Nothing like the combination of withered leaves falling off of trees and me going another year without a Halloween party to go to (or props for said party) to remind me of just how old I'm getting. Actually, yesterday was kind of a huge culmination of one particular reminder, and I'm still kind of stewing about it as I spend another lonely Halloween. (I doubt the neighbourhood kids want me lecturing them about how sexist/violence-promoting their costumes are.)
Several weeks ago a couple of my North Carolina friends tried to start a meme where people sent them postcards to decorate the walls of their rooms, since in this day and age the Internet enables us to keep acquaintances all over the country if not the world. I thought that this was a fun thing to do, and I certainly wanted to send them postcards. My first thought was to go to the gift shop at Wildwood since I knew I saw postcards there the last time I was there. Well, after finally making time to head over there, first I found that the gift shop had moved over a mile away, then I found out that their hours had changed, and then yesterday, when I finally got there when the store was open, they had no postcards whatsoever.
The shopkeeper on duty suggested that I try the post office nearby, but I couldn't see any postcards on sale there (and I didn't have time to wait in line for the two people on duty there to help me), so I hit Meijer and struck out again there. At that point I had to rush up to campus to teach, and my students suggested that I might try a local airport. After class let out I then drove all the way out to Toledo Express Airport (which is fairly far from my house and in a pretty seedy part of town), and not only did they not have any postcards on display at the gift shop there, but the shop was closed anyway.
After I got home and stewed a bit I tried looking online for Toledo postcards, but the only postcards I could find were of buildings in Toledo that were probably torn down long before I was born. Now, I'll admit to being very critical of Toledo (particularly its laughable attempts at tourism, such as our mayor's clueless performance on The Daily Show several years ago), but you would think that any city, let alone a city the size of Toledo, would make it easier to find postcards of the few good things we have here like the park system. More than that, though, I'm kind of taken aback at just how difficult it's been to find any postcards anywhere. I will grant you that our new electronic world kind of makes postcards obsolete in a number of ways, but even though I'm hardly an expert on Americana, I can confidently say that postcards are one of those pieces of our cultural heritage here in America that shouldn't ever be so quick to disappear. From the tacky to the beautiful, the informative to the silly, postcards hold a special place in our history, and I can't believe they would disappear out from under my nose like that.
I've heard reports from other people trying to complete this meme that they're having difficulty finding postcards as well, so this isn't just a Toledo thing. It's still a sad thing, though, and another thing to make me feel old.
Fun little reality check for you: we're still more than a year away from Election Day 2008. (Election Day 2007 is coming up soon here, and I'm finally getting well-versed on the local and state things I'll be voting for next week.) You would think that people would remember back to four years ago and how it seemed like Howard Dean was a lock for the Democratic nomination, and not keep rushing to judgment over the leads Clinton and Giuliani currently have, but hey, maybe a year of having those two all over the place might actually help make the general public as sick of the two of them as I am now. (Speaking of Dean, a couple of weeks ago I took one of those "What is your political orientation" memes, and the picture they chose for "true liberal" was Dean's. Um, yeah, newsflash: Dean was a balanced-budget hawk who frequently got top ratings from the NRA during his years as Vermont's governor. All of Dean's bluster about being from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" was a half-truth at best.)
It's bad enough that nearly all of the left-wing Websites I visit have already gone into "Hillary doesn't represent our best interests but she'll be better than the Republican candidate so don't you dare vote Green" mode. What is really making me sick right now, though, is the fact that as long as we're still in something resembling a primary (as much as the press and its corporate masters are trying to turn everything into Clinton vs. Giuliani now), most of these left-leaning Websites are giving more press and praise to Ron Paul than to Dennis Kucinich. I'm not saying that I don't understand wanting to highlight Paul and the things that he stands for, but by putting Paul under so bright of a spotlight and scarcely mentioning Kucinich (if he's mentioned at all), it's like a tacit admission on the part of Democrats that they have lost complete sight of their identity, promoting someone who has gone on record as saying he would like to do away with UNICEF over someone who actually espouses true liberalism, the things that once made the Democratic party a great party and which have been stripped away by fifteen years of Clintons and the DLC.
I would like to think that somehow 2008 will be the year that finally breaks the two-party system. I'd like to think that people will get so fed up of Clinton and Giuliani that at long last the Religious Right defects over to the Constitutionalists (where they're a much better fit), Libertarians abandon the GOP in greater droves over the fiscal irresponsibilities of the current administration, the Greens regain the strength they built up in the 2000 election and then some, and the Socialists finally get some real press and escape from the shadow of misinformation that's been hanging over their heads thanks to the "better dead than red" crowd. Given all the various forces out there that are conspiring to force everyone into black-or-white, good-or-evil, Republican-or-Democrat choices, though, I fear that I've got another year of oversimplified drivel awaiting me as I look for intelligent political discussion both on the Internet and on what few political television shows I can manage to stomach from now until November of next year.
I've written several times in the past about the major traffic intersection about a mile south of my house. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's one of the most important in Toledo, but it's definitely at least a second-tier intersection in terms of both the amount of traffic it funnels through as well as all the important destinations that are close to it. I can still remember how each building near that intersection has changed over the years, although I don't get to see the southern side of it that often now that I'm not going to UT anymore.
I went past there yesterday on the way to the grocery store, though, and saw something quite odd. Back in the early 80s there was a roller skating rink that my sister used to go to, although I never got to go there. (The one time I put on roller skates in my life, I went about three feet and fell and broke my right forearm fairly clean, and wound up spending half the summer between kindergarten and first grade in a plaster cast and unable to swim.) Over time that building held a variety of businesses, most recently a pool table/recreation room vendor, but it got demolished recently. Yesterday I saw that they're building this huge two-story Gold's Gym on that land, which isn't so surprising given that the Powerhouse Gym near our house recently shuttered. However, in the tiny retail building that just opened where my childhood McDonald's used to be (that McDonalds having moved one spot over to the old Big Boy land), Gold's Gym has rented out a space there, apparently as a "preview" of the new building. I've never heard of a company doing something like this before, and given the cramped space that they're in right now, I can't imagine that they could be getting much business done there. (If they need a space to handle office stuff, why not just rent a trailer?)
The presence of the Wal*Mart that was built there a few years ago, though, continues to have a chilling effect on the area. They're currently converting this store over a Supercenter, which I fear will cause the nearby Meijer to start suffering even more. As it is, the Kroger just south of there has started going down the crapper at an alarming rate, and I don't see myself shopping there again soon unless I absolutely have to. (I hate having to drive longer to get to a Kroger, but there is a nicer one that I pass fairly close to on my way to and from work.) More than anything, though, I'm still upset that Wal*Mart's presence forced the K-Mart on the opposite corner to close down; that K-Mart was on "my" corner (meaning that I didn't have to cross any of the major streets to get there), so that was the only store I could go to by myself when I was young and just had a bike to get me around. That building is still unoccupied, and I doubt that anyone's going to want to put a store in that close to the Wal*Mart anytime soon.
Unfortunately, this has caused something very bad to happen. There's a part of that old K-Mart's parking lot that is fairly hidden since it's sandwiched between an old auto repair place (also abandoned albeit long before Wal*Mart came to town) and a gas station. Now that there's no lighting in the parking lot, that particular space of the parking lot has become an absolute haven for drug transactions. If I'm ever driving by there after sunset, it's hard not to look over and see some shady business going down between different parked cars. I'm not saying that this part of town has ever been that great, but it was certainly a lot better than this, and the general vibe I get around here is that no one feels like they can do anything to get the drug dealers to at least not be so blatant about what they're doing just a mile south of here.
As much as I love this part of town, and as much as I still get chills thinking about moving away when I finally find a full-time job somewhere, it just seems like things get worse here week by week. I'm not saying Wal*Mart is entirely to blame for this, but their presence here certainly isn't helping matters any, as the same things that seem to happen whenever a Wal*Mart moves in nearby are starting to happen close to home. Times like this make me worry about ever being able to really escape the huge shadow Wal*Mart casts over so much of this country.
... of the release of the Playstation 2 in North America. I awoke to find mine in front of my door in a package from Electronics Boutique. I was not only eager to have the system for its ability to play games, but at that point I also didn't have a DVD player (this was well before you could pick them up for twenty bucks at grocery stores), so the PS2's DVD-playing capability may have been an even bigger reason for me to get one so soon. Ironically enough, though, the one DVD set I'd picked up earlier, a limited edition of the Tenchi Muyo! OVA, doesn't play that well in PS2s, so I was still stuck there. Later that night I went out and got EA Sports' NHL game, the last of the EA Sports hockey games I bought. All in all I think the PS2 managed to live up to its hype, and to this date that was the last video game system I ever bought on its first day, a decision I've yet to regret given how the current generation of video game systems hold little appeal for me. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. Of peace, joy, love, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control, which are you most lacking?
At this moment in time I would say patience, but I haven't been sleeping well for several days now and am currently operating under a fair amount of sleep deprivation.
2. Of peace, joy, love, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control, which are you most blessed with?
Love, but some days are better than others on that front. (Not to say anything about how I've never really had a special someone to share it with.
3. The Scout Law says that a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Which of these are relative strengths for you?
Avoiding the temptation to go on a polemic about how homophobic the Boy Scouts are, I'd say loyalty and trustworthiness.
4. Which of the elements in the Scout Law are relative weaknesses for you?
Obedience (I'm always questioning the nature of power) and cheerfulness (I'm usually too wrapped up in my own thoughts to put on a front of happiness).
5. If you were to create a list-type law, such as the Scout Law, for your occupation, what might it look like?
For English teachers? Let's go with respectful (nothing ticks me off more than other teachers who treat their students with contempt), curious (teachers have as much to learn from their students as their students have to learn from them), timely (don't take weeks to grade tests or review papers), lenient (no super-hard deadlines unless there's a pressing reason such as a mandate from above), and entertaining (never let your students get bored), just to name five.
Ariel recently redesigning her Website has me thinking that it might be time for me to tweak the design of the .org. This wouldn't be a major redesign on the level of what Ariel did, or my launch of ".org v3.0" earlier this year, but I do want to make some changes. There are some things I know that I want to do (such as make the main body text bigger, a criticism I've heard plenty of since the last redesign), but there are other tweaks that I'm not so certain of, and I'm sure that there are lots of other things I could do that I'm not thinking of that you all might suggest to me. First, though, let me go over some of my own concerns in terms of the redesign.
In addition to generally making my blog entries longer and trying to cut down on the less intelligent entries that I tended to lapse into during tough times of my life, one of my main goals in the last major redesign was to switch to a white background to look a bit more professional, since I finally began to view the .org as an extension of my professional career at that point. As much as I loved version 2.1 of the .org (sample) because it successfully integrated my personal colour scheme (black, deep purple and dark green) with graphics I felt communicated various aspects of my life (the leaves on the sidebar and the "mist" behind the main body text). I knew I had to switch to a white background to look more professional, though, so I tried to keep the colours and graphics in the redesign in a more subdued way. That being said, I've never been that happy with the two leaf backgrounds I've been using in the new design. I can't even put my finger on exactly what it is that bothers me about them; they just don't seem to convey the leaf/nature theme as well as the previous design did. For that matter, the backgrounds look a bit different now that I'm testing this new flat panel for my folks, so I should probably learn how to do some colour calibration on the monitors here soon.
The other thing I've been thinking of is perhaps switching all of .photography over to Flickr. I've always been envious of the increased networking Ariel gets through her Flickr sidebar on her Website, and I'd like to think that perhaps being active on Flickr might increase traffic here. (Even though my DeviantArt account has yet to yield similar results.) The downside to this would be that I would lose the extra banner ad impressions I get by self-hosting my pictures, and while the amount of money I get from running ads on the .org isn't all that great, I don't think the potential gain in traffic from Flickr would make up for the loss of not getting an ad impression with every picture view.
Those are my primary concerns, so if any of you have any advice for those, or other suggestions for how to improve the .org's design, please reply to this entry. I probably won't be doing too much redesign work over the next few days because I'll have a lot of papers from my students to review starting tomorrow, but I'll probably sneak in the odd tweak here and there when I'm on break from looking at papers.
I hope it will come as a shock to some of you that I have a MySpace account. (I'll probably post a link to it in the next couple of days on the sidebar of my Website since I want to tool with it a bit soon, but it's fairly easy to find it if you want to go looking for it now.) MySpace has the reputation that it has for a reason, and under normal circumstances that reputation would pretty much preclude me from ever using it. The only reason I ever got a MySpace account was because I needed one to look at photos that some friends had put on their accounts, and for a long time there I basically had next to nothing on my profile. I don't remember what eventually caused me to fill out a full profile -- I'm guessing boredom was the likely culprit -- but I do now have something resembling a typical MySpace profile now, albeit without a million annoying Flash plug-ins and Web graphics that were obnoxious ten years ago. (My only real concession is that I do have a Jill Tracy song on my profile, but I don't think that's too big of a deal.)
Surprisingly, I've actually found MySpace to be a useful tool. Although I don't see myself going full-bore into it anytime soon (such as reposting my blog entries over there), MySpace has enabled me not only to keep in touch with some friends in a much easier way than other communication methods, but I've also managed to get back in touch with quite a few old friends through my profile as well. I haven't had similar luck with my Facebook profile -- that's even more bare-bones than my MySpace profile -- but for all that MySpace is maligned by most of the people I know (for reasons I mostly agree with), I've still managed to find it a useful tool. In fact, the first two jobs I applied to that I got to the interview stage on -- director for a local art gallery and a paid internship with the Kucinich campaign -- were jobs that I was first alerted to through MySpace.
What's got me thinking about MySpace so much lately is this phenomenon that's developed over the past couple of years where movies will set up their own MySpace profiles, and, in some cases, actually advertise their MySpace profiles as their primary Websites instead of a standard domain. Although my memory isn't 100% perfect on this, I could swear that I've seen more than just the teen/young adult-oriented movies (which probably get better publicity to their target audiences through MySpace than an ordinary Website) doing this. It's almost as if MySpace has kind of usurped the Web as a whole, at least among a certain age group, and honestly I can't say that I'm too thrilled at this prospect simply because MySpace, by its nature, will never be as open as the Internet as a whole, to say nothing of who operates MySpace and what kinds of ideas and stuff they might wind up censoring one day.
Another thing that came to mind recently when I was thinking about movies setting up a MySpace profile as a primary Website is the old ".to domain" shortcuts. Several years ago it seemed like everyone I knew was getting a come.to or travel.to domain or something similar. Back before I set up the .org, I even had http://come.to/seanshannon point to the tiny personal Website I kept on the free hosting I got from the dial-up ISP I had at the time. (It now directs to the .org.) If movies can't secure the movie's name as a domain name because all the usual extensions are taken (e.g. titanic.com, titanic.net, titanic.org), you'd think that they might pick up one of the .to domains. Then again, in recent years I can only recall seeing one advertisement for a Website that used a .to domain, so perhaps MySpace has already far and away usurped that target market from the people who snatched up those .to domains.
Back a few weeks ago when Halo 3 was released, I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I came on a story on a television news broadcast that claimed that one of the reasons Halo 3's release was such a big moment for the gaming community was that the game had a "great plot." The sole reasoning for the so-called "gaming expert" gave for this claim was that Halo 3 featured two different races of creatures to blow up. In all seriousness, how could anyone make such a ludicrous claim? I could go on a long tirade here about how the Xbox was basically designed and marketed to young men who need both a huge brick of a gaming system and a lot of games features armoured men holding big guns to help them compensate for their lack of size in other areas, but I'm trying to be nice about the whole thing. (Before anyone asks about my own Xbox, I only got it for the DDR games that came out for it a few years ago and, the only game I've ever bought for it that wasn't a rhythm/music game was Chessmaster.) I'm not saying that first-person shooters don't have their place in the gaming world, and I have no problem believing that the Halo games are some of the best of that genre, but to say Halo 3 has one of the best plots in video game history is like saying Independence Day has one of the best plots in movie history.
I've been playing with this movie analogy in my mind for a while ever since this one incident, and I guess the best way I can explain it to non-video gamers is that all the "shooting games" are basically the video game's equivalent of "popcorn movies." Sure, you get to see a lot of stuff blow up in really cool ways, and they can be quite fun and certainly have their entertainment value. However, if all you play are shooting games, then video games move from a potentially enriching experience to, for lack of a better phrase, mindless entertainment. The tie between diehard fans of games like Halo 3 and diehard fans of movies like the Rambo series should be fairly obvious, I hope. The Metal Gear Solid series is the only real series of shooting games that I think tries to bridge the divide to be something more meaningful, but it's kind of obvious from playing them that the games' producer (Kojima Hideo) couldn't cut it with his stuff in Hollywood and is thus forcing it upon the video game world, plus the games get too caught up in their tiny little clever geegaws to create a really coherent experience.
I suppose I would have thoughts like this as I continue to replay the greatest video game ever, Final Fantasy VII, which I'm kind of famous for evangelizing at every opportunity I get. The temptation of the previous analogy is to call Final Fantasy VII an art house film, but I think analogizing it to the Godfather movies (at least the first two) is more accurate; Final Fantasy VII was both profound yet accessible, perhaps not the biggest box office smash of all time at the time of its release but a movie that has endured, and if anything gotten better, in the many years since its release. Games more apt for the art house film analogy would be those other games Square released during this timeframe that practically required taking extensive notes just to keep up with all the characters and plotlines and symbology and all of that, like Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears. No, I don't know how my dancey games would fit into the analogy, thanks for asking.
Don Cherry died. No, not the Donald S. "Grapes" Cherry of my beloved Hockey Night in Canada, but a jazz trumpeter of the same first and last name. Yeah, I got nothing else today, so let's just get to the friday5.org Friday Five, especially since this week's edition came with special instructions ...
As you know, one of the bizarre traditions of the English language involves creative, appropriate collective names for groups of animals. Thus, we have a “pride” of lions, a “murder” of crows, and a “creep” of tortoises. We heard some time ago that this originated as a parlor game to pass the time for those land-rich people who never had to work, as portrayed in all those Jane Austen books. Whatever the origin, we ask you to play the game with us as we look at our own lives!
Um ... okay ...
1. What would be a good collective name for your family, as in "A _____ of Joneses?"
A commune of Shannons and Cloetes, since we're basically like a commune here, only with lots of electronics and no compost heap.
2. What would be a good collective name for your closest group of friends?
A void of emptiness. I have no friends. I walk alone.
3. What would be a good collective name for the stuff in your desk?
That's another zero-set since my desk has no actual drawers, save the keyboard drawer. I do have a small set of plastic drawers that I keep both my writing/office supplies as well as a few keepsakes in, though, so let's just call that a collection of useful items and miniature mementos.
4. What would be a good collective name for your next-door neighbors?
The last time I talked to one of my next-door neighbours has to have been over five years ago. The less said about them the better, so no answer here.
5. What would be a good collective name for the people in your line of work, as in "A _____ of accountants?"
A menagerie of eccentrics, particularly those of us in the English Department.
I've continued to use Google Desktop for the past several days, and even though I think I'm going to use it instead of Yahoo! Widgets for desktop tools, I'm still not entirely happy with the way a lot of the components have been working. (If anyone else uses Google Desktop, does Google's built-in music player consume a lot of RAM? Any time I try to do any wide-ranging search with it, my system seems to halt to a crawl, and I don't have that many MP3s on my computer.
I've appreciated the news feed that Google includes standard with Google Desktop, but I continue to be perplexed at the stories it selects to put in the window. Every day I get a large number of stories on European rugby and cricket, and while I have a passing interest in both sports I can't think any reason why Google would select all those stories for me. More to the point, I'm not sure how the content-selection system works, but only having the option to say "Don't show me more stories like this" doesn't help me that much. For example, I keep getting conservative op-ed columns from a British newspaper, and I'm not sure how pressing the "no more like this" button would work. I'd like to get op-ed columns, but I'd prefer them to be from American papers and news sources (I haven't seen a single American op-ed in the feed), and I'd like to at least get a more balanced selection of opinions than just conservative ones if not a greater tilt towards progressive, liberal columnists. It seems to me that it would be a lot simpler to just have checkboxes to say whether or not you want US news, world news, financial news, sports news, op-eds, and so on. I know Google loves its shiny technology and all, but in this case I just don't like the content selector for the news unit, and I still can't see the logic in what it thinks I want to read.
I suppose that I could use Google's RSS feed component as a kind of personalized news feed, but I'm running into a couple of problems there. First of all (and this is not Google's fault but it still creates a problem for me), nearly all of the progressive Websites and blogs I visit have already shifted into "we know Hillary stinks but if you vote Nader/Green you're worse than the conservatives" mode, making it difficult for me to find a good selection of progressive-minded RSS feeds that don't actively tick me off. (As of now, the Green Party's own RSS feed is the only one I've added.) Secondly, so far I've been using the RSS feed to keep up with my friends' entries on their Websites (most notably Ariel, Don, and Sterling), and it would be nice if I could have two copies of the component in my sidebar, so I could keep friends' writings and my personal news feed separate. I still can't find a way to get Google Desktop to let me do that, though, and I don't want to go through the trouble of writing my own component just to be able to keep two separate customizable RSS viewers.
Still, I suppose that what I have right now on there is decent, and I've certainly found ways to help maximize my productivity through some of the other components. Between that and downloading Trillian and finally making myself available on instant messenger services on a regular basis for the first time in ages, though, I'm finding that I've basically divided the widescreen flat panel I've been testing out here into two parts: a conventional-aspect left side for all my usual applications, and a bar on the right side for Trillian and Google Desktop. I wonder if other people who use widescreen flat panels on a regular basis do the same thing with their desktops.
The recent RIAA court case and subsequent judgment have me thinking about the whole music distribution debate more than usual. I have never used any of the file-sharing services myself, although my primary reasons for doing so are for covering my butt against things like these lawsuits from happening, and because I've never been a big fan of lossy compression formats like MP3 in the first place. That being said, I've generally been supportive of the idea of sharing music because I have a very strong dislike of the music industry in general. In any other industry, the fact that nine out of every ten albums the music industry releases lose money, along with deep consumer resentment over having to pay upwards of fifteen bucks for a CD with only one good song on it, would force the industry to make changes in the way they do business. However, since the RIAA has been so dominant and monopolistic historically, instead of changing with the times and making their industry friendlier to both recording artists and consumers alike, they just sued the hell out of everyone, and now it looks like the courts are going to help them along those lines. (Even when they have allegedly tried to adopt to the Internet, they've saddles us with things like draconian DRM and not offering songs in non-lossy file formats.) Personally, I still view music-swapping as a legitimate form of non-violent civil disobedience, and although I won't risk my own neck and continue to buy CDs of the music I want, I'm supportive of those who song-swap.
Perhaps another reason this has been on my mind so much lately is because I've kind of been going back to my own music here lately, in part because I recently reestablished contact with an old-friend and near-bandmate from my days at Antioch. Back then you didn't hear that much about MP3s, and even when you did hear about them they still took an achingly long time to download over dial-up connections. Although I've moved more and more towards writing over the past six years, I've never really given up on music, but figuring out if I could find a comfortable place as a professional musician is difficult. I certainly don't want to become a part of the RIAA given how strongly I disagree with the things they do, but at the same time they're still largely the only game in town. Yes, there are certainly some publicized cases of musicians striking it big outside of the RIAA's framework, but those are few and far between, and it was a lot easier to think about doing that when I was a student; now that I'm in the job market and paying off my student loans, it's difficult to consider the possibility of dropping everything and seeing if I could make a living off of music.
Even at that, the ability for people to make it outside of the RIAA is becoming worse, most notably through Congress continuing to pass Internet radio laws that squeeze out the smaller Internet stations that provide the best venue for independent artists, such as the ones at my beloved somafm.com. The state of America's music industry is hardly the most pressing issue we face in this day and age, but I still think it's a representative microcosm of the potential for big business, in collusion with certain politicians, to poison an industry so that the only people who actually reap significant benefits from it are the executives. I come from a family where music has always played a deep role in all of our lives, and if you've read my work for any amount of time then you know how important music has been to me, and it's hard not to be saddened by the fact that the corporate fatcats of the music industry have just made it all the harder both for musicians to get their music out there, and for consumers to be able to find good music at a reasonable price.
It being a Sunday night here at the Shannon house, everyone else in the house was watching Family Guy a short time ago. I had a Red Wings game, but even if I hadn't, I guess I haven't really latched onto Family Guy the same way everyone else in the house has. It's not that I don't like the show; I think it can be quite funny at times, but at the same time it just doesn't really feel to me like the kind of show that I absolutely have to catch. (I haven't asked my comp students if they're big Family Guy fans; if they are, then I might catch the show just to be conversant with them about it.) I certainly like the show much more than The Simpsons and South Park, although Drawn Together remains my favourite animated show currently in regular airing. (Of course, that's the show that's most likely to bite the dust soon, but I've pretty much come to expect that from the shows I like.)
Although I don't make a point of catching Family Guy on a regular basis, I do read news stories about the show on a regular basis just because I think it's kind of funny just how many people are objecting to their content being parodied and satirized on the show. In both of the recent cases I can think of -- Carol Burnett and the writer of "When You Wish Upon a Star" -- I've certainly sided with Family Guy, even though I've never seen the bits at the hearts of the two lawsuits. In both cases, the entities bringing the suits are fairly iconic, and I'm sure that their material has been similarly parodied dozens of times before. Perhaps Family Guy's popularity is what is inspiring the lawsuits, but it seems to me that it's more likely that the entities are objecting to the more "adult" treatment that the writers of Family Guy give to their bits.
This makes me consider the notion of whether or not the owners of certain bits should be able to selectively decide who can and cannot parody/satirize their work based on the nature of the bit. On the one hand, if you do even a small bit of digging on the Internet, it's easy to find the work of some really sick people whose mission in life seems to be to profane and ruin pretty much anything that anyone else considers sacred, adding blood and gore and sex and stuff to any topic you can think of, and my gut reaction when I see such material is to puke. However, I'm just too big of a First Amendment advocate to even consider advocating that the makers of this material should be prosecuted for it. Even though I haven't watched that much Family Guy, I get the general impression that the writers have a fair amount of respect for the cultural tidbits that they skewer (the lack of which in South Park makes that show quite difficult for me to watch), and even if that might not show through so easily when they do deliberately adult stuff, I think that compared to how other shows out there might skewer their stuff, the people who get parodied/satirized in Family Guy get off relatively easy.
... that Herman Wouk's play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, based on his seminal book The Caine Munity, was first staged. It bowed on Broadway some three months later for a somewhat modest run, but its 1983 Broadway revival is notable for being the only Broadway production featuring one of New York City's favourite sons, Jets quarterback and hall-of-famer Joe Namath. No word on whether or not he was wearing one of his netted slingshot briefs on-stage. On that disturbing note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What was the last thing you baked?
A vegetarian pepperoni pizza, about an hour ago. Half was my lunch, the other half will be next Friday's lunch. Not counting pizzas, last Friday I baked up a batch of my world-famous brownies for Lara.
2. What was the last thing you tried on for size?
Probably the last coat I bought a couple of years ago. I'm reminded now that I should probably pick up a new coat soon. (I've lost a fair bit of weight since I last had to wear coats, and I'd like to treat myself to a smaller one.)
3. What was the last thing you purchased on credit?
I don't have any credit cards nor do I want any. The best answer I can put here is the last semester I took at UT, since I had to take out more student loans for it.
4. What was the last thing you put a postage stamp on?
A rebate offer for the flat panel monitor I bought for my father's next computer, and I think I mailed out a CV to try to get another local teaching job at the same time.
5. What was the last thing you took a photo of?
Probably a AAA (perfect score) of a DDR song for my diet log. Not counting pictures of my dancey game accomplishments, I honestly can't remember. (I'd meant to take a photo of Lara when I saw her in Cleveland last weekend, but I forgot.)
Once you cross the state line into Michigan on US-23, the exit ramps don't really have that many fast food places or restaurants nearby until you get up to the city of Dundee, about seventeen miles north of the border. In particular, the exit I take to get to work has no gas stations and no restauarants. It takes me about a half-hour from when I cross the state line to get to campus, and the only real store I pass on the way there is a fairly small "market" that looked to me like it basically sold everything a modern-day gas station would, minus the gas. I use the past tense because apparently sometime in the past week the store shuttered its doors for good, or at least that's what the sign out in front of the store seems to indicate.
This doesn't affect me much because I always make sure to do all the shopping I need to do while I'm still in Ohio, but this has forced me to consider the demands of rural living. I live within a five-minute drive of both a Meijer and a 24-hour Kroger, and if I weren't boycotting Wal*Mart I could go to one that's even closer than the Meijer and Kroger. Here at the house, if we run out of some staple (say milk), it's certainly a bit of a pain to have to get around and go get some, but it's not that big of a deal. I guess it never occurred to me until now just how difficult it must be for those people in rural Michigan who don't live anywhere close to any kind of real grocery store or gas station to make those trips for one or two items that were either forgotten in the last grocery trip or ran out earlier than expected. The closure of that market just off of US-23 must create a huge pain for the people who live around there, and it makes me wonder if I could live in a similar locale. I mean, yes, I could if I had to, but I think I may be too addicted to some of the conveniences of modern living to want to live that far away from a Kroger or Meijer.
I'm still finding ways in which Toledo manages to screw things up, too. Just before you cross the border from Michigan into Ohio, there's a sign that tells you to tune your radio to 1630 AM to get information on any traffic problems in the area. This is a nice service to have, and even though I don't have any real need for it, the other day I decided I'd tune my own radio to the station just to hear it. Unfortunately, I was then confronted with the fact that my car radio only goes up to 1620 AM before it loops back into the 500s, and 1620 is far to buzzy to make out anything that might be on 1630. Granted, I'm driving a minivan that was made in 1988, so it's not exactly that new of a car, but you would think that city of Toledo (or the Ohio Department of Transportation or whoever is responsible for the traffic station) would have the good sense to put the station on a middle band where more people could access it.
Lost amidst yesterday's obligatory anti-Cleveland sports joke was the fact that I did, in fact, go to Cleveland for the third time in my life on Saturday. The first time was in 1995 to see Björk perform at the Agora; the second time was this past winter to attend a dance game tournament being co-run by Lara. (I arrived too late to take part in the tournament, but I mostly went to show Lara support and to provide brownies and cookies for the participants.) This third time I pretty much just hung out with Lara and played dancey games with her. For a change, the trip went pretty much as planned, and in addition to having a fun time hanging out with her I also enjoyed stopping at a number of service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike and paying way too much for bad food. (Seriously, there's just something about that experience that appeals to me.) I missed most of Hockey Night in Canada that night, but that's kind of a small price for me to pay, especially considering how infrequently I get to socialize these days.
As I mentioned before the trip, I'm hoping that I can get Lara over here for an afternoon soon. Given that Toledo has never been that good of a location for dancey games, I figured that the best thing we could do would be to photograph the autumn leaves together, and so far she sounds up for it. The only real problem I'm running into is trying to figure out what would be the best Saturday for it. Right now it's still kind of early in the season; there are a fair number of leaves on the ground in our backyard, but they're mostly of the yellow and tan varieties, and the trees themselves are still mostly green. I think that rules out this coming Saturday, but I'm not sure which of the next two Saturdays would be better. I've been looking through my autumn galleries in .photography trying to determine if the 20th or the 27th would be better, and it kind of feels like a day in between would be best. (Unfortunately a mid-week trip is out of consideration because of our usual commitments.) Then again, I'm guessing that trying to figure out the weather to that extent is probably an exercise in futility at best.
The first two days of the week this week we broke 90 degrees each day, then today we only got up to about 75 or so. Starting tomorrow the highs are only scheduled to be in the mid 50s to low 60s for the foreseeable future, so it's finally going to start feeling like autumn here shortly. In all honestly I'm more concerned with how the lower temperatures will interfere with my workout schedule (I've been playing dancey games in the garage a lot these past few months and I'm probably thinner than I've been in over three years now), but I do hope to get out a bit more here and enjoy the changing of the seasons. We're just starting to get the first patches of gold on some of the trees now, and even though I like it most when we get the reds and oranges in full bloom, it's still gorgeous out now. I should probably make a trip to another park by myself here just so I can really document this autumn in full, both for my own personal record and to show the rest of you.
I can't say that I'm too happy that the Tigers didn't make the playoffs this year, but I'm even more disappointed that the Yankees made it in, which has caused the usual amount of disturbing behaviour from the other members of this house. The highlight came last night when my sister discovered that some of the frozen meat patties she had bought were from one of the companies that recently recalled a lot of cow carcass because of e.coli contamination (and gee there have been a lot of those lately), so she decided to have them cooked up, crumbled up and tossed out on our front porch along with the other foodstuffs we put out there for the squirrels and birds and such. Now, this in and of itself is kind of worrisome but not that big a deal, except for the fact that when my sister decided to put the patties in the fridge to thaw, she put them on the top shelf. To be more precise, she put them on the top shelf directly below my part of the lower shelf of the fridge. For all that my sister loves all the television chefs I can't stand (Alton Brown and Paula Dean to name two) and plays their television shows loudly and quotes them at every opportunity, this was an egregious error to make in terms of food safety, and I'm still kind of steamed about it.
On the subject of baseball, I wanted to say something about the tens of thousands of annoying, obnoxious insects at the game in Cleveland on Friday, but then I thought that if I was going to write about the game, I should write about the bugs that swarmed the field. Oh, I kill me. (See, this is why as much as I love Dennis Kucinich, I could never work for him, because I still have that anti-Cleveland thing going in my head from decades of being a Detroit sports fan. Well, that and the whole Democratic party thing.)
Anyway, it's hard to care much about baseball when I've got hockey again, with a Red Wings game on my television as I type this now. I had to laugh when I saw a recent news article talking about the problems the Red Wings have had filling Joe Louis Arena that mentioned things like Michigan's poor economy and the resurgence of the Tigers as reasons for the attendance downturn. Not that those reasons don't have some validity, but nowhere in the whole article was there any mention of the Wings letting Darren McCarty go and the Red Wings being at the bottom of the league in fighting majors in every year since. (I didn't know until a few days ago that Anaheim actually led the league in fighting majors last year, which is certainly cause for rumination.) Seriously, unless NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman starts embracing fighting soon, the whole league is going to be in even deeper jeopardy than it's already in. It's not like hockey's ever been that popular outside of the "hockey belt" here in the States, and now even in traditionally hockey-loving states, we're just getting sick of the NHL and Bettman's rule.
If there is one plus side to the Red Wings' attendance downturn (the Joe wasn't even close to being sold out for their home opener), it's that I think it's finally time for me to go catch a game there. I may have missed seeing a game at Tiger Stadium before it shuttered, and I'm not old enough that catching a Wings game at the Olympia was ever an option for me, but it's about time for me to go catch the Wings in action while there are still plenty of good seats. My only real problem is that there's no way I'm going up there by myself, and with the family all Yankees-dazed I'll have to find a friend locally to go up to Detroit with me. Given how few friends I have in town these days this could be a bit of a problem, but I think I may know a couple of people who'd be willing to keep me company, at least if I bought their ticket and Little Caesars for them.
A few days ago I finally downloaded Google Desktop to my computer. Honestly I don't see myself ever using its searching feature that much -- I keep a well-organized computer and work diligently at keeping all my files in their proper spaces, and whenever I do miss a file the built-in search in Windows is usually more than enough to help me -- but I wanted to try Google's desktop gadgets to see how they compare to Yahoo! Widgets, which I've been using since shortly after Yahoo! acquired and rebranded Konfabulator. I must say that I like the sidebar functionality, and I find myself using things on the sidebar whose comparable Yahoo! widgets I never touched before. However, there are small things that bother me about nearly all the gadgets that have me thinking that I might actually switch back to Yahoo! soon. (Not to mention the fact that Google Desktop sometimes seems to slow my computer down to a crawl, particularly if I load a Flash-heavy Website.)
First of all, I don't like how I have to either shoot the calendar out to the side to see my scheduled events for the day, or else give the gadget an intolerable amount of space. By comparison, the comparable Yahoo! Widget only shows events listed for the day and doesn't force you to keep a full calendar up. (I don't use computer-based scheduling that much, but I'm guessing that once I teach multiple classes I'll really need it to help me keep things straight.) I don't like how you can't remove Google's search box from the side (I prefer to launch all my Web sessions directly from my browser), particularly when Google's already got their logo at the top of the sidebar. The news bar is nice, but as with Google's own news service on their Website, I just don't see any logic in how it selects stories. (Right now I seem to be getting a lot of cricket news and items from Slashdot for seemingly no reason.) The music player is nice, but it's hard to find stuff given how tiny it is, and the lack of an ability to sort by genre really inconveniences me since I use genre sort in my usual MP3 player to sort between my new age stuff, my game music stuff, and my more rock-based stuff, so I have stuff to play depending on what kind of mood I'm in.
What I really don't get is why neither Yahoo! nor Google are offering a customizable sports scoreboard. (There's third-party stuff out there, but none of it works well.) I would figure that this would be one of the most clamored-after things the general public would be asking for, but I'm still waiting for a good scoreboard to come out. Similarly, I'm still waiting after all this time for Yahoo! to put a Launchcast station player out as a widget; if they ever did that, I'd probably stay loyal to Yahoo! Widgets for life, given how pleased I've been with Launchcast over these past couple of years. I still need to see if I can get my soma.fm stations running using an Internet radio Google Gadget, but that can wait for a bit.
Earlier today I also downloaded Trillian for the first time. Back in the day I used ICQ a fair bit, but then all of my friends switched to Yahoo! Messenger so I used that for a while, and now all of my friends are on AIM. I had been using AIM's own software, but after reading this item about the huge security flaw there, I decided that maybe switching to Trillian would be a good idea. Given that I don't like to dress my IM environment up that much (and I hardly ever IM as it is), it's working out well for me so far, although I'm kind of worried because I'm not seeing anywhere near as many people online as I usually do this time of night, making me wonder if they're online and Trillian just isn't showing me.
... Monty Python's Flying Circus was broadcast for the first time on the BBC. Exactly one year later, the PBS' television arm was founded. There certainly isn't a shortage of coincidences there. And now for something completely different: it's ... the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. Of the people in your life, who is Most Likely to Succeed?
Given how tight I keep my circle of friends right now, all of these questions are going to be difficult to answer, but I'll do the best I can. For this I'll say my friend Anna-Marie, who is currently at Bond University in Australia getting her Masters in Film.
2. Of the people in your life, who has the Dreamiest Eyes?
I honestly don't have a better answer for this than a female dance game player I've met all of once named Fie; she has very deep eyes that I found strangely entrancing the one time I was in the same room as her.
3. Of the people in your life, who is the Cutest Couple?
The only real couple I can think of right now are Lara and her boyfriend Jason (the latter of whom I've never met), so I guess they win by default.
4. Of the people in your life, who is Most Changed?
Um ... me? Seriously, I'm having a hard time even thinking of people for these answers, and even if I could, I kind of try to avoid talking about my friends' personal affairs on here for the sake of not saying anything that they don't want revealed about themselves.
5. Of the people in your life, who is the Geekiest?
I'll have to go with myself again here, because I can't think of anyone I know who is geekier than I am.
I probably should have gone with something completely different for this Friday, given how difficult it was to answer those questions.
This coming Saturday I'm heading to Cleveland to play dancey games and chat with my friend Lara. I've been wanting to hang with her for a while now -- I last saw her this past winter at a dance game tournament she was helping to run, and since she was so busy running the tournament we really didn't have much of a chance to talk -- but it was only in the past couple of weeks we were able to work the specifics out. (I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll have something special for all of you shortly after this trip.) Although we haven't worked it out yet, I'm hoping that she'll return the favour in a week or two and come to Toledo, likely to go take photos of the leaves at our local parks, hit a pizzeria, and maybe go down to Levis Commons (I think she'll dig the architecture there). It'll be a fun time, given how Lara is one of the few people I know whom I can feel comfortable calling a friend at this point.
This, unfortunately, will segue all too well into the heart of this entry. Last night I discovered (I won't say how because I need to protect another friend) that this Saturday, while I'm in Cleveland, there will be a multi-year reunion of Spectrum members going on at UT's campus. Given that this event is apparently being organized by the person who not only drove me out of Spectrum but also has yet to do anything about the hundreds of dollars of my personal effects that I have yet to get back from other Spectrum members, I can't say that I was expecting an invitation, and even if I'd gotten one I probably wouldn't have wanted to go. Still, there is something about the fact that I was left so out of the loop on this reunion that just gets under my skin. I hate being bitter about anything, but the way I was forced out of Spectrum still feels wrong, and even now that I'm long gone from UT I still feel like there's this huge cloud hanging over me from a wrong that was done to me that I never tried to right.
What bothers me the most is the sheer immaturity of this situation. I announced my decision to leave Spectrum on this blog because I knew some members of the group were reading this, and I know that someone did because I said that I wanted off of Spectrum's mailing list here, and I never got another e-mail from them. However, in that same post I also made a list of all the things that were owed to me -- my own possessions that had gotten scattered about during three years as a part of Spectrum's officer team -- and I have yet to still hear about any of them, let alone get them back. I have left messages on Spectrum's voicemail, slipped notes under the door to their physical office, sent e-mails, gotten Spectrum faculty advisors involved, and done everything else I could think of to get my stuff back, and all I've gotten back is silence. It's not just that some of the items cost a lot and can't really be replaced, but some of them have very strong sentimental value to me, including the first full-size music keyboard my parents ever bought for me.
On the off-chance that there is still someone from Spectrum reading this, I want my stuff back. No matter what some people in the group may think of me, that does not make it acceptable to keep my personal possessions from me after repeated attempts to get them back. This infantile behaviour has got to stop.
Madonna nominated for Rock Hall of Fame (AP via Yahoo! News)
Given that an artist/group has to wait twenty-five years after his/her/their first album to be nominated, this kind of reminds me of just how old I am. (Did I mention the laugh I got out of my students when I mentioned pagers a couple of weeks ago?) I can still remember back when we first got MTV and they started to do their first bit of "regular" programming, playing a new video from a hot artist at the top of every hour. When MTV started doing this, it seemed like they'd cycle through the same three artists every three hours: Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna. I was a bigger fan of Michael and Cyndi when I was younger, but as I grew older and Madonna went through her S&M phase I gravitated towards her for most of my teenage years. I haven't followed Madonna seriously for over a decade now, and given what I've heard of her recent music this is probably a good thing, but to realize that it's been about twenty-five years now since "Holiday" first hit the airwaves makes me feel older than dirt.
Looking at the article, I'm kind of dismayed that only five of the nine nominees can make it in, given that incredibly strong cases could be made for all of them to be inducted. Like Madonna or not, her influence and her ability to reinvent herself successfully, over and over again, kind of makes her a given. Likewise, the Beastie Boys (I actually have their pre-Licensed to Ill albums on cassette somewhere) have been one of the most enduring acts in modern music history, and I don't think their influence on several generations of artists can be overstated. Leonard Cohen ... yeah, why wasn't he inducted, like, ages ago? Ditto for Afrika Bambaataa, John Mellencamp, and the Dave Clark Five. I'm a bit less certain about the Ventures, and I admit that my love of disco may be influencing my opinions on Donna Summer and Chic, but still and all, I don't know how you don't induct all of them. I realize a hall of fame is supposed to be "best of the best," but all of the nominees certainly qualify for that.
This news is also making me think about the likelihood of my favourite artists ever making the hall. Technically Björk could be nominated any year since she did release a self-titled album in Iceland back in 1977 that went Platinum there, and if her Y Kant Tori Read album counts then Tori Amos will be eligible fairly soon. I don't think either of them would ever get in, though, which is a crying shame. I think Sarah McLachlan would stand a good chance just because she broke through to the mainstream a bit more, plus she'll have the whole Lilith Fair thing going for her. As much as I know I shouldn't take the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seriously (it's in Cleveland, for crying out loud), I still can't help but feel a bit sad and a bit angry that the artists I love the most probably won't be inducted while other acts I don't like will probably get in after their first year of eligibility (Guns n Roses and Green Day just to name two).
Conservatives consider 3rd-party run (AP via Yahoo! News)
I kind of half-expected that there would be a conservative backlash coming up as we got closer to primary season and Giuliani was still polling at the top of the Republican candidates. I don't think the timing of this is coincidental, either; even though I know that this conference had been planned for some time, I doubt we would have seen the kind of harsh rhetoric that came out if it if Gingrich hadn't dropped out of any potential run earlier. I honestly thought that Gingrich was going to come in and swoop up the nomination because he could unify the more religious element of the Republican party with those who were looking for Giuliani-like name recognition, but that's all out the window now.
Of course now this raises the question of just what the Republican Party will do in response to this. In the past there's hardly been a big stink raised by Republican operatives of votes going to Libertarian candidates being "wasted," or at least not anything approaching the vitriol that Democrats have thrown at Green/Nader voters over the past seven years. (For that matter, you hardly hear any talk at all about the Constitution Party, which would likely be the best home for the Religious Right if they leave the Republican fold.) Given the huge numbers of self-identified Religious Right voters, particularly in key Southern states that should be considered "in play" for '08 after the midterm elections, this kind of split would all but guarantee a Democrat in the White House in 2009. If Karl Rove wasn't already masterminding the Republicans' presidential campaign after leaving the White House, Republicans are probably banging down his door now to try to get him to fix this huge problem that is just now surfacing on the major newswires and political television shows.
This would be a lot more satisfying were it not for Democrats racing towards nominating Clinton. (As much as I think it's absurd to be talking like the tickets are already determined this early in the campaign season -- remember how likely it seemed that Dean would be the Democratic candidate at this point four years ago -- it's hard not to bet against Clinton right now because the Clintons just don't make political mistakes.) Particularly given how ineffective congressional Democrats have been since they regained the majority -- witness the continued war funding and the sad state of affairs over the MoveOn.org ad -- you would hope that truly liberal Democrats would break from the party in equal numbers this next year and help give the Green Party as much legitimacy at it gained after Nader's showing in 2000. More than anything, you would hope that this would be the year that America has a giant epiphany about how absurd our two-party system is and we finally get a strong multi-party system in place, but for some reason I just don't see that happening.