Oh, hell, let's just vote already. Just get it over with.
Saturday Night Live has rarely been good, but I like reading books about it because it's such fertile ground for great stories: talented people under pressure in an unstructured environment. The best book is Tom Shales' Live From New York, which simply presents uncensored quotes from nearly everyone involved in the show; also good is Doug Hill's Saturday Night: A Backstage History. I just finished Jay Mohr's Gasping for Airtime, which is badly written and apparently unedited, but it's still worthwhile for the anecdotes.
Mohr was a featured player on SNL for two years, and really only barely involved, but he saw enough to gather some hair-raising tales. Essentially, SNL demonstrates Shaw's observation that youth forgives itself nothing and age forgives itself everything. Mohr blames himself for the fact that no one greets him or explains anything, and that executive decisions (hiring, casting, picking sketches) are made behind closed doors and without explanation. When Mohr's dressing room is moved without warning to an elevator shaft, he complains, and Mike Myers tells him that he spent his first year without any dressing room at all—he sat in a hallway, afraid to inquire because he wasn't sure he'd even been hired.
At 24, Mohr was still too innocent to recognize the outrageous irresponsibility of the show's executives, most notably Lorne Michaels, a talented producer who staged one coup in 1975 and has been coasting for 30 years. Today Michaels shows up only for the bare essentials: the Monday pitch meeting, Wednesday table reads, and the Saturday show. He's detached, arbitrary and uncommunicative, and he doesn't adapt or grow. The main reason SNL sucks is that each episode is written in one grueling all-nighter. There's no reason for this; it's just a "tradition," but no one thinks to change it even though it demonstrably hurts the show.
Halfway through his first season, Mohr was on Klonopin for panic attacks. It's easy to see why; I think almost any manager could draw a lot of useful lessons from his experience.
|W|P|109921944948714295|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA popular bar gets a new robotic bartender installed. It can not only dispense drinks flawlessly, but also, like any good bartender, it can engage in appropriate conversation.
So a man enters the bar, orders a drink, and the robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, then asks him, "What's your IQ?"
The man replies, "150." And the robot proceeds to make conversation about quantum physics, string theory, atomic chemistry, and so on.
The customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool." But he decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink.
Again, the robot serves him the drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?"
The man responds, "100." And immediately the robot starts talking about football, baseball, cheerleaders, and so on.
Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He goes back in, and this time when the robot asks about his IQ, he replies, "50."
"So," the robot says, handing him a drink, "you gonna vote for Bush again?"
|W|P|109905600285140010|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIt's not too late to convince your mom to vote against Bush.
|W|P|109881843916005445|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAustria's Humanoid Robotics Lab has created a "bar-bot" that begs bar patrons for change so that it can buy beer.
"Unlike most of today's robots, the bar-bot is not useful for humanity," says the video. "Rather, it is useful for itself, like humanity. The dependency on others to pursue its own highly selfish objectives makes the bar-bot perhaps the most humanoid robot ever built."
|W|P|109881828238902780|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Another historical precedent for the current administration: Libertarian gadfly Lew Rockwell has written a telling comparison of George W. Bush and Nicholas II, the last crowned emperor of Russia. Like Bush, Nicholas entered office on the strength of a dynasty, relied on connections, favored resented elites, and ran up huge deficits with unnecessary wars. History now judges him an incompetent at the mercy of cynical advisers.
The son and grandson of royalty, an unprepared Nicholas took the throne when his father, Alexander III, died young. He relied on his uncles and on Kaiser Wilhelm, whose imperialist advice led to the disastrous Russo-Japanese war of 1904. Kept from any real contact with his people, he struggled with the Duma, vacillated diplomatically and blundered into a second bloody war with Germany. After the Bolshevik's revolt, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and his whole family was executed in 1918.
The moral is that pedigree counts for nothing. Nicholas's full title was Nicholas the Second, Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, Poland, Siberia, the Crimea, Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volkynia, Podolia, and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semgalle, Samogitia, Bialystock, Karelia, Tver, Yugoria, Perm, Vyatka, Bulgaria and other countries, Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belosero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk and all the Region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the Country of Iverie, Kartalinie, Kabardine, and of the Provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian and Moutan Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Duke of Schleswig, Holstein, Stormarn, Ditmarschen and Oldenburg, Heir of Norway, but he was pretty clearly in over his head, to Russia's great cost.
Rockwell's point is that enough rightist arrogance ultimately invites a leftist reaction, less as an active choice than as an desperate alternative to the status quo. I'm willing to agree with that. I'm not voting for Kerry because he has a compelling vision. I'm voting for him because he's not George Bush. I believe that's why he got the nomination in the first place—he was judged to be less exciting than Howard Dean, but more electable. Maybe that's precipitate, but I don't expect a fire that's hotter than this frying pan.
|W|P|109870513574024514|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."—Thomas Edison
|W|P|109872413434574386|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRatio of Americans killed by lightning since January 2002 to those killed by terrorism: 3:2
From this month's Harper's Index.
|W|P|109849927875218910|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comApparently the Red Sox have won some kind of sporting event. I'm not really following it; I've never been able to get into sports. For me they have a sort of magnificent, almost studied irrelevance. Nothing against the fans; I just don't get it. Sports is manufactured drama. It's entirely arbitrary, and weirdly superfluous. Commerce, medicine, education, law, politics ... if the world were clockwork, you could lift sports out and fling it at the stars and the remainder would tick along fine. Any newspaper could cut sports without an ethical qualm. It just doesn't mean anything.
Invent a sport—nerf soccer on rollerskates. Draft local teams, compose a tournament, anoint the winner. Do this every year and eventually a girl will be killed because the fans take it too seriously. It just doesn't make any sense.
Anyway, while I'm quoting comedians, here are a couple on this subject:
"Men in America are way too invested in sports. They care too much. Guys, you're not the 10th man. You're a machine for turning beer into piss. It's so sad when the team wins and they go 'We won!' No, no, there's no we. You didn't win anything. Ten black guys who would hate you if they knew you won."—Bill Maher|W|P|109849673635144503|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"The players change teams, the teams move from city to city�the only thing that stays the same are the uniforms. We're literally rooting for laundry."—Jerry Seinfeld
I've wandered into sampling "alternative" comedians, who are a lot more intelligent and less show-bizzy than the mainstream. My favorite is still Patton Oswalt, whose 2.5-hour 222 I'll buy as soon as he puts it up on the United Musicians site. But the best political punchline I've heard so far comes from David Cross:
"I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said!"
He adds, "Are we a nation of six-year-olds? Answer: Yes."
|W|P|109847825713642052|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
In looking for a historical precedent for 9/11, most people point to Pearl Harbor, a large-scale surprise attack on American soil. But a better example—with closer historical parallels and more telling lessons—might be the Reichstag fire, which destroyed the German parliament's assembly hall in 1933 and ultimately swept the Nazis to power.
I am not saying that Bush is Hitler, or that Republicans are fascists, or any such glib cant. But the episode does show how an extremist conservative minority can turn the destruction of a landmark building into a powerful symbol to advance their cause and enact some draconian reforms. Here's what happened.
On Feb. 27, 1933, a Berlin fire station responded to an alarm and found that the assembly hall had been set afire. The police found Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist agitator, cowering behind the building. When Hitler and Hermann Goering arrived, they announced that Communists had set the fire and arrested the party leaders. Hitler declared a state of emergency and convinced president Paul von Hindenburg to abolish most of the human rights protections in the Weimar constitution.
The Nazis tortured Van der Lubbe into a confession, and the Communists lost badly in the next election (their leaders were in jail, and they were denied access to the press). Hitler won with 44 percent of the vote and forced the remaining minority parties to grant him the right to suspend civil liberties and rule by decree. When the Reichsgericht actually acquitted the Communist leaders, an enraged Hitler established a "people's court" that would rule on all treason cases.
You can see the parallels. (This cartoon sums up the main point very nicely.) It's easy to conclude that the attacks of 9/11 were most significant for their symbolic value, and that the neoconservatives have siezed on that pretty adroitly to stifle opposition and advance questionable goals. But it still falls to the voting public to reject appeals to emotion and nationalism. And so far, I think, the public has failed.
|W|P|109813523935675565|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHumans pretty readily consider themselves the dominant species on this planet, but I've never really understood this. Dominant how? Bacteria and insects are more numerous and diverse. Humans are generalized, adapting well to various environments, but there's evidence that this actually accelerates the evolution of other species.
So what else is there? We say we're the only species capable of symbolic thought, but almost by definition we wouldn't recognize higher intelligence in another life form.
I think we're too quick to claim the title, and that stunts our curiosity. We're the most numerous large animal on Earth, but do you know what number two is? Crabeater seals. There may be 40 million crabeater seals in the pack ice around Antarctica. And most people have never heard of them. What does that imply?
|W|P|109812823414376047|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBest Onion headline in a long time:
Jacques Derrida 'Dies'|W|P|109829954474658387|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I saw a telling sigfile in a recent e-mail:
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder;
act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none;
in a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
I miss my apathy. I miss my benign, complacent faith. Four years ago I used to tell people, proudly, that I was neither Democrat nor Republican, that I was right smack in the middle, trying to judge each issue on its merits. Now someone has yanked the carpet over, so suddenly I'm on the "fringe," a bewildered liberal in a new world where nurses drive Humvees and Arnold Schwarzenegger has his own police force.
I don't want to be a liberal; I don't want an ideology. A copy of American Prospect has been sitting on the dining room table for two weeks now. I can't read it; it's just as shrill and blind as Fox.
I want to be a moderate again. But there is no middle anymore.
|W|P|109818522383672815|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe "special extended DVD edition" of The Return of the King has been delayed until Dec. 14, a month later than its predecessors, due to staggering amount of material it will include. I still think ROTK was the weakest of the three movies, but I'll probably still get the extended version. In reviewing the first two recently, something else has struck me.
They never quite explain what the Ring does. I mean, sure, yeah, it makes you invisible, but that doesn't warrant a cataclysmic war. It "binds" the other rings, meaning presumably that if Sauron recovered it he could subjugate the other races. But if only Sauron can wield it, why do Isildur and Boromir covet it? What power do they expect it will give them? This is never really explained; there's just a lot of mystical handwaving.
In that regard there are a lot of parallels with Darth Vader's character in the original Star Wars. Vader is really a secondary character there, but in the sequels George Lucas starts to insist that the whole saga was really about him. It's not really satisfying, though; there are no clues in the original film that Lucas had any broader vision for the character.
Likewise the Ring. In The Hobbit it was just a magic ring that conferred invisibility. As a driving force for the larger story in The Lord of the Rings, it really doesn't make sense.
|W|P|109811660435378875|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The inevitable website OctoberSurprise.net is handicapping the odds of various potentially election-winning Republican stratagems. The current standings:
- Osama bin Laden captured: 38.9%
- Spectacular terrorist attack on U.S. soil: 16.0%
- Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert: 14.3%
- Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states: 12.1%
- Escalation in Israel, Iran, or North Korea. US opens a new war front: 8.9%
- WMD's found in Iraq: 6.1%
- US pulls out of Iraq in October, leaving the UN in charge: 3.7%
I'm almost infinitely cynical at this point, but those all look pretty iffy to me. But keep your eye on new rumors that Bin Laden has been located in China, and that we're negotiating for him now.
|W|P|109796289633092422|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot."—Groucho Marx
|W|P|109785588977589380|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBest encapsulation I've seen yet of modern American conservatism (from a Metafilter discussion of school funding and the third debate):
Never forget that this is all about morality for GWB, and that morality is pure Weberian Calvinism: Prosperity is proof of virtue. It is pure and simple Master-Morality stuff.
That's just exactly right.
|W|P|109776187699551901|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe servers at electoral-vote.com has been getting attacked lately, allegedly by Republicans, though it's hard to see why. Today's tally has Bush leading strongly, with 291 electors against Kerry's 228. There's no spin, here, either: Why would anyone object to an objective presentation of polling data? It makes no sense.
A paranoiac might think the Republicans want to suppress the fact that Kerry's been gaining since the debates started. I'm not that paranoid, but conservatives have been seeming a lot less sanguine lately. (Actually, if these data are right, Kerry's been generally winning in the electoral college since June.) Tonight's final debate seems to favor Kerry, I think—like his father, Bush has largely ignored domestic policy. It would be fitting if he became a one-termer for the same reason: It's still the economy, stupid.
|W|P|109769131503188909|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com