Category: Other People

I saw the MoveOn Democratic Presidential Candidate Slate today. My analysis:

• Carol Moseley Braun: Would do a good job. Not a chance.
• Sharpton: Dramatically irrelevant.
• Dean: The Ralph Nader of 2004.
• John Edwards: Possible.
• Dick Gephardt: I thought this was the guy from Florida, but I was wrong. I don’t know what the hell this one’s about.
• Graham: Too conservative for my taste, and too old, and from Florida, meaning “probably corrupt.”
• Kerrey: Has money (I stand corrected: it’s his wife’s and she thinks politics is stupid– but he’s pretty well funded anyway). Too Northern. Possible nominee. Looks like Kennedy, which may be a good thing, or not.
• Kuchinich: Unpronouncable, unattractive, too progressive.
• Lieberman: Practically Republican, too old, and too close to the 2000 debacle.

Apparently, there are gay men in Broadway. Why is this news?

A memo from Steve Ballmer outlining the challenges to his company from open source software, and Linux in particular, was responsible for driving down the stock today. “We need to woo young programmers away from Linux” said the memo, which was quoted in financial television. Then the reporter said, “Linux stock is up fifty percent this morning” and showed a chart in which LNUX had, indeed, risen. Linux is not a company. VA Software, the company that trades under the symbol LNUX, is a Linux software vendor, but that’s not at all the same thing, in fact its business is less and less related to the operating system, given that it’s changed its name from “VA Linux.” Stupid investors.

Comments on Slashdot about a picture of my boss made me think: hey, he oughta be an album cover. So, I put together an ad for it, of sorts. I’m not the GIMP genius like tig but hey.

So, I more or less lost a friend earlier this week when I went from disagreeing with her politics to attacking her personally for holding particular beliefs. It wasn’t a polite thing to do, but I sort of got away from myself, and I just kept punching.
It resonates with the recent discussion about whether Libertarian and Republican politics (for the most part) are just variations on the theme of greedy-greedy-greedy. (Not to say that Democratic politics aren’t frequently the same thing, mind you– lobbies have their own greed, even the lobbies of the left.)

More on hypocrisy, and tending toward lies, discussed by Brad DeLong. Brings up for me the thought that the tax cut business is being pushed just like the war.

Compare: the war was pursued for less than honest and coherent reasons (WMDs being the most obvious fabrication), and it is not a glorious liberation (the looting and the unguarded nuclear waste has if anything made the Middle East more dangerous). So, too, nobody of any account (Mallard Fillmore? Rush Limbaugh?) believes the line that Bush is feeding us about the tax cut– even the conservative journalists say it’s an illogical, sop to the rich and that it’s the sort of thing which could wreck an economy. The Financial Times and the Economist are the sort of publications you’d expect to support the Party of Business. Alan Greenspan says it’s a bad idea. The party rank-and-file disagree with it but are afraid of the backlash from the Bush cronies– they won’t go on the record, because everyone who disagrees with Bush is punished, and punished harshly.

It’s not just a sop to the rich, it’s not just a stupid mistake. It’s a deliberate plan to bankrupt the federal government and forcing it to eliminate its social programs.

And when it’s all over I guess I’ll just have to say I told you so, since I don’t know how to make it stop. Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, and everybody knows….

Man, they make me look bad. I’m a proud American, and I am ashamed of the things that other people do in the name of my country.

Also, note the way they used the word “[pansies]” in brackets instead of the actual gender slur. Nice choice– it conveys the meaning but not the actual word of offense.

I am not what you would normally call a sports fan. In fact, last night’s Sox/Rangers game was the first time I’d ever been to a professional sports game of any sort. Not only that, but I live near Fenway and I live with the park’s impact on the neighborhood: trash, traffic, parking lots and bars and schlockerias that cater only to the summer crowds. And don’t get me started about not being able to walk down Yawkey Way on game days.

But inside the park, I understood it. The buzz of thirty thousand people in overpriced uncomfortable seats on an unseasonably chilly night to witness a dream. Yes, I know it’s the team that won, not me. But I don’t care.

But there really is some sort of magic to it. I felt all the excitement of the child who gets to come out onto the green and say “Play Ball” after the anthem and before the first pitch. Well, almost: the kid they had last night stood up at the mic, then froze and fainted, and his parents carried him away.

So, tonight, I can hear the music play, an announcer mumble Nomar or Manny, and the crowd cheering faintly, and I know why, and that makes me incredibly happy.

<itp> I need a shirt that says “Ian Peters is a douchebag.”
<verbal> I’m sensing some self-esteem issues here.
<itp> Shut the fuck up. I’ve read your blog.

Man trapped inside crashed car, sort of. The OS crashed, and none of the locks or windows would work, and he was sitting there baking until someone smashed a window to get him out.

I remember seeing an Olympic gymnast with a huge open blister on his palm. The whole palm of his hand was just raw flesh. So he put chalk on it to dry it out and went back out to compete. But that’s not as bad as the self-amputation story, which just makes me feel queasy.