Not funny any more

I watched and listened to the President’s news conference last night with anger, resignation, and something like shame. After all that’s happened, even acknowledging that we know now that Saddam had no stockpile of WMDs, he still says he would have invaded Iraq. Barely an acknowledgement that the small decentralized cells of radical stateless terrorists who blew our lives apart on September 11th pose more of a direct threat to the US than Iraq and the rest of the “axis of evil” ever did. He says the August 6 PDB memo didn’t constitute a clear warning. What about “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US” is unclear? It might at least be expected to give one pause before cutting an emergency post-9/11 call for additional anti-terrorism funds from the FBI by two-thirds.

And what was up with the response to the question, “After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say? And what lessons have you learned from it?” Bush’s answer, “I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it… I can’t come up with something under the pressure of the press conference,” is the clearest self-articulation of Bush’s lack of self-reflective wisdom, courage and inability to handle anything unscripted that I’ve heard yet. As Queso wrote, “!?! Wow.”

And compare his non-response to the question, “you never admit a mistake. Is this a fair criticism? And do you believe you made any errors in judgment” to Richard Clarke’s unequivocal statement: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you….And for that failure, I would ask — once all the facts are out — for your understanding and your forgiveness.”

The folks at Pandagon echo my shame: “I hate having so little pride in my own President.” Dave Winer thinks Bush ought to resign and take the presidency of Iraq, since his focus has been there and not cleaning up troubles and threats at home. I don’t know that one has to go beyond the first part of that sentence. Bush ought to be a man, admit that he and his cabal of true believer advisors were wrong, wrong, wrong, and resign. He is unfit to be our president.

Update: Lots of good discussion around this. Thanks to one commenter for pointing out I had misquoted the title of the PDB; I’ve corrected it in line.

Brilliant use of Technorati for cross-blog conversations

BoingBoing added Technorati support to their template, enabling site visitors to click a link and see all the other weblogs that are commenting on that particular item. Dave Sifry at Technorati explains how anyone with a Movable Type weblog can do the same.

It’s pretty simple to do. The URL at which the Technorati Cosmos for a particular post lives is a static construction with the permalink of the item at the end, like http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&sub=mtcosmos&url=permalink. The problem for Manila is that the only way I can get the permalink of the post is through the permalink macro, which takes no arguments and always spits out a linked graphic.

UserLand, if you’re listening, I’d like a macro that would just return the permalink URL so I could pass it into other things like the Technorati macro.

Needing an open window

joseph cornell toward the blue peninsula

At various times in the past I’ve written about my fascination with the work of Joseph Cornell and my experiences with his works. Last night I finished the big collection of his work, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay…Eterniday, and as always came away both inspired and humbled by the work.

And saddened. William Gibson wrote in Count Zero that the Cornell-manque boxes encountered by the protagonist evoked “impossible distances, loss and yearning,” and Gibson wrote that he sensed autism behind Cornell’s obsessive junk-shop searchings.

I think the truth is closer than that. Cornell’s series of parrots caged in decaying European hotels rings sad when you know he spent his entire adult life in his house in Queens, taking care of his mother and brother. Imprisoned? By choice, if so. But still, looking at the empty bird cage and cut wire of Toward the Blue Peninsula, with its open window in the back of the box, one wishes that Cornell, too, had let himself fly the coop.

Seven hundred year old buns

How and where did hot cross buns come to symbolize Easter? And for whom? I know that, growing up, hot cross buns weren’t something we regularly had, but my mother in law makes them every year and they were an important part of Lisa’s traditions.

This site claims, variously, that they date back to pagan times or only 150 years or so. Neither claim cites supporting evidence. A Gannett news service article cites Sister Schubert’s cookbook Secret Bread Recipes in claiming a medieval origin for the buns (incidentally, “Sister” Schubert is not a nun). The Wikipedia agrees and points to another article which gives the most detailed origin for the buns, fixing a year (1361), a place (St. Albans), and a name (Father Thomas Rocliffe, also spelled Rockliffe) to the story—meaning that the origin is almost certainly fabricated. Other sources agree with the pagan origin claim; this one cites Charles Kightly’s The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain. Yet the earliest reference the OED finds for “cross-buns” is a 1733 mention in Poor Robin’s Almanac.

Oh well. At least they’re healthy.

Four services later

I just got done with Easter dinner with Lisa and her parents, after spending seven hours at church (like AKMA, I was up at 5 for a sunrise service). Four services’ worth of singing, including four performances of the Hallelujah Chorus, took a lot out of me, but fortunately the veal roll with arugula sauce and potato and tomato casserole put a lot back into me.

Also have to give a big thumbs up to the Planeta Winery, whose Santa Cecilia has to be one of the most incredible reds I’ve tasted recently. Big full bodied fruit up front just bursting with flavor, yielding to a softer but still intense almost-vanilla aftertaste.

Now to nap, hopefully.

(Thanks, Tony, for the link, and belated best wishes to you and Mox on the “nuptials,” however April Foolish. If two bloggers with such diverse political views can find connubial bliss (or even nubile bliss), there’s hope for us all.)

Before and after

before and after science

Here is that before and after shot I promised. You get a sense of how much airspace has been added in front of the house.

To do today: dig out some pine needles and ascertain the extent of the damage to the soil where the tree branches overhung their beds; plant some hardy native groundcover; and, oh yeah, get some shopping done for Easter dinner.

Like getting a whole new house

Well, six hours later, the tree guys have wrapped up and headed on out. They did a fantastic job. The trees actually seem to belong now. They actually ended up taking out a small spruce that was dead most of the way up and leaning back toward the house. Fortunately its small size (less than 4 inches in diameter) meant we didn’t need a permit to remove it. They were also able to give the small cherry tree a lot more room and light, so it should start growing stronger now.

And wow, it looks like a whole new house now. From the street you can easily see the whole house—which, since it stretches sideways across the lot, looks enormous. You can also see the lack of work we’ve done on the front landscaping, so I predict I’ll be giving that a fair amount of attention over the next few weekends. In fact, I think I’ll head outside now and do some cleanup, now that I can see what I’m doing.

Lisa and her mom are at Heronswood right now for the spring woodland garden showing, but when they get back with the camera I’ll post before and after shots.

Tree surgery for fun and profit

I’m working at home (WAH, in the inevitable Microsoft acronym) this morning so that I can answer questions from Davey Tree as they trim up the overgrown pines in our front yard. They’ve already done the heavy lifting of the removal of branches up to about eight feet from the sidewalk and removing the small spruce that was dead most of the way up and growing back toward the house. Now they’re doing the finesse work: pruning the deodora cedar so that it doesn’t overshadow the cherry tree, getting some of the deadwood off the cherry, handling any remaining thinning on the pines.

The dogs have been mostly good, though there’s been a bit more barking than is ideal. But when a chainsaw and a tree chipper (and two strange men) are in the driveway and the front yard, who can blame them for a little bark every now and again?

Thurston Moore on Nirvana

Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) in the New York Times: “When the Edge Moved to the Middle.” A practitioner’s view of the importance of Nirvana in shaping the music industry of the 90s, and Kurt Cobain’s refusal to be swept up in that massive change.

I didn’t write a “ten years after” post about Kurt’s suicide for precisely that reason. Kurt’s suicide, even then, was no surprise to anyone who could see the pain that Kurt’s fame caused him. I had no reason to want to remember the pain I felt that Saturday morning in April when I woke up at a college friend’s parents’ house in northern Virginia and saw the headlines. (Besides, Tony Pierce has, as always, said a lot of things that I wanted to say and some I didn’t think to say, far more eloquently than I would have.)

But Thurston’s point is well worth thinking about. I don’t know how much of the coarsening and cheapening of alternative rock you can pin on Nirvana’s influence—however misunderstood and misheard—but surely it is no coincidence that the rush to find angry young men with guitars started at this time. I’ve been looking over the past few days for music from some late-80s alternative artists. It’s stuff that’s a little hard to find on the online sources because the bands are gone, largely unlistened.

But how could the gentler REM-influenced sounds of the Connells, the Brandos, or Dreams So Real, or the more experimental and nuanced sounds of Art of Noise, PiL, Love and Rockets, or even the Pixies survive against the one two punch of the incredible bass and guitar work and angry lyrics of “Come As You Are”? But the kids only listened to the surface. I’m pretty sure that only a few heard the lyrics of “In Bloom”—He’s the one/he likes all our pretty songs/and he likes to sing along/and he loves to shoot his gun/but he don’t know what it means—and recognized themselves in Kurt’s acid portrait of his fair-weather fans. And what the music industry did was worse yet.

When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group, an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste for bullyboy music – always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal. Most people who adapt punk as a lifestyle represent these ideals, but with one of the finest rock voices ever heard, Kurt got to represent them to an attentive world. Whatever contact he made was really his most valued success.

Darwin is sometimes ugly, and it isn’t Kurt’s fault that his band was leading that sea change. Just once, though, it would be nice if the sea change allowed all the rich and strange things to thrive, rather than the plain and ugly ones.

Channel 9

Channel 9 is on MSDN and not from Outer Space, to begin with. See comments from Dave Winer, Slashdot, and Channel 9 co-conspirator Robert Scoble.

As a Microsoft.com product manager, I ought to be saying something about how Channel 9 doesn’t look like the corporate site. But I think that’s a strength. It’s pretty clear that these are real people inside the company communicating with the customer, not “the voice of the company.” Which is, I think, rather the point of blogging in general.

Mixed blessings from Wilco

Tom Harpel at Tandoku points to the new Wilco album, A Ghost is Born, available via QuickTime 6 stream at WilcoWorld. Quoth Tom: “Jim O’Rourke is a genius, Jeff Tweedy, a god.”

Alas, a god in rehab. Rolling Stone says that he checked into a clinic to kick his addiction to prescription painkillers, which he was taking to treat migraines. The album release will be delayed two weeks but the group is still planning to tour. Good luck, Jeff.

And in final Tweedy note, I found a free promotional EP at a local store the other day in honor of the expanded reissues of all the Uncle Tupelo back catalog. And when I say “EP,” I mean 45. That’s right, vinyl. Now I just have to see if I can find that funny little ring adapter to fit the really big hole in the middle of the record…

In-laws in-town

Lisa’s folks arrived last night from New Jersey, somewhat stiff but otherwise no worse the wear for their six hour flight. The dogs had not forgotten them from Christmas and were in such a transport of ecstasy to see them again that it was very hard to get them to go to bed.

It’s quiet this morning, but I know that won’t last. I don’t know what Lisa has planned for her folks today, but it probably has something to do with gardening…

In other family news, my father appears to be making a good recovery, and my aunt has successfully made it through her second knee replacement surgery. I think I still have a sister in seminary, but as she hasn’t blogged in over a month it’s hard to tell. sideways smiley

Mac Office 2004 on the way

Looks like Mac Office 2004 has been released to manufacturing. Congratulations to Rick Schaut, fellow Sloanie Angela Liao, and the other folks in the MacBU for completing this release.

Rick notes that there have been some advances in how Mac Word 2004 handles Unicode text, support for table styles, line layout across platforms, and (yes) long file names. Still no XML support, though.

For more info on Mac Office 2004, see MacWorld, our own Mac information site, and MacNN.

Announcing Sloanblogs

I have put together an aggregated list of known bloggers who are either students at or graduates of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The listing, modeled after Hooblogs (my list of UVA bloggers), is currently rather short; my hope is that having a home will encourage more Sloan folks to send me their blog address (or even start blogging!).

New feature for Sloanblogs, to be added to Hooblogs shortly: an aggregated view of all Sloanblogs activity courtesy of Kinja. You can get updates via RSS as new Sloan bloggers are added to the list, and you can add a Sloanblogs blogroll to your site courtesy of Blogrolling.com (see the Sloanblogs page for details).

A cold day where? Windows Installer Toolset on SourceForge

Slashdot has just posted a pointer to the Shared Source release of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset, now available on SourceForge. The code was released under IBM’s Common Public License (CPL). This is the first Microsoft source to be released under an OSS approved open source license.

Yep. Catch your breath. Microsoft code on SourceForge. The sound of a locked trunk opening?

Details on Rob Mensching’s blog, including both technical details of what WiX does and a description of its path to open source.