresh Sci-Fi Book

"...through to maturity and beyond..." From my fresh review of the award winning novel, Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. (Click the quote for the full review.)

Obama's Initial "To Do" List

This piece was recently in The New York Times:
"(Obama) has begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters, and will remind Americans regularly throughout the transition that the nation’s challenges are substantial and will take time to address."

Sorry Mr. President-Elect, that boat has sailed. We expect miracles, or at least heroic efforts on the substantive and addressable problems that you are about to inherit. Not on the economy -- the economy is a long term issue and very difficult to control -- and it is likely to self correct, don't let it be an albatross around your neck -- get something else done.

Here's a nice place to start, a mini-rant by a well-informed friend of mine. Go ahead, pick any 3 to get done in your first 100 days; that'll be a good year's accomplishments and you'll have 265 days to work on less solvable issues, like the doling out $700 Billion dollars to someone that might do some good with it:

“…the Bush administration destroyed so much of what works in government that the Democrats should have a relatively easy time making corrections, like giving Bankruptcy judges the power to revise mortgages, giving Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices with the big drug companies, closing Guantanamo, not torturing captured terror suspects, not illegally spying on Americans, no (or less) snowmobiles in Yellowstone, no roads in roadless federal areas, not butchering the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, ending don’t ask don’t tell in the military, not letting the navy torment whales, not giving health care providers a conscience opt out on abortion and other female health issues, not appointing right-wing Federalist Society judges, not wasting money on abstinence education, getting out of Iraq, capturing Bin Laden …”

While your advisors are busy lowering expectations, could they also discourage, just a little, the focus on your being the first African-American elected to the Presidency of the United States. I really don't care -- I mean it's great indication that maybe our nation is maturing, but I didn't vote for you because you are African-American or to prove that such a person can be elected. I voted for you, and I think so did a lot of others, because you are eloquent and visionary and persuasive and strong and you seem to be honest and moral and "in touch" and forthright but still clever; and those are the qualities we need in a leader right now, no matter what color his (or her) skin is.

Please find the issues that we can make quick progress on and make it. I'm looking forward to it.

Go Parker Griffith!

It's tough enough to be an informed voter without having candidates with similar names running for the same position. In this case its Parker Griffith(D) vs. Wayne Parker(R) in Alabama's 5th Congressional district. To compound the confusion the Democrat is using red signs and the Republican is using blue signs. Come on, guys, help us out a little here! We want to vote for the right guy -- the one who has the strong family values and the fiscal restraint and looks like he can keep the good jobs coming into the Tennessee Valley just like our retiring Congressman, Bud Cramer (D) did for years. We want Parker Griffith. He's a medical doctor, an M.D., so he's clearly smart enough for the job. He's got experience in elected office as a state Senator and he has the endorsement of our Blue Dog Conservative, Representative Bud Cramer. Maybe a little mnemonic device would help: "Go with Griffith"? "Griffith is Great"? "Gee, wouldn't going with Griffith be great, y'know, the one with the 'G' in his name"?

Harmon House Painted on Its Own Slate

There's a house I like to stay at, up the Hudson from New York, more for the denizens than the architecture, but both are grand and storied. I was pleased this week to deliver the fruit of last summer's (2007) family trip to there and other haunts in the vicinity of "The Big Apple" (I wrote about the trip here).

On that trip I collected a few slate tiles that had come off the roof as the result of a violent thunder storm a couple weeks earlier. I also collected a few photos. I gave these to my mother, who can paint, and asked if she could render a view of the house onto one of the slates. She did so and I've now gifted the results to the current owners of the Harmon House as a thank you for their hospitality. They've posted a terrific video of the painting on youtube; you can also see a scan of the painting here; and a corresponding photo here.

Paul Newman Passing

I always liked Paul Newman films. We got to watch "Cool Hand Luke" in school in seventh grade after reading it as a play. He was indeed cool. Back in the seventies as a kid I rarely went to first run films, but we saw "The Sting" in the theatre. I didn't know what "running a con" meant and with the goofy clothes I thought I was in for some kind of mean Mary Poppins film. It was great.

I've seen "The Color of Money" recently and even though Tom Cruise grates on me, Newman is outstanding. I need to go back and re-watch "The Hustler". He aged well and was superb in "Nobody's Fool". If you see it again pay attention to when the snow blower is, and isn't, in the back of his pickup. I enjoy that continuity issue because I spotted it before being told about it. (I guess you can't do that now; sorry.)

I've also found buying his "Newman's Own" products satisfying; they're generally good quality and good tasting and you're doing good. But I also have felt a special connection to Paul Newman since the mid 80's because I had the chance to hang out with his daughter Melissa a couple of times. A friend met her when she was taking an art class, painting, at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York one summer. I met her briefly then, but later in New York City she went out with us one evening when I was visiting that friend. He lived on Columbus Avenue, above 106th street in Spanish Harlem, in a 5th floor walk up apartment. That place was a tiny 3 bedroom for $1600 a month twenty some years ago. I guess if you wanted to be in Manhattan it was swell, with the 24 hour crap game on the curb next to a steel post with a few almost bald car tires and a sign that simply read "Flats Fixed". We walked a block and half to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant and had a great evening hanging and chatting, basking in our youth. I'm sure Melissa Newman remembers me less than I remember her. She had long wavy hair and was friendly and unpretentious. And now I'm sorry for her loss; but still grateful for the connection.

Bailout Bill Bunk

Why should we support the $700 Billion bailout of Wall Street? While I understand that their failures can impact the economy as a whole so it is a bit of a scorched earth strategy to let them go down. They did their jobs poorly; they ran their businesses badly and the result of that is that they failed. And the people who caused the failures should not be rewarded and they should have a lot of trouble finding another job in that field. I’m reminded of President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers – they paid for it with their jobs, and we all suffered a bit. How is this so different? Wall Street screwed up. Throw them out and bring in fresh financiers.

I don’t pretend to understand all the vehicles of high finance. But I shouldn’t need to. I’ve earned two graduate degrees, in Mathematics and in Management; if I can’t make some sense out of this in short order then it is intrinsically too complex. I haven’t heard anyone say that it is not too complex. That brings me to a second point: Why do we think that the bailout will either, a) be enough; or b) really be needed in the long run, i.e. we may either need to pour in more money to actually prop these institutions up; or there may be flat failures of some institutions but won’t others just become stronger – we’ve still got the same world, with the same natural and human resources. The financing is just an organizational framework imposed on those resources – a system of catalysts and rewards. Other institutions will fill those voids; people will work, technology will evolve – with or without a bailout.

So there’s one more point to make: we need to consider the source of the panic. This is coming from an administration that has lied to us, deceived us and denied us access to information on a consistent basis over the past eight years. They’ve used the excuse of “security” to pretty much do as they saw fit, from hiding their dealings with big oil companies to lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to not disclosing discussions in the White House of torture as an option. Now it’s "financial security" and it firstly effects their ex-colleagues in the financial world and they want to hand them a lot of money and see if it helps. I’m sorry; they’ve cried wolf too many times. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Not this time, not now.

My own Congressman Bud Cramer makes a compassionate argument in his September 29 letter: "Without action, the store owner, the farmer, the homeowner and the senior have their hands tied and could lose their store, farm, home or pension." I haven't found the perfect analogy, let's try this one: paying "protection money" to a gang of thugs so that a store can stay open in a tough neighborhood and serve the locals isn't a proper solution -- clean out the thugs first and reestablish the store when you can.

David Corn posted the memo from Congressman Brad Sherman in his blog. Sherman is squarely against imposing this burden on the taxpayers: "...the Bailout Bill allows million-dollar-a-month salaries to executives of bailed-out firms, and it allows hundreds of billions to be used to buy toxic assets currently held by foreign investors."

That was a couple days ago. Now the Senate has loaded up the bailout with candy for everybody. If there was one good thing about the Paulson proposal it was that it was clean. Now we've got tax breaks and disaster relief melded into a banking bailout bill. No wonder we don't understand why things break. We let this crisis ferment for years and now we shouldn't panic to fix it with a barage of money and perks in just two weeks. No big bail out, just the FDIC insurance that was already in place -- oh, and let's make everybody play by the rules in the stock market, no naked short selling, for one; there's already a rule against that, the SEC just doesn't enforce it.

But no bailout, it's bunk.

Senator Shelby Says Paulson has been Staggering

I was heartened to hear my Senator, Richard Shelby (R - AL) this morning on National Public Radio urging caution on the financial bailout as proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I appreciate Mr. Shelby saying: "We don't know the endgame in this, and I'll tell you, what bothers me about this is that I believe that the chairman of the Fed and the Treasury secretary, Paulson, with all due respect to them, they've been staggering from crisis to crisis, and they haven't even said today that this will end the crisis."

I hope he continues to work with Senator Chris Dodd (D- CT) to ensure:
1) Accountability and transparency through oversight provisions
2) That taxpayers are first in line for any monies recovered (including prevention of any large payouts to senior executives at the impacted financial institutions)
3) That the mortgage crisis itself is addressed, i.e. that homeowners and lenders submit to a judge and get a restructuring of terms rather than all the failures.

(Dodd was interviewed on NPR this morning.)

By the way, it was nice to hear Alabama on the national news in a positive light, rather than about the Don Siegelman/Richard Scrushy mess or a judge that won't keep church and government separate.

The Best Songs and EPs per David Rawson, Vintage 1995

Two half dozens and one year ago, my friend, in an effort to improve my musical taste, mailed to me, a list containing 40 of the best albums, 100 of the best songs, and 5 of the best EPs, from nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-five. Years ago I posted the list of albums, today I finally finished scanning, OCR'ing and posting the songs and EPs, here, on my website.

Go on, get yourself some culture.

Troopergate Lives

Another Sarah Palin flip flop: NPR aired a story this morning noting that Todd Palin is refusing to testify in the “Troopergate” investigation in Alaska , despite a legal subpoena to do so. Governor Sarah Palin has already instructed her aides to disobey their subpoenas. This is not the transparency in government that she pledged in her campaign for Governor and that she has been speaking strongly about in her VP appearances (from her speech on Sept. 11): “the ethical standards that had led to closed doors and closed door dealings and self-interest: it's gone." I guess not.

NPR also kept attributing the “McCain Campaign” as saying that the investigation has now become political and that it is no longer legitimate. Firstly, I’m not sure why the McCain campaign has any standing to participate – this is a state matter that pre-dates Palin’s involvement with the Presidential campaign. She should deal with it as Governor of Alaska, just like ex-Governor Don Siegelman has had to deal with apparently politically motivated accusations here in Alabama .

But if this is the measure of how long Sarah Palin and the McCain Campaign will stick to their pledge of transparency and cooperation in government, that is, only until it inconveniences themselves, then we don’t need them. We don’t need eight more years of disobeyed subpoenas and constitutional overstepping.

Reviews Catch-Up

I caught up, somewhat hastily, with some languishing reviews of audio books that I heard over the summer:

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring **** Richard Preston

A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures *** Ben Bradlee

How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions-and You Can Too ** Annie Duke

Upgraded My Memory

Well, the memory in my computers, anyway. I noticed my newer deskside computer seemed a bit sluggish running big progams like Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 under Windows XP Pro when I thought to check on how much RAM it had. When my son and I built it in 2002 we installed one stick of 512 MB DDR (PC2100). That just wasn't enough for the load I was putting on it, Task Manager showed I was trying to use about 600 MB. Oops, the OS was having to swap memory in and out.

So I checked the specs on my Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP motherboard and ordered two Kingston KVR333 (PC2700) 512 MB DDR DIMMs from newegg.com. Slightly faster memory and twice as much of it, whoo-hoo! Also kudos to Giga-Byte's support website: when the motherboard didn't recognize half the memory on the first try, they answered my e-mail question within a couple hours, providing some helpful hints -- turned out I just hadn't fully seated one of the DIMMs).

But that's not all; I took the 512 MB PC2100 DIMM that came out of the home built machine and put it into my slightly older Micron computer (it also has a Giga-Byte motherboard, a GA-7DX Rev 2.2). It previously had 384 MB and also runs XP Pro, so it could sure use a boost. It only has two memory slots, previously a 256 MB PC1600 and a 128 MB 200MHz PC1600. So I moved the 256 over and put in the 512 and voila, 768 MB -- I assume this all ends up running at the PC1600 speed, but still, I doubled the amount of memory in both my home computers, and the memory speed in one of them, for about $46, including shipping. (The home built machine still has an empty memory slot, I probably should have gotten another 512 MB stick. Hmmm. Also, if somebody needs that 128 MB DIMM, I'd part with it for a couple dollars, plus shipping) Now if I can resurrect the screen on the HP laptop that my son just handed down to me, we'll really be in business!

Much Better than Postal Chess

Way back in middle school, I once tried to play a game of chess with one of my mom’s students. She taught at a different school and provided extra help to kids that were struggling with one subject. This kid, whose name I’ve long since forgotten and it isn’t germane in any case, not that this whole story isn’t just one long sidebar – but I really digress, so: my mother began carrying moves back and forth to this unevenly smart boy, y’know, King’s Knight to Rook 3 and such (I never learned the proper notation). We drew the board, too, for clarity. It was agonizingly slow and petered out after maybe a dozen moves. Maybe it helped my mom establish a rapport with the boy, I don’t know, but it soured me on using couriers for activities that more typically garnered instant gratification. Flash forward thirty years and I was still hesitating to try DVD rental by mail. My local shop had great hours and a decent selection and a subscription service where I could rent as often as I wanted as long as I didn’t rent the newest releases (had to wait for them to “go on 'blue'” -- movies were retagged 3-6 months after their DVD release. But as my appetite for more esoteric films increased and the clerks’ ability to alphabetize older releases seemed to diminish, I became less satisfied and the ubiquity of the Blockbuster and Netflix ads caught up with me.

Blockbuster’s combination of a nearby store coupled with the vast selection available by mail made a compelling argument, but in the end the cheaper price, presumed better efficiency from a category leader and a UPromise rebate tipped the scale: I signed up for two-at-a-time Netflix and have been quite pleased. Turn-around time is about 3 days: I drop a disk in the drive-by mailbox at the post office on my way to work on Monday and have a fresh one waiting in my mailbox at home on Wednesday. And the variety is great. My daughter and I watched “La Belle et la Bete” from 1946 (Beauty and the Beast) – definitely not Walt Disney, and yet a lot of that fantasy magic and some great special effects, like live arm candle wall sconces. I’m also going through the “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” TV series – it wasn’t quite good enough not to miss it on regular TV, but with the convenience of 4 episodes on a disk, watched on my schedule, it’s pretty high quality television – it has the appropriate political views for a show set in Los Angeles and full of youthful entertainment types.

I’ve also discovered watching with the English (hearing impaired) subtitles turned on. Not only does it help my now-less-than-perfect hearing to catch the dialog, especially when there isn’t perfectly calm ambience in my viewing area, but they sometimes add interesting non-spoken bits, like I just re-viewed “August Rush” and whenever a song is being played the subtitles give you the title and author, in case you can’t quite finger which Mozart piece is lighting up your ears. It’s a lift.

I’ve only cycled through about a dozen DVD’s via the mail, but it’s also only been about 6 weeks. I haven’t seen too much else out of the main stream, although I did just ship off “A Scanner Darkly”, a rather bizarre and imperfectly updated adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. It was a trip. I plan to have quite a few more before I get bored with postal films.

A President Who Can Think on his Feet

In a speech that reminded me of some of the strongest moments from the film The American President (full script here, I’ll add a sample below), Barack Obama demonstrated that he can inspire, that he can be tough, that he has an open mind, that he values fairness and American values in all their diversity and, most encouragingly, that he can articulate these points without fumbling; that he can give a 45 minute speech without veering off into incoherent sentence structures and without inadvertently flipping what he means to say into its own opposite. George W. Bush can’t do it and I have yet to see John McCain get passionate and stay coherent on any topic.

Some quick quotes (full speech text is online here too):

“This, too, is part of America 's promise -- the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

"That's why I stand here tonight. Because for 232 years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive."

“You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq .”

"I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

“ -- that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington . Change comes to Washington ”

Sure, the speech was pre-written and well-rehearsed and not so different from the one I saw months ago in Birmingham (Alabama), but he delivered it with interest, on tempo, with vitality and with sincerity. A President we can believe in.

Here’s a bit of Michael Douglas as Alan Shepherd in The American President:

“Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about. This is a country made up of people with hard jobs that they're terrified of losing. The roots of freedom are of little or no interest to them at the moment. We are a nation afraid to go out at night. We're a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

I hope we all stay in touch with this inspirational vision and that we elect Obama and reject the continuity offered by John McCain as he has moved closer to George W’s policies of war for oil’s sake and gotten tighter with the closed minds of ultra-conservative religious minorities.

Let’s bring a fresh quick mind with a powerful vision to the Presidency – we should never settle for anything less.

McCain’s Desperate Gambit

Sarah who? Governor of which state? For how long? John McCain’s running mate is in her second year as Governor of one of the least populous states in the country, Alaska . It’s not lost on me that Alaska is an oil state, too; although apparently she’s been a critic of big oil to some extent, still her state receives a big pile of oil money every year. So McCain wanted a woman, one with “maverick credentials”, to me that’s because he’s lost his own set. He began losing his independent voice sometime before 2006 when he visited Alabama and cozied up to some very right-wing religious groups, some with ties to white-supremacy and other hate groups; and shredded the rest as he has backed George W. Bush’s plays in Iraq and the former Soviet Union. But I can see why he picked a woman, and why he didn’t want her name out in the media on his short list. He wanted to let Obama pick a non-woman, i.e. someone other than Hillary Clinton, and then he’s hoping to swoop in and pick up the disenfranchised Hillary supporters, particularly in the large swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania , where Hillary did better than Obama. I’m sure most of the Clinton-ites will see right through this. Sarah Palin is not Hillary Clinton. She is not a statesman the way Hillary grew to be as First Lady and has carried on now as a 10 year veteran of the U.S. Senate. We know Hillary’s passions and foibles. Sarah Palin is an unknown and there is not enough time now for the American public to ensure that she is qualified to be one heart beat away from the Presidency. She is younger than Obama, but we know that he can handle pressure, we’ve seen him on the campaign trail for 18 months; we saw him at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. What was Sarah Palin doing in 2004? Can she stand up to the pressure of the office that she now seeks, or the one that might be bequeathed to her suddenly? We can’t find out in the next 68 days, but we would need to in order to be swayed to their ticket. It’s a desperate gambit by a man seeking an office where desperate gambits can put us all in harm’s way.

Preamble Rambling

My daughter just started seventh grade. They’re studying US history, presently The U.S. Constitution. It’s heady stuff. She’s had to memorize the Preamble, and while there is some uncommon language it’s all pretty straight-forward – and powerful. I was going to just point to a copy on the web at, say, http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html, but it’s worth duplicating it here (and copyright should not be an issue, :-) ):

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That’s about as strong an opening on as serious of a topic as there is in our civil life, yet our general citizenry in this day and age only really pays attention to it when they’re in secondary school. “… secure the Blessings of Liberty”, not just for the framers (who were largely regular citizens) and their contemporaries, but for their posterity (that’d be us, now). And they were sure to include tantamount precepts like separation and balance of powers and the Bill of Rights for individuals.

Just to take one example from that Bill, the first amendment, again is strong stuff:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In the face of that founding right, how do we have stories like the one coming out of Minneapolis today where 3 videographers had their cameras, equipment and notes confiscated by police (Minneapolis cops confiscate cameras)? Prima facie it flies against the most basic tenets of our government and I don’t understand why it’s not the top news story of the day. Maybe someday my daughter will explain it to me.

An honor to know the Honorable…

I’ve gotten more familiar with our hometown mayor, Sandy Kirkendall, over the past four years – he’s up for re-election today. I voted for him, and I’ve had his sign in my yard and his magnet on my car for a couple months now as his campaign heated up. We’re invited to his victory party this evening, although I don’t think his victory is assured. As near as I can tell he’s a fine small-and-growing town mayor – we’ve certainly had worse in the past 15 years. He’s down-to-earth yet very sharp and not a hint of impropriety in his administration; he’s a frequent customer at Bruegger’s Bagels where my wife works and he awarded my son the Madison Mayor’s Scholarship a couple years ago. My daughter recently doodled his campaign logo . He stopped by our house during his canvassing and he planted our yard sign himself. This morning he was out in front of city hall, in the drizzling rain, greeting all who came to vote, for him or not. He’s a model politician – if only his style would catch on for higher office holders.

Drivin' on Dylan Time

New review of Bob Dylan autobiography wherein I am seen to say "his hipster-speak is not self-conscious and the prose is packed with metaphor".

Cataloged Odd

They finally got my donation of Odd and The Frost Giants cataloged at the library.

We Can Solve It and Warm as the New Status Quo

I haven't checked out either what T. Boone Pickens is proposing on energy (I've just seen his TV commercial suggesting we can do a lot with renewables like wind power) nor have I checked out WeCanSolveIt.org, the new effort from Al Gore (but I caught part of his speech to the NetRoots Nation conference on CSPAN), but I like that these things are popping up and gaining some traction. Would it be catastrophic if half of Florida ended up slowly submerging under water, or if upstate New York had milder winters? Probably not, the Earth has changed climates and surface area over the millenia a bunch of times, and we'll adapt. But we risk a collapse of our society and a slip into pestilence and feudalism; into disease and subsistence living rather than the society of opportunity that we have now, where many people can live long, safe, healthy lives in the pursuit of their own fulfillment, if we don't handle the energy situation and its fallout into food production and climate change.

I saw this article on the tenuousness of ice at the north pole. I already know that my children are growing up when there was always an Internet, when everyone has a phone, and most people have one on their belt or in their purse; when there is air-conditioning if it's hot out and heat if it's cold and cars and planes take us everywhere. I knew that technology was ubiquitous. But I also thought that they would grow up with basically the same planet as I did. But it seems that now it may be the easiest way for my kids to get to the North Pole is to just take a boat -- no dog sleds or snowmobiles needed, just sail up there and watch the sun circle around you. And that there will be no snow in Africa, not even on Kilimanjaro. I've lived half as long at this point as my maternal grandmother lived, and she saw the growth of the automobile and the birth of the airplane and television and, toward the end, the Internet. I didn't think I would be, but I may be in for a span just as wide.

Avoiding Lloyd Bentsen's quote.

I understand the pressure on Obama to move to the center during the general election cycle and I'm sure his advisors are telling him to appear strong on foreign affairs and terrorism, but Hillary Clinton managed to vote against the new FISA and it's retroactive-and-prima-facie-unconstitutional retroactive telecom companies immunity. But that's not the leader that had me excited about public service in America again. That's not the leader that voted against the Iraq war (Hillary Clinton didn't manage to vote against that, when Barack Obama did.)

It's a disappointment when I find that an inspiring leader is on the opposite side of an issue from the ACLU. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against this new FISA; from their complaint: "...supplies none of the safeguards that the Constitution demands. It permits the government to monitor the communications of U.S. Citizens and residents without identifying the people to be surveilled; without specifying the facilities, places, premises, or property to be monitored; ...; without obtaining individualized warrants based on ... probable cause".

I find myself largely agreeing again with Dave Winer here and here and I will similarly be redirecting my donations henceforth (but not my vote). I'm also disappointed in Obama's non-acceptance of public campaign funds and a couple other reversals; I think the other party can make more hay out of his flip-flops than his progressive positions; "Change You Can Believe In" -- do You believe in it, Mr. Obama? I would hate to think that we could apply Llyod Bentsen's most famous quote. I hope Obama gets back on point, and stays there.