| If it bleeds, it leads |
[Jan. 30th, 2008|02:07 pm] |
I was just reading the cnn.com story on John Edwards's announcement that he's withdrawing from the Presidential race, and was struck by the list of news stories ranked by popularity listed on the other side of the page:
1. Body parts found in 8 bags
2. Victoria's Secret: What Is Sexy?
3. Edwards quitting presidential race
Perhaps this suggests something about why Edwards was never able to get as much press coverage as he sought. |
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| And now for the moment you've all been waiting for |
[Jan. 30th, 2008|12:21 am] |
Florida's done, and I have to admit that a month ago I was expecting that by now there would be little chance that either nomination might still be up in the air after Super Tuesday, so now I'm pleasantly surprised that this may not be the case after all.
Giuliani's Florida-centric strategy has come to naught, which would seem to cast some doubt on the viability of my plan to seek the Democratic nomination in 2012 by spending a year campaigning entirely in Hawaii. Too bad, it would have been nice.
The Onion has a nice page of candidate profiles, including for each their plan for Iraq. Rudy's is listed as "Plans to stick it out until he finds a prettier, younger country to invade." The McCain position is summarized as "The United States should no longer act as the world's police but instead as the world's stripper, dressed as the police," which strikes me as intriguingly innovative, though I'm not sure exactly how you'd operationalize it (as people in my field are wont to say). |
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| Parapraxis? |
[Jan. 9th, 2008|10:29 pm] |
I was in Montgomery last night for my annual visit to SAASS, where I used to teach. So this morning I turned to the USA Today lying outside my hotel room door to see the final results of the NH primaries. Turned is the operative word, because although America's newspaper did make the vote their top story, the actual vote count was only to be found on page 6. Far more amusing was page 7, where an article speculating about the possible regional fragmentation of Pakistan featured a map on which the unjournalists had managed to misspell the name of the country's capital:
"Islambad"
Perhaps it was not an accident.
SAASS seems to be thriving, though as always it's having to work hard to retain its organizational freedom of maneuver. I don't wish I were back there again, but I do miss having an office with 100 feet of bookshelves in it. |
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| Light at the end of the tunnel? |
[Jan. 6th, 2008|09:46 pm] |
I miss watching presidential press conferences. I basically gave it up during the Reagan administration because I couldn't stand seeing the "great communicator" and the pathetic excuse for a press corps facing him. The next two administrations were better, but still painful to see in action most of the time for their various reasons, and their questioners never regained their pre-Reagan form, then W. demonstrated that things could be an order of magnitude worse than under Ronnie, up until he stopped doing press conferences altogether (which ought to be an impeachable offense in a democracy).
Meanwhile, C-SPAN would show envy-inducing clips of Blair's question time in the House of Commons, and every so often old footage of JFK's press conferences would make me pine for a golden political age that I never experienced (of course, you can say that about most golden ages people pine for). What it must have been like to have a president with a rapier wit. Right now I'd settle for simply having one with a sense of humor.
So although I'm probably being a pie-eyed optimist as I look at the current primary races and realize that I'd actually enjoy watching press conferences by at least four of the major candidates, including both of the front-runners in New Hampshire, it is difficult not to feel a bit of excitement.
Huckabee is really impressive. I normally consider anyone in denial about Darwin as a sad waste of valuable amino acids, but he'd be enjoyable to watch in action even if the GOP elite weren't reportedly going nuts about how his success is revealing the internal contradictions of their party's coalition and threatening its well-laid plans. And this alliance of mutual admiration that he's established with McCain is a tactical delight.
I find that I am looking forward to Tuesday night a great deal more than I expected a few weeks ago. |
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| Just a month until Super Tuesday--Ugh. |
[Jan. 5th, 2008|11:14 am] |
Up until this week I've been paying remarkably little attention to the presidential race, aside from catching fragments on The Daily Show and being appalled by the way the primary schedule has been mangled into utter irrationality by the states this time around. But watching the Iowa caucus results come in finally kindled some real interest in the contest.
Since I want to see a Democrat in the White House, Hilary Clinton's failure in Iowa is quite cheering. She seems to be touting herself as the one candidate who can deliver a Democratic victory in the fall, which strikes me as odd since I see her as the one potential nominee who would not only mobilize the Right the most to support any Republican against her, but would in fact cause tens of thousands of conservative corpses to rise reanimated from their graves, march to the polls and bring about a GOP win in the face of any obstacles. I've never understood the fanatical hatred that she inspires among so many (though she does creep me out), but denying its power is like insisting that gravity does not exist simply because we can't detect the particles that transmit it.
But the Republican race looks like it's really going to be the fun one to watch. More on that later. |
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| Powers of 2 |
[Jan. 4th, 2008|09:59 am] |
When we weighed the girls yesterday, it turned out that Lida is 32 lbs. and Kara is 64. This sort of mathematical elegance appeals to me. Too bad it will be fleeting. |
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| Didn't last as long as its namesake, but covered more miles |
[Jan. 2nd, 2008|03:39 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | car | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Steinberg: Sym. No. 1 | ] |
We now have a new, blue minivan, purchased in the two-day window between being told that our 2003, 122,000-mile Honda Odyssey needed a new head gasket and leaving for the long, long Christmas drive to Michigan. Like its predecessor, the new ride is an Alabama-built Odyssey, but stubborn brand loyalty (and the unwillingness of the adjacent Dodge dealer to offer a seriously competitive price on a Caravan) have us hoping that it will prove to be more reliable. (At least we can be pretty sure that the guys who designed the self-destructing '03 transmission have been spending the last few years working on Honda's recent Formula 1 cars.) Coolest new feature so far is the auxiliary audio jack to plug in an iPod (or in our case a portable DVD player) to the stereo.
It looks more or less like this picture from the brochure, except without the windmills:
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| Happy New Year |
[Jan. 2nd, 2008|03:17 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | lj, work | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Southern Culture on the Skids | ] |
Hmm. I see that in a year I managed to post here only thirteen times, which seems unimpressive even my by low standards. I wonder what the chances are that 2008 will see an improvement.
Considering that I'm currently spread across four different projects at work with a fifth waiting in the on-deck circle, all five of which are particularly interesting subjects and each one relating to a different one of my central areas of specialization, and that I'm going to be teaching at GU again this semester after a long hiatus, the odds seem poor. But it's surely better than being bored. |
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| Dust in the wind |
[Oct. 24th, 2007|01:10 pm] |
Yeah, it's been forever since I posted. I blame sleep deprivation, though I realize that eventually people will stop buying that as an excuse for my failings. My hope is that by then I'll be less sleep deprived. But probably not.
I see that religious conservatives are now ringing the chruch bells in alarm over the impending release of the movie of The Golden Compass. It's nice that they finally have a chance to rail against a lovely work of children's literature that really is as gloriously heretical as they say it is. I like Peter Hitchen's characterization of Pullman as "the author atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed." |
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| One thing crossed off the to-do list |
[Aug. 1st, 2007|11:36 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | work | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Elgar: Chanson de nuit | ] |
Yes, I'm still alive. And still very bad at keeping the blog updated.
More later (he said unconvincingly). In the meantime this report, which I co-wrote with one of my old SAAS colleagues, has just been published.
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| More silliness from the War on Terror |
[Jul. 13th, 2007|04:20 pm] |
From the BBC:
"The US Senate has voted 87-1 to double the reward for the death or capture of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden to $50m."
Hooray! I've actually known where UBL is hiding for a couple of years now, but I've been sitting on the information waiting for the price to rise. Now that the reward has gone up, perhaps I should cash in quick before one of UBL's lieutenants who wasn't willing to betray his movement and risk his life for a paltry $25M decides to beat me to it.
Actually, since this is now looking like a pretty good investment, maybe I will bide my time a bit longer. At least until the dollar rebounds against the other major currencies.
I suppose I should find out which isolated Senator was smart enough to realize that raising the reward on Osamma will actually increase his prestige. I wonder if he's clever enough to sponsor a bill to annoy UBL by dropping the reward to fifty bucks, preferably in the form of McDonald's gift certificates. |
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| Finally home |
[Jul. 11th, 2007|02:47 pm] |
I'm doing a predictably terrible job of keeping this up to date.
Just back from a ten-day triangular trip to the Finger Lakes to visit my parents and my youngest sister and her family, then to central Michigan for Michelle's brother's wedding, which involved much frantic last-minute logistics work. (Our new sister-in-law recently arrived from China, where we met her for the first time last summer after getting Lida--as recounted briefly on our abortive blog of that trip.) Kara got to be the flower girl, to her immeasurable delight.
The trip home was delayed by a day en route when it appeared that our transmission was failing, but the problem turned out merely to be a bad sensor. (The Odyssey's original transmission ate itself on a trip to Michigan after a brief lifespan of 60,000 miles and it took a long striggle with Honda to get them to replace it; it's now 60,000 miles later, so the warning light and some quick arithmetic brought vivid images of needing to buy a new minivan.)
So we got home late Monday might, much in need of a vacation, just in time for the scheduled installation of our new central air conditioning system yesterday (which, for those keeping track, amounts to merely the third biggest expense of the summer, after the new roof and the new porch enclosure), on the hottest day of the year. |
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| We are not amused |
[May. 30th, 2007|12:27 am] |
I see that the White House have put forward Robert Zoellick to replace Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank. This is just one more indication, as if we needed one following the whole M.C. Rove unpleasantness, that this adminstration has no sense of humor whatsoever. It would have been so much funnier if they'd selected Doug Feith instead (or maybe John Bolton). |
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| Idiocracy |
[May. 24th, 2007|01:31 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | terrorism | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Diepenbrock: symphonic songs | ] |
My dad sends me a lot of news items about overreaction to imagined threats from terrorists, but this tale of governmental stupidity still took me aback. I feel a generalized urge to rant about these morons, but can't decide where to begin. |
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| Quick update |
[May. 22nd, 2007|02:53 pm] |
A long time since the last update.
Kids are doing well. Lida's new daycare is terrific, a huge improvement over the previous one. Kara has become much more enthusiastic aboout playing guitar than she was few months ago--I went with her to guitar class for the first time on Sunday (usually Michelle does it) and was very impressed not only by how adept she's become but how much she understands what she's doing. The Pretend Trip to China at Kara's preschool, which Michelle did much to facilitate, was a big success, and it was fun to see Kara leading the class singing the Chinese songs she'd taught them.
The house now has a new roof and a lovely, heavily windowed new room that used to be the back porch, though the latter still needs a floor of some sort laid down. Last weekend Kara and I disassembled the old steel climber/swingset in the back yard, a project that should qualify me to dismantle rusty ex-Soviet armored vehicles in order to comply with arms control treaties, except that I'm trying not to travel that much. Its wooden replacement currently sits in the back yard in many, many pieces, awaiting assembly.
This week in the office I'm working on five different projects (assuming I haven't forgotten any). Sadly, my multi-tasking confort threshold is usually exceeded whenever I try to do more than eat and watch TV at the same time. The thing I'm working on at the moment, and back to which I must alt+tab very soon, is the documented breifing from a project lest year that ought to have been done ages ago, isn't much fun to work on, and may not be very warmly received by the office sponsoring it. But on the bright side I have managed to avoid taking my second trip of the year to Hurlburt AFB, Florida, this week (for a sixth project that I need to get back to very soon).
O.K., gotta get back to work, but I will sign off with a quote for the week from Kara's candy-enthusiast friend Kara (they're in the same class) at a birthday party on Sunday:
"I only like chocolate when it's in things. Like M&Ms or Butterfingers." |
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| Double take |
[May. 1st, 2007|10:40 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | war | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Elgar: Serenade in E minor | ] |
Overheard last night in a restaurant:
"Ballroom dancing is to conventional war as break dancing is to counterinsurgency."
Now that I think about it, a Limbo analogy would not only have been funnier, but considerably more insightful as well. |
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| TDY |
[May. 1st, 2007|08:53 am] |
I am in the middle of a six-day trip to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to attend the Army's annual Unified Quest wargame--which is not nearly as cool as it sounds. In fact, even if that doesn't sound cool to you at all, it's still less fun than you're thinking.
This will be the longest I've been away from home (well, from the rest of the family) since early 2005, which is bad enough, but this is also the week when our house is getting a new roof and the contractor is replacing our back porch with an enclosed room. And it's Lida's first week in her new daycare.
It reminds me of how, when I was young, my mom would conplain that my dad was always out of town when the basement flooded, it was time to change all the clocks, or anything else particularly inconvenient happened. |
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| A GWOT by any other name |
[Apr. 19th, 2007|10:28 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | iraq, terrorism | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Philip Glass: The Fog of War | ] |
Two weeks ago the House Armed Services Committee announced that they no longer wanted the administration to refer to Iraq, Afghanistan, and various U.S. counter-terrorist activities as the "War on Terror", not least because the GWOT label conflates a number of different conflicts only some of which have, or at least had, anything to do with al Qaida.
A couple days ago Hilary Benn also spoke out agaist the "war on terror" label, noting that the UK does not use it and additionally suggesting that aside from being a nmisnomer, it also emboldens our enemies.
Now the new CENTCOM commander, Adm. William Fallon, has decided that the more recent catchphrase "The Long War" is to be persona non grata, becuase he doesn't think that the Arabs want to hear that we are in fact plannning on waging a generations-long war in the Middle East.
(I know that according to internet etiquette I ought to provide links to the relevant news stories, but I'm too lazy. Just trust me.)
Fallon has not yet selected a new label for whatever it is that we're spending all this money on (a very small amount of which is going to two projects I'm working on this fiscal year, one of which has "War on Terror" in the title and the other "The Long War"). So while they mull it over (perhaps there should be a contest, like one of those ones in which you suggest new ice cream flavors to Ben and Jerry's), I'm thinking that I'll start referring to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively as DubyaW1 and DubyaW2. It should be just the ticket for flinging around inappropriate Hitler analogies and dire warnings about our way of life hanging in the balance. |
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| It's a new generation |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|12:16 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | kara, music | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Nils Lofgren: Into the Night | ] |
As I'm driving Kara to school this morning (with a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts CD playing), she announces "I feel that it's not important how something looks, it's important how it feels."
That's mighty philosophical for five-and-a-half, I think.
Then she adds "Like my coat."
Joan Jett is her most requested musical artist at the moment, followed by Martina McBride, Queen, and Heart. Her favorite Joan Jett tune is "Bad Reputation", which tickles me coming from someone who owns more than a few sparkly fairy princess outfits, though I have to admit that it sounds less precociously edgy when she refers to it as "the Shrek song". |
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| 33 |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|10:51 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | lj | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Couperin: l'Apothéose de Corelli | ] |
So it turns out that I am better than I expected at resisting temptation, at least the temptation to spend a lot of time keeping up an LJ blog. My original intention follow up the first message with additional posts crashed into hazy months of nights in which sleep has mostly come in short bits and not enough of those, and days when there has always been something more urgent to do at work or home.
None of that has changed. Lida is still waking up a lot during the night, and I'm juggling far more things in the the office than my limited ability to multitask easily handles. But ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) percyprune has dilligently encouraged me to starting keeping up the journal at least so I won't forget what's happening in my life, and he makes a persuasive case.
Plus it occurs to me that on LJ I can whine about how busy I am, something that is absurd to do at home and pointless at work.
But if I've learned anything from twenty years of marriage, it's the value of keeping expectations low. So don't expect much. |
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