Inadequate

Joyce Carol Oates makes me feel inadequate.

From her "Journals 1973-1982":

' "Keeping busy" is the remedy for all ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed. '

' The childless couple...can remain romance and love indefinitely, because the sense of being young lovers, still, is never damaged. The couple with children, however, is irreparably altered; one of the issues that contributes to their estrangement is the children-arguing over the children. '

'Do we ever "read" the same book twice? Do we "read" the same book others read?'

She's brilliant, even in journal form. So good I cannot finish it, I fear.

Nobody Knows Nothing

Does it mean anything that two of the best quarterbacks in the NFL were undrafted (Tony Romo) and a 6th round pick (Tom Brady)?

The End of Giuliani

"I had to teach New York City how to use principles of fiscal conservatism."

-Rudy Giuliani, May 14, 2007


"Obscure New York City government agencies picked up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses racked up for security detail used by former mayor Rudy Giuliani during trips to the Hamptons, purportedly to visit paramour Judith Nathan, according to a news report out Wednesday."

-Fox News.com, November 28, 2007

Belated Shout Out

I shouldn't let the 11-0 Patriots slide by without a mention. The Eagles scared the bejeebers out of them Sunday night, showing that Jim Johnson can still beat an offense sometimes, given half a chance. And the Patriots are beatable, so we don't have to hear any more of that nonsense.

Lotts to Say

November 25, 2007
Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, being interviewed by Ken Auletta of the New Yorker: “Apple destroyed the music business.”
No, Jeff, you and your cronies destroyed the music business by KEEPING THE PRICE POINT OF A CD AT $15.00 for 20 years. Your manufacturing costs went to nearly zero, and you kept charging me the same $15.00. You blew it. Your business model died, and you were too pig headed to adapt. Fool.

Zucker: “Nobody has figured out the economic model for digital yet.” No. Your customers have. What I want, when I want, where I want is the model, whether you like it or not. What you haven’t figured out is how you are going to make pots of money. That’s your problem, not ours. Maybe movie stars can’t make $30 million dollars per picture any more. Maybe you can’t have 80 vice presidents any more. Boo hoo.

The notion of CNBC being “anti business” is insane. The network that employs Larry Kudlow and Jim Kramer and was the major cheerleader for the tech bubble? PUH leeze.

New podcast today-(for me)-The Onramp Podcast. Politics, I guess, with some tin foil hattery, but they seem like decent guys. They’re going on and on about vaccines and mercury, which is a bogus controversy. Vaccines contain ETHYL mercury, not the METHYL mercury which causes nerve damage. There is no evidence that Ethyl Mercury causes damage.


November 27, 2007

Trent Lott announced he is going to resign.

Tee hee hee hee hee.

Another Combo Platter

November 23, 2007
It’s The Day After Thanksgiving. Hooray.
If nobody in my company gives a crap, then why should I? Seriously. The Day After Thanksgiving is not a holiday. Never has been, never will be. Yet I can’t reach anybody, and questions go unanswered, and nobody gives a crap. So I’m just going to stop trying. The hell with it.

My company, obviously concerned with having handed out perfectly good bonus money that they could have kept, has apparently realized that it’s much easier to simply raise the targets, thus making sure no one can collect the bonus. Way to motivate the team, guys.

One of the things that people don’t seem to get, in sports and in life, is that insisting isn’t enough. The manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates can insist that his team play winning baseball, but if they keep writing out a AAA lineup, they’re not going to win consistently. You have to motivate AND provide the tools for success in order to cause success.

But what the hell do I know?

I still hold on to this attitude, admittedly a selfish one, that if I’m working, everyone should be. I get bitterly resentful when I hear people saying, “Oh, I didn’t think you’d be open because of the holiday.” It’s not a holiday.

I’m such a crank.

LHP Joe Kennedy has died, my phone just told me. He’s a guy who was with the A’s, but never seemed to catch on anywhere. He’s one of those baseball guys that kind of disappears from view, never fulfilling his potential, turning up here and there when you watch a game. I usually have the reaction, “oh, THAT’s where he is now.”

Of course, you can also argue maybe he didn’t GET enough of a chance. And sometimes, with lefties, the light just goes on later, for whatever reason.

But now he’s gone. RIP.

I know I’m not playing up to my potential, exactly, either.

I have never been to a high school or college reunion. And I really don’t see the point. Never have. I didn’t like being there when I was there, and I don’t see how I would like going back. I do almost everything in my life because I have to, so I don’t see any point in doing anything voluntary that I won’t enjoy.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine anything that I can do voluntarily that I would enjoy. Other than being stranded on a deserted island, maybe.

I’m a cheerful bastard, eh?

November 24, 2007

Doug Stanhope was on TV last night. He’s pretty graphic, but very insightful at times. His most recent special is pretty reflective, the most Bill Hicks-ish stuff I have ever heard him do. I identify powerfully with his apology for thinking-constantly thinking about God, nature, society, mankind instead of thinking about real estate values and reality television is extremely draining and very distracting. But, like he says, it’s hard to turn off the carnival in your head.
It hurts. It hurts to think about art, and war, and sex, and health, and politics, and love, and baseball, and economics and physics and technology and God and the future. It hurts to try to contain all these thoughts and still do what needs to be done. I get depressed, and eat, and spend too much money, and continuously ruin my life.

It is becoming obvious that I hate my job beyond my ability to properly describe it. It is also becoming obvious that the economy is going to hell, and so I must hang on to it like a barnacle on a rowboat.

It’s great, though, life. It’s really super. I recommend it to everybody.

If I ever get old and retarded and helpless and out of control of my own affairs, please just shoot me in the head.

Please.

Bush Pardons Turkeys

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21897315/


I guess there were no Cabinet posts open.

Turkeys

Fox made their stupid robot on their football broadcast a stupid robot TURKEY.

Doesn't make it any less stupid.

SEVENTH?

November 21, 2007
It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow. Wahoo.

Interesting piece on “Marketplace” about what companies who advertise on sports programming think of their customers by Will Leitch, a well known sports blogger. Suffice it to say, he described how little they think of us. The easy stereotyping of guys really bothers me. He cited one of my least favorite, the Coors Light commercial involving the misunderstanding between the man and woman about her pregnancy test turning blue and his beer bottle turning blue.

That commercial has always bugged me, primarily because I want to defend the guy. It’s a misunderstanding, brought on by the fact that they are in two different rooms, talking about two different things. And he ends the commercial in trouble, and it isn’t really his fault.
Or am I reading too much into this?

There was something on VH1 Classic last night about the “10 Greatest Bands”. It was some kind of a marketing tie in with the video game “Rock Band”, one of the many “Guitar Hero” clones out there. It’s kind of fun to pop in to the middle of those (I was waiting for “Nirvana Unplugged” to come on at the end, which I haven’t watched since it aired.)and see how long it takes for you to guess a)what the category is and b) who’s next on the list. It was #7, IIRC, and it was The Clash.

Number SEVEN? AHEAD of U2?

I can think of probably 50 bands better than the Clash, and probably 100 that I like better. I could buy the Clash as one of the top ten punk bands, or one of the top ten British bands, even, but top ten of all TIME? Come on.

Now, these lists are subjective, I get that, but SEVEN?

Argh.

12 Word Novel

My entry in "On The Media"'s 12 Word Novel Contest, available at OnTheMedia.org






Ball four.

Free pass.

"Nothing's free," he thought.

He left the mound.

Bill Clinton is going to save the world

Just finished the cover story of the October 2007 Atlantic Monthly magazine. (Yeah, I'm a little bit behind.)

It describes the Clinton Foundation, and specifically the work they did getting AIDS drugs into the third world. What they did was, essentially, work with the manufacturers to ensure a steady demand, then use the power of this demand to lower the price. Now this is a brilliant idea, and more specifically an example of why the free market will never solve our problems.

Clinton didn't demand they give the drugs away, nor did he browbeat the countries into buying expired drugs or anything like that. He simply used the power of the market to serve a public good.

There was a disconnect between the high price of the drugs and the low cost to manufacture them-the price was extremely high, but they were only being sold to the West, so the profits were low. The foundation could show them that there is a demand out there and a way to sell many, many more units at a reduced price. Patients get drugs, drug companies make profits.

What makes me crazy about politics today is that so many people will immediately dismiss this idea because Clinton's name is attached to it. It is exactly this kind of creative energy that is so desperately needed right now, and so utterly absent from the current President.

Your Name Here

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17surnames.html?_r=2&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Organizations/C/Census%20Bureau&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


Here's a neat little toy. Put in your last name, and you can see how often it comes up per 100,000 Americans, according to the 2000 Census.

Mine is 137th, with 61 people per 100,000. That seems too high, but then again, I have met strangers who do share my name.

Plus we're all God's children.

Stupid Union

Stupid, half asleep fight with the wife last night. Is that some kind of a union rule, we have to fight every once in a while to prove we're still married?

Playing Ketchup

November 11, 2007
Now listening: Dan Carlin’s “Common Sense” podcast. I already enjoyed his history podcast, and this is more like a current events/politics podcast. Not bad, so far anyway.
He’s talking about James Watson’s unfortunate racist comments about Africans not being as intelligent as Westerners. Carlin raises an interesting point-Watson is wrong, but it does get at the underlying lie that all men really aren’t created equal. We all know this, but it isn’t polite to say so. Carlin also raises the larger point that at times, science doesn’t always say what we want it to say, but that doesn’t make it any less true. He also makes the excellent analogy to the Nixon era presidential study of drugs that advocated legalization of marijuana and was quickly spiked.
Good “Car Talk” puzzler this week. Apparently there is a jacket photo on “Summer of 49” showing Ted and Joe together. (I have the book, but the jacket has long since bought the dust.) The puzzle is, since you can only see Ted and Joe in the picture, and it was obviously taken at a ballpark, although you can’t tell which one, you can tell that it was taken at an All Star Game. I don’t remember the picture, but I bet it’s the fact that both men are wearing home uniforms. If Ted’s uniform says “Red Sox” and Joe’s says “Yankees”, it has to be an All Star Game, because if it were a game at Fenway, Joe’s will say “New York”, and if it were at the Stadium, Ted’s will say “Boston”.
Funny bit on PRI’s “Fair Game” I just downloaded-the anti-gay rights, pro-gay sex ticket: Larry Craig and Ted Haggert.
November 12, 2007
From the “You have GOT to be fucking kidding me” Department: Apparently Senator Larry Craig circulated an email to his Senate colleagues reporting he had found a men’s wristwatch….
….wait for it…….
………on the floor of a men’s room.
Seriously.
If you are Senator Larry Craig, and you find a watch in a men’s room, you keep it. Seriously. How do you type that with a straight face?

Norman Mailer

November 10, 2007

RIP, Norman Mailer

Two weeks until Thanksgiving. Yawn. What a pointless holiday.

I would be perfectly happy to stay at home and be left alone. Then again, that is true of me every minute of every day, so why should Thanksgiving be any different?

I hope the people in my life know that I appreciate them, through my words and actions. We don’t need a day for it.

And I don’t like the food either.

“My family thinks of me as a schmuck with a pen.”-Saul Bellow

Currently listening to: 90 minute lecture about Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” produced by a Canadian television station. I love the Internet.

Instead of being the one to talk other people in off the ledge, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be the one talked back in instead?

Great Bill Moyers Journal about the death penalty. There are few things more American than the death penalty-accomplishes nothing, but makes you feel better.

Bernard Kerik got indicted, apparently. Mr. Love Nest above Ground Zero was apparently mobbed up, as well. On KCRW’s Left, Right and Center, Robert Scheer makes the point that Giuliani and Bush, who, if nothing else, claim to be able to defend us, wanted to make this guy the director of homeland security. That being said, you have to question their judgment.
According to Mark Shields on the News Hour Podcast, 65% of Americans are satisfied with their own lives. That sounds really, really high.

I would obviously be in the minority on that one.

Another special, this time on NOW, about the SCHIP program. The moral outrage of denying children health coverage makes me so angry I can barely see. The Federal government has $6 billion dollars they can LOSE in Iraq. Lose, as in gone, as in went away and is never coming back. The Federal government has billions and billions of dollars for Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root. But children’s health care? That’s “irresponsible”, according to the president.
No, Mr. President, what is irresponsible is sending Americans to die in the desert for no good reason at all. What is irresponsible is letting CEOs and hedge fund managers grow obscenely wealthy while poor Americans die in the streets like dogs. What is irresponsible is two things-everything you have done, and everything you have said.

I just wish corporations would make up their mind-either they are part of this society or they’re not. If they’re going to get tax breaks, they have to act like citizens, and be held responsible for the things that they do.

“The Great Gatsby” again on Studio 360. I’ve heard it before, but it’s worth listening to again. One of my favorite novels, and the way Studio 360 deconstructs and retells it, it is an engaging way to spend an hour.