A very pretty example in a long line of suddenly fashionable (and not incorrect) descriptions of why the Electoral College should go away.
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Jay Rosen presents Doug McGill, ex-big time journalist at the Times and elsewhere:
Some reporters, including me in my early days, actually wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. “Give me any subject and I can write a story within minutes."
The original piece has some awfully interesting extra bits, including:
Today, the contemporary journalist’s main job, according to Carey, has transformed from this artistic and interpretive role into essentially one of translation and simplification – that is, translating the technical jargon of different government, business, scientific, and social communities into the common vernacular of readers and viewers. That is, transforming complex specialized matters into simple, palatable, and above all, the commercially marketable commodities called stories. It’s in this sense that Carey calls contemporary journalism “technical writing.” And it’s a perfectly natural, and in some ways necessary, response to the development of our highly complex industrial and multicultural world, the very world that Lippmann fretted could ever be adequately covered by journalists.
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So now we're all excited and haven't a hope of getting to bed anytime soon. But more importantly, what are they going to do with this sign on westbound Storrow Drive now that it's been done?
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Only Fox, the network that made the NFL unwatchably blinky, could make baseball, the slowest, least flashy of all possible sports, into a friggin music video of fast cuts between extreme closeups of guys looking around, AOL logos throwing footballs out of sunbursts with whooshing noises, wide angle shots of Tony LaRussa milling about the dugout, pitchers doing something unidentifiable because the cut was too fast, extra jittery shots of randoms in the crowd, all made doubly annoying by the fact that there's a half-second delay on the normal view from center field over the pitcher's right shoulder, the view that actually tells us what's happening in the game, and the one that they often don't cut to until the pitch is on its way to the plate, or already there. Replays are indistinguishable from live action. Oh, and Tim McCarver is babbling unendingly. Saving the day are the mute button and the fact that for an inning or two we've been able to enjoy the usual temporary Red Sox fan's conceit that they might actually win.
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More Get Your War On, just in time to make you sad after the election.
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The trouble with the present World Series is that a disinterested baseball purist—is there really such a thing?—would of course be rooting for the Cardinals. They play in a league without the DH rule, they bunt, they manufacture runs, and they even ran the suicide squeeze in the playoffs. An elegant game. In a different year they'd be fun to root for. Of course, real baseball purists also like to see curses lifted. Update: The strike zone is, for both teams, apparently shaped like an amoeba tonight, and likewise shifts pitch to pitch. Makes it more exciting, but only if your team is ahead.
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Separate realities for Bush and Kerry voters. Can this really be right?
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Driving home, looking for a CD to listen to because NPR is in campaign talking point regurgitation mode, it struck me that all but two of the CD's in the car were burned and given to me by my college roommates. Cool. The Garden State soundtrack in particular is suddenly in heavy rotation.
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The hammerheads in Kenmore Square celebrate a historic sports victory at least as well as anywhere else's hammerheads. Nice.
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Headlines in The New York Times that say enough:
- Red Sox Defeat Yanks in Historic Comeback
- Red Sox' Anguish and Yankees' Mystique and Aura Dissolve in Game 7
It was actually happening. The nerd was kissing the homecoming queen. Paper was beating scissors; scissors were beating rock. Charlie Brown was kicking the football. The Red Sox were beating the Yankees for the American League pennant.
Sooooo glad I'm not in Kenmore Square at the moment.
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Baseball note: The television just played Yankee Rose by David Lee Roth. Possibly only one of this space's readers actually cares. But it's pretty damn funny. Trust me.
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Look out, kids: Lib is driving.
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Oh my. They're using one of The Who's best songs to sell super-bright, gratuitously blinding headlights. Pete must have decided that he had accumulated too much good karma or something. Or maybe he has nothing to do with it and he hates these headlights just as much as me. Bummer either way. Update: Here's what Pete himself says:
In a very real way the use of Who music in this manner keeps it alive, and brings it to a new audience in an era when our music would otherwise never be heard on the radio or TV.Hmmm. This space isn't sure what to think.
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Rob Pike, Unix guru: "Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."
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Okay, so we've finally got a confluence of fifteen free minutes and a correctly functioning FTP server at this space's host, so here's three batches of baby pictures: (1, 2, 3).
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This space's earliest prehistoric precursor, now at least ten years old and gone from the web, pointed to the US Naval Observatory, where They keep The Time. It drifts 100 ps per day; a nanosecond is 1,000 picoseconds, but you already knew that. At any rate, I spent several of those ten years having fun sweating over and occasionally retooling a pretty crazy optical bench—it had wiggly mirrors and scary laser beams pointing backwards into microscopes and stuff—but after looking at this optical cooling setup that powers a cesium fountain clock (crazy quantum mechanics, kids!) let's just share one of those quiet prayers of thanks that I'm not an experimental physicist anymore.
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Man, Jon Stewart needs to be on more shows more often. (Of course, that would mean having to watch more TV.) "It's not so much that [Crossfire] is bad, as that it's hurting America." Update: It turns out that a ton of other nerds with websites are excited about this, too. Good. Update: Here's an mp3 of the segment.
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Senator John Edwards: "Chim chim cheree!"
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Me: Watching this debate is like watching some comedian's routine for the third time.
K: Except it wasn't funny the first time either.
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So the lovely wife was at the library and found a CD of old Woody Guthrie songs for kids. Regrettably this CD didn't contain one or two of the songs I remember from my own Songs To Grow On LP that I listened to a couple dozen years ago, but it does have a version of what Wilco and Billy Bragg later recorded as Hoodoo Voodoo, and it's exactly as ridiculous as you'd expect, but it was great fun to stumble across it by surprise on the car trip back from the Berkshires the other weekend (c.f. as-yet-unloaded baby pictures), which, of course, took us through Stockbridge, MA.
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So I have an unexpectedly large pile of baby pictures to rifle through. This could take a bit. Update: iPhoto is unforgivably horrible and slow once about a year's worth of pictures have been loaded into it. I know there are other pieces of software that can rescue iPhoto from itself, but why should they even be necessary? I know a lot about writing software with a mediocre user interface, and there's pretty much no excuse for a user interface to ever run quite this slowly. Further update: Now my web host is refusing FTP connections, thereby making upload of all these pictures impossible. Barely able to suppress its rage, this space is heading to bed.
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Sitting here waiting for the debate to come on, watching C-SPAN on mute. Everyone is sitting completely still. It's completely surreal. Interesting zen exercise: imagine what the headless voices are saying about the completely static scene.
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"He also vetoed Monkey." The Danish government can tell parents that the name they've chosen for their baby must be changed. [Original version here.]
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The next, long overdue set of baby pictures will be posted shortly. Probably this weekend. Sorry for the delay.
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Todd and Kelly went and got themselves an exceptionally cute dog named Bella. This space periodically wants to get a dog, but responsibility for a small, helpless cutie who poops in her pants is plenty difficult without having to worry about the rugs. This space's wife also doesn't want one, which makes the decision easy.
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When it comes to qualifying for the American Presidency, a grating accent can be a bigger political liability than a record of homicidally misguided policies. Being inconsistent is a greater personal failing than being consistently, doggedly, disastrously wrong. Being dorky is more damning than being dictatorial.
Note that I can personally vouch for the fact that Bill Clinton never once acted lecherously toward my wife, although I did shake his hand once. That and I was on track to actually receive some Social Security money upon retirement while he was still in charge for a while, there.
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The clock on my computer is slow, so I usually check the time by looking at a web site: NIST is good even though Daylight Savings Time is bad.
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Thanassis Cambanis: "To write about a re-painting of a school when three car bombs go off killing how many dozens would be irresponsible journalism, I think."
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