Okay, I have a new favorite band. Named after a New Jersey gift shop, Fountains of Wayne makes the kind of brilliant, insanely catchy, tambourine-in-the-chorus power pop that makes you want to roll up your car windows and risk some serious eardrum damage.
How catchy is it? Remember the 1997 Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do, about a garage band in the early '60s that writes one perfect song? That whole movie depended on one tune—it had to capture everything that can be great and redemptive about three-minute radio pop—and it succeeded fantastically. Well, Adam Schlesinger wrote that song, and got an Oscar nomination for it. That's how catchy it is.
Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood met in 1986 at Massachusetts' Williams College and discovered that they both loved melodic British pop. They recorded a never-released LP under the name Pinnwheel, and after graduation Schlesinger left for New York and a gig playing bass for the indie-pop band Ivy. Collingwood joined the Boston country group Mercy Buckets, but moved to NYC in the mid-'90s and showed Schlesinger some songs. The two reunited for an eponymous 1996 debut that was named number 2 album of the year in the Billboard Critics' Poll.
What's really inspiring about this music is that it's not facile. The production is glossy, but Schlesinger's writing favors ascending chromatic basslines and Lennonesque minor subdominants. It's perfect, but it's not simple. And they have bridges and modulation and melodic guitar solos and all the other stuff that's so unfashionable now. I've been playing the first three songs on the new album, Welcome Interstate Managers, over and over for three days now.
|W|P|105964856846152489|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."�George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003
"And the time is getting worse. That's what people have got to understand up there in Washington or over there in Washington down there in Washington, whatever. Thought I was in Crawford for a minute."�Scranton, Pa., Jan. 16, 2003
"I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that."�Conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as reported on June 3, 2003, in The Washington Post and elsewhere
|W|P|105956432817457127|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBigger than Europe, Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, highest, and driest continent on Earth. Its ice sheet contains 90 percent of the ice and 70 percent of all the fresh water in the world, but it's technically a desert (it has not rained in the dry valleys for 2 million years), and the reflected light can actually sunburn your retinas.
South Pole Station sells sweatshirts that say "Ski South Pole: 2 Miles of Base, 2 Inches of Powder." Every year the pole sees six months of continuous sun, then six of frigid darkness; in winter the average temperature is 76 degrees below zero.
Other fun facts:
The continent is also famous for heroic explorers, including Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen. In her photoblog, Life in the Freezer, researcher Gillian Hadley recommends Roland Huntford's The Last Place on Earth. I'll see if I can get that in time for my vacation in August.
|W|P|105947635151636931|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA third game against VictoriaBot, my first loss. I made only two material mistakes in 56 moves; in this case it's really the time trouble that kills me.
In the end it had 44:55 to my 8:09. I think perhaps it's not really that strong, it just moves so fast that humans can't keep up. I'll try to find different opponents for future games.
|W|P|105938935632874726|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."—Paul Wolfowitz, July 21, 2003
|W|P|105930559540989685|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCosmic insignificance got you down? Get religion! Answer 20 questions and the Belief-O-Matic will rank 27 faiths based on compatibility with your beliefs. (Salvation not guaranteed.) My list:
I wonder why it puts Unitarianism above secular humanism. I've attended to a couple of Unitarian churches, and I find religion without dogma kind of pointless.
|W|P|105923297270727071|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe skunk ape is Florida's answer to Bigfoot, a mysterious large primate that conveniently reveals itself only to isolated witnesses and somehow evades all investigation. It's reputed to live east of Interstate 75, near Myakka River State Park.
Apparently the whole business started when an anonymous writer mailed two photographs and a letter to the Sarasota sheriff's department in December 2000, claiming she took the pictures in September or October.
"Is someone missing an orangutan?" the writer asked. She identified herself as a grandmother who had taken two flash photographs when she found the beast stealing apples from her backyard. "It is hard to judge from the photos how big this orangutan really is. ... I judge it as being about six and a half to seven feet tall in a kneeling position. ... It had an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard. The orangutan was making deep 'woomp' noises."
No orangutans were missing, of course. Loren Coleman, a "cryptozoologist" and part-time professor at the University of Southern Maine, leapt into action. He reports earnestly that "meaningful analyses of the eyeshine, the pupil diameter, the dentition, the tongue, hair color, and exhibited behavior of this apparent primate is taking place."
The whole thing just screams "hoax" to me. If the skunk ape is 7 feet tall kneeling then it must be nearly 10 feet tall standing. The largest male orangutans are 4 feet 5 inches. The letter writer says she was standing within 10 feet of the monster when it stood up ("an animal this big could hurt someone seriously"), but she stood there anyway and took a second picture. Plus, why is she trying so hard to remain anonymous? (The letter was typewritten.) She says she contacted the police at the advice of a friend who used to work in animal control. Surely that person would have wanted to get involved, or could at least have contacted the sheriff on her behalf.
There have been other "sightings" since then, but of course no evidence. Nice photos, though.
|W|P|105915951824497615|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFifteen years ago, in an elevator in Greenbelt, Maryland, a librarian said to me, "The truest thing you can say about art is that you don't know why you like it." For some reason I've always remembered that.
Nokkvi Eliasson's site presents 90 black-and-white photos of abandoned farms in Iceland. You'd think an empty building would make a boring subject, but I find them just tremendously evocative. And I have no idea why.
|W|P|105907764585851632|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI'm reading two social histories of the Internet, with tellingly similar titles: James Gleick's What Just Happened and Michael Lewis' Next: The Future Just Happened. I haven't read enough of the Gleick to know yet if I like it; essentially I think it's a collection of his articles from The New York Times. I liked his Chaos, when that came out. We'll see.
The Lewis I really like, even though it comes with two strikes against it. One, I've already seen the BBC series on which it's based. Two, it partakes of the same anecdote journalism that drives me up the wall on NPR's Morning Edition. NPR doesn't report a trend using statistics or expert commentary, it picks an example and paints a "vivid" picture, because the editors think that's a more compelling way to tell a story. Well, it is, for most people, but it's unethical unless you demonstrate to yourself and to the audience that you know the example is representative. NPR never does that, so it comes off as lazy reporting. "Every morning at five o'clock, Julio Sanchez cleans his tiny straw hut and begins to load his burro for the long trip to the coca fields." This drives me nuts, so I usually switch to 96 Rock.
Lewis isn't quite so guilty of this, because the trends he's reporting are so outlandish that even one example is convincing. For example, 14-year-old Jonathan Lebed made $800,000 trading stocks on the Internet, and his parents never really understood what he was doing, even after the SEC got involved. Even if there's only one Jonathan, it's significant that anyone could pull this off. And there aren't really any statistics on this kind of thing anyway. That's sort of the point.
I had read most of Lewis' Liar's Poker after innocently starting it to do some research, I don't remember why. His prose style is wonderfully readable. Thoroughly reported but not arrogantly so, and remarkably incisive without being smug. He finds nutshells for things that I hadn't suspected could even be characterized:
Cedar Grove, New Jersey, was one of those Essex County suburbs defined by the fact that it was not Newark. The real estate prices appeared to rise with the hills. The houses at the bottom of each hill were barely middle class; the houses at the top might fairly be described as opulent; but in some strange way they were all the same house. Even million-dollar homes built on streets with names like Tiffany Court were less upper-class mansions than some middle-class person's idea of upper-class mansions. Indistinguishable from the homes on either side of them—same manicured lawn, same grandiose entryway, same more-crystal-than-crystal chandeliers—they were, in fact, giant tract houses. In Cedar Grove rich just means having more of exactly what you had when you weren't rich.
I'll see how the Gleick stacks up after this.
|W|P|105895722916453912|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWay back in 1981, Kevin Russell played guitar for a band called 707. No one remembers them—they had only one semi-hit with "I Could Be Good for You"—but I always liked them. They were relatively faceless exponents of the unabashedly hooky guitar pop that made the Cars famous, and Russell's solos were brilliant high points. Every one was a witty little paragraph that combined melody, imagination, blues and fire into eight pithy bars. It all sounded fresh but he never repeated himself, and everything he did supported the song.
I always wondered what happened to him. Today on allmusic I saw that there are only two albums in his discography, S.F. Blues Guitar Summit, Vols. 1 and 3. Today I got the third disc, and was ... disappointed.
My musician brother once said that jazz is more fun to play than to listen to, and I think that's probably doubly true of the blues. No idiom is harder to play well, or easier to play badly. I've never heard a bouncy mid-tempo shuffle in E that I've liked—too often the soloist does what I call water-skiing, just noodling around behind the band, instead of "taking it somewhere," as Jeff Beck put it. They don't play rests, and they don't build the solo. The stuff I like is very rare, but absolutely some of my favorite music. The player ignores the pulse, steps up and prays through the guitar, as Stevie Ray Vaughn said.
I've been playing guitar and searching for that kind of thing for 25 years now, and I've found maybe four instances of it. "Blues Breaker" by Brian May and Eddie Van Halen, "Shame, Shame, Shame" by Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the middle section of Zakk Wylde's "Farm Fiddlin'", and maybe David Lindley's "Mercury Blues," which I just rediscovered and which never gets old. I wish I could find more.
|W|P|105887280265242475|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI spent the week doing tactics training and then yesterday played another G/45 against VictoriaBot on FICS. This time I was clearly losing at the end, down by the exchange and two pawns, but it accepted a draw by repetition anyway. All's fair, I guess.
It doesn't feel that strong, but it moves incredibly fast—in the end it had 44:56 remaining to my 12:48. Anyway, this kicks me up from 1729 to 1738, an all-time high.
|W|P|105878788209094271|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMan, who the hell edits PARADE magazine, and why are the cover lines always so life-affirming? This week it's an interview with Tobey Maguire: "I Had to Find My Own Truth." Blecch.
|W|P|105872941804878677|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOh, did I mention why musicals suck? Sorry, let me clear that up. Most drama respects the convention of the fourth wall. The characters don't acknowledge the audience at all, or only rarely, as in Shakespearean asides. In recent years the level of irony in our culture has made it possible to create broadly self-referential comedies, chiefly satires, like Gary Shandling's HBO series a while back. But in those cases the audience isn't emotionally invested in the drama. There's no suspension of disbelief in the first place, so it's not jarring when a character turns to the audience.
Musicals suck because they want it both ways. They want to create an emotionally compelling story with real characters, but they also want to stop periodically, in mid-story, and sing songs and dance choreographed production numbers, and then return to the drama. Or, worse, continue the drama within the song. Well, pick one, verisimilitude or showboating. You can't have both.
That, and I always imagine an air of undeserved self-congratulation around the performers. They're so confident that they're special, and that the audience is lucky to witness their talent. Let me decide whether you're any good, okay?
So that's why musicals suck. You're welcome.
|W|P|105862833561047122|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMovie actors always say that the actual process of shooting a film is mostly boring. I gather that's because most of the complex decisions on a movie set concern photography, not acting. For each shot the director and cinematographer have to place the camera, choose lenses, set up lighting, etc., not to mention the sound and continuity and a lot of other necessary but technical preparation. This has led to the odd practice of using stand-ins, or doubles, literally just to stand there while the shot is composed around them. Then, when everything's ready, the actor steps in and says his lines. Hugh Grant's stand-in is named Adrian Davey:
Grant: Adrian, yes. I just worked with him again on the next Woody Allen film. Well, he's an actor. He's always got a script in his hand, and he's always doing auditions. I dread the moment when he will suddenly get the part that I want. I'm sure it's going to happen any day now.
The Onion: Does he look much like you, or is he just the same height?
HG: He does look reasonably like me. I have one in England I've worked with since Four Weddings, and he looks unbelievably unlike me. He's a middle-aged man. We couldn't afford a stand-in on that film, so he just sort of volunteered. Out of loyalty, I use him every time now. [Laughs.] But it's ridiculous. The whole idea is that they look like you so they can light, but he looks like my father.
O: Does he get his own trailer?
HG: No, but I let him come into mine. He's allowed to sit in the corner of mine. He is a big star, after all.
O: It would be interesting to see a film where the big stars are all replaced by their stand-ins.
HG: I always fancy my co-stars' stand-ins. I don't know why. They have this sort of blank quality.
O: It's surreal. That's the person standing in for the actor who is standing in for the person who is the part. It's very convoluted, but I can see how that might be appealing in a psychological sense.
HG: Yeah, it might describe why it happens.
O: Yeah. Anyway, back to Adrian. Does he get his own catering, or flowers? How much power does a stand-in have on the set? Were there issues between Adrian and, say, James Caan's stand-in?
HG: [Laughs.] It has happened, actually. There are some stand-ins who work for very, very big stars and get special treatment. They get special trailers to sit in, with their name on the door. But Adrian I like to treat like shit.
O: So he can't get into all the good restaurants?
HG: If he even tries, I prevent him.
O: You have that veto power in your contract?
HG: Yes, and I enjoy it. He wanted to get married recently, and I said no.
O: He has to ask your permission?
HG: Well, that's what's insulting: He didn't even think to ask.
I gather that being a movie actor doesn't involve much acting, but it does involve a lot of odd, arcane skills, like dodging paparazzi and bearing unimaginative interviewers, that aren't taught in drama school. It must be hard, because any failure will be hugely public.
|W|P|105854721329302151|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhen critics dismissed their music as pretentious, Gentle Giant started touring with a huge neon sign that flashed "PRETENTIOUS" over their heads. That's a healthy sense of fun for a band whose music was challenging to listen to and difficult to play.
Between 1970 and 1980 Gentle Giant released 12 albums, which is an incredibly prolific output when you consider how much rehearsal time it must have taken. Their songs combined elements of rock, classical, blues, Renaissance music, jazz, and the avant-garde. A given piece might jump from an a cappella madrigal to a vibes solo to a chamber ensemble to a guitar rave-up, but they avoided the wankery (Dixie Dregs) and self-conscious jokiness (Frank Zappa) of their few peers in experimental rock. This was demanding music, but it was done seemingly for themselves, not for an audience. (I've never heard a rock band play so quietly.)
Among them, the six members played 30 different instruments, often switching instruments with one another in concert: electric guitar, 12-string guitar, electric bass, drum kit, various drums and percussion, organ, piano, clavinet, several synthesizers, vibes, violin, cello, trumpet, tenor sax, alto sax, tambourine, clarinet, various recorders, Shulberry (a percussion instrument of their invention), and more. And five members sang.
I first heard Octopus and The Power and the Glory about 15 years ago, I think, but I've just started listening to In a Glass House, which seems to be the consensus favorite on rec.music.progressive. I can see why—it's dense and knotty all the way through, which means, if it's like the others, that it will bear many listenings and grow on me all the while. I hope so.
|W|P|105843877166444773|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWilliam Faulkner is a bad writer. I'm thinking of "Dry September," which I read last night, but nearly everything I've read is simultaneously grandiose and inept—a bad combination.
In Faulkner's world, air is "vitiated"; hips are "conscious"; streetlights hang "rigidly" and "violently"; and a road can be "rutted with disuse." The simplest ideas evade his pen: "McLendon stooped his thick head." "Their motion was like an extinct furnace blast: cooler, but utterly dead."
He uses intransitive verbs transitively ("he roved his gaze") and is fond of gravid syntax: "There was no sound in it save their lungs as they sought air in the parched dust in which for two months they had lived."
Those errors arise from carelessness and technical incompetence, but the ideas themselves are bad even if expressed clearly. A good writer imagines a scene, vividly and without words, before trying to capture it. A bad writer just tries to make the words sound pretty, and hopes they say something. In "Dry September," a barber's angry customer gets up in mid-shave. "He smeared the cloth over his face and flung it to the floor. ... The barber picked the cloth from the floor. He began to fold it neatly." Think. Really picture that and think. Why would he fold it?
As Faulkner struggles to sound impressive, the clumsiness just gets worse:
When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious.
As Capote said of Kerouac, "This isn't writing, it's typing." Leave aside that "which" should be "that" and "upon" could be "on". The qualifying phrase seems to imply that the town's social life can be "exemplified" in a sense that excludes high school parties and church socials. And why build the sentence to require a five-word adjective phrase? Why is this period described as "of her contemporaries," when clearly she was a popular participant? What's the antecedent of "while still children enough"? Why the showy neologism "unclassconscious" instead of the simple "unconscious of class"? None of this is necessary; all of it is distracting.
It's these fumblings that vex me most, but finally he's guilty of a certain coyness in the storytelling. "Dry September" concerns the senseless lynching of a black man, Will Mayes, for the rumor of some indiscretion with Minnie Cooper, a maiden aunt of nearly 40. Afterward, Minnie begins laughing uncontrollably at a picture show. Why she laughs is unclear, and that's important. Does she regret her accusation? Is she reacting to the town's attention? Does she envy the young couples she sees at the show? Does she mourn the hopeless South? A bad English teacher would say it's all of these things, that the many interpretations are evidence of Faulkner's genius. That's patent bullshit. There's a big difference between subtlety and evasion. Faulkner may feel all of those things, but the character herself has a specific reason for laughing, and he should be definite about it. Feh.
|W|P|105829972667917381|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI'm going to play one serious game at reasonable time controls each week now, and analyze it closely. This was a draw against a higher-rated comp on FICS last night, which went pretty well. I made only one error, which it failed to follow up correctly.
I could have played for a win (24. Re1!), but I thought a draw was worthwhile against a stronger player, and I was quite behind on time—at the end I'd used about 23 minutes to its five seconds (!).|W|P|105818972184494300|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com Man, North Carolina is disgusting! There are bugs here I'd only heard about in legends. The mud dauber, for example, is a wasp that collects mud to build its tunnel-like nests. This week I noticed a nest about the size of my index finger attached to the ladder in our garage. Sharon did some web research and learned that mud daubers reproduce in an almost unimaginably horrible way. The female duels spiders, paralyzes them, then carries them to the nest and lays eggs on them. The eggs hatch, and the little dauberlings eat the live, paralyzed spiders. This morning I knocked down the nest in the garage. The dauber was inside, and flew away, but on looking closer I saw that the nest was packed with paralyzed spiders. It was just awful. I swept the whole mess out into the driveway. I hope they leave us alone now—I don't think I could stomach seeing that again. Niacin is like a lounge trio from Neptune. At first you think, okay, Hammond organ, bass, and drums, fine. But here's the lineup: John Novello (ex-Chick Corea, Edgar Winter, Manhattan Transfer), uber-bassist Billy Sheehan (ex-Talas, David Lee Roth, Mr. Big), and double-uber-drummer Dennis Chambers (ex-George Clinton, Gary Grainger, Bootsy Collins, Carl Filipiak, Gary Shider, Phil Magnotti, Parliament, Michael Hampton, Lincoln Goines, Rodney Curtis, John McLaughlin, etc. ...). It's like Jimmy Smith on steroids. "The music is sort of mostly high-energy, instrumental blues-rock," Novello says, "but it has jazz harmonies in it, because of my jazz background." They based the band around the Hammond because Sheehan had never been in such a lineup before. (Niacin is vitamin B3—get it?) BTW, Sheehan says that the last CD he bought on which he loved every song is Bobby Darin Sings the Classics. "I put in an enormous amount of time practicing. In my mind, I still pretty much suck, so I have to keep at it." "A conquest made by a democracy is always odious to the subject states. It becomes thereby monarchical by a fiction, but it is always more oppressive than a monarchy, as the experience of all times and ages shows."—C. L. De Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, X, 1748 Okay, now that I've evaluated everyone, here's who SelectSmart says I should support, based solely on policy. I asked it to include candidates and parties who have not formally announced yet:
At first I was surprised to see Kucinich and Sharpton so high on the list, but I suppose I don't disagree with them sharply on policy grounds. I guess I'm surprised at how much I value character and experience, apart from the platform itself. But maybe that's necessary these days. I do think Bush belongs in 24th place.
|W|P|105783140628722760|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom alt.quotations:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
is an anagram of
In the name of national security, we people of "freedom" (Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft), without an able ounce of sense, just love to enter into agreement to help our rich friends belittle democratic institutions, toss out the "outmoded" Bill of Rights, imprison "terrorists" after speedy secret trials, defraud some deportees, and invade Iraq.|W|P|105775204790249142|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Carol Moseley Braun was born in Chicago to a cop and a medical technician. She got her B.A. at the University of Illinois in 1969 and a law degree in 1972 from the University of Chicago. She's served as assistant U.S. attorney, Illinois state representative, county executive officer, senator (1992-98), and ambassador to New Zealand (1999-2001). That includes Antarctica, by the way, which fascinates me—what are the duties of the ambassador to Antarctica?
She teaches law and political science at Morris Brown College and DePaul University and has a business law practice and business consultancy in Chicago.
I like some of what she says:
Congress should not have abdicated to the president the power to engage Americans in a unilateral, preemptive war. And the president should not walk away from our allies, the United Nations, and the systems of international law to which America has contributed so much.
She's concerned about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. She supports education and a balanced budget.
But there are some troubling allegations about financial improprieties that seem never to have been investigated thoroughly. And apparently she had a romantic relationship with former campaign manager Kgosie Matthews, a hired agent for the government of Nigeria. "Right after she was elected to the senate, she and Matthews hopped over to Africa for what she described as a 'vacation,' thus skipping the senate's indoctrination for new members," wrote Mike Royko in a Chicago Tribune op-ed in August 1996. "We don't know what kind of relationship Matthews [had] with the dictator [Sani Abache] and his government, or [how long he was] on their payroll." Royko also says Matthews put Moseley-Braun's campaign "deeply in debt," paying himself $15,000 a month.
Also: "Carol Moseley-Braun appeared to write her own political obituary ... by declaring she would never run again for public office. 'Read my lips,' the U.S. senator from Chicago said in an interview with the Tribune, a day after losing to Republican challenger Peter Fitzgerald. 'Not. Never. Nein. Nyet.'" (Flynn McRoberts, "Senator's Defeat Is Her Last Hurrah," Chicago Tribune, 11/5/98)
Bottom line: Too many ethical questions.
|W|P|105766168625881397|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJohn Edwards is a Tarheel, which means I should support him, with the kind of unthinking geographical boosterism that seems always to work in election cycles. I don't.
He just turned 50 on June 10. He was born in South Carolina and grew up here, in the Piedmont. Like Gephardt, he takes every opportunity to tout his working-class roots. The first in his family to go to college, he got a law degree at Chapel Hill in 1977 and spent 20 years as a personal injury trial lawyer. In 1998—five years ago—he ran for the Senate. That's the extent of his experience as a public servant.
His economic plan is vague and short on specifics ("get rid of pork in the budget and close down special interest loopholes"). He'd make the first year of college free to qualifying students, and all four years free to those who work on homeland security for five years. His foreign policy plan is indescribably vague. He wants a new domestic intelligence agency to replace the FBI's efforts there, and like Lieberman and Graham he wants to support first responders.
Here's why I don't like him: He's completely in the pocket of trial lawyers. More than 80 percent of the money raised by his hard-money PAC, New American Optimists, has come from personal injury trial lawyers. Same for nearly all the money contributed to his soft-money PAC since early 2001.
Distinguishing votes:
Bottom line: Not nearly enough experience, far too beholden to ATLA, and no compelling plan.
|W|P|105757720281492102|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAl Sharpton became interested in running after concerns about disenfranchisement in the Florida hanging-chad debacle in 2000. He's the only hopeful who's done time—he served a 90-day sentence after being arrested in Vieques, Puerto Rico, on May 1, 2001, for trespassing while protesting the Navy bombing exercises.
His National Action Network's Madison Avenue Initiative sought to challenge racial bias in advertising. And he wants statehood for Washington, D.C.
Frank E. Watkins, a long-time aide to Rev. Jesse Jackson, became Sharpton's campaign manager in April 2003. He announced a call for constitutional amendments including the rights to vote, to quality public education, to quality health care, and to equal rights for women.
He wants universal government-run health care and believes the government should fund all political campaigns. He opposes the death penalty and supports gay marriage, and he was a vocal opponent to action in Iraq. But among his self-professed top 10 reasons for running are "increase political consciousness and awareness," "stimulate more people to get involved in the political process," and "increase voter registration."
Bottom line: George Washington University's summary quotes a cab driver: "He don't have nothing to say, he just want the publicity."
|W|P|105748379402452811|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI've been getting too sloppy in chess lately, so from now on I'll play only regular time controls and analyze every game. I really think I do understand what a well-played game "feels" like, I just have to do it.
This guy was provisional, so I think I should have been able to finish him quicker. We'll see what the analysis shows.
|W|P|105745389085082373|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism."—Sigmund Freud
|W|P|105740606314576240|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe son of a Florida state senator, Bob Graham went to Harvard Law School and worked his way up through the state legislature to become governor in 1978 and senator in 1986. Like Howard Dean, he's never lost an election.
Since 1974, Graham has worked 386 "Workdays," meaning he spends a day doing a regular person's job: firefighter, airport security screener, construction worker, police officer, fisherman, garbage hauler, social worker, busboy, park ranger, school principal. That's colorful, but not really compelling, presidential-qualifications-wise.
Graham serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and after 9/11 recommended a joint House-Senate inquiry into intelligence failures that may have permitted the attacks. He voted against the use of force in Iraq, and like Lieberman he'd increase funding to first responders. He wants to go back to Afghanistan, which makes sense to me.
He'd expand the Children's Health Insurance Program, permit those who have lost employer coverage to buy into Medicare early, and extend Medicaid to the working poor. He supports environmental protection.
As governor he balanced eight budgets, and he argues for fiscal responsibility, but it's hard to square that with his proposed "holiday" from part of the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes for the next two years.
Distinguishing votes:
Bottom line: Sort of a generic Democrat. I can't find any scandals or outrageous charges against him, but he doesn't really have a bold program.
|W|P|105732545318345021|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."—Mel Brooks
|W|P|105722901419563369|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHands-down best sentence in allmusic:
Where Napalm Death concerned itself with social protest in its often barely comprehensible lyrics, Carcass' early vocabulary was taken straight from medical textbooks and glossaries, achieving a bizarrely humorous gore factor most metal bands could only dream of; underneath song titles like "Vomited Anal Tract," "Excoriating Abdominal Emanation," "Crepitating Bowel Erosion," and "Cadaveric Incubator of Endo-Parasites" lay an almost pathological disgust with flesh (human and otherwise) that probably explains why everyone in the band is a vegetarian.|W|P|105714280198456059|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Long Bets has been getting a lot of links lately, and perhaps deservedly so. The site is well designed, and the idea—letting well-known thinkers bet on future events—is intriguing. But more interesting to me is The Foresight Exchange, which, like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, lets ordinary people vote on the likelihood of future events, assigning values like an equity futures exchange.
"The goal is to see how well an idea futures market can work in practice," says Ken Kittlitz, FX's administrator, "If the market is accurate, the predictions allow us to assess what future events are more likely than others; in other words, the market helps us predict the future."
What's interesting is that Kittlitz claims that the market is right about 70 per cent of the time. That would mean that a group of interested laymen has better judgment than a single expert. That seems unlikely, but I guess Long Bets may prove the case one way or the other.
|W|P|105705010873050059|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com