Electric Josh

Ugh. Watching this stupid debate is like watching the Red Sox in the postseason. You absolutely know that something catastrophic is about to happen, but there's nothing to do but wait for it while listening to the television talking emptily in the meantime. Blah blah...I believe...war on tara...blah. Update: ...hard work...(pause)......and then John Kerry almost forgot his closing statement. Dear God. Nearly flawless otherwise, I thought.
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Reporting in lieu of transcription. Yay, Mr. Nagourney!
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The paper of record's standing in this space recovers some from yesterday after we found this "archive of editorials on the flaws in the mechanics of our democracy": Making votes count. (With a theme, reverse chronological arrangement of opinionated writing, and no paywall, this counts as a weblog. From the Times.)
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There's an article in The New York Times whose headline (and subject) is "How Young Is Too Young to Have a Nose Job and Breast Implants?" I'm not going to link to the article, but it's worth stopping for a minute and pondering the fact that this is not a parody. The paper of record has devoted a thousand words to this subject, to say nothing of the doctors quoted therein. Hmm. Here's a crazy mental exercise: guess the answer.
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Point of clarification: This space is still receiving email despite port 25 being blocked at work, but this requires using webmail, which gets checked much less frequently.
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This space is delighted to have stumbled across bartleby.com, where one can find (and buy hard copies of) exquisite public domain works including William Strunk's The Elements of Style (later made forty years more current and much less comically compact by E. B. White) and Gray's Anatomy, complete with (low-res) scans of every illustration therein. Yay, internet!
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Extra-cool self-assembling carpets of nanotubes that turn colors and kill bacteria, complete with SEM pictures to make the microscopists among this space's readership smile. (Someone please tell me why I must pay again for this research article that the federal government's money already paid for...?)
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Ted Rall: Triumph of the Stultocracy.
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Digital cameras are great, but they take photos with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Prints are usually four inches by six, for a 2:3 aspect ratio. That means that when you carefully frame your picture in your camera you need to remember that the edges along the short axis are going to get chopped when you make a print. We always forget this and it's unbelievably frustrating.
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Edward Tufte's site has a long thread (two years worth of what must be heavily moderated postings) that culminates (early) in this fantastic, cold dismissal of large-scale project planning software:

These are excellent and thoughtful contributions by [several people] about the practicalties of project management charts in the face of low resolution IT solutions residing on the interface. Printing out charts and putting them on the wall seems to be the way to go for big, complicated, serious projects.

There are even beautiful scans of draft pages of his new book. If this book is out by Christmas, well, then, this space's author would be a particularly easy to please.
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Jon Stewart on the Bill O'Reilly show. Strange but true.
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The new Get Your War On installment is one of the best in a while.
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Campain coverage coverage:

I was at Scranton-Wilkes-Barre Airport, in northeast Pennsylvania, at 8:30 Wednesday morning. After a police dog had sniffed our bags -- and one cameraman wiped doggie saliva off his camera lens -- we took our places on or behind a truck riser, while we waited for the vice president's flight to land. A network cameraman was finishing his breakfast of Cheetos and Sprite. A candy bar poked from the top of his shirt pocket.

A more fascinating description of a completely tedious day is rarely told. In 1992, Bill Clinton, then a mere Presidential aspirant, stopped in Burlington for a rally that a bunch of us went down to because, hey, how often do you get to see the guy who might be President firsthand? Adam and Dan, who worked at the radio station, managed to get press passes and went down and watched the event from the press platform, where the guys from CNN and everywhere else had their cameras and microphones and what-have-you. The speech was interesting enough, I guess, but the report from the press pool was one of dirty, suicidally bored reporters reciting the stump speech (including the jokes) word for word, people playing Tetris on their laptops, and a general air of oppression. And this was, by then, pretty clearly the winning campaign. I can only imagine what it's like for those poor bastards who have to follow an obvious loser around for six months or longer.

Of course, if they'd simply avoid being so damned lazy and actually do some substantive reporting (i.e., criticism and analysis) instead of the usual mere transcription then the job might prove a bit more rewarding.
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Hey, wait a minute. Summer ended and I didn't notice.
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Jay Rosen on Philip Gourevitch's talk on the press corps that follows the Presidential candidates.

Cheesy package tour. That was Gourevitch's first impression about traveling with the campaigns. You sign up. You get on the bus. It hits all the major sights. Crowds of people get off at each one. Then they get back on. The campaigns tell you what the schedule is. The campaigns tell you where the pick up will be. The campaigns feed you, get you to the airport, take you from the airport.

"Right there they have you," Gourevitch told our crowd of about 50 journalism students and faculty. "Outside the bubble you cannot go because then you're dirty again and have to be checked by the Secret Service." Under these conditions, he said, "no spontaneous reporting is possible."

Should have already read this in the New Yorker (on paper), but I'm a week or two behind. Besides, it's hard to link to a physical magazine.
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The Economist on black box voting machines: "When it comes to ensuring accuracy and accountability, casino slot machines in Atlantic City, New Jersey, get more government supervision than federal election voting machines."
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Jay Rosen on the coming news wars.
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After looking at football a couple of times this afternoon I'm pretty well convinced that I'll be having a seizure before the season is over. The NFL blinks even more than the MTV all of a sudden. It's like watching a 26" strobe light.
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Emergency baby picture.
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Here's why Howard Dean would have won, even despite the scream.
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Lib describes her trip to New York to see her friend Abra play with the Vermont Youth Orchestra and Trey Anastasio at Carnegie Hall.
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Technically legal library signs.
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So this space went and gave blood on Thursday. (Because I can and should. So should you.) Now, under normal circumstances one would think that this is about the most apolitical thing possible. Alas, afterward, while drinking sugary iced tea from a can and eating animal crackers, the always astonishingly nice women that staff the post-bleeding table handed me a safety tube, a little eight-inch plastic tube containing a plastic 4 oz. bag of water, a dust mask, a light stick, and a whistle. The instructions described how to affix the tube to the bottom of one's desk in order that it be there "in case of an emergency."

Not to be too cynical or anything, but what kind of emergency did they want us to bear in mind, pray tell? Amid mock speculation of the tube's intent, one of the volunteers said, "You know, it kind of reminds you of 9/11." Uhh, well that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? I did at least say so, to responses that varied between chuckles (of agreement? disdain?) and enlightenment.
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What is this hard drive failure?
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If I see you in one of these I'm going to laugh at you. Hard.
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The Age of the Essay is clearly written by a programmer, albeit a pretty literate one, but is remarkable to this space for a couple of reasons:

1: One of the central sources is an article entitled, "Where Do College English Departments Come From?", published at Indiana University when my grandfather (this guy's son) was also an English professor there. Grandpa Daghlian would have found (probably did find) this to be the funniest title he'd heard that week.

2: It acknowledges UVM, this space's alma mater, as having had one of the world's (!) first English departments. Who knew? That very same department taught us, among other things, that it was okay not to enjoy Emily Dickinson's poetry much. This fact was something of a revelation at the time and it continues to delight, although one worries about stating too publicly that such disregard for a major figure of American Literature is a centerpiece of one's liberal arts education. Oh well.
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The Globe asks, "With everything from modest homes to million-dollar dumps now commanding princely sums, it's no wonder that Boston's hospitals, colleges, and biotech firms are seeing so many job offers rejected. Who can afford to live here?" That's what crushing debt is for, silly.
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A sudden thought that pleases this space greatly: we've made it through summer without having to put the air conditioners in the bedroom windows. This is delightful largely because it means that this space needn't lug two enormous air conditioners down two flights of stairs for at least a year or so.
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So it seems that The Atlantic has put every single article behind a paywall. What a drag. It'll join Salon on the list of publications I would like to read but not enough to pay. Now that I won't be reading I won't know what I'm missing, and won't be inclined to start paying. Alas.
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We've marked the anniversary of the big terrorist attacks mostly by ignoring them, which exactly what various fearmongers (both Arab and American) would like you not to do. Packed up the kid in the car and went and hung out in Boston with some friends. (Thanks, Lee!) If fear crossed your mind today and you see nothing wrong with nonsense like this pap asserting like an unoriginal sixth grader that terrorism isn't a threat, it's a promise, then you should be ashamed. I mean, really. Most of us big kids grew up somewhere between the 1950's and the 1980's, when it was pretty much assumed that on any given day the world could end because Johnson and Brezhnev (or Reagan and Gorbachev, or whoever) couldn't quite work out which of their deputies were fighting which anonymous proxy wars. Am I really supposed to change my daily routine or my vote just because Tom Ridge is bored or John Ashcroft can't find any more harmless hippie comedians to harass? For the record, here's the best acknowledgement of the attacks I've seen (though only until Monday, apparently).
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That new camera mentioned the other day pretty much rocks.
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Liberal dirtbag exposed. (Found here, as usual.)
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So this space's venerable Nikon Coolpix 3100 abruptly died. It did so by refusing to acknowledge that batteries inserted into it had any charge in them, this despite these same batteries measuring quite full with a voltmeter and powering any other AA-size battery powered device quite nicely. At any rate, we were delighted to discover that not only were we entitled to a store credit of the original purchase price of this camera (which had, to its credit, shot a couple of thousand pictures in its year or so of life without too much fuss), but—and this really shouldn't have been a surprise at all—that digital cameras are significantly cheaper than they were a year ago. Now we have a Canon Powershot A85, which promises to solve a number of problems that we had with the previous camera, the most annoying of which (aside from eventually breaking) was that the lens was tiny: smaller than your thumbnail—and this made low-light photography pretty much impossible. We'll see with this new one.
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This space's archive links in the sidebar now stretch all the way back through its oh-so-promising start in February of 2002. The layout of that first year of pages is different because I was using software I'd rolled myself (detailed in some of the early entries), rather than this slick package of semi-freeware that allows others to maintain similar subspaces. At any rate, we expect to be Literate again Real Soon Now, at which point this space will become once again active.
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