Messages from the Ether

Message sent to NPR's ombudsman

I just listened to your story on Bush's vow to give up golf out of respect for the families of the US soldiers in Iraq. The story continued with a reflection on previous presidents' relationship with golf while in office.

I was stunned that the story did not contain the more serious and salient aspect of Bush's statement: the fact that he broke that vow around two months after he made it.

This may seem like a petty complaint for what was essentially a puff piece, but I believe that with this sobering fact, it should have never merited as a puff piece. Only injudicious editing of surrounding facts allowed you to play it as such.

With the furor that it caused in the online community, I'm sure I'm not the only one communicating my irritation.

I left out the "fuck you" that I said in the car after I heard the story...

Greetings from the Columbia River Gorge!

End game

Caught a second-hand conversation on the environment from workers at this hypothetical company. People are still pulling out the same old macho canards: "raping the environment won't affect me in my lifetime so it doesn't matter what I do," paired with "it's too difficult to recycle so I shouldn't have to." After the initial blush of anger at such short-sighted and basically infantile idiocy (this is how adults act?!?), I realized that infantile is the key word. I should maybe look upon it like 14-year-old boys telling each other they'd like to "fuck the hell out of some chick" with carelessly offensive swagger. It's sort of a group aggression in the face of a discomforting "other". The sad difference is that the former discussion results in them actually fucking the hell out of the environment; the latter merely ends in video games and who-can-punch-the-hardest competitions.

Mike Norman

So one of the racist Marietta bar owner's many bon mots--displayed in the redneck businessman's version of Yosemite Sam mudflaps: the backlit plastic letter sign--was no habla espanol--and never will. Ignoring the recursive idiocy of such a statement (akin to saying "only kikes think I'm a jew-hater" or ... well, you get the idea), I'm just glad that I had Freedom Tortillas for lunch today and not those nasty, non-American ones. GOUSA!!

Where was I?

Lisa and I were in Portland for the Indie Wine Festival Thursday April 30th through Monday May 5th. Wineries, book store, lots of amazing restaurants and bars, and some great hiking. All documented in Twitter but not easily linkable. Photo entry and highlights to come.

Went to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at The Shakespeare Tavern last Thursday (runs through June 1st). One of my favorite movies and the play was outstanding. Much more bawdy that I remember from the movie, and I caught more of Stoppard's wordplay in this version, sometimes clever and sometimes vaudevillian.

Friday was Iron Man (3/5) at Atlantic Station. Without Downey and Paltrow, the movie would have only been a minor effects-vehicle. They were electric throughout (he getting most of the screentime, of course). I had difficulty getting past the silly science that seemed to stretch the bounds of even comic-book-science. Radical direction changes in a metal suit (whether in the air or hitting the ground) would be catastrophic to the body. And when Paltrow reached into the metal tube that went into his heart in order to pull out some faulty wire, well ... just silly. All-in-all a fun ride though.

Saturday was my niece Sarah's ballet recital. There were some very good dancers there and (at times overly) complex choreography. One senior was Absolutely Amazing showing off such grace and flow throughout her whole body that she can only be moving on to professional dance. I noticed the greatest sense of flow in how she used her hands and wrists in relation to the rest of her movements. Seeing such art helps you more clearly differentiate mere skill.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Michael Chabon

Sirens

Whatever the Miley Cyrus hooplah is about (and it is about people being uncomfortable looking at a 15-year-old girl looking satisfied, seemingly forgetting what teenagers spend most of their time thinking-about-if-not-doing, that menarche hits at 12, etc.) it's not about sending kids to war but not letting them drink or fuck. The war is the war, and I don't think that the time people are wasting being offended that VF and AL conspired to purvey the photo is time that those people would otherwise be using to protest or otherwise denounce the war.

Jeremiah Wright on music

OK, so I've finally found a subject to take issue with with Rev. Wright. On CSPAN today, he was denouncing the idea that the western music tradition is any more valid that the African music tradition. I'm all for inclusive education in the arts, but his examples were so poorly chosen as to--and I really hate to say this--invoke the specter of reverse discrimination.

His first example was harmless enough (although he phrased it inequitably as a value judgement), suggesting that western tradition emphasizes predominantly martial time with a notable absence of syncopation. In his fantasy world, African music freed the west from Sousa by offering up the off-beat clapping of gospel. I've often heard different forms of this argument, and it does injustice to both lineages. In the west, early sacred choral music took much from Eastern Europe and therefore took much of Eastern Europe's compound meter and shifting metric relationships. Similarly but different, Baroque virtuoso music stretched metric interest by committing to paper the technical flights of violin and keyboard masters. Beethoven also introduced great rhythmic color into his pieces, as did Brahms (although perhaps depending primarily on hemiolas). To say that Africa gave the west "syncopation" is like saying the west gave Africa "freedom."

Martial music is often simplistic in that it is meant simply to count to four and do little else. Conversely, folk music can be rhythmically surprising (for reasons I don't know) if a bit repetitive. Early Renaissance folk meter borrowed its irregularity from language (e.g. musique mesuree). Bartok and Kodaly transcribed much Eastern European folk music and came away absorbing and re-passing on its inventiveness to the western tradition. Gospel has similar characteristics but could only arrogantly declare itself as FIRST POST.

Rev. Wright is well-read, so I'm not sure why he would paint such a tainted picture. He does have a couple of nutty canards as Bill Moyers generously labels them, so maybe it's simply more of the same.

Oh, will hitman monkey ever find happiness?

IMSLP, back

IMSLP will be online again on July 1st, 2008 at 12AM US EST.

The internet hearts Helen Thomas

Send Helen Thomas some flowers. You know you want to.

Green it

Did anyone else throw up a little when they saw this?

Fox. Spin it. Dimwit.

Fox. Flip-flop it. Profit.

(OK, they obviously had a marketing team trying to make the rhyme difficult...)

Google maps and traffic

Google maps added some nifty new stuff to its traffic view. Icons with popup infomation and traffic predictions by DOW and TOD. See the resulting niftiness:

Now you can see your commute go into the red for the day of the week of your choice!

See also Wikipedia, maps

More Expelled fallout

I hoped it would die a lonely death. It's not. Dawkins wrote a letter to a Jew who was convinced by the movie that Atheists are evil. I am (sadly) not making this up. Dawkins reply is detailed and reasonsed. On the original letter-writer's unfortunate phrasing:

While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

On that jackass, Ben Stein:

Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

A Jewish person had asked me this weekend about Obama's anti-semitism. I (also sadly) didn't have an immediate answer because I honestly don't know any of the source material that made them think that. More research needed. I do, however, know how to shut down the lies being passed around about atheism and/or evolution.

The most fucked-up things I've heard recently (short, enumerated rant)

• Even if the debates don't ask important questions, I still watch them to judge the candidates on how they react. (co-worker) - Media corporations have a unique and potentially rich access to our presidential candidates. Joe Blow can't gather the candidates together at his home and compare their answers to (hopefully) pithy questions. Our country's fucked up if not only do media corps cheapen their access by asking what's-your-favorite-color questions but viewers actually appreciate that they get such little information and are happy to base their vote on the resulting banalities.
• You people need to understand how completely biased Frontline is. (co-worker) - Ignoring the truism that any statement is biased, how the fuck does someone even come to this conclusion? The show's had a few questionable episodes. Considering they've been on since 1983, and considering you practically can't watch a single episode of a show on Fox News without running into deep factual and ethical infelicities, Frontline has an outstanding record. Again, what the fuck?!?
• Schools should teach religion and ID in science classes because evolution can't explain the origins of life. (Bill O'Reilly interviewing Ben Stein) - Where to begin with this eyesore of logical thinking and basic intelligence? First fuck up: the misunderstanding that evolution has anything to say about abiogenesis. Second: the idea that the lack of complete success discredits a theory's partial success. Third: that religion and ID even qualify as a science and should be placed next to rigorous theories instead of next to philosophy. Why the fuck isn't architecture taught in English class?!? Fuckhead.

Uglies, Pretties, Specials (Boxed Set); Scott Westerfeld

I'd heard about this set from Boing Boing and was intrigued but wanted to avoid it for the idiot reason that it felt too much like buying an Oprah book: the heavy weight of a Boing Boing recommendation makes it more "marketing" than "recommending." Anyway, I picked up the boxed set during the recent Amazon sci-fi sale (along with complete Space: 1999 DVDs, complete Aeon Flux series, and two experimental films by Shozin Fukui) and just finished the first book, Uglies. It's teen fiction, but I've been completely engrossed with the characters, story, and ideas contained. Anti-future where everyone gets extreme plastic surgery at 16 to make them super-super-model beautiful. Our very much flawed female protagonist is drawn into a resistance group. Reluctantly, at first, then heroically. The clever concepts make up for the limited, teen-directed vocabulary and short (< 5-page) chapters. You'll burn through it quickly because of both this and it's compelling drama.

Cam nom nom nom

Kettle

First I heard discussions on NPR with priests mincing about how the pope shouldn't be expected to apologize (for the endemic corruption of the clergy regarding the sex abuse scandal) because the issue is about Christian forgiveness and is not about blame. A more repulsive hypocrisy I can't imagine. Then, they go on to discuss the prevalence of homosexuality in the priesthood. Oh, no you didn't. I hope you didn't just try to equate the two, 'cause shit like that just doesn't hold up. Ultimately, this is from only one representative of the church and not the leadership, so maybe the church as a whole has a different position. But then, that jackassed pope tries to blame the abuse on everything but the church's leadership. I'm at somewhat of a loss.

Religion didn't invent hypocrisy, it just made it a whole lot easier.