Electric Josh

Snoop
So while I'm all busy screwing around with the font manager on my laptop (For those who must: I think that my decision to put some slightly non-standard lines into /etc/apt/sources.list has begun to bite me in the butt), you kids should go entertain yourselves with the Snoop Dogg Schizzolator. It makes this space way cooler; if I were Snoop, I might have said:

Bwaahahahaaa n' shit. ..!
I has successfully dominated da world of Daghlians, as measured by what I'm now willing call da one true standard of importance: Tha G-double-O-G-L-E." Harry 'n tha dude's horrible, radioactive death will pull back ahead, of course, just as soon as they fire off a dirty bomb in some major city, at which point I'll care not at izzall 'bout my Tha G-double-O-G-L-E rank."

Tunnel
Last night, as Melissa and Aaron were leaving, I felt an uncontrollable urge to go drive through the new northbound tunnel. It sure is a tunnel. There's one more lane, and there are only two onramps where there used to be four or five. It's sort of anticlimactic in that all that time and money and cool engineering went into an experience that lasts a minute or two, but I guess shortening the experience of driving through town was kind of the point. Now we don't need public transportation at all. (Wait, is that good?)

This thing is going to save me like two hours a week.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Colonies
The cover story in the Atlantic this month is A Tale of Two Colonies. The main idea is that here are two shady, backwater countries that the US has to deal with, which kind of makes us the colonial power on the block (or something), but what's far more interesting is the fantastic detail in which Yemen and Eritrea are described. It's the sort of storytelling about places that American white kids (me) never study, totally fascinating in their own right, that hits a really nice intersection of history and current politics. I shoulda been a political science major.

Take, for example, the Wadi Hadhramaut, a hundred-mile-long oasis in southeastern Yemen, surrounded by great tracts of desert and stony plateau and inhabited since 1,000 B.C. Despite its isolation and a history of insular tribal feuds, the region has for centuries maintained links with India and Indonesia, among other places. The Nizam of Hyderabad, in south-central India, recruited his bodyguards exclusively from among Hadhrami tribesmen. The Hadhramaut is also linked to Saudi Arabia, by Bedouin trails that in antiquity were caravan routes. Today all this makes for a convenient social and economic network in which an organization like al Qaeda can conduct global business—especially since Osama bin Laden's family has its origins in the Hadhramaut region.

Yemen is central to the destiny of Arabia and, therefore, to the war on terrorism. It was the political tensions in the Arabian Peninsula that spawned most of the September 11 terrorists, almost all of whom were Saudi nationals. Though Yemen has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia's land area, its population is almost as large, so the demographic core of the peninsula is here in its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sandcastle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since the classical age.

Separated from one another by mountain fastnesses and rich from the production of funerary spices, ancient tribal kingdoms such as Saba, Hadhramaut, and Himyar fought wars even as their merchants cultivated contacts with Africa and South Asia. These kingdoms were followed by a bewildering array of medieval Shiite and Sunni Arab dynasties, among them the Ziyadids, the Zaydis, and the Rasulids, and while they reigned each valley or oasis remained sovereign unto itself. Though the Ottoman Turks ostensibly conquered Yemen in 1517, large swaths of tribal lands never came under their control. The British officers who followed the Turks and manned the Aden Protectorate were kept busy maintaining peace among the feuding tribes in the Hadhramaut and adjacent wadis. Freya Stark, a British explorer and Arabist who traveled in Yemen in the 1930s, wrote of "wild little men of some earlier world" who spent a lifetime in "guerrilla warfare."

Operation Steel Lover
So the folks at Boing Boing (the one in the sidebar) say that this has been around forever, but you'll enjoy minutes of pseudomilitary hilarity at the American Military Operation Name Generating Device. I got these:

1. Operation Steel Lover
2. Operation You May Want to Stand Back From Our Goddess
3. Operation Bursting Storm
4. Operation Endangered Crocodile
5. Operation Don't Piss off the Justice
6. Operation Very Hungry Ka'bah
7. Operation Irascible Killers
8. Operation Frenzied Jury
9. Operation Aggravated Lynx
10. Operation Midnight Jesus
11. Operation Sore Children
12. Operation Black Typhoon
13. Operation Humane Jungle Cat
14. Operation Brutal Tiger
15. Operation Merciless Harpoon
16. Operation Democratic Gunship
17. Operation Spitting Celebrities
18. Operation Spewing Goat
19. Operation Innocent Dragon
20. Operation Famous Jihad

Mmmm, laws
Here's news of another of those bizarre laws that do nothing but foster disrespect for the law: Use a firewall, go to jail. Why do legislatures find these goofy bills so attractive? Does curtailing my use of the internet somehow improve the local economy, or make us more secure? Is the idea to criminalize anything that decreases the convenience of conducting electronic surveillance? Argh!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Heh heh

[permalink | reply | tb ]

Another county heard from
So here's how this war looks to (relatively) disinterested third (fourth?) parties: Battlefield Iraq: A War in Search of Heroes.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

More
I forgot all about the Times of India (IA) and Dawn (PK).
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Hmm
I hadn't even noticed that Canada and Mexico aren't going along with the war. That really is kind of amazing.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Bwaahahahaaa...!
I have successfully dominated the world of Daghlians, as measured by what I'm now willing to call the one true standard of importance: Google. Harry and his horrible, radioactive death will pull back ahead, of course, just as soon as they fire off a dirty bomb in some major city, at which point I'll care not at all about my Google rank.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Also
My list of non-U.S. papers a couple of days ago omitted the Toronto Globe and Mail. Not sure how I forgot that one.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Well, duh
Unsurprisingly, Arab and American TV viewers are seeing different things.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Idiots?
A relatively noninflammatory column that got a guy's column cancelled, and actually a pretty well-argued manifesto, not against the war, but against the non-rational, you-must-really-hate-America vitriol from some prowar types. Read up.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

DeLillo
So while we're in a strange mood thinking about the logic of eradicating infidels and other massively bizarre philosophies, it occurs to us that in Mao II (1991!), Don DeLillo wrote this, which I'm unwilling (and too dumb) to break down further. Have fun.

"Where I live, okay, there's a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it's water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island---little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it's all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers."

"Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time."

"I'll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop."

"You'll wonder what made you mad."

"I already have the World Trade Center."

"And it's already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse."

"What?" she said.

"If there was only one tower instead of two."

"You mean they interact. There is a play of light."

"Wouldn't a single tower be much worse?"

"No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it's like a dialogue, only I don't know what they're saying."

"They're saying, 'Have a nice day.' "

"Someday, go walk those streets," she said. "Sick and dying people wath nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?"

...

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"Keep going. I like your anger."

"But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we're giving way to terror, to new of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before---what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear."

Yesterday
Work has lately involved a lot of 90-second pauses while one automated task or another completes, and I've taken to filling the interstitial moments with locating interesting articles that I then have no time to read, because I'm at work, and I got stuff to do. Usually I post such stuff that evening, but last night I bought new running shoes, hung out with my lovely wife, then called my mom instead. Here are a few from the last few days that I finally got around to checking out.

• Interview in The Atlantic with Steven Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam. Good stuff, including an interesting analogy between the Protestant reformation of the Catholic church and the current rise of various puritanical forms of Islam, which brings us to:
• This piece in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend about Sayyid Qatb. At some point in high school I was reading a copy of Cat's Cradle in which someone had left, as a bookmark, part of a printed page of an Arab-sounding rant that, in retrospect, could only have been Qatb. The man wrote well. Someday the arcane spelling choice will be explained; someone overtired doing the transliteration, perhaps?

UK
I just realized that I read American papers nearly to the exclusion of all others, which is pretty dumb given that we have this magical network that pipes the whole of the international press into my house. I'll start with the Guardian (UK) and the Economist (UK), and then try to read Le Monde (FR) on those infrequent occasions when I feel like working through the rapidly thickening language barrier. Gotta do some research on this whole international press thing...

• Guardian
• Le Monde
• Economist

But I will say that it's wonderful to be able to keep up with rapidly unfolding current events without having to turn the TV on.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

GYWO
Just your friendly "There's a new Get Your War On" alert. It's good to be an American.
Go to it.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Kid
K and I got the kid's first picture taken the other day. The fact that 18-week fetuses can be imaged quite this well is pretty neat.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

I want my awesome shock!
Nice cynical article in the Guardian about the television's frustration with the war's false start:

"Let's face it," admitted the mid-afternoon anchor on BBC News 24, as he introduced yet another map showing the one small house targeted in case Saddam Hussein was in it, "no one expected this." Turning hopefully to his pundit of that hour, he asked: "So - shock and awe coming up?"

Over on Sky News, Kay Burley was stuck with pictures of B-52s, which were supposed to have dropped the awesome shocks, still on the ground in Gloucestershire. "If they were to be in Iraq tonight, when would they have to leave?" she asked military expert Francis Tusa. But, like a pathologist faced with a body, Tusa would only commit himself to a long range of times. The pictures of the bombers in Gloucestershire filled the screen again. "Causing massive destruction in Baghdad this evening?" wondered Burley. "Stay tuned."

Before the war started, the main fear of the broadcasters had been false information. They had not allowed for what they now faced - a false start - although perhaps that resulted from deliberate false information.

Cats
On a good night's sleep, the Catamounts would have crushed Arizona. Maybe next year.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Tunes
Tried to go to a concert. Nobody there. Argh.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Downtown
So K and I were deep in the south shore after picking up the car from having been serviced at the dealer when the cell phone rang. It was Emmett, calling from work, half a dozen stories up, right downtown. "There's a huge antiwar protest happening right now. Get down here," assuming that I was still at work. How big, I asked. "Huge. Thousands of people. They're headed over to the Government Center area," which is the center of downtown. The radio had instead mentioned a small march that started over at MIT, apparently because it had tied up traffic. We'll look for a real report tomorrow. Update: he had sent this email:

I just saw the biggest peace protest I have ever seen. It was beautiful.

Pictures and newspapery story here, although the Globe's links tend to rot after a couple of days.

Update: off I go.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

The 16 and the 1
The NCAA has decided not to delay the tournament even if there's a war. That means that Arizona's gonna lose to UVM Thursday, right on schedule, and I'll be able to rant excitedly about the the first loss to a 16 seed by a 1 seed to all my friends on Friday. It'll be beautiful. (Go, Cats, go...)
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Boom
Tom Tomorrow points to Howard, the man:

To ensure that our post-war policies are constructive and humane, based on enduring principles of peace and justice, concerned Americans should continue to speak out; and I intend to do so.

Color
This is the most amazingly stupid thing in the entire world. Geez.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Blind, stupid luck
On the way into Montreal, we were struck by the number of people walking around with antiwar signs. Traffic was still fairly slow due to the unusual number of pedestrians around, so the eleven of us in the van chatted about the war"Oh, there must have been an antiwar rally here or something." Then, in the lobby of the hotel this morning, we saw this: we had seen the very tail end of a march of at least 200,000 people.

It's an excellent thing we had stopped at Nectar's in Burlington to watch the UVM basketball team make the tourney. We're a 16 seed, playing Arizona Thursday. It doesn't look good.

Anyway, leaving Montreal this morning we almost got caught in the St. Patrick's Day parade. Didn't know that there were so many Irish-Canadian francophones. How nice that the three of them have a parade!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Canada
Going to Montreal this weekend to stupidly indulge in the tradition of bachelor parties. It's gonna be ugly. But Todd'll be married in 6 weeks, so there's something. See you all on Monday.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

15
As is completely obvious by looking at her site, it's Libby's birthday. Happy birthday, Lib!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

George
Soros on Bush. It's good to see someone besides me (that is, someone with an audience larger than a dozen) offended by the difference between the current attitude from Washington ("I think the greatest fear is of the unknown,") and memorable attitudes from many decades ago ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."). Now, gawd, stop talking about politics all the time on your stupid website!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Notes
Busy day.

• Baby's heart seems to be working. That's good!
• I quit drinking coffee. Head hurts. There's an essay there, somewhere.
• Road trip to Canada planned for the weekend. Must hydrate.
• Sleeping more. Much better.

2004
Howard Dean, the guy in the sidebar, your next President, is busy appealing to nerds. Nice.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Atlantic
The reading list that is the sidebar continues to grow. I've added The Atlantic, which fills the niche that the New York Times once did, like a decade ago: a skeptical viewpoint, maybe even a bit liberal, but at least its writers treat you like you have a brain. The senior editor there, Jack Beatty (Daddy, why must all online bios have smug black-and-white photos?), who has been a fixture on VPR as far back as I can remember, presently writes us a jittery, eloquent piece that sums up nicely why I think fundamentalists of any stripe shouldn't be put in charge of governments.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

New
There's a new Get Your War On. Follow the link in the sidebar.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Monty
In this space's continuing and losing battle to avoid posting overtly political stuff, we note that Kelly V. has pointed us at Terry Jones's faintly Pythonic essay: I'm losing patience with my neighbors. Kuro5hin has more.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Navel gazing
The calendar at the top of the sidebar looks horrible when days appear as plain text rather than links. This unreasonable aesthetic dictum is starting to drive some ill-conceived posts into this space. In retaliation, I'm going to massively redo the layout here, and maybe even move toward a layout that's completely dateless, like Cursor has. This date thing only works if you have no real job other than posting to a website, which, in turn, only works if you're a really good writer, too. Alas, this author ain't that.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Sleep
Now! In convenient pill form! Never feel tired again! Except that this is an actual drug that seems to prevent the mental effects of sleep deprivation, although it probably turns you into the Joker after prolonged use.

I realize that maybe I can find a different supplier. I log onto the Internet to see if I can get modafinil on the sly. I find it cheap at the Discount Mexican Pharmacy. I feel delighted and relieved. Then I feel terrified that I am delighted and relieved. "Discount Mexican Pharmacy"?!

Lisp
So the big project for this weekend is to try to cram more of the Lisp programming language into my brain. It's got the sort of syntax where instead of typing 2 + 2 you have to type (+ 2 2), but it lets you write programs that do cool stuff like shove + and two 2's into a list and then, since such a list is represented as (+ 2 2), evaluate the code that it just wrote, which people in artificial intelligence think is pretty cool; easier to get programs writing programs...

Why don't I have a life, again?
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Ack!
Two Bush posts in a row. Sorry about that.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Speak
Listening to Presidential press conferences has always caused me to be totally unable to emit prose for days afterward. (I should have just waited and read the transcript.)

Was it just me, or did this news conference, after being billed as a big deal, produce no new information other than the fact that the U.S. will ask for a vote from the U.N. even if it's obvious that we're going to lose that vote? What we need are Prime Minister's questions, like they have in the U.K.; find this trivial stuff out no more than a week after it's been decided, rather than have to wait for these biennial, prime-time affairs to hear anything from the horse's mouth.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Search
I'm a little wary of contributing to the growing overuse of the following sequence of words---someone has too much time on his hands---so instead I'll just point to someone named Brian (not to be confused with Brian), who's either spent a lot of time typing in his web browser or spent a bunch of time writing a script that compiled search results at whitehouse.gov. Longish excerpt:

england..................   133
egypt....................   139
italy....................   165
saudi arabia.............   190
iran.....................   212
germany..................   239
france...................   287
japan....................   302
korea....................   322
canada...................   352
india....................   381
israel...................   392
china....................   507
russia...................   566
mexico...................   636
texas....................  1130

fear.....................   429
worry....................   492

pretzel..................     9
alcohol..................   163
     
baseball.................   152
football.................    87
soccer...................    37
golf.....................    32
basketball...............    32
hockey...................    17

sex......................    44
drugs....................  1060
rock and roll............     2

springsteen..............     0
stereolab................     0
beatles..................     1
madonna..................     2
michael jackson..........     3
britney spears...........    23
yo la tengo..............   152
rolling stones...........   380
who......................  3962
guided by voices.........  9798

More school
There's more! Lee, one of this space's early readers, got into BC and will be studying for a Master's in Education. Cooool.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Schools
It's that time of year when younger siblings get into college. Martha's going to Bennington (no longer that expensive), and we discovered the other day that Adam got into his first choice, UC Santa Cruz, the coolest thing about which is that their sports teams are the Fighting Banana Slugs. Nice job, guys!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Porn in Pakistan
Funny. (Not porn.) Go. Update: many people had this idea.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Day
I'll be quick in pointing out that it's staying light later. This is good.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Think
So it's now possible to get a "United We Stand" license plate from the State of Massachusetts. Really. The initials U.S. that dominate the left side of the plate are there perhaps for the benefit of those New Englanders who've forgotten that Massachusetts is one of the fifty states that, together, comprise the United States...?

I used to see this Think! flag all over the place; mostly on Dave Winer's site, although I'm pretty sure he had it sitting around in his sidebar much earlier than the link suggests. It'd sure make a great bumper sticker, nowadays. It's even pretty apolitical.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Why does the sun shine?
According to Tom Glazer, author of On Top of Spaghetti and many, many science songs (available here; you want the versions at a 168 bitrate, not 32):

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

Moment of Zen
The television currently contains a show called Married in America. It's a show wherein five people are introduced by a guy evidently pulled moments earlier from what must have been a really fun frat party, and whored off on national television to those viewers willing to drop $1.50 (or whatever) on a phone call to vote for their favorite trick. Or something. The fact that this absurd show is even on national television is probably the most disturbing part. It's like bad performance art, only less entertaining and with none of the irony.

Now is the time to go do the Zen Television Experiment. It's well worthwhile, especially after accidentally watching anything on Fox.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Mr. Rogers
Get Your War On acknowledges the death of Fred Rogers. (I had totally forgotten about that song...) Surreal.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Kid
As pretty much all dozen of you know, K and I are having a baby in August. Today being rainy, we decided that we should probably get on the stick and investigate all the baby-related crap that can be bought. We went to the Baby Expo at the Bay Side Expo Center, and oh, man, people must really enjoy buying scads of stuff for their babies. Stuff to carry the babies, wrap the babies, feed the babies, entertain the babies, rock them back and forth, to monitor the babies. Babies need stuff like that.

But, this being America, there were strollers (not the big jogging types; just regular ones) three times the size they need to be, with 15 cubic feet of storage space beneath the seat, with knobby tires like SUV's and they actually say Jeep Cherokee on them, which is something I couldn't make up even if I were, for some reason, to try. It was possible to get breast pumps that pump both sides at once, battery powered; they come with 12V car adapters, and look like they came from a Woody Allen movie or something. The place was packed with parents and babies, the latter, like me, silent and completely overwhelmed by the spectacle. You can get $200, antibiotic-coated baby mattresses that will fit kids for less than three years. Parking was twelve bucks.

It was super rainy all day, and since I had never bothered to clear the recent record snow off the back patio, the rain had conspired with the icy remnants of frozen snow to send a slow stream of melt over the lip of the bulkhead and down the steps into the basement, where it puddled. So off I went into the backyard with a pickaxe, a snow shovel, and a spade, where I spent three hours in the rain digging trenches through two-inch-deep ice, pushing slushy water around the patio toward the mysterious drain, realizing that the drain was getting clogged with bits of slush, clearing out the drain with the spade, building a little ice dam at the edge of the bulkhead to stanch the flood somewhat, digging more trenches. Getting rained on and cold.

So anyway, we're officially havin a baby. Woohoo!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Hiney
Two words: The Ass-o-tron. For your consideration, here's the Globe, the Times, and the Department of Homeland Security. Use your imagination. Update: I removed all the links because the assotron had become a regular old nasty porn site. Oh well.
[permalink | reply | tb ]