I'll add my name to the growing chorus of folks who've greatly enjoyed Stephanie Dupont's extended guest-hosting of Brian Linse's blog. I haven't seen anyone else say this, so I'll say it: Brian, when you get back to LA, do whatever you can to convince Stephanie to start her own blog. I guarantee it'll get permalinked all over the place (except maybe by the Samizdata folks).
Dark clouds may be looming, however. Via the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, we find that the Illuminated Donkey is questioning Stephanie's existence. C'mon folks - just because someone can't be tracked down via Google doesn't mean he or she is a ghost. I admit, at first I thought Brian might be pulling a joke on us, but no more. I believe in Stephanie, and so should you.
UPDATE: Kathy Kinsley has also suggested that Stephanie get her own blog when Brian returns.
UPDATE: Gary Farber and Bill Quick are also insisting Stephanie is a hoax, most likely Brian in drag. They cite Brian's friendship with Kinky Friedman and the fact that "Stephanie Dupont" is a character in some of the Kinkster's novels. Well, from one good American to another (*), I say why can't this merely be a nom du blog? If it turns out Brian has hoaxed me, I'll admit it and congratulate him. In the meantime, I say viva Stephanie.
* - See here and scroll down a bit.
UPDATE: I met Brian (and Ann Salisbury and Kevin Drum) when I was in Anaheim in October. I asked him about Stephanie, and told me flat out that she's a real person. So there.
There's been a fair amount of bloggage regarding this article in the WaPo about Islamic schools in America. I'm as alarmed as the next guy, but not because gasp we've suddenly discovered such things in our midst. No, my discomfort about these schools is the same as my discomfort about many religious schools. The problem I have with these schools is that they teach a distorted and frequently intolerant worldview. The fact that these specific schools are Islamic makes no real difference to me.
Here's an example from the article:
[T]hey file into their Islamic studies class, where the textbooks tell them the Day of Judgment can't come until Jesus Christ returns to Earth, breaks the cross and converts everyone to Islam, and until Muslims start attacking Jews.
It's not the particulars that bother me as much as the us-versus-them underpinnings. I still remember a tale from my Catholic school days in which a "Moslem" king threatens to kill all Christians in the kingdom. At one point, he calls his staff into the throne room and demands that all Christians step forward. Fifteen people do so. "And do you wish to remain Christians?" he demands. "Yes" they say, at which point the king orders their executions. It was presented as a story of heroic martyrdom, where the best thing we little Catholics could do was die for our faith. The rather unflattering view of "Moslems" it gave us was left unspoken, but nonetheless it was pretty clear. Admittedly, we weren't exhorted to become suicide bombers, but the bottom line message is the same: We're right and they're wrong, and you're better off dying than becoming one of them.
I guess I see a lot of religious schools as being inherently isolationist, and I believe that isolated people are more likely to be xenophobic. Of course every parent should teach their children morals and values, and every parent should want to shield their children from inappropriate aspects of our popular culture, but at what point do you cross over into demonizing values and cultures that are not your own? At what point do you become like the people of a small town who can't understand why some people don't want to be forced to pray like the rest of them do.
I don't want to make the same mistake that I'm accusing others of here and demonize all religious education. Religious education is generally a good and healthy thing, and even if I don't much care for it, it's as American as the First Amendment so I can take my dislike and stuff it. Besides, as I just pointed out in the links above, one doesn't have to go to a private school to be isolated from Others. But I will always worry about people who grow up never knowing anyone who isn't like them, for it will be easier for them to believe whatever they are told about those people.
You may be starting to suspect an ulterior motive on my part. You're right - I mean this as a defense against that bane of right-wingers known as "multiculturalism". The multi-cultis deserve a lot of the criticism they get, for their excessive relativism and their own peculiar brand of demonization, but the vision of multiculturalism is a good thing. It's a reminder that there's more than one valid viewpoint out there and that not everyone has your experiences and perspective. In short, The World Is A Big Place. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this was what the multi-cultis originally intended to teach us.
I had the good fortune to eventually get into an excellent public intermediate school (that's "middle school" for some of you) and then into Stuyvesant High School, which was an incredible melting pot in addition to being a damn fine place to learn. Once I figured out that not everyone was Catholic - my first year in public school I gave Christmas cards to a fair number of Jewish kids because I didn't know any better - I did fine. Going to college in Texas was further exposure to different perspectives and backgrounds.
I like to think that I'm a better person for the experience. I like to think that more people could benefit from similar experiences. That, in a nutshell, is the discomfort I have with sheltering children in overly controlled environments. The particulars of the environment don't make much difference.
The Ballpark Soon To Be Formerly Known As Enron Field is now officially The Ballpark Formerly Known As Enron Field. Enron will get some money back in the bargain. As long as none of it goes to Lay, Skilling, or Fastow, I'm OK with that.
I don't particularly care if stadium's name is bought and paid for. For $100 million over 30 years, I'd have gladly called myself "Charles Kuffner, brought to you by Enron". But would it kill anyone to leave the name as "Astros Field", or deity forbid, "The Ballpark at Union Station" for this season?
According to this story in the Chron, "[a] $100,000 donation from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez's bank in 2000 helped fund Republican efforts to retain control of the U.S. Senate".
You know, I'm as desperate as any Texas Democrat to get a few of our folks back into state office. I just have a hard time believing that Tony Sanchez is actually one of us. I'll still vote for him if he wins the primary - I really dislike Governor Goodhair, and I'm that big a tool - but I'm not gonna like it. I really wish Dan Morales had thrown his hat into this ring a bit earlier, instead of flirting with the Senate race. Alas.
At least Texas isn't the only state with questionable gubernatorial candidates. Read about Ginger's adventures with California's Spammin' Secretary of State, Bill Jones. Hey, all you LA Bloggers - what do you know about this guy?
Fritz Schranck has some good stuff about how we pay for roads. Check it out.
Jeff Skilling denies all in his testimony to the Senate. What a scuzzball.
This is my favorite bit:
In Tuesday's hearing, Skilling clashed with senators over his stock sales, repeatedly blamed auditor Arthur Andersen for signing off on questionable accounting transactions, and told disbelieving lawmakers he could not recall receiving $5.6 million in bonuses from Enron.
Compare this to the redoubtable Stephanie Dupont:
Now for my one political thought that the whole world can click on. I once won $1000 in a Super Bowl pool. God bless the Cowboys! I remember that like it was yesterday. How come Jeff Skilling can't remember getting 6 million dollars?
You said it. Hell, when I was 10 I won a football helmet in a neighborhood raffle. That was over 25 years ago, and I still remember it. Skilling lies like a cheap rug.
Wendy's International has bought a 45% interest in Houston restaurant chain Cafe Express. Cafe Express is a "fast-casual" restaurant. Watch that phrase, I think you'll be hearing it again.
Cafe Express is Wendy's first investment in the fast-casual restaurant business. The term "fast-casual" refers to a growing market in the industry, combining the casual dining of a restaurant like Chili's or Friday's with the self-service, walk-up concept.Robert Del Grande, president of Cafe Express, said he was told by Wendy's CEO Jack Schuessler that the fast-casual market is "just beginning. It's teeny now, but it's going to be huge, and he expects it to grow exponentially."
I'm actually surprised that there isn't more of this already. I don't know if Houston is a trendsetter here, but we also have Eatzi's for high-end takeout, and the Amazon Grill, a single-location competitor to Cafe Express in the "fast-casual" market. Good food, low prices, quick service - hey, Virginia Postrel, is this The Future or what?
Last night Tiffany and I watched Judging Amy, the Amy Brennerman vehicle on CBS. T has seen a few eps, but I'd never watched it. It wasn't bad - decent writing, good cast, and Tyne Daly's a hoot - but I was scratching my head at the ending.
Amy spends the episode in a funk, partly because the guy she most recently went out with (and apparently slept with, though this wasn't clear) hadn't called for four days. She mopes and makes with the man-hating and then at the end of the episode (and two more days have passed) she gets a large bouquet of roses from this guy. Reading the card makes her very happy.
Are you kidding me? Sending flowers after being completely incommunicado for six days isn't sweet and romantic, it's manipulative. Other than being comatose, what could this guy have been doing that he couldn't pick up a phone and say "Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I had a really good time and I want to see you again"? There's a word for people who fall for this sort of thing: Sucker.
I did a lot of stupid, pathetic things when I was single, so maybe this is just too close to home for me. Still, I don't understand it. If I were Amy, I'd sure like to know what he'd been up to and why he thought this was better than just calling after a day or so.
No, not Bryant. I'm talking about Don Haskins, the longtime coach at UTEP (formerly Texas Western), who made history by winning the 1966 NCAA men's basketball championship with an all-black starting lineup. The team they beat was Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. Rupp was, to put it charitably, behind the times on racial matters - it would be three more years before Kentucky featured a black player.
Anyway, Jerry Izenberg wrote this nice tribute to Haskins. It's not true that UTEP has never competed for any other championships - their track and field team is a perennial power - but no matter. Go read and enjoy.
UPDATE: In this entry, about the death of Texas Western guard Bobby Hill, I was going to make a stronger statement about Coach Rupp being a racist, but a Google search on him led me to this page, which argues that he's been unfairly labelled as such. I report, you decide.
Had a minor dog emergency this afternoon while taking Harry for his afternoon walk. He usually walks on my left, and sometimes when the leash goes slack his right foreleg will step over it, making it necessary to untangle him. I must have pulled on the leash while it was like this, and somehow the clip that holds the choke chain got attached to his paw. It's the kind of clip that you push in at an angle to release, rather than the vertical kind, which meant that any attempt to remove it made it worse. I tried, but the pain made Harry resist.
I wound up having to carry him to the car (he's only 45 pounds, but it's harder than you think to carry a dog that weight, especially when he whines and writhes when he gets jostled) and off to the vet we went. They had to give him a sedative/painkiller to remove the clip. He's walking without a limp, but has been less active than usual (a hangover from the sedative) and whining more than usual. He's even refused a Milk-Bone, which is like Tom DeLay turning down soft money. He must really be out of sorts.
Poor Harry. I guess today wouldn't be a good day to trade places with him.
Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry is asking pollution officials to look for alternatives to lowering the speed limit. This just gets more and more entertaining.
One thing to keep in mind is that average speed on Houston highways during peak hours is nowhere near 55 MPH, let alone 65 or 70. Take a look at the historic freeway travel times on the Texas A&M Realtime Traffic Map of Houston and see for yourself. I know that lowering the speed limit is only part of the solution, and it's one that's easiest to implement, but let's not lose sight of where the real action is.
Today while at the bank I heard a political ad on the radio which began "I want the best for my children. That's why I'm voting for..."
Is it too late to stick an amendment in the Shays-Meehan bill that makes it a capital crime to imply that a vote for the other guy makes you an unfit parent?
I've avoided commenting on Houston's other big story, mostly because I'm conflicted about it. What Andrea Yates did was horrible, but I don't believe that killing her is in the interests of justice.
I think we can all agree that Andrea Yates is ill. Her attorneys are going for an insanity defense, but this is a tall order. According to Texas law, you must "at the time of the conduct charged...not know that [your] conduct was wrong". However sick Yates is and was, revelations that she considered using a knife to kill her children don't make it easy to conclude that she didn't know what she was doing at the time.
I think what really bothers me about this whole thing is how polarized discussion of it has been from the beginning. Wanting to understand how this could happen and how we could prevent it from happening again does not mean wanting to absolve Andrea Yates from all blame. Questioning the appropriateness of the death penalty in this case does not mean that one wants to see Yates walk out of the courtroom with her freedom and a lifetime supply of Zoloft.
There's a difference between what Andrea Yates did and what, say, Susan Smith did, and it's not in the number of dead children. Ask yourself this question: If Yates' erratic and ultimately lethal behavior had been caused by a brain tumor, would you feel differently about her? If the answer is yes, then why is postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia not enough to mitigate your emotions?
In The New Republic, Michelle Cottle proposes sterilizing Andrea Yates as part of her sentence. This is a can of worms in a tar baby on a slippery slope, but it's hard to argue that another Yates pregnancy would be in any way a good thing. I'm having a hard time resisting the urge to say "And while you're at it, let's fix Rusty Yates, too."
Like I said, I'm conflicted. I'm sure glad I wasn't called to be on this jury, though I daresay they'd have voir-dired my butt out of there. It will be interesting to see what the jurors have to say after the trial, regardless of the verdict.
Justin Slotman says that the IRoB is still ranked for the Google searches on "Jaime Sale nude". Well, I was getting a lot of Google hits on "Elena Berezhnaya nude", but alas, I seem to have dropped out of contention.
On the other hand, I'm still getting hits on "Robert Gordon University naked", thanks to this post. It's good to know that I have such a high quality readership.
Some time ago I wrote about the hapless Chief of Police in West University Place and his suspension for having surfed to smut sites on the Web. Seems the loss of pay is the least of his worries, as the West U Soccer Mom Mafia is calling for his resignation.
As Michael recently said about a New Zealand judge in the same predicament, one wonders if these suburban paragons of virtue are all huffy because the police chief was neglecting his duties (for a total of 20 minutes, as the original story makes clear), or because they think people who look at nekkid pictures are icky and should go back under whatever rock from which they first emerged. Would they still be out for his scalp if it had come to light that he had similar tastes at the video store as Clarence Thomas? How does this make him unqualified for his job? The West U Police Department doesn't even have a vice squad.
The fact that this story was reported by a society columnist should tell you all you need to know. Good luck in your next job, chief.
Cleveland Indians pitcher John Rocker, best known for his sensitive commentary on racial and sexual relations, will portray a crazed killer in a new movie. The film, called "The Greenskeeper", is the type of film that also features a Playboy model and a radio "personality", so I don't think they'll be on any Oscar short lists. The producers are looking for a national distributor, otherwise it's straight to video.
UPDATE: Here's the IMDB page for this movie. Alas, no one has offered a review of it as yet.
Glenn Kinen points to this excellent article in the NY Times Sunday magazine about NITV and its subversive pro-American broadcasts to Iran. I sure hope they can find a sugar daddy to help them keep up the good work.
Matt Welch has been all over the Free Slobodan Milosevic petition which has been signed by over 1300 people. He suggested that bloggers start Googling these folks to see what else they've said and done.
Well, David Janes has put up a more detailed list of the signees, from which I see that a few call Houston home. I thought I'd check out a couple of my more interesting neighbors to see what history they have with Slobo.
First, there's Sonja Myers. She apparently likes writing letters to the editor. Here's one she sent to the Ottawa Sun. I'm personally fond of this quote, regarding the NATO bombing:
The jury is still out on the intent and consequences of NATO's war and history would doubtless make the adequate judgement
Would that jury have anything to do with the OJ verdict? I'm just asking.
Here's an unpublished letter to the NY Times. Guess it wasn't fit to print.
Sonja has been an active opinion writer to the Houston Chronicle. A search of the Chron archives showed three letters in 1993 and two op-ed pieces in 1995. Most recent was a letter from December, 2000. Chron archives require registration so I can't easily link them. I'll quote from them instead.
Letter to the editor, 5/5/93:
The conflict in Bosnia is largely the result of outside interference in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia. Germany in particular greatly contributed to the present problems by encouraging Croatia and Slovenia to declare their independence and then pressuring the European Economic Community and the United States to support the move.
Those darned outside agitators. Serbia would've been such a peaceful place had it not been for them.
Letter to the editor, 8/16/93:
Taking sides in a three-way civil war is the worst thing the United States can do. Someone should tell our government that, among other things, bombing of the Bosnian Serbs will:Not help but ruin the peace negotiations in Geneva.
Not bring peace to the region, but incite a long-term war.
Damage and close the existing humanitarian supply routes.
Bring about more killings of innocent civilians -- the Croats, the Muslims and the Serbs -- due to their close proximity to the front lines.
Cause a permanent rift between the United States, its NATO allies in Europe and the United Nations.
Upset the delicate balance in the U.S. relationship with Russia.
Here's Chuck's Sure-Fire Handy-Dandy Never-Fail Advice For Prognosticators: Always wait until after the event you're forecasting has occurred before you make pronouncements about what will happen. It's less embarrassing that way.
Letter to the editor, 12/3/93:
Thanks to [...] the media, we are led to forget the fact that the people of Serbia are innocent. Compassion for human suffering, if genuine, is not limited to any particular nation or group of people.We should ask ourselves why is the Bosnian Muslim population more deserving of the sympathy of the world then the suffering peoples of any other nation including Georgia (in the former Soviet Union) or Serbia.
Um, maybe because they were being ethnically cleansed? Just a guess.
Sonja started writing op-ed pieces for the Chron in 1995. She wrote one on 3/16/95 which, for some odd reason, I couldn't find in the Chron's archives. There were a couple of links in the Google search that seemed to point to this article as well, but they were all dead. Coincidence? You decide.
Anyway, the first op-ed piece drew four letters in response, three of which were critical. Here's one letter in response, dated 3/21/95 by Zvonimir Milas:
In her March 16 Outlook article, "Bosnian Serbs, too, have vowed: "Never again,' " Sonja Myers attempts to justify the genocide committed by Serbs on Croats and Muslims during the last four years of Serbia's aggression on Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.She depicts Serbs as victims of Croats and Muslims during World War II. She distorts the WWII statistics, in a similar way that the former communist-dominated Yugoslavia had done for nearly 50 years to justify Serbian dominance over all other nationalities in that country.
In that war, however, there were massive exterminations of Croats and Muslims by Serbs which continued after the war ended. But in that totalitarian, communist Yugoslavia ruled by Serbs, even to mention the Serbian actions resulted in imprisonment, exile or worse.
Her next op-ed article was on 6/10/95:
Contrary to the current popular belief, there is a solution to end the civil war in Bosnia. It is the same solution that could have prevented the war. It requires applying the same moral principles and affording equal treatment to all sides, including the Serbs. A short trip to the library would reveal that the Serbs in Bosnia have a case: their legitimate rights and concerns to be heard, acknowledged and respected. This would open the way to meaningful negotiations and secure necessary Serb concessions for a long-term political settlement and peace in the Balkans. The alternatives are too awful to even contemplate.
Sometimes, as Dogbert once said, no sarcastic remark seems adequate.
Her most recent letter to the editor was on 12/5/00. I quote it in full because it's a bit bizarre:
My entire family in Belgrade demonstrated for days demanding that Slobodan Milosevic accept the results of the presidential elections and concede defeat to his opponent, Vojislav Kostunica.The ruling party used election officials, courts and the media - all run by Milosevic's political party - to deny victory to Kostunica.
The main weapon for manipulating public opinion was to call the people of Serbia "traitors, bandits and mobsters," and swear that the "will of the people," the "fair and accurate vote recount" and the "rule of law" should prevail.
Many Serbs and those who followed news reports on the Yugoslav elections probably had a strong sense of deja vu regarding the 2000 U.S. presidential election as they watched the "ruling party" and its operatives manipulate public opinion, pressure the courts to change existing laws, harass and threaten election boards to do all they could to change the bad outcome for their Democratic candidate, Al Gore.
History has a weird sense of humor, but in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that the actions and intentions of the power-obsessed Milosevic could have been matched up exactly to the last dirty trick by America's Democratic Party and its candidate for the presidency.
What can I say?
There were not that many results in Google for Sonja Myers. Most of them point back to the Free Slobo petition or refer to one of her published or unpublished editorials. The Houston Chronicle archives were the most useful resource.
Stan Goff, as nearly everything written by or about him always says, is a retired US Special Forces Master Sergeant. He's written a book called Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti. I'm not qualified to comment on this book, but surely someone else out there is. (Paging Sgt. Stryker. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.)
Stan has apparently been busy in the antiwar camp since 9/11. Here's the text of a speech he gave at a "teach-in" (oooh, coopted 1960s rhetoric!) at the University of North Carolina on 9/17/01. You can read this in HTML here. We see that whatever talent Stan may have as a military historian, he's pretty lousy as a pundit:
"Since the attacks of September 11th, we have seen the unfolding of a national ritual denunciation of this crime that is much more than an expression of outrage and sadness. A disciplined military-financial-industrial press is harmonizing us in this ritual, and the orchestra director is theBush regime. Failure to participate is being constructed as heresy.Heresy includes:
- The failure to call for war or support out leaders when they call for war
- The denial that this can be reduced to a test between good and evil
- The refusal to accept official explanations
- The temerity to suggest that our own rulers have committed equally offensive actions
- And finally, that our own financial, political, military, and intelligence establishments bear a portion of the blame.
There is a new McCarthyism emerging here, and a new loyalty oath along with it."
Yeah, yeah, we know, the poor oppressed antiwar demonstrators. Been there, done that.
Next up is an article from 10/20/01, in which Stan discloses the real reason for the attacks and the US response. I'll give you a hint: it's all a Big Conspiracy! Involving oil! Which we're running out of! So we need to control the supply!
"The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power."
Too bad you didn't do any of these things. I'll give the man props for vocabulary, though - he actually used the word "klavern" to describe President Bush's senior leadership team.
Here's an interview conducted on 11/5/01 with someone named Mike McCormick. All I have to say is someone needs to explain the concept of "paragraphs" to whoever transcribed this.
Here's an excerpt from and plug for his book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti (ISBN: 1887128638; only two left in stock at Amazon, so hurry up and order). It's in a Marxism-Feminism list archive at csf.colorado.edu. The joke is left as an exercise for the reader.
I searched the Chron archives but found no matches for "Stan Goff", "Stanley Goff", or "Hideous Dream", so either he's not from the Bayou City or he's not a letter-writer like Sonja Myers. There were quite a few pages' worth of results in Google on Stan, but I think this gives the basic gist of who he is.
Gary Farber has a nice piece about John Ashcroft's recent remarks, in which our breastphobic Attorney General says
"Civilized people -- Muslims, Christians and Jews -- all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom -- a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God."
Ashcroft groups Christianity, Judaism, and Islam under the "civilized faith" umbrella a few more times in the prepared statement.
I find it very interesting that people like Ashcroft now seem to be going out of their way to include Muslims when speaking positively about religion and people of faith. Anyone else remember when the watchword among the religious right was "Judeo-Christian"? Well, apparently Muslims have made the big leagues. I'm willing to bet that while this lexical change began before 9/11, it's really become noticeable since. One can take this as sincere outreach by people who have traditionally had a very narrow view of morality, or one can take it as crass pandering to a group of voters that generally went to Bush in 2000. Either way, it's interesting.
Went and saw the Asylum Street Spankers last night with some friends. What a totally kickass show that was. Having Guy Forsyth play with them helps get them back in touch with their bluesier side. It's worth the price of admission just to hear Guy and Christina Marrs sing "If You Want Me To Love You", which featured different (but still hilarious) lyrics from what's on the Nasty Novelties CD.
We were joined at our table by Ted Barlow and his fiancee Leslie. They were excellent table companions. There's no reserved seating at Rudyard's so we all arrived around 8 PM to ensure we could sit (wise decision - it was standing room only well before the band started playing at 10). We had plenty of time to enjoy chatting and getting acquainted. Turns out they live fairly close to me. Since Ginger is also my neighbor, I guess that means there's an Axis of Left-Leaning Bloggers here in the greater Heights area.
All in all, a rousingly good time. The Spankers rock. Chuck-Bob says check it out.
UPDATE: Here's a more thorough review of a Spankers concert, this one also featuring Guy Forsyth.
Craig at Page Fault Interrupt asks: If there really were such a thing as reincarnation, would you rather come back as a Saudi woman or as an American dog?
Dude. Anyone who could ask that question isn't a dog owner. There are plenty of days when I'd happily trade places with my dog. It's no contest.
Earlier this week Tiffany attended the ninth annual Houston Heritage Society Attic Sale. It's basically a big garage sale thrown by Ladies Who Lunch as a fundraiser for the Heritage Museum. While at said sale, Tiffany found and bought an easy chair/ottoman set. Not just any easy chair/ottoman set, mind you, but a lime green naugahyde easy chair/ottoman set.
One of the differences between Tiffany and me is that despite three-plus years of marriage, I'm still comfortably in touch with my Inner Bachelor. If I found a lime green naugahyde easy chair/ottoman set at a garage sale for a good price, I'd happily put them in my house. I'm pretty much impervious to irony and rolled eyeballs from my mother in matters like that. Hey, it's a comfy chair, I got it at a good price, and it fits in my living room. And it came with an ottoman - bonus!
Tiffany, of course, being a person of Style and Taste, plans on recovering them with fabric that will go with the overall motif of whatever room we wind up putting them in. This will, we hope, be after we move into the new house as there's no place for them in the current house. I'm not sure what she plans on doing with them in the meantime, but I'm sure she has something in mind.
As far as the new house goes, we've settled on a price and will go forward with signing another large wad of legal documents. The inspection is next, which may yield an additional bargaining chip or two. Stay tuned.
Ginger talks about the sad state of computer documentation, and wonders how one can redirect mail in Outlook. I have good news and bad news for you, Ginger. It looks like it can be done, but as if often the case with Microsoft, it depends.
I dinked around in my Outlook 2000 client at work, and in the Rules Wizard there is an option to "redirect" mail (as opposed to "forward" mail) to another person. I didn't finish off this rule - more on that in a minute - but it seems to me that this would do what you and David Pogue would want, as it seems like the equivalent of setting an alternate recipient on the mailbox via Exchange Admin.
The bad news is that this can only be done as a server-side rule. Most of the rules on my profile say "client only", and when I tried to add a rule to test this out, it refused since I was apparently trying to add a client-side rule. Of course, with Outlook, it's impossible to tell how and why rules are client- or server-side. I do have one server-side rule on this profile, so I know I can test this out, but I'll probably build a new profile and test it out on that instead. I'll let you know if I succeed. And you do need Outlook 2000 - a warning popped up when I picked the "redirect" criterion to make sure I knew that. You'd think the software would know its own version...oh, let's not go there.
Matt Welch recently pointed out a bizarre interview in the Chicago Tribune with Ralph Nader. I don't normally do this sort of thing, but I think this deserves some deconstructing. I'm going to quote selectively, so go to the link above if you want to see the whole thing.
Q. You write that people who accused you of merely taking votes away from Gore missed the point. What was the point?A. The point was to build a broad-based political movement that transcended any single election. [...]
Call me Mister Obvious, but in order to build a broad-based political movement, one must have a political platform with broad appeal. How many moderates and conservatives found Ralph and his merry band of WTO-protesting kiddies to be appealing? Ralph was skimming from the left end of the Democratic party. There's no broad base in that.
Q. Did you accomplish your goal?A. The first stage, certainly. When was the last time any progressive party got 3 million votes? [...]
It's a bit disingenuous of Ralph to proclaim success here, since before the election the Greenies were talking big about getting 5% of the vote and qualifying for federal funds in 2004. They wound up with 2.7% of the vote instead. That's one out of thirty-seven. I'm willing to bet that if you rounded up thirty-seven random voters, you could find at least one who believes that Elvis is alive, that space aliens are being autopsied in Nevada right now, or that God planted dinosaur bones around the globe to fool us into thinking the earth was more than 6000 years old. Or perhaps that Ralph Nader was a viable Presidential candidate.
To answer his question, I suppose that depends on one's definition of "progressive", but allowing a subjective response would be 1996, when Ross Perot and the Reform Party got 8 million votes. In 1992, Perot got nearly 20 million. And, for your beloved young people who've probably never heard of him, in 1980 John Anderson got 5.7 million votes. (Thanks to David Leip's excellent US Election Atlas for the data.) In case you're curious, Ralph, they all got more votes than you because they had broad appeal.
Q. What is the biggest impediment to the rise of a progressive third party in this country?A. One is the winner-take-all mentality. If people don't think you can win, they won't vote for you. [...]
Yes, it's shocking how people would rather vote for someone who has a chance of actually acheiving office, where they might be able to do some good. How much better it is to vote for a surefire loser who is pure in heart. After all, someone who never gets elected will never disappoint you by compromising or making decisions with which you disagree because it's in the greater interest. Noble failure is so romantic, isn't it?
Q. Would you rather Al Gore had won?A. The similarities between the two towered over dwindling differences, so I was indifferent to whether Bush or Gore won. [...]
Ralph's thing all along has been how Bush and Gore are essentially the same. Let's check a few issues and see if they're the same or not, shall we?
- Abortion? Different.
- Gun control? Different.
- Huge tax cuts which skew towards the upper income brackets? Different.
- Privatizing Social Security? Different.
- School vouchers? Different.
- Drilling in the ANWR? Different.
I could go on, but this point has been made many times before. Even if you minimize all of these things, let's not forget that if Gore had won, John Aschroft would be just another talking head on Fox News. 'Nuff said.
Q. Would you have made an effective wartime president?A. This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years.
Ralph, do you honestly believe that in the nine months between January 20 and September 11 that you could have forced all domestic airlines to fit all their planes with stronger cockpit doors? I don't believe this could have been fully accomplished in nine months even if the airlines had wanted to do it. Even putting that aside, before 9/11 pilots and crew were trained to accede to hijackers. They were taught to get the plane safely to the ground and let the authorities there deal with the situation. In other words, the hijackers very likely would have been given access to the cockpits by the pilots as part of their training on how to handle hijackings. This is nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst kind.
Q. But could a president from the Green Party, which advocates non-violence, wage war?A. Non-violence does not mean that you let people destroy you, because that encourages violence. In other words, we wouldn't foment aggressive war, but we would certainly have a very strong defense. The Green Party stands for health and safety, and safety means security. But we'll do it in a smarter way. The key in the Green Party is to foresee and forestall, and one way you do that is to put meat and potatoes on what Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell said: that this kind of terrorism is tolerated and bred by poverty, injustice, dictatorships, destitution and human suffering.
Yes, but how would you have dealt with the situation? Harsh language? Ralph sounds like he's taken the Tom Lehrer song Folk Song Army way too seriously:
We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.
Look at this transcript of Nader with Bill O'Reilly. I'm no fan of Dubya, but thank God he's surrounded by people who had the guts to do what needed to be done.
There was a time when I had respect for Ralph Nader. I even briefly considered doing one of those vote-swaps for him, since my vote in Texas wasn't gonna count. I eventually rejected that on principle, and I've not regretted it a bit. He's a pathetic shadow of what he once was, and he has no realization of the depths to which he's fallen. Sad.
In today's Chron, there's an ad for the new movie Super Troopers. This ad contains the following pull quote from critic Lou Lumenick of the New York Post: "An Amazingly High Joke-to-Laugh Ratio!"
Um, you do know that this means the movie contains way more jokes than laughs, right? Lumenick did in fact give this movie a good review, so I guess this is just another case of what John Allen Paulos calls "innumeracy".
According to his regular newsletter, Michael Moore is calling for President Bush to resign during the 7th inning stretch on Opening Day at Enron Field, which will be on April 2. I quote from the letter, to which Amy was kind enough to point me:
Finally, I want you to know that I will be looking forward to only one thing during this entire book tour -- Opening Day of the 2002 Major League Baseball season! Why? Because that is the day I am asking George W. Bush to resign. And I want the resignation to take place right in the middle of Enron Field in Houston during the 7th-inning stretch of the Astros-Brewers game. I've asked if I can throw out the first pitch at 4:05pm CT.
I mean, can there be a more perfect way to end the madness -- Bush, Lay, Mike, Texas, America's Favorite Pastime, and the visiting team from a Blue State owned by the Commissioner of Baseball (who will hand over his job to the ex-"president" as the fans sing "Da Do En-ron-ron Da Do En-ron")?
C'mon, George, are ya listening? Just step up to the microphone and go out like Gehrig! Opening Day, April 2, 2002. Yoooou're Ouuuuuuuut!!!
Putting aside the fact that Moore and his minions did their best to help Bush win in the first place, I have to ask what normally would be a stupid question: Doesn't Moore realize that this would make Dick Cheney President? How, exactly, will this end the "madness" that he refers to? I'd guess that Moore is fondly recalling the good old pre-Twelfth Amendment days, when Al Gore would've been Vice President, except that (oops!) Moore doesn't like Gore, either.
Ah, who cares about such details when you've got a book to pimp. Way to market, Mike! You're a good little capitalist, aren't you? By the way, the link to his latest and greatest provided here is straight from Amazon rather than the one that refers to his site, from which Moore presumably gets a kickback. Just my little subversion for the day.
Karin sent me a note about an upcoming homage to Can't Stop The Music at the Austin Drafthouse by local comedy troupe Mr. Sinus Theater 3000. I have to say, I'm just sick with jealousy that I won't be able to see this. It's just wrong that Houston has nothing comparable to this.
I suppose I'll have to console myself by going to the Sing-Along Sound of Music while it's here in town. Wonder where I can find a nun costume...
The owners of the house we want have come back with a counteroffer. We're still apart on price but I think we'll be able to meet in the middle. We've given a new offer to our real estate agent to take back to them.
In the meantime, maybe we should have looked for a self-cleaning house like this one.
Dahlia Lithwick discusses Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's reasoning behind his recent claims that Catholic judges who believe the Church's teaching that capital punishment is wrong should not be on the bench. Scalia, who is a devout Catholic, is not arguing for his own resignation but is advocating his position of originalism, or strict constructionism, as a means around this dilemma.
Originalism (colloquially known also as "strict construction") requires interpreting the law based on the principle that the Constitution means only what it meant to the framers who adopted it. For Scalia, capital punishment was constitutional at the time of the framers, so it is constitutional today. Period. Since the framers had no intention of protecting the right to choose, he can oppose abortion as a constitutional matter while purporting to be morally neutral on the issue. As he said at the Pew conference: "[M]y difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than moral one. I do not believe - and no one believed for 200 years - that the Constitution contains a right to abortion." By following the flame of originalism, Scalia can lead his flock of tortured Catholic judges out of the constitutional wilderness. Their personal morality and even the dictates of the church are immaterial. Their only judicial task is to follow the intent of the framers. This method of interpretation allows Scalia to look value-neutral, even when his own writings often belie that neutrality. As he told the Pew conference while defending the death penalty, "That is not to say that I favor the death penalty. I am judicially and judiciously neutral on that point."
This is, as Lithwick points out, quite convenient for Scalia, as he believes the Founders views coincide nicely with his own. If you know and follow the intent of the Framers, you have a clear way to rule on any given matter of law.
I have two basic problems with this. One, of course, is that it's easy to say that one knows the intent of men who have been dead for two centuries. We have their written words, but to say that there is One True Way to interpret those words strikes me as being rather presumptuous. Hasn't the email revolution taught us that it's often easy to misconstrue written communications? The Framers aren't here for us to ask them what they really meant, so why is Mr. Justice Scalia's interpretation of their words any more correct than, say, Barbara Tuchman's or Arthur Schlesinger's? Or mine or yours, for that matter.
Further, while Scalia dismisses the idea of interjecting modern mores into Constitutional considerations, he has no problems with using old ones. If the Framers would have considered abortion to be unconstitutional, might it be in part because they also considered women to be unworthy of the right to vote? Or that certain people could be owned as slaves? In other words, if these intelligent and well-educated men existed today instead of in the late 18th century, isn't it at least possible that some of them might view the abortion question differently? If so, then why must we deny ourselves 200 years of extensions and improvements to the ideas that they acted upon at that time?
Which leads me to my second objection. It seems to me that the Framers themselves recognized that what they were writing down in 1787 was unlikely to be perfect forever, since after all they did build in a mechanism for amending their work. I believe there are two basic reasons why we have done so: To respond to situations which the Framers could not have foreseen, and to fix their mistakes.
An example of the former is the 20th Amendment, which changed Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20. Originally, several months were needed for the transition to a new administration - it took weeks just to get everyone to DC. By 1932, when the 20th was ratified, advances in transportation and in communications - which were clearly unknown and presumably unknowable in 1787 - made the long transition period awkward and necessitated the change.
The rest of the amendments, however, were more or less corrective in order. Nothing fundamentally changed about women (#19) or blacks (#13, #14, #15), or the Senate (#17) that necessitated their Constitutional change in status. This was the country recognizing that what the Framers had intended originally was wrong, and that it should be fixed.
If you accept that, then it follows that the original intent of the Framers is not sacrosanct. By all means, it should be considered and weighed heavily, but surely someone with Scalia's intellect is capable of deciding when the original intent is not in the best Constitutional interests of the United States in the 21st century. Again, why shouldn't we be allowed to use what we've learned in the two centuries since ratification to interpret our laws?
Antonin Scalia's approach to the Constitution is certainly a valid one. It's logically consistent and is useful for approaching practical problems. He claims it's the best approach. I disagree, but that's a matter of opinion. If he says it's the only approach, however, then he's wrong. Our history clearly says so.
It's my birthday, too, yeah. I'm exactly the same age as Justine Bateman, and exactly one day older than Cindy Crawford. Here's what else has happened on my birthday. Nice of the Senate to celebrate my 20th by outlawing genocide, doncha think?
I finally got a Blackberry wireless email device. With my pager and cellphone, this means I am now officially a triple-threat geek. Tremble in my presence, mortals!
Continental Airlines CEO Gordon Bethune lauds Tom DeLay for all his help to the airline industry after 9/11. There are many ways that one can be snarky about this sort of thing, but I'll settle for the one that's closest to my heart: Why is it that funds for rail require a local referendum, but funds for all other forms of transportation can be freely given?
We showed up at the Dome a bit before 7 last night in anticipation of the Martina McBride/Lyle Lovett double bill. I, having never actually been to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, expected that the "7 PM" time listed on the concert page meant that McBride would start at seven, play for an hour or so as most opening acts do, then Lovett would take the stage for up to two hours.
Wrongo. First, we got the Catalena Cowgirls, followed by a wagon-train introduction of the rodeo head honchos and various special guests. The most notable special guest was former Oilers head coach Bum Phillips, who got a rousing ovation. Ask any longtime Houstonian, they'll tell you that the beginning of the end of the Oilers in Houston was the day Bum got fired.
We then got about two hours of actual rodeo. As this was all new to me, it was interesting, though probably about an hour more than my attention span could handle. We saw various competitive events plus the calf scramble, which has to be seen to be believed. I don't mean to make fun, here - the rodeo is very much about scholarships for kids, and the scramble is one way kids can get scholarship money.
At long last, it was music time. First up was McBride. I don't follow pop country, so I'd never heard any of her stuff. She has a very good voice, and can really belt them out. She's also a babe, which never hurts. She's from Kansas and told about how her family would make a big event out of the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz (note to Mikey and any other obnoxious young'uns reading this: Some of us are old enough to remember life before VCRs), then launched into an excellent rendition of Over the Rainbow.
Next was Lovett and his Large Band. If your only impression of Lyle Lovett is "that guy with the funny hair who was married to Julia Roberts for 30 seconds", I suggest you learn more about him, as he's one of the most original voices in music today. If you countrified the 60s group Blood Sweat and Tears you'd have something close to Lovett's sound.
I only wish there had been time for more music, but at least now I know not to get there too early on Wednesday for Bob Dylan. Here's the Chronicle review of last night's show if you want more details about it.
On a side note, this is the 37th and last year that the Rodeo will be in the Dome. Next year it moves to the new Reliant Stadium, home of the Houston Texans football team. (Yeah, I think that's a lame name, too.) The Astrodome is now officially called the "Reliant Astrodome", but I'll call it "Harris County Domed Stadium" before I call it that. I can accept "Enron Field", and I can (barely) accept "Compaq Center", but "Reliant Astrodome"? Never.
This is really scary. A coworker just pointed me to the Houston Curling Club homepage. If you go to their Snapshots page and click on the photo on the top right, the guy crouching on the lower left is a dead ringer for me. Even worse, he's wearing a T-shirt, shorts and white tube socks, which means he even dresses like me. Thankfully, the picture in the lower right makes it clear that he's not actually me - his hair is too dark, and he's not wearing glasses. Whew!
Guess this is my punishment for mocking Fritz Schranck. Lesson learned: Never annoy a web-enabled district attorney.
Received an email today with the subject "Save over 300% on Medication". Nice to know that Andy Fastow has found something to do in his spare time.
I work for a large multinational corporation, the kind of place that the anti-globo folks hate. It's actually a rather progressive place to work, and has a fairly strong record of emphasizing diversity.
Today we had a diversity activity in honor of Black History Month. The activity, sponsored by a black employees' networking group, was karaoke singing in the cafeteria. I just heard a report that one of my male coworkers dressed up as Gladys Knight to sing "Midnight Train to Georgia". He had four other coworkers singing backup for him - after all, what's the point of being Gladys Knight if you don't have any Pips? I am truly sorry that I missed this, but I'm consoling myself on rumors that photos were taken.
Any more questions about why celebrating Black History Month is a good thing?
Duncan Fitzgerald adds a nice coda to my post about how Britney's movie may be a bad career move. The relationship between movies, music, and (of course) marketing is a complex one. I suppose we should just be grateful if Britney doesn't make any movies that feature her parachuting onto a beach.
Reading Duncan's post reminded me that we both overlooked one of the seminal movie/music/marketing crossovers, Can't Stop the Music, which not only helped kill the Village People, it also strangled Bruce Jenner's movie career in its crib. Hell, this movie may well have been the death knell for disco itself. Truly, we owe director Nancy Walker and her cast and crew a debt which can never be fully repaid.
We have tickets for two shows at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this week. Monday is Lyle Lovett, and Wednesday is Bob Dylan. (What, you thought it's only country/western music at the HLSR?) Friday I'm meeting some friends at a local pub to see the Asylum Street Spankers, who are briefly touring with original Spanker and badass bluesman Guy Forsyth. Saturday we've been invited to a champagne-tasting party. Oh, and Tuesday's my 36th birthday.
So this means I may be light on the postings this week. Things should be back to normal by week's end.
The Sunday Chron has a longish feature about racial tensions at Texas A&M University. A&M is a unique school. Its students and alumni are zealous about its history and traditions. Sometimes, that zeal and those traditions lead to conflicts with students who don't feel included by them.
From BBC Sport's Funny Old Game:
The question of what exactly Scottish men keep under their kilts has long been a source of titillation and mirth for folk south of the border.Now a team of hardened celtic rowers have left nothing to the imagination - by practising in the nude.
The Robert Gordon University rowing team has never beaten Aberdeen University in the seven-year history of their annual race.
So this year, ahead of the race on 2 March, the Robert Gordon team have decided to toughen themselves up by rowing naked on the River Dee.
A spokesman for the team told the Daily Record: "The Aberdeen University team have been wearing the trousers in this race for far too long and we are absolutely determined to put an end to their winning streak.
"We thought we'd go back to nature and find out exactly what natural assets we have for rowing.
"However, I'm not sure this will be a regular fixture on our training schedule for this time of year. We have been very cold."
One word: Shrinkage.
We made a contingency offer on the house we've been looking at. T and I spent an hour with our real estate agent initialing and signing a boatload of papers pertaining to this. We made the seller a slightly lowball offer, but the house has been on the market for a long time (longer than we originally thought), so I'm sure they'll listen.
We had our house painted this week, which led a couple of our neighbors to ask if we were planning to sell. They were pleased to hear that if all goes well we'll still be in the neighborhood. We're happy with the paint job, but the flower beds got trampled in the process. We did some triage on it this morning, so hopefully it'll look OK by the time we get our house on the market.
There are still a couple of minor things to fix inside, mostly to repair some dog-related damage. Our dog Harry has a favorite window from which he likes to bark at trucks, other dogs, and miscellaneous passersby. He's dinged the sheetrock on the wall and taken some big gouges out of the windowsill with his claws. The new house has lower windows and faces an esplanade that's popular with dogwalkers, so we've been plotting dog containment strategies. The layout of the new house is conducive to keeping him in the back area, in and around the kitchen, so that's likely to be our plan.
The fun really begins when we hear back from the seller, and when we put our house up for sale. March and April are gonna be hella busy.
Megan misses the point when she responds to my question "why is it a problem if Ivy League professors skew left?" She starts by asking how I'd feel if the shoe was on the other foot:
The first is to ask how you would feel if Oral Roberts and their ilk were the gateway to the good life for your children? Would you be happy that the only way you could get your children the most prestigious education was by sending them somwhere where the political center was around, say, the National Review -- and there were no professors in many departments with any other point of view?
Are you suggesting that an Ivy League education is the only gateway to the good life? I'm sure all of the graduates of UT and Texas A&M here will be surprised to hear that. You are overvaluing the prestige of an Ivy League education, which is something that folks on the East Coast tend to do relative to the rest of the country. The way to get ahead here in Texas is to go to UT or A&M, where you'll get a perfectly decent education at a low cost, and where you'll plug directly into the good ol' boy network. I guarantee you that in business and in politics, both here and in a lot of non-Northeastern states, being an alum of one of the state schools will carry more weight than being a Harvard grad would.
Before anyone points to our president as a counterexample, I'll remind you that Bush was plugged into the good ol' boy network here long before he started college, regardless of where he went. And in the 2000 Presidential election, which candidate was generally portrayed as a stuffy egghead, and which one was thought to be the kind of guy you could have a beer with? Dubya got no bonus from his Ivy League education. He overcame his Ivy League education.
The reason why I say that Horowitz's survey is meaningless is because any college education is a good start to the good life, though of course it's far from the only way to acheive it. Ivy League alumni comprise a tiny percentage of the American population. If they're the only ones who can truly succeed, then our capitalist system isn't working too well, wouldn't you say?
Look, an Ivy League diploma is considered more valuable than a diploma from another school because an Ivy League education is perceived to be better than that which can be had from other schools. Now, either the Ivy League education is in fact better or it isn't. If it is, that invalidates the hypothesis that there's something damaging about an excessively liberal faculty. If it isn't, then the market will adjust to correct for that. I can't believe I have to explain this to a libertarian.
And to a certain extent, the market is already moving that way. There are a fair number of schools that now position themselves as offering an equivalent education to the Ivies at a much lower price. Take a look at the US News rankings of best value, where you'll find Rice right up there with Harvard. The more expensive Ivy League tuition becomes, the more people will look for good alternatives. I daresay the same thing will happen if people begin to believe that the Ivies are just a refuge for empty liberal rhetoric.
Megan then goes on to say
The total dominance of the left is encouraging intellectual complacency, shutting down debate in many areas, and in general creating an unhealthy atrophy in the intellectual atmosphere of many humanities departments -- just as it would be if 94% of the academy hailed from the right.
Wait a minute - Horowitz only surveyed Ivy League profs. How do you get from there to the claim that all colleges are 94% liberal? If there's a flaw in Horowitz's survey, it's taking the results of a specific sample and generalizing it to people who are not part of that sample. You'll have to show me a survey that includes profs at Brigham Young, Baylor, and Notre Dame before I grant you any validity here.
I'll say it again. Horowitz commissioned this survey for one reason: to validate his worldview that the liberals are out to get him. The result, which I'm perfectly willing to concede is statistically valid, means nothing.
One last thing: If you're going to cite my arguments, please cite them correctly. I made a joke about affirmative action for right-wing profs. I even called it a "cheap" joke. If I had really been advocating that position, I assure you that I'd have had more to say about it than a single throwaway quip.
The IOC has awarded a second gold medal to Jaime Sale and David Pelletier, thus ending the biggest scandal of these Olympics. Canada whoops it up, and Russia pitches a fit.
Meanwhile, I've been getting a ton of Google hits from people searching for "Jaime Sale". Between this post and the one about Britney, I'm really pimping for some numbers. Watch that counter shoot skyward, baby!
I'd like to do a little followup on my post from yesterday in which I discussed David Horowitz's survey which claims to prove that Ivy League professors are more liberal than most Americans. I'll start by explaining why this claim doesn't impress me.
Suppose you come across the following sentence in an op-ed piece: "This move is an attempt by President Bush to appease the extreme right wing of the Republican Party." How likely are you to accept the word of the author that the president has done something bad?
Well, if you are on the right-hand side of the political spectrum and those words were written by someone like Molly Ivins or Michael Kinsley, I'll bet the answer is "not bloody likely". You expect someone like that to view most things that President Bush does in a negative light, and thus to portray them negatively in their words. Their idea of what "extreme right wing" means is probably not the same as yours, and they're more likely to consider something that "appeases" them to be bad than you are.
Now suppose the writer is Robert Novak or Bill Kristol. You're more likely to sit up and pay attention, right? You know these guys don't consider "right wing" to be dirty words, and you know they don't make cheap jokes about President Bush's intelligence or legitimacy. In short, they're credible, and if they have something negative to say about Bush or the Republicans, it's worth your time to listen to them.
If that makes sense to you, then you understand why those of us on the left-hand side of the equation, upon hearing of Horowitz's latest crusade, react by saying "Wow, David Horowitz thinks liberals are bad. Film at 11." Every single column or article ever written by Horowitz can be summed up as "Liberals bad. Conservatives good. See what those nasty liberals are doing to these good conservatives? Why don't they ever realize how bad they are?" Bless my pointy little head, he's got just such a column in Salon today. It's Premium, so you may not be able to see the whole thing, but the subhead is "Liberal intellectuals who praise Bush for prosecuting the war but still insist he's stupid are the real dummies". Need I say more?
I'm not saying anything profound here, just that it's often worthwhile to consider the source. Writers like Horowitz have a vested interest in making their guys look good and the other guys look bad. It's to be expected. If he ever wants to be taken seriously by someone who isn't already in agreement with him, he's gonna need a big heaping dose of intellectual honesty.
Which brings me to my next point, about hypocrisy. Sgt. Stryker recently posted that "[h]ypocrisy isn't the sole domain of the left", followed by a couple of quotes from The Corner on National Review Online. The first complained about "New York elites" who consider most people to be "cultural retards", and the second called Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee "a trash-can diva".
Full marks to the Sarge for recognizing the hypocrisy, but a brickbat for being surprised by it. Hypocrisy is the domain of those who believe they and those who think like them are always right. It is the domain of those who only see and accept evidence that supports their position, and discard and discredit evidence which contradicts them. It has nothing to do with which direction you lean and everything to do with refusing to acknowledge that there might be something in those other directions.
In sum, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith: "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." That's hypocrisy.
It's hard to fully appreciate the horror that is Britney Spears' new movie Crossroads. I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around this professional virgin pop singer who gets to star in her very own Mary Sue. How much more can we be expected to endure?
But it occurred to me this morning that if you hate all things Britney, perhaps her making a movie is the best thing to happen. Think about all of the other annoying pop singers who made awful, critically panned and financially disastrous movies, and how many of them essentially disappeared from the limelight afterwards. Condsider: Has Vanilla Ice done anything since Cool as Ice? Didn't Mariah Carey have a breakdown and get released from her recording contract after Glitter came out? Has anyone seen Andrew Dice Clay since The Adventures of Ford Fairlane? Okay, technically Dice wasn't a pop singer but geez was he annoying.
This method isn't perfect, I'll admit. Whitney Houston survived The Bodyguard, though it's been rough for Kevin Costner since then (not that this is a bad thing). Mandy Moore will probably survive A Walk to Remember. But there's hope, and that's all that we can ask for.
In the meantime, content yourself with this incredibly funny and biting review from MaryAnn Johanson aka the Flick Filosopher, from whom I shamelessly borrowed the title of this blog entry.
Megan McArdle has an interesting thread going about a survey commissioned by David Horowitz which claims that professors at Ivy League universities are much more liberal than the American population at large. The thread starts here, with followups here, here, and here.
I'm going to make one side comment first, just to get it out of the way. David Horowitz is, in my humble opinion, a complete nutbag. He sees Left-Wing Conspiracies everywhere he looks. He's a shameless publicity hound, and as his slavery-reparations advertisement debacle showed last year, an expert in playing the Professional Victim game. It's very difficult to believe that he commissioned this survey with an open mind, especially given that he hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who's been known to bend facts to suit his beliefs (see this Virginia Postrel archive page, and search for "Luntz").
All that said, it's certainly possible that they're right and that Ivy League professors are in fact way out of step with the rest of us Just Plain Folks. Well, then what? McArdle isn't sure:
It's important to look at the whole academy, but especially at humanities at elite schools, because that's where a majority of the media, especially the major media, derive their ideas, and there is data that suggests that they perceive the world to be centered considerably to the left of the country's political center, and that they tend to discount the bona fides of conservative intellectuals. Moreover, it would be better for the academy as a whole to have all sides represented in debates, so that students could develop sharper analytical skills. However, while it is important to address hiring bias, or self-selection due to perceived discrimination, it would be folly to enact remedies that lower the rigorous intellectual standards of the academy. The only caveat is that we must ensure that the existing professors don't set up the rigorous standards to exclude conservative thought.
Now, how do we bell the cat? Any suggestions?
There's a cheap joke about affirmative action for right-wing professors to be made here, but it's not what I came here to do. I'm genuinely interested in what sort of remedies might be acceptable to address this problem (and I'm not yet willing to concede that there is a problem; more on that later).
After all, why isn't the Free Market the solution here? Let everyone know the political leanings of every professor and institution, and thus let the informed consumers (i.e., those who plan on going to college) decide what best suits them. If the Ivies are too damn liberal, start your own college with a greater diversity of viewpoints, or just one which only allows right-wing professors. It's not like there's any restriction on founding a university. It simply takes money and people. Sure, you may not have the cachet of Harvard or Princeton, but if you truly believe that those schools are doomed to obsolescence by their slanted politics, then the market is ripe for a competitive alternative. Who's to say that in twenty or fifty years Reagan University can't be a top ten school? One of the commenters on Megan's last post explicitly makes this point.
Getting back to this issue of whether this is a problem at all if Horowitz's claims are true: I didn't go to an Ivy League school, but I did go to a very good private liberal arts institution. At the time I attended, many of the professors were relatively new hires. Most of them were children of the 60s, with the liberal creds to go along. I had my fair share of classes taught by unapologetic lefties. I like to think that my critical thinking skills came out more or less intact. Of course, I was a math major, and I managed to avoid some of the fluffier lib-arts classes.
But even still, my recollection of many of these liberal professors is that they were really good at their jobs. They were good teachers who respected their students and those students' opinions. I'd have to doublecheck with some of my Republican classmates, but at the time I don't recall any of them complaining about bias. Was I just lucky? I don't know.
This is just anecdotal evidence, so take it with the grain of salt it deserves. All I'm saying is that if the evidence does in fact show that Ivy League profs are Too Liberal For Our Own Good, that still doesn't mean that taking classes from them will turn you into a zombie of the radical left. Whether true or not, the Ivies have had the reputation of being a haven for lefties for years now. Anyone who goes there without knowing this beforehand has no real right to complain about it, and anyone who goes there with this foreknowledge is presumed to be forearmed. So what's the fuss?
My alma mater, Trinity University, featured two all-school semi-formal dances per year, with the spring dance being, appropriately enough, a Valentine's Day dance. In 1987 during my junior year, my roommate Greg and our suitemates made plans to go to the spring fete, to be held at a downtown hotel.
(Historical footnote: There's a picture that survives from this event. I had really shaggy hair back then, and my only tie was a blue knit. Thankfully, there's no scanned image of this photo, so you're in no danger of seeing it any time soon.)
My roommate Greg drove a little white 1964 Volvo sports car, which I nicknamed Lazarus for its propensity to die and be brought back to life by providential forces. As the day of the dance approached, his car died on him again. He tried to start it but eventually gave up and called his sister Susie, who attended college at Our Lady of the Lake University, which is also in San Antonio. Susie drove over to the TU campus, gave the keys to Greg, hopped in the passenger's seat so he could drive her back to OLLU, and watched in horror as her car sputtered, gasped, and croaked. Yep, Greg had become an automotive serial killer. Nonetheless, I loaned him my beloved 1969 Nova to take Susie back to her campus, secure in the knowledge that my car could take care of herself.
So Greg called Dana, his date, and confessed his plight. No problem, said Dana, I just got my car back from my dad. Dad's a mechanic and he just tuned it up, so we'll use my wheels. Little did she know...
Now Greg is nothing if not romantic. He heard an ad on the radio for a Valentine's Day dinner special at a local Italian restaurant, featuring dinner for two, wine and dessert for a reasonable price. As V-Day was that Friday, the day of the dance, he made a reservation for 8 PM. The dance was slated to go from 9 PM to 1 AM.
We others, too cheap and/or unromantic to follow Greg's example, got to the dance at 9, just before a torrential downpour hit the River City. We ate, drank, danced, made merry, and as the hour grew later and their absence got more noticeable, speculated with increasing titillation as to just what the heck Greg and Dana were up to. Finally, one AM arrived with no sign of them. We headed home, and I wondered if I was going to find myself locked out of the dorm room.
The door was unlocked when we got there, so my date and I entered my room. There on the couch we found Greg and Dana, both fully dressed, slightly wet, and in Dana's case, a bit drunk. Greg told the sad tale: On the way down highway 281 in the midst of this biblical rainstorm, smoke and steam started pouring from under the hood of Dana's car. A radiator hose had burst, and the car had overheated. They were stuck. Fortunately, on such a night, freelance tow trucks cruised the freeways, and they didn't have to wait long before one showed up to tow them home. They glumly piled into the cab of the truck to discover that the driver's wife and two small children were also there. Apparently, Mrs. Driver didn't want her husband to be lonely on Valentine's Day, so she and the kids accompanied him for the night. Somehow, this made the ride back to campus a little nicer, albeit a lot more crowded. The rest of the evening was spent drying off and drinking wine.
When I first related this story to a coworker, it didn't strike me until I was finished that these events had taken place 10 years before. It's now been 15 years, and as I did then I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Tow-Truck Driver are doing these days. Happy Valentine's Day to all, especially my old classmates and extra-especially to Greg, who only killed one more vehicle that year as far as I can recall.
An even better Valentine's Day story can be found here, in this tale of a WTC survivor and his wedding ring.
I got a reply to this post from Joe Morales, brother of Democratic candidate for US Senate Victor Morales. With his permission, I'm reprinting his note to me:
It is not unusual that a lot of people don't know of Victor Morales' strength in this year's primary. What most people don't know is that for the last 5 years Victor has been touring the state of Texas ( and other states to a lesser extent) as a Motivational speaker, speaking at the major Texas colleges, high schools, and elementaries. All of those kids (which would add up to the thousands) would go home and naturally in some if not most cases tell their parents about their school experiences.Victor was doing this full time but of course it was not newsworthy so many people did not know except those of us involved, such as family, friends and students, that his name and face was out in the public eye almost non-stop since 1996. That was one of the main reasons given our discussions, that Victor decided to run. Many hundreds of adults still remembered him, liked his sincerity and knowledge of issues (which were never reported in the media) and encouraged him to run again. After all, he was a high school civics and government teacher for years and years so he had more knowledge than given credit for.
So his strength to those close to him was no surprise even to the Democratic higher ups who were calling him trying to get him to not run for office. One Democratic leader went so far as to offer a high government office (which I won't divulge to prevent embarressment for that person) if he would support their candidate, work in his campaign and not run for office. Even Mayor Kirk called to ask for his support. I could go on and on about what happened behind the scenes but let's just wait and see where this Senate race ends up. I'll bet more folks will be surprised by the outcome. After all, the polls show Victor only 5 points behind The AG in a head to head matchup in Nov.
This article in Roll Call mentions the mere 5-point gap between Victor Morales and presumptive Republican nominee (he's unopposed in the primary) John Cornyn. Of course, the same poll shows Ron Kirk trailing by six points and Ken Bentsen by eight, so it may be more about Cornyn than Morales. Still, given what a GOP stronghold Texas has become and given that the Attorney General and former judge Cornyn is a well-known name, that's encouraging for the Dems.
Whether you viewed Victor Morales' 1996 quest as quixotic or energizing, the fact that he scored 45% of the vote against a powerful incumbent who outspent him 14-1 is impressive. If he wins the nomination, he's once again likely to do better than anyone thinks. I sure won't make the mistake of forgetting about him again.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras and the first day of Lent. Tiffany traditionally gives up chocolate for Lent. I figure that means that I don't have to give up anything. I'm going to be living with a chocolate-deprived wife for 40 days. Haven't I suffered enough?
The Enron exec (she's still with the company) and whistleblower has placed no limits on what questions she'll answer. Keep quiet, Kenny Boy. It ain't gonna matter.
Meanwhile, the oh-so-poor Lays have sold their cottage in Aspen for $10 million, "fetching the highest price per square foot that real estate agents can remember in this haven for the rich and famous." They bought the place for $1.9 million in 1991. Nice to hear that they've got resources beyond Enron stock, no?
Also taking the Fifth this week was Craig Rosebrough, an alleged leader of the radical Earth Liberation Front. I say "alleged" here because he's never been directly linked to any of their activities, he's only ever claimed to be a conduit for their communiques. The ELF, in case you're not familiar with them, makes their political statements by destroying new developments that they dislike, usually via arson. In 1998,they burned down a ski resort in Vail, which caused $12 million in damage.
So far, no one has been killed by the ELF's actions, as they tend to do their thing when buildings are known to be empty. As FBI counterterrorism official James Jarboe said, "[I]t is only a matter of time before they accidentally kill someone". Firefighters have in fact nearly been killed, according to Jarboe. Think the ELF will get any sympathy from the public if a firefighter dies while dealing with their handiwork? I don't.
The new 55 MPH speed limit signs are continuing to go up, despite the request of the Harris County attorney to suspend implementation. Now we're waiting on a ruling from the state, which seems to be saying "we can go along with this if you want, but if the feds crack down it's your ass". I won't shed any tears if they abandon the lower speed limit, but I sure hope the local powers that be know what they're doing.
Damian Penny points to the unfolding figure skating scandal in which French and Russian judges collaborated to give the gold to Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. Justin Slotman also has some good stuff.
I don't watch figure skating, so I can't judge the case that Jaime Sale and David Pelletier should have won convincingly. I will say that all joking about "Russian judges" aside, I haven't seen this much fuss about an official's decision since the 1972 US-USSR basketball game. I'm impressed.
There is a silver lining in all this, from the ESPN article linked above:
Until Monday, only a few diehard figure skating fans in North America knew who Sale and Pelletier were. That's all changed."Their agent told me he's had about a hundred calls," Brennan said. "I'm guessing they are now a household name, which never would have been if they'd won the gold medal with no controversy. I would imagine that they became millionaires in the last 24 hours. The sympathy factor is huge."
Living well is the best revenge, eh?
Fritz Schranck defends curling, quite possibly the only Olympic sport which can be played by people with beer guts, at least until bridge gets certified. I'm glad you like it, Fritz, but curling strikes me as shuffleboard on ice. On the other hand, unlike figure skating, at least the outcome in curling is objectively determined.
Andrew Hofer has explained the concept of derivatives to us non-financial whizzes, but though Hofer's prose is as lucid as one can be for such a topic, I guarantee that you'll enjoy Joe Bob Briggs' explanation of Enron's business more. Chuck Bob says check it out.
On a more serious note, Fritz Schranck gives a good explanation of How Things Get Done In Government. It's well worth reading, and provides (as Schranck himself mentions at the end) another good argument against term limits.
Dane Carlson, whose weblog is more technical than political, points to this interesting article on website usability. I'm definitely a technical user, so none of the concepts described within were new to me, but it reinforces the notion that many web sites suck from a user's perspective. They suck because they are designed by people who don't know and don't think to find out how people will actually use them.
Lest you think that I'm going to spend my time bashing web designers, I wanted to make the point that usability is an issue in many places, inside and outside the world of computers. Today a coworker and I spent an hour installing a component of some fax server software. We've been installing bits and pieces of this software for awhile now, and at every step there's been something about the install process that makes us swear. Today during the install we had to manually specify a bunch of directories that the program will use. There was no reason why the program didn't have a default set for these directories, with an offer to create them for us. Later, we had to specify a print queue for the software to use. The interface forced us to go through the godawful Network Neighborhood hierarchy in Windows NT, and never gave us the opportunity to type in the path we wanted to use. Unbelievable.
And then there's houses. I've already ranted some about clueless homebuilders. Last weekend we saw more examples of What Not To Do. One house we looked at had a den abutting the kitchen. The wall opposite had a fireplace with mantel and built-in bookshelves on either side. The adjoining wall had two windows, and opposite it was the stairs to the second floor.
In the corner of this room was the one cable outlet on the ground floor. The problem is, where would the TV go? Between the fireplace, bookshelves, windows, and stairway, there was no logical place for a TV. Plus, wherever you wound up putting the TV anyway, you'd either block the breakfast bar or the stairs by putting in a couch to watch the TV. Basically, once you attempt to furnish that room, it becomes useless. We really ragged on the builder for that.
That house and its neighbor, both built by the same construction company, both had finished attics on the third floor. They were intended as rec rooms, for kids or grownups, since there was no obvious place downstairs in either house. Unfortunately, there was no plumbing installed in either room, so you'd always be forced to go downstairs if you need to use the bathroom or want to have a drink. (You could install a fridge, but not one with an icemaker.) What's the point of that?
All of these things have a common feature, which is that the problems could have easily been avoided if someone had taken the time to think about how they were going to be used. Simple, isn't it?
The Harris County attorney is asking the TNRCC to reconsider implementing the 55 MPH speed limit, saying that a new study claims it will not achieve its touted air quality improvements. While I'm not surprised to see that an array of interests has sued the State Implementation Plan (SIP), I was surprised to see this statement:
Ramon Alvarez, a scientist for Environmental Defense in Austin, said the group has not promoted the 55-mph speed limit."We do not believe the strategy is as effective as the plan claims it to be. We think it will be difficult to enforce and involves the risk of creating public resentment of environmental programs," he said.
A better strategy, Alvarez said, would be to use financial incentives to reduce driving, such as basing auto insurance premiums on miles traveled instead of time, and allowing employees to pay transit fares out of pre-tax dollars.
First, the enforcement issue is one I'd wondered about. Houstonians (myself included) are notorious leadfoots. One reason why is that we can get away with it. I can't tell you how many times I've been doing 70 in a 60- or 65-MPH zone and been passed by an HPD car. I've been in Houston over 13 years and the only speeding ticket I've ever gotten was not in town. I believe most people will ignore a 55 MPH limit unless enforcement is heavily stepped up, and even then people will take their chances more often than not.
On the flip side is the fact that you can't go 55, let alone 70, on most of the freeways here much of the time. There's too many cars out there. As I've said before, all the stop-and-go driving on the roads here has got to be worse for the air than going 70 MPH, but beyond the current MetroRail plans (which is more aimed at reducing non-highway inner city traffic) there are no hard plans on the horizon to bring rail out to where the heavy stuff is. Until there's a real alternative to driving to work, we're not going to make much progress on reducing auto emissions.
Got this off a mailing list I'm on:
Heinz launches chocolate french friesBeginning in May, H.J. Heinz Co. will ship a new line of Ore-Ida frozen potato products called Funky Fries featuring five new shapes, colors and flavors, all intended to give kids even more say over their parents' grocery store lists.
The new products include French fries flavored with sour cream and chives, or cinnamon and sugar, and a new product called Crunchy Rings - basically Tater Tots with a hole in the middle.
Then there's Kool Blue - a sky blue seasoned French fry, and Cocoa Crispers -- a brown chocolate fry designed "for kids with a sweet tooth."
"We asked the kids what would make them want to eat more French fries," said John Carroll, managing director of North American potatoes and snacks for Heinz' frozen food division.
Man. No one ever had to do anything funky to get me to want to eat french fries. I always thought they were their own reward. That's great when you're a kid, not so great when you're an almost-36-year-old grownup with a desk job and a fondness for the couch. Even as I write this, I'm trying not to think about the excellent fries at Fuddruckers, which I regularly crave and am barely able to resist most of the time.
So I have a hard time understanding why anyone needs funky flavors as an enticement to eat french fries. I remember a frozen-french-fry-like product from my childhood called "I Hate X", where X was a vegetable. They made french-fry-like things out of the vegetable, on the theory that they would then be more palatable to finicky children since they looked and (sort of) tasted like french fries. It actually worked pretty well, though I still refused to touch the "I Hate Broccoli" ones. Haven't seen them in years now.
My old college roommate Greg used to dip his fries in mayonnaise. I once thought that was the best example of taking a basically unhealthy food and making it even worse for you. Then I was introduced to chili cheese fries. That sound you hear is my arteries hardening at the very thought.
I mentioned that to the other list members, and found that lots of people like dipping their fries in nontraditional condiments. The most popular, which I found moderately appalling, was Wendy's chocolate Frosties. Others voted for tartar sauce, and vinegar. Personally, when I go to Fudd's, I like to use their barbecue sauce. It's zippier than regular ketchup without being, you know, gross.
What's the strangest thing you've ever seen someone dip french fries into? Let me know, and I'll print any interesting replies I get.
Perusing my referral log (have I mentioned how addicting it is to look at one's referral log?), I see that a few people have found there way here via Google searches. So far, one person found me via a search for Rick Majerus and Temple, one by looking for "Arthur Anderson joke" (no doubt it helps to spell "Arthur Andersen" correctly), and two people have found me by searching for Angel Boris, one of whom also included "Fear Factor" in his criteria.
Dunno if these folks found what they were looking for, but the lesson is clear: Mention a Playmate, and the hits will come.
By the way, if you have some time to kill and a good vocabulary, give Googlewhacking a try.
Rany Jazayerli does a reality check on KC sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who is brimming with optimism about the Royals' chances in the upcoming season. Rany regularly writes about the foibles of his accursed favorite team, which centers around the fact that they have never figured out that scoring runs is a good thing, and to score runs you must get on base. The Royals are almost always near the bottom of the league in runs scored, walks, and on-base percentage, and their management shows no indication that they understand that these are Bad Things.
Rany bemoans the blind spot that the 1985 World Series victory has given the Royals:
The shadow of 1985 still hovers over this franchise like a giant albatross, brainwashing the Royals into thinking that offense is strictly optional for World Championship teams. The Royals won a World Series with George Brett and seven defensive specialists...In some ways, winning a World Championship with Buddy Biancalana as the starting shortstop was the worst thing that happened to the Royals.
The irony is that Buddy Biancalana had 15 minutes of fame immediately after the World Series when David Letterman invited him on the Late Night show. Part of Dave's schtick was showing highlights of Biancalana's World Series performance. What clips did Dave show? The five times that Biancalana walked. (In dramatic slow-mo, of course.)
Admittedly, a couple (two, I think) of these were intentional, as Buddy batted before the pitcher. But still, rather than lament his role on the last Royal World Series winner, I think Rany should celebrate him and hold him up as the model of the next World Series winner, whenever that may be.
Karin rants about Britney and the sad lack of powerful women in rock music nowadays. I hear what you're saying, but fercryingoutloud, how could you overlook The Pretenders? I wouldn't bet against Chrissie Hynde in any butt-kicking contest, regardless of the competition.
I suppose country music offers some hope, in the form of the Dixie Chicks and Mary-Chapin Carpenter. I'm at least as clueless as Karin as far as the hiphop world goes, so maybe the landscape is truly barren. Just don't forget about Chrissie Hynde, or it might be your butt she kicks next.
If you've come here via the link on Matt Welch's Warblog, please note that his URL contains a typo, which is why you're here at the top of the page instead of here, which is where he intended to send you.
Regardless, I'm glad you're here. Don't be a stranger, take off your coat and stay awhile.
UPDATE: I'm pretty sure this was the referral that first put me on the map. I got a ton of hits (over 200 on the first day) from this, and subsequently started seeing myself on more blogrolls. Actually, it's Matt Yglesias who deserves the most thanks, since Welch cited Yglesias' cite of my post.
Over in the Senate primary, Victor Morales has a small lead over Houston Congressman Ken Bentson and Dallas mayor Ron Kirk. This surprises me, since Morales (last seen during his 1996 race against Phil Gramm for this same Senate seat) has done nearly no advertising or campaigning so far. Heck, I'd forgotten he was in the race. Much as I admired Morales back in 1996, I'm not sure he's the one this time. It's still too early to call this race.
It should be noted that having Hispanics Democrats in the main races could be very bad news for the state GOP. Hispanics historically have not been much of a force as a voting bloc. Too many are unregistered, and too many who are registered don't vote. That could be changing, though. The lesson we learn from Orlando Sanchez's run for mayor in Houston is that Hispanic candidates will draw Hispanic voters, even (as was often the case with Orlando Sanchez) if the voters don't necessarily agree with the candidate's politics. The state GOP is hoping to capitalize on former Governor Bush's popularity with Hispanics, but I think they're going to take the historic opportunity to vote for one of their own.
Not that the Dems should get too smug about this. Governor Perry has good popularity numbers and will certainly play up his ties to the President. The GOP is also pretty adept at turning out its voters. There's no indication that Tony Sanchez or either Morales would have coattails, either, so John Sharp better make his own effort to court these voters if he wants to become Lieutenant Governor. Finally, while Orlando Sanchez may have invigorated Houston Hispanic voters, he still lost the race. Hispanic voters may have a lot of potential to determine political races, but as we know from sports, "potential" means "ain't done nothin' yet".
UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias and Ginger Stampley also have words of wisdom on this topic.
It's nearly de rigeur to complain about the coverage of the Olympics. From the extreme glut of Oprahesque stories about athletes conquered obstacles on their way to acheiving the Olympic dream, to "plausibly live" coverage, to too much focus on American athletes in events where they have no chance, to banishing the less-sexy sports from the airwaves, everyone has a gripe about what they do and don't see on NBC.
Well, here's what I think. I think NBC or whoever should look for a way to create personalized Olympic coverage. Offer a subscription for $25 or $50 that would allow a household to pick and choose exactly what events they want to see on a given day. Nonsubscribers can still watch whatever the network suits choose to air on the main station, anyone else can be their own executive producer.
I have no idea whether this is financially feasible for a network, and it may only be realistic for folks with some combination of digital cable and TiVo, or perhaps a satellite dish and TiVo, but ask yourself: Wouldn't you pay a reasonable fee for guaranteed coverage of what you want to see? It can't be that much different than established premium services like ESPN College Game Day. Why hasn't anyone thought of this?
UPDATE: Got a note from Duncan Fitzgerald, who recalls that a pay-per-view scheme was tried before, in 1992. Guess it wasn't much of a success, but surely the technology has advanced enough that it could be done better now. I think people are more used to the idea of paying for premium coverage now, which argues for another attempt. Tying into TiVo/ReplayTV technology also means you can work around the problem of when the games are in an awkward time zone for American audiences, as the 2004 Games in Athens will be. C'mon, guys. There's synergy to be captured here!
We're getting close to making an offer on the house we've been looking at. We toured three other houses yesterday, and though one of them was very nice we came away more convinced that we're not going to find anything better. Now we're getting worried that someone else will come to that same conclusion and beat us to the punch. So, we've asked our agent to see if the owner of that house will consider a contingency offer. We'll see.
In the meantime, we are getting our house's exterior painted. Today we're planning on doing some of the fixup jobs inside that will need to be done before we can start showing this house. That will be either some repair to the walls in the master bath (reinstall a robe hook that fell off, patch a hole for an ill-placed towel rack, etc), or repair the window sill that Harry scratched up while barking at trucks and other dogs.
Next up is the mortgage qualification process. Then the fun really begins.
Rep. Tom DeLay has decided that he doesn't fanatically oppose commuter rail after all. He now supports extended the Metro light rail line out into the lower Fort Bend towns "if the residents want it".
Mighty decent of you, big guy. Of course, the mayors of Sugar Land and Missouri City have been supportive of a rail line for some time now, even back before you killed Houston's federal funds for the Metro line.
You don't suppose the fact that the local GOP was ordered to allow Michael Fjetland's name on the primary ballot had anything to do with this, do you? Nah.
UPDATE: Thanks to Larry for showing me how to fix the broken post. It's gone now.
Finally added a hit counter to the page. Dunno if it'll be enlightening or depressing, but I finally got jealous of all the other sites that had 'em and did something about it. Thanks to Erica for the info.
Also, you may have noticed that I'm now ad-free. Credit for that goes to Mikey, which he called a belated Christmas present. Thanks, Mike!
Which John Cusack Are You?
Thanks to Jack for the link.
My dad has his say about mandatory sentencing and judicial discretion. He did 14 years on the bench in New York, so he's got some perspective on the issue.
Speaking of such things, the California Supreme Court just dealt a blow to the state's three-strikes law. They didn't overturn it, but declared that giving a life sentence for petty theft is "cruel and unusal".
Baseball season has officially begun, with Rice's wild 10-9 win over Baylor last night in the second annual Astros Collegiate Classic at the Venue Soon To Be Formerly Known As Enron Field. I'll be there tonight to watch the Owls take on the Aggies. Baseball in February - do you need another reason to want to live here?
The Houston blog community had its first get together last night. Sadly, I was unable to attend this time, but it sounds like there will be other opportunities in the future. Thanks to Hanna for playing photojournalist. I think this is a slightly more respectable-looking group than the Los Angeles bloggers, but then again, I'm not in the picture so that's gonna throw things off. We have better margaritas, that's fer sure.
Hey, Katherine! This guy thinks Silicon Valley sucks! And he lives there!
UPDATE: Ken Layne hates San Francisco too! Be sure to follow the links, especially this one from Nick Denton's blog to one of Layne's old Tabloid.Net pieces. Woof.
For the record, I don't hate San Francisco. I have a bunch of friends there, and I've enjoyed my visits to the Bay Area. What I do hate is snotty provincialists from either coast who think that it's all tumbleweeds and J. R. Ewing down here, and can't understand why anyone would choose to live here rather than wherever they are. As such I'm happy to give equal time to dissenters.
Back in 1994 a sportswriter for the New York Post, down here to cover the Rockets and Knicks in the NBA Championships wrote a piece called "Houston is Hell" or something like that. It was clear from reading it that he came in with his mind made up about Houston and made no attempt to see if maybe he was wrong. Having lived in Clear Lake, Mieszkowski has certainly earned the right to whatever opinion she wants about Houston, but if it's gonna infect her writing then Salon had no business asking her to write that story. Shame on them all.
Megan McArdle takes issue with liberals' use of the word "fascist" as a code word for "people I don't like". She suggests the following experiment:
1) Find a liberal
2) Get him to say someone is a 'fascist'
3) Then say, "Other than one fascist's regimes penchant for genocide, what specifically do you have against fascism?"
That sure is a ringing endorsement for fascism, I gotta say. Sorta like the old joke "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
If you want to play that game, I'll point out that libertarians and conservatives have their own code word for people they don't like, too: "jackboot". Go to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, look up "jackboot", then click on their link for the Ten Most Popular Sites For "jackboot". Among them (it actually returns 20 links), you'll find four references to John Perry Barlow calling proponents of the Clipper chip "jackboots of the InfoBahn", this quote from The National Review which says "Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy", this article from the Cato Institute entitled "'Jackboot Liberalism' Residues", and this guest comment from The National Review calling Janet Reno a jackboot for daring to enforce the law by returning Elian Gonzales to his father.
I wonder what the response would be if I said to these folks "The primary definition of 'jackboot' is 'a heavy military boot made of glossy black leather extending above the knee and worn especially during the 17th and 18th centuries'. What, specifically, do you have against jackboots?"
By the way, weren't Generalissimo Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini both fascists as well? That'd be more than one objectionable fascist regime, I think.
Oh, and one last thing: Why are jackboots also a metaphor for people we don't like? Because of who wore them.
And that would be?
Say it with me now...Fascists.
Salon's readers (mostly) give Katherine Mieszkowski the business for her sweeping generalizations of Houston. Ginger notes something we both missed the first time around, that Mieszkowski hails from Clear Lake. And as she notes, that explains a lot.
A dozen Hare Krisha congregations are filing for bankruptcy. I was going to make a cheap Arthur Anderson joke about this, but the Chapter 11 filing is in response to a lawsuit that alleges sexual and emotional abuse of children, so it's not really funny.
Julia Child's kitchen is going to the Smithsonian, while the legendary chef moves into a retirement community in Southern California. If they really want to honor her life, the kitchen should be fully operational and properly staffed at all times.
The chief of police in West University Place, a small incorporated city within Houston, will be docked two weeks' pay for surfing naughty web sites at work. That's $3000 in pay that he'll be forfeiting. What really makes that hurt is this:
"[At] the work station in the police chief's office, there was a pattern that showed there were frequent visits to these sites during a six-day period," [the West University Place city manager] said.According to the surveillance software, [he] made 34 visits to cybersex sites, spending about 3.4 minutes a day perusing porn.
Damn. That's $3000 for 20 minutes, or $150 per minute. Even Miss Cleo doesn't charge that much.
My wife's name is Tiffany. She's a graduate of Georgetown University. She holds a doctorate in Science and Technology Policy from The University of Manchester. She's a sweet, intelligent, serious person.
And she's got a name which is routinely and unfortunately associated with bimbos and bitches. Jake's ditsy girlfriend on Once and Again is named Tiffany. Luann's arch-nemesis is named Tiffany. And in today's Doonesbury we discover that Jim Andrews' third trophy wife is named Tiffany.
It's just not fair. Anyone know if there's a support group for this sort of thing?
Even worse, Tiffany tells me, is that when she was a kid there were no personalized chotchkes with the name "Tiffany" on them. You know, like the little license plates with a name on them that kids put on their bicycles. There were no "Tiffany" license plates to be found when Tiffany was a kid. Once all the kids in the extended family were given personalized toothbrushes. No problem for her sister Pamela or her cousins Jennifer and Vanessa, but hers had to have her middle name Ann on it because there were no Tiffany toothbrushes.
In short, my wife was Tiffany before it was cool.
UPDATE: Larry reminds me that I've overlooked perhaps the most famous Tiffany, namely the teenage pop singer from the 80s. Apparently, the now-fully-grown-up Tiffany is featured in next month's Playboy. I don't think I can add anything to that.
Charles Dodgson sums it up pretty well for me. I like the free market just fine, thanks, but I've never viewed it as magic. I agree with Molly Ivins here - government is like a hammer. It can be used for good and it can be used for evil, but it is inherently neither.
Britney Spears is starring in a new movie. According to the IMDb, the plot summary is as follows:
Three high school girls, from a small Georgia town, who used to be best friends when they were younger, but now have very different personalities (a cheerleader, a straight-A student and a "burnout", whatever that means) (Spears plays the smart one) get together for a trip across the country. Along the way, they meet a musician who persuades them to go to Los Angeles to compete in a musical contest.
Britney plays the smart one...Well, I guess she won't have to worry about typecasting. I can't wait to see what she says about the experience in her blog.
UPDATE: Well, my friend Amy Hemphill has to actually consider seeing this movie because she knows the guy who plays Britney's boyfriend. Yet another examples of the dark side of show business.
Chronicle political columnist John Williams makes this interesting observation about Enron: For all the lobbying power Ken Lay had, the company "never won a big government contract in Houston."
As part of its effort to clean up the air and comply with EPA regulations, an eight-county area covering Houston and its hinterlands is now under a 55 MPH speed limit. Some folks are not too happy about this, saying that lower speeds will have no effect. Naturally, officials defend the science behind the lower speed/fewer emissions link.
I'll stipulate the benefits of driving 55 MPH - it's safer, it burns less fuel, and yeah, it's more emissions-efficient. I'm a leadfoot, so this is gonna be hard on me, but I'll try my best.
Of course, I wouldn't bother blogging about this if I didn't have some gripes. First off, I can't help but think that the real problem is with jammed freeways during our everlasting rush hour. Surely going 70 MPH is better on the air than stop-and-go driving. And speaking of stop-and-go driving, don't get me started on Houston's bizarrely unsynchronized and poorly timed traffic lights. I'd like to see more light rail plans and better traffic light management before I'm willing to make nice about driving slower.
One nice thing about this is that I have yet another reason to feel smug about not driving an SUV:
In general, the lighter a vehicle and the smaller and cleaner its engine, the less improvement in pollution from a lower speed.As a group, [Randy Wood, deputy director for environmental policy at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission in Austin] said, heavy-duty vehicles, including big trucks and larger pickups and sport utility vehicles, release about 10 times the [Nitrogen oxides, called NOX for short] per mile as light-duty vehicles, which include cars and smaller pickups and SUVs.
Of course, even if everyone started driving Geos at 55 MPH, we'd still be a long way from compliance:
The 55-mph speed limit is part of a two-prong plan to cut vehicle emissions, which the H-GAC estimates produce 24 percent of NOX emissions in the region.The other prong, certain to also elicit howls of complaint from motorists, is a tightened tailpipe testing program scheduled to begin May 1.
The slower speed limit is projected to account for a NOX reduction of about 12 tons a day, the tailpipe test about 36 tons. Together, they would achieve about 7 percent of the needed reductions, set at 750 to 800 tons a day under the state's air plan.
Can't wait to see what industry (read: refineries) will have to do. You can read about the plan here and here.
There will be no contraction in baseball in 2002, as Minnesota's Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of an injunction that forces the Twins to honor their lease this year. Many folks in Minnesota, including the players, are glad to hear it.
I'll be rooting for the Twins to win the Central Division this year. I just can't see Bud and the boys trying to eliminate a team that makes the postseason. How can you claim that a winning team is doomed to failure?
For those of you who'd like to better understand baseball's complicated and obfuscated finances, I highly recommend this series of articles from The Baseball Prospectus. I've linked to article 6 of 7 (the seventh is forthcoming). It has links to all of the previous articles. You will have a much better understanding of the facts after you've read them.
I really don't want to get into the whole gun debate here. It's been done to death in blogdom, and frankly I find the whole thing boring. If there's one issue on which a lot of bloggers (including myself) who otherwise consider themselves bastions of critical thinking do a lousy job of seeing other perspectives, it's guns.
That said, I want to address a couple of points raised by Megan McArdle. First, as Megan says in the comments to this post, I did not and do not advocate a ban on guns. I'll get back to this in a minute. My point in picking on Glenn Reynolds was that his argument about guns as a metaphor for cars can be easily turned around to support something he wouldn't like. As this site shows, gun control advocates do exactly that. They try to turn it back around, but I think they get into hairsplitting. If the ultimate aim of registration and licensing is acheived, I don't think gun control advocates will care whether it's at the federal or state level.
I think the confusion comes from this statement that Megan makes:
Because the fundamental aim of the more prominent groups is to outlaw handguns entirely, and in some cases long guns as well. The fundamental vision of the gun control groups is that there is no legitimate right to self defense with a weapon.
Well, for what it's worth, here's the Mission Statement at Handgun Control:
As the largest national, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence, the Brady Campaign and the Brady Center are dedicated to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in their communities. The Brady Campaign and the Brady Center believe that a safer America can be achieved without banning all guns.The Brady Campaign works to enact and enforce sensible gun laws, regulations and public policies through grassroots activism, electing progun control public officials and increasing public awareness of gun violence.
The Brady Center works to reform the gun industry and educate the public about gun violence through litigation and grassroots mobilization, and works to enact and enforce sensible regulations to reduce gun violence including regulations governing the gun industry.
Emphasis added. Of course, there's lots of room for weaseling there, since they say "all" guns. But still, that's what they claim.
Now obviously, their view of "sensible" gun laws and Megan's are different. For that matter, their view and mine are, too. I think if I had a beer with Megan, we'd find we're not too far apart on this issue.
I used to be very anti-gun. I didn't grow up with guns, so I don't have any of our "gun culture" in me. Perhaps that's why they don't give me the feeling of security they give some folks. For the record, to answer Swen Swenson's claim that "[y]ou are far better off defending yourself with a gun than you would be going mano e mano with ball bats against some 250# goblin," I'd rather face that scenario than deal with a goon with a gun. For one thing, I might be able to outrun the 250-pound goon. I might even be able to disarm him before he can get a good swing at me - all I need is some room, a rock to throw, and good aim. I ain't outrunning a bullet, and if he's got the drop on me my piece isn't gonna help me much. I should say that I have had several opportunities to fire guns, both handguns and rifles. I still don't much like them, but they don't mystify me.
My position on guns began to change as I realized that a virulent anti-gun stance is not consistent with many of my other beliefs. I believe in abortion rights. As such, the argument that [a]ll of the gun control laws - some 20,000 of them - were proposed as 'reasonable restrictions' - 'just between us folks of good will' has some resonance with me, since it's exactly the tactic that the anti-abortion advocates have been using. Of course, abortion rights has only a reversible Supreme Court ruling on which to hang its hat while gun rights has an actual by-god Amendment to act as a backstop. But still, I couldn't reconcile the dichotomy, so I had to adapt. My strong feelings about the First Amendment took me further along this path.
Of course, as Megan herself has written, Constitutional rights are not unlimited. "Constitutional rights can be regulated, so long as the regulation is narrowly constructed to resolve a particular, definite harm," says she. I like her approach to education as a prerequisite for ownership. I'd want some assurance that there'd be a way to prevent felons from getting certified, and to remove certification once someone gets convicted. That opens the background check can-o-worms, but you're gonna have a hard time convincing me that the state has no compelling interest in keeping guns away from criminals. If we're still talking after that point, then we can argue over the least intrusive way to make this work and still be effective.
Maybe the misunderstanding is mine. My stance on guns has moved away from close agreement with the Brady folks, perhaps far enough that they wouldn't consider me one of them. Down here in a gun-loving state, I'm considered a gun control nut. Megan lives in New York City, which is a very anti-gun place. It's also full of the elitism that she refers to. I grew up there, I recognize what she's talking about. I suppose Megan stands out as a gun rights nut in NYC. It's all about the perspective.
Anyway. I'd rather talk about sports. Is it baseball season yet?
Ginger says that blogs rely heavily on broadband. She cites some blogs with sizaeable front pages (including mine, though I'm tied for third smallest at 52K) as evidence that bloggers assume we all have fast connections.
Well, for what it's worth, we're still using a 33.6 modem at home for dialup. Between the prospect of moving, an old computer that is scheduled for an upgrade Real Soon Now, and the need for a plain old dial line for connecting to Tiffany's work, we haven't hopped on the DSL bandwagon just yet. I do quite a bit of blog reading and research at home on this slow line, and with the exception of QuasiPundit I generally don't notice how long it takes for the pages to load. If QP got rid of their scrolling Java stuff, I probably wouldn't notice their time to load, either. Just a data point for you.
Reading Ginger's previous post about blogging's costs and who bears them, I have to admit that I've enjoyed freeloading so far. Given that I've been adding entries every day, and that people do actually read them, I really should do something to pay my fair share. I hereby resolve to look into getting BloggerPro.
- Tiffany and I were heading over to her sister's place to watch the game on their amazing HDTV-ready widescreen TV when we passed a Ford Excursion with a baby stroller attached to its rear door on a bike rack. This made us wonder: Do these people really have so much stuff (or so many kids) in there that they need to carry the stroller on the outside?
- The Rams defensive coordinator is named Lovie Smith. What the heck kind of name is "Lovie" for a football coach? Every time I hear it, I think of Mrs. Howell.
- Was it just me or were the ads boring this year? The only ones that stand out to me are the Budweiser valentine-card ad, and the Docker's little-black-dress ad. Other than that, snoozeville.
- I admit it - we switched to NBC to watch Fear Factor with the Playboy Playmates. We laughed at it, but in the end we were hooked enough to turn back after the game. Poor Angel Boris. She was robbed.
- Pretty damn good game, too. I was sure it was going to go into overtime. I still can't believe the Rams' defense let the Pats down the field like that at the end.
- Top story on the local news after Fear Factor: Ken Lay is now refusing to testify before Congress. Oooohhh...
Well, I started this thing a month ago. Didn't know how long I'd be able to keep it up, didn't know if I'd run out of things to say or would find it a chore. So far, it's been mostly fun and a lot easier than I thought to find things to say. As a bonus, I've had the pleasure of hearing from a few other bloggers, both local and elsewhere. And I must say, being cited favorably by another blog is a bigger kick than I thought it would be.
I've written a lot more about politics than sports, which surprises me somewhat. Guess there hasn't been all that much on the sports pages that was moved me to comment. I'm sure that will vary over time.
Anyway, I'm happy with what I've done so far and hope to keep it going for as long as I can.
The ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll for men's college basketball is smaller by one today. Seems Utah coach Rick Majerus had been delegating his voting duties to an assistant, and said assistant had been voting for the Temple Owls, who currently stand at 6-12. According to Majerus, the unnamed assistant was "unaware" of Temple's poor record this year.
Okay, let's take a closer look at this. First of all, the guy had Temple at #9 this week. I can understand a throwdown #25 vote, but how can you claim that a team is one of the top ten and not know what their record is? Even worse, this vote wasn't a one-time thing. Temple had been getting votes since December 23, when they were 3-7. Even more damning, they had been climbing in the polls. That means this guy had voted them higher every week, again without knowing their record.
It's easy to make fun of the "computer geeks" who rank teams by complicated formulas, but at least they always know how many games each team has won and lost, and against whom. I understand that Majerus had family problems that caused him to delegate his vote in the first place, but frankly if he didn't have the time for it - even to check what his assistant was doing in his name - he should have asked to be relieved of the duty. Since he didn't as far as I'm concerned he should never be burdened with this responsibility again.
Score one for the Harris County Democrats, as a ruling from the 14th Court of Appeals knocks out a GOP challenger for the 270th District Court bench. I still think that technicalities should not eliminate otherwise legitimate ballot applicants, but the court's ruling that "it is not unfair to require a candidate who files for office and swears that the application is correct to bear the consequences for an error of application" is certainly reasonable.
Salon tries again to capture Houston's mood in the post-Enron collapse. While this article is a lot closer to reality than their cringe-worthy first attempt, it still felt off to me.
I don't deny that the free-market deregulation worship that Katharine Mieszkowski describes exists, and is even rather prevalent. Houston is indeed the land of no zoning and free-for-all suburban sprawl. Houston is also a very big place with a large and diverse population. As such, anyone who tries to capture its essence in a four-page article is going to make a bunch of sweeping generalizations about it that are going to be flat wrong for a lot of its residents.
I grew up in Staten Island, New York. Staten Island is a part of New York City, but its small size (compared to the other boroughs), relative isolation, and suburban feel make it a very different place. I often got annoyed when I'd hear someone say something or other was "quintessential New York" or "definitive New York" because they were seldom describing anything resembling my reality. To put it another way, New York is as much The King of Queens, Crooklyn , and Working Girl as it is Seinfeld and Sex and the City.
It's the same sort of thing in Houston. We have snooty old money (River Oaks) and snooty new money (Memorial), too cool (and expensive) for you downtown lofts, gentrifying neartown neighborhoods like the Heights and Montrose that are struggling to retain aspects of their past identities as hippie and gay areas, a large variety of ethnic and minority enclaves, the more rural areas down south and out east near the refineries, and on and on. In addition, a lot of us here now weren't here during the 80s boom and bust, myself included. I'm sure it makes for a boring story, but if author Mieszkowski had looked, she'd have found a bunch of people with no memory of or interest in the psychological baggage she talks about.
UPDATE: This time Ginger was harsher than I was. That's two Premium subscribers you've pissed off, Salon. We deserve better.
An interesting opinion piece on the nature of alternative political parties and restricted ballot access. The writer, a Libertarian, makes the case that freer access to ballots would not necessarily weaken the traditional parties:
Mark Rutherford, chairman of the Indiana Libertarian Party, offered another angle. "If the Democrats want to weaken the efforts of the Green Party in Indiana, in a perverse way, easier ballot access might do that. It will cause Greens to focus less on statewide organization, and more on candidates, which will splinter their efforts and effectiveness." He pointed out that tough ballot access rules have actually helped organize and motivate the Libertarians, who have more elected officeholders than all the other alternative parties combined.Rutherford was quick to add a counterpoint: "The more names on the ballots, the more issues are raised; and all the candidates then become more focused to the needs and desires of the voters. This is good for the astute Democrat and Republican who picks this up, and steals the issue from the Libertarian."
I've generally been agnostic on this issue, as I find that alternative parties tend to be fringe and single-issue types who are boring at best, but I think he's on to something. It's certainly the case that reasonable ballot access laws are in line with the spirit of our democracy. Call me a convert on this issue.
The state of Idaho has repealed its term limits law, becoming the first state to do so. I'm genuinely shocked that the mostly Republican state legislature did so over the veto of the Republican governor. Term limits were a rallying cry for the GOP in 1994, so to say the least the party has made quite a turnaround. Of course, the issue does lose some luster when it's your guys who are in office, but still.
We all know the arguments against term limits. Here's one that hadn't really occurred to me before:
Party leaders say [...] term limits take away critical experience from government, especially in rural areas where many small towns have struggled to fill local offices.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad they did it. I hope this encourages local leaders to push for a repeal of Houston's moronic term limits law.