alternative hippopotamus

Busy, busy, busy. The people that I work for have taken the notion of salaried employee very seriously, and have made me earn my keep. So unfair! Minimal to meager blogospheric output for the time being.

If I promised you something over the last couple of weeks, I’ve probably failed miserably. Sorry. Very, very sorry. Sometimes, Life comes at you fast. For everything else, there’s Master Card.

Meanwhile, after reading this article, describing how Ohio is being caged for 2008, I thought I’d leave you this for a deep thought. Our founding fathers designed a society where the vote of people who live in rural areas are weighted more than those that live in urban areas. Furthermore, they designed a society where voting for president is not a right. Not even if you’re an upstanding citizen and a pillar of the community. You’re not guaranteed a right to vote for US President.

You may recall for instance, that if Supreme Court decided for Gore in Bush v. Gore, the Florida Republican Party threatened to send in their own slate of electors picked by Jeb to vote for his brother, Bushie.

Just another reason why the Electoral College has so impressed new democracies that they don’t want anything to do with it.

At Drinking Liberally last Thursday a few of us were commiserating over the new iPod Touch. One of the problems with technological progress is that it leaves a big wake. Included in this wake are our old video iPods, and even iPod Nanos. Sure, the stubby 320×240 video iPod with the classic click wheel is something we’ll hold onto for years. In case a museum wants one. Until then, it’s just a reminder that if we had waited a few months, we could have had the iPod we always wanted.

I finally got a chance to see an iPod Touch at the Apple Store in Bethesda, and it really is as cool as it looks in the ads. Your hands will tremble as you surf the web in full 480×320 Safari glory. I gather the device supports Adobe Flash, at least well enough to play selected YouTube videos (see below for more, however). I say “gather” as the demo unit wasn’t playing back on youtube.com, but I’ll chalk that up to bandwidth/connectivity issues. The display is sharp. No, I’ll take that back. The display is art. If Leonardo da Vinci had an iPod Touch, he would have put down his brushes and gone surfing.

I asked a salesman how the new iPods were selling. He told me that weren’t so much “selling” as “sold.” I asked him about the Virginia stores (there’s two accessible by Metro). He said he’d could give me their phone numbers and I could call them. Really? Apple doesn’t have a gizmo to check stock at local area stores? I mean, calling up an Apple store when I’m at another Apple store sounds so 1986 to me. So Windows 3.1.

Now, let me explain why I really wasn’t all that bummed out that I couldn’t take an iPod Touch home with me today. See this Business Week story for more details.

First, the iPod Touch doesn’t support Flash. It supports some features of Flash that enable it to play some Flash videos. Since Adobe has published the API for swf files, it can’t be a licensing issue. So, maybe this will get fixed in a firmware upgrade. There’s a lot of websites out there who use Flash extensively, so this would have been a big plus. Woulda coulda shoulda.

Second, the iPod Touch doesn’t have an audio input jack. That means you can’t use it for Skype, or other VOIP services. You can do IMing through web sites, though the Business Week article argues that it’s pretty awkward.

Third, there’s other devices that have been out there for more than a year that are better suited for web browsing, or have other applications that the iPod just doesn’t have, and probably won’t ever have: the Palm TX and Sony PSP. Here, I can give you my own hands-on experience. I can’t and won’t argue that either one is as sexy as the iPod Touch.

The Palm TX may be rightly described as the iPod Touch’s older, geekier brother. The 320×480 screen is sweet. I use it to read the Washington Post (and other favorite newspapers) through PressDisplay. I’ve bookmarked most of my favorite blogs, and will often be found in the wifi hotspots of the Hipposhire browsing over a cafe au lait, or pub cider. Using services like Mobipocket, I can cache anything that has an RSS feed for browsing offline. Favorite books (e.g., Eric Boehlert’s “Lap Dogs”) are there for my perusal. I can even read pdf documents, Microsoft Word files, and Excel spread sheets. If I want to listen to a podcast, I can and often do, download it through bloglines.

The Sony PSP is… how do I put it? While the iPod Touch is Euro-chique (and make no mistake, I like Euro-chique), the Sony PSP is East Coast street-wise. I also use it for browsing, though it is not nearly as kind as the Palm TX for dealing with pages using large gobs of memory. That means I stick with the mobile versions of pages mostly, though it has no problems with the Huffington Post, Open Left, TPM, or many other blogs that I read.

When riding on the subway, I’ll use the PSP to watch videos I’ve compressed offline, look at art (most people keep family photos on their mobiles, mostly I keep shots of pop art and graffiti), or play a variety of games. Tony Hawk’s “Project 9″ is on there right now. The 3D graphics rendering is perfectly respectable. Sure, it’s not the XBox 360. But I wasn’t expecting that. On the other hand, I don’t see too many people with XBox’s hooked up to flat panel monitors gaming on the Metro.

I’ll mention one other device briefly, but not with any kind of recommendation: the Sony Mylo. The Mylo is built to do everything the iPod Touch doesn’t want to do: particularly instant messaging and Skype phone connections. The display is tiny, and while it can function as a web browser in an emergency, it’s painful if it’s not an emergency. All that said, I often use the Mylo as an mp3 player, as the audio codec quality is better than other devices in its class. And for one other reason that will probably not interest most users. I can plug it into a Linux machine and just do file copies of mp3s, jpgs, or videos. If at some point in the future IMing becomes more of my daily habit than web browsing, then the Mylo would become my device of choice.

With this in mind I walked back to the subway. I didn’t get the other store’s phone numbers from the Apple Store salesman. For now, I don’t think I need them.

Over the years I’ve noticed that I’m a leading indicator of various trends. Biking to work, for example. I started biking to my job in Lexington, Mass in 1987. In those days that meant a ten mile trek along Mass Ave in traffic roughly that of Wisconsin Ave, DC, in rush hour. My legs cramp up just thinking about it.

Within a few years, bike trails had sprung up all over Boston, and biking to work became de rigeur. A friend of mine, another leading indicator, began skating to work, just before rollerblading mania took hold. It got to be such a huge part of life in Boston that they shut down Memorial Drive on Sundays to give all the rollerbladers a place to do their thing and socialize.

I’ve also been part of some bleeding edge trends that I always knew were too good to ever catch on as mainstream. I remember the first time I saw an Apple Newton, for instance. These days we take mobile computing for granted. There was a time, long, long ago, when there were no laptops. I was traveling to Belgium every couple of months, and that meant that I had to get email on a DOS machine using a French keyboard. Awkward! The Newton meant that I could plug a handheld device into a phone jack, get my email, and even dial into a BBS service for the latest news and gossip.

(historical note: a long, long time ago, before Al Gore invented the internet, the closest thing was a BBS. Leading indicators, such as myself, would dial into a central Vax 11/780 on their VT 100 terminals. Alternatively, you could use your Commodore 64 and lightning fast 2400 baud modem and dial into Compuserve.)

These days I see the kids (a kid being anyone ten years younger than myself) surfing the web using their touch screen iPod. It’s times like these I remind myself that suffering is good for the soul.

But back to the Newton. This was way before its time, and it surprised me not at all when Apple discontinued it. I knew that the world would have to wait years until there was a handheld device that did anything useful.

I think I may be a leading indicator on skateboarding. But there’s a point or two of clarification that I need to make. There’s a very talented pool of athletes who have come up with amazing feats on a skateboard. I’ve seen kids on the street who can do things that are the equal of the best Olympic gymnastic events. As an example, there’s something called a grind trick. The skater ollies (leaps using the leverage of the board) onto a rail, and then grinds (slides on the trucks of the board) recovering with a manual (landing on the front or back wheels). The Metro has a regular guard at the Metro Center stop just to keep skateboarders from doing this trick. Sadly, I saw one skateboarder put into plastic handcuffs for doing just this.

Now, here’s the point of clarification: I’m not a talented athlete. Chance that I’m ever going to do a grind trick: nada. I skateboard the same way I do cross-country skiing: with extreme caution. I’m a tortoise, not a hare. I skateboard for the aerobic exercise, to take in the sights, and if I get a nice downhill run, that’s part of the fun. I’ve got to the point where I can confidently stop when I’m going too fast, and can go a fair distance without getting tired. That I will never ollie doesn’t bother me.

This afternoon I skated the Friendship Heights area, just on the border between DC and Maryland. The east side of Wisconsin Avenue, between Chevy Chase plaza and Saks has this fantastic neauveau brick cobblestone surface that makes every move you do a deft glide. As you glissando past Clyde’s restaurant and into Bethesda, watching the admiring gazes of shop owners as you swoop past their doors, it’s impossible not to think to yourself: “this is not too shabby.”

I see that KO’s commentary about Bush’s depiction of what he calls the Democrat Party is making the rounds. (About his continued grating use of “Democrat Party.” At least he doesn’t put on a bad French accent, calling them la parti démocratique.)

I know that tempers flair when it comes to the subject of MoveOn.org and their now infamous NYT ad. Indeed, there’s a strain of liberalism, best characterized by the New Republic, that believes that the Democratic Party should distance themselves from MoveOn.org. Peter Beinert has said so explicitly, adding Michael Moore to the list of who should be shunned, before clutching his pearls. Condemning MoveOn through a sense of the Senate resolution has doubtlessly made the New Republicans happy campers.

As the First Amendment says: if you condemn a general that the president is hiding behind, then you yourself shall be condemned. Or as my mother says, “You may disagree with me. Just not out loud.”

As tempting as it is to add my own 0.014196 euros, there’s an old joke that says it much better than I can. A man walks into what he believes is a jewelry store. He says to the man behind the counter: “I’d like to have my watch fixed.” The man behind the counter says: “But I’m not a watch repairman. I’m a mohel, a performer of circumcisions.” The customer, puzzled, asks: “But then why do you have an enormous clock in the window?” The mohel answers: “And what would you have me put in the window?”

How does this relate to the MoveOn ad? The mohel in the story provides a vital service to the community. But, the people who live in the world described in the joke would prefer he not be so public about his livelihood. Likewise, democratic society can’t exist without the ability of ordinary people to criticize the government. That’s what MoveOn does. That they do so loud and proud, is in the essential nature of their group. But, when they place an ad in the NYT, the Peter Beinert’s of the world would prefer that they put a picture of an enormous clock. Unlike the mohel, they choose to do otherwise.

Busy, busy, busy.

When I can’t keep up I’ll lurk in the comments section at politico.com. As a result of the drudgification of the site, you get some real doozies. Who amongst us doesn’t like to be regaled in the latest rants against the Hildebeast? She called him “Darth,” which has upset the Drudgicos. I thought everyone called him Darth.

This comment is a keeper. Not because it’s particularly amusing, but it’s an extreme example of the side of the health care debate that you usually don’t hear:

Let me give you a scenario - My sister and I are 10 Months apart in age. We grew up lower middle class living in Projects in Flint Michigan. We went to the same schools and had the same options available to us. She dropped out of school, never went to college lived on welfare and unemployment and now suvives payday to payday with the governments help. I finished school, joined the military, went to college, have a great job, great retirement and living well. Hillary thinks I should give my sister money and help because she needs our help and the rich should help those not so lucky. Lucky - nothing - I worked hard all these years, I stayed up late studing and working and I deserve what I’ve earned. Why should I pay for my sister’s health care when she could have gone the same path but chose not to. She decided not to finish high school, she decided not to go to college that was’nt my choice. Hillary thinks we should help those less fortionate - but thats wrong - she just wants to hand out money and collect votes. Well she will never hae mine.

Hae now! I really have to give this commenter credit, Reagan at least used the “welfare queen” slur to keep the social net neatly divided along the haves and have-nots. Reagan would never tell his own sister to, in effect, curl up and die. Well, not publicly.

I’ve come to understand over a number of years that I’m not ever going to be a popular blogger.

Why do I say that? Well, there’s no short answer to that question. But I’ll start with a subject that always provokes an argument: never listen to critics. Which I mean sincerely. The people who are hired to criticize books, movies, music, art, etc., don’t really have a sufficient grasp of their subject to say the things that they get printed.

That idea alone makes me an eccentric. Yet, time and again I see the most god awful stuff praised as high art, while something true to form, and even clever, is tossed in the trash bin.

As an example I’ll take M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water.” I thought this film was very clever. “Lady in the Water” is an adaptation of a very old allegory about finding one’s place in the world. The allegory goes like this: imagine a majestic estate with the master of the house away. While the master has gone a very curious thing has happened. The cook thinks he’s a musician, the musicians are taking care of the children, the children are in charge of the medicine cabinet, and the doctor is making bread. As the allegory goes, everything must be put in its proper place before the master can return home.

That in a nutshell is the plot of the movie. I’ll agree that if you had no familiarity with the original allegory you would have a hard time with “Lady in the Water.” But seriously, when I read stuff like this:

“Fans of actor Paul Giamatti or of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan may get something out of Lady in the Water, a fractured fairy tale about a water nymph who comes to a Philadelphia apartment house to deliver an important message. Anyone else is likely to be perplexed by the muddled mythmaking or actively astonished at the self-indulgent ego of a writer-director-producer who casts himself in the role of a visionary writer whose martyrdom will change the world.”

I have to wonder: is there no one who publishes who still reads?

This quote has come up in conversation a few times over the couple of days. I’m guessing there’s something in the air. Either that, or I just tend to repeat my self.

Ron Suskind: (my favorite part in bold)

The aide said that guys like me were ‘’in what we call the reality-based community,'’ which he defined as people who ‘’believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,'’ he continued. ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'’

The source for the quote has never been identified, though I’d put my money on Rove. And not just because Rove is so arrogant, but because he knows Suskind well enough to know that he’ll fall for the elliptical quote, so that likely as not, it’ll go into the article.

I also think it’s significant that the anonymous author declared that we’re an empire now. He didn’t make it clear, however, whether by “we” he meant the American People, the Republican Party, or just the Bush administration.

From a close reading of DC journalists, a pattern is emerging. There’s something about writing for Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, etc., that changes one’s perspective on issues that I’d call Civics 101: Just and Equitable Societies for Dummies.

Take Matt Cooper (please):

Maybe Bush would be better off with some national unity type attorney general. But he shouldn’t have to neuter himself. He has a right to appoint who he wants if they’re within parameters of integrity and competence. Olson more than meets those standards. And if Dems reject him, that’s a bad precedent for their presidencies. They ought to be free to appoint liberals who are as partisan and brilliant as Olson.

Umh, no. Integrity and competence are necessary, but not sufficient requirements for an attorney general. There must also be a standard of independence. We had such an extreme case in Gonzales that the bar is probably permanently lowered, but still. You can’t permit the Justice Department to be used to get your boss re-elected. You can’t use the office of US Attorney to prosecute your political enemies, and give your buddies a get out of jail free card.

Secondly, the advice and consent of the Senate is there, not because someone thought it would be a delightful bit of formality to dress up the president’s rubber stamp. There’s a great number of reasons not to trust the chief executive. The consensual nature of the Senate is a necessary means of preventing the president from totally f’ing things up. And make no mistake, even with an opposition party leading the Senate, this president is doing a heckuva job of f’ing things up.

If advice and consent is what Cooper means by the president “neutering himself,” then I would call that a just and equitable neutering.

Ross Douthat has an amusing post up on TPM Cafe. My favorite line in bold:

In 1980, the face of tax cuts was Ronald Reagan, whose devotion to smaller government no one would question, but who was flexible enough to raise taxes in certain circumstances, and to tell the American public that his goal was not “to do away with government, but “to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.” Today the face of tax cuts is Grover Norquist, a Beltway performance artist who brags about drowning government in a bathtub. What began as a majority-making insight - that the rich are the engine of American economic growth, and that overtaxing them both diminishes their economic liberty and diminishes everyone else’s prosperity - has curdled into the minority-making zealotry on display in this Norquist quote […]

Too funny!

Thing is, I think it’s either naieve or disingenuous for Douthat to take the notion of Republicans wanting “smaller government” at face value. They certainly don’t want a smaller Congress or Supreme Court, or military, or FBI, or NSA, or FAA. What they want is a reversal and removal of any programs associated with FDR, Johnson, or Kennedy. And Nixon, at least the EPA. They’re pretty sure that Carter never did anything to begin with, and for all I know they’re right. Clinton was sufficiently big business that no real harm was done.

More concisely “smaller government” is a euphemism for an end to:

• liberalism
• the middle and lower classes

On anything else they’re willing to negotiate.

I feel a little bad picking on K-Lo, who I’m told by inside sources, how shall I put this? Isn’t the most shocking eel in the 10-gallon NRO aquarium. But then I read this, and I just had to laugh:

Are the Hannity Freedom Concerts:

a) just another country-music event;

b) a Fox News commercial;

c) Sean Hannity living out his David Hasselhoffian dream (albeit, unlike Baywatch, with his shirt on)?

Although Hannity did sing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” in the Atlanta Freedom Concert, the answer is not c.

The answer is: d) a miracle.

Miracle? Oh, sure. The miracle of right-wing propaganda.

Now, you’d think that K-Lo would wander if an event that featured Hannity, Ann Coulter, Rudi Guilliani, Oliver North, and Newt Gingrich might be kinda partisan. No, she says, it’s for the orphans of those killed in Iraq. If that were so, wouldn’t you think there’d be people involved on both sides of the aisle? Or does she believe that liberals don’t support the troupes so much that they wouldn’t want to help the orphans? Is it kind of like when you’re a kid and you’re mother tells you to stop making that face or it will grow on you? I mean, has K-Lo’s brain made that face too many times?

The “Freedom Concerts” (what else would they be called) raise funds for the Freedom Alliance, not for the scholarship fund directly. As newshounds points out: “Only 55.7% of the charity’s funds are spent on the programs and services it exists to deliver. It received an overall rating of two stars and no stars for efficiency from Charity Navigator.” Remarkably, in 2003 it was operating at 81.6% efficiency. Say, there wasn’t any kind of political event in 2004 that would need cash. Was there?