NYT: Bush, Citing Fires, Will Seek to Ease Laws on Logging. Um, excuse me? How did this get pitched—no, how did anyone say this with a straight face? “OK, we appear to have a fire fighting problem. Might as well cut all the trees down.”
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X-Men 2 Trailer is Up
Just watched the X-Men 2 trailer. I think it looks already like the sequel will do a much better job of capturing the gripping paranoia that underlaid so much of the brilliant storytelling in the best days of the comic (“Days of Future Past,” for instance).
Now, the question is: Will the creators cop out and not make the connection between raiding Xavier’s School for a mutant round-up and the holding of Arab Americans without charges under the Patriot Act?
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Long night’s journey into day
Couldn’t sleep last night for a lot of reasons. Part is the ongoing transition from school and short semester horizons to work and the long series of relational interactions. (Can’t say more, really, right now.) Part was an ill-conceived decision to go to a happy hour with some fellow returning interns—not that that was so wrong, but it resulted in my eating a dinner consisting of fried calimari and one oyster Rockefeller, washed down with a couple beers. Not the best thing to try to go to sleep after.
So I’m trying to regain some perspective this morning, and found this line from Huey in today’s Boondocks helpful: “Relaxing thoughts? … Can I think about Al Gore and Joe Lieberman beating each other silly in a pay-per-view steel cage death match to determine who’s the biggest loser of all time?” Not that far away from what I was trying to think about to relax me.
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The Scandal Map
Lance Knobel: Scandal map. Draws the lines between Enron, Worldcom, Merrill Lynch, Martha Stewart, the California Energy Crisis, and emerging financial scandals. Dense and engrossing. Needs dice and cute player tokens (“no, I want to play as the decoupage! OK, then I’ll be the big oil barrel!”).
Georgia landslide
Greg points to the primary results in Georgia. Of particular note: “Cynthia McKinney, a 10-year incumbent, lost her primary by 16 points.” My question to Greg: Now that she’s out of the picture, what are you going to do next? (Other than play Soup Dragons–oh, and I suppose Jesus Jones, if you must, though I ceased being a fan about 10 years ago.)
Seriously, there are a couple of worthy candidates in need of serious campaign savvy, including Tara Sue Grubb, who’s running against the infamous Rep. Howard Coble (of Berman and Coble) for a House seat and may be the first candidate to run her own blog (Sheila Lennon’s coverage of Tara Sue is good). I’d love to see you working with her.
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Kickoff
Cavaliers vs. Colorado State University Rams. Kickoff 7:30 PM Eastern time Thursday. This will be the earliest season start in college football history.
The fact that I still care about this just goes to show: You can take the boy out of Virginia….
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.Mac – A little more, but why?
Judging from an email in my inbox, Apple is starting to recognize that they need to put a little more push into converting free iTools subscribers to paid .Mac subscribers. I ponied up for the service because my various forwarding addresses point to my mac.com email address, and because I was getting ready to buy virus software protection and web hosting space anyway.
Today I received the following email:
Dear .Mac member,
Since we launched .Mac in July, we’ve welcomed thousands of new members into the .Mac community, and we can’t wait to add more. As an additional thank you to our former iTools members, we are announcing that when they convert to a paid .Mac membership before September 30, 2002, their first year of .Mac membership will automatically be extended to September 30, 2003.
As a full member, you’ve already qualified. Your membership will now extend to September 30, 2003, well past your original renewal date. And stay tuned for more membership benefits coming soon! Thank you for joining the .Mac community.
[signed–The .Mac Team] Apple Computer
The extension for me is about two months; for a non-converted subscriber it would be one month, or $99/12 = $8.25, about an 8% bonus. It’s not especially compelling as a “special offer.” What it feels like is an end of quarter sales push. It will be interesting to see in early October what the conversion numbers actually look like — and, since Apple hasn’t offered a plan to its investors to set expectations, how the Street will react.
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Groggy, grey morning
Moving slowly this morning, thinking slower. Bad sign when there’s an executive review in 40 minutes. We’ve entered the slippery slope towards fall here in Seattle: two grey days in a row, beads of water on the cars. Paying bills, drinking coffee, waking up.
We’re sending my inlaws off in style tonight (their flight is tomorrow noonish) with dinner at Etta’s. Looking forward to it.
Random weblog of the day: Brilliant Corners
I’ve started clicking my own Blogtree link–not to be vain, but to browse Blogtree for other blogs that might be interesting reading. A lot of them are familiar, but every now and then I run into a cool weblog that engages my attention.
Accordingly, the first “random weblog of the day” here at JHN is Brilliant Corners. And not just because he’s namechecking Monk. Bill Turner discusses Barthelme and postmodern fiction intelligently one post away from linking to two contrasting articles about making movie trailers. Plus he wrote his own blogging system using Perl and MySQL. Check him out.
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Too Southern for Atlanta?
Latest radio asinine moment: Country DJ fired for sounding too Southern — in Atlanta! Greg nails this one:
Like much of the rest of the industry country music has taken a nosedive — but that has nothing to do, so we’re told, with playlists programmed by committee, managers so out of touch that a quintuple-platinum Grammy-winning sleeper hit still can’t get airplay, or artists that aim to sound less like Johnny Cash than Rick Dees. Nope, the problem is that the DJ — on a country station — in Dixie! — sounds too Southern.
Don Box: “Tolerance is great, but…”
“…vocal tolerance is even better. Keeping your tolerance to yourself only exacerbates the problem.”
Marriage counseling? Nope, he’s talking about the longstanding practice on the web that emphasizes generation of correct outgoing code but acceptance of incorrect incoming code. He points out, rightly I think, that unless you find a way to tell the source that generates the broken code that it’s broken, that no progress will ever be made.
Don’s story is in the context of the new RSS feed on his site at GotDotNet, which I highly recommend subscribing to if you’re a developer or interested in XML web services.
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Back from the weekend
I never got back to working on IM and weblogs on Saturday. We spent the morning at Pike Place Market. In the afternoon Lisa and I finally installed Roman blinds on the roof panels of our “solarium” — a little bay next to the kitchen and dining room, it’s constructed from six patio window panes, three slanting up from the floor meeting three slanting down with the roof line. Unfortunately we also found out that there are serious leaks around all the panes when I tried to wash them. More contractors, more $.
Sunday we took Lisa’s dad to Mass and did some gardening. The soil in the bed next to the driveway is packed like concrete and very sandy, so we are concluding sadly that we’re going to lose one or two of the rhododendron bushes that the previous owners left. (They weren’t planted in shade anyway, so they were pretty much doomed.) I dug out a couple 1.5 foot holes for some Tuscan rosemary–besides being tasty, the plant also gets really cool blue flowers which should look nice. Hopefully they’ll do better than the rhododendron. I finished the day by washing both our cars for the first time since we’ve moved. Then finally I rolled Lisa’s car INTO THE GARAGE–yes, we’ve finally unpacked or moved enough stuff to make that possible, though you can’t open any doors on the passenger side when it’s in. A red letter day by any measure.
Holy smokes! IM in my favorite weblog tools
Userland announced that Frontier (which runs this site through the Manila weblog suite) and Radio Userland now have beta support for IM. Flexible architecture: Jabber and AIM are included, other drivers can be written. You can IM outbound or you can use an IM client to write to your blog. (I haven’t tried it yet but once we get done with our morning activities I’ll be back to give it a whirl.)
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Axis of Medieval
Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times: Bush Vs. Women. Is the administration’s appalling record of actively trampling efforts to better the condition of women worldwide the result of
- (a) a low prioritization of women’s rights
- (b) a confusion about whether the issue is abortion or survival
- (c) a Talibanesque desire to push women worldwide back into the Stone Age?
Kristof makes an alarming case, based on the administration’s record, that the real story is closer to (c).
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Happiness is…
Happiness is… dinner on the patio for the first time in a new house. Takeout Thai food, with a chilled Languedoc and an Oregon Pinot Noir, and the company of Lisa’s parents. Music courtesy Frank Sinatra, Wynton Marsalis (Levee Low Moan, one of the few Wynton albums that breaks free of manner and drops down into the blues), and Joe Henderson. Perfect sky, sunlight slowly fading behind the hedges. Good stuff, in other words. Such a pity this only happens for three months a year.
[Originally written 8/10 but never posted due to blog error. Oh well. Never too late to update.]