The War

So, Gentle Reader, have you been watching “The War?” The show has been running on PBS for over a week now and except for Sunday-last’s installment, I’ve watched it all. And I’ve mostly been impressed with the first-person accounts directors Burns and Novick have assembled. Really, the first-person narratives are what distinguish this particular documentary from all the others…and there have been many… about Big Bang Two. And there was an amusing example last evening…

I’m writing from memory, Gentle Reader, so I could be mistaken about the details in this particular anecdote. But, as I recall, the subject was jokes and Marine pilot Sam Hynes related what he recalls as the best joke from the war. He opened up with “the joke was visual…and you had to see it, not hear it.” “It was in the Officers Club bar on Kwajalein (or Enewetak?)… but anyway, behind the bar, mounted on a large plaque…like a marlin or a tarpon… was this huge brassiere. And underneath the brassiere was the legend…

‘Remember Pearl Olsen!’”

That may be a “you hadda be there” sort of moment for some of you, but most of us recall “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as the watch phrase during The Big One. Leave it to fighter pilots (or other flight crew members) to irreverently remind one and all what they were really fighting for…

One more thing about “The War” and then I’ll leave it go. One of the criticisms I’ve read in multiple places is how Burns’ anti-war views bleed thorough in this film. I definitely noticed one such example last evening during the segments on the fire-bombings of Dresden and multiple Japanese cities, e.g., Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, etc. In addition to the narrative, which took pains to point out that most of the victims of these bombings were women and children (“over 100,000 children died during these bombings…”), the soundtrack was the usual tug-on-the-heartstrings solo violin dirge, explicitly designed to evoke pity. Violins are good for that, ya know. Nothing better, actually, in the world of music.

Now if it had been me scoring that particular segment I’d have used this:

Yeah, I know: it’s been done before. So?

My criticism aside, watch the re-runs if you missed it the first time around. It’s more than worthwhile.

Just a Couple of Vids...

By way of ASM826, a commenter at Lex’s place, here’s a lil reminder of days gone by…

“I’m Jon Karry, and I approve this message.” Heh.

Via Mike…in a way, since he posted “What if real life were like a comments section in a blog,” which led me to the “College Humor” site, which led me to this:

For the uninitiated…this is High Times. Only in America, eh?

A non-parenthetical parenthetical comment: I found it interesting that the Wiki claims Al Gore was either (a) on the cover of High Times or (b) was interviewed by High Times. “B” is probably the safer bet but ya never know, especially when it comes to the Goreacle. Now if we were talking about Al Gore III, I’d go for option “A.”

Care to Dance?

So. I sorta quit paying attention to McNeil/Lehrer The News Hour last night about 20 minutes or so before it actually ended. I got wrapped up reading something or other, and by the time I looked up Jim Lehrer’s smiling face was gone and this had begun:

Live From Lincoln Center
Mozart Dances
Mostly Mozart Festival
Mark Morris Dance Group

It was the music that caught my ear, and I looked up. The Mark Morris Dance Group is pretty good, if you like that sort of thing. Understand, Gentle Reader, I could stick what little I know about “dance” in my eye and it wouldn’t hurt a bit. I’ve never been to a dance recital. This is the first recital I’ve seen on TeeVee, to the best of my recollection. So, it’s with a grain of salt you’d be taking when I say this was Modern Dance. I know it wasn’t ballet—no tutus. And it wasn’t folk dancing—no ethnic stuff. And I’ve come to the end of my dance-description rope, right here. Right now.

I stayed with the program…but only for the music (Mozart is my absolute favorite composer). I’m not much into watching half-naked men dancing around a stage— especially when they’re dancing with each other rather than with the women. And there was a lot of that, seemingly every other time I looked up from my reading.

And as for the women-only segments of the program? They were just OK, these segments. The women were beautiful and very well put together (in that athletic, dancer sort of way), the costumes were interesting, and the dancing complemented the accompanying music. There was a critical element missing, however, that ultimately impaired my enjoyment of the performance…

No poles.

Via blog-buddy Morgan, we get this link to a BBC article noting that “Depression is ‘over-diagnosed’.” And like Morgan, my immediate impression was “Gee. Ya think?” Excerpts:

Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when all they are is unhappy, a leading psychiatrist says.

Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a "catch-all" diagnosis driven by clever marketing.

But another psychiatrist writing in the journal contradicts his views, praising the increased diagnosis of depression.

Professor Ian Hickie writes that an increased diagnosis and treatment of depression has led to a reduction in suicides and removal of the old stigma surrounding mental illness.

Under the current diagnosis guidelines, around one in five adults is thought to suffer depression during their lifetime. This costs the UK economy billions in lost productivity and treatment.

[…]

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, said: "Depression can be a complex and challenging condition ranging from feeling low to being so disabled that the person may be unable to get out of bed in the morning, sustain relationships or work.

"It is not surprising that with such a wide range of symptoms, identification varies from one doctor to another.

One can go back and forth on this subject, spending endless hours in beer- or scotch-fueled debate, and I have. Speaking as an individual who’s been diagnosed in the past as “clinically depressed,” and further as an individual who spent a couple of months on Paxil as a direct-result of said diagnosis, I believe depression IS over-diagnosed. But there’s also merit in the counter-argument, regarding the reduction in suicides and such. I suppose it all depends on the accuracy of the diagnosis and the severity of the depression…which can range from feeling low to climbing out on that ledge.

My depression was pretty debilitating even though I was never suicidal. I suffered from the sort of depression that left me incapacitated, in that I would literally spend days on my couch staring blankly at the TeeVee from a fetal position…unable to go to work, feed myself, or perform even the barest of human functions, save relieving myself. It was pretty bad.

Still and even, I took myself off the Paxil after two months and after re-visiting my doctor (there are dire warnings about “stopping abruptly” in the drug packaging. God only knows what that means.) My personal experience… and I emphasize the “personal” here… was the depression, even in its worst stages, was preferable to walking around in a gauzy sort of haze where I felt nearly nothing. The drug “leveled me out” in such a way that I didn’t feel anything: no joy, no sadness, nothing. I hated that, and preferred the occasional bouts of “sleep on the couch” for days as opposed to being chemically numbed-up. It was sorta like Novocain for the psyche. Not good, in other words.

I still get depressed, although the bouts are mild and infrequent. But I’ll never resort to drugs for the condition, ever again. Unless I’m institutionalized, of course, and if I ever get to that point the situation will be well and truly out of my control.

One of my favorite hot buttons, again:

This is worth repeating. The FBI has determined that in some cases, it's better to let innocent people be assaulted, murdered, or wrongly sent to prison than to halt a drug investigation involving one of its confidential informants.

Could Murphy assure the U.S. Congress, Delahunt and Lundgren asked, that the FBI has since instituted policies to ensure that kind of thing never happens again?

Murphy hemmed and hawed, but ultimately said that he could not make any such assurance. That in itself should have been huge news.

Shortly after the Johnston hearings concluded, another informant scandal emerged.

Jarrell Bray, a longtime informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration's Cleveland field office, admitted that with the cooperation of DEA agent Lee Lucas, he had repeatedly lied in court to secure the convictions of innocent people. Bray said he and Lucas fabricated evidence, falsely accused people who had done nothing wrong, then concocted bogus testimony to secure their convictions.

Bray's admission could result in dozens of overturned convictions.

Dozens of overturned convictions? How about hundreds, if not thousands? These guys are out-of-frickin’-control. Please: Tell me how much good the “War on Drugs” is doing, will ya? Can ya? I doubt it. I really, seriously doubt it. This war, unlike some others that come to mind, is indefensible, pure and simple.

(h/t: Chap)

Today’s Pic: Didja know there’s such a place as Pennington, Minnesota? Well, now you do, and you have visible proof in the form of a hastily (and poorly) composed pic of El Casa Móvil De Pennington, in Pennington. Or something like that.

June, 2000.

It's HOT!

Well, the Dog Days of Summer are upon us. This term has always fascinated me from the time I first heard it in the way, way back. The etymology of the term is here…and says, in part:

Popularly believed to be an evil time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies" (from Brady’s Clavis Calendarium, 1813).

The Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose just before or at the same time as sunrise, which is no longer true owing to precession of the equinoxes. The ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that that star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.

While I’m not into sacrificing innocent animals, I’m sure there are more than a few people in other places that would be willing to give it a shot. I feel particularly bad for those folks, and their numbers are legion, that suffer from the oppressive combo of heat and humidity. As for YrHmblScrb, well…not so much. It’s 90 degrees as I peck this out, but the heat index is “only” 89, a function of our relatively low humidity (currently 35%).

This sort of weather always makes me wonder how folks survived prior to air conditioning, particularly in places like N’Awlins…and the entire Gulf Coast, for that matter. I still have painful and vivid memories of long, hot, sleepless nights spent sweltering in the UN-air conditioned barracks at Keesler AFB (near beautiful Biloxi-By-The-Sea) in the summer of 1964.

I’m reminded of this American Standard TeeVee ad for their AC…maybe it’s TOO comfortable (and us, too).



This could be good news, if it’s true. Well, sorta. If it IS true, it’s definitely a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I’ll be able to read David Brooks again. On the other, that skank Dowd and her male counterpart, Krugman, will be unleashed upon the American public again. Maybe the NYT ought to keep TimesSelect. It’s two-to-one FOR keeping it, in my book.

Captain Ed has a similar thought:

Two years ago, the New York Times provided on-line readers with a strong disincentive to read their columnists. TimesSelect, which I called the Firewall of Sanity, charged $50 per year for people who just couldn't get enough of Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich. Now the New York Post reports that Pinch Sulzberger has finally realized that he has marginalized his own columnists in an on-line universe.

To quote another Big Dog: Heh.

Today’s “imagine the disappointment” moment:

Time of Visit: Aug 7 2007 10:01:35 am
Page Views: 1
Referring URLhttp://images.google...1%26hl%3Des%26sa%3DN
Search Engine: images.google.es
Search Words: ladies viagra

Sometimes I really don’t understand why folks click thru. This is an image search, Gentle Reader. And the Ladies of Deuce Four (click the search link, if you’re interested) certainly get a lot of hits…but not for reasons one would expect.

 

Today’s Pic: Apropos of nothing…Granddaughter Anastasia captured celebrating the Fourth in Birmingham, MI (a suburb of Detroit) at my great good friend Kim’s house. A good time was had by all. As always.

July, 2000.

Small Stuff

Just a nit, but worth a mention… My neighbor across the way got out and began mowing his lawn at precisely 0700 this morning. Sunday morning. I think that’s rude and inconsiderate. It’s the noise, Gentle Reader. Power mowers are loud and their sound is obnoxious at all times, but on Sunday morning it’s particularly so, especially in an environment where residents live in close quarters. I say this with the full understanding that it’s much easier to mow the lawn when it’s 68 degrees outside, vice 85 and up. But couldn’t you wait until 0830, say? I think you could.

Oh…I had been up since 0500, so the noise didn’t awaken me. Irritate me, yes. Wake me up? If it had been yesterday, yes. But not today.

On nerds…in today’s NYT (Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?):

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

Cue up the Geico caveman, please. To wit: “Yeah, I’ve got a response… uh … WHAT?”

It’s WAR! Normally I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy, and my tolerance extends to creatures great and small. Included in the “small” community are various bugs, with the exception of flies and mosquitoes, which are terminated immediately with extreme prejudice…always. Take spiders, for example. Spiders are generally good, as they eat other small critters and generally stay out of my way. And I enjoy their webs, which are both small-scale engineering feats and supremely artistic, as well…as anyone who’s seen an early morning web covered in sparkling dew will attest.

My tolerance ends, though, when spiders begin to overwhelm my personal space and get presumptuous about territory and such, thinking it’s theirs for the taking. While I love and appreciate outdoor webs I don’t like to see the things hanging off my table lamp, or worse, have a small spider drop down on a gossamer filament right in front of my face while I’m surfing the other web (heh). And that’s just in the front of the house. Things get worse, much worse, as you move to the rear of El Casa Móvil De Pennington. Lately I’ve been involved in a daily ritual that involves wiping away webs that have been spun overnight in both the bathroom and the kitchen, and the spiders have become so numerous that they’re scurrying around in plain sight. It’s time for a new strategy: we’re gonna surge.

It appears that GHQ Arachnid is located in the bathroom. Yesterday I took extreme measures on the HQ… emptying both bathroom cabinets, thoroughly cleaning out the spaces, and finishing off by liberally spraying the interiors of both cabinets and the surrounding baseboards with Raid. Result: no webs in the bathroom this morning. The kitchen will be a little more problematic because I don’t want to engage in unrestricted chemical warfare in that operational area. The risk of collateral damage (to YrHmblScrb, hisownself) is just too high. So we’ll just content ourselves with applying forceful thumb pressure on the little terrorists as they transit from nook to cranny. And waging chemical warfare along the baseboards and other spaces in the kitchen where the risk of collateral damage is low.

We have evidence the surge is working, as noted above. There will be NO political settlement, and we’ll take no prisoners. All I’m asking is a return to the status quo ante, or in other words, if the spiders stay in their space, I’ll stay in mine.

Peace in our time.

Today’s Pic: A rather cheeky-looking SN3 in a restaurant on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. We were just finishing lunch and getting ready to go on a cruise around the Bay. And the following transpired as we were getting off the boat, after said Bay cruise:

Me: Well, what didja think?
SN3: It was kinda boring, Dad.
Me: (Dumbstruck silence, followed by a change of subject…)

June, 2002. (SN3 was five years old.)

Burnin' Down the House

RP is back burnin’ down the house with great music, Lizzie Edwards does a slow-burn about Ann Coulter and actually calls her on it, and Tehran literally burns, in places.

RP is back today after yesterday’s Day of Silence. So the soundtrack to my life resumes…Further…there’s this on RP’s home page this morning:

Due to the huge numbers of Internet radio listeners who responded to this appeal, many of you were unable to get through to your Senators and Representative. If so, it's definitely not too late. Please contact your members of Congress now via SaveNetRadio.org and ask them to support the legislation currently pending that would set an Internet radio royalty rate that is fair to all involved: stations, listeners, artists, and record companies.

What's this all about? The US Copyright Office has set a royalty fee structure for Internet radio that is — in almost all cases — at least 10 times greater than the royalties paid by any other type of radio, anywhere in the world. No existing Internet radio services would be able to operate profitably under this fee structure. It would mean the end of stations like Radio Paradise, and the end of the royalty payments to artists that we're currently making.

No indication as to what “huge numbers” actually means. But it’s a great good thing that the phone lines were so busy some folks were unable to get through. I didn’t even try to call, opting for e-mail instead. I hate phones; it’s just the way I am. But you, Gentle Reader, probably aren’t phone-phobic. You could ring up your congresscritter’s office and tell ‘em internet radio is worth saving, if you have a free minute or three today. I’d sure appreciate it if you did.

Today’s Teapot Tempest…Elizabeth Edwards vs. Ann Coulter.

Elizabeth Edwards, ever her husband's most aggressive defender, called in to MSNBC's "Hardball" yesterday to admonish conservative commentator Ann Coulter for using the "language of hate" to attack John Edwards. Elizabeth Edwards asked Coulter -- who has compared the former senator to a gay man and has mused about his death in a terrorist attack -- to stop using personal attacks as part of her public routine, a request Coulter quickly rebuffed.

I don’t like Coulter. I’ve said this before and my opinion hasn’t changed. God Help Me for saying/thinking this, but Mrs. Edwards is right. Coulter’s rhetoric is SO far over the top she’s become a caricature of the right and an actual asset to the likes of Pretty Boy. Coulter’s “fag” comment about Edwards raised millions for the man. Hell, Elizabeth should be glad Coulter attacks her man as she does. And Jonah Goldberg thinks she is:

More to the point, John Edwards is imploding. And his last really good moment in the press was when Coulter called him a "faggot." It was dumb and distasteful, but it was also money in the bank for Edwards, who used it to further endear himself to the netroots base and to raise money on it. Elizabeth Edwards is — smartly — trying to change the subject back to Edwards as a victim of those mean rightwingers. It strikes me as a little desperate.

Desperate, perhaps. Smart? Most certainly.

Shut up, Ann. Or at the very least, tone it down. For the children your party.

Meanwhile, Tehran Burns…

Motorists today set fire to petrol stations in Tehran in an angry backlash against the Iranian government's decision to impose petrol rationing.

A station in Pounak, a poor neighbourhood of the capital, was set alight, while two pumps were completely destroyed at another in the east of the city.

[…]

Iranian state radio reported that several petrol stations had been attacked by "vandals".

The unrest put further political pressure on the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is already under fire for failing to deliver on promises to improve the economy after his election in 2005.

In May, the government reduced subsidies for petrol, causing a 25% jump in prices.

Pajamas Media has more, including shaky cell-phone video of burning gas stations (worthless, IMHO, coz it could be any gas station…just sayin’), and links to a Canadian-Iranian blogger (much more worthwhile) and other sources.

The Left thinks Dubya and Co. is inept at managing our gub’mint, but real ineptness is named “Ahmadinejad.” This could get out of hand real fast, Insh’Allah.

(Very) Briefly

An American Institution, as seen by the Brits and written about in The Times (UK): “Kentucky shows off its racy side to the royals.” It’s not a bad article…not bad at all!

This, however, is beyond comprehension…Lileks:

My column will end a week from this Friday. (There’s a series of pieces I can’t wait to write.) After that, it's just-the-facts-ma'am - and I'll no longer be telecommuting, either. This means I will start burning my share of hydrocarbons like a good American. Hell, I may leave the vehicle running all day outside the building just to make up for lost time. Maybe I will put a green roof on the car to balance things out. Some turf, some switchgrass. It's murder on the paint but we all must do our part.

Would it matter if you contacted the paper? It very well might. Here's the reader's rep's page.

If I can get my column back and / or a nice big Online gig, that would be a satisfactory conclusion. Reporting on internet start-ups as opposed to joining an internet start-up – eh, not so much.

There’s not a soul amongst us who doesn’t have a horror story about mismanagement in corporate America…and I have a boat-load of those stories, myself. But MY stories pale by comparison to this one. James’ new job? Writing straight news. Now there’s a classic mismatch of skills-to-assignment if ever there was one. Incredible.

I’m not sure what good, if anything, can come about if non-Minneapolis residents write and make their feelings known to the Strib’s Reader’s Rep. But…it doesn’t hurt to try, eh?

Abbreviated entry this morning for the usual reasons plus one. Up too late, slept in until mid-morning, and then received a call from the Suzuki store before the first cup was poured. The parts are in to restore the ‘Zuki to its gleaming, pristine, pre-pratfall condition. Just one problema…the first available service appointment is not until June 5^th. Even math-challenged persons such as I understand that is nearly a month from now, to the day. I can live with a scratched fairing, but I cannot live without my turn signals on a nearly 1,800 mile trip to Salt Lake City and back. And the service personnel were duly informed of that fact when I told them “Hey! This is a safety issue!” The response was “Just a minute,” followed by “we can do the turn signal…just bring it in anytime.” Thanks, Guys. I’ll do just that.

So. It’s off to the Big(ger) City^TM immediately, if not sooner. Right after I post this.

Back later today…

Gutenberg's Help Desk

(hat tip: Insty) In which case: Heh.