Electric Josh

Colors
Must stop posting along this silly political theme. John Ashcroft's color codes.
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Defection
So there's been this high-level defection from the ranks of the Bushies, and I'm spending some time to try to understand this one. I'm assuming it's not just the Lyn Nofziger silliness from 1992, when Bush Pere's advisor decided to jump ship over to Ross Perot's campaign.

I knew Lee Atwater and watched the development of "wedge politics" flourish from Lee through Ron Kaufman, Charlie Black, Rich Bond, Mary Matalin, and Karl Rove -- with the considerable media help of Roger Ailes and Stuart Stevens.

For those not familiar with the theory of "wedge politics," its basic concept is to drive wedges between different political interest groups -- using fear and intimidation as its primary tools. This process drives many people away from the voting process, while motivating the targeted groups with negative tactics and fear.

It is easy to scare an electorate who remembers a better -- easier -- time, and then blame the current state of national affairs on: Democrats, Hispanics, Afro-Americans, Muslims, women, gays -- take your pick.

The end result is that candidates employing these tactics often win elections, but find themselves in an impossible position to govern as a result of the ill will generated in the electoral process.

One need only reflect on the reprehensible and personal attacks employed by the George W. Bush campaign in the 2000 South Carolina primary against Senator John McCain to get a sense of how "wedge politics" can be effectively and viciously employed

I respected the fact that Lee admitted before his death that "wedge politics" was one of the most damaging tactics ever developed and apologized for the effects it could have on the American political process.

Back
So we end radio silence with a report that Sophie's doing great, bouncing away in her bouncy seat beside your narrator. Now, two hours later, she's eating. Now she's strapped to my belly in her gay little baby carrier, snoozing happily.

The original point of this post was to point out that we have time to type just as much as ever, although now that seems in doubt. Alas. We'll see what happens.
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Sophie
Sophie was born yesterday morning by C-section. 7 lbs, 11 oz.; actually, she measured 3.500 kg on the scale, which I thought was a nice, round number. Everyone's fine, and extraordinarily cute. A few pictures.
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WZ
A particularly pithy quote by Warren Zevon:

My daughter likes to buy books because she believes that she's also buying the time in which to read them.

Kid
Radio silence should not be interpreted as baby news. K continues to hog the baby.
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Old School
We just rented Old School. If you're thirtyish right now you really ought to see this right now. Video stores are open late, so go rent it now. Holy crap is it funny. Have a nice weekend.
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F&B
The Fox suit against Al Franken got thrown out of court. ("Well, of course it did," I didn't think, and wish I could.) When I get around to it I'll remove the slogan at issue from the sidebar. Just thought you'd all like to know.
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18
"Eighteen months of doing nothing but grieving and connecting the dots."
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.ppt
Ah, so Wired has David Byrne and this space's hero Edward E. Tufte each tackle PowerPoint. Presumably this article pair was motivated by someone at wired noticing that Byrne and Tufte had already produced anti-PowerPoint works of art, and figured that they'd be funny to juxtapose. They are. The Talking Heads singer uses irony; the Yale professor doesn't. Both denunciations are amusing, although perhaps this humor is easier to notice if you are forced, with any regularity, to use PowerPoint (or to endure its use by others) in real life.
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SCLM
I've been reading Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media, which, predictably, has me all worked up (and which a decent majority of my dozen readers would find interesting enough to blow a couple of beach days on). Then I suddenly ran across this New York article via cursor.

Ann Moore, while she openly shuddered over the AOL merger, still thought Time Inc. did pretty fine work without corporate interference. And Michael Kinsley, who was there with his new wife, Patty Stonesifer, who runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said sanguinely, "I don't see the problem, frankly," and then offered a defense of big media and Bill Gates.

Indeed, nowhere at the conference, really, was there controversy. In some sense, the theme of the conference, even, was a rejection of controversy-much talk about the erosion of civic trust that came from partisanship.

The state of the world might be bad, but there was a sense here of the brainpower to make it better. ...

Kid
Due date was today. No news.
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On
More Get Your War On. For the record, a load of reporters are still there, or have gone back.
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Fear
Trading on Fear. Nice.

Television uses sudden, loud noises to provoke a startled response, bright colours, violence - not because these things are inherently appealing, but because they catch our attention and keep us watching. When these practices are criticised, advertisers and TV executives respond that they do this because this is what their "audience wants". In fact, however, they are appealing selectively to certain aspects of human nature - the most primitive aspects, because those are the most predictable. Fear is one of the most primitive emotions in the human psyche, and it definitely keeps us watching. If the mere ability to keep people watching were really synonymous with "giving audiences what they want", we would have to conclude that people "want" terrorism. On September 11, Osama bin Laden kept the entire world watching. As much as people hated what they were seeing, the power of their emotions kept them from turning away.

Tense
I've decided that it's totally unacceptable to relate stories that occurred in the past by using the present tense. I think sportscasters, the same crew whom we have to thank for phrases like judgement call and real good success, are the ones who started it. The joke below is an example.

Yes, we've now reached an age where we get annoyed at the way in which people (fail to) conjugate verbs. Hmmm...
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Consultant
A quick search reveals that close to 300 other people have posted this to the web, but in the interest of demonstrating that this space is just as nerdy as you'd expect a frequently updated web site to be, I'll reprint the following joke, received via email, in its entirety.

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.  The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?"

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: "Sure.  Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.  Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.  Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.  He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas.  He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.  Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1586 sheep."

"That's right.  Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep." says the shepherd.  He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.  Then the shepherd says to the young man: "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"  

"You're a consultant." says the shepherd.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't know crap about my business. Now give me back my dog."

B&A
Before and after satellite pictures of the blackout. Looks like it got Vermont, too.
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Dowd
Doesn't Maureen Dowd have any sense of shame? Pride in her work, perhaps? Read this. Good lord. She sounds disturbingly like Jackie Harvey.
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NY
Here, a firsthand account of Manhattan with the grid hosed. Many cool pictures.
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Cocktail
New York must have been a fun town last night, but a couple of comments here caught my eye. More to come on this.
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Carlisle
Our old haunt, recently repopulated by Redskins, has been vacated by its Redskins. Alas.
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Stamps
Conan O'Brien's stamp collection. Recent issues by the USPS.
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Writer
Why I'm not a writer. Nice.
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SCOTS
Yes!! Southern Culture on the Skids is playing Boston with Reverend Horton Heat. September 25th, man. Excellent, ironic redneck rock for the people. Who's with me? (Ignore those chirping crickets.)

Larry and Mohammad and I used to groove out to Dirt Track Date (best album cover ever) whilst pointing lasers into microscopes in the basement of Lewis Lab; humming these tunes brings the smell of immersion oil flooding back. A-and I saw the Rev'd in Burlington at Toast; memories of that place come flooding back every time someone mentions tiny firetrap concert venues.

It's good to live in America.
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SYN flood
So if the dearth of bouncy electrons fails to take down the internet, maybe something like this will. Here's to oddball, non-Microsoft operating systems!
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e-
So there's supposed to be a massive blackout; grid problems. Boston has seen no problems at all; not even a flicker. What's more, I can see sites that are hosted across the country (1, 2, 3), along with a bunch right around here, including this space itself, hosted all the way up near New Hampshire.

They're going to be talking about this for weeks. We're going to get a lot of cool explanations about how the electric grid works (or is supposed to work).

The most interesting property I seem to remember (from way back in they day, when I was an academic) about the North American electric grid is that it's a bistable system. That is, it has an "on" state and an "off" state, and the transition from one state to the other is typically a sudden, catastrophic thing. In biology they call it a switch. We read yesterday in this space that climatologists think this is the way ice ages start. It sounds, though, that we might just be looking at a switch in the most literal sense: too much power in the system, one circuitbreaker at a plant goes, thereby increasing the load on the rest of the grid, causing the rest of teh circuitbreakers to flip, too.

Oopsie.
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Oil
Okay, so this is getting kind of creepy. A Financial Times Op-Ed piece [summary] follows the same line of thinking from my short-form ramblings the other day. Or maybe it's just kind of obvious. Cool. Link from our sidebar friends at Cursor.
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Free
Just as I was beginning to suspect that this space wasn't exactly the universal hub of journalistic agendas, along comes Wired with a piece (clearly a response to my blurb) describing exactly what these "charge people for a basically free product" clowns are doing wrong.

Sure, leasing a broadband connection with a Wi-Fi base is cheap. But add a billing system - secure login server, transactional database, credit card processing, tech staff, customer service operators standing by - and the outlay skyrockets to $30, $50, even $70 a day, particularly if there are lots of support calls. (Ironically, most of those calls will be about problems with the billing system itself.)

Back
Adam is back from his two-month tour of Europe. He broke no U.S. laws.
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Layout
New layout. Work okay?
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Weather
Nice article I stumbled across (I forget where from) in The Atlantic's archives: The Great Weather Flip-Flop. Synopsis: global warming will probably kick off a process whereby the Gulf Stream is interrupted and the global climate (especially Europe) enters a new ice age over the course of about five or ten years. Neat. I mean, damn!
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F and B
Close watchers of the sidebar will notice that this space, like many others, is now a fair and balanced site. (Groupthink is fun.)
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Seersucker
So my excellent wife got me a seersucker shirt and now I look like my dad. At one point yesterday the shirt was draped over the back of a chair in the kitchen, and for a moment, looking quickly, I thought,

1. my dad's over there in the kitchen, and
2. it's 1978.

TV
The television is trying to show me something called the Miss Teen USA swimsuit competition. Think about that for a minute. Fifty high school girls with way too much makeup, identical high heels and identical bikinis. Do fourteen-year-olds need to shave, much, really? When do sales (to advertisers) of images of dozens of indistinguishable, nearly naked, not-even-barely-legal girlies become kiddie porn? (Note that it would be totally unfair to mention women's tennis at this point. At least they're mostly over 18.)

Hopefully the television really hopes to attract only teenagers to the broadcast.
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K
Hey everyone, wish K a happy anniversary with me:

Happy anniversary, baby!

GYWO
So Get Your War On is back, but isn't exactly screamingly funny. Hopefully this dude won't go the way of Ren & Stimpy, starting off amazingly great only to fade into mere acceptability after running out of ideas. Cross your fingers, kids. [Update: more War cartoons are appearing. Huzzah!]

And now he's in Rolling Stone, apparently, although there ain't no way I'm going to start reading Rolling Stone again; that magazine lost any right to my eyeballs ten years ago when they celebrated a Def Leppard album as being, "...full of witty double entendres, such as, 'Let's get the rock out of here!' "
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2.5 million???
This is dumb. WiFi is really, really cheap; so cheap that it's not worth billing users for. Rigging an airport with WiFi doesn't cost anywhere near the millions of dollars some loser company is claiming.

• 100 gates X 2 access points per gate X $150 per access point = $30,000 for parts.
• $50,000 for wiring?
• $10,000 per month to maintain a T3 line to the internet.

How do these companies plan to make money once people figure out that they can set up wireless internet access almost for free, and that they don't need no steenkin wireless company to do it for them?
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The News
In Suffering News Burnout? The Rest of America Is, Too, the Times warns, ominously, probably unwittingly, that,

The total evening news audience on the broadcast networks has been lower this summer than it was during the summer of 2001, when the pressing stories of the day were shark attacks and Chandra A. Levy.

It works
So spam works. What do you know?

An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products' websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to spam and placed orders for the company's Pinacle herbal supplement--a supplement to, you guessed it, make your penis larger. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

free network!
The Globe talks (from single-source research, and in grasping, buzzwordy fashion) about Boston (okay, Davis Square in Somerville, but it is on the Red Line) getting wired up with no-cost WiFi hotspots. How hard could it possibly be to people on board with such a plan in Boston of all places?
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Chuck
Why has nobody made one of a whole family of jokes involving Liberian Thug-In-Chief Charles Taylor and the basketball shoe named for him. Thousands of professional comedians. Both are in the news. Maybe Jon Stewart did so when I wasn't looking. Alas.
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Saudis
So here's some pretty decent thinking by Joe Conason (and without Salon's heartbreaking paywall!) on The Classified 28 Pages. See also this. Man, do I ever hope nothing quite this vulgar and cynical is actually going on in the White House.

If I was an optimist, I'd openly express hope that the following situation is closer to what's actually going on:

1. The various Bushies were making a ton of oil money from their dealings with the Saudis, but had some reservations about how much ill will was being generated across the Middle East by the presence of US troops there to prop up the monarchy.
2. Upon watching buildings get destroyed by airplanes driven by Saudi-directed jihadis, the Bushies decided that this relationship had to end, the Saudi royal family driving lots of the world's terrorism and all, but...
3. ...the entire US economy would crash horribly if the Saudis did anything untoward with the oil supply right when the amazingly greedy and destabilizing tax cuts were hitting, and...
4. ...doing anything drastic to reduce America's oil dependence---like declassifying good batteries that could power long range, ass-kickin electric cars, or suddenly, massively instituting Europe-style gas taxes to get people to use less oil---would crush the economy worse than any (temporary) oil supply problems. Imagine all the oil companies and most of the car companies all in serious financial trouble at the same time because the nationwide demand for oil dropped forever by 50% in two years.
5. So we needed our own non-Saudi-controlled oil supply to protect us against any economic nastiness that might otherwise be headed our way upon withdrawing all our troops from Saudi Arabia and telling the monarchy to go screw, that last bit having the effect of removing the House of Saud from power. Oh, wait, never mind, because they'd quickly be replaced by a probably even more anti-American theocracy. Hmmm...

Of course, I'd just declassify the stinkin batteries and raise gas taxes and be done with it. I'd rather be poor than dodge fundamentalist suicide bombers or whatever. All of which is easy for me to say, not being President...

That's the optimist's view.
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Transcript
Okay, I need to go to bed because I've found myself reading Larry King transcripts, but this one is pretty priceless:

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(EXPLOSIONS)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Memories of the war in Iraq.

Fraud
How to go directly to hell without waiting in line:

People posing as Army casualty notification officers have contacted the families of five soldiers deployed to Iraq in an apparent fraud attempt. The suspects contacted the families by telephone and went to their doors in Army uniforms, said Maj. Joe Golden, rear detachment commander for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team. The suspects told the families they had important news about their loved ones but asked to first see documents such as Social Security cards and birth and marriage certificates. One of the impersonators asked for a check for $300.

Marriage
Oh no! Ever since gays have been allowed to get sort of married in Vermont my marriage to K has been on the rocks. But now that there's a gay Episcopal bishop we're breaking up for good. Too bad, because we were quite deeply in love (just last week!) and very much looking forward to our new baby.

Looks like the Republicans were right all along: gay people really do threaten The Sanctity of Marriage. Who knew?
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Crash
Argh. Palm Pilot crashed. (It's only supposed to do one thing! What kind of loser ships an address book whose default behavior if anything at all goes wrong is to drop all of its information irretrievably on the floor?!)

Send addresses and phone numbers if you want us to have them.

On the other hand, the guy who came to deal with the hot water heater looked at it and told K, "Yep, it's a slow leak. That's funny. These things usually just explode." Holy crap! (So it could be worse. Today I heard a couple of war stories from people at work about spontaneous, catastrophic hot water heater failures. Too terrible to recount here.)

So after informing K how lucky we were, he accompanied her to Home Depot where he laid down his serious Alvin Hollis jujitsu on the typically slow Home Depot staff and got the thing replaced under warranty, when he could have just said, back in the basement, "Yep. Leaking. The one I have in my truck will cost you $500," and been done. The replacement one works great. Alvin Hollis rocks! But do not let their oil delivery guys give your kids a sip of heating oil straight from the hose as depicted on their site.
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Lib
Libby is updating from Greece.
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Davis
West coast Mom sends the following update from California, where the Governor is even embarrassing his fans:

If you are a political junkie and thrive on larger than life scenarios, check out Dan Weintraub's blog for sometimes hourly updates on the latest developments on Gray Davis' self destruction.  The next four days will be crazy and pivotal to the ultimate outcome.  Indeed, this is not about the right wing any more (if it ever was), as Davis  continues to dig himself deeper and deeper.  The good news is that the whole recall issue is educating some of the populace about the fundamental structural problems with CA state government (like term limits, Prop 13, etc.)  that need to be addressed before anything will get better.  The very best person to take over is Dianne Feinstein, with enough political capital to be able to do the right thing, and also the ability to restore some credibility (both national and international) to the state.  Will she do it?  I'd support her in a heartbeat.

[Update: As though on cue, Feinstein has gone on record saying she won't run, which leaves Arianna Huffington as the likliest lefty? Imagine an SUV-hating governor...]
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Football
Okay, the season's first football game is on. Monday Night Football, home of exploding helmets and snazzy computer graphics. After spending close to two hours of my life half-watching this "game," I've seen Morton Andersen kick three field goals and a 28-year-old guy on the Chiefs break his neck. That was with 17 seconds left in the second quarter. They paused the game for 15 minutes and ran ultra-slow-motion replays of the guy's neck breaking in some freakish, compression-related fashion before wheeling the poor guy's limp body off the field on a stretcher. Now that Paul's done playing football I'm pretty sure I have absolutely no use for the sport anymore, except possibly as an excuse to drink. On the other hand, even mindless drink is an experience I don't need dulled by annoying football commentary.

Then they finished the first half moments before K informed me that the water heater is leaking all over the basement. So it goes.
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Glucose power
This is cool, but it's especially cool if you're my dad: Ars points to a story about generating electricity from the glucose kicking around in your friggin blood! 100W, which is how much power They claim they'll be able to leech out of one human, is enough to run a laptop, or a cell phone or tracking device embedded completely inside your body, or a small FM radio station. Or one could power a little number-crunching RAM with a direct frontal lobe interface, or some heads-up display eyeglasses, or a little video camera with an RF relay to the news/police/rescue truck outside.

Now dad always said---he's a botanist, so he should know---that the electricity source we'll all be using in the far future will be something very similar, but based instead on the (extremely efficient) photosynthetic pathway: carbon dioxide and red light in, energy out.
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Howard
Cursor, on Candidate Howard's trifecta. Watch him go! [Update: BusinessWeek, too.]
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Marry
Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic (which is about to get more expensive, apparently) on gay marriage:

I doubt that most homosexuals would take their marital vows less seriously than heterosexuals do, as some conservatives insist. Even if I'm wrong, however, surely the exemplary power of failed or unfaithful gay marriages would pale next to the example currently being set by a whole group-an increasingly fashionable group-among whom love and romance and sex and commitment flourish entirely outside of marriage. And can you imagine social conservatives telling any other group to cohabit rather than marry? Can you imagine them saying, "The young men of America's inner cities won't take marriage as seriously as they should, so let's encourage them to shack up with their girlfriends"?

Suspected
As alluded to Friday, John Gilmore is a suspected terrorist. Nice.
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Kids
Okay, two younger siblings in Greece with the parents after a junket in Costa Rica, and another in England hanging out with friends and their families after a junket through western Europe; the remaining immediate family basking in another perfect California summer. K and I just spent a lovely weekend on the beach down the Cape. When the hell did this happen to us? Could be worse, huh?
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First
Forgot to say, "Rabbit, rabbit," when I woke up this morning. Oopsie.
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Bomb
K and I agree that this is the funniest thing ever. A teenaged kid travelling out of Logan this morning with his family decided to put a note in his bag that read:

Did you find the bomb yet? Nope. Just clothes. That's what I thought so fuck you.

1. travelling with your parents, who will now be pissed because they have to deal with you instead of going on vacation,
2. a citizen of a country where it's obviously illegal to joke about killing the president or putting bombs on airplanes or anything, and
3. already being Watched anyway.

But it's still pretty damn amusing to us here in the living room.
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