For all that this presidential election gets talked up as being so historic, and for all that it has generated an unprecedented level of enthusiasm (at least for as far back as my own memory stretches), I seem to get more and more tired of it by the day. It was kind of a given that once Obama got the nomination he'd start moving to the centre, but I guess I allowed myself to get caught up in that whole "he's not that kind of politician" gimmick enough that all the stuff that he's done recently, most notably his decision to support a bill that gives telecommunication providers partial immunity for any illegal activities they performed at the behest of the current administration, has kind of depressed me. I never got the allure of McCain, and it seems like the veneer has all but worn off of the "Straight Talk Express" by this point. I don't know how this is going to end, but I do know that I want it to end soon. The primary campaign went on for too long, and from the looks of things we're just in for more of the same until November; Hillary Clinton will probably wind up getting nearly as much television time as an Obama surrogate as she did from her own campaign.
It doesn't help that my own choices for this election continue to be less than optimal. If Ralph Nader had just run for the Green Party nomination I wouldn't have any problems right now, but now Nader and Cynthia McKinney are going to split the progressive vote. Although my support is still behind Nader over McKinney, that support is tenuous. If I were thinking about voting strategtically -- you know, all of this "party over conscience" stuff everyone else does -- I'd vote for McKinney simply to help keep the Green Party strong. If I voted solely on my gut, Nader would get my vote because I still don't get a good feeling off of McKinney. Issues should be the thing I base my decision on, but that hasn't worked out so well for me because Nader and McKinney are kind of similar on the issues. For a while I thought I favoured Nader on the issues a little more, but the more I read up, the more I find myself trending towards McKinney.
I haven't looked into Bob Barr's campaign that much, but as much as I have some libertarian leanings, I know that I don't agree with a great deal of the Libertarian Party platform. Still, you would think that the media, particularly the Democratic Party echo chambers I invariably wind up listening to, would pay more attention to Barr's campaign due to its ability to "play spoiler" on McCain. After seven and a half years of hearing Nader get dumped on, I'd like to have it start going the other way now. For that matter, I'd really like to hear Barr and Nader and McKinney and whoever the Constitution Party puts up get some serious press here, because there's enough festering just below the surface of the Big Two parties that the third party candidates should be more viable than ever, assuming the media gets off of its collective butts, and starts actually reporting on them in a serious manner.
Labels: greenparty, politics
The world's first automatic teller machine, or ATM, was installed in Enfield in London. Some people from that day are still waiting to get their money. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What was the last thing you purchased from a vending machine?
A week ago Thursday, just before the semester-end party for my comp students, I bought a bottle of LifeWater from a vending machine on the MCCC campus. I'm getting addicted to that stuff, particularly VitaminWater XXX.
2. What was the last thing you made copies of on a photocopier?
Handouts for my current crop of comp students. I made most of the handouts ahead of time this term so I wouldn't have to worry about the copier malfunctioning just before class when I need to use it.
3. When did you last use a pay telephone?
I believe in 2000 when I needed Dad to pick me up from the Greyhound station after making a trip to Cincinnati. That was my last major outing until I started going back to school, and I got a cell phone right after 09.11.
4. How often do you visit an automatic teller machine?
As little as I have to. I don't like walking around with cash these days, and if I need cash I just take some out when I make a grocery run and pay with my debit card.
5. Which of your daily tasks would you most like to see automated?
Cooking. Particularly since I went back on my diet a few weeks ago, I've had to spend a lot more time cooking than I used to, and I need all of the time I can get these days.
Labels: fridayfive
From my previous experience going to school with the children of the owners of our local cable provider (and the local paper as well), I know that the people in charge of my cable are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is a cable system, after all, that thinks that there are enough sports in Toledo for us to have our own 24-hour all-local sports channel. (They actually broadcast some of the gym games from my old private school.) This is a cable system where each of the big three local television networks have their own 24-hour local weather channels, none of which are any good. (I'm hoping that NBC buys up The Weather Channel so we can get a proper Weatherscan channel in here.) It's not like I have much time to watch television right now -- I only watch to keep up on news and the pop culture of the students I teach -- but I don't exactly have that many good options available to me here in Toledo.
Our cable company's latest brainchild is a 24-hour local real estate listings channel. I'm not particularly sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this channel bowed right in the middle of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but it doesn't strike me as a good omen. That being said, the idea of having a real estate channel strikes me on some levels as novel; television offers a lot of ways for real estate agents to market their properties that aren't available through traditional channels, such as walk-through tours of properties. The thing is, the only actual motion video on the channel, apart from the commercials, are "handy how-tos" segments from the too-perky, too-plastic "host" of the channel. When they actually show a house on the channel, they only show the same static photos you'd find in a listings magazine, or a Website from ten years ago. Some of the photos even look like they were taken using a disposable camera with a lens that someone sneezed over before using it.
The idea of having a television channel without moving images is silly enough, but at least they have audio on there. Unfortunately, in addition to featuring the same kind of low-grade muzak you'd expect on a channel like this, the audio consists of different people reading the fill-in-the-blanks advertising copy the realtors come up with to try to sell the house. That stuff is bad enough to read, but when people are saying it aloud, and the same key bullshit phrases get repeated every fifteen minutes ("cozy" means you'll feel like a sardine packed in there, "needs TLC" means that the walls are falling apart, etc.), you can literally feel people's opinions of real estate agents drop. I'd laugh at how poorly put together this channel is if it wasn't so sad.
Labels: television
My first "summer" course ended this past Thursday, and after grading a bunch of portfolios I got to go right back to teaching the exact same course again a second time. I love teaching dearly, but I signed up for these classes back before Dad died, and I'm beginning to worry that I need a break soon to help me recharge and take care of a number of things I've been neglecting these past few months. I only have a dozen students in this class, though, so maybe my workload won't be quite as great as it has been lately. My commute is a whole lot easier as well, since I'm teaching at MCCC's satellite campus just across the Ohio/Michigan border; in addition to saving time, I estimate I'll be able to save at least $15 a week on gas as well. The class also ends on July 31, meaning that unless I pick up an extra course in the autumn, I'll have the entire month of August to myself, so I do have that to look forward to.
Still, unlike all of my other classes at MCCC which were in the evenings, this is an early afternoon course. Normally I'd be driving up to campus at this time of day, not already home and decompressing. When I first signed up for this class I didn't think that getting up earlier would be that much of a hassle, but I forgot just how much my body tends to gravitate towards the dark hours when we're this close to the solstice. I've always been a bit of a night person, and although I've gotten better at doing things in daylight, there's still a part of me that nurtures the darkness and wants to be awake for those late, late hours. I go back to teaching evenings in the fall, though, so unless I pick up another course, I only have to worry about waking early these next six weeks. I still get thrown off when I leave the house and the sun is in the eastern sky, though, just because I'm so unused to going out of the house that early in the day.
I should probably take advantage of this current schedule to go and do some photography after class one of these days. I've been meaning to get to Wildwood to take more photos here for a while, although I have a stronger urge to hit the Toledo Botanical Garden at the present moment. (I've been using my previous photos from there as desktop wallpaper on my new computer, which probably explains why.) I'd go out and work out in the garage now if my dance pads weren't messed up. I just hope that my body can get used to this new schedule, because it is definitely throwing me off right now to have the sun still be so high in the sky after work. At least I can count on the sun being there. (RIP George Carlin.)
Labels: personal, teaching, weather, work
... American television saw a collaboration that, in hindsight, seems almost incomprehensible. Martin and Lewis came on to help preview the music of South Pacific alongside its composers, Rodgers and Hammerstein. That in and of itself would be extremely notable, except that this meeting of two of the most high-powered American entertainment duos of the 20th century came on the debut of a new show called Toast of the Town ... a show that would, several years later, rename itself by the name the American public usually referred to it by: The Ed Sullivan Show. Hey, at least Letterman got a sweet theatre out of the deal. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s too spicy for your tastes?
Although I am a longtime fan of Emeril's Essence seasoning blend, as well as Morningstar Farms' vegetarian version of buffalo wings, both of which are quite spicy, for some reason even the mildest Mexican hot sauce just sets my tongue in a tizzy.
2. What’s too sweet for your tastes?
A couple of months ago I tried Jolly Rancher soda. It tasted like cooled-down melted sugar.I think you can get diabetes just by looking at the bottle the wrong way.
3. What’s too salty for your tastes?
A lot of things; I've never been much for salt, and I always get low-sodium foods whenever they're available.
4. What’s too bitter for your tastes?
I have nearly no taste for bitter foods. Nothing in particular springs to mind right now, but there are a lot of foods I won't eat because they're too bitter.
5. What’s too sour for your tastes?
Again, I don't like sour stuff. Anything with vinegar in it just tastes awful to me, which is why I've had all of half of a sushi roll my entire life.
Labels: fridayfive
In addition to having a few bird feeders in front of our front deck here at the house, we also tend to keep a bowl full of food -- various seeds and leftovers we humans don't want to eat -- on our porch itself. Birds, squirrels, raccoons, and even the odd cat come by and keep us company, and in addition to making things more active around here, it helps us to feel better. Only rarely do we have stray dogs in the neighbourhood, especially after the police went around to the dog owners around here and told them that the leash laws were about to be enforced a lot more strictly than they were before. Even when the dogs do come, they don't tend to care for the food we put out there, and we can usually scare them away quite easily because they're rather timid.
Imagine how we felt yesterday, then, when not one but two huge black rottweilers -- easily as big as I am -- came bounding up to our front deck and started eating from our animal bowl. They had no collars or tags on them, and no amount of yelling at them or banging on the glass door separating the house from the porch would make them go away. They weren't barking or looking mean at all, but to have two dogs of that size suddenly pop up on our deck was more than a little disconcerting. We called our local police, and they said that they would send someone down as soon as they could to look into the matter. Given how quickly the first officer showed up, I'm guessing he probably left the station just as soon as Mom got done calling him.
However, that wasn't quick enough. Mom went back towards the door to yell at the dogs some more to get them to disperse, at which point one of the dogs raised up on his hind legs and used his front paws to claw loudly on the front window. At this point Mom screamed bloody murder, and I can't blame her in the slightest because I probably would have done the same thing. If this house hadn't been rebuilt a few years back, the dog probably could have pushed through the glass just by his weight alone, and even if the dogs were friendly we still would have had the issue of all that broken glass getting on Mom. Eventually the police officer called the county dog warden, who came by and took both dogs away, but not before I'd done a fair bit of screaming myself to try to get the dogs to leave.
Any episode like this, in and of itself, would have been difficult to deal with. What made this one all the worse for me, though, was that as Mom started screaming, all I could think about was her having a heart attack or seizure or something like that. I probably would have thought about that stuff no matter what, but for a few seconds there -- and like the old cliché goes, they seemed like an eternity -- I was thinking about the possibility of losing Mom less than four months after I lost Dad. I harbour no illusions of Mom living to be 100 or anything close to that, and I know that I will never fully "get over" Dad's death, but I need Mom more than ever now, and if I were to lose her I don't know what I would do. The next time there's a dog on the loose, no matter how big or small, cute or scary, I'm calling the cops, because I don't want to have to deal with another situation like that ever again.
Labels: personal
Here's this week's friday5.org Friday Five.
1. Who gave you your last balloon, and what was the occasion?
The day after my birthday this year, a few of my students in one of my comp classes set up a birthday party for me in class, including a whole lot of helium balloons topped off with a huge Powerpuff Girls balloon. Even though nearly all of the helium has drained out of them, I still have the balloons out in the loft.
2. Who gave you your last scolding, and what was it for?
I can't remember clearly, and I'm afraid it might have been Dad for some small thing.
3. Who gave you your last attaboy, and why?
I'm fairly certain this was Dad, and again, it would have way too long ago.
4. Who gave you your last haircut?
A woman at a First Choice in the mall near where my sister currently lives. In 1989. No, I'm not kididng.
5. Who gave you your last massage?
I've gotten massages before, but it would have been several years ago, probably before I went back to school.
Labels: fridayfive
I can't say that I've been all that pleased with all the airplay that Bill O'Reilly's meltdown on Inside Edition has gotten these past few weeks. Granted, I don't care for O'Reilly much at all, and I won't deny feeling a touch of the old schadenfreude when I saw the video the first few times. The video got really old in a hurry for me, though, and the more I see other people harp on it over and over -- Keith Olbermann is the most famous of these people, but I'm even thinking about liberal bloggers here -- the more I lose my taste for it. You can only tell a joke so many times in a given time frame before people stop laughing and start rolling their eyes whenever someone starts to tell the setup, and in a similar fashion you can only show that video so many times before O'Reilly dropping those f-bombs and blowing his stack gets banal and blasé.
Those of you who remember the pre-.org days doubtlessly remember me doing similar stuff online back in the day. Yes, I'm actually empathisizing with Bill O'Reilly here; it isn't the first time I've done so, and it likely won't be the last. We all have episodes like that, but some of us happen to do it in a more public, amusing, and downright stupid fashion. Doing it on the Internet is the worst of all because it's so easy for someone to make a permanent record of it; it's only been in the past few years that I've really come to understand how everything I do online can and will come back to haunt me. I'm assuming that people in front of television cameras should similarly run under the assumption that anything they do in front of the camera, whether or not the little red light is on, could find its way out into the world later. At least I would assume so today in our satellite and digital recording era; back in 1989, though, I have to assume that not as much was being recorded due to the costs of professional videotape and archiving and all of that. Regardless, I think Bill O'Reilly had an expectation of privacy there that kind of got screwed over, and regardless of how amusing or vulgar or just plain wrong his Inside Edition meltdown was, to be making such a big deal out of it nearly two decades later strikes me as, well, kind of missing the point. Shouldn't people who dislike O'Reilly be spending their time constructing solid arguments against his positions, not laughing over him shouting at his camera crew from nineteen years ago?
Episodes like this really make you double back on your own steps to make sure that you're not doing anything that could come back to haunt you later. I mean, I like to think that I blog openly, but there's lots of stuff I want to say on here that I don't say because I'm worried it could be used against me later. (Hence my relative silence about Dad's death, at least for now.) I've been using Twitter for several weeks now, though, and that's just adding another layer of coverage about me, by me, that is part of a permanent record about my life and the things I'm doing. Now that Apple's incorporating GPS into the next generation of iPhone (and I have to admit, between the new features and the lower price, Apple's actually impressed me), soon we'll even be creating records of the places we've been on a minute-to-minute, metre-to-metre basis. Orwell wrote about the perils of Big Brother watching over us all, but now we're doing Big Brother's work for him. I don't think I've wanted to go on a vacation into the wilderness of Michigan more than I do at this exact moment.
Labels: personal, television
That makes this date in 1990 an important milestone for me, because this was the date on which 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be was declared legally obscene by Judge Jose Gonzales, who ruled that the album was "directed to the 'dirty' thoughts and the loins, not to the intellect and the mind." Keep in mind, this is 1990 we're talking about here. 2 Live Crew were later arrested for performing material from the album in Florida, although they were later acquitted on the obscenity charges they got smacked with. Personally, I think this episode, more than any other, may have led to me being such a huge defender of the First Amendment; nationally, coverage of this story led to the first national exposure of Florida's Attorney General as she spoke out in favour of 2 Live Crew: Janet Reno. Yeah. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s something people do in public that really annoys you, even though it’s probably not a big deal?
I really try not to notice people when I'm out. I keep my eyes on the ground and the brim of my hat pulled down. That being said, when I'm in a public restroom and someone uses the toilet and doesn't wash his or her hands afterwards ... ew.
2. How readily do you ask strangers to stop their annoying behavior?
Never, I'm far too polite for that.
3. What’s something you do in public that probably annoys others?
When I'm in a public restroom, the moment I sit down on the stool and start doing my business, I start wadding up toilet paper for later use. (Yeah, this five is leading to me talking about toilets a lot. Sorry if that bugs you.)
4. What’s your theory about why it’s so easy to get annoyed when one is behind the wheel of a vehicle?
Because on the one hand you have the power of over a tonne of steel that can go in excess of eighty miles an hour, but on the other hand you don't have the power to get the person in front of you to get a freakin' move on. (In my case, more like getting people behind me to stop tailgrabbing me. Like I said, I am far too polite.)
5. What regular, minor annoyance have you learned to tolerate?
When my cable signal deteriorates. It happens a lot, believe me.
Labels: fridayfive
A couple of nights later than I would have liked, but hey, I'll take what I can get.
Well, at least one of my two picks to make it to the Stanley Cup finals got there, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb predicting that the Red Wings hoist the cup tomorrow night. Particularly given the demoralizing nature of Saturday's game on the Penguins, not to mention Crosby going off like he did after the final whistle, I just don't see a way for the Penguins to come back to win this series, much less win tomorrow night at the Joe. Mind you, I should have known that the Red Wings would get the cup tomorrow night because it's the only night of the series where I teach on the same night. After all I've been through lately, I surely need the visceral thrill of watching the Red Wings bring home yet another championship. (Yes, for those of you who strayed to the Pistons or Tigers or even the Lions, the rest of us will still forgive you for your transgressions. Hockeytown always has room for more residents.)
I will admit that the Red Wings kind of lucked out, facing a very depleted Colorado team in the second round, then catching the Stars after that quadruple-overtime game. There have been a lot of questionable calls going Detroit's way this whole playoff season, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the NHL Rules Committee revisit the rules on goalie obstruction after the way the Red Wings' opponents have been complaining about their style of play. That being said, I think a healthy dose of luck is necessary to win any championship, and, well, the Red Wings were due for some luck after the way the past few seasons had gone. I think these Wings still have some championships left in them -- only now does everyone seem to be catching on to how the Red Wings managed to stay dominant in the salary cap era thanks to a top-notch front office that scouts out European players as closely as North American players -- but I don't think they're going to be quite as dominant as the 1997-2002 teams. It'll probably be a while before the Red Wings hoist another cup, so I'm going to make sure to enjoy this one as much as I can.
This all being said, I'm now more convinced than ever that wherever I go in this country, I will need to pick up NHL Centre Ice just so I keep access to CBC's NHL coverage. Hearing the analysts on Versus talk about how the next two NHL franchises should go to Kansas City and Las Vegas gave me a headache, not to mention all the American commentators trying to say that Hockeytown faithful were cheering McCarty more loudly than the other Red Wings because of "his story," not because, you know, he pounds the ever-loving crap out of the opposition. I know that hockey will never gain the same national attention as other sports just because the sport dictates facilities that are easier to find and make here in the northern part of the country, but still, the standards for being a "hockey expert" in the American media seem to be even lower than those for being a "celebrity" these days. Some of my students from last semester went on a trip to Toronto this weekend, and I probably should have gone along with them; I doubt I could ever live full-time in Canada just because I'm so attached to my American creature comforts, but I should check things out there at least once.