Everyone knows the Democrats couldn’t agree to Republican plans for Texas congressional redistricting. And many of you know Republicans in the state House can’t agree with their counterparts in the state Senate, for arcane reasons. They’ve been bickering so long they’re on the verge of postponing elections so they can settle the squabble.
“We’re just praying the Democrats will leave again, to take the heat off of us,” Smithee said.
Just too rich.
Two days ago, Gwen and I saw a movie that reminded both of us of Ghost World. Today, we saw a movie starring one of the actresses from that movie, Scarlett Johansson: Lost in Translation. Very good and very melancholy. The story is less sad than Sofia Coppola’s previous movie, The Virgin Suicides, but it feels sadder, somehow–Virgin Suicides had a very detached quality to it; this had a very intimate quality. It also made me very nostalgic for Japan, and a little melancholy about my own experiences there.
Gwen astutely commented that it was sad seeing Bill Murray, an actor we’ve grown up with, not only playing (well, being) an old guy, but in a role where his age is a key part of the role. She also pointed out that a scene where the two main characters were chasing through a pachinko parlor seemed like it was lifted from another movie we had recently seen, but neither of us could quite put our finger on which one.
Ideal double-feature companion movie: CQ: both movies address the isolation of smart young Americans abroad. Both use the movies as a schtick in the movie. And both are made by second-generation Coppolas.
Bush has asked for $87 billion to rebuild Iraq. Actually, that’s a lowball figure–he really wants more like $150 billion, and once you add in the interest payments, it will be many times that. But let’s stick with $87 billion. Of that, most of it will go to pay for American forces over there; the rest will actually be used for reconstruction (that is, Halliburton contracts).
But even the $20 billion or so for actual reconstruction is a lot of money, and some Democrats have shamefully proposed–and some Republicans supported–the idea that the money should be treated as a loan to Iraq, which that country would repay.
Now, never mind the whole blood-for-oil slogan. Never mind that the administration mistakenly thought that the Halliburton welfare project rebuilding effort could be paid for out of oil revenues. The idea that one country would invade another, blow it up, and then charge it for repairs is appalling. The Mafia has it figured out: they charge you protection money up-front, so that nothing…unfortunate happens to your country. We could save everybody a lot of trouble if we’d just extort rather than invade and then try to take money.
Finally got around to seeing American Splendor last night. Very good. If I’m ever feeling down about my own life, I can console myself with the thought “at least I’m not Harvey Pekar.” That sounds mean, but come on–a file clerk who says “every day’s a struggle” is automatically pathetic and self-involved.
Despite the aggressively mundane quality of Pekar’s world, and his almost complete inability to find any joy in it at all, the movie’s funny. The little observations within the movie are funny, and the wacky metafiction mashups are funny: the real Harvey Pekar provides voiceover, and occasionally the scene shifts to a white space, cluttered with some of the set dressing from the previous scene, with the Real Harvey giving some insight on what’s going on. This might sound annoying, but it is necessary, if for no other reason than Toby. Toby is one of Harvey’s coworkers depicted in the story, and he is such an oddball character that one would be forced to conclude that his depiction, if not the person himself, was fictionalized. But eventually we cut to the Real Toby, and that’s exactly what he’s like, and we realize fiction is hard-pressed to keep up with truth for strangeness. In that shot, we see Real Harvey talking with Real Toby, as Paul Giamatti (portraying Harvey) and Judah Friedlander (portraying Toby) sit on folding chairs in the background. That’s meta.
Paul Giamatti wears a scowl through the whole movie that’s constantly on the verge of a grimace. He probably had to do face-yoga at the end of every day of shooting. The shots of Pekar himself today show that he’s mellowed a little bit with age, and he occasionally breaks into a smile.
Ideal double-feature companion to this movie: Ghost World. Both are comics-inspired, and Harvey Pekar seems to have been the inspiration for Seymour in Ghost World.
Just finished reading Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace. Very good. Some years ago, I read his book Forever War, one of the standards in the science-fiction canon. This was not a sequel to that, rather a sideways look at some of the same issues in it.
The book starts off slowly with exposition. He’s set up an interesting near-future world for the reader to get acquainted with, and if that were the extent of the book, it wouldn’t be bad. But right in the middle of the book, when things are starting to slow down, he throws a crisis at us, which is merely the butterfly wing-flap that precipitates a boggling storm of events. Everything starts happening very quickly.
I’ve always said that a cynic is a disappointed optimist, and I think Haldeman is a cynic when it comes to human nature: he hasn’t given up hope, but he’s arched his eyebrow at his fellow man for so long that those muscles have just given out. The book was written in 1998 and the action takes place in 2043; I suspect that every day now he cradles his head in horrified amazement at his own premature prescience.
Anyone who has used a laptop atop a lap is intimately familiar with the heat that a modern CPU can generate. Every watt of that heat is wasted.
Talking with Dave earlier, he mentioned that he had converted one of his PCs to liquid cooling, silencing at least some of the fans that had made the thing sound like a damned airplane. He explained how the cooling system used an aquarium pump to circulate water; I hypothesized that the pump was probably redundant–the CPU itself probably put enough energy into the system for natural convection to circulate the water adequately, as long as there’s a one-way valve in the plumbing somewhere. He was skeptical.
Anyhow, if it hasn’t been done already, it would make a good project for a casemodder. But after thinking about it a bit, I realized this idea had a lot of potential. Take it a step further: rather than using energy to cool the system, actively scavenge the processor’s waste heat. I can imagine a couple ways to do this:
Imagine the steampunk/geek-cred you’d earn by having a functioning stirling engine installed in your case.
When I got my current computer, a Powermac G4, I started using the mouse that came with it, a featureless polycarbonate ovoid. It’s a beautiful mouse–nice heft, nice materials, nice shape. But a one-button mouse. These days, many mice have four buttons plus a scroll-wheel that can also be clicked, and OS X is built to recognize two buttons plus a clickable scroll-wheel with no extra software required (unless you want to remap the button functions).
Perhaps out of exasperation with my button-deficient mousing lifestyle, my über-geek friend Drew just flat-out gave me a new-in-box Microsoft mouse with two buttons and a clickable scroll-wheel that he happened to have lying around (this isn’t that surprising–as near as I can tell, he’s got 8 computers in varying levels of service). So I plugged it in this morning and have been using it.
My findings: In terms of shape, materials, and build-quality, Apple wins hands-down. As to the extra controls, I’m actually a bit ambivalent. The scroll-wheel is a big advantage, no question. But it clicks along in steps, not smoothly, which is actually jarring when following a screenload of text. The second button is also handy (though not as frequently so), but it forces me to pay more attention to what I’m doing. And despite that, having two extra buttons doesn’t quite feel like enough. With a one-button mouse setup, I use the keyboard more to make up for the mouse’s deficiencies. If I’m going to really use the mouse, I need to be able to use it more. Chorded input would give me 7 possible clicks from three buttons, but I’m not sure if that can be accomplished, and I am loathe to install Microsoft’s bloated (4.9 MB) mouse software to find out. A mouse with more physical buttons would do the trick, though perhaps at the expense of a lot more mistaken clicks. There are other mice out there that offer multiple buttons with better ergonomics, and I might break down and try one out.
I’ve written before about the “senior administration official” leaking the identity of a CIA covert operative to the press, as revenge for her husband embarrassing the White House, a story Robert Novak ran. The story-behind-the-story was astounding, but got very little press at the time. Now that the CIA has requested a Justice Department investigation (which in fact has been underway for a while), and has publicized that request in the media, the media is reviving it–a little bit.
Billmon has been beating the drum on this story for the past couple of days.
One of Billmon’s commenters wondered, if the administration is willing to pull a dirty trick like this over a relatively piddling matter, what are they doing with the really important stuff? One shudders to think. And we can clearly drop the “if”: The fact of the CIA’s request makes it clear that the story is not bogus. Someone in the administration who is placed highly enough to find out Wilson’s wife’s secret identity, and vindictive enough to violate federal law and put her and her contacts’ lives at risk just to get back at her husband: Carl Rove comes to mind.
Later: Even some well-connected Republicans are appalled:
Compared to this, all of Clinton’s peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production … Let me make this as plain as possible — I was an unpaid advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and I know and respect some high-ranking people in the administration. And none of that changes the following: if George W. Bush knew about or condoned this kind of White House activity, I wouldn’t just vote against him in 2004 — I’d want to see him impeached. Straight away.
There’s lots, lots more out there in the blogosphere, but this is some of the juicy stuff.
Chip has been doing a good job of beating the drum on Verisign’s offensive “typojacking” (great word) of all unassigned domain names on the Internet. Meaning, for example, if you accidentally type “corssroads.net” into your browser, you are taken to a Verisign page that tell you “perhaps you meant one of these pages.” Prima facie, that actually sounds helpful, but there are serious problems with it. The architecture of the Internet depends on the ability to check whether a domain name is valid or not. This trick stymies that ability. It’s also sleazy, because Verisign can monetize your typos: rather than pointing you to the most likely correct spelling, they can suggest you visit sponsoring sites that seem like likely hits.
And finally, simply by visiting Verisign’s website, you are agreeing to their terms of service. There may have been a tattered fig leaf of respectability for that stunt when you had to intentionally go to their site, but that fig leaf is completely gone now. One harassment tactic that geeks could take would be to write them, saying “I came to your site completely by accident, and I do not agree to your terms of service. Please make it so that I can no longer accidentally violate your TOS.”
In fact, now that I think about it, I wonder if we can write up a sort of “reverse-TOS”–that is, we could file a TOS (hidden in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard) reading something like “responding to any HTTP GET or POST requests originating from my computer constitutes acceptance of these terms of service,” which might include terms like free ice cream delivered daily for the next year.