Here's an important educational tool from the United States government to help children process the Indian Ocean disaster:

http://www.fema.gov/kids/games/tsunami/

(as discovered by my friend Jason)
http://jmccargar.blogspot.com/2004/12/red-cross-priorities.html

Beaming like a kid who just met his favorite sports star, Mayor Anthony A. Williams signed legislation Wednesday to bring major league baseball back to the nation's capital.

So Councilwoman Cropp's resistance to the billion dollar tax giveaway to baseball faded in the face of a non-binding promise to try to get private funding for some of it cost. But at least Mayor Williams is happy. Sign me up as one disgusted anti-corporate-subsidy baseball fan.

I have a bunch of science text books without warning labels. I finally found a website with appropriate labels to prevent others from reaching dangerous conclusions from my books.

The original from Cobb County Georgia:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

From Berkeley:
This book does not contain the word evolution, the unifying principle in biology and in important component of the National Science Standards and Scholastic Achievement Test. For an overview of what your class is missing, go to: http://evolution.berkeley.edu

See 8 other stickers in the link. Also see the link to a CafePress t-shirt of these stickers. The t-shirts are not as stylish as the ones Joel is selling through (I think) the same vendor.

The link also points you to scary ID sites from the Discovery Center and the Intelligent Design Network.

I was riding my bicycle last Saturday when I noticed an irregularity in the rear wheel. I took it to bicycle repair shop on my way home, and the mechanic quickly removed and stripped the wheel, noticing in the process that it looked like I needed a new chain and that the gear cassette was also terminally worn, and then diagnosed a broken spoke. (I'd actually noticed that months before as a 'loose spoke' but not bothered to do anything about it.) I concurred that I was experiencing very disconcerting chain jump going up steep hills, and added that I also couldn't go down hills very quickly because my big front chainring, i.e., high gear, is no longer accessible because the derailleur no longer moved far enough. Also my pannier rack has two cracked welds, which doesn't seem to matter except that it rattles a lot. I've had the bike over nine years, at a total expenditure of US$3,835: it's a $500 bicycle, but I paid $858 the day I bought it, including helmet, gloves, lights, tools, bags, etc; later I added clipless pedals and shoes, the pannier rack and panniers, several ill-fated bicycle computers (which is why I can't give a total mileage figure for the bicycle, nor a cost per mile comparison, but we can estimate crudely: cars cost between $.375/mi (IRS) and $.56/mi (AAA) to own, fuel, insure, and operate— let's call it $.5/mi, so I would have had to get 852 miles a year out of my bicycle to save money over a car. Probably I fell short of this.), spandex garments, tuneups, new tubes and tires, a lock, a light to replace the stolen one, and a numbing sequence of ultimately defective rear lights. The mechanic interrupted my reverie to announce that the rear wheel was not just out of alignment but bent and unfixable. He put it back together with the new spoke and said he couldn't charge me anything for the work.

"So I should hurry up and get a new bicycle?" I asked.

He bent over my bicycle and cupped his ear. "What's that? 'Take me off life support'?"

So this morning I test-rode some recumbent bicycles. These are lower, longer, heavier, more expensive, more comfortable, and more aerodynamic than traditional upright bicycles, which are properly called "safety" bicycles because they replaced the "dangerous" penny-farthing designs. After riding three models around the block many times, my initial impressions are:

• I got used to steering very quickly; the key is to remember you are on a bicycle and to maintain balance, rather than to get sloppy like on a tricycle and steer by moving the handlebars. Within a few laps I was able to stick my arm out to signal turns without swerving.
• I sat much higher than I expected to.
• I'll have to use a rear-view mirror, which is probably a good thing
• There are perfectly nice recumbants for $550 to $750, which surprised me.
• The higher pedals of a short-wheel-base bicycle feel much more athletic.

And a purchase? Deferred until January.

Lars turned me on to the benefits of a dual-monitor desktop (and the Kinesis keyboard) in the Collaboraid office, and when I set up my home office I wanted the same. Having wasted more than a few Danish weekends struggling with X driver problems, I determined to do a lot more research. After wasting less than a day or two net, I've been working on my dual-monitor setup for almost a month without any problems, so I am documenting it on the internet for anybody else who was equally frustrated at how hard it was to find out what to buy.

The key features of my setup are:

• Two flat-panel monitors, each with 1600x1200 resolution
• digital connections from the video card to the monitors
• Both monitors driven from the same video card
• the correct video driver for Linux kernel 2.6
• Excellent performance

The hardware that provides this is:

• Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20" monitor, US$800 each
• PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 AGP video card, US$100
• LFH-60 to dual DVI splitter cable, US$30. The video card comes with a big 60-pin connector and a splitter to two VGA connectors, but the digital picture is noticably sharper.

Software:

• Debian Linux, sid distribution
• NVidia's binary driver, as per the Debian-nVidia HOWTO. There are two main ways to do multiple monitors in Xwindows; one is to use two or more video cards and have X span them, and the other is to let the video card manage the monitors and present X with a single workspace. In my experience, the second approach works much better.
• The relevant parts of my XF86Config-4 file are:

  Section "Device"
  	Identifier	"PNY NVS 280"
          BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
  	Driver		"nvidia"
  
  	Option 		"TwinView"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorHorizSync" "28-80"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "43-76"
  	Option		"MetaModes" "1600x1200, 1600x1200"
  	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier	"Default Screen"
          Device          "PNY NVS 280"
          Monitor	        "Generic Monitor"
          DefaultDepth    24
          SubSection "Display"
  		Depth		24
  		Modes		"1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection

• For high-resolution screen backgrounds at 3200x1200, PlasmaDesign.co.uk., £7
• The KDE Desktop includes Multiple Monitor support, which ensures that dialog boxes pop up in the middle of a monitor instead of splitting themselves in the middle and lets me maximize windows to just one monitor.

Since I type with the keyboard in my lap, the KellyRest Clamp-on Mouse Platform (US$20) was very helpful in getting the mouse tray close to the keyboard. My desk is an IKEA Ivar shelf unit (US$105 for two sides, five shelves, and a brace), which provides an adjustable monitor shelf, foot rest, and storage shelves above the monitors.

I'm a big fan of baseball, but I'm not a big fan of wealth transfer from tax payers to private corporations via subsidy. So naturally I'm deeply opposed to the deal between Major League Baseball (motto: "slightly less incompetent than the National Hockey League, but we make up for it with nastiness") and the city of Washington, D.C., in which DC would put up all of the money for a new stadium and the baseball team's owners would keep all of the profits. The fig leaf, that the money was coming from a new business tax, isn't worthy of being spit at. Are you telling me that businesses will submit to a tax for a stadium but not for schools?

I was pleased to hear a mainstream news source (NPR) finally mention on air what's been known for over a decade: that stadiums and arenas provide negligable or even negative economic benefits to their neighborhoods, and are therefore terrible ways for governments to spend money. But I'm even more pleased to find that the City Council has rallied behind dissident Councilmembers to defy MLB and their lapdog the mayor (motto: "Making you nostalgic for former mayor and crack addict Marion Barry") and demand at least 1/2 private financing. One half! The audacity. Let's hope this starts a trend of local governments standing up to extortion by sports teams and other companies demanding public funding in exchange for the pleasure of their company.

The Impossibility of God, edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier
A collection of philosophy essays presenting logical proofs that God can't exist. For what they are, many are interesting, but this is not a general-purpose entry in the dialog between theists and atheists. The proofs include such classics as, A) an omnipotent being can do anything. B) God is omnipotent. C) An omnipotent being can move anything. D) An omnipotent being can create a thing which cannot be moved. Since A-D cannot all be true, God does not exist. Woohoo. I'm convinced.

I suppose that the essays fill a niche in the thought process, and help to uncover inconsistencies in how we use god-related words and concepts. Lacking a specific interest in this precise niche, though, I wasn't able to muster more then a series of skimmings.

Closed Chambers, Edward Lazarus
A very detailed story by a former Supreme Court clerk (to Blackmun, 88-89), which sheds a lot of light on the functioning of the Court. In particular, Lazarus explains the legal issues thoroughly, clearly, and readably, and ties them to the actors and to a broader context. Reading this is enough to turn one into a Court junkie. I am skeptical of Lazarus' thesis that the Court worked better "before" and is on a barely reversible slide to dysfuction and to a role indistinguishable from partisan politics. It's not that I don't think that's where the Court is (cf. Bush v Gore), it's that I doubt that there ever was a golden age for the Supreme Court, when all of the justices were brave and smart and judicious. Even the Warren Court, a highlight for many of us liberals, did its work on as shaky legal foundation. Anyway, a great read, both entertaining (in a legal sort of way) and education (same).

The Secret Life of Dust, Hannah Holmes
A complement to The Secret House, but much more specifically focussed on dust. Where it comes from, what it's made of, how it moves around in the atmosphere, what effects it has on the climate and on people, and so forth and so on. Some key points: there's a lot of dust, all the time, everywhere. There has always been a lot of dust, going back millions of years. Some of the dust has become much more poisonous in the last few hundred years. Altogether dust (and, specifically, man-made pollution) are probably a key factor in many or most respiratory deaths and heart-related deaths, and in many other deaths. Cigarette smoke is makes just about everything worse, and just like the cloud of fecal matter/water vapor droplets that hang in the air of your house for hours after each #2 flush, cigarette smoke pervades everywhen even when you can't see it or even smell it.

While reading this book, I had to put it down a few times to remind myself that I wasn't dead or dying, and that human beings do in fact live for many decades despite inhaling a lot of dust. The author seemed to lose sight of that from time to time. Notwithstanding that caveat, and the complaint that there weren't any pictures, it was a good, informative, and readable science book.

[Comedian David Cross] even seemed to have a better handle on the mindset of Osama bin Laden than the Bush administration: "If the terrorists hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be fucking dust." Just a few months later, bin Laden released one of his tapes (not on Sub Pop), saying, "Bush has told you that we do not like freedom. Then why didn't we hit Sweden?" Whoa.

— Josh Modell, Onion AV Club

"Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr Moulton, ask you to imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this: Paradise Lost, Darwin’s Descent of Man, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map, Mill On Liberty, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, The Annual Register, Froissart, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le Morte d’Arthur, Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Boswell’s Johnson, Barbour’s The Bruce, Hakluyt’s Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, The Faerie Queene, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Bacon’s Essays, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyàm, Wordsworth, Browning, Sartor Resartus, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace, Ossian, Piers Plowman, Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents, Quarles, Newman’s Apologia, Donne’s Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, The Deserted Village, Manfred, Blair’s Grave, The Complaint of Deor, Bailey’s Festus, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven.

Will you next imagine that in this volume most of the author’s names are lost; that, of the few that survive, a number have found their way into wrong places; that Ruskin for example is credited with Sartor Resartus; that Laus Veneris and Dolores are ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, The Anatomy of Melancholy to Charles II; and that, as for the titles, these were never invented by the authors, but by a Committee?

Will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as prose; while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into short verses, so that they resemble the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an examination paper?

[...]

Have we done? By no means. Having effected all this, let us pepper the result over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with a marginal gutter on either side, each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross references. Then, and not till then, is the outward disguise complete—so far as you are concerned. It remains only then to appoint it to be read in Churches, and oblige the child to get selected portions of it by heart on Sundays. But you are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the game: that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have to tell, and indeed to have written mainly with that object: so that Macaulay and Adam Smith, for example constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that what they tell us must be right because Walter Map or the author of Piers Plowman foretold it ages before.—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), On Reading the Bible (II), Wednesday, April 24, 1918

Here's an interesting argument I hadn't heard before for why it's important to defend the theory of evolution (in addition to the part about it being true):

There happens to be a great deal of disagreement over lines of descent, the development of cellular mechanisms, whether or not protists (which include seaweed and diatoms) should all be grouped into one big family or categorized in anywhere from four to a dozen separate groups, and it just goes on, and on, and on. Yet about the basic idea that life as we know it is all descended from common ancestors over billions of years through the mechanism of natural selection, there is no scientific disagreement. Which is to say that while a few individual scientists may hold alternate beliefs based on their personal ideology, the verifiable scientific evidence points to evolution, and that body of evidence is growing all the time.

If they can portray the scientific community as hopelessly confused on such fundamental issues, it isn't a stretch to assert that 'nobody knows' whether or not global warming is happening or even whether stem cell research could be useful. By creating a story line where any secular investigation of the facts is portrayed as being inconclusive by definition, and the material truth unknowable, the listener might as well pick that version of the story which suits them best at the moment. This has implications beyond whether or not people believe that we're distantly related to other primates.

It seems like every article about gasoline in the last few years says something like, "gas prices hit a new record of X today. However, this is still lower than the peak in 1981, when adjusted for inflation," but no article ever says just how much gas was in 1981, adjusted for inflation or otherwise. So I went googling and found: "the following plot shows how much I paid for each gallon of gas over the past 25 years or so." With the advent of the internet, those anal-retentive records that some of us keep (I kept a gas log while I still had a car, but never actually looked at the data) finally have the broad exposure and high google PageRank that they deserve.

Explain Away evaluates the different explanations for why Kerry lost. My own take is that Kerry lost because Bush got several more percent of the vote nationwide, and that there's certainly no single reason what that happened. But this article debunks some of the more simple theories.

Healing the heartland offers a very well-informed and heartfelt analysis of Democrats' rural issues.

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

...

While liberals' chief claim to moral superiority mainly rests on championing the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, one of the most significantly and consistently disenfranchised segments of the American economy of the past 20 years has been the rural sector. If rural dwellers who see their way of life under assault wonder why liberals do not seem to consider their cause a worthy one, they probably cannot be blamed for concluding that they simply live in the wrong place, lead the wrong kind of lifestyle, and are not the right color. It may not be the whole truth, but there is some truth to it.

More to the point, urban liberals should be concerned about what's happening to rural America, because it directly affects their lives as well. The corporatization of agriculture and the accompanying gutting of local rural economies first of all affects urban dwellers' food sources; even as genetically modified foods are being pushed into the food chain, the actual supply of traditional hybrid strains of crops and the genetic diversity they represented has been decreasing dramatically, since many of these resided within the purview of smaller family farms.

Moreover, corporate farms are rapidly becoming a major source of pollution, a problem that affects every locality. Unsurprisingly, the current administration relies on "voluntary compliance" when it comes to regulating this pollution.

...

Cecil Andrus, the longtime Idaho governor, former Interior Secretary and godfather of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, tried to warn party leaders against pursuing this course in the 1990s. In 1994, he and a group of Western governors met with President Clinton and his advisers to discuss the party's approach to rural issues, particularly those in the West. Andrus bluntly warned Clinton that, if his administration didn't take rural people's concerns seriously, and continued to send signals of being out of touch with Western issues, they risked becoming a permanent minority party in the West. Democrats' insistence on representing an urban perspective was a real problem, he warned.

At the end of the meeting, Al Gore reportedly took Andrus aside and gave him a chewing-out, telling him: "We think you're the problem."

...

It's hard to overstate the powerful effect a campaign appearance by John Kerry would have had in a place like Idaho -- where he owns a vacation home, but hardly seems to actually visit or have any contact with the residents. It says everything you need to know about the DLC approach to the 2004 campaign that, during one of Kerry's springtime visits to Sun Valley, the Blaine County Democratic Party held a major Kerry fundraiser in Ketchum, raising several hundred thousand dollars -- and Kerry couldn't be bothered to drop in and make even a brief appearance.

...

The larger point, of course, is to shift the focus from supposed cultural differences back to the vast common ground. Rural people, just like urban and suburban folk, value good schools, good jobs, sound infrastructure, social amenities, a vibrant and healthy culture. When we talk to rural Americans, those are kinds of things we should be talking about -- because, for many of them, these are things they have been losing, while the rest of the country seems to be gaining.

There will be inevitable differences. We won't always see eye to eye on some subjects, especially when they are products of differences in religious beliefs: abortion, gay rights, evolution. What has to change is how we react to these differences. Instead of dismissing people as hopeless ignoramuses for disagreeing on these matters, liberals need to operate from a basis of mutual respect for differing but sincerely held beliefs.

Of course, this respect will not always be reciprocated. This will be especially the case for the hard-core right wing that has an entrenched presence in rural America. Those are not the people whose minds can be changed. And in these kinds of cases, liberals should feel no compulsion to be "sensitive." Indeed, failing to stand up to them with appropriate strength is a recipe for getting bulldozed, as liberals have for the past decade.

More apologies. (If you are not American, please do your part to reach out to and support your American friends by buying them a T-shirt.)

A summary of anomolies reported. So far, nothing at all to call into question the national result, but the primary electronic voting products are (still) extremely low-quality software with few safeguards. I think the only fix is a national voting law, and a much better one than 2002's Help America Vote Act. From the summary:

In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of 32,767 [2^15 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.

I checked my American Apology Shirt storefront and discovered that I've sold about 450 shirts since the election, easily putting me over the 3000 mark. So I've finally put together the design I had in mind a while ago, for a simpler, more legible, and more graphic shirt that can be offered in many languages. Check it out, and if you know something besides English, send a translation my way. Don't forget your Bill of Rights bumper stickers and mugs - they are politically neutral and make great gifts, plus might make good starting points for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. (I'm referring, of course, to the inevitable consequence of the Red Sox' winning the World Series.)

I'm not going to leave the country because Bush won. It's my country too. I spent two of Bush's first four years overseas and I find that I like America better. I'm going to stay and promote my values and work to change America to be what I want it to be.

I'm not going to spend the next four years angry.

Democrats don't need to tear everything down and start over. Kerry lost 51-48. He was a good candidate to win, and the other side beat him. The Democratic party is not a perfect institution or a perfect representation of my values, but it's the best political vehicle for me in this country in this system. I will continue to support the party.

Nader is right in many of his criticisms of both parties and of corporate capitalism, but wrong to think his independent candidacy promoted constructive change. We should build alternatives to the two parties, but first we must reform our winner-takes-all systems at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and I will help do this.

Hey amigos, it's been a long time since I wrote a personal update. Since I left Denmark in July, I've been splitting my time between Los Angeles and San Diego. I made a return trip to Northern Europe in September to meet with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam and GP Germany in Hamburg, to wrap up the requirements work I've been doing for them through Collaboraid. The trip had some interesting highlights, including the warehouse of the Greenpeace German Action Team. Those guys have really a lot of Zodiacs. Mostly, though, it confirmed the wisdom of my decision to decamp from Europe. The weather was terrible—cold, rainy, windy, and dark—in every city I visited; Danish continues to not leap off my tongue, though it interferes with what little German I retain from college; and the back-and-forth between familiar Southern California and familiar Southern Copenhagen showed California to be a much more natural setting for me.

I started apartment-hunting in San Diego almost as soon as I got off the plane back. It took almost a month, but I've finally moved into the Imperial Tower, a few blocks up from downtown. I'm only on the fourth floor, but with my south-facing view down the hill it seems much higher. Almost all of my apartments have been very close to water, but for the first time I can actually see water out the window; I can even see a stretch of the Pacific.

I've been opposed to cell phones for as long as I've been aware of them. This is because I don't like telephones: telephones are disruptive and intrusive. They make loud noises which demand that you pay attention. More fundamentally, they allow direct communication with people who are not physically present. As a fan of place and geography, I find this abhorrent. When I'm here, I want to deal with the space, the features, the smell, the people, of my immediate surroundings. I don't want to deal with there.

And phone companies are evil, just as every other monopoly company is inevitably driven to be evil. With regulation, this evil was at least predictable, but phone companies have been incompetently deregulated for many years. By incompetent I refer both to the removal of regulations and to the enforcement of remaining regulations. Phone companies were supposed to share their physical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly product, with competitors, to create competition at the service and network level. Obviously the incumbants have strong motivation not to share, despite the law; obviously, they need to be closely watched; obviously, this hasn't happened.

In Seattle last year, I would receive as many as three or four telemarketing calls in one day, some of them the illegal pre-recorded type. In China, I would often answer the phone to hear a recorded spiel in Mandarin. In Denmark, with either more ethical companies or better and better-enforced laws, I received only two or three such calls in nine months (score one for the socialist state). The phone company sold phone numbers to the marketers and then sold "telemarketer blocking" back to consumers for a monthly fee, making good business just like the Swiss armaments industry in World War II.

So a cell phone takes these two factors, the destruction of distance and immoral corporations, and frees them to do business everywhere. The cell phone companies have even succeeding in colluding to present a unified pricing front to consumers, forcing the "calling plan" model on a public which has repeatedly shown preference for metered rates (electricity, water, gas, long distance telephony, food, clothing, hard goods) or fixed rates (local calls, sewage). After 20 years of competition, a few companies have reluctantly started to offer metered calling, but mislabel it to preserve the paradigm: it's "adding minutes automatically as you need them." The invisible hand is powerless against marketers willing to destroy language and civility to make a profit.

So, in order to maintain some sort of business activity while moving from place to place, city to city, and country to country, I finally, reluctantly, and too late to make much difference, got a cell phone. The first one didn't work well at my Los Angeles location, so I returned it the next day. The company I returned it to had just paid out a class-action lawsuit because it had been charging cancellation fees even for plans cancelled within the state-mandated 15-day return period. They didn't charge me their $150 cancellation fee, but since I had been able to make one call, they charged me the $35 activation fee.

The second phone worked better, but cost twice as much per month. After almost two weeks of carrying around a cell phone, it has helped on several occasions, but been unreliable and misleading on others. With an apartment phone due tomorrow, I've just returned the cell phone, with one day to spare in the grace period, and I am much relieved.

In other news, I've gotten around to codifying my embargo list. The following companies are not allowed to do business with me, because they are destructive, dishonest, or otherwise disagreeable. This list omits companies I've forgotten or purged from my memory, but I expect it to grow, and your suggestions are most welcome:

• Burger King, since ca 1984.
• McDonalds, since 1990.
• Starbucks, since 1997
• Walmart, since 1998
• Old Navy, since inception
• Barnes & Noble, since ca 2000
• Borders, since ca 2000
• The automobile industry and related industries, as much as possible, since 2001
• Fry's Electronics, since 2004
• Radio Shack, since 2004

When you add this to the list of my other self-imposed restrictions— don't do drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), don't drink coffee, don't own a television, don't own a car, don't eat meat (defined as, anything that could have escaped)— the wonder isn't that I eat a lot of chocolate, it's that I do anything besides eat chocolate.

The System of the World, Neal Stephenson

As a fictional tour of the real history of London and Northern Europe
in 1666 to 1714, and of Newton, Leibniz, and the other personalities
responsible for the scientific method, very successful. As a
three-thousand-page novel, good but not great.

An hour by hour guide to the most tense election in my lifetime. Example:

CRUNCH TIME: 9PM

431 Electoral Votes in play

Polls close in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

ANALYSIS: At this point, the election could be over--but only if George W. Bush has won contested states (Arkansas, Florida and Ohio) earlier in the evening. (In theory, Kerry could also wrap up the election at 9PM, but he would need to have won North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia to do it--far less likely.)

A few minutes after 9PM, though, in all likelihood, the result will still be up for grabs. All eyes will then turn to Michigan. If Kerry wins there (as polls suggest he should) attention will shift to Minnesota and New Mexico.

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later [...]

—Neal Stephenson

For the whole of 2004, [Drewry Shipping Consultants] estimates that the number of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) leaving Asia bound for America’s west coat could top 11m, while the number going the other way may be only 4.9m. — Economist

If you couldn't see the money flowing, what would you make of one part of the world carefully crafting hundreds of millions of artifacts and sending them to another part of the world in an endless stream of ships, and getting back in exchange ... less than half as many things. And repeating this year after year.

My grandfather had a problem with his new HP scanner. Every time his Windows XP desktop starts up, it automatically reinstalls the drivers. Every time he tu rns the scanner on or off, it automatically does some sort of reshuffling or reinstalling. Despite all this, it still worked for scanning and printing. Unti l this week, when it mysteriously stopped responding. It took me an hour just to get the HP drivers and miscellaneous crap removed. I then tried the Windows install to get a newer driver; this failed. I then tried the Windows install with the drivers from the CD-ROM. The system successfully installed the scanne r driver, and then cheerfully announced it had found some new hardware and would I like to install a driver for it?

Thinking there might be a hardware problem with the printer/scanner, we tried again on his XP laptop. Same results.

More out of curiousity than anything else, and since it was already on, I tried my Thinkpad running Debian Linux. I plugged in the printer, and the system log showed it was recognized. A bit of google searching revealed that sane was the standard scanner backend, so I installed it with "apt-get install sane." Then I needed a front-end, so "apt-get install xsane." A minute later I was ready and ran xsane - it said no scanner found. I searched for the model number of the printer and quickly discovered I needed another package with extra drivers; "apt-get install hpoj". I ran xsane, and got a preview, and scanned, and emailed him the picture. Total time: under 10 minutes.

This is perhaps the first time in my personal experience that linux has given me a radically better experience with new hardware than Windows.

Political reporters--outside of partisan outlets like the Murdoch media--do not intend any partisan bias in their character judgments. Historically, the process has been brutally unfair but essentially random, and therefore nonpartisan. Reporters and pundits seize upon isolated and generally meaningless incidents. In 1972, Democratic hopeful Ed Muskie appeared to shed a tear as he defended his wife. In 1992, Dan Quayle read the word "potatoe" from a misspelled cue card. In a 1992 debate, George H.W. Bush checked his watch for his response time. These incidents became proof that Muskie was too weak, Quayle too stupid, and Bush too aloof to be president. The character traits "revealed" by these anecdotes, once rendered and self-fulfillingly repeated, proved impossible to dislodge.

In recent years, however, Republicans have figured out that this process doesn't have to be random. [...]

—Jonathan Chait, New Republic

The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a minister for Europe can only use when speaking French. — Denis MacShane, minister for Europe

(I didn't read any Derrida; I waited for the movie.)

The Language Log analyzes pauses in the first presidential debate:

Jim Lehrer: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?

John Kerry: [pause 0.278] Yes, I do. [pause 1.268] But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. [pause 0.588] I want to thank the University of Miami [pause 0.564] for hosting us. And I know the president will join me [pause 0.831] in ...

[sound file]

Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, you have a ninety-second rebuttal.

George W. Bush: [pause 0.055] uh uh I- [pause 0.165] I, too, thank the University of Miami, and [pause 0.454] and uh [pause 2.116] and say our prayers are with [speeds up] the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot. [pause 1.304] um [pause 1.507] September the eleventh {sigh} [pause 1.212] changed how America must look at the world. ...

[sound file]

When I listen to the two clips Bush sounds better, and Kerry sounds worse, then the text transcription suggests.

The X-Prize has (un-officially) been won. And Richard Branson is already preparing to bring commercial spaceflight to market. The private sector has caught up to NASA circa 1960. Another ten years at this rate and we'll start to have a real space industry.

And, in vaguely related and nearly as good news, the US Air Force executive who pushed sweetheart deals with Boeing, at taxpayer expense, in exchange for jobs for herself and her family, is going to prison for 9 months. Her sentence would have been only 6 months but it turned out she continued to lie about the scope of her crime even after pleading guilty.

In the last few years, California's laws, Native American tribes, gamblers, and new governer all collided, and there are two gambling propositions on the ballot in the fall. (Non-American readers should know that gambling was, with the exception of Nevada and a city in New Jersey, basically illegal in the United states for many decades. The Native American claims to historical land have been consolidated in small, economically worthless "reservations" often quite distant from ancestral lands; Native tribes are technically foreign nations within the United States but their legal rights have been honored more in the breech. However, in the last few decades many Native tribes have taken advantage of an otherwise worthless sovereignty to host casinos on their foreign soil. This is rather brilliant; picture a circle of tribal elders: "We don't have oil, arable land, minerals, or other natural resources." "Our young ones leave the reservation for the cities and abandon their heritage. Our language and culture are going extinct because we have no future to offer our children." "Wait! We do have the right to erect buildings on our reservations, and the white men will come from hundreds of miles away to put their money down in our buildings and then go away." "And what will they get in return?" "Nothing!")

This LA Weekly article explains everything quite lucidly, though I don't have any other data points with which to assign a trust level. The reporter's take:

• There are Good Tribes and Bad Tribes in California. ("Just before the turnoff for Palm Springs, a 23-story skyscraper towers over the desert floor. ... The only building more than a half-dozen or so floors high in the entire Coachella Valley, the hotel tower is the crown jewel ... now being completed by the Morongo Band of Indians. As one enraged Palm Springs community activist pointedly put it: 'So much for the notion that some people are genetically predisposed to be better stewards.'")
• Proposition 68, despite being backed by Larry Flynt, is bad. Vote no.
• Proposition 70, drafted by the Bad Tribes, is much worse. Vote no.
• Arnold has negotiated a pretty fair deal between the tribes and the state.

  The agreement that he struck with the five tribes was an artful compromise that had something for everyone — including labor. The new compacts approved that night by the Legislature would indeed preserve the tribes’ monopoly on casino gambling but would also require them to make a $1 billion up-front payment to the state as well as annual payments of about $175 million. It fell short of the 25 percent levy Schwarzenegger had promised during his campaign by about one-half, but it was, nevertheless, a sea change.

  Signatory tribes could now expand beyond the previous state-imposed limit of 2,000 slot machines each, but would have to pay increasingly more to do so. The tribes also agreed to submit to numerous state environmental, safety and building constraints, thereby waiving some long-held rights of sovereignty (each of the state’s 107 tribes is, at least theoretically, a foreign power exempt from most state and federal regulation). And to the surprise and delight of many, Schwarzenegger held firm in demanding that the tribes agreeing to the new compacts permitting expansion would have to remain neutral in any labor-organizing attempt, effectively kicking the doors open to unionization.

  It wasn't clear to me if this deal is fait accompli, still requires approval, or depends on both of the related Propositions failing. By the way, in case you think my recent spate of pro-Arnold entries suggests I approve of his gubernacy, note that the LA Times reports that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to boost business generally overruled his desire to help the environment and consumers this year." So call this a credit-where-credit-is-due-so-long-as-you-take-the-la-weekly-at-face-value-which-isn't-necessarily-a-smart-thing kind of posting.

Ilium, Dan Simmons
The Iliad recast within a science fiction setting bordering on fantasy, as hyper-technological gods from another dimension recreate the events of the Iliad with a terraformed Mars for a stage and apparently a community of "Eloi" on an otherwise abandoned Earth, while cyborgs from beyond the Asteroid Belt come to investigate the hubbub. Readable as crack, with erratic writing mixing formal prose, smartass grad student humor, and random classical references. Definitely a guilty pleasure, though you'd have to be a blind inmate of the SF gulag to conflate the depth of the source material with the lack of depth of Simmons' work.

Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
Coupland goes a bit gentle and the result is marvelous, sincere, and affecting.

Dead Air, Iain Banks
Iain Banks channels a bit of Mil Millington with a story of a verbally profuse intellectual shock jock with a risky romantic life. Just as the protagonist is happy to listen to himself, Banks has shown in this and in his previous, non-fiction book, that he's a bit too happy to watch himself write. The result is engaging and pleasant but ultimately tiresome. It's nice to see Banks do something different twenty fine books into his career, but this direction is not promising, or at least not to my taste.

Papal Sin, Garry Wills
Garry Wills argues thoroughly and convincingly that the institution of the Catholic Pope, through its doctrine of infallibility both formal and informal, is intellectually and temporally dishonest and profoundly corruptive, with horrifyingly destructive consequences for hundreds of millions of people.

A third Johnson bill signed by the governor, SB 1438, requires that any electronic voting system approved by the secretary of state after January 2005 include a printout that voters can use to check the accuracy of their ballot. ...

He also signed AB 384 by Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City), which prohibits adult and youth prison inmates from smoking.

As I continue the process of relocating to California, what could be more welcome news than progress on fair voting and a further step towards a non-smoking state? (For the record, as a strong supporter both of euthanasia and of personal liberties, I do support the right to smoke, in private, where noone else is harmed.) The entire LA Times article is recommended, because it describes a number of nice laws that Arnold signed. If all he did was not veto the progressive California legislature, he'd be no better or worse a governor than Gray Davis.

The Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying" Movement ... while there is no doubt Kübler-Ross made an important contribution to the treatment of dying patients ... she also contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of the dying ....

But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen began to go around the bend, began declaring there was no death, there were only "transitions" from one permeable boundary to another. And often back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not only have the reports of her death been exaggerated but reports of death itself have been exaggerated. ...

... its popular success was due in large part to the behavior control function of the five stages and its appeal to hospital and hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of moral progress: Potentially disruptive and annoying anger would give way to the more quiet stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier on the night nurses.

Well. I guess I can get rid of the Five Stages poster with pushpin I used when Piazza was traded to the Marlins.

California air regulators Friday unanimously approved the world's most stringent rules to reduce auto emissions that contribute to global warming ... The industry has threatened to challenge the regulations in court. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed support for the proposals and has pledged to fight any such lawsuits.

Q: You’ve been compared with Trump. Are you a clone?

A: You won’t catch me in a suit, you won’t catch him out of one. His businesses are built on other people’s money and doing deals. My businesses are built on sweat equity and building businesses. He dismisses his casino partners’ problems as not his; I can’t sleep at night if my partners aren’t successful. I play basketball, he plays golf. I go to sports bars, he goes to black-tie dinners.

— Mark Cuban

Moneyball, Michael Lewis

When I got on the internet in 1991, it wasn't the Web. It was the internet. (And men were real men, women were real women, and little green aliens from Alpha Centauri were real little green aliens from Alpha Centauri.) I spent a lot of time in newsgroups (where some of my earlier, stupid posts are still preserved for all time in usenet archives), and in particular rec.sport.baseball. I learned, from convincing arguments with sound statistics and methods, that most common baseball statistics were meaningless. Runs, RBIs, batting average - all nearly worthless for measuring the ability to win games or to predict that ability into the future. This wisdom is shunned by the anti-intellectual, good-old-boys network of baseball and by the media.

Moneyball is the tightly written story of how the right manager for the right team at the right time finally broke the barrier to these ideas in major league baseball, with the result that the Oakland A's have simultaneously been among the top three teams in total games won, and the lowest three teams in total payroll, for five years in a row.

Billy Beane is the iconoclastic manager, prepared for his role by a baseball career that failed even though his althletic style and classic baseball physique made him look like a great ballplayer. The Oakland A's management refused to spend money but supported Billy in every other way. And the baseball establishment continues to undervalue players who don't look right, or who don't have the right (meaningless) statistics.

I highly recommend this book even to all; baseball fans will learn a lot, and people who either know nothing or far too much about baseball will still enjoy a great read from a talented writer.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. William Easterly.
Globalization and its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz

Stiglitz and Easterly both talk in depth about the failure of the first-world economic instutions, the World Bank and IMF in particular, to make a positive difference in world poverty. And both take a while to cut to the chase, both draw some blood but also throw some wild punches, and both avoid other obvious conclusions.

Easterly takes half his book to name his main villains, corrupt governments and the financial experts who enable them. But his world still seems populated by earnest men in suits who really would like to see an end to poverty. Stiglitz sinks his fangs to the gums into IMF, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, for following rigidly ideological prescriptions with arrogant certainty (low inflation uber alles, high interest rates as needed, and free flow of capital) even after these prescriptions are challenged as ineffective or counterproductive. Stiglitz connects the dots as far as saying that these rich bankers favor their own interests over those of developing countries. Beyond that, his rage seems triggered by a perception that these villains would rather see millions in poverty rather than question their own opinions. The step he doesn't take, though, is to say that they may have reasons for preferring this state of affairs. In other words, he doesn't go all the way to Zinn, Chomsky, and the rest.

• Quality Assurance and Bathing; Why Nobody Loves You
• Politics in QA Management 2; Gas Warfare and Advisory Panels
• Breaking New Ground; 1.0 Projects and Iranian Mineclearing Techniques

At least three or four times since Reagan's death, most recently tonight during radio reporting of the part of the Republican convention in which a commemorative video was shown, I have heard reporters and commentators giving misty-eyed reminiscences about hearing President Reagan say, "Mr Gorbachev, tear this wall down." He said no such thing, not ever. People sometimes say linguists fuss over trivia, but I can't believe anyone could see this point as trivial.

It's so strange that people should misremember, for two reasons. First, the correct original version still phonetically rings in my ears, unforgettably, and I would have thought that would be true for anyone who heard it (which would include even a 30-year-old junior reporter: the speech was in 1987); and second, the way he put it — synonymous, but with with very slightly different syntax — is so much more compelling. The rhythm is better; the parallel with the preceding sentence ("Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!") is better; and (let me get technical for just a second) the crucial direct object is positioned as last constituent in the verb phrase, not followed by the anticlimax of a particle that belongs with the verb, so the nuclear stress coincides perfectly with the final monosyllable which delivers the pragmatic punch, the key piece of new information conveyed by the final noun. Syntax, prosody and pragmatics in perfect harmony. What President Reagan said, very deliberately — and they say it was audible over on the other side in East Berlin — was: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
— Geoffrey K. Pullum

That tells you something about the insanity that has gripped the American media. Imagine if the leader of a Canadian political party decided, in the middle of an election campaign, to ignore Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson and Kevin Newman, and only do an appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

—John Doyle, Globe and Mail

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

Writing credits (WGA)

Hans Bauer	 	(1997 screenplay) and
Jim Cash	 	(1997 screenplay) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(1997 screenplay)

Hans Bauer	 	(story) and
Jim Cash	 	(story) &
Jack Epps Jr.	 	(story)

John Claflin	 	(screenplay) &
Daniel Zelman	 	(screenplay) and
Michael Miner	 	(screenplay) &
Edward Neumeier	 	(screenplay) (as Ed Neumeier)

The vast majority of large global companies consume software rather than produce it. ... If the cost of software is driven down by competition from open source, and thus a major cost of doing business is reduced for global industry, will it be a net gain or net loss to the economy?

... Economics is not a zero-sum game. Money can be spent in ways in which its positive impact on the economy is greater or lesser. If a firm spends $25 million developing a software product that never achieves widespread use and never makes much of an impact (and a huge proportion of commercial software projects fall into this category), the only positive impact on the economy will be the transfer of funds from company coffers to general circulation (and taxes) via the salaries of the employees involved.

On the other hand, if a useful piece of software becomes available at little or no cost to many companies, especially to companies that otherwise would not have been able to afford such software, it can give a major boost to that company's productivity. In that case, even if no money was spent, all those companies increased their efficiency and revenues.

— David Adams, Free Can Mean Big Money: The Open Source Economy

Tom Ridge will announce that September is Preparedness Month ... on September 9th. That won't give us much time to prepare, but it will catch the news cycles leading up to the 9/11 weekend. Many have challenged the administration's terror announcements as deliberately manufactured and timed for partisan purposes. The response is, you complained that we didn't alert people and now you complain that we do alert people. What would you have us do? This suggests an obvious response — stop scheduling non-news-driven events in an blatantly partisan manner.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

...

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

—Geoffrey K. Pullum

It was really tough to make the Japanese public perceive me as a serious actor or director. As an actor, one of the first films I worked on was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima, back in the early '80s. When it was released in Japan, I sneaked into the theater to see how the audience would react. I thought the film was great and my acting was not bad at all. I anticipated that the audience would be impressed by my performance, which was completely different from my comedy persona on TV shows. However, at the moment I appeared on the screen, every single person in the theater burst out laughing. I was devastated and humiliated by the experience, because the character I played in the film was not the kind of person to be laughed at. I swore then and there that I would stick to the serious and dark characters in any films or TV dramas thereafter, and I did. And it took years of playing dark characters, serial killers, and cult gurus for Beat Takeshi to be perceived as a serious actor.

Masters of Doom, David Kushner
Very readable, if gossipy; life stories of John Carmack and John Romero.

The Secret House, David Bodanis.
A tour through the happens of your house at a mostly microscopic level, from dust to the air pockets in the fat of potato chips to vaporized toilet water particles. In one place where I happened to know a bit of the science it rang wrong, so I'm not 100% confident of the author's breezy summaries of the science and facts involved. Although it is very very engaging and informative, I am reluctant to recommend it to the disquieting effect it's had on me. Two things in particular have dominated too much of my thinking since picking up the book: the bacteria all around us, and the scams of the food manufacturers. While neither was exactly news to me, the depth and vividness of Bodanis' depiction has me shying away from dread moisture and loathing every bite of processed food. The revelation that lower-quality and spoiling ingredients are reserved for chocolate-flavored foods because chocolate hides rancid flavors better was especially disturbing.

Monster, John Gregory Dunne.
This has been sitting on my book to buy list for a long time, and it did not disappoint at all. A great page-turner describing multi-year experience of writing a Hollywood movie.

Nine Layers of Sky, Liz Williams
An engaging alternate universes story, featuring Russian folklore and central Asian settings, but limited by a weak ending and less satisfying overall than expected.

I successfully vacated Denmark. This was not especially difficult, since thanks to the excellent public transportation, I could have taken any of four completely different routes to the airport. The vacation was very nice as well - two weeks in San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver, including a lovely two days at the Vancouver Folk Festival. The picture on their website makes it look much more frenetic then it really is; last year Ani DiFranco had to mediate a dispute between the sitters and standers.

The trouble is getting back from vacating. In Copenhagen, with few friends, a haze of smoke in even the few good restaurants, an approaching summer that went into retreat in early June, the loudspeakered party room under my apartment, and a harbor view from my corner desk in the office, I didn't have a huge problem doing work. Back in LA, with my reassembled bicycle (about 0.5% of it didn't make it through shipping), good cheap food, old friends, abundant retail opportunities, and my grandmother's garage to help clean, it's been a bit harder to get into the groove. But groove I shall, because I am a seasoned professional. Also I've booked all my tickets to go back to Copenhagen in September to keep the ball rolling with the remaining projects that I'm doing with Collaboraid.

Meanwhile ... meanwhile I think it will be many months before Southern California doesn't feel like vacation, even when I'm working.

On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
“[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair.”

On the VCR, 1983

"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

On the public domain, 1995

"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"

— Jack Valenti

Remember when you were in high school, and you really wanted to go to the prom with a gorgeous girl, but you couldn't ask her because she was really popular and already had served two terms as president of the United States, so you wound up asking John Kerry? That's the situation the Democrats are in now. — Dave Barry

Pictures of protesters confined to crummy, caged pens far from the action. At the Democratic convention. Very not cool. Don't let your reactions to Bush's policies blind you to the fact that the Establishment includes both major parties and the Democratic Party are only the good guys in comparison.