I've Lost 15 Pounds! Ask Me How!

Don't bother asking - I'm going to tell you anyway. And at the end, you'll also learn my secret to losing weight - it's not just diet and exercise!

So this year I made this New Year's Resolution - I was going to whittle down my ectomorphic body to the recommended BMI for my height, which is 5' 8". I was, at my peak, around 180. This is the result of a lack of exercise coupled with depression and comfort-eating from my recent divorce, and my lack of a bathroom scale.

So once I bought a scale and assessed the damage, I devised a strategy. Since I worked pretty close to my apartment, about 3 miles, I decided that I could get there by bike. After all, I could either waste 12 minutes a trip driving there or I could profitably burn calories for half an hour riding. * So outfitted with the bike, a helmet, and a heart rate monitor (more out of curiosity than anything else) I commenced burnin' off that excess avoirdupois.

For the first two months, that was my whole strategy - daily exercise and more sensible eating. That helped me lose 10 pounds. Additionally I felt more alive and I've developed a nice tan, something my pale countenance needed aesthetically.

Caveats to this plan, by the way - obviously if you have a forty minute drive to work, you're screwed as far as the bike trip goes, because it'll take you around 6 hours. You can't listen to the radio because you need your ears to detect the traffic sneaking up behind you. And Canoga Park in the dead of winter, even in the middle of LA, is surprisingly cold. Antarctica cold. Mr. Freeze couldn't take that kinda cold. Bring a sweater.

Around the end of March, I realized I was stalling at around 172 pounds, 10 pounds short of my goal. Since I'm around actors all the time now (I'm in a play this month and another play next month, but I swear I'll stop after that!) weight advice is pretty easy to get. My friend Art gave me the obvious advice: "Stop with the carbs." No bread! No sugar.

These would be difficult things to give up, but my weak will power is easily trumped by my vanity so I have manged to curtail both bread and sugar with relative ease. Especially bread! My director Karen also suggested that I avoid all white foods, which is pretty weird but essentially good advice.

On the exercise and no carb program, for the last two weeks I've lost about .6 pounds a day, and as of yesterday I'm officially out of the "overweight" BMI zone and in the "normal" zone. Normal is a term of art here; we're Americans! I've been normal this whole time.

But what is the secret? I've been through this before and when someone asked me that I just sighed and said "no secret - diet and exercise." But that's not really true. Those things alone won't do it because the diet thing flies out the window when you start feeling hungry. The secret, the thing that will make you lose the weight and keep it off, is this:

Find ways to like the hunger.

That's your only hope. I'm a little hungry about half the day. I would reach for a snack normally, but I've convinced myself that mild hunger is just your body's way of telling you it's burning off the fat. Mild hunger is exercise that you don't even have to do! Extreme hunger, low-blood-sugar-fainting hunger, is a different story and you should just open up that bag of Wonder Bread and enjoy. But most of the time, listen to your body, thank it for the helpful info, and plan your trip to the beach. On a bike. And use sunscreen.

* You probably don't live so close to your job, but you may live that close to a mass transit access point! Good exercise, and you'll be reducing your carbon footprint, and you'll be ahead of the curve when gas goes up to $5.00 a gallon on Memorial Day. Ha ha, just kidding! Unless it does, in which case I'm predicting.

Damn Dirty Apes

The Evolution in Schools debate continues to fascinate me. Even as a liberal Atheist, I have to admit I see wiggle room here. After all, no scientific theory is ever completely proven. So when I hear this morning that Florida (the state located under a burning Bush) is requiring teachers to present arguments against the theory of evolution, I can't whip myself into a high dudgeon. I'm contrarian by nature; I always want both sides of the argument.

The problem, I suppose, is that we have to keep religion out of the schools. Therefore, the syllabus will have to be something like this: "Scientists suggest this happened, but others say that's impossible because of this." "Who are the others?" "Ask your parents." Which is a fine sequence, come to think of it.

The people who fought to get this into the school system are clearly hoping for an endgame in which Christian creation stories are advanced; but what about Muslims? What about Buddhists? Each of these myths differ enough that they would deserve equal time, but I don't think these guys are fighting to have Islam taught in science class. In fact, I can't imagine they would let that happen without a fight. An ugly fight. Warner Todd Huston is whipped up because he fears the encroachment of Sharia Banking Laws in the lending industry. What's he gonna say about the Koran in 3rd Grade?

Why not just teach just Christian theory in public schools? Because that gives the United States an official religion. Even if you want to ignore the plentiful constitutional language forbidding that, you only have to look at Governments who DO have an official religion to see that we're better off without one. Even the Communists, who had an official absense of religion, ran into trouble. We're in Iraq right now in part to prevent a religion-based government from forming there. Granting an exception because YOUR religion is really really cool doesn't solve the problem.

As much as I hate slippery-slope arguments (they're fear-based), dragging God into science class is a luge race to oblivion.

Happy Earth Day, Half The Country!

"It's April 22 and everybody knows today is Earth Day / Merry Christmas / Happy Birthday to whoever's being born." - Dramarama

I just want to take a moment to wish a happy day to everybody who isn't actively campaigning against environmental prudence, energy saving, and alternatives to fossil fuels which could destroy us all if they don't run out first.

Happy Earth Day to those who believe that the oil companies don't have people's best interests at heart; to those who don't think CFC bulbs are a political issue, who don't think that the majority of the worlds scientists are lying because they're liberals. Happy Earth Day to Al Gore, and to all those who don't make an issue of the fact that a guy with a bigger than average house uses more power than a guy with an average-sized house. Happy Earth Day to me, because I ride a bike to work.

Happy Earth Day to the Earth. Good luck to ya, baby.

No Happy Earth Day to the RNC Talking Points crowd, because you're trying to kill me.

Conan The Contrarian

Kudos to Arnold S*****************r *, the governer of California, for being a Republican and yet recognizing the value in easing off the fossil fuel use. He appeared on FoxNews over the weekend (HT to Crooks and Liars for the video) to explain that Republicans who deny global warming and fight green technology are missing the boat.

I think they’re just trying to protect business. And in the end, they’re hurting business. Because we’ve proven in California that you can do both, that you can protect the environment and protect business... I think people realize now, ‘wait, this does not hurt our economy, this is actually a big plus’ because we’re creating jobs through green, clean technology.

True dat, Arn. Additionally, a lot of global warming denyers somehow seem to think that only people would be troubled by climate change -- "oooooh, it's too hot here!" -- without considering that the economic effects are the real problem. It's not such a trivial thing to move a soybean farm three hundred miles north, pal. And if Allstate has to pay to replace expensive beachfront property because the ocean levels have caused seepage into that 4-car garage, then you're paying more insurance. Global warming causes inflation! Get it? That's your free-market solution.

Meanwhile businesses are the biggest user of fossil fuels, to heat their buildings and refrigerate their food and transport their goods. If we don't develop alternate energy solutions, and the price of gas keeps rising, businesses fold. Instead of being choked by regulations, they are bled by Exxon. Either way there's less competition, and prices go up. The sun has a few million years of life in it, why not tap some of that?

S*****************r * recognizes that there are incidental benefits to using energy more efficiently. He is the anti-Cheney. I'm betting the rest of the party won't pick up the message and run with it any time soon, but it's kinda like the denial of evolution and the insistance the Al-Queada was running Iraq -- it's a talking point that mainly helps Democrats because it makes the Right look a little dim-witted. So keep it up, boys, at least until November!

* I'm saving energy by not spelling it out.

The Not-So-Great Debate

You know, I don't watch debates. They are not debates in any real sense of the word. They're more like sales meetings. Candidates appear and try to look like they might be good elected officials, but they seldom answer a question straight, let alone actually debate something. It's so frustrating that I've just given up, in the same way that I've given up on trying to devine the state of the union from the State Of The Union address.

From what I'm reading though, ABC managed to find a way around my objections with Wednesday's Democratic debate. Knowing they wouldn't get substantial answers about policy questions, they simply refused to go near those kinds of topics. They avoided any topic with substance apparently. Obama got hit with a lot of questions about people he knows who aren't running for President, Hillary was asked why she kept lying so much all the time. You could boil the first 40 minutes of the debate down to variations of "You're a really bad person, aren't you?"

And the answers were variations of "No I'm not, but my opponent might be."

Eventually they settled into the usual "what would you do if..." with the usual response of "I won't exactly say, but the Republican candidate eats babies."

Listen, you won't learn ANYthing from debates except that all politics sucks. Don't bother. The ultimate goal is for you to like one of the candidates more than the other, and you can get that from sound bites. I mean in the last two elections we (probably) chose the most likeable guy running and look where it got us!

If you insist on watching a staged, prescripted, disingenuous event with voting, may I suggest AMERICAN IDOL instead?

Where's MY 40 Acres and a Mule?

African Americans tend to vote Democratic, a demographic factoid which is puzzling to Lt. Colonel Frances Rice (Ret.) of the Lincoln Heritage Institute. She has published an Open Letter to the Democratic Party demanding that they apologize for their roles in the repression of African Americans over the years. Check out some of this!

Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,

Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,

Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them...

Yikes! And without doing any of the research myself, I expect that she's right. First of all, about asking for an apology. We can afford to apologize, because we stopped acting that way (with the possible exception of Sen. Robert Byrd) around the mid-sixties. We could admit the mistakes, point out the good works we've done since, and pry away the remaining 45 Black Republicans.

Nowadays, white Republicans are in almost utter denial that there's any racial problem in America. They're furious that we're still running affirmative action programs, they're enraged that African Americans percieve that they're still being kept down. How dare they! While we Democrats are falling over ourselves to be good to the people that America kidnapped and made to build our nation, Republicans nowadays have decided that we have done enough and it's time for those ingrates to stop whining and climb the corporate ladder. Which will be easy because nowadays, there isn't any racism.

The white Republicans were pretty good to African Americans for a hundred years or so there, from a little before Lincoln to a little before Nixon. Then it seemed to turn around. That's when they started saying, "Why is that guy getting breaks I'm not getting? Why should I have to have some kind of artificial barrier to prevent me from competing fairly, while another guy HAS to be considered because of the color of his skin?" The answer, of course, is that it's a corrective to unconcious racism, but they keep saying there isn't any such thing.

Look, I'm sorry you guys aren't getting the credit you deserve for your century of progress. Seriously. But voters can't re-elect Lincoln. I'm not black, but if I were I'd be considering what you've done for me LATELY when casting my ballot. And as a white guy who doesn't want to be surrounded by dissatisfied African Americans, I'm sticking with the Democrats, guilty and backpedaling as nobly as they can.

Learning the Lessons of the Cold War

Here's a scary thought.

I was having my usual argument about the efficacy of the war in Iraq. My opponent argued that being there somehow prevents attacks on our own soil. Even if that were true I said it's a 3 trillion dollar insurance policy against a couple million dollars damage.

But you know what? If you're a terrorist that's a great strategy! By funneling more and more of our assets into Iraq, we're devoting less to public services and infrastructure. You remember when we had fewer national guard troops and equipment for the aftermath of Katrina? That was the terrorists hitting a major American city. The weak economy? Terrorists striking a blow.

Sure it puts the terrorists all the way up into the coveted evil-genius Fu Manchu class, but they're not all stupid. In fact if they're not smart enough to see this plan themselves, they're hardly a threat. Even if we dismantle our own government without them being in on it the effect is the same.

We won the cold war without a middle missle being fired. It was enough to force the communists to spend more on missles than they could afford. Its possible that our enemies will accomplish the same spending pennies to our dollars.

They Might Be Giants Writes Exxon Slogan

I heard on the news today that the rising price of deisel gasoline is hurting students. Since the busses have to run, schools are taking the money out of books and pencils and teachers salaries.

Exxon - "We Don't Want the World; We Just Want Your Half."

My, That George Bush Fellah is Evil

So this morning Bush announced that he was going to both withdraw the surge by summer AND reduce the time soldiers are out in the field back to 12 months, both on the advice of the commanders in... I dunno, sub-chief? He also announced that he will hold the line on any further withdrawals until Petreus and company can evaluate the situation caused by the first set of withdrawals.

Interestingly, NPR's hourly newscast is emphasizing the last point, that Bush is refusing to consider further withdrawls at present. Could be liberal bias, could be that they consider that the real news since we knew he was going to say the other stuff.

Bush also whined about the next emergency war funding bill, saying that unless Congress met his conditions for it he would veto it. I think that when Bush whines about stuff, he really believes it. It's when he's not whining that he's lying. The whining is his way of saying, "you idiots! Why are you fighting me on this? I'm right!" I gotta admire a man who so doesn't accept compromise that he's willing to underfund his own war in order to get his way. There's your rejection of nuance!

By the way, how is this an emergency? Were they planning on the war being over when they did the regular budget?

I think Bush made a good point about the need to keep troops in until we have defeated the terrorists. If we withdraw, they will be emboldened. But if we don't and we don't "defeat" them, they will also be emboldened. And the terrorist aren't likely to throw in the towel any time soon, because they're terrorists.

And how did poor Iraq get in this situation, with us taking over their country to lure terrorists away from our own soil and thus fight them there? Isn't that the worst possible foreign relations move? I'm deliberately ignoring the point in the narrative where we claimed to be invading Iraq because they were harboring the 9/11 attackers. Because they stopped saying that for a long time and only recently started saying it again.

It was amusing to hear the President say that 15 months ago we were on the defensive... I don't recollect that kind of assessment coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania 15 months ago. As I recall, victory was just around the corner back then. Well, the corner must be pretty damn vast.

======================================

Almost forgot my most important point! Why is Bush willing to draw down the troops? That's not like him!

Well, maybe even he recognizes that if he doesn't want to be the one to start up the draft again, he's going to need to get his Iran invasion force from somewhere. He's got till the end of the year to crank up THAT machine, and from the speech I'm guessing it's going to be sooner rather than later. Maybe that's the emergency which will postpone elections. Still too early to tell. I'm keeping some money on a bird flu epidemic.

Quit Whining About Liberal Media Bias!

I'll steal some numbers from Glen Greenwald, because they speak for themselves.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

I'm begging, BEGGING, Warner Todd Huston to explain how this proves the media has a liberal bias. I know you can do it, Warner!

My Life As A Trendspotter

When I wrote that thing about the right wing's weird support of any issue that helps the oil companies, even I didn't see this coming. 

"the story will center around all our favorite Muppets producing a show to raise money to save their old theater. They need the money, of course, because an 'evil character' is trying to buy the building so that he might tear it down to "get at the oil underneath." Why is it we have to turn everything into an anti-capitalism, anti-oil hatefest?"

Warner also helpfully supplies addresses, so you can write to Jim Henson co and, I guess, demand that the Muppets let the capitalist drill. What he's failing to understand is that, as sponges-rubber based puppets, the Muppets would inevitably absorb oil spills. And have you ever tried to clean oil out of a sponge? They'd never be the same again.

By the way, if you think I'm anti-capitalist, here's the deal with stories of this kind: The Muppets are raising money to RETAIN PROPERTY THEY ALREADY HAVE. The oil company is trying to take advantage of a perceived weakness. To support the oil company in this story is to support the practice of big Oil stealing the property of hard-working Americans for their own profits. Of course, legitimately they could be fighting eviction by OSHA because that theatre is in pretty bad shape. I bet those stairs are unsafe.

They Shot The Wad On Clinton

Before I start let me both apologize for and elicit applause for the abominable headline. Hey, I'm a blogger - you've seen worse. If I don't sicken and offend you at least once in a while, I might as well be writing for CNN.

Barack Obama is in a fascinating position right now, because it seems that everything is conspiring to get him elected President of the United States. Let's look at historical trending first. With the president's approval rating at constant lows, with the economy doing not so well, the usual drumbeat for "change" is louder than it's been in a long time. Visually, Barack Obama represents change more than the other candidates. (You know what I mean. Don't pretend you don't.) Plus, he neither is promising to extend an unpopular war for the next hundred years, nor is he the wife of someone who held the office for the sleaziest eight years in recent memory.

Next, his opponents. There has been an historical blunder committed by the usually skilled Republicans, and it is gonna cost 'em. For a long time now, they have assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee. I mean a long time, like a couple of months after they pretended George Bush was elected. *rimshot* So for seven years now, they've been demonizing Hillary Clinton. She swindled her Whitewater investors, she killed Vince Foster, she's the antichrist, she has an annoying laugh. They can produce volumes of rumors at the drop of a hat proving that Hillary Clinton flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers. Really. Ask a Republican some time.

It's a well-oiled machine, it's been running like a juggernaut for a long time, and it's worked! Unhappily, too soon. It's supposed to be kicking into high gear now that Hillary is the presumptive Democratic nominee, but she isn't. They made her such a monster that America turned to the good-lookin' tabula rasa instead. Hillary! as she's known among the wingnuts for reasons I've never had fully explained, is taking on water fast.

So now, the Republicans are scrambling to find ways to demonize Obama, and they just don't have the research. They've tried insinuating that he's Saddam Hussein, they've tried claiming that people who vote for him are hypnotized (oh, that's an effective way to swing voters - tell them they're stupid) and lately they're demonizing his pastor, because everyone knows you blindly believe everything your pastor tells you.  Not everyone does; just the black folk. Uh oh.

The race thing is a real minefield for Republicans, who have to avoid the one easy arrow in the quiver: If you elect Obama, he'll give the country to the darkies! So they're stumbling. And because their attacks have been so week, Obama looks even better than Hillary by comparison. 

Meanwhile, Hillary has been spoiling for a fight for eight years herself. She's armed herself to the rhetorical teeth. The only way she knows how to campaign is to fight dirty, which would have been great if she were against McCain, but she's using it against our own guy. Instead, as a result, she looks strident and overambitious and prepared to bring down the party to feed her lust for power. Thus Obama is the only un-scary candidate, and after a constant desert of orange alerts and shoe-bombers, the country badly wants to feel un-scared right now. Obama is our national oasis.

A change in strategy from either Clinton or the entire right-wing machine could put Obama in a worse position, but I don't think anyone is capable of correcting their course at this stage. Obama has been criticized for being vague and for saying little. Can you blame him? Every time someone else opens their mouth, he looks better and better. He is the jujitsu candidate, using the force of his opponent's blows to topple them.

NRG - Norquist Regales GOP

I was at a dinner party last night, and a friend of mine said she was taken with this story about right-leaning politicians fighting for our right to choose - light bulbs. How odd that this would become an issue to tear our congress people away from the war on terror, or the struggle to prevent gay marriage, abortion, and Arabs! 

Indeed, energy issues are a fascinating extremist litmus test for the Republicans. Their argument against CFC bulbs, for example, is that they contain mercury and therefore are bad for the environment. When have you ever heard a Republican passionately defending the environment against a manufacturer such as General Electric?  By the way, a typical thermometer has ten times the mercury, so where's the horror at their use?

Almost all scientists agree that there is a global warming problem caused by man's use of fossil fuels, but the wingnuts (term of endearment, boys) believe the handful of contrarians who happen to work for the fossil fuel companies. Dick Cheney takes office, has a mysterious summit with, oh, no one that you'd be interested in, and emerges with our nations energy policy: quit wasting so much money on R&D and use more coal and oil. 

The right wing's position, as I read it, is "We must waste as much energy as possible to stay competitive." Which is arguably a valid position. 

IF YOU WORK FOR AN OIL COMPANY.

For the rest of us, it means taking money we'd be saving by using wind power and solar power, and giving it to Big Energy instead. They'll remain competitive, we'll all suffer. Already one of the chief causes of inflation is the price of transporting everything, because the cost of gas keeps crawling up. Sometimes it leaps.

And once in a while when I'm venturing onto right wing blogs, I'll complain about how these tax cuts are hurting the country, and they'll respond "we need to cut social programs." When I suggest that maybe we could also stand to eliminate some tax breaks to Exxon and company because they're achieving record profits, my right wing friends turn strangely silent. Perhaps they don't have the energy to speak.

So here's my theory. Grover Norquist, the creepy old guy in that smoke filled room in New York where the X-Files old men used to hang out, is getting his money from the Oil Companies. In turn, he's encouraging pro-big-energy opinion around the offices of Fox and NewsMax, which filters down to my favorite right wing blogs. They write their pro-coal-industry editorials, then set down a piece about how the unions and the trial lawyers control the left. What do you think?

Please, PLEASE Don't Think Different

News that strikes at the very core of my being - Karl Rove loves his iPhone. Burbles the K-man:

I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am. I no longer carry around a giant address book, if I don’t have my calendar close at hand, I can quickly check it out of my– I don’t have to carry, I used to carry several notecards, now it’s just as easy to scribble on my little notepad, I can take photographs and forward them on immediately, it’s just remarkable.

You understand, he could use a Blackberry for all that stuff, or a Palm Centro, but the weasel insists on shouldering into my turf. Come to think of it, even I don't have a damn iPhone!

Look Republicans, superior technology, like science itself, is the provence of Democrats and Libertarians. You have to use Windows-based gadgets. Its just how the divide falls. Did you know that Steve Jobs is a vegan AND a buddhist? You know what was featured prominently in the early ads for the iPhone?

A front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Rove might as well be puttin' Cindy Sheehan up in his guest room.

Tell you what, if that guy tries to link to my MySpace page, I am NOT approving.

Bring Back the Steam-Bulb!

These are scary times. Once in a while you long for something familiar and old-time, even if its ridiculous and senseless. I was thus comforted to learn today that Congresswoman Michelle Bachman has introduced a bill to Counteract a provision in last winter's energy bill. The provision mandated the phasing out of wastful incandescent bulbs over the next 25 years; Bachman is fighting for our right to choose the crummy old bulb.

It fills me with nostalgia. Not incandescent bulbs; they suck. But to see Republicans rallying around some crazy-ass technology and screaming against progress, that's a welcome return to form. These are the people who fought shoe laces because it would put button-hook factories out of business, and it's great to have 'em back.

I think, however, that bringing back torture and the Crusades may be taking a good thing too far.

Clear As Kristol

William Kristol, one of the far-left fringe communists writing for the New York Times, was forced to issue a retraction today. Apparently Kristol has claimed that Barack Obama was attending a sermon by Jeremiah Wright on a certain day, which would have proved that Obama agreed with everything the Reverend said; in fact, Obama was enroute to a campaign stop in Miami that day, which still proves that he agrees with everything the Reverend says. Whatever.

This puts me in an interesting position, because I was whining atop my high horse (it sounds like a mixed metaphor but it's not!) about the burden of columnists to provide facts just a few weeks ago. And you may recall that I concluded that since they aren't writing straight reportage, they have no such burden. I'm sticking to that opinion.

Kristol is a columnist. He was quoting what he believed is a legitimate news source, in this case Newsmax. As far as he has a source, he can write whatever crazy shit he wants. In fact, as long as he admits he hasn't got a source he could do the same thing. The burden is on you, the reader. If he's proved wrong often enough, stop reading. Or keep reading, but stop believing.

In other news, struggling fringe network FOX NEWS admitted their New York offices are infested with bed bugs (don't let 'em bite!) AND they just recently hired Karl Rove as a commentator to provide some much needed conservative-biased commentary for their coverage of our glorious successes on the battlefront and elsewhere. The bugs came in at the same time as Karl did. Just sayin'. I do not have a source, but it's painfully obvious.

Bad News For Lazy Screenwriters

Futronic, a gadget company, is marketing a fingerprint reader that can tell a dead finger from a living one. You can still cut off that executive's hand if you want, but it won't get you in the vault. Maybe you can have it made into an ashtray instead.

Too Much Internet At My Fingertips

Hi! Me Again!

Hey, it's a busy life lately. Among other things this weekend, I biked up to a scenic overlook to take pictures; I participated in a disaster simulation where helpful volunteers wrongly pronounced me dead twice; and I upgraded my Sprint phone from a tiny l'il handset to a smart phone, specifically the Palm Centro.

The Centro, essentially, is the Sprint equivilent of the iPhone. And you may remember I was lusting after one of those things so badly that I bought an iPod touch, which is an iPhone only without the phone parts. I'd have had to cancel my service contract, and them iPhones are expensive enough as is. So now I have both, and I'm in a position to kind of compare the two of 'em.

First things first - if you have a Mac, get an iPhone. Syncing up your contacts and Calendar with the Centro is a painful multistep process that required 8 reboots, purchase of additional software, and great intuitive leaps that probably saved me days of even more heartache.

The iTouch is much much better for music and video. That sumptuous widescreen is irresistable. On the other hand, the Centro has years of software development behind it. There's a whole section in Fry's devoted to Palm software. The iTouch may catch up with 'em, but they just released the SDK for it this last week and I don't even think it goes out of beta before June.

The Centro has a tiny keyboard, but at least there are raised buttons for tactile feedback. The iPhone's keyboard is virtual, and it appears when it thinks you'll need it, devouring screen real estate.

Web browsing - iPhone. No contest, except... see below. Email? Same thing. However, I'll be using the Centro more because I can only get email on the iTouch if I'm near a wi-fi hotspot, and those things are harder to come by than you'd think. And that's an intersting point. Wi-Fi is the best way to get data right now, if you can find it. If not, you're at the mercy of your wireless carrier as far as data rates go, and Sprint is faster than the notoriously slow AT&T EDGE network, the only network which iPhone officially supports. So with iPhone, gorgeous pages that take forever to load, unless you're at Starbucks. But you're always at Starbucks, right?

At home, I have Wi-Fi, so if anything crashes and I need to check my email, I am covered.

For all these reasons, I'd going to keep 'em both.

Name-Callin' Not Cool, Says Turd Blossom

Karl Rove, the man who leveraged the "wedge issue" strategy so far that it's finally going to split the Republicans permanently, is advising right-wingers to avoid calling Barack Obama "Barack Hussein Obama". From the linked article: Rove said that the use of “Barack Hussein Obama” would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party. And we wouldn't want to perpetuate THAT notion. Especially now that African Americans have finally acheived complete equality!

Then again, maybe it's important, just to distinguish the candidate from other Barack Obamas. You know, a clarity issue.

In the early nineties, George Bush Sr. ran a campaign against Bill Clinton that seemed to rest entirely on referring to him as "Slick Willy" whenever he spoke. "There goes Slick Willy," he'd say. How'd that work out for him?

I've called my wingnut blogger friends on this behavior. I probably should shut up, because it makes them look worse to keep referring to Hillary! and Hitlery and Juan McCain and the whole Obama/Osama thing. Name calling is a form of insult shorthand, and in a lot of these cases it's an empty meaningless reference. It's a way to be insulting without taking the trouble to know what you're saying, and people catch wise to that usually around 4th grade.

I invite examples of the same bad behavior to the left. This is not a challenge; I know we do it too. I want to be balanced; I just don't think I have to be the one giving the specifics.

Enough Dick Already

I just got back for the same l'il Italian place I went to Monday - Andy Dick was there again. This time he was stinkin' drunk; rude, obnoxious, and pawing every woman under 3o who passed close enough. The waitress brought him a glass of water, he demanded a margarita in a gravelly voice, and when she left Andy threw the ice at a blond who had her back to him. They tossed him out once but he wandered back in an hour later.

I'm happy to report that he showed zero interest in me, though. And I suppose it's good to see that the stories I've heard around town are true - sometimes people make stuff up about celebrities and you want to believe them even when they're not true, as long as they're entertaining. And frankly, the West San Fernando Valley is celebrity starved. This is the first famous person I've seen in this place who wasn't in porn. Though with that name...

Ironically, one of my drinkin' and singin' buddies is a staff writer for the National Enquirer, and he left early, because there's no money in Andy Behaving Badly stories any more.I wonder if Britney's still awake?

Spotted Dick

I just want to report briefly that I went to my local italian restaurant/karaoke joint on Monday and there, with an entourage of about 4 guys, was Andy Dick. They were eating Italian food and listening to people singing Neil Diamond songs.

Happily, Mr. Dick and company neither seemed high nor drunk; there was no shouting, no fights were started, and they all left peacefully. Sadly, before I got up to sing.

Ginned-Up Phony Outrage - Or Misguided REAL Outrage?

Maybe I'm too charitable. I look at some of the things that the right wing gets upset about and I assume that, well, they must be kidding. Case in point: this recent Warner Todd Huston piece accusing a liberal media operative of slandering Dick Cheney by reporting he'd said something he didn't.

In one of the most egregious examples of MSM bias I've seen lately, Tim Rutten of the L.A.Times has blatantly lied about remarks that Vice President Cheney made at CPAC in a February 8th piece headlined "Bush's message for McCain." Rutten makes the outrageous claim that Cheney said he was "glad the administration had tortured people" during the Conservative Political Action Conference...

One of the commenters suggests that Ruttan should be fired for "lying...to advance (his) personal agenda."

Okay, so the outrage appears to be that the MSM misreported the content of Dick Cheney's speech. So I read Cheney's speech - it's true, he never said anything of the kind. But I also read Ruttan's piece, which starts as follows:

If you're one of the people who couldn't quite follow all the steps in the intricate little folk dance the Bush administration performed around the torture issue this week, don't feel left out.

Odd beginning for a straight news story. But since it's an editorial on the editorial page, it's a little less odd. What Ruttan is clearly doing is telling you what he thinks Cheney meant.

You can legitimately take issue with that opinion, but Huston is frothing at the mouth over the so-called "lie" perpetrated by the far-left media, furious that they're trying to fool you into thinking that Dick Cheney supports torture.

I tried to convince him otherwise, and I got a little snarky. Quoting myself here: There wasn't a LITERAL folk dance at the White House. That is a metaphor. Though the White House has held folk dances at times, it is seldom during discussions of policy issues. Metaphors are often an indication that the writer is expressing an opinion.

Another tip-off - Tim Ruttan is referred to as a "columnist" and not a reporter. Yes, sometimes columnists do break stories (Robert Novak famously did a few years ago, for example) but generally they try to not break the story and offer opinions about it at the same time. Novak didn't say "Valerie Plame is a CIA operative AND therefore Joe Wilson must have been lying." See how that works? Because it dilutes the impact of the story.

Here's another paragraph that might indicated that it's opinion and not reportage:
"It's hard to read this week's events as anything other than an attempt to put McCain on notice that he'd better acknowledge the unitary executive theory if he wants help with the conservative base."

Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, it's really hard to advance the idea that he's trying to fool you into thinking this is not an opinion piece.

Sorry I was so snarky in the early paragraphs, but I'm assuming you're not really serious either. You can't really believe this was an attempt fool readers, can you? You're better than that, Warner.

Honestly, I don't know if I've gotten through to him on this. He's changed the subject so either he agrees with me or feels he doesn't want to repeat himself. But again I can't help but wonder - is this stuff an attempt to whip up the base because he thinks they're dumber than him, or is he the base?

A President With Experience

First of all, put that idea out of your head. None of the people running for president have any experience in the job of President. And if George W Bush has taught us anything, it's that being in charge of the whole country is different than being in charge of, say, Texas. Or a baseball team. 

We're in interesting times right now, because all of the front-runners are Senators. Senators traditionally make bad candidates because of their voting records, which tend to be a little, um, nuanced. Because of the horse trading that goes into making laws, voting for any particular bill usually means voting for a hundred odious riders that can be used against you in ads. I suppose this is true in Congress also, but because there are less Senators one's options are more limited. 

This is why Obama is the most electable candidate, as far as I'm concerned. Clinton and McCain have both made voting decisions which probably were wise and sensible at the time but which have infuriated their respective bases. Hillary Clinton voted for (and vocally supported) a war which was obviously a horrible mistake even if you didn't have security clearance. McCain, well, everything he did that I like makes him unelectable to half the Republicans. Ironically, I probably would have voted for him if he'd gone against Gore because he seemed more honest. Now I have Democrats I like well enough to stick with.

Obama has almost no record. You can view this a negative or you can view it, as I do, as a savvy move by a smart, smart man. To me, it makes him the first nominee I wanted to vote for since 1996; as opposed to the choice after you decide who to vote against. And as sunny and naive as he seems, he's smart and vicious enough to sling a little mud back at Hillary Clinton when it becomes necessary. So I think we'd be in good hands.

Anyway I hope to God that he makes it to the finals, because the idea of sharing a candidate with Ann Coulter would depress the hell outta me.

ROI

Mitt Romney has announced he's suspending his candidacy. Behold the destructive power of Super Tuesday! I'm having trouble deciding which pundity to advance on this one, so I'll throw 'em all at you and you can pick the ones you want.

First of all, the undisputed conclusion - Romney was getting a terrible Return on Investment. He outspent his rivals 20 to 1 and saw an increasing downward trend in votes. He could still buy the Vice-Presidency, which is much cheaper but considerably less powerful; but even then he's likely to get trounced in the marketplace by the rival Huckabee brand and he will probably decide it isn't worth it. He is the Mitt who can't catch votes.

So what does it all mean?

Option 1: Americans don't trust good-looking white guys any more. They've fallen by the wayside one by one. John Edwards, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney - these are the WASP prom dates of politics, the White Alpha Males, and there is a feeling that that kind of guy will get the country drunk, take advantage of it, then not call the next day. We are thus left with the old white guy with the enormous cheeks, the younger white guy with the friendly jowls, the sexless battleaxe and the hot UN-WHITE guy. If the trend continues, I'm pretty sure the battleaxe will be running the country by this time next year.

Option 2: Americans are kidding about hating the illegal immigrants. That was Mitt's trademark, stopping the flow of illegals because the illegals are dismantling the country. And a lot of people claim that's at the top of their list of concerns, yet they voted for the guys who gave it the least lip service. Perhaps on some level we secretly LIKE paying less for vegetables and construction.

Option 3: Mormons creep the rest of us out. I have Mormon friends and they are perfectly decent folk, normal and friendly. But the Mormon narrative, with its Jesus in Utah tales and the cannibalism and the magic underwear and the aversion to caffeine (what kinds of monsters ARE these people) makes you question not just their faith, but faith itself. And when I say this remember I grew up Catholic, so I know a little bit about weird narratives.

Option 4: Americans saw through Mitt Romney. Cynics beware, this one is a hard option to swallow. To buy Mitt Romney's positions, you have to believe that all the positions he so fervently held as governor of Massachussetts were mistakes which he saw the light about just a couple of years before he ran for president. Sure it could happen, just as it's possible for Bill Clinton to believe he wasn't lying to the Grand Jury because he didn't think THAT was SEX. But, you know, c'mon. So voters may have heard him claiming he was a social conservative and simply didn't buy it. Ah well, at least Rush Limbaugh bought it.

Option 5: Americans didn't buy the name. Mitt Romney is the name of a character from PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. It's not the name of a president. BTW, if this one is true it doesn't auger well for Huckabee, who is a better Theme Restaurant than a president. And come to think of it, Barack Obama doesn't exactly suggest leadership as much as Pebbles Flintstone's boyfriend.

Option 6: Ron Paul paid Romney off. I'm completely talking through my hat on this one, but Ron Paul is making so much internet money that who knows, maybe he saw a chance to narrow the field and Romney saw a chance to make a little cash back on a bad deal. And you can't tell me Paul isn't crazy enough to make the offer.

Option 7: Romney isn't actually pulling out. I think he said he's "stepping aside" and "suspending his candidacy". Language like that means at the last minute, he might step in again, maybe after Huckabee mysteriously comes down with Dioxin poisening.

That's what I got. Anybody have other analysis?

Coulter For Clinton!

Last night on Hannity and Colmes Ann Coulter said if McCain wins the nomination, she will vote for Hillary Clinton.

Yes she did.

If you consider Coulter to be a radical right failsafe device (if the crazy ideas catch on she's cutting-edge; if not she's just kidding) then this is big news. It represents a serious tantrum of the far right, and that's good for my side. If they torpedo McCain, then weirdo Mormon Romney is the candidate to beat. If McCain prevails, no matter who wins those guys will be so demoralized that they might keep out of our hair for the next four years. Cross your fingers, remaining 90 percent of the country! We're going to be making the decisions again!

Danger: Meme Approaching!

My antennae are up - I just heard Andrew Cohut, the pollster, talking about John Edwards. Now that he is out of the running, where will his voters go? Cohut says that white males are the x-factor here because they look at the remaining choices and, well, they don't have anything in common with them. (Edwards biggest block was white males.)

I was a little taken aback by this. And just now I read that Dick (el chupacabra) Morris was happily chatting up the same idea on HANNITY AND COLMES. I'm certain that they'll trot out Juan Williams to assure us that there's nothing wrong with a LITTLE bigotry. It will be their version of balance.

Me, I think enough of white male democrats to believe that they won't vote for McCain by mistake. I'm plenty cynical; but I think people's knee-jerk hatred of Bush's policies will trump the other hatred. But watch for more "those racist democrats" talk. It's good for a few easy points.

By the way; if we're so racist why have we driven all the white male candidates out of the race?

More Fun With RNC Talking Points

Hey great news! Remember John Bolton? He was the furious moustache with a man attached who was our UN Representative until everybody in the government except the president forced him out. Well, he says that "the mullahs in Tehran" are hoping for a Democrat to win the presidency.

You may recall that the prevailing talking point before the 2006 election was that if Democrats became the majority in Congress, we'd fail in Iraq and terrorists would be everywhere here at home. However, now you can't hear a Republican speak without mentioning that we're winning the war in Iraq, and there hasn't been a major attack on American Soil since a Republican ran the White House! So given that predictions are dubious but results are rock solid, it stands to reason that Bolton's suggestion will have the opposite effect - Tehran is as good as destroyed once a Democrat gets the presidency.

While I'm at it, I might as well address the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim but has converted to a Christian; a few right-wing columnists have suggested that electing him would thus infuriate the Muslim world, who would hate the President and put out orders to assasinate him. As always with the RNC talking points I'll take the conversion thing as fact; but how would it be any different than the way the Muslim world feels about the current guy?

And by the way, I'd like to see a definition of "the Muslim World" which doesn't assume ALL the Muslims are bomb-weilding terrorists. I don't have figures, but I do know the majority of them are not, just as I know the majority of Christians aren't picketing Heath Ledger's funeral.

Maybe These Two Killed Music Video

I just ran across the two most incredible music videos ever. Look at this!

The thing that amazes me about Terri's little effort here is even though it's clearly a vanity project NOBODY involved seems the slightest bit interested in it. Maybe her husband paid for it. Maybe she's one of the Shaggs, all grown up. But I defy you to come up with an explanation of this that makes any sense.

Post this to all your blogs - I want to see it go viral, like it should have in the eighties. Never too late!

On a related note, maybe this one is the lost dream sequence from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Thanks to MySpace friend and real life friend Anna Borg for calling my attention. Happy Birthday, Anna!

His Name Is Either Chuck Or Herb, I'm Guessing

Ouch! Check out the last line of a comment from the previous post:

No wonder no (one) comes to your blog. Useless drivel.

Compassionate conservatives! Well, dude's got a point: even by blog standards, I'm not setting the world on fire. I average about 37 visitors a day, and most of them are looking for pictures of the ugly dog pageant winner. And I haven't had an entry syndicated to Reuters since November! I'm a slacker.

Useless drivel? Yeah, I'll cop to that too. Unless you absolutely refuse to form your own opinions, you really don't need mine. I hope you're entertained by the way I present them, but I'd hardly call them useful. In fact GWK, I'd call your opinion more useful than mine, because it provided a springboard for this post. Then again it's useless drivel that no one reads anyway, so I suppose we're both outta luck.

Anyway GWK, since this is spillover for a comment fracas we're having over at WHERE ARE MY KEYS, I certainly apologize if you took my remarks as personally insulting. I was only trying to attack your ideas, not you, and I must have crossed a line somewhere. You're usually a classy guy. 

Beating a Horse Which, While Not Dead, Is Accruing Crippling Hospital Debt While On Life Support

I've been having that universal health care argument over at WHERE ARE MY KEYS again. Great White Knight insists that the high number of uninsured people is misleading because so many of them are unemployed; and then most of them don't WANT insurance. He has friends who are saving the money they'd pay for insurance premiums and intend to use THAT for medical bills. Presumably, that's what everyone else is doing too.

So let me just reiterate my position here about the handful of poor people in the nation who AREN'T saving up and cannot afford health insurance. I know it's only a handful; and they are all poor because they want to be. But if there is some untoward epidemic or plague, who is going to get shots? The rich, because they can afford it. Who won't? The poor. The more people who can't get health care, the more to spread disease. Check out Africa some time. They don't have universal health care, they got plenty of poor people, and they're dying of AIDS in record numbers. And that's a non-airborne contagion.

Bird flu, typhoid, something new - the poor are going to kill you unless you protect them. More importantly, they're going to kill ME, and I'm not for that at all.

Why The Surge Is Doomed

It doesn't matter how much progress we make - our enemies still have weapons of mass destruction. Thus, once we have delivered the fatal blow to Al-Quaeda, they will simply dig 'em out and destroy our troops. We should therefore pull out now.

An Embarassment of Riches

Twice this month I've gone out for drinks to find impeccable, beautifully executed jazz combos. Perfect Chet Baker style bands, just chugging away with their five minute solos, playing their standards. For the record, if you're in the San Fernando Valley, call The Back Room at Henri's in Woodland Hills, or check out JAX in Glendale.

And I'm marvelling at the technical skill of these house bands. If you put them up against a typical house rock band, it's like comparing (my new favorite metaphor) Apples to Lobsters.

What the hell happened to jazz, that people this good are playing gigs this accessable? Seriously, if it were the same in rock I'd be seeing U2 playing an accoustic set at the local coffee house.

Thompson Seedless

Yesterday Fred Thompson, a damn good actor, dropped out of the presidential race. In some ways I can make even less of this than I could of his candidacy in the first place.

They guy clearly wasn't really trying. Compared to the monomaniacal efforts of Clinton, McCain, Obama, Guiliani (yes, Thompson was putting even less steam into his race than Guiliani, who to date has only campaigned heavily in one state) Fred just wasn't bringin' the heat. In fact, until I read a Warner Todd Huston piece I didn't even know what Thompson represented.

He represented, as it turns out, grass roots conservatism.

Thus his departure worries me. The one thing I have found valuable in Republicans is conservatism. Some times it is useful to progress; but sometimes it's wiser to maintain what you have. If Thompson was that guy, and he's out, then we got no force to balance the urge for radical change.

Thompson, with his nebulous voting record and relative lack of experience, was also the Republican Barack Obama. I'm not sure what kind of omen is implied by this, because as the anti-conservatives, Democrats view lack of experience as an opportunity to think outside the box.

Of the Republican candidates, the one who least scares me right now is John McCain. Even with the pandering to the evangelicals, he still mostly seems to say what he believes and act on it. I don't trust Huckabee because he ain't panderin' - he really IS evangelical. I don't trust Romney because he panders to everyone simultaneously. And both of them are scarred by they ridicule they received in grade school due to their ridiculous names.

Giuliani? Fascist. What's worse, he acheived his greatest success applying fascist tactics, circumventing established law to clean up New York City. And it did work, undeniably; not onlike the way the trains were so much more prompt under certain other famous Italian leaders.

I'm starting to warm to Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. The experience she keeps touting won't help her govern directly, but it WILL help her defend against the increasingly shrill and crazy attacks from Republicans. Maybe we need a Democrat who is out for revenge in that position. Because, you know, Obama will get eaten alive. Yes he should guard against assasination, but the real danger to the body politic is character assasination. Whatever Democrat gets elected they're going to throw every crazy accusation in the book at 'em; maybe we need someone who is ready to jump in the mud with 'em give 'em a good kidney punch while she's down there.

I know there IS a John Edwards, but I just don't trust him. He's our Mitt Romney.

Commuting by Bicycle - An Overview

Top 5 upsides to bicycle commuting
1. You don't have to feel guilty about not exercising.
2. You don't have to feel guilty about not carpooling.
3. Exposure to the elements, which is surprisingly good for you.
4. You attract the attention of hippies -nice people!
5. No gas, no noise, no carbon footprint.

Top 5 downsides to bicycle commuting
1. Sidewalks: frequent level changes, slow pedestrians, cars tend to wait in driveways by blocking sidewalks.
2. Helmets: dorky but necessesary.
3. Most motorists ("piston jockies") would just as soon kill you as slow down.
4. Wherever you go you arrive soaked in your own rank sweat.
5. The nagging feeling that you are becoming a hippie - annoying people!

I'd Say I Was "Elitist", But Most People Don't Know What That Means

Right now, as I write this, AMERICAN IDOL is embarking on its seventh season; and like in previous years, it's taking off without me. I have never seen a full episode of AMERICAN IDOL. The only reason I've ever seen any of it is because I set my DVR to start two minutes before HOUSE so I don't miss anything.

It's hard to have a beef with a show I've never seen, but I'm managing with this one. I know I'm in the minority. When the TV ratings come out next week the top slots will be filled with American Idol. If they have three shows a week, they will be numbers one, two and three. What's wrong with you people? How did Simon and company suck you in? 

As I've written before, the show is less entertainment then it is a money-making strategy, squeezing dollars out of the audition process (on some shows it's prep, on this one it's the show) the voting, even the hosts' beverages. Then an idol is picked, and Simon's record company puts out an album which you will want to buy because you just watched a season-long informercial for it. It's sinister! But also - the music is crappy and unimaginative, the judges are insufferable, and Ryan Seacrest isn't a personality: he's a dotted line into which you are supposed to insert a personality.

But most importantly, AMERICAN IDOL is a reality show. It's a little late to nip this trend in the bud, but for Pete's sake, when will people stop watching that crap? Scripted television is less inauthentic than reality shows! Professional wrestling is more convincing than THE GREAT RACE or THE APPRENTICE. Of all the reality shows, AMERICAN IDOL is the reality-est. That is to say, the most staged. How much weight do you think your fifty-cent vote carries, eh?  I like to think that last year's contestant, Sanjaya, the kid with the bad hair and inconsistent performance, was the public's unconscious attempt to see how far Simon would listen to the public before he simply pulled the plug. 

So you guys watch, I'll blog. When I run out of blog material, I'll make a sandwich and maybe play a little solitaire, or download TORCHWOOD from the BBC and watch that. It's only five months... I can hack that.

"Wave" Bye Bye

You know how something can be so inoffensive, so bland, so nondescript that it winds up offending, grating at you and standing out like a sore thumb? The guy in the cubicle next to me has a radio just barely at audible level which plays "The Wave" all day.

I'm not sure you know what "The Wave" is. It's a "smooth jazz" format station. In Las Vegas, where I just was, they call it "The Oasis." I suppose in Alaska they call it "The Hot Spring." They playlist tends heavily toward R&B with something that you might define as jazz every couple of hours. For example, that remake of TAKE FIVE that someone cleverly arranged in 4/4.

Remember PICK UP THE PIECES by the Average White Band? That's odd. The Wave does! Not only do they play it on a daily basis, they also play a plethora of inexplicable covers by series of faceless saxophone artists. I'd have never imagined that there was a PUTP subculture out there. This daily basis thing is important - they play EVERYTHING on a daily basis. I know I'll hear two Anita Baker songs in the course of a work day, and about nine versions of Pick Up the Pieces, and a little Steely Dan, and some Hiroshima, and yes, Kenny G. It's like a country music station playlist, only more limited. It's not like there isn't enough material to fill out the genre - oh how I wish that were the case! - it's that the programmers have decided that familiarity breeds comfort. They've smoothed jazz to the point that you can skate across it.

They don't play any Miles Davis or Chet Baker or Ornette Coleman, perhaps out of fear of attracting the late greats' attention and causing unnecessary grave-spinning. My feeling is, for god's sake, let the spinning begin! I'm weary of David Sanborn. I'm no longer enamored of Enya. Maybe my problem with the station is that when I listen, I perpetually feel like I'm about to get a massage that never comes.

When I get home tonight, I'm going to pack the iPod with speed metal.

Photo Proof of Liberal News Bias!

{irony}Warner Todd Huston is right! Look at this news photo of Barack Obama!  I think there is a very clear message being sent by those rays of light shining down upon him from a higher source. Photo courtesy of The Washington Times. {/irony}

The Washington Times, of course, is the ultra-right-wing tabloid run by Sun Myung Moon.  Today's edition seems especially kind to liberals. Sample headlines: SEX ED FOUND TO PROLONG TEEN VIRGINITY; LIBERAL AND PRO-US? WHO KNEW? (a review of "Charlie Wilson's War", a movie starring Tom Hanks; PROGRAM LENDS HAND TO POOR INDIAN TRIBES. There is a CLINTON NEIGHBOR ARRESTED IN NY KILLING, but that's off the wires. 

What's up with the paper today? Spirit of Christmas got a hold of 'em? Or is the regular editor off for the week? If so, do I buy a condolence card for the guest editor now or wait until he meets with a freak accident around New Years?

Thanks For Asking

And since you ask, I've simply been too busy hanging around with people to write. I've found this is a much more effective way of tamping down the Seasonal Affective Disorder than simply brooding, which is my usual strategy. Go figs!

Went to my office Christmas party last night, which was held at a swanky bowling alley in Hollywood. I was gunning to win a flatscreen HDTV in the raffle. Didn't quite make it, though I did win a wind-up generator portable TV with a lantern on it. And a memory foam pillow. And a DVD player. And a wind-up flashlight and radio. And LED stick-on laps for under-lit places. And a SEX IN THE CITY trivia game, which I gave to the waiter as a tip. 

The reason for all the prizes was everyone was given 5 tickets at the beginning of the evening, then more tickets were awarded to our bowling teams using an arcane selection of rules - how many strikes, how many combinations (3 / 7 split? You win!) and so on. I didn't understand it, but I got another 50 tickets. 

Another guy won two telescopes. Give him a little duct tape, and he's got the best damn binoculars ever.

What I found tremendously disappointing about the evening was this: Nobody, I mean nobody got embarrassingly drunk. The golden age of the office party is clearly past. I remember just a little over ten years ago going to one where a marriage broke up, somebody fell off a bar stool, and a women I barely knew came at me out of nowhere and french-kissed me.  I miss being around that kind of madness. A couple of years ago I was a the Christmas party of a mortgage company and it came pretty close; but since we had all just been laid off it was mighty bitter drinking. Embarrassing but no fun.

You are going to ask me about my plans for Christmas. I know you are. Well, I'm going to Vegas on Friday and I'm staying in town until Christmas day. There are few places more Christmas-immune than Vegas, baby. The Noel is pretty weak sauce in that town. You'd barely know there WAS a holiday except it's half deserted and the dancers in the Rio sky parade are wearing Santa hats.  If I don't write before then, just re-read this post until I get back.

The Right is Never Wrong (Especially When They Are Wrong)

I have long marveled at the ability of Republicans to "stay the course." They out stake a piece of ideological territory and never, ever give it up. In a lot of ways it's their strength because it makes them appear solid and reliable. However, it also frequently backfires on them because in real life people change their positions in the face of new data.

You might think I'm talking about the latest N.I.E. concerning Iran's nuclear program, but the President is only now starting to dig in his heels on that one and insist that they have one anyway. That issue just isn't ripe for pickin' yet. Instead, I'm going to give the example of a l'il comment war over at WAMK.

The esteemed Madeline's Dad wrote a post called WORDS MATTER. If I'm not mistaken, the point was that Democrats are too quick to label some of the excesses of our country in this time of war as, well, as he put it:

Senators and Congressmen using the words "torture" and "atrocities" to describe events that are unseemly, but hardly worthy of their definitions.

Fair enough, a matter of opinion. Or rather it would be, if it wasn't for that "Senators and Congresmen" passage. Something about it bothered me, and I asked for an example of a Senator or Congressman actually using the word "atrocity" to describe events. MD was kind enough to provide links to an editorial by ABC News, another one by the Washington Post, then CNN and then the Independent in the UK. No Senators, no Congressmen. He also posted a YouTube clib of Sen. Durbin in which he used neither word, but condemned our practices using less inflammatory language.

In the next 15 responses, I asked repeatedly for some proof that one of our elected officials had used "atrocity." Responses included:

I guess the search engines at Puffington Host don't cover traitorous statements made by US Congressmen.

Ted Kennedy never clamied that Saddam's torture chambers had "reopened under US management".

jOn caRrEy never acused US troops of "terrorizing innocent Iraqi families" during the night. Or that that's something the Iraqi military should be doing themselves instead.

Barack Obama never said that the US is carpet bombing Iraqi cities.

John Murtha would certainly not say that US Marines had murdered innocent Iraqi's "in cold blood".

(Preceeding courtesy of Ameridann, who missed his chance to call Barack Obama "Osama". You're slipping, Ameridann!) These are all legitimate quotes (probably) and also, they are all attempts to avoid saying "no, I can't prove that a Senator or Congressman used the word 'atrocity.'" Mad's Dad insists that he has heard it said, even though he can't find proof.

What fascinates me is, even if they think they have a legitimate larger point, they refuse to give up ground on the parts that don't matter. It makes Republicans less like statesmen and more like bulldogs, I think. I love bulldogs, but I don't consider them electible. They're ***king dogs.

Then again, when Mitt Romney revises his opinions based on the facts, I find him untrustworthy. Double-edged sword, the nuance thing.

Another Front In The War On Christmas

I am outraged! It's Saturday afternoon, and there isn't a lot on TV for adults - it is thus that I landed on KSCI Channel 18, which is a local foreign language station. Today they are running a Hindi-themed show in English, SHOWBIZ INDIA. It was pretty enjoyable until I came across this commercial.

It was for some long distance service, and get this - they were saying you should sign up in time for "this festive season."

This Festive Season!

Obviously the War On Christmas has filtered down to the smallest stations! There is no time to lose. We must now do... well, whatever we do to preserve our treasured Christmas traditions. Call your local Hindi station now and demand that they directly refer to Christmas when they talk about this time of the year. 

While your at it, don't let your Jewish friends off the hook. 

Going to Welles Once Too Often

Perhaps I'm not the nurturing type, but I AM nursing a head cold. It's making my throat sore and sapping my boundless energy. This leaves almost nothing for my righteous political rage at the end of the day, which is why yesterday instead of attempting to laugh through the Republican debate I popped a DVD of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI into my iMac and grooved on the 60-year-old cinematic goodness.

Though actually, it wasn't all that good. 

There's a couple of background stories concerning the movie which probably explain away the bad chemistry of this movie. For one thing, it was kind of made on a whim. Welles was mounting a stage production and needed a quick $50k for sets and costumes, so he called the head of Columbia and offered to make a movie based on a Maxwell Anderson novel which some say he hadn't even read. They gave him the money provided he cast Rita Hayworth, Columbia's number one star and Welles' then wife. By the time they went into production, the marriage was almost on the rocks and they divorced before it was even released.

And of course, there was the usual studio butchery as Welles lit off to his next project, leaving the post production to a team of non-geniuses.

Orson Welles fans are a peculiar lot, more so than most fans. They love CITIZEN KANE, his one flawless film, but they others? They don't love them. They love the films they WISH they had been. To be an Orson Welles fan is to be forever tantalized by the noble failures he left behind. 

A couple of months back I watched MR. ARKADIN, a movie which now boasts 7 different versions and no definitive director's cut. Every version is a bad movie, but somehow you can believe that had Welles remained in the editing room, it would have been a classic. Welles would have found the exact right pacing. Welles would have flawlessly dubbed in all the bad dialogue in a host of sparkling radio voices. Welles would have commissioned a score that does the story justice.

I can't help but suspect that Welles, who was a great filmmaker but a brilliant self-promoter, realized that he was better off leaving his work to people who could take the blame for his cinematic misdeeds. He was the tallest man on the landscape and yet was always able to make someone else the lightning rod. And then, as his fans lamented how others had ruined a masterpiece, we went off to sell wine and frozen peas and pick up an occasional gig as the voice of God. 

The last film Welles shot, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, remains unreleased to this day as various rights holders bicker over how to cut it. I recall hearing an anecdote on the Tonight Show,  years after Welle's death, by a famous actor who did a cameo in it. I can't recall who it was.

"Welles said 'Action! Now look down.' I looked down at the floor. Later I asked Orson what I was supposed to be looking at and he said, 'Dwarves. Dwarves are running between your legs. I'm going to add them in post'"

It's been over 30 years and there still ain't no dwarves. And you know what? I don't think there ever will be.

At Last, Democrats Get A Shot At The Big Pandering Money

I tip my figurative hat to WAMK for again pointing me in the direction of a fresh outrage. 

Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat, has introduced the inevitable bill designed to "help nearly 638,000 families – a quarter of the 2.2 million people at risk of foreclosure – keep their homes by allowing them to modify the terms of their loan in bankruptcy proceedings." It sounds like a blow struck for the little guy against the big mortgage companies, but I'm more cynical than I used to be. A press release can say anything. 

First of all, no matter who it benefits, this amounts to a kind of bailout. Bad financial decisions need to have predictable consequences, because that prevents bad financial decisions in the future. If an offer seems too good to be true it damn well better play out that way. 

And free-market capitalism being what it is, big mortgage companies are already motivated to restructure debts, because the last thing they need is to foreclose on hundreds of thousands of houses at once. The paperwork overhead of turning those things over, added to a glut of fire-sale-priced residences, has got to be a worse headache than simply renegotiating with the current owners. 

What worries me about this bill is that I suspect that Durbin isn't pushing it to help the little guy; he's giving the mortgage companies a face-saving way out. I mean come on, in a match between huge money and the common man, who do you think will get to a politician first? On the other hand, it pleases me to see a Democrat behind this. Sleazy? Yes. But two or three years ago it would have been a Republican with an identical bill, but they would have sold it as a means of sustaining jobs and keeping the economy afloat. The fact that the banks let a Democrat carry their water means it's going to be a mighty rough election year for Republicans.

Globalonybaloney

I'm increasingly amazed by the ability of people to deny that mankind can effect the environment, especially when politics is involved. Poor science is made to jump through all kinds of hoops by the right. If Stephen Hawking were explicitly liberal, Rush Limbaugh would be mocking him for suggesting there is such a thing as "time."

Therefore we have to suffer through a lot of crazy debate about Global Warming, because it's a pet cause of Al Gore. Instead of listening to the majority of legitimate scientists, conservatives are forced to believe a handful of oil-company researchers. I have been batting this issue around lately with Warner Todd Huston (who believes that the new Eagles album aids the terrorists, even though it's perfectly acceptable to hate it because the album is just lame) and he's been riding the bullet train to Crazytown trying to convince me that there is no such thing as Global Warming. Or there is, but we aren't causing it and there is nothing we can do to stop it, and we shouldn't even try because there isn't any.

Warner says:

This isn't about "saving the Earth." It's about so-called scientists getting money for more research to assure globaloney exists.

Yes, that's right - the majority of the world's scientists have gotten together in secret, maybe at one of those conferences in Helsinki, and agreed to gin up the results of their research to squeeze a little grant money out of the rest of us! All this time I thought it was energy companies trying to protect their profits; but it turns out they're the altruistic ones! Those scientists are the greedy, rapacious bastards!

Warner says:

...People imagine that plastic won't break down and disintegrate. But this isn't true at all. It's just that plastic is such a new substance that microbes haven't figured out how to break it down. Eventually, they will.

Same thing happened to trees millions of years ago. Now trees break down and disappear because microbes, etc. break down the wood. But millions of years ago, they hadn't quite figured that out yet. That is why we can find bark and nearly whole fallen tree trunks deep under the earth in coal mines (for instance).

These two paragraphs have created a whole new energy source, because they make my head spin so much I have hooked a belt to it to power my reading lamp. First of all, microbes will eventually figure out how to break down plastic? How is that possible, knowing that there is no such thing as evolution?

Second, as proof that microbes learned to break down wood, Warner offers the example of million year old undecomposed wood. These microbes had millions of years - wouldn't a few of them have gone back to the older stuff and learned to eat that? If anything, this example proves that when Charlton Heston digs his fist through the sand screaming "you maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you all to hell," he will get his wrist tangled in one of those six-pack holder things, 'cause they're going to be around forever.

Finally, Warner says:

But a local "mess" does not automatically translate to a mess that encompasses the whole world!!!

I suppose the multiple exclamation points means I'm winning. But you know what? These guys always cite examples from nature ("The earth warmed during the renaissance! We didn't cause that!") so I'll refute that argument with a natural example. My "local mess" - the eruption of Krakatoa. From Wikipedia :

In the year following the eruption, average global temperatures fell by as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius. Weather patterns continued to be chaotic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The eruption injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) gas high into the stratosphere which was subsequently transported by high-level winds all over the planet. This led to a global increase in sulfurous acid (H₂SO₃) concentration in high-level cirrus clouds. The resulting increase in cloud reflectivity (or albedo) would reflect more incoming light from the sun than usual, and cool the entire planet until the suspended sulfur fell to the ground as acid precipitation.

I'd have quoted Conservapedia instead, but they don't have an entry for Krakatoa. Those guys only have so much server space and bandwidth, and explaining how dinosaurs survived on Noah's Ark takes up most of it. But you could call the eruption a local event, and it effected the entire world. It is said that Munck's THE SCREAM depicted the post-Krakatoa sky. In Norway. Just sayin'.

And yes, eventually the sky healed and things got back to normal. But it was just one source of pollutants, and it stopped after a month and a half. We have been pouring junk into the air since the industrial revolution from points all over the globe. How brainwashed by Bill O'Reilly do you have to be before you think that might create a problem?

Well, never mind. If Al Gore believes it, it MUST be wrong. Next thing, you'll be telling me that there is a company called APPLE that makes computers and phones!

However, I Am Not Gay

Sometimes you do stuff without realizing it. Only after a while do the patterns emerge. Let me explain.

When I moved out for my separation in August, I made a point of getting a set of dishes. A single matched set, and I thought the set might as well look good, so I went for a deep red theme.

So last week I was attempting to use my microwave/toaster combo (one unit! Kenmore! Pretty good idea for tight spaces) for a kitchen timer and I accidentally set it to cook instead of time. It cooked itself for 8 minutes, which was sufficient to destroy the electronics. The toaster still worked, but I thought I'd replace both. Instead of the cheerless white color I'd gone with originally, I opted for the striking red as depicted below. Note the enclosed cookbook under the left foot - my counter is a little skewed.












Well, this afternoon I stopped by Best Buy. I have this $50 dollar gift certificate, an award for good administrative assistance at my job, and I've been needing a new vacuum cleaner. Guess what I got?


















I swear I wasn't planning on matching anything; I just liked the price and feature set. My point is, when will this stop? Is a cherry red comforter next? A sub-rosa leather couch? Will I move to the red-light district when my lease runs out?

Quin Hillyer Is A Stand-up Guy

My last post used a column by Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator as a jumping off point, and he was kind enough to respond. It's a long letter and I won't quote it completely but I will say that I found all of it to be intelligent and heartfelt. No, I don't agree with all of it, but I respect his point of view. Which is represented as follows:

I do happen to believe that the Left is more often guilty of this sort of behavior than the right is, but I have been way out front in blasting conservative scofflaws too, criticizing Tom DeLay in print as far back as 1998, and writing columns for places such as the New Republic -- in early 2005, WAY before everything blew up in their faces in 2006 -- warning that GOP congressional ethical lapses were a serious problem that could help cost the GOP its congressional majority. I happen to believe that Bill Clinton, however, is the most prominent example of the psychology described in the study, because time and again when I worked as a leadership press aide in Congress in 1995 and 1996 I was privy to people coming back from meetings with Clinton having been assured he would do one thing, only to turn on the TV and see him saying the exact opposite while fiercely attacking them for positions he had just told them he could work with. Neat trick.

Before getting to your main point, I really, really hope you understood, from both the headline and my closing paragraph, that the whole column was slightly tongue in cheek. I was using the study as a launch for me to criticize specific liberals for lies and hypocrisy, but I acknowledged in the end that I was stretching the study beyond its actual findings in order to make my points. 

In short, as I noted in the headlines (which I personally wrote, even though that is not always the case) that my column was a bit of a "psych job" intended to goad  my liberal friends (and my liberal adversaries), and that I was "having fun" with the study. In short, the column was intended to use mild humor and mild self-deprecation (noting that I myself wasn't being fully honest with the psychological study) to make serious points about how people in politics (of course I focused mostly on the left!) manage to talk themselves into doing incredibly unethical things while still telling themselves they are morally superior.

Now, as for your point about torture: Please know that I wasn't trying to divert attention from or "derail" ANYTHING, and that I wasn't even thinking about the torture debate when I wrote my column. Granted, I clearly come down more on the side of "enhanced interrogation  techniques" than you do (http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10709). But I also, at first glance (not an in-depth analysis), think that I agree with what Bill Clinton said about a narrow statute allowing a presidential finding, etc. I do NOT think we should broadly lower our standards to those of the inhuman monsters for whom torture is almost an end in itself, and I think it is good that we so clearly set so many hurdles in the way of any of our own folks who might fall into the self-justifying trap of deciding for themselves, without checks and balances, that their own ends are noble enough to make torture okay.

My only response, aside from thanks for the respectful reply, is that as my pal Skot suggests the phrase "just kidding" literally means "I'm not kidding." However, Quin, you're perfectly justified in not originally addressing torture in your column and you are graceful to not sidestep my attempt to drag you into my tangent.  Long may you wave.

Ignoring the Elephant

(H/T to WAMK) Quin Hillyer of The American Spectator has done something fascinating with a short item in the Washington Post about a psychological study. It's a a pretty nifty trick, and I'll have to go into some detail to explain what he's up to, so bear with me.

First of all, the short item. It's the third item in a column called "Science Notebook" in which researchers for the Journal of Applied Psychology interviewed people about, basically, their sense of right and wrong. Salient idea follows: "...their research highlights the idea that people with exceptionally strong convictions about their moral goodness are likely to follow extreme courses of action because they can convince themselves that whatever they do is good."

Hillyer uses this as a jumping off point to attack the Clintons. Then William Jefferson and then Elliot Spitzer. Then Patrick Leahy. He then denies that he's claiming only Democrats do it, then goes back to attacking more Democrats. The point of course, is that Democrats delude themselves into doing immoral things.

If I hadn't given it more thought, I'd have simply believed that he was looking for a hook to hang the usual Clinton character assassination on - new wrapping paper for an increasingly shopworn box. But something nagged at me. This study resonates much more strongly elsewhere, and I think Hillyer saw this story as a train that he had to derail before it reached it's logical destination.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques."

With the nomination hearings for Michael Mukasey centering on his claiming to not know if waterboarding is "torture," or if any of the torturing we do nowadays is "torture," the last thing the meme-watchers need a reminder that we've somehow talked ourselves into endorsing behavior that was once only the province of third-world communists, terrorists and B-movie villains. Because we are absolutely sure what we do is right, we're okay with torturing our captives. A lot of us are even okay with torturing innocent captives. Price you have to pay, right?

To me the question is: does Quin Hillyer KNOW he's diverting the debate from its main point or is he doing it unconsciously? Or does he even think it applies? I wrote Quin Hillyer and if he responds, I'll report.

The Play's the Thing You Can't See

Just a quick note as I count down the minutes until work is over - tonight marks the beginning of the last two weeks of THE GAME OF LIFE, the play I am appearing in at the Stage Door Theatre in Agoura. Two more Saturday nights, two more Thursdays, two more Fridays, and one more Sunday.

You say you want to come on Saturday? Good luck pal! It's sold out! I hear the Sunday matinee is similarly spoken for. Other nights, well, call first.

Our good fortune is the result of positive reviews in the Ventura County STAR, and a small amount of seats at the Stage Door. Place only holds 49 people! Still, getting that many people to pay $15 to see something that hasn't already done 500 performances with Nathan Lane on Broadway is quite an achievement. I bow my head to Kimberly Demarry, the wry author of our good fortune, and the rest of the cast who wring big laughs out of the material. Personally I'm good for about 2 or three big laughs a night, which is a little low for me.

The play has taken up a good portion of my free time for the past few months, which I found pretty useful (it is either that or full-on brooding) but I'll be glad when it's over and I can go back to regular apartment cleanings.

Oh and possibly I'll join a band, but I'll blog about THAT if anything develops.