MoveOn virtual primary

/ current events

MoveOn.org has published the results of a virtual primary. It is, of course, not binding, and arguably doesn’t really mean anything: although MoveOn did go to some trouble to avoid ballot-box stuffing, there’s always that risk. MoveOn had already made nice noises about Howard Dean, and the voters would probably be sympathetic to MoveOn. MoveOn only gave three of the candidates an opportunity to address the voters in advance–it defined those three as the “front runners,” but those three are Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich (??), which is unrealistic. And sure enough, those three easily outpolled the others. Dean got over 40% of the vote. Kucinich, inexplicably, got over 20%.

The others got the dregs, and there wasn’t much for them to fight over. Carol Moseley-Braun outpolled Joe Lieberman, which strikes me as unrepresentative. Wesley Clark–who wasn’t even on the ballot–outpolled Al Sharpton. This is interesting: Sharpton doesn’t even have much cred among the dedicated left, and a recently retired general, who has made only vague noises about running, does. But I’m not sure what it signifies: has the left moved to the right? Does Clark appeal to a certain subset? Is he perceived as more viable today because of his military background?

Meddle

/ technology

No doubt many electrons will be spilled as self-appointed geniuses like me pore over Apple’s new announcements. These are interesting, I agree, but I’m going to take a detour and look at Apple’s website.

Apple has long done an admirable job of presenting a clean design on its site. One thing that it always steered clear of is dynamic content. There’d be a little “hot news” animation on the front page, but that was usually it. As of today, though, there are signs of more mouseover fun. The Panther page uses some mouseovers (using old-school HTML+JS instead of way-new CSS effects), and the G5 page likewise uses these on the performance charts (one could easily miss these), and on the navigation bar for the G5 pages.

Shortly before OS X was made public, the Apple site was retooled with an Aqua look for the graphic buttons. It is interesting that it is reversing course to some extent–the buttons have a much less pronounced Aqua look (the Aqua interface itself has been toned down), but on some of the Apple Store pages, some buttons are flat ovals–not at all Aquatic.

Apple seems to be reversing course on Aqua for its software, too: in addition to all the iWhatever programs, Apple will be applying its “metal” theme to the Finder. This strikes me as dumb: the rationale behind the metal theme has always been dubious, the application of that rationale has been spotty, and I never liked the theme in the first place (so I turn it off).

I’m not sure what prompted the changes to make the site a tiny bit more dynamic and less aquatic. The website once was a harbinger of the Aqua interface on the Mac, though, and I wonder if it’ll be again. It would be nifty, from a geeky perspective, if Apple tried using modern CSS layout techniques and valid, clean HTML, but it is still a pleasure to read.

Thanks, Dick

/ current events

When I’m president, we’ll have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day

Representative and Dem presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Makes G.W. sound like a frigging constitutional scholar and defender of democracy.

Finding Nemo

/ movies

Partly on the recommendation of my sister (who, having kids, probably only sees children’s movies), and partly because I’ll see any Pixar movie on spec, Gwen and I saw Finding Nemo on Friday. A 9:30 PM show, meaning there was only one bawling child in the theater.

The movie is very enjoyable. It has a typical Disney “child-loses-parent” plot, although unlike Bambi, Dumbo, the Lion King, etc, the child is reunited with the parent. While those are always coming-of-age adventure stories for the child, this one atypically includes as much coming-of-age adventure for the parent. But we weren’t going for the plot–we were going for the visual imagination and the comedy. Albert Brooks was great, as he always is. Ellen DeGeneres was perfect. Willem Dafoe, likewise. The quality of the images was stunning, and the artistry–which somehow made the fish look realistic and still anthropomorphic–was delightful. I want to know how they do that.

New Green Goddess coming

/ Japan, language

Kenkyusha is readying a new version (link in Japanese) of its New Japanese-English Dictionary. Despite its many faults, it is considered the standard J-E dictionary, and is referred to by Japanese translators as the Green Goddess, or GG for short. It is interesting that the product announcement explicitly refers to this. On the Honyaku mailing list, Tom Gally writes:

The chief in-house editor of the dictionary
at Kenkyusha first learned that the dictionary has this nickname from
Mayumi Nishioka, a long-time Honyaku contributor, when she contacted
him in 1995 about a term that had been discussed on Honyaku.

Purchasers of this dictionary may note other connections between
Honyaku and the new GG, including terms and translations that have
been discussed on this list in the past and several familiar names
among the contributors.

It is a minor sport among J-E translators to point out bizarre entries in this dictionary, many of which seem preserved from the first edition in 1918–it still contains entries like 鉄道馬車 tetsudo basha or horse-drawn railway car. The fourth edition was released in 1974, and one gets the impression that new glosses were tacked on to the end of existing ones, so one often must skip to the end of the entry to get the most helpful definition. The example sentences also have an antique quality, like “give a wrench at the doorknob.” Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to see how new the fifth edition is.

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