Web Log Archive August 7th through August 20th, 2005
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
A bit before my time it was...but I'm told
that the American Public did not know that Franklin
Roosevelt was unable to walk. In 2005, of course, such public ignorance seems extraordinary
and is commonly attributed to the less-pervasive-than-today
state of communications way back in the 40's. But another
factor must certainly have been at work: it would have been unpatriotic---an
act of disloyalty, even, in the time of WWII---to make FDR's infirmities
a "mere" and idle object of journalism! Then, as today, there was a reticence
on the part of our mainstream news outlets to host speculative
discussions concerning the health of our President. After all, you don't
wanna let on to our enemies that the Commander-In-Chief's not, maybe, all
there!
And so, here's a story to which you are unlikely to
hear even an allusion,
were it not for our Web: Is
Bush Out of Control?
Friday, August 19th, 2005 Happy Birthday, Melissa!
I cannot say where I end...or where
another (of you) begins.
The more I (attempt to) control my inter-actions, the more evidence that I'm
only one actor!
I reject the flippant
(yet appealing) notion that I am responsible
for what happens to me.
I accept only that I am somewhat and sometimes responsible
for what happens to me.
The belief that one can control one's fate is in the very recipe for madness but
Surely: it must be true that one can affect one's fate!
"It's astonishing what some women
will put up with just to have a warm body." Judith
Rossner (1935-2005)
Thursday, August 18th, 2005
Though Trust
is Faith and
Faith is Love,
Trust is a choice and
Love is no choice.
Love is a feeling
Which lingers long after
Though Trust has been
broken,
Misplaced and then lost.
Overheard:
"Have you passed gas yet?" he asked. "No, I don't do
that until the third date." she said.
Wednesday, August 17th, 2005
If you have tears, prepare to shed them.
Here's an interesting (if over-long) slantless column from the Washington Post. Warning: if you haven't already, you will be required to "register" before you may read the column. I say the column is worth the three or four minutes that will be taken up by that registration process.
Tuesday, August 16th, 2005 Elvis has been dead for twenty-eight years
"A rag-tag bunch of insurgents, now estimated in the tens of thousands, using garage-door openers and cell phones...have fought the U.S. military to at least a draw."
Monday, August 15th, 2005
In the wake of last week's ill-conceived
and healthily-bungled escape from a Tennessee prison, people more than usual or
ever will ask why someone would choose to initiate a personal (even intimate)
relationship with a person with whom there is virtually no chance of a
"real life". Of course it's perfectly understandable that a prisoner
would seek 'outside world' contact, but why would an otherwise functional
citizen (like Jennifer
Hyatte) be driven even to violent measures to be with a certified violent
criminal?
Of the several thriving Web sites featuring incarcerated correspondents, the
largest is probably www.writeaprisoner.com.
Sunday, August 14th, 2005
"Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for
years after V-J Day,
President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that...the war in
Iraq is over." Frank
Rich
Fascinating Facts Department
I sure hope yer not driving a car when you read this...but in the movie Ice Princess, the two main mother-daughter combos pair off with the same birthdays! That's right! Michelle Trachtenberg and Joan Cusack were each born on October 11th (twenty-three years apart) and Kim Cattrall and Hayden Panettiere were each born on August 21st (thirty-three years apart)!
Saturday, August 13th, 2005 Forty years ago today...I left New Jersey for California Happy Birthday, Marilyn!
Like I was saying, although it's fairly
easy to determine if another metabolizing human being is at the other end of a
conversational phone line,
it is never so easy to determine if another person is communicating with you, in real time (as we
say), by computer .
The only quasi-standardized test to determine the latter condition is called the Turing Test,
after Alan Turing, a poor bastard whose 42 earthly years were up in 1954 when he
poisoned himself with a cyanide-laced apple. Alan was the incomparable
flaming genius troubled
with the task of tying his own shoes. He is credited,
in some quarters, with no less a feat than winning World War II for the
allies and 'simply' (if only virtually) inventing the modern digital computer!
His story is not so heroic as it is tragic. He was arrested in 1952 and charged with "gross
indecency". Yes, Alan was, in today's parlance, "gay" and, to
avoid a two-year prison sentence, he acquiesced to the ingestion of female hormones
as a means of ‘chemical castration’.
But I digress. I
have been conducting my own Turing Test, of sorts, with
Comcast High Speed Internet Service 'Customer
Support' and, near as I can so far determine, I am
not
communicating with another person, by computer in real time.
To be continued...
Friday, August 12th, 2005
"No one ever learns anything! We all, each of us, keep making the same mistakes over and over." Robin M. Blind
Fatalism is an oft-debated world view. Free will or not? Idle people spend hours in its thrall. Take Wikipedia's definition, for example: "Fatalism is, roughly, the view that the future is already set and, therefore, that human deliberation and actions are pointless because things have to be the way they have to be." But this definition presupposes the very existence of "future". I say it's always now, so I prefer the 'official' definition from Stanford University: "Fatalism is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do." Yes!
Over these last twenty-four hours, I have received two compliments...one each from two of my favorite people in the world!
1) My until-it-was-recently-redesigned Home Page was said to resemble "a 'Zodiac' letter" and 2) I, myself, was described as a "new kind of weird"!
Thursday, August 11th, 2005
I am not one who likes to speak ill of the elderly...but has
anyone else caught some of the late
night (on E!) "Reality
Series" (yeah, right) featuring Hugh Hefner? It's enough to turn
you off to the whole idea of sex!
Hef (in his eightieth year) has become the veritable embodiment of---the
proverbial poster boy for those who
refuse to surrender
gracefully "the things of youth"! If you think you know vapid;
if you think you've seen airheads:
Eewwww! Who watches this shit?
WHEN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin … in the dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes … in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? … in the dust, in the cool tombs?
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers are losers … tell me if any get more than the lovers … in the dust … in the cool tombs.
Carl Sandberg
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
"There is no misanthropy in affability, but all the more contempt."
Nietzsche
Breaking News:
Maureen Dowd is back (with a characteristically brilliant column)!
I especially like her phrase, "elementary shrewdness".
During a phone call, most of us can tell
pretty fast (if not 'right away')
whether we are conversing with a human being or a machine. I say "if
not 'right away'" because, well, funny
story...
I've been known, at times, to
prefer my own company (as the saying goes) and I
haven't answered a wired phone (except for my time in the lockup) for about
thirty years. I mean, somebody might wanna talk to me!
But screening
calls is what it has been all about for this
misanthrope.
In the first (and even somewhat into the second) epoch, my answering machines
were a baby sister, a girlfriend and a wife. "No he's not,
may I take a
message?"
Yeah, but one day (and it was bound
to happen) in the second epoch, I found
myself living alone...with
a phone! What to do? I pretended to be an answering machine! At first, I actually recited
(as stiffly as I could) something like "Hello. You have reached the
answering machine of A. Hermit.
Please leave a message when you hear the tone. Thank you! Beeeeeeeeeeep!" And
then, of course, I would stay on the line (very quietly) to hear who
was calling. :-)
Later, I 'automated' this 'process'.
To be continued...
Tuesday, August 9th, 2005
Not often do I agree with Condoleezza Rice, but when she says, ''It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel'', how can I not? click to enlarge
And from the
What Did She Do To Deserve This
Department...
Monday, August 8th, 2005 Thirty one years ago today, Richard Nixon resigned
The supermarket tabloids got this one right...although they said he had "only weeks to live". Turns out, it was only days.
While San Francisco itself went more than four-for-five
for Kerry, Berkeley went more than nine-for-ten
for him. Where I live, only two towns away
from these "Blame America First-ers", such bumper stickers as
"Somewhere In Texas, a village is missing an idiot" go
unvandalized.
And vehicles with "Friends Don't Let Friends Have Sex With
Republicans" park unmolested.
The other night, Maggie and I took in our local
Theater's production of "Anything Goes". With a cast of
dozens, it was a thoroughly enjoyable two-plus hours. The Cole Porter songs (for
which the watery plot is merely a vehicle) are so good that, as Jimmy
Stewart so famously remarked, even 'non-professional singers' (he considered
himself to be one) can't ruin 'em. [Jimmy was referring specifically to
"Easy To Love", which gets my vote for the most
compactly-beautiful love song ever written.]
The Theater's productions are routinely sold out and so, if one (in a fit of
spontaneity) wishes to attend a performance, then one must arrive forty-five minutes
too soon...to be put on a "wait list". Fortuitously,
while waiting on said list, we were joined by one of Mag's friends (a young
woman nearly as beautiful, intelligent and talented as my own daughter)
and her mom. While the girls tuned us out, we lefties commenced to
Bush-bashing. The mom told me a story from when her daughter was only eight
years old and had come back from school in a pensive frame. "Mom",
she said. "I have to ask you something." Expecting a 'defining
moment' question about sex...or drugs...or dirty words, her mom came to full
attention as her daughter went on to say "I just met someone who says
he's a...Republican!"
Sunday, August 7th, 2005 Happy Birthday, David
"In principle, I believe it is wrong to embark on military action without broad international support. In practice, I believe it is against Britain's interest to create a precedent for unilateral military action." Once Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in his letter of resignation to Tony Blair in March of 2003. Robin Cook collapsed and died yesterday in the Scottish Highlands at the age of 59. No cause of death has yet been announced.
"I want to ask the president, `Why
did you kill my son? What did my son die for? Last week, you said my son died
for a noble cause and
I want to ask what that noble cause
is!" noble cause and
I want to ask what that noble cause
is!" Cindy Sheehan, of Vacaville,
California, near Crawford,
Texas, where the President is vacationing at his ranch. Sheehan said she
planned to continue her roadside vigil until she gets to talk to Bush. In April
of 2004, her twenty-four year old son, Casey, was killed in Iraq. Deputy White
House chief of staff Joe Hagin took pains to assure her that "he
(Bush) really does care!"
"Hopefully, the dead man will float to the surface (with the body badly decapitated) after about ten days." ---author unknown---quoted by Edwin Newman, who writes that 'hopefully has hopelessly infected other words (heretofore immune), and is now rivaled only by the foundation stone of American English: "Y'know".'