Oh No, We’re Winning

It started when I was at lunch with my oldest daughter on Saturday at the local Irish pub. The restaurant was quiet, and television set at the bar was tuned to CNN. The news story was about how the month of July has seen some real changes in Iraq. The subtitle was something like “Iraq: A New Positive Trend”. My turkey sandwich waited untouched on the plate while I watched a news story that talked about increasing stability and fewer deaths, both among Iraqi and U.S. forces. Several other patrons were also gazing at the television, confused.

Obviously there was a problem in the CNN newsroom – weekend staffers, probably, or producers who sent out a confusing memo about editorial direction. Obviously this was an anomaly, and soon enough staffers from Pelosi’s office or the Hillary campaign would call their friends at CNN and express confusion and surprise that they would choose to focus on these positive details when, let’s be honest (they would say), the Bush administration’s efforts are obviously a failure – and thank you very much for not reporting anything positive, since otherwise the progressive Left will have nothing whatsoever to talk about, no flag around which to rally, and besides – they might look a little foolish. C’mon, CNN. Are you trying to be Fox News?

The mantra is as follows: Bush and the Republicans screwed everything up, and we’ve lost already in Iraq. Even if momentary evidence is to the contrary, even if the trend is changing, the mantra must be repeated, at least until 2008, at which point a counter-narrative can be constructed which credits any positive news to the new Democrat administration, and blames any lingering bad news on the previous manager. Repeating anything else besides the mantra creates cognitive dissonance. Stick with the program.

Now, two guys from the most pre-eminent liberal think-tank (and noted war critics, previously) are writing in the New York Times about a genuine turnaround in Iraq, and the need to continue the surge until 2008? Have the spheres come off their celestial rails? Does my GOP-issued tin foil hat need to be taken in for repairs? Next thing you know they'll be telling us the economy is in good shape, unemployment is at record lows, and some of the "prosperity gap" numbers ignore any inconvenient counter-trends, notably the fact that achievement in education and basic hard work are still the best predictors of success regardless of the economic layer of society to which you were born.

Isn't everything supposed to be going downhill? Aren't we supposed to be losing? Won't some people be horribly confused if they are deprived of their right to complain incessantly? If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention, right? How does that work when there are positive news stories about the war on CNN?

Work, Bananas, and Jane Espenson

You won’t find me writing about work on this blog, besides general observations about the business environment, or travel dispatches from locations I visit as a result of my employment. That’s been a deliberate policy from the outset – despite the fact that it requires setting aside some very, very good material.

But here’s something that falls under the “general observation” category – because I think it’s probably true for almost any job in America: We all want to imagine that our workplace is a sitcom, our coworkers are a zany cast of characters, and the jokes are always slap-ass funny. If you could pop the roof off a greasy spoon lunch joint in Wichita, Kansas and a prestigious law firm in Boston, Mass you would find one thing in common – there’s a couple of jokesters, some teasing of the junior staff, and banter sprinkled with lame, overused punch-lines from real television sitcoms.

Which is why America, as a whole, should be reading Jane Espenson.

She a TV writer whose credits include a few geek jewels like ‘Buffy’ and ‘Battlestar’ – but she cut her teeth working in the trenches of sitcoms, knocking out joke after joke for weekly episodes. Her blog is ostensibly aimed at frustrated would-be screenwriters who are attempting to break into the business, but for all practical intents and purposes it serves as a place where plots, characters, dialogue and humor are analyzed with keen patience. And jokes – funny or not – go under the autopsy knife.

She often dissects “clams” – TV-writer lingo for rank, overused laugh lines. Examples abound – the terrified passenger saying “I thought you knew how to drive this thing!” or somebody deadpanning “Well, I think that went well” after some kind of noisy confrontation. You can “freshen up a clam” – for example Borat, in his humor class, getting it wrong by saying “This suit is NOT BLAAACK!.” But unless you’ve got a clever variation, these comedic tropes should be off-limits.

Which is why the proverbial guy from accounting needs to familiarize himself with the list of clams. Saying, in 2007, that you’re going to vote Cheryl the administrative assistant “off the island” because of some minor incompetence should be met with bored silence – because workplace decorum usually forbids the practice of getting up from the conference table and having somebody hold down Mr. jokey jokester while the others kick him in the head. (“You’re a real funny guy, Larry.” WHAM. “Not!!” WHAM.)

Maybe I’m being too severe. Some people are easily amused, and lighthearted banter is harmless, eh? Personally I find gallows humor in an office setting to be a constant source of funny, but you have to be careful with that approach if you are a manager. ( “We’re getting new office furniture next month. Which should be nice for those of you who haven’t been fired by then. Ha!”) And Jane Espenson would remind us that trying to be funny, and failing in a funny way, can actually be quite funny.

One final note – I learned via Espenson’s blog the phrase “bananas on bananas”, which is TV-writer lingo which supposedly dates back to the vaudeville era. It denotes a follow-on joke simply that simply isn’t necessary after material that was genuinely funny. For example, if the hobo steps on a rake, and then staggers backwards and slips on a banana peel, it simply isn’t necessary to have him get hit with the seltzer water. This is one gag too far, or the comedic equivalent of (another great phrase) “gilding the lily”.

But I’d like to see “bananas on bananas” be used in a broader context, to describe, for example, long-winded corporate memos, or overenthusiastic advertising campaigns, or impractical foreign policy suggestions. Feel free to try it out yourself – throw it out casually in your next meeting or social occasion, and adopt a look of puzzled surprise when people say they’ve never heard it before. But you may need to jump on the bandwagon quickly, before it catches on – at which point that proverbial banana turns into a clam.

Tags: Jane Espenson, Television Comedy, Screenwriting

The Drunk Astronauts

Color me nonplussed at the news that these folks may have been known to hit the bottle before heading out to the launch pad.

One well-known trivia item about military history is that soldiers, from at least the time of the Roman legions, often bolstered their enthusiasm for grisly death on the battlefield with booze or anything else at hand. And marijuana, of course, became popular in Vietnam.

If I were tending my acre of potatoes in the hills of Ireland one day, and somebody forcibly conscripted me into an army and told me I was being sent to the Ottoman Empire to run towards spikes and impale myself in the name of Christendom – well, I’d bring along a nip of whiskey.

Many of our astronauts come out of a modern, military tradition – which doesn’t officially condone any kind of self-medication, of course. And reasonably so – we have forked over several billion taxpayer dollars for the hardware involved in spaceflight. The 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule cited in the news article seems like a good idea - although it's rather telling that something that might seem obvious has earned a little catchphrase.

The fact remains we're asking these people to do something incredibly dangerous. Space shuttles have a expected, engineered failure rate of 1%. Imagine if the computer you used at the office everyday blew up and killed seven people about once every 100 times you flipped it on. Spaceflight should become more reliable - vigorous private competition in aerospace may eventually bring down cost. But as the other recent news item reminds us, it's still a pursuit that inherently involves extreme risk. It simply takes a phenomenal amount of energy to escape gravity, and it can only be obtained by a barely-controlled explosion.

At the end of the day we're still human beings, striving for something, despite the sophisticated hardware. No rigorous selection process can entirely filter out the fears and weaknesses that come built-in to our natures alongside courage and ingenuity.

Junie B. Backlash

There’s trouble brewing at the local library over Junie B. Jones, the main character in a series of book that enjoys immense popularity among the pre-pre teen crowd. What drives some parents into a unnatural state of apoplexy is the grammar employed by Mrs. Jones. In the stories she garbles up adverbs and objects in a creative and quirky way. As related to the New York Times:

“My dad doesn’t like the grammar,” said the Bartells’s youngest, Mollie, 9. “And I guess that’s important, because maybe when you grow up and you’re at work and you say, ‘I runned,’ people will get annoyed at you.”
She added: “I’m also not allowed to watch R-rated movies, but nobody is these days.”

One might argue that lackadaisical grammar is a problem that goes right to the halls power in America. Many citizens have known the feeling of watching the president speak on television, and then quietly reconstituting the meaning of a sentence that was deployed from the podium without tense agreement, or with vocabulary choices that confound meaning.

With a household bursting with daughters we know the Junie B. oeuvre very well. The missus and I both studied English at university, and we’re kind of, well, literature nerds, and we both thought the books were simple and cute – and better than most fare available to grade-schoolers. Any parent with serious concerns about their child’s understanding of correct grammar could easily remind little Suzy, after the giggles subside, that it’s “more beautiful” and not “beautifuller”, thereby transforming a whimsical story into a teachable, if tedious, moment.

But you know what happens?

The little child in question learns. He or she stops saying all of those cute things. It becomes spaghetti instead of “piz-ghetti”, a train instead of a “twain”, and instead of “those guys-es”, they. That small human grows up immediately, losing before your eyes all of those creative and endearing characteristics which would almost certainly have fallen away with time anyway, and advancing the day when they become a miniature adult, stressed about work, writing things in a planner, and jabbering on a cell phone.

Childhood is very short these days. I think Junie B. should enjoy a prominent spot in the grade-school library, and her grammar choices should be greeted with benign tolerance … even if some people get annoyed at you.

The Blackberry Post

Recently I became the owner of a Blackberry 8100, the “Pearl” model that has been marketed to consumers. It was a reasonable deal subsidized against our cell provider plan, and after some research, it seemed like the best trade-off between price and performance for a smart phone.

After using it for about two weeks my response is simply that all phones should work this way in 2007. There’s no reason why email cannot be managed on a mobile phone, and synched with your account, along with a calendar. The infrastructure exists, companies like Apple are setting a new standard, and Blackberry has already perfected an almost faultless design. Years of careful thinking about ease-of-use is on display with every function point on the Pearl.

Email works so well with the device that most of the time the LED light indicating a new message begins blinking minutes before I see I have new mail on the Gmail webpage - which supposedly refreshes at a short interval. The calendar and contact lists synch easily with Outlook, which, to be honest, isn’t a piece of software everyone loves. But it does help tie everything together. And admittedly, I am using the Blackberry as “Joe Consumer”, not in the Enterprise mode typically common with Crackberry corporate types.

One feature I like – and it’s not uncommon on phones these days – is the voice recognition technology. A side-button allows you to say “Call Larry Mobile” and most of the time the number will dial instantly. Note to the folks at RIM: You should have the ability to configure this feature to automatically launch the speakerphone, if the user so chooses. This completely hands-free operation while driving after one button click.

One very pleasing discovery was the Blackberry's capacity to act as a tethered modem with direct access to the Internet via the EDGE network. If you have the right settings and some technical know-how (the information is available on the Internet) you can use the Blackberry to make a dial-up connection. Thus Laptop + Blackberry + Coverage = Internet anywhere, anytime. You're already paying for data access anyway. I’m not sure that can be done with an iPhone – although theoretically you should be pleased enough with Safari and the touch-screen keyboard that a laptop isn’t needed anymore. In any event, it’s nice to know that buying an add-on feature like a data plan really means access to a network, not yet another item locked-down on the phone by the mobile provider.

Other nice features include a very hi-res large screen, solid bluetooth support, and a MicroSD slot. After getting the phone I immediately picked up a 1GB card for $8 at Newegg.com - which is simply a ridiculous price, no wonder hard drives are moving to flash memory. The phone then doubles as a roomy thumb-drive, with extra storage for pictures taken with the serviceable, though not spectacular 1.3 megapixel camera.

The media player is limited, both in terms of features and playable file types, but that's one of the few drawbacks I discovered. I suppose a truly modern feature set would also include wi-fi support, but it's hard to imagine why that would drastically improve the "user experience".

Overall this is a very nice piece of technology. For better or for worse I am more wired than ever, clicking through Michael Yon dispatches at the lunch counter, and checking out an email from my sister while waiting for an elevator.

Tags: Blackberry Pearl

Pater Familias Interlude

My better half is leaving for a trip to California for three days tomorrow. It's a long-overdue visit with two of her sisters who live in L.A. and work, in various capacities, in "the business". There will be a great deal of bonding, meaningful conversations, feelings shared, and ad-hoc analysis of the quirky little foibles of spouses, siblings, and other family members. More words will be exchanged between the three sisters, probably, than I have spoken in the past few years.

My lovely wife deserves a little time away. The poor creature has to deal with my stoic self, most of the time. The last feeling I had to share, for example, might have been back in 2002, if I recall correctly. It lasted a few minutes, seemed somewhat unnecessary, and may have been the result of the Thai lunch special I consumed earlier that day.

During her trip I will be completely in charge of taking care of the seven month old. And I'm a professional daddy, I know the ropes - and can handle feedings, changing of drawers, and so forth. This is not the first child, and as babies go she's not very difficult. When she cries it's usually because there is something obviously wrong, or she's figured out what's happening, and doesn't like it.

For example lately, when you walk into her bedroom in the evening, and the blinds are closed and the light is off, she usually looks around lets loose with one of those "Aaaa!" type cries that is really more of a yell of protest, because she's wise to the situation. She has the same reaction when she reads about congressional appropriations bills.


Division of labor, when it comes to child care, is a tricky issue in many homes. The burden traditionally rests on the mother, even when both parents work. Many Dads are content with this arrangement - one that almost certainly was modeled by their father before them - and they either avoid chores related to child-rearing, or feign incompetence. Put the infant's "onesie" on backwards and upside down enough times (Hon, is this outfit supposed to dangerously constrict her sternum?) and the lady of the house will very likely take over that job full time, thank you very much.

Moms handle these things regularly, and don't make a big, bragging fuss. And the truth is, I think we take on a fairly balanced share of work when it comes to the kids.

Still, it doesn't matter if you are Mom or Dad, three days without a spouse, somebody to "spell" you for a few moments after a long day in the front lines with the short ones, that can be a minor challenge. Let's hope the good woman has a great trip to Cali and the inevitable separation anxiety is mitigated by a rip-roaring, sisterly good time. And I'll dutifully hold the phone up to the cute little dickens so she can look vaguely alarmed when she hears Mommy's cooing voice before trying to eat the receiver.

So Monday, if you find me wandering down the street muttering quietly to myself and smelling faintly of scotch and baby formula, it's because the wife's plane has landed, the baby is safely tucked away, and Daddy finally had a little break time.

Carbon, Climate, and Energy: A Dialogue

Are there reasonable solutions for this matter of climate change?

Let's start with cars that run on batteries. Plug them in at night!

But where does that electricity come from?

Wait. It comes from the energy industry! They are responsible for 2.5 billion tons of CO2 every year! That's bad.

They are producing as much energy as they can at the lowest possible price for consumers. They are in a competitive business. This does cause higher carbon emissions -

So regulate the energy industry! Force them to either build greener generation facilities, like coal gasification plants, or maybe force them to trade carbon pollution allowances. Make those greedy bastards pay.

This price will be passed on to the consumer.

They can take it out of their insanely insane profits.

No they can't. Established, competitive industries are already running at the lowest-possible long term average cost. Investors won't --

Blah blah blah.

You've never taken a microeconomics course, have you?

It's all about profit.

Yes, it is, but profits are only possible when a business is running at maximum efficiency.

But since that also causes CO2, we might as well have the government run the energy industry. No more corporate greed.

But higher taxes.

You have to pay the price somewhere.

So it's okay to soak the average citizen with higher taxes which go into government coffers, and have arguably America's most critical industry run like Amtrak - but if corporations compete to deliver goods and services at a lower price, while also turning a profit, this is not acceptable.

You want to save the planet, right?

Yes, but --

I'll bet you work for big oil or coal.

No, but I'm trying to understand why --

Fascist.

All I'm suggesting is - if you think skepticism about global warming is hard to stomp out now, wait until people in coal-dependent states are staring a huge tax or energy rate hike in the face. They may take a sudden and profound interest in the hardcore science.

Americans are lazy gluttons who take more than their fair share.

That school-marmish attitude would be easier to take if it didn't come along with such a resentful, sneering hatred of the default American way of life. It's that contemptuous attitude, plus a tendency to sweep past any contradictory evidence which makes the whole thing seem grounded more in socialist politics, not practical climate science.

You can your corporate cronies can go stick it.

Thanks for sharing in this thoughtful discussion.

Ten Years of Blogs

Writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Ray Cooklis notes the ten-year anniversary of the blog as a medium of communication.

To celebrate the occasion I'm going to perform the sacred ritual observed by bloggers worldwide, and offer some ill-informed, hot-headed criticism of Mr. Cooklis' editorial. He is a well-heeled member of the corporate establishment, and I am some wild-eyed everyman tapping away on a laptop in my Spiderman PJs. The nut of his sorta-argument:

Following your favorite blogs can be addictive. But is it worth it? Novelist Tom Wolfe told the Journal he no longer reads them. "The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors," he writes, noting Marshall McLuhan's prediction that modern communications would "turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective 'news' reports but only to what the drums say ..."

With all due respect to the brilliant Mr. Wolfe, rumors aren't really the stock-and-trade of bloggers. I think that's a perception that got started during the Drudge/Monica era - the first momentous collision between Internet media and public affairs.

Blogs are only newspapers, exploded. Instead of a sports section, five million vital and informed blogs about teams, trades, games and players. Instead of an editorial page, four million tub-thumping everyman editorialists, pushing their "humble opinions". And another million subject matter experts, who follow every morsel of information in their niche - fishing, miniature horses, book-binding, TV shows, obscure programming languages (the list could scroll endlessly). And ten million more blogs with nothing more than pictures and family news.

What confounds people, what makes it very difficult, is the complete lack of obvious signs of authority. It puts quite a burden on the readers, especially those above a certain age - that lack of a "meta" layer that explains who and what matters. (Now who the hell is this guy? Spacetropic? What does that mean?) And the bloggers themselves don't help, with inscrutable babble about tags and indexes, hat tips and inbound links. Blogs turn everything over; agency is celebrated and hierarchy is eschewed.

Blogs have a hardcore feel of liberty to them. But those are Just simply some thoughts from a tribal primitive, spreading rumors on a Tuesday morning.

The Will of the People

To my brother Tony:

The light came on, for me, after the '94 election. I was reading an article in The New Yorker about the Republican takeover of Congress. It made the American people sound like a group of elderly people that got suddenly very confused and ill-tempered at election time, and did something that would have terrible repercussions by voting in those horrible creatures - and this needed to be explained to them with condescending patience.

The 'will of the people' has always been valuable in the minds of beltway lefties and the fourth estate insofar as it reflects their eminently reasonable doctrine. If it doesn't, we're a bunch of self-interested idiots from JesusLand.

Let's review. We elected the Executive branch in 2004. (Never mind that some people still dispute that with all kinds of arm-waving, while conveniently forgetting that the popular vote, which some might see as a reflection of the 'will of the people', wasn't even close.) We put in place a president that was, like it or not, a stay-the-course type of dude.

This, of course, was America in it's "What's wrong with Kansas?" mode - a bunch of ignoramuses that obviously don't know anything. There were sanctimonious websites on which Americans offered their apologies for the results of the election, Democrats loudly complained that no mandate existed, and "Still Not My President" bumper-stickers proliferated. The suggestion was made repeatedly that will of the people, having been constitutionally expressed at the ballot box, should be entirely ignored. The editors at the New York Times repeatedly wagged one scolding gray-lady finger - this president better be moderate and compromise. Or else.

Now in 2006, armed with a congressional majority and an opinion poll - the Democrats feel like the American people have finally come to their senses. And we are obliged to listen to them on Iraq. And nobody is urging moderation.

And brother, to your point about the military. Yes, it would be wise to listen to the generals when it comes to these types of conflicts - including General Lynch, who makes it clear that a sudden departure is basically abandonment, and the world will watch as the chaos in Iraq accelerates to truly horrific proportions. The Left always warns of "slippery slopes" and cause célèbres like Darfur. Our departure from Iraq may be a prelude to a truly historic event.

Is that the will of the people? And will the people who claims do be doing their bidding take any responsibility afterwards?

The Maverick In Winter

F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been wrong. There are plenty of "second acts" in American public life, from John Travolta to Steve Jobs to Bill Clinton, whose political career flat-lined following his deadly speech at the '84 convention.

But I don't think John McCain is going to make it. (Some are calling it a 'deathwatch'.) Once, back in 2000, I was a huge supporter. He seemed, at the time, like a much more restorative solution than Bush to the post-Bubba miasma that was in the air at the time. It still seems like a wise idea to keep an eye on special interests (hello, immigration?) - even if campaign finance reform turned out to be a bad idea. And I have no problem going against the grain and telling the prevailing ideological orthodoxy exactly where they can stick it - when it really matters, when your most deeply-held principles are being crossed.

But McCain the maverick has mushed too often into McCain the coastal elite, whose opinion jibes too keenly with whatever pabulum is making Tim Russert glare in a constipated way at any given moment. McCain has been occasionally incoherent on the war in Iraq, somewhat more persuasive on the war on terror (to the extent it still seems to be happening) and woefully, radically wrong about immigration reform - again because I suspects he fears the easy demagoguery of the Connecticut dinner-club crowd.

It's not surprising his advisers and top campaign people are jumping ship. Personally they probably love McCain, and agree with him - but professionally, pragmatically, they know he's a dead man walking.

Still, I hate to see him go out like a chump.

Tags: John McCain

A New Downtown Revival

Now for some good news. Er ... mostly good news. Maybe a trend with some positive spin, but I'll punt this one downfield anyway since it jibes with my observations.

Brian Griffin at Cincinnati Blog has a post that links another post from Urban Cincy (a new local blogger) - and the subject at hand is the downtown revival.

That's right, I think it's fair to call it a Cincinnati downtown revival. As a long, longtime worker in these parts - I'm downtown every day, I know every streetcorner - I can say that is quite eye-popping to see the amount of building and growth, and most importantly, the crowds of people in downtown Cincinnati these days.

The naysayers will point out that there's still crime in the city. Per my previous post, kids still shoot each other in some neighborhoods. Once and a while somebody who is not involved in a life of destitution - someone merely visiting downtown will be a victim of crime. No matter the frequency, those news items are anxiously seen as "proof" that the city is dangerous, all of their fears are valid, and the urban center does not match the city of yore, the "safer" place they remember fondly from the stripmalls-and-subdivisions enclave to which they've relocated.

Which is perfectly fine. Maybe they'll come to a movie on the square once and a while, or maybe those visitors will be other families, or younger people without kids. Maybe they'll be surprised when the demographics of the urban center look different and have a different world-view when it comes to genuine risk.

It's funny how many people are on the square these days, even at night and on weekends. The commenters at Cincinnati Blog gripe that it's all restaurants - but it's been my observation, since I've come to the Midwest, that eating is important in these parts, on equal par with sports. And what retailers do exist downtown are only going to see foot traffic increase as people go to and fro from restaurants. There's a lot of potential synergies that take place in putting together a commercial district, and it seems very likely that it works quite differently than building a retail center next to the exit ramp and waiting for people to drive up and start shopping.

Right now I think the prognosis for a new downtown revival Cincinnati - and a new cross-section of the population that spends time there - is starting to look encouraging.

Tags: Cincinnati

Three Downbeat News Items

This blog has a largely upbeat editorial policy. But today, I'm in a different mode, thanks to three headlines in the local paper.

First, the story of yet another teenager killed in a horrible car wreck in the sub/ex-urbs. Jordan Bessey went to Moeller, and by all accounts had a very bright future in tier-one college football. But he wrecked his Camaro yesterday, traveling at 100 miles an hour without a seatbelt. He was thrown from the car, in a collision so violent that the car was almost broken in half, and the flames from the explosion reached 30 feet in the air. He was killed, really, by testosterone, and the belief - one which teenagers have by design - that he would live forever, that his physical world is without consequence, and everything you've ever told about driving was the product of "worry". And when your friend is in the car you show off, of course. Now his parents will live with inconsolable, shattering grief.

(We pin stories like this on the fridge, at my house. One day there will be boys at the door, shy and proud, bursting with adolescence, and anxious to impress.)

The second story - well I wish I knew more, but the details are slim. A 15-year-old shot a 13-year-old in the face, in one of our inner city neighborhoods, Walnut Hills. Based on the flood of violence that has afflicted a certain demographic here in Cincinnati, poor kids in an urban setting, usually (not always) African-Americans, usually (not always) kids without strong family structures. Testosterone plays another role here, albeit a much angrier one. These stories don't get the same headlines, and we seem resigned to the fact that they are commonplace. You can't look for the causes, you can't ask hard questions - if you are a white person, and you are outraged, you may be called a racist - even if what you want is for kids to live without violence, with school as a priority, making decisions that don't include creating yet another generation of children without Daddies, and Moms who work to support the family, but are gone all day - and who never believe that their sons could have done what they are accused of doing when they are interviewed later.

The third story is par for the course, and so ordinary it is barely worth mentioning. Yet another fantastically enormous big-box retailer is building in the "greater" Cincinnati area. Soon the residents of Fairfield Township may have a shiny new, 200,000-foot Meijers in which to buy shopping baskets full of product. Several acres of parking lot will be constructed - and since development is only a one way trip, it will probably exist for another 100 years, and possibly be abandoned when living patterns change. Again, I'm an avowed capitalist - I would never stop these things by regulation, but I'd be pleased if more people saw how this type of spreadsheet-driven development makes our culture empty, ugly, and brain-dead - when it should be vital, strong and in the service of our communities.

For now, though, you can still see the green space on Google Maps.

Each of these stories is so ordinary, so easily accepted, almost the cost of doing business here in America. I'm not prone to prattle about "change" - but I'm alarmed by what we allow, what fails to trouble us.

Science Fiction Memories

Catching up ... Nixguy posted recently about Robert A. Heinlein - it would have been his hundredth birthday. It's impossible to think of science fiction without him - and Clarke, and Asimov - those three dominated the era between the 50s and the 70s. Their speculations were just as often about our social future as they were adventures with spaceships. And Heinlein especially, with the sexual revolution (Stranger In A Strange Land) and the Vietnam war (Starship Troopers) - although the stories were never intended to be perfect metaphors.

Honestly, I never dug too deeply into the Heinlein bookshelf besides those two classics - although if I recall correctly, I also read Friday when I was about 15, for no other reason than the cover artwork. (C'mon. I was fifteen.)

My mother remarried when I was a child, and my stepfather moved in with, among other things, a very large library of science fiction - almost everything that had been published through the early 80s. They were mostly trade paperbacks, and no matter how serious the subject matter the blurb on the back cover was filled with hyperbole (Take a wild ride through a doorway in time! A planet where death lurks around every corner!) and the front cover was a trippy, psychedelic painting that had little connection with the story. Long were the hours I spent, in summertime, plowing through those novels - Andre Norton and Arthur C. Clarke almost in their totality, but a sampling of others along the way. I read in my room, on the beach, in the back yard, and always in the back-back seat of the family station wagon, on our long drives to vacation places in New England.

Soon, though, I had so much required school reading that my time for science fiction was less and less. And even before that my mother, a great lover of English literature and one of the best-read people I know - had instilled in me an interest in books in general. The juvenile canon soon took up my time: Salinger, Golding, Knowles, Steinbeck, and so forth. Soon enough I had to slog through Great Expectations before school resumed in August. It was brutal. And Dickens remains one of the very few classic authors I ultimately never learned to like.

These days about every 6th or 7th book I read is sci-fi or some kind of speculative fiction - always Vernor Vinge, the cyberpunk writers, some Gaiman, J.G. Ballard - and more often in the summer, maybe because of the habits of yesteryear. And getting back around to Heinlein, in honor of the centennial, I will add The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress to queue, and maybe take it with me on our yearly trip to Maine.

I've been meaning to read it since the early 80s ...

The Fred Thompson Facts

Some serious facts about Fred Thompson:

• Fred Thompson has on multiple occasions pronounced "nuclear" correctly.
• With Fred Thompson departing from Law & Order, it's now being renamed The Cops and Lawyers Fun Hour.
• Fred Thompson honors the fallen on Memorial Day by setting fire to hippies. Burn long and hard in their remembrance, you filthy hippies.
• Fred Thompson once stood on our south border and glared at Mexico. There was no illegal immigration for a month.
• Fred Thompson can open clamshell packaging without the slightest trouble.
• What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Fred Thompson appears out of nowhere and beats the crap out of both of them.
• At a campaign stop, a Belgian Hound tried to hump Fred Thompson's leg. That breed of dog no longer exists.
• Fred Thompson has never been confused by anything that has happened on Lost.

Read the whole list.

[HT - Melissa the Misanthrope]

Live Earth: Sustainable Rocking In the Free World

If you browse the website for Live Earth concert series, Al Gore's attempt to do for the planet what Live Aid didn't really do for Africa, you will eventually come across the "green event guidelines" - which somebody wisely decided should be in place before mounting a colossally expensive (by any measure) concert.

According to the guidelines they intend to observe every environmentalist commandment - from offsetting "artist travel" by way of carbon indulgences - to making sure the office computers used by organizers are quick to go into sleep mode.

[Al Gore joke goes here.]

Of course, nobody has done the math on how much juice the whole effort will consume - even with LED lighting and so forth. It would be much more persuasive, even quasi-scientific, to add everything up in terms of kilowatts - even taking into account the somewhat fraudulent economics of supposed carbon offsets. Honest accounting would also consider all of the energy required to transmit the performance worldwide, right down the the TVs and radios the expected audience will use to listen to rock and rap stars posture sanctimoniously about climate change.

Even if the event proved to be a net energy drain, I suspect it would be excused as "raising awareness" anyway: A few more thousand people worldwide may feel bad about themselves, and vaguely like they must be subtracting more than their fair share in the zero-sum game that environmentalism encourages.

(On the other hand - the guys in the Arctic Monkeys, at least, display some healthy skepticism and sense.)

Tags: Live Earth, Al Gore, Climate Change

Happy Birthday America

Tonight we grilled hamburgers. As I write, in the park near my house, they are setting off bottle rockets. Later I will drink American beer and read Ernest Hemingway, before bed.

My daughter is Irish, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Scottish, Belgian, and English. I would be equally proud if she had some Native or African American "blood" - but isn't blood an antiquated notion, 231 years into this grand experiment? The very definition of America is to create oneself and ones progeny anew, on our quirky but mostly-flat playing field. And all of it is our heritage anyway, the story of colonials, slaves, the original inhabitants, heirs to the Enlightenment, and generation after generation of more recent arrivals - from every nation, every creed, unified (mostly) by gritty American optimism.

So anyway, happy Independence Day.

God bless the troops overseas. God bless the men and women charged with our protection. God bless every piss-ant Green dissenter who rails against capitalism while enjoying the fruits of it's innovative munificence. God bless the Democrats and Republicans, and our noble, brilliant Constitution - not as elastic as some would claim, but rugged nonetheless. God bless each of the fifty states, the judiciary, all of those horrible bastards in Congress - even the president.

We're a country of Miles Davis, Milton Friedman, Johnny Carson, and Jackie Robinson. The French may adore Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, and Henry Miller - but never in a thousand years could such unmistakably American characters be forged in any other country. Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Bugs Bunny, Jeff Tweedy, Ella Fitzgerald, Nate Hawthorne, even Barbra goddamn Streisand. Lewis and Clark, Simon and Garfunkel, Laurel and Hardy, Seals and Crofts, R2D2 and C3P0, Sanford and Son, Homer and Marge, Ike and Tina, Tracy and Hepburn, Mom and Apple Pie.

We're all that, and more, and always becoming. This is a good country, something to be proud of - a unique thing in history.

Happy Birthday America.