posted 2007/02/28 at 21:55
(Couple of housekeeping notes here: First of all, my number never came up for jury duty, so hopefully that is the end of that. Secondly, I now have a DeviantArt account for showcasing the best-of-the-best of my photography and hopefully getting advice from other photographers on there. If you click the "Download" link on each photo's page, you can get the original high-resolution photo for that image.)
Anyway, I know I've really been laying on the political talk lately, so let's take a break with some hockey stuff. Unfortunately I am pissed to no end at the Red Wings right now for trading to get Todd Bertuzzi. For those of you who don't follow hockey like I do, a few years ago Bertuzzi was suspended for seventeen months for this cheap shot that ended Steve Moore's career. As much as I harp on Claude Lemieux damn near killing Kris Draper in the 1996 Western Conference Finals with that check from behind, at least Draper was able to play again after the incident.
I'll be the first to say that the Wings were in desperate need of a tough guy, especially after losing Darren McCarty and then Brendan Shanahan. The closest thing the Wings had to an enforcer before this trade was Chris Chelios, and I don't think Geritol is an effective treatment for fighting-related injuries. Nevertheless, there is a difference between being a tough guy and being a cheap-shotting punk, and after what he did to Moore, Todd Bertuzzi showed that he has absolutely no place in the NHL, let alone wearing the Wing Wheel on his chest. The Detroit Red Wings are a proud and honourable franchise, and Todd Bertuzzi wouldn't know honour if it punched him from behind and slammed his face into the ice.
This isn't enough to make me swear off the Red Wings or hockey, but I am not happy and I can only hope that Bertuzzi never gets medical clearance to play in the NHL ever again. This will have the side effect of reigniting the Red Wings-Avalanche rivalry, but now the Red Wings are going to be the bad guys in the rivalry and I never like rooting for the bad guys.
posted 2007/02/27 at 13:41
Study: College students more narcissistic (AP through Yahoo! News)
Reading about this study has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I suppose this may be a matter of semantics, but from the example questions from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory listed in the story, the index looks like it measures self-confidence much more than classical narcissism. Certainly too much self-confidence can be detrimental, but for the study's authors to claim that young people are being given too many positive messages smacks me as the kind of bootstrap cynicism that I have rallied against nearly my entire life.
Putting aside the issue of whether or not young people actually receive the positive messages they're told when growing up, let's just take a look at the negative messages that are already out there. As much as some companies might try to spin things otherwise, Western advertising culture continues to push beauty and luxury items to a greater and greater extent, to younger and younger audiences. When younger and younger audiences are constantly being bombarded with messages in all media -- magazines, television, Internet ads -- not to mention in their peer groups, that they aren't worth knowing if they don't have the latest cell phone with fifty functions they'll never use, or you can't see their ribs sticking out of their bodies even when they're wearing the latest $80 skin-tight shirt from the big name retailer, or they haven't gotten plastic surgery to "correct" what's "wrong" with their faces, what the bloody hell are young people supposed to think? This, in turn, has led to more high schoolers taking more and longer part-time jobs to make more money because now they too have to "keep up with the Joneses," and let's not forget that their parents are experiencing that phenomenon to a greater extent than ever. Working parents continue to put in more and more time at their jobs and fewer hours parenting, not just for luxury items but also for true necessities like food and shelter, and if these young people aren't getting the attention they need from their parents, then should it be any surprise that programmes started popping up to give today's young people positive messages in the first place?
This isn't even getting into how woefully underreported and misunderstood young peoples' Internet culture is by today's adults. The relative anonymity and safety of the Internet has spawned a whole new generation of cyber-bullies, people who hide behind chat room and messageboard names, treating other people like shit because they think the Internet is some sort of refuge where they can act as immaturely and irresponsibly as they want and never have to take any responsibility for their actions. This is a phenomenon I noticed soon after I first got Internet access over a decade ago, and not only is it becoming worse in today's youth culture, but a lot of the people who started acting like this a decade ago continue to act that way to this day because they've never been made to take responsibility for the things they say and do online. Teenagers were vicious enough to each other before the Internet age; things certainly must be at least five times as worse now. As awful as it is to say, it's probably going to take some of these bullies getting killed by victims who have been pushed too far before we're likely to see people take this issue with the seriousness it deserves.
We can argue about the effectiveness of self-esteem building programmes for young people another time (let's not forget how overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated today's teachers are). For now, though, I'm just really sick and tired of people like the authors of this study saying that giving young people positive messages is what's wrong with them. How about first we work on at least reducing the number of negative messages they're already getting, and then we take a look at whether or not giving these young people positive messages is necessary?
posted 2007/02/26 at 15:45
When I wrote a few days ago about the need for American politicians to stop taking themselves so seriously, it made me wonder about whether I should be encouraging politicians to be so humourous. After all, American politics, at least in my lifetime, have been about too much style and not enough substance (a problem which has only seemed to worsen as the years have gone by here), and I want to help move politics towards more substance. Suggesting that politicians need to have more of a sense of humour about themselves, in a way, kind of feels like more of an advocation of style than substance, and I've been thinking this issue over for the past few days.
What I think is going on here is a battle of my pragmatic and idealistic sides. My idealistic side wants to think that if you just get the right candidate out there saying the right things, then s/he won't have a problem getting elected because the public will automatically gravitate towards the wisdom of his/her ideas. My pragmatic side, on the other hand, sees that there's already lots of evidence out there that people don't go for pure substance these days, and that perhaps dressing good ideas up in a bit of style -- whether it be humour, rhetorical vitriol, or what have you -- could at least help the right candidates "get a foot in the door" and then, once elected, try to change the political tone so that substance matters more than style. I'm having a hard time determining what side I fall on, though.
Let's go back to Dennis Kucinich again, because he's the only Democractic candidate at this point who I can see myself voting for over whomever gets the Green Party nomination. Last month Dennis got play on the political comedy shows when he sang from "Sixteen Tons" at a Rainbow/PUSH conference speech. Now, obviously I don't think it's fair that Dennis gets ridiculed in the media for basically not looking like what this country seems to expect a Presidential candidate to look like, but at the same time, even as much as I love Dennis, I have to admit that even I chuckled when I first saw this. After that, I was honestly tempted to e-mail Kucinich's campaign and suggest that they run with this, and create their own viral video mimicing those TV commercials of past-their-prime singers covering their old standards, with deliberately unsubtle alterations to the song lyrics to mention Dennis' stances on key political issues. It would bring absolutely nothing of substance to the campaign, yes, but it would show that Dennis has a sense of humour about himself, and I really think that something like that would end up helping Dennis in the long run.
Weeks have passed since I first had that thought, and now it seems kind of silly and a little bit stupid to me that I'd ever dreamt that up. At the same time, though, it's kind of hard to watch all this coverage of the Democratic nomination and have it be Hillary-Obama-Hillary-Obama all the time. I want politics to be more about substance than style, yes, but at the same time, I also want someone I can really believe in elected to office, and it doesn't feel completely wrong to play to style a little bit for the sake of getting someone of substance elected. How do I find a balance between idealism and pragmatism here?
posted 2007/02/25 at 18:39
Ah yes, it's Oscar night, and I still have yet to get over those two painful snubs from so long ago: Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within not getting nominated for any animation awards because of course the award just had to go to yet another piece of Disney Dhrek, and more importantly, Björk not even getting nominated for Best Actress after blowing everyone else out of the water in Dancer in the Dark because everyone felt sorry for not giving the award to Julia Roberts for Pretty Woman so long ago. Do not even get me started on how much I hate all the "swan dress lol" cracks Björk still gets to this day and how Hollywood people wouldn't know true creativity if it bit them on their surgically-enhanced asses. Needless to say, I won't be tuning in to the show, as usual.
Tangentially, however, this brings up an interesting point I've been discussing with someone this past week. Looking ahead to next year's Presidential election, if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, then there's a chance that enough left-wingers could be sick and tired of the Democrats' centrism that the Green Party might be able to make another run at getting at least 5% of the popular vote nationally, thus ensuring federal funds for the 2012 election. (Scary thought: that's the first election I'd be eligible to run for President, too.) The problem is that the Greens don't seem to have anyone with any recognition to run right now. Ralph Nader has name value in spades, but he as a person, more than the Green Party, seems to be carrying the stigma right now for allegedly "spoiling" the election for Gore in 2000, and him being the Green Party candidate might do the party more harm than good in that regard. I thought Peter Camejo would have been the perfect candidate in 2004, given the strong showing he had in the California gubernatorial recall election debates, but after he lost the Green Party nomination and became Ralph Nader's vice-presidential candidate in Nader's independent campaign, Greens might not be so willing to give Camejo a second chance, plus any name recognition he might have had from the recall election has long since faded.
How does this relate to my Oscar diatribe from earlier? Well, remember the role Julia Roberts so undeservedly won that Best Actress Oscar for: Erin Brockovich. Brockovich was the vice-presidential candidate for Nader in his 1996 presidential campaign, and through the film that bears her name, Brockovich has a certain measure of fame that might give her the mainstream appeal that would likely be necessary to get 5% of the vote next year. Needless to say I don't know that Brockovich would necessarily be the person I'd want running as the Green Party candidate for President (I still wish Dennis Kucinich would change party affiliations given how much closer he is to the Greens than the Democrats on countless issues), but it's something to think about for next year, anyway.
posted 2007/02/24 at 14:57
I swear I had to restrain myself from writing any more in that last entry than I did. I was getting all ready to discuss things like Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, and Al Gore's 2000 run, and if I had kept going on like that then the entry would have just gotten too long and convoluted to post here.
This brings up an interesting point, because I'm not sure what to do about posting my longer-form writing. Although I believe I still have access to Backwash to write columns there, I've been gone from there for about two years now, and even though I have the time to maintain a regular column there again, they're not paying their columnists anymore, and as much as I believed in the "blortal" business plan back then, I don't think it's panned out these days. I still have my .journal, but now that I've repurposed the blogging component of the .org to be a bit more serious and professional (since I have to plan on potential employers checking out this Website), I'd kind of like to move the .journal to the place where I talk about more personal things, such as whatever experiences I have at jury duty next week.
There's one idea I've been considering, but it's kind of out there. I've always been a big fan of Keith Olbermann from his ESPN days, and I'm glad to see him finding such success with his latest show on MSNBC. Although I enjoy the "Special Comment" segments that have propelled Olbermann's popularity this past year, and by and large I agree with the conclusions he comes to in his comments, I think that in these segments, as well as the other segments of Countdown, Keith sometimes uses the same deceptive tactics in his reportage that he so rightfully chastizes Fox News and others on the right for. (This is why I hardly ever talk about Michael Moore; I agree with him on a lot of issues, but the tactics he uses to prove his points in his documentaries sometimes sink into the morass of intellectual dishonesty.) I also have to wonder how much of Keith's popularity these days is because of the actual content of his commentaries, and how much of it is simply because Keith is such a good student of newscasters of the past (like Edward R. Murrow) and he can mimic their styles so well with that distinctive, deep voice of his.
This makes me wonder sometimes how well I could do something like that. I know that I already possess the ability to structure a coherent argument, and YouTube is right there to provide the bandwidth I'd need for the videos. I also wouldn't be hampered by the limits of live television, so I could re-tape segments until I got my delivery absolutely perfect, and I could also edit in video clips from the AP feeds to dress the final videos up. Given that Countdown has started to engage in a bit of Nader-bashing these past couple of weeks, I'd also have the advantage of being able to present truly left-wing commentary, and not Democratic party-approved "safe" opinions.
There are some problems with this plan, though. First of all, I am one of those people who, to use an old phrase, has "the perfect face for radio." Unfortunately, I don't have the perfect voice for radio. Even though I don't think it's right that people would judge the content of my arguments based on my physical appearance and my speech, I know full well that that's what will likely happen should I ever attempt something like this. Also, alhough technically I have the money to invest in the kind of hardware and software that would be necessary to produce a quality video, I really don't see myself spending that kind of money while my employment situation continues to be so murky. I think the idea of doing video commentaries is novel, but I don't see them being feasible for me anytime soon.
That returns me to the original problem of me not having a space to do long-form commentaries on things. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be glad to hear them, because I feel like I've run into a dead end on this.
posted 2007/02/22 at 21:15
After Keith Olbermann mentioned the show so many times this past week on Countdown, I figured I should go check out whatever clips of Fox News' new show The ½ Hour News Hour I could find on YouTube. (Search link since I'm guessing YouTube will remove individual clips pointed out by Fox News.) I don't think the phrase "Those were thirty minutes of my life I'd like to have back" have never been more true for me than at this moment. I honestly think I would have preferred to watch something more overtly hostile against Democrats and left-wingers, because then at least the show would seem to serve some purpose. As it is, the writers of the show seem to have absolutely zero idea what the tenets of comedy are. If there were any actual jokes in the show, I'd like to have them pointed out to me.
Honestly, what offends me the most about The ½ Hour News Hour so much is the fact that they would so deliberately rip off the name and format of one of my favourite Canadian comedies of all time, This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I haven't watched the show as much these past few years after all the various cast changes, but 22 Minutes still kicks the crap out of nearly all the political comedy America produces. Even though I've never followed Canadian politics all that closely, I still get the jokes because the writers have such finely-honed senses of comedy.
While I'm on the subject, I'd like to discuss The Colbert Report, one of the few television shows I make a point of watching these days. It kind of sickened me when late last year Nancy Pelosi said it would be a bad idea for congresspeople to go on the "Better Know a District" segment, because in their continuing attempts to copy Republicans, the Democrats seem to think it's a good idea to take themselves way too seriously. Apart from the kid-gloves stuff that comes out at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner and the occasional appearance to do a Top Ten list on Late Show with David Letterman, you just don't see politicians in America of any stripe -- and yes, I include my fellow Greens in this -- able to have a good laugh at their own expense.
I mention this in the context of 22 Minutes because at my peak of watching the show -- back when Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister -- he actually appeared on the show on numerous occasions (here's just one), and the situations the people from 22 Minutes put him in far exceeded anything Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart could ever dream of getting away with. Nearly every week on 22 Minutes you will see fairly high-ranking members of Canadian political parties really put through the ringer, and if nothing else the Canadian people as a whole respect them more because of it. Where have American political parties gotten the idea that the way to win the public over is for candidates to never portray any sense of humour, or only to use humour as a way to denigrate political opponents?
posted 2007/02/21 at 22:03
Something about sports in general has been bothering me for quite some time now, although I think I am about to provide a textbook definition of the term "picking nits" here.
I think it was about fifteen years ago or so that scoreboards for major sporting events here in the US started displaying the tenths of a second during the final minute of play. Given all the difficulty in determining final-second plays (and the advent of instant replay rules), this was a pretty wise decision.
However, nearly every scoreboard I have seen has the same flaw to it. When these scoreboards get down to the final minute, they display "1:00" for a second, then switch to "59.9" after that second is up. There's actually a whole nine-tenths of a second added to the game at this point. The scoreboard should either flash "1:00" for a tenth of a second and then go to "59.9," or it should stay at "1:00" for a second and then drop to "59.0." (The scoreboard at Maple Leaf Gardens did the latter, making it the only scoreboard I know of that got it right.)
I realize that nine-tenths of a second isn't exactly a large period of time, and that human error in starting and stopping the scoreboard at referees' signals probably causes more variance in a period of any given game than the nine-tenths of a second. Still, for all of the games that have been played since scoreboards started counting tenths of a second, you have to believe that at least a handful of games have had different outcomes than they would have if the scoreboards counted the time properly. More to the point, I kind of worry that children watching sports on television could get an incorrect idea of the passing of time by having this gaffe occur on nearly every televised sporting event.
posted at 16:05
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday about going back and updating old pages here on the .org is that I kind of forgot that in the early days here, instead of linking to Amazon.com affiliate links for music I mentioned here, I would link to CDNOW because their commissions were higher. The thing is, Amazon.com bought CDNOW ages ago, and now none of my old CDNOW links point to the products I originally wanted to link to, but instead lead to a generic CDNOW "page" created by Amazon that's really just a modified version of the Amazon homepage. I'm thinking that I should probably go back and change those links to the appropriate links on Amazon.com, but at the same time I'm tempted to leave the links as CDNOW links just for historical purposes.
(On the subject of Amazon.com, I'd just like to point out that it's less than a month to go until my birthday, so now would be a great time for you to go and buy me a birthday present off of my Amazon.com wishlist. Yes, I have no shame, thanks for asking.)
Going through some of the first pieces of writing here on the .org, I'm wondering if there would be some use in expanding the About Me section of the site. I was already considering adding a page just about the .org, to mention things like the different designs I've used on the site (and how I've stolen heavily from Ariel's Website for each of the last two redesigns), and how I started coding everything by hand starting in 2002, and how my hosting company has the coolest name in the world. After reading my first writings, though, I'm wondering if maybe I need some sort of glossary so that people who may not want to read through all of the old entries (and who would have the time for that) can get thumbnail sketches of the people and places I used to refer to in older writings. A FAQ page would be another option, although that might end up duplicating the old question-and-answer entries I used to do for the Website's anniversary in the .journal, and there are still some recent events I don't feel comfortable discussing (such as what happened to cause me to leave Spectrum).
There are a couple of things that make me reluctant to do anything of the sort, though. First of all, the older pages of the .org simply don't generate that much traffic, so I'm not sure there's really much of a demand for those kinds of documents. Mostly, though, I'm not sure what use there is in dwelling in the past, especially considering that right now I'm in that transition period between finishing school and getting my first post-school job, and I'd like to place more emphasis on my future than my past right now. It's not that I want to run from my past -- as much as I said (and did) a lot of really stupid stuff back in the day, it's important for me to acknowledge those mistakes so I can learn from them -- but I'll be going through a lot of changes in the coming months here, and I'd rather focus on what I can do correctly in the future than what I did wrong in the past.
posted 2007/02/20 at 18:35
In my spare time these past couple of weeks I've been moving older pages of the .org over to the new design. For most of the pages this just involves adding a few bits of HTML to get the background image to display behind the title of the page, but for some older pages I never bothered moving them over from the first design of the .org, and moving them to the new design takes much more effort. On the plus side, once those pages are moved over then not only will future redesigns of the Website be much easier to implement, but I'll finally be able to say that the .org is 100% coded by hand. (The original "Twisted Mystic" version of the .org was composed in FrontPage.)
Looking at these older pages as I redesign them, it's hard not to be struck by my writing style back then. I wonder what my composition students would think if they saw the grammar I used to use back when I was just starting out here. Back then I actually would overlook some rules of grammar on purpose, because I think one of the things that has always been a clear mark of my style of writing is the conversational tone I use. (I attribute this to the authors I read as a child.) If you ever get the chance, record a short conversation with one of your friends and then transcribe it; it's interesting to analyze the grammatical structures you use when you write versus the structures you use when you speak. I think one of the main reasons I was able to do so well in my English studies was because I learned to adapt that conversational tone to the demands of academia, moving my grammar more into line with Standard American English while still keeping my sentences free-flowing and uncluttered by the steel-vice diction that tends to plague so much academic work. Certainly I've used this style more and more on the .org as the years have gone on here.
Still, there was a time when I was not quite as eloquent writing on here as I would have liked. In addition to that, someone pointed out to me recently how ineloquently I expressed some of my ideas in my earlier writings here. I've given a lot of thought to that, and I think that what happened was that going to Antioch for a year got me started on the "untamed passion" phase that most young adults go through, where your political ideas are strong but the passion with which you feel your beliefs often clouds your ability to make a coherent and cohesive argument. Most people grow out of that phase fast enough, but I think what happened to me was that leaving college and going to work for my father for all those years kind of kept me in that state for a long time. Once I went back to college at UT, I think I was finally able to grow out of that phase and move on to a more eloquent style of expressing my political views. I don't think I have become as good at that as I could be, but it is something that I continue to work at here.
That being said, it is hard to avoid the temptation to go back through those old writings of mine and "fix" them to reflect where I am in my life at this moment. However, I think it's important for me to keep those writings up there, not only to remind myself of where I've come from but also for everyone else to see where I was at in those earlier stages in my life. Six years from now I'm sure I could look back on the things I've been writing over the past month or so and find lots of stuff I could "correct" if I wanted to, but I can't let myself worry about that. It's better for me to keep the history going than to try to change it.
posted 2007/02/19 at 15:09
I need you all to help me gain a little perspective here, because I may be in one of those situations where I'm placing unfair expectations on other people, but I'm not entirely sure of that.
Perhaps this is because I've always been far more of an observer of human interaction than a participant, but I try to look for patterns in the activities of the people around me, and adjust accordingly. For example, although the time at which my parents have dinner every night can vary quite widely, after dinner, without fail, they will always go lay down and cuddle together on the living room couch for fifteen to twenty minutes before taking an evening shower together. On rare occasions one or both of them will fall asleep during this "couch time" and it will take longer for the two of them to drag themselves to their shower, but there's still a general pattern there, and I plan for it accordingly; if I need to talk to the folks about anything, I make sure I talk to them about it at dinner so as not to interrupt their cuddle time. I also try not to take any showers close to when they're going to shower, to make sure they have plenty of hot water.
Now, I will admit that my schedule has become a bit more flexible now that I'm out of school, but there are still some general patterns that have held true in my life for quite some time. For example, about two hours and fifteen minutes after I walk downstairs to the garage with a video game console under my arm, I come back up here in worse need of a shower than anyone in this family ever gets. In all seriousness, I have to be careful where I take my shirt off in the bathroom after a workout, because I've been known to drip so much sweat into the cat litter that it starts clumping up. However, in spite of this pattern generally being true for the past couple of years or so, I can't begin to tell you how many times I have finished up a workout in the garage, then walked back up here only to find that my sister or brother-in-law have just started a shower. This leads to me having to stand here drenched in my own sweat, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time, unable to sit down without leaving a huge damp ass-print on my chair or bed.
I mention this right now because another general pattern that holds is that I get my lunch around an hour to an hour and a half after I eat breakfast. I do my daily journaling between the two meals, so sometimes it can take a bit longer, but again, it's a general pattern that's been established for quite some time. However, after I finished my journaling earlier today, I went downstairs to find that my sister had just put a cake in the oven and that it wouldn't be accessible for at least forty minutes. Every time I've gone downstairs since then, my sister's been busy baking other stuff, and I can't be sure exactly when I'll be able to fix my lunch here. It's bad enough that I'm pretty much starving at this point, but now the entire house smells like a cake that I can't eat on my diet anyway, making the hunger all the worse.
Now, I don't want to go into too much detail right now, but this is just part of a larger pattern of disrespect that my sister and brother-in-law have been engaged in, and steadily escalating, for quite some time now. It is no exaggeration to say that the two of them completely ruined both of the last two Christmases for me, and I can't begin to count how many times my mother has burst into tears recently due to their bad behaviour. The thing is, at least at this exact moment where I'm waiting for my sister to get out of the kitchen, I don't know if it is necessarily fair for me to blame her for not seeing this pattern in my activities. I don't know if other people are as observant of these kinds of things as I am, and if they aren't, then it would be unfair of me to blame my sister, at least in this instance. Am I incorrect in assuming that other people are as observant of these kinds of things as I am?
posted 2007/02/18 at 16:24
Yesterday I made a daytrip to Cleveland for a DDR tournament Lara was co-running. I didn't actually enter any of the tournament divisions (I arrived too late to enter the first, left too early to participate in the second, and just generally hadn't been playing that well recently), but it was still nice to see Lara for the first time since I went to North Carolina last March for an ITG tournament she was co-running. (Strangely enough, when I was at a service plaza on the way to Cleveland, I ate Sbarro pizza for the first time since I was at a rest area on my way home from North Carolina.)
I almost didn't go, though, because I woke up yesterday morning to find that Toledo was in the midst of another bad snowstorm. Although the highways weren't all that icy, the roads leading to the highways were slippery as all get-out, and it didn't help that I was driving one of my parents' mini-vans instead of my Camry. (The driver's side window of my Camry doesn't roll down, and since I had to take a toll road between Toledo and Cleveland I kind of needed to roll my window down so I could access the toll booths.) To top things off, I was using the same minivan my brother-in-law has been using to get to work and back, and not only did he leave me with next to no gas in the tank, but the windshield wipers were in a horrible state, and once other cars started kicking road salt up onto my windshield it was all I could do to see out of the resulting white haze. (I ran out of wiper fluid once I got to Cleveland, too.)
As much as I wanted to see Lara again, this was certainly not a trip that I had to make, and under other circumstances I might have turned around and come home after a couple of minutes of slip-sliding down Toledo roads at a snail's pace trying to get to the highway. The reason why I made the trip anyway is that I figure that at some point in my life, there will come a time when I will have to make a long trip under those kinds of bad road conditions, and it would be better for me to practice driving in them now than to have my first experience be under more distressing circumstances. Besides, I've been a passenger in that van when idiotic drivers have plowed into it, and it's built like a tank, so if I'd had an accident on the road I would have been a lot better off in that van than if I'd been in my dinky little Camry.
It was a nerve-wracking experience at times, but I got to Cleveland and back without incident, and now I have a little more confidence when it comes to driving in wintry conditions. Toledo will finally be going back to above-freezing temperatures starting tomorrow, so the roads should be a lot better in the days ahead. Still, days like yesterday make me wonder why I haven't started applying for jobs in Florida yet.
posted 2007/02/16 at 23:26
Yesterday while I was out picking up Norton Internet Security Suite 2007, I also picked up Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol for PS2. Believe me, I never thought I would spend any money on anything with the words "American Idol" attached to it, and I very nearly skipped this release of Karaoke Revolution for that very reason. However, once I found out "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was going to be on the game, I pretty much had to pick it up. We Shannons are huge Jim Steinman fans, what can I say.
Anyway, at the very least they made the American Idol features avoidable, so I can just go in and play the game like I played the previous Karaoke Revolution games and not have to worry about dealing with the spectacle that is the show that sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with American culture these days. Seriously, Simon Cowell is right up there with David Spade and Craig Kilborn on my "People who make the strongest case for legalizing retroactive birth control" list (non-political edition). In addition to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," the game has a lot of other songs I actually appreciate, like "Easy," "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," "Proud Mary" (although I would have preferred Tina Turner's cover to the original), and "Piano Man." As usual, all the more recent selections are bottom-of-the-barrel stuff (seriously, why hasn't Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" appeared yet), but the classic rock and R&B gives me plenty to enjoy.
That being said, there are still some things that bother me about the game, starting with the fact that I had to get it for PS2 since Secret Level isn't porting the games over to Xbox anymore. I originally got Karaoke Revolution games for Xbox because game-and-mic bundles for the Xbox were cheaper than the ones for the PS2, but the Xbox's ability to download content to its internal hard drive was a huge bonus for me. I can put in Karaoke Revolution Party for Xbox and play nearly all of the songs that are in the first four Karaoke Revolution releases for PS2 without having to switch discs (and with all the improvements that were made in the series up to that point). Not only do I essentially have to "start over" with the PS2 releases, but because the microphones aren't compatible across different systems, I had to lay down ten bucks more just to get a PS2-compatible microphone with the game. Couldn't Konami have hired another company to port the game over to the Xbox, or did they spend too much money in their lawsuit against Roxor Games?
Another thing that bothers me is how the on-screen characters work. I like the create-a-singer function that's been in the past couple of games (and this time around they actually have something that resembles my signature black bucket hat), but for all the options you have for customizing how your on-screen singer looks, you don't get any control over how the singers move. I admit that my childhood dreams of being the lead singer of a band never moved beyond singing over CDs in my bedroom, but I know that my "style" of singing has always been to keep the microphone on its stand ninety percent of the time and rarely, if ever, to do any big theatrical moves on-stage. In the Karaoke Revolution games you're always stuck with the microphone in your hand, and not only do the singers keep doing a bunch of stupid dance moves, but the moves weren't even motion-captured that well, making them look even more artificial within the game. (They also aren't synchronized well with the songs, so that during a ballad all of a sudden your singer will start flailing her arms around wildly, looking like she's having a seizure.) I don't see why Konami can't include an option in the game to customize the motions your singer performs during the songs.
That being said, I'm still generally pleased with how the game turned out (especially since it allows American Idol haters like me to not have to deal with the game's simulation of the television show), and it was a good addition to my collection. I understand that the Karaoke Revolution games are great fun when you're drunk, but given that I know nothing about being drunk (and very little about having fun, for that matter), you all will have to let me know how that works out for you should you try it.
posted at 15:03
Several weeks ago I finally got sick and tired of the repeated prompts I got on my computer urging to me upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, so I finally did so. Although I've grown to appreciate some of the changes (at first I never thought I'd make much use out of tabbed browsing, but now I use it nearly all the time, e.g. right now I have another tab open to check out the links I'll be inserting later), I'm still not all that happy with the new interface. One of the things I always liked about the past few versions of IE was that I could take the text labels off of the main button bar and then move that bar right up to the right of the menu bar, which in turn freed up more space for displaying Websites. (Example) Now IE forces the buttons into certain locations (and I don't like how they moved some buttons and the URL display above the main menu bar), and not only does this take up valuable real estate at the top of the browser window, but it's also been a pain to get used to.
I think what bothered me most about the upgrade, though, is that it's significantly slowed down my computer. I'll admit that I built Yggdrasil Mark I years ago, and on the cheap at that, but still, I am hardly what could be called a heavy computer user. Most of the time I just have Outlook, IE, and Word open (sometimes Musicmatch Jukebox, sometimes other programmes if I'm doing Web stuff), and that should not be enough to make my computer stall as much as it has since I upgraded to IE7.
Things got even worse yesterday when I had to upgrade to Norton Internet Security Suite 2007 on my computer, which has not only made my computer even slower, but has also added a gaudy green bar at the top of my browser window that is making it harder to me to make judgments about the redesign of the .org. (I'm still tweaking the background graphics a bit, and the green bar is influencing my ability to make colour-based judgments.) I also seem to have lost the ability to maintain a steady connection with somafm.com's streaming radio channels since upgrading Norton, which is a huge pain for me because soma fm's channels (particularly Drone Zone) are perfect background music for me when I'm working on writing-related activities.
I realize that Yggdrasil Mark I is starting to show her age and probably needs to be replaced soon -- if nothing else building her was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for me -- but I'm still not happy with the fact that today's software is pushing her past her limits. I mean, my father still manages to find uses for his first PC, a Leading Edge AT, for crying out loud. As usual, though, I'm not sure whether I should be upset at software manufacturers for forcing all of us to constantly be upgrading our hardware for what are usually specious reasons, or upset at myself for sounding so crotchety and feeling like I'm stuck in the past while the rest of the world just whizzes on by me.
posted 2007/02/15 at 23:31
If you haven't bought Ariel's new book Offbeat Bride yet, you should. Now, not only does Ariel have limited numbers of autographed copies at the OffbeatBride.com store, but she also has some nifty t-shirts for sale as well.
Give her some of your money. She deserves it. Seriously.
posted 2007/02/14 at 11:52
Every year on this day I try to write some kind of missive about how Valentine's Day is an artificial holiday concocted by marketers to get people to buy stuff they normally wouldn't buy during a traditionally slow period of the sales year. This is, of course, usually followed by a caveat that I probably wouldn't feel this way if, you know, I actually had someone to share Valentine's Day with. This year, though, I actually feel okay being single right now.
I suppose I'm starting to rethink the whole "You shouldn't need something like Valentine's Day to shower your loved one with gifts" argument. On its surface, yes, it does seem kind of silly that people actually need some big national commercial endeavour to be reminded to do something special for their significant others every once in a while. Given the pace of modern life, though, I think it's understandable why a lot of people simply don't even think about taking the time to do something special with their partner. After all, Christmas (by which I mean the retail perversion of the word, not the Christian holy day) does provide non-Christians like me and my family an opportunity to buy neat stuff for each other, something which just doesn't seem to spontaneously happen the other 364 days of the year. If, by chance, you are one of those people who likes to buy gifts for people out of the blue, I have an Amazon.com wishlist, you know.
My original point in writing something about Valentine's Day this year was that I wanted to mention how some of us on the left, particularly GLBT people, have tried to turn this day into National Right to Marry Day, cutting through the romance that is in the air (or whatever that funky smell is) to remind people of how same-sex couples are still not accorded the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples in 49 of the 50 states. There's one prominent gay activist here in town who always goes downtown with his partner and attempts to file a marriage certificate every year on this day, although maybe this year the snow emergency is going to shut down the city's government buildings. Anyway, I was hoping to point you all to links on the topic, but a Google search on National Right to Marry Day yields all of four results. You would think that for all that the GLBT community wants to make a big deal out of this (especially campus GLBT groups), someone would put together a Website with information on the subject.
posted 2007/02/13 at 17:01
Right now we're under a snow emergency here in northern Toledo. Since the start of the day we've had about four inches fall on top of the three inches or so that was already on the ground, and we're supposed to get up to a foot more by tomorrow morning. I can't say that Toledo hasn't gotten worse snowfalls than this, but this one will be kind of big by our standards. That being said, after all the images in the news these past couple of days of the house-high snowfalls in upstate New York, it kind of feels odd for Toledo to be shutting down given we're only going to get a fraction of what people in New York are battling right now.
The University of Toledo declared its first snow day in a couple of years today, and of course I'm a little bit steamed that they'd declare a snow day right after I've graduated from there. This actually takes me back to the first-ever snow day I experienced at UT, during my second semester there. I was taking an introductory sociology course, and it was one of those courses that only met once a week for two and a half hours straight. Now, I had lots of once-a-week courses as a graduate student, and I think that format works well in graduate courses because at that point in your academic career you're really prepared to study for that long and go into a great amount of detail for a single subject. For a 1000-level course, though, students -- especially students just coming out of high school -- just aren't ready to stay seated for that long, let alone sit there and listen to a two-and-a-half-hour lecture. It didn't help that the professor in this course was one of those professors who just lectured at the students instead of making a significant effort to get students involved during the long class period.
What I'm getting at is that this course was not fun, something I realized very early on in the term. However, on the syllabus we got at the start of the semester, it noted that one of the classes in late March would be canceled because the professor would be attending a conference in Florida that week, so I was looking forward to that. Wouldn't you know it, the day that class was going to be canceled, Toledo got a freak early-spring blizzard that caused the campus to shut down that afternoon anyway. Making matters worse, I had scheduled an oral exam in my Japanese class for that afternoon, and word of the campus closing came literally five minutes before I was scheduled to start the exam, meaning I got all worked up over the exam only to have to reschedule it for later.
Thus, my first snow day at UT wound up hurting me more than it helped. What ticked me off more than that, and more than having to drive home in a blizzard, was thinking that this sociology professor, who I didn't particularly care for in the first place, was sunning it up in Florida while we, his students, were having to deal with all this snow and cold weather. Looking back on it now, that was kind of a real petty thing to be thinking, but looking out my window as I type this now, I can still remember how pissed I got back when it happened. If I were in that professor's position, I would have at least canceled a later class to "make up" the snow day for them.
Given that I'm going to Cleveland for a DDR tournament this Saturday, I really hope that the roads get better by then. The Ohio Turnpike is a pretty desolate area, and I've already experienced one traffic accident on there -- actually the only other time I've been to Cleveland, when I saw Björk perform there on the Post tour back in 1995 -- which was enough for me.
posted 2007/02/11 at 17:38
Clinton Parries Iraq Questions in New Hampshire (via AP/Yahoo! News)
Ever since Hillary formally announced her candidacy for the Presidency, I've been bothered by the fact that people on the left haven't been making such a big deal out of the sudden change in her public statements about Iraq shortly after the midterm elections. Back in 2003 Hillary was nearly Lieberman-esque in her trumpeting of why the United States should invade Iraq, and her statements didn't seem to change all that much until the war's popularity finally plummeted to chilling levels. Now all of a sudden we're already in the 2008 presidential campaign season, and Hillary and her cronies seem to be working overtime to position her as the best anti-war candidate.
This got me to thinking about political conversions and transformations, and just how it is that we can know when a politician shifting on a given issue is a genuine change of heart or a calculated ploy to get more voters. In the case of Hillary's seeming turnaround on Iraq, I find it hard to believe that this isn't a ploy on her part, given her and her husband's involvement with the DLC and everything they've done over the past fifteen years to turn the Democratic Party into a centrist party and squelch truly left-wing politics in America. In other cases, though, things don't feel like they're so clean-cut.
Let's take Dennis Kucinich as an example. Although Kucinich has a well-earned reputation for being one of the most left-wing members of the Democratic Party (and, in my opinion, one of the few Democrats who still fights for the principles the party was founded on), up until he started contemplating his first Presidential run back in 2002 his voting record way very pro-life, in keeping with his Catholic faith. However, he then switched to voting mostly pro-choice, which some people portrayed as him flip-flopping to bring his voting record into line with the Democratic Party on one of its most defining issues. I believe Kucinich, though, when he says that he realized that he shouldn't allow his personal opposition to abortion interfere with the decisions women make over their own bodies.
Kucinich may not be the right person for me to look at, though, given how much of a fan of his I am. Perhaps looking at Arianna Huffington would be a better example. I generally believe the reasons she gave for her switching from right-wing to left-wing politics around the turn of the century, mainly because she spoke convincingly of how she first believed that the private sphere could take care of social problems, then through first-hand experience realized that private enterprise -- at least the kind we have here in America -- was simply too concerned with preserving their wealth and power to look out for the less fortunate. However, during the 2003 Californial Gubernatorial recall, Arianna suddenly shifted from a firm independent and friend of the Green Party to a Democratic Party appeaser, and none of the explanations she's given for that change have ever satisfied me.
Not that I know Arianna personally or anything like that, but my suspicion is that Arianna didn't want to find herself disinvited from all the posh dinner parties and stuff her fat-cat Democrat friends were holding, so she joined the majority "Ralph Nader caused 9.11 and the PATRIOT Act" wing of the Democratic Party. Arianna still points out how the Democratic party should move further to the left, and I admire her for that, but if Hillary gets the nomination in 2008 then her Huffington Post blog is going to be Hillary '08 Central, and that any Green Party or other left-leaning third-party candidate is going to be savaged for "helping to elect" the Republican nominee.
I hold no illusions of an American past where the voting population didn't view their politicans with a healthy degree of cynicism, but I don't think that any careful observer of America would dare to say that this country's cynicism hasn't doubled and then redoubled over the past thirty years. That being said, I shudder to think that America has become so cynical that politicans -- or other public figures -- changing their stance on a given issue is only to be seen as an attempt to gain publicity or support. Anyone of voting age who has never changed their opinion on any subject is a fool at best, a zealot at worst. Nevertheless, anecdotal and historical evidence alike give us all good reason to be skeptical whenever a politican's public stance on a hot-button issue suddenly changes. How are we to tell when such changes might be genuine, though?
posted 2007/02/10 at 22:09
If you're reading this on the .org (and not via syndication), then you've probably noticed by now that I've launched the new design of the Website. I haven't gotten the new design spread to every page yet, but all the main index pages and archive pages have been updated, and I even went and fixed the archive index after Blogger messed it up. I know that the columns aren't lining up on the top in Firefox like they should, but I'll be looking into that here over the next few days.
I have to say that it was actually kind of hard for me to take the old design down. For all that this new design has its advantages over the old design (especially now that I've got ads up on here), I really liked that old design. I'm sure I'll grow to like this new design even more over time, I know, but moving on -- even when it comes to something as relatively insignificant as a Website design -- is never easy for me.
Oh, and while I was working on the redesign I also wrote a new autobiographical page to replace the old one that I hadn't updated all that much since the first couple of years of the Website. Why do I get the feeling that now that I've got advertisements on the .org, I'm going to suddenly find my motivation to keep the site updated on a regular basis again?
posted 2007/02/09 at 01:06
Ah, this seems like old times. Back in the day, it didn't seem so uncommon for me to just not notice the passing of time as I worked on a Website, somehow managing to squeeze in my meals without remembering actually eating them, all manner of music and television on in the background. This isn't a life I'd ever want to return to, but for my own Website, and for the sake of nostalgia, surrendering a day to just working on the redesign of the .org was worth it.
I think I've finally got the design down, but I've run out of steam for tonight. I'll probably want to run the design by a couple of my more visually-oriented friends before I commit to changing everything over, but I don't foresee doing any major changes. I've managed to keep my personal colour scheme in the new design, although I will finally, at long last, be changing over to black text on a white background. (What can I say, even though I know the black background makes text harder to read, I guess the 1% of me that identifies as goth insisted on it.) With any luck I should be able to get the new design rolled out by the end of the week.
One snag I've run into is that apparently I can only use the new Blogger layout features if I switch back to Blogspot.com hosting, which isn't going to happen since I'd lose the ability to have special pages for all the other sections of the .org. Worse yet, in the change over to the new Blogger system, apparently the ability to edit the template for the archive index has been completely lost. Old posts are still being archived, but the index itself no longer updates, so now I'll have to go in and manually update that. This isn't going to take as long as it sounds it will, but at the same time I'm still not happy with having to do it in the first place.
I will find a way to keep a copy of this current design accessible just for historical reasons. Heck, I never did update some of the old .journal entries over from the original "twisted mystic" design I used starting with the .org's launch. (I need a cool nickname for this current design ... suggestions?)
posted 2007/02/07 at 15:31
So, those of you reading this entry on the .org have undoubtedly noticed by now that I finally put the Google ads on the Website like I said I would. Again, I can't say that I'm entirely happy about doing this, but as long as my employment situation is up in the air I figure I should do whatever I can to make a few extra cents here and there.
There is one problem, though, which is that I really can't find a way to integrate the ads into my present site design all that well. I made a couple of tweaks to the design of the .org last night after I put the ads up, but I still think the ads look a bit awkward where they are right now.
Between this and the fact that I can't seem to edit my old archive index page on Blogger -- likely because Blogger recently changed its proprietary formatting and I'm still using the old formatting -- it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to do a redesign of the .org soon. Granted, I haven't done a real redesign here in at least four years, which in Internet years is, oh, forever, but not only am I worried that I might end up breaking my Website the moment when the companies I've applied to work at start poking around my Website (leaving them with a bad impression of me), but I still really like the old design.
Although the design of the .org looks kind of outdated right now, I still like how functional it is. I was never able to get the graphics exactly as I'd like them, but I really like how I got the colour scheme to work, and I like how I'm able to squeeze all the various sections of the Website into the top and side menu bars. The colours and designs also all hold various personal meanings for me, although most of them have to do with my hippie-dippie airy-fairy new age thinking that I'm sure most of you don't want to read about.
I do have a new design kind of sketched out in my head right now, but getting it onto the screen here will likely be a problem, especially since I've had maybe one Website design project in the past few years. I really don't like how I let my Internet and tech skills deteriorate in the later years of my college education, but I had to make my education my top priority. I'm hoping I can get the redesign done fairly soon here, but I don't want to make any guarantees on that front, either. I just hope I can re-learn CSS formatting quickly.
posted 2007/02/06 at 21:18
Ever since I got my new computer desk in here, whenever I work at my computer I've been treated to a view of my backyard, which just so happens to border on the main Toledo highway loop, I-475, near where it hooks up with US-23 (the main route from Toledo to Ann Arbor and central Michigan).
For most of the night tonight there's been one lane of I-475 -- the westbound lane that leads to US-23 South -- that has barely been moving if at all. We only had about half an inch of snow today, but given that we've barely broken double digit highs the past couple of days, that was enough to make the roads treacherous. We're under a snow emergency right now, and I-75 (which is on the other side of town from the house) is being described on the news as completely iced over.
The thing is, although I wouldn't swear to it, I'm almost positive I can remember Toledo having worse problems than this. There's only three to four inches of snow on the ground right now, and I can remember having close to a foot of snow within the past two to three years. While the temperatures are certainly bad -- bad enough that schools around here are closing (they never closed for low temperatures when I was a student grumble grumble grumble), and bad enough that I've been curtailing my own plans for going out -- I swear I can remember temperatures getting a lot worse than this.
Perhaps it's just the long line of barely-moving traffic outside my window that's driving it all home to me right now. Like Mom just pointed out, though, you worry that someone's car could stop out there. Someone with a baby that needs to stay warm. I'm on the opposite side of the highway from the stalled lane, so if people there need to go for help they'll probably go to the housing complex to the north of us, but it's hard not to want to do something to help the people who are waiting to get onto US-23 right now.
posted 2007/02/05 at 21:10
I've never been one for watching the Super Bowl for the commercials, since I figure that I'll see the good ones a million times in the next few weeks. (Not to mention the not-so-good ones ...) Well, last night while I was watching cute little puppies romp, Snickers decided to get a joke out of two guys kissing.
That's not the worst part, though; as the article points out, Snickers originally had posted a Website for the commercial that showed NFL players reacting in disgust at the kiss. Then Snickers offered three alternate endings for the commercial, with people asked to vote for the best ending, which would then be shown during the Daytona 500. One of the proposed endings featured the two men trying to kill themselves afterwards; another showed the two beating up each other.
I honestly can't say that a major company doing something like this is totally unexpected, especially given how the Super Bowl is already awash in unabashed displays of testosterone. It doesn't make things any easier to deal with, though, and even with Snickers pulling the Website, I'm still really peeved off at this. Don't even get me started on public and government reaction to this commercial versus the reaction to Janet Jackson's nipple a few years ago.
posted 2007/02/04 at 23:34
So I hear there was a football game earlier tonight. If you can believe it, I've actually been spending the evening watching Puppy Bowl III on Animal Planet. I'm not quite sure what this says, except that I had about zero interest in the Super Bowl this year. (Not that I usually have much interest in it at all, mind you.) Still, I'm not even a dog person. This is kind of confusing to think about, actually.
As far as the Red Wings go ... well, there's no way I see them winning the Cup this year given how horrible their special teams have been, and bringing in Peter Forsberg just strikes me as the kind of hot-shotting I thought the team would be through with after losing Yzerman and Shanahan and Hull. Right now the Wings need to focus on building a young core, and I shudder at the word going around that Datsyuk is going to test the free agent waters after the season. (Don, I caught the Wings/Isles game on Tuesday, and I'll be the first to say that the refs totally screwed you over.)
I may actually get back into watching basketball for the first time in a while, as the addition of Chris Webber to the Pistons has actually sparked my interest a bit here. I'm still not that much of a basketball enthusiast, though.
posted 2007/02/03 at 15:50
Normally this time of year the average high in Toledo is about 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Tomorrow we're supposed to have a high of 6. Needless to say, Punxsutawney Phil and his prediction of an early spring can both kiss my ass.
It was nice to get out and shoot photos on Thursday, although by the time I came back here I thought my feet were going to freeze off. I used to be pretty darn good about making my shoes last for an incredibly long time, but ever since I started playing dance video games I just seem to be tearing holes in my shoes left and right. As a result, walking out in the snow more often than not means that my socks get soaked and my feet start to feel like they've been frozen into a solid block of ice. Believe me, that makes the drive home real fun.
At least the roads seem to have stayed relatively ice-free around here. Now if only I could get on them, say, to go to a job interview. Then maybe I could get a job and be able to afford to replace my shoes on a more frequent basis.
posted 2007/02/01 at 18:57
I didn't like abandoning so many of the sections of the .org here after graduate school started taking up so much of my time and effort. I figure that while I'm still waiting to hear about job offers, I should take the time to update things here, and since I felt like going out today, I thought I should take my camera with me.
So, new in .photography: A study of sculptures at the Toledo Botanical Garden. Obviously I wasn't going to find much there in the way of purty flowers to photograph, so I tried to take some interesting shots of the sculptures there, along with a few shots of other things like ducks. As always, constructive criticism is appreciated from any of you photography buffs who may be reading.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon