I hope everyone had a pleasant Easter Sunday. Mine got off to an early start when I headed over to Casa Mia around 0730 to hide plastic eggs filled with candy for Caitlin to search for. We weren't planning on doing that this year, Caitie said she was looking forward to it, so in the spirit of over-indulgence that has marked most of my parental career, I filled and hid eggs. She recovered all but four, and I never remember where I put them all. So they'll turn up throughout the summer, with melted gooey treats sticking to the insides.
Hiding eggs makes for a pretty early start to the day, so after Caitie got up and did her search and recovery thing, I turned my attention to other things I could do.
Caitlin had managed to persuade her mother to buy a couple of those inexpensive game CDs you see everywhere for the Windows platform. This particular one is some kind of 3D Frogger-clone by an outfit called Cosmi. I tried installing it for Caitlin, but every time it launched, it complained about not being able to figure out what kind of screen we had and promptly quit. Piece o'crap. The box maintained it was XP-compatible, but I guess that doesn't mean it'll actually run.
So, feeling stupid, as working with Windows applications often makes me feel, I turned my attention to the much less challenging issue of getting the HP laptop to print to the HP printer hooked up to the Apple PowerMac G4. Here's an area where perhaps Scoble could be of some help.
When you use the Windows XP wizard to add a network printer, and the printer is connected to a Mac, the wizard comes back with an alert that the "server" in the printer (presumably, this is the Mac, masquerading as a print-server) doesn't have a driver to load into the XP machine. It then allows you to choose from a list of printers already supported by XP. A quick search through the dozens of HP printers XP supports reveals the OfficeJet 6110 is not among them. So then you can click on a button that says "I have a disk" (or words to that effect), and you get to try to locate the driver on the CD that came with the printer. Well, that was another effort in futility. So many folders, even some with "drvr" in them, but nothing that XP really thought was a driver.
So then I figured I'd just run the installer from the CD. Sounds reasonable right? Except that didn't work either. The installer showed a little progress bar window that made it all the way to 27% and proceeded to sit there doing nothing, and appeared content to do so for the remainder of the life of the laptop. My guess is it got stuck because it went to look for an HP6110, but couldn't find one connected to the computer. Oh well.
So, I turned to Google and found the answer at Mac OS X Hints. It turns out, if you want to use a printer that is connected to a PowerMac on a Windows network, you have to tell Windows it is a Postscript printer; and that means just selecting one of Apple's Postscript printers in the list of printers XP supports. I re-ran the wizard and when it gave me the option to select a driver, I picked an Apple Color LaserWriter, and voila! We could print!
Now, to the Scoble part. How much trouble would it be, in the spirit of cross-platform, interoperable, non-monopolistic benevolence, to add a few words to the wizard to the effect that if you're trying to add a printer that is connected to a Macintosh on the network, select an Apple LaserWriter driver, or, better still, to just select a default one for the user? I don't think that's asking a lot. Fortunately, it did involve using a Mac, so finding a solution from the community of Macintosh users was simple and straightforward. I might also add that Apple could be just as forthcoming with its assistance in the Applecare Knowledge Base, which is usually otherwise quite helpful.
So not only can Maria now print to the 6110 from her laptop, so can Chris from his XP box upstairs. There was much rejoicing. High-fives all around.
My faith in myself as the master my domain, illusory as that notion is, restored, I turned my attention to more mundane matters. (As if that were possible.) I spent the next hour or so blowing the leaves off the back patio, which had completely disappeared. Blowing leaves off of patios sounds simple, but nothing is ever as simple as it sounds. Suffice to say, I got it done. And 15 minutes later, mother nature was well on her way to demonstrating the futility of man's existence. But I also cleaned off the table and chairs, and raised the umbrella. When my hearing returned to my right ear, I also enjoyed listening to the sound of the monster wind chimes I hung last year.
I did a few other chores, and baked a loaf of bread to take with us to Melissa's house, as she was hosting Easter dinner for us and her brother-in-law, Andy. Dinner was great, and we had a nice time at Pat and Mel's. I took everyone home and then headed back here and pretty much went right to bed. Not a bad day. Except for the part where I was working with Windows XP.
In other news, my refurb'ed Aiport card arrived with the adapter on Saturday, and I installed that in the iMac. The only hardware thing left to do is to replace the PRAM battery. I'm thinking of installing some modest lighting inside after I get the case opened up, but I haven't made up my mind. The iMac is now in my bedroom with the Keyspan IR remote control. I haven't had much opportunity to play with it as the world's most expensive and sophisticated alarm clock, but I'll tinker with it throughout the week.
I ordered a Pioneer DVR-107, DVD-burner for my G4MDD. This is an OEM model, so it comes without software, but it was only $105.00. I was skeptical about owning a DVD-burner because I don't make any of my own videos, and copying DVDs is more hassle than just buying them. But for backing up data, I figure it's probably worth having. My iPhoto and iTunes libraries are huge, and I do back them up to another HD, but it's probably best to have them on something I can store separately. I'm curious to see if I can burn an iTunes playlist to a DVD, and if my DVD player will see it as a playlist of MP3s. That way, I can burn a sizable portion of my MP3 collection to DVD, and have it available to play from my entertainment center, without having to buy some kind of network device to interface with my primitive, low-tech entertainment solution.
It seems to me, sometimes, that we are a nation of ideologues. The whole red versus blue states thing, shows like Crossfire, conservative talk radio and now liberal talk radio, warbloggers and peacebloggers. If that's true, how did we get here?
First, I don't really know if it's true. I strongly suspect that it is, at least for the portion of the nation that bothers to vote. But if it is, I think I have some idea of why it happens to be this way.
I believe that the capacity for ideological thinking is present in every human being, and indeed it exists because it has been "selected for" by evolution. Ideological thinking is a good way to unify the actions of large groups of people in competition with other large groups or nature. And people working together for common goals, when they happen to be the right ones, enjoy a survival advantage. But I believe it is only recently that technology has allowed so many ideologue authorities to marshall that capacity to much greater effect than ever before in our history.
There's something thrilling about conflict. Play an online first-person shooter sometime. My guess is, you'll find it "fun." "Fun" is a physiological reaction in the brain. It's dopamine and reward centers. It's stimulating. We usually enjoy increased levels of stimulation, otherwise, we become "bored."
Ideological thinking stimulates those processes within the brain that give us a sense of reward, or perhaps just "stimulation." For the most part, we lead safe, comfortable, mundane existences. But when we're able to introduce drama into our lives, by identifying perceived "threats," then our lives become more stimulating, maybe even more "meaningful." Ideological thinking exploits this. Ideologues always have opponents, the best kind are other ideologues but anyone will do. Ideologues are always trying to do "good," which makes their ideological thinking "meaningful." And today there are so many channels by which this stimulation can reach us, and we can even participate in it, that we're likely drenched in dopamine all the time. There are probably physiological and psychological consequences to that as well, but that takes me well past whatever little I actually know about mind-body physiology.
And we're vulnerable to this aspect of our human nature because we are not the rational, cognitive thinkers we all would like to believe we are. We're not that far removed from the laboratory rat that keeps hitting the lever to get the hit of cocaine. Most of what we do is behavior governed by non-thinking, largely emotional processes within our bodies. And for the vast majority of the time, it works exceedingly well, so we're never inclined to think there is anything "wrong" with the way we behave. We're blind to our own behavior.
So what makes me so damn smart, eh? Well, it's when your behavior doesn't work, it's when your dopamine levels are so low that life is pretty much meaningless, that you begin to take an interest in the behavior that you call your "life."
As usual, I'm an authority on nothing - I'm making all this shit up. I urge you, I encourage you, I implore you, I insist you... do your own thinking.
So I don't like labels like "conservative" or "liberal" applied to me, isn't calling someone an ideologue doing the same thing?
I don't think so. The point is, one doesn't argue with ideologues, at least about topics that touch on their ideology. So being able to identify ideologues can help to conserve cognitive resources for more useful purposes; like maintaining one's self-control and suppressing the overwhelming urge to punch them in the nose.
And understanding the particular weaknesses of ideologues, especially when it comes to matters like crafting strategies and policies to address complex issues over many years, can be useful when making decisions at election time. Unless, of course, one already happens to be an ideologue.
Of course, it sort of raises the question of whether constantly criticizing and mocking the ideological thinking and policies of ideologue leaders isn't a form of ideological thinking itself. That's actually two different questions, with two different answers.
Ideologues aren't immune to criticism, indeed they are often extremely sensitive to it; because they believe they are doing "good," and they want to be perceived that way and to receive approval. I think this explains much of the Bush administration's response to its critics, especially when one recalls that ideology takes precedence over principle, so "slime and defend" is appropriate in their own eyes.
But while ideologues are largely immune to having their thinking changed, their actions can be influenced by criticism. The testimony of the National Security Advisor, even the creation of the 9/11 commission illustrate that point. So criticism of ideologues as ideologues, or at least as exhibiting ideological thinking is legitimate, as indeed would be criticism of non-ideologues. It just tends to take a lot more criticism to make a difference with an ideologue.
But mocking them is a different issue. It's natural to wish to mock someone out of frustration and anger when one feels powerless. But that same impulse can drive one toward ideological thinking as well. In general, I think we regard mocking someone as a "bad" thing to do. It means not treating them with the same respect we would expect for ourselves. And when we do something "bad," we seek to justify our behavior and that drives us toward being "right" and doing "good" as justifications, and then we become trapped in our own ideological thinking. In part, this series of posts is part of my effort to assess my own vulnerability to ideological thinking, which I know I've exhibited from time to time, and to try to discover for myself how I might better avoid the risk. Perhaps it may be useful for the reader as well.
I immediately went to Version Tracker to locate and download the latest driver for the device. I probably should have checked that out before I ordered it because several users identified problems with the driver in Panther. Indeed, the driver should support a system-level command to increase, decrease or mute the system sound volume. That appears to be broken in 10.3.3.
I was able to resolve the issue to my satisfaction by using the configuration editor, even though that isn't a terribly intuitive application. I confess I haven't read the manual, so it can't be that hard to figure out. I discovered that after editing a configuration file to change what the buttons on the remote do for a given application, you have to save the configuration file to disk and then quit and relaunch the "mapper" application that watches for and interprets the commands from the remote. The configuration editor includes menu commands to quit and relaunch the mapper, so it's fairly convenient in that respect.
Fortunately both iTunes and the DVD Player app include keyboard commands for raising and lowering the volume. I've also configured a couple of the buttons to start and stop the Visualizer feature for iTunes.
So, basically it works, but some of the system-level features which would ordinarily work across applications are broken. Not a huge deal.
I've discovered that using Speakable Items pretty much requires you to be right in front of the computer, so that's kind of out for learning the time. The Keyspan remote could be configured to run a script that would speak the time to me, though I'd have to do all that myself, it's not an "out of the box" feature. But then there's the issue of locating the remote in the dark. Another semi-geeky solution (to what is essentially a non-problem anyway) would be to buy another PowerMate (or use the one I already have, but seldom use - but where's the fun in that?), and get a USB extension cord to connect it to the iMac. Then I could put the PowerMate on the night-stand and just mash the big button when I wanted the Mac to speak the time. It has that cool throbbing blue LED to make it easy to locate in the dark.
I've been listening to iTunes on the iMac and I'm still impressed with how good that little box sounds when it's running with an iSub subwoofer. I don't have a terribly sophisticated "ear" for audio, but it still sounds pretty damn good to me.
Another personality aspect that helps identify the ideologue is the insistence on being right, and since ideologues believe themselves to be doing "good," all others who disagree with them are either ignorant or "bad." I think one would be hard pressed to identify an ideologue who has ever admitted to being wrong on a subject that was part of their core ideology.
The requirement, the necessity, to be "right," (as in "correct") comes from the belief that one is doing "good." If one adheres to a set of beliefs that purportedly describe the best way to order a society, or to solve a particular problem confronting society, there seems to be some implicit requirement to take action; even if that action is only repeating the major points of the ideology over and over and over again to the unpersuaded, the skeptical, or those who disagree.
Ideologues require authorities to legitimize their adherence to their beliefs. All human beings have some innate wish to either become, or more commonly, follow authority. Being an authority is a rewarding experience. I speak from personal experience. I don't know how we'll set up the experiment, but when we get around to measuring the dopamine levels of people who are in positions of authority, I think we'll find they are higher than those of people who don't enjoy the same privilege. When I went from being the XO of JOHN HANCOCK to simply being a 3-digit code on a group staff (someone three tiers from the top of the hierarchy), I felt like I should have been issued a prescription to Prozac. There was a noticeably physical/emotional component to the change in status.
Ideologues in positions of authority are motivated to maintain their positions, as indeed are all persons who are in positions of authority; and given that, to me, an ideologue is someone whose ideological belief system takes precedence over their own set of principles, it is principle that suffers when authority is challenged. The debate about the quality of the intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war is a reflection of this characteristic. It was in the nature of the pro-war ideologues to characterize ordinary intelligence reports in ways that promoted their arguments for the necessity of the war. Principle would suggest that whatever information we would choose to share with the American people and the world would be accompanied by the same caveats and qualifications that professional analysts used in preparing their briefings. But to an ideologue, those sorts of things only muddy the water and distract from the immediate requirement to "do good." So the qualifications are stripped from the reporting and the analysis and the information is presented to the public with the voice of "authority" as Secretary of State Colin Powell did before the United Nations. I wish to note at this point that I do not regard the Secretary of State as an ideologue, but he works for one.
Of course, being an ideologue doesn't make one, axiomatically, wrong. In fact, when ideologues get it right, I suppose history regards them as men and women of "vision." The problem, as I see it, with ideologues is that their certainty comes at the expense of a respect for uncertainty, and an acute sensitivity to criticism or the differing opinions of others, even if they are essentially seeking the same goals. A ready example comes from my least favorite ideologue, Paul Wolfowitz. In testimony before Congress, Army General Eric Shinseki testified that the occupation of Iraq would require "several hundred thousand troops." Assistant Secretary of Defense, and architect of the Iraq war, Wolfowitz publicly slapped down the opinion of a career military professional by declaring his estimate was "wildly off the mark." I leave it as an exercise for the reader to conclude who was more wildly off the mark.
I've never welcomed labels like "conservative" or "liberal" applied to myself. I remain a registered independent, the Florida primary rendered irrelevant to me by Kerry's string of victories. I don't like to belong to groups who think they have a monopoly on good ideas; although I must admit I am a Macintosh user, and we generally have better ideas than our Windows counterparts. So, I'm all too human in that respect.
I'm a skeptic about ideologies. I wouldn't make a good libertarian, there are a lot of ideologues in that crowd. I work with a guy who is an ideologue, of a rather extreme sort. He regards "liberals" as "the enemy within." He often makes obtuse references to the tree of liberty being refreshed by the blood of patriots, a Jefferson quotation if I'm not mistaken, in the context of some kind of armed conflict with "the enemy within." He's otherwise a perfectly rational guy, competent in his job and a decent sort of fellow most of the time. We started to get into a discussion one day and after a couple of exchanges he started saying something like, "You liberals..." and I laid into him about reducing every argument to a label, and if he was just going to call me names there was no point in talking to him. We never talk about politics anymore. He doesn't know how to have a conversation or a discussion with Dave Rogers, he only knows how to hurl charges against "liberals," or receive validation from like-minded ideologues. He listens to Rush Limbaugh every day, religiously, and he receives an e-mail newsletter that he forwards to me from time to time with rather provocative quotations. His office-mate is a libertarian and he listens to some libertarian talk radio show in the morning. They get into some pretty interesting arguments. The libertarian is in favor of gay marriage and against the war on drugs. He's also against taxation and any form of federal assistance to anyone.
What frustrates me the most is that an ideologue who is not himself an authority within the ideology kind of surrenders his ability to think critically. He is content to be titillated by the humor of Rush Limbaugh, or the venom of worse ideologue authorities of the sort who publish the newsletter my co-worker reads. Arguments consist of the recitation of what are little more than "talking points," which are themselves over-simplifications of complex issues. One of the issues the libertarian and the conservative share some agreement on is the "death tax." It's a very simple issue for them, and it's based on a "principle." The suggestion that there may be adverse consequences for democracy from an increasing concentration of wealth is swept aside by a rigid, unquestioning adherence to a "principle." No need to think when a "principle" is involved. In this case, though, the "principle" under consideration is not the kind of idea that guides the choices or actions of individuals, rather it is the type of intellectual abstraction that serves the needs of members of a group, rather than, and often at the expense of, the individual.
Howard Kurtz remarked today on some of the responses to Ted Kennedy's speech yesterday: "One caller to Laura Ingraham's radio show said he's providing 'aid and comfort to the enemy' in Iraq, 'bordering on treason.'" This is an example of the distorted thinking of an ideologue, to suggest that criticism, even harsh criticism, borders on treason. Unfortunately this is all too typical. This is not to suggest that ideologues are unique to the conservative end of the spectrum, there are ideologues for any brand of ideology you care to name.
Well, it's late and I've scratched this itch enough for one night. More to follow.
Whatever had glitched up QuickTime this morning seems to have resolved itself following a reboot after the latest security update. I saw the Thunderbirds trailer. I'm not sure I'll like the movie, but I've always loved the ships.
How ironic is this? I'm running OS X and I'm pretty damn sure I have all the QuickTime updates installed, and I can't play a trailer from Apple's own QuickTime trailer site.
What is an ideology? To me, it is a set of beliefs that comprise a kind of theory of how a given society should be ordered. The object of the conditional is typically believed to be some realization of the good.
So what is the good? As it relates to ideology, it is some outcome that is to be preferred to most, if not all, other outcomes. In general terms, it usually relates to the material success of the greatest number, although not always, and "material success" is a broad enough description to encompass differences within a given society that may raise questions about its validity. At its root, material success suggests members of the society get to eat and reproduce.
So again, an ideology seems to me to be a system of beliefs that comprise a theory of how a given society should be ordered to promote the greatest good for the greatest number. How the good is defined may vary, but it generally can be boiled down to some type of material success.
What are principles, and how are they related to an ideology? It seems to me that a principle is an idea that suggests something about what the good is, as it relates to the individual. Principles are less than a theory. While an ideology can almost be thought of as a series of if...then statements, which can be subjected to some type of logical analysis and perhaps "proof;" a principle is more like an axiom, a statement for which its truth value can perhaps be observed, but not necessarily derived from analysis. For instance, as a principle, we might say that it is always best to tell the truth. While there are clearly many examples we can show that "prove" this statement to be true, there are equally many examples where we can show that it may be false. It all comes down to what the good is, as it relates to "always best."
In general, principles may be used by individuals to help govern the choices they make as they live their lives. While principles and ideologies relate to both individuals and societies, I think in general it can be said that principles most closely relate to individuals while ideologies most closely relate to societies.
This can also be reflected in ideas about authority. Principles help govern and promote the authority of the individual, while ideologies promote certain individuals in societies as authorities. What the hell am I talking about?
If I have a set of principles that I embrace as the set of governing ideas that shape the choices of my life, then that reinforces my own authority over myself. If I have done an adequate job of examining my principles and choosing them carefully, observing the results and consequences of their use in my life, then I am promoting my own authority over myself. If I lack a set of principles, then I am subject to the influence of whoever I may regard as an authority other than myself.
In an ideology, the "system" of beliefs has to be promoted, maintained and refined against challenges from competing ideas and ideologies. Not all individuals are equally suited to perform that task adequately, so an authority structure emerges. If one is to subscribe to a particular ideology, then one also generally accepts the authority of certain figures within that ideology.
What is an ideologue? In general, an ideologue is anyone who is an advocate of a particular ideology; but that's too general a definition for me. To me, an ideologue is someone for whom the set of beliefs that make up a particular ideology either trump or replace a set of principles, which would otherwise govern the choices of the individual.
Why would someone choose to be an ideologue, in my sense of the term? Because an ideology is supposed to promote an idea of the good. I think that in our own minds, we desire to see ourselves as good. Acting on principle requires acting on one's own authority, and it is not always clear whether or not one is acting in such a way that promotes the good, therefore it is sometimes difficult to unambiguously see ourselves as good. We also know there is safety in numbers, which is part of the idea of social proof as a principle of influence. If conventional authorities tell us that a particular ideology is "good," and we, along with large numbers of others, subscribe to that ideology, then we can more easily persuade ourselves that we too are good. And there is no fundamental contradiction here that makes this untrue in all cases.
So, what is the downside to being an ideologue, assuming a given ideology does, in fact, promote some notion of the good. There are a number of traps. First among these is disagreement about the nature of the good. I think it would be safe to say that we believe it is good to treat all people with respect, and that such a belief is very likely to be among the set of principles of all good people. But an ideologue puts promoting the beliefs of their ideology before the ideas of their own principles. For example, many Macintosh users are ideologues in the sense that they believe the Macintosh operating system is a better way of computing than the Windows operating system. This is complicated by the fact that many Macintosh users perceive, rightly in my opinion, that Microsoft's un-principled, highly ideological behavior disadvantaged Macintosh users in the marketplace. As a result, many Macintosh users think nothing of showing disrespect to Microsoft employees or Windows users. So while treating other individuals with respect would seem to be a fundamental principle we could all adhere to, it gets tossed aside when we assume our roles as adherents to a particular ideology. The same sort of behavior can be observed in many other areas where people have competing ideas about a better way to do things. Open source versus closed source, Ford versus Chevy, organic food versus industrial agriculture, etc. etc. etc.
Most of these examples are rather trivial, if unfortunate. What isn't trivial is when the power of nations or religions gets bound up in ideological conflicts.
One of the clearest signs of an ideologue is a consistent history on a particular issue. We generally regard consistency as a virtue. In part, it helps us deal with uncertainty about the future because consistency suggests how a particular individual may behave in some future circumstance. Demonstrated inconsistency promotes doubt and uncertainty.
I've gone about as far as I care to go with this tonight. Getting up in the wee hours of the morning like this does little to promote my good humor and even temper for the rest of the day. I'm going to return to this, but I just want to tie up a loose end or two here.
Not all people who have principles adhere to them at all times. It's hard, because of the way we're built biologically. Most of the time our behavior is simply behavior. It is not the result of an immediate cognitive choice, it's the result of a programmatic script. Nature likes to conserve resources, and it hasn't endowed us with the cognitive resources to make deliberative choices about every source of stimulus we encounter during the course of our lives. We can re-write the programs, we can learn to maximize our cognitive resources, we can do better, but I don't think we'll ever be perfect. Ideologies as systems of belief actually work well with limited cognitive resources and promote the success of groups, which is why we so often behave as ideologues, even if we aren't genuine ideologues.
Even people of principle embrace ideologies, but real people of principle are seldom genuine ideologues. They can exhibit the behavior of an ideologue from time to time, but they lack the consistency that marks the true ideologue.
Even ideologues can sometimes act from principle. This is more likely if the action relates to some issue which is not close to the beliefs of the ideology. Being an ideologue does not axiomatically make someone a bad person. But some bad people are ideologues, and being an ideologue often means abandoning good principles.
Inconsistency is not a reliable indicator of being a principled person, as consistency is a reliable indicator of an ideologue. But a principled person may often appear inconsistent, I might even go so far as to say, will always appear inconsistent, but I want to think about that some more.
This is going somewhere. I don't know that I'll be able to change anyone's mind about anything. Mostly, I just want to sort it out for myself. I think I should be able to go back to sleep now.
It's April 6th, so I've purchased and watched TheMatrix Revolutions.
Had a nice video chat with Al Hawkins last night. I'm afraid anyone who makes the mistake requesting a video chat with me probably gets more than they bargained for. I'm not noted for my reticence. Sorry about that, Al.
I've been thinking a bit about ideology, ideologues, principles and ethics, especially the ethics of ignorance (inspired by AKMA's ethics of signification). I think there's a case to be made that there's too much of the former and not enough of the latter; and that the former does not require the latter. Indeed, the latter often gets in the way of the former. More to follow if I can ever get these thoughts untangled and down on paper. Or silicon. Or ferrous-oxide. Or something.
I've been spending some time getting my vintage 1999, iMac DV/400 back up and running. The PRAM battery is dead, so I'll need to crack the shell and replace the battery. I've opened it up before when I installed a 60GB HD in it, so it's not too hard. Just lots of screws to keep track of, and one has to pay attention to the various tabs and seams of the shell to ensure everything is together tight before screwing it back together.
Some time ago I learned that an iMac of that series will support up to 1GB of RAM. At the time it was being manufactured, 256MB was the largest DIMM you could get so the documentation indicated 512MB was the maximum amount of RAM it could use. But before I knew all that, I had upgraded the RAM to 512MB, and now PC100 RAM is pretty darn expensive. It'd set me back nearly $200.00 to bump it up another 512MB. I'm not sure it's really worth it, under the circumstances; but I am thinking about it.
I did order a refurb'ed Airport card and the adapter necessary to install it in the iMac. Eventually, this box will go into my bedroom to be a kind of entertainment center/alarm clock. I'm wondering if Speakable Items will work well enough with the built-in mic and me several feet away from it. I don't have an alarm clock and I don't wear a wrist watch these days, so some mornings I just kind of lie there wondering if it's worth getting out of bed to see what time it is. I don't have any problem waking up in the morning, the two cats make sure I'm up and moving no later than 6:30 and usually much sooner than that. But if I can make it work, it'd be kind of cool to use Speakable Items to say, "Computer, what time is it?" and have it answer. I'm such a nerd.
I also ordered a Keyspan IR Remote Control to hook up to the thing. That way I can use it to control iTunes or the DVD player app without getting my dead ass out of the rack. If money were no object, I'd order an LCD projector to connect to the external VGA connector, and a Bluetooth wireless keyboard. An LCD projector is probably out of the question unless I win the lottery, and I'd rather do my typing on the 19" monitor connected to the G4, so I doubt it'd be worth the money to connect a wireless keyboard to the iMac, but the thought of the blue gumdrop with only a power cord connecting it appeals to me.
I also pulled out the original installation CDs and installed a factory configuration onto one of my HD partitions. I just wanted to recall what the experience was like booting up that iMac for the first time. It was replacing a very used Powerbook Duo 280 at the time, with a 33MHz 68LC040 processor and a 640x400 b&w active matrix screen. The difference was like night and day. Back then, my 6500 with 300MHz Sonnet L2 G3 processor upgrade was still at Casa Mia as the main box and I was making do with with the Duo. The iMac was even a significant step up from the 6500. It was also the first machine I had that could really play 3D games. The 6500 had an ATI processor with 2MB of VRAM, but it wasn't really very useful. Even today, the iMac can play some fairly competent 3D first-person shooters like Red Faction and Aliens vs. Predator.
Anyway, it's fun putting some older hardware back to use.
I'm ambivalent about the whole Daylight Savings Time idea. This is the one day out of the year when I have to cope with losing an hour out of my day. It's really the fact that I'm an hour closer to when I have to be doing things I don't necessarily desire to be doing, when I could be doing something else. Like this.
My daughter Caitlin is in a little community theater group and their spring production is Peter Pan. I saw it last night, and the kids were all very charming. It was a pretty challenging production for such a young group, but they managed to pull it off. Caitlin was playing one of the Lost Boys, Curly, and she had a brown curly wig as part of her costume. It was remarkable and almost frightening the effect that wig had on her appearance. With her long, blond hair all tucked up under that wig, her face looked years older than how she appears in my mind. (She's all of 11 going on 12.) Add to that that she was also taller than many of her cast-mates, and I didn't see my little girl on the stage.
How do you like your dose of reality? Regular or Extra-Crispy?
Was that in poor taste? Thank you for noticing.
You're my friend if I let you puke in my car.
I'm saying not only is the emperor butt-nekked, I'm saying he has a tiny dick too. Everyone else seems to be pretending they're too polite to notice.
If you think I'm talking about you, I am. Anything to accommodate your fantasy that, yes, you are the center of the universe.
How is running up a half-trillion dollar deficit and passing a prescription drug "benefit" that's going to cost another half-trillion dollars that we don't have, not the same as raising taxes?
Is anyone else sick and tired of silly metaphors being uncritically embraced into the hip, new belief systems of the truly cool? Markets are conversations? The internet isn't a thing, it's an agreement? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is bliss.
Ask not what the internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the internet? Is that so we can turn the conversation around from talking about the internet to talking about you? Is that it? Somebody help me out here.
I don't care how smart, hip, cute, connected, clicked-on, clued-in, wired-up, weirded-out, fucking special you are, if you're typing away on your keyboard to your friends making snarky little comments when someone is trying to make themselves heard, you're being rude. Don't like the presentation? Leave. Jesus. Are we all children again?
If I'm your friend, you'll let me puke in your car. What was that thing about children again?
If the only reason you're scared of Kerry as president is because of taxes, console yourself with the knowledge that he'll have to work with a Republican House and Senate who are known for their sense of fiscal responsibility.
Oh, wait...
Those "low-fat" flour tortillas are frigging useless! They all stick together and then if you manage to get an intact one, it comes apart when you try to wrap your tuna. On the other hand, if you nuke one (intact or not) in the microwave for about a minute, it turns into a really crispy, big cracker.
Somebody be sure to ask George Bush if he has any more "I never said imminent" threats in mind for his next administration. I don't know about you, but I find I'm growing less fond of surprises in my old age.
I, for one, welcome our new NMCI overlords.
I see Microsoft lowered the price of the XBox again. I guess losing nearly 2 billion dollars in 2 years wasn't enough. What other company could afford to sustain those kinds of losses and remain in the marketplace? See? That's why there's so little competition. And if MS has its way, there'll be even less. Do yourself a favor. Go buy yourself a GameCube this weekend. It takes up less space, uses less electricity, consumes fewer raw materials in production, and is more fun too. The XBox is the Hummer of game consoles.
There, I feel better. Have a great weekend. I'll fix the monthly archive thing when I damn well feel like it.
This is from page 39 of Bob Woodward's Bush at War, a largely glowing and definitely uncritical account of the president's and his administration's actions after 9/11:
"He acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. 'There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the [previous] bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling.'"
Again, I don't think that's surprising or particularly damning, but it does support one of Richard Clarke's assertions.
I've been reading Clarke's book since Monday, and it is fascinating. It's also clear he's a fellow with a pretty huge ego, even by Washington D.C. standards, a place where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen huge egos. It also seems pretty clear that we were fortunate to have someone with his particular ego and obsession in place on September 11th, and that we might have been better served if more people had listened to him before that date. But the virtue of hindsight is that it is often thought to be 20/20.
Hey, if you haven't checked out this site, you might want to do so. It's a web-based front end to query the Federal Election Commission's database on campaign contributions. See which of your fellow 'bloggers actually contributed to Howard Dean's campaign and how much. Check out which way your geographical neighbors are leaning. It's a little disturbing, and a lot of fun.
It's pretty clear why the president will not appear alone before the 9-11 commission. Somebody has to go with him to ensure that, "What the president meant to say..."
Yeah, it's a lot of the kind of stuff you would expect a presidential candidate to say, but it's not as if he's not saying anything; and there are some specifics, not all of which I necessarily agree with.
First, I've significantly reduced my consumption of Diet Pepsi. Yes, I was a Diet Pepsi abuser. I would usually have at least five cans during the workday, and often as many as seven. Then I would drink glasses of the stuff at night, sometimes the entire contents of a two-liter bottle.
For the most part, I noted no ill effects. Caffeine didn't seem to keep me awake at night, and it's calorie-free, so what's to worry about?
Well, four weeks ago, on a whim, I decided to quit drinking Diet Pepsi at work and changed over to drinking water from the bottled water dispenser. It's free in the office. The first effect is that I'm saving between seven and eleven dollars a week. The second effect I didn't notice right away, but it's been pretty consistent since I first began to notice it, and it's pretty remarkable.
My knees don't hurt.
I walk up two flights of stairs to my office each morning. And each morning my knees would complain, often they would do so strenuously. I attributed it to taking Taekwondo and advancing age. But since I've stopped drinking so much Diet Pepsi and instead consume what is probably an equal amount of H2O, my knees don't bother me at all going up the steps.
I'm guessing the diuretic effect of caffeine was preventing the cartiledge from being adequately hydrated, reducing its cushioning effect. Whatever the reason, I'm glad they feel better.
So for any of you who may be consuming vast quantities of diet colas or other caffeinated beverages, there may be some benefits to scaling back. And for what it's worth, I haven't been bothered by any headaches as a result of reducing my caffeine intake.
Okay, a second observation. Kerry and his lack of "vision." Nearly all of what passes for political criticism these days is just crap. Remember, almost all of us, myself included, reason backward from our feelings. A lot of people don't "like" John Kerry, and it is usually just an emotional response, not the result of some cool analysis of his record, his character and his campaign assertions. A lot of people don't have any feelings one way or another about John Kerry, and those are the people that the Bush campaign are aiming for with their "death and taxes" approach.
But for those who already don't like Kerry, they'll reason backward from their feelings and offer seemingly sound rationales for their dyspepsia. Take, for instance, his lack of a "plan" for foreign policy. First of all, I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure if you look at his web site there's probably no shortage of position papers and such on foreign policy that, in the aggregate, probably make up a pretty good "vision." The people who don't like Kerry probably aren't motivated enough to look, and his campaign hasn't been emphasizing foreign policy yet, because his campaign is going after folks who may have voted for Bush in 2000, but have been disaffected by his performance on the economy. In any event, I'm sure Kerry will offer a number of significant foreign policy speeches, which will in any event be judged insufficient by those who already don't like him anyway.
All of which is neither here nor there, because what is the value of such "vision" anyway? Does anyone recall what President Bush's foreign policy vision was during his campaign? Did it resemble in any way, shape or form what it has turned out to be? Well, after 9/11, of course not - except in one respect. While Bush's campaign seemed to back away from the concept of "nation-building," and his initial months in office were marked by disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian problem, he surrounded himself with a clutch of neo-con hawks with an agenda about Iraq that didn't get a lot of play in the campaign. Perhaps if we had paid closer attention to who he surrounded himself with, and less to what he said, we'd be in a different situation today.
The point is, what a candidate says in a campaign and what they do in office, blinding glimpse of the obvious here, are two different things. Post 9/11, it is inconceivable that any president is going to be "soft on terrorism." We can debate which might be more effective, but terrorism and terrorist movements will be getting a lot of attention from any future American administration. Also, reality has a way of changing our "plans." There's an old military maxim, "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy." We often liked to joke in the Navy that we needed a plan so we could have something to deviate from.
Do I like John Kerry? Honest to God, I don't know. But frankly, it doesn't really matter. He isn't obviously disqualified for the job, and I happen to believe that the present administration has deliberately misled this nation in the pursuit of a highly ideological vision, and fundamentally abused the power of its office. I definitely do not like George W. Bush, the smirking, malapropism-uttering, posing, flight-suit wearing, "war president." And I'll reason backward from my feelings with the best of them.
I spent much of the weekend at my stepdaughter's house looking after her two dogs, Marley and Lucy. She and her husband, Pat, were in Cocoa Beach at a surfing competition. Marley is half-Pit Bull, half Lab and Lucy is pure Pit. Of the two, Lucy is higher maintenance. She's very shy, although she's not a fear-biter. Melissa doesn't like to leave them alone at night, so she asked me if I would stay over night with them each night. When I looked after them at Christmas, I just went over three times a day to let them out and feed them, but much of the time I couldn't get Lucy to even come outside.
So this weekend I just sort of moved in. I brought my old iMac DV over, which had been sitting on the floor gathering dust at Maria's after she moved back into the house. I also brought over my Game Cube. Melissa has Tivo and Dish Network, but it's all too complicated for me. So I had plenty of entertainment.
Both dogs slept with me each night, Lucy making sure she snuggled right up against my legs. I guess spending the night with them makes all the difference with Lucy. I was able to get her outside and she even played a lengthy round of fetch with me. Unfortunately, sleeping in a too-soft bed with two large-ish dogs does not make for sound sleep. Plus, I seem to have contracted a Springtime head cold that's making the rounds. So I pretty much feel like crap this morning.
It was a beautiful weekend, but between congestion, running back and forth between my apartment and Melissa's house, and dropping by Maria's, I didn't really enjoy much of it. I managed to get the planet-stomping, resource-devouring, driver-intimidating, politically-ever-so-incorrect SUV washed and waxed. Discovered that either the JFK or an amphib that had been in port recently managed to deposit a significant quantity of fuel on my car. The combatants burn JP-5, and the nature of the fuel controls for gas turbine engines is such that you seldom get significant quantities of fuel in the air. While amphibs and aircraft carriers still use DFM (or Distillate Fuel Marine) for their boilers and the nature of boiler light-off sometimes allows for a lot of unburned fuel to go up the stack and into the atmosphere to rain down on anything down-wind. I'm guessing it was more likely the amphib, because I park a pretty long way from the carrier, and the amphib was tied up right next to where I park. Hazards of the business, I'm afraid. I'll have to get some bug and tar remover and do the roof again, it was pretty bad.
None of which seems terribly blog-worthy, I guess. Oh well, Sturgeon's Law and all that.
In politics, it is axiomatic that it is never the wrong-doing that gets one in the most trouble, it's the cover-up. As regards the charges leveled by Richard Clarke in his book and in his testimony before the 9/11 commission, there's nothing there that should be horrendously shocking to anyone, and I think most reasonable people, while grateful to Mr. Clarke for his account and his insight, would not necessarily hold the administration to the same standard that Mr. Clarke seems to be using.
That being said, I think what is most damaging to this administration, at least in my mind and if it can even be said that anything could damage this administration any more than it already has, has been the response of this administration to Mr. Clarke. We've seen this pattern of behavior again and again, with Joseph Wilson and the "outing" of his CIA wife Valerie Plame, with the investigation of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and now with Mr. Clarke. Yes, this administration has enemies, but these people have been attacked and maligned by the highest figures in this administration, not for being clearly partisan political operatives, but for being public servants who differed with the administration's policies and assertions, and who take their differences before the public, as indeed we should wish any public servant to do.
While these attacks are perhaps only peripherally related to the conventional notion of a cover-up, they reveal an administration that is hyper-sensitive to criticism and which is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to punish those who they feel have threatened them. Sooner or later, people are going to begin to notice, and it's going to put the lie to the administration's bogus claim to a higher standard of moral conduct in the execution of its office.
This administration deserves to be turned out of office. I'd rather face more terrorists and more taxes than leaders like this.
Supposedly, politics is the art of the possible. I suppose it's very possible that President Bush will win re-election. I suppose it's possible that a campaign that appeals to people's fears about the only two certainties in life, death and taxes, can persuade enough people to vote for the "safe" choice.
It's possible that people don't feel that candor and honesty on matters of war and peace are important anymore, as we seemed to feel in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war. It's possible that people aren't troubled by a one-party rule that has involved this nation in an unnecessary war and run up a deficit of more than half a trillion dollars while ignoring the loss of more jobs than any administration since Hoover. I suppose it's possible that many people will be unpersuaded as former administration figure after former administration figure steps forward and details an ideologically driven administration detached from the real challenges facing this nation and oblivious to the reactions, let alone the thoughts and ideas of other nations, even those who were once among our closest allies.
Real life has been interfering with AKMA's ability to respond to things the way he would otherwise like to in his weblog. But that's okay, it's not a particularly time-sensitive issue. I've elaborated a bit more, or repeated myself yet again I suppose, in a comment on this post.
That seemed to prompt a piece of correspondence from Jonathon Delacour who pointed out two delightful pieces of writing that are relevant both to the topic at hand, and to the process underway in discussing the topic at hand. I think Shelley Powers would appreciate each of them as well, in light of her recent experiences and discussions.
The first is Charles' Rules of Argument. I love this piece. I came to have an intuitive grasp of rules 1 and 2 about the time I closed up shop on Time's Shadow. The experience of discussing the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent debate during the run-up to the war in Iraq finally hammered home, in a way that only utter exhaustion can, the futility of trying to change people's minds. Despite that, old habits are hard to break and I continued fecklessly tilting at the occasional windmill until it drove me into despair. Even then, I couldn't quite break the habit. While it seemed pointless and futile and maddening enough to make me want to quit Time's Shadow, it evidently wasn't pointless and futile and maddening enough to keep me from doing essentially the same things in the comments facilities of others' weblogs.
But I did begin to understand that I didn't need to respond to everything I disagreed with; that it wasn't my job to save the world. This, in itself, became a cause of argument, as I argued with others who seemed to me to be foolishly believing they could save the world by the power of their arguments. The irony was not lost on me; but then I believe irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe, so I was pretty comfortable with that.
Charles' Rules of Argument are well worth reading and thinking about. I find that while I'm in agreement with, and I've been somewhat inclined to apply, rules 1, 2 and 3, I find I haven't quite come to the same conclusions he espouses with regard to what to do when you find yourself in an argument. I clearly don't believe you only get "two passes." I am demonstrably quite content to continue flogging a dead horse seemingly endlessly, which is somewhat the basis for the return of my weblog under its current appellation. I do understand the risk of boring people by repeating myself, but I find that much of what passes for conversation or discussion in life as well as on the internet is largely the act of repeating ourselves. I'm simply embracing it. For the humor impaired, I'm being somewhat facetious here but determining just how facetious is left as an exercise for the reader.
The second wonderful read Jonathon pointed me toward is How All Communication Fails, Except by Accident, Or, A Commentary of Wiios' Laws. This is relevant to all of us and well worth reading. It does offer the sobering reminder that, sometimes, silence says more than words ever could. And I expect I'm probably not very clearly understood even as I utter that.
Anyway, someday I'd like to read about what the ethics of ignorance might be. Seems to me they might be a more productive guide to promoting the good, than the ethics of signification.
Bob Edwards has been removed as the anchor of Morning Edition. I'm not sure what I think about that. I liked the sound of his voice in the morning, even though his questions sometimes grated. He's been such a fixture of my morning routine for more than a decade now, I think I'll miss him doing the lead-off summaries of the "hour's top stories." In what is almost certainly a sign of advancing fogeyism, I'm really unhappy with NPR's efforts to make the shows more "hip." That thing they do around noon in connection with Slate magazine really gets on my nerves. I turn it off as often as I listen to it. The day they get rid of Diane Rehm is the day I quit listening to the radio. Period.
Not a lot, I'm afraid. Just thought I'd just pop in to say I'm alive.
Maria bought an HP laptop for her law practice. There are simply too many useful software applications for attorneys on the Windows platform to not use a Windows machine if you're an attorney and not much of a geek. The Mac can be made to do everything the specialized applications do, but you have to have some affinity for software, and an imagination that is inclined toward that kind of thinking. Maria's a great attorney, but she's not much of geek at all.
I had entertained the notion that my son would provide the bulk of the technical support for her, but he's disinclined to delve into the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of XP and OS X to solve some of the most practical problems. Maria, wisely I think, intends to use the Mac for the bulk of her e-mail requirements. It's far less susceptible to the various viruses and mal-ware that plague Windows users. She has an HP multi-function printer, the OfficeJet 6110, attached to the Mac and she'd like to print to that from her laptop. I was pretty sure I could make that happen, but it turned out being yet another painful lesson in why I am not a Windows user.
The very first problem was just getting the laptop to grab an IP address from the Linksys router. In Mac OS X, it's basically a no-brainer. With XP, you have to go through a "wizard" to help you set up your network. To try to make a very long story short, the "wizard" is not very helpful. There's a very tricky section in the wizard that makes you do something that seems counter-intuitive - you have to uncheck all the network interfaces so that the wizard won't start some sort of facility called "bridging." Every time this bridge thing was created, I couldn't see the internet. I had it working on the internet early on, but I couldn't recall what I did to make it work. Once I tried to set it up to see the Mac by using that network wizard, I broke the internet! And then there are about 15-quadrillion different combinations of right-clicking, properties-selecting, tab-picking, advanced-button-pushing, options in various control panels and properties windows to configure your computer to see a network. It is patently a scheme to keep MCSE's gainfully employed. Bastards!
I actually learned more about setting up the laptop to get on the network from Apple's support files than from Microsoft's. Once I learned that all the computers had to be assigned to the same Workgroup, I was able to get the HP to see the G4 on the network. Now Maria can mount the G4 as a shared volume, at least her home directory anyway, and she can move documents back and forth over the network. The HP also sees the 6110, but I need to do some more studying to figure out how to get it to talk to the printer via OS X printer-sharing. Basically, I have to send the print jobs as Postscript files, so I need to figure out how to do all that.
It's not a lot of fun, and frankly, it made me feel stupid struggling with it. Of course, many of you will simply nod your heads and mutter, "That's because you are stupid, Rogers." But I'm able to share printers between Macs without breaking a sweat, so I don't know why it has to be so hard just to get an XP box on the network. Anyway, I'll get it to print this weekend, if I don't slam my fist through the keyboard first.
I'm really looking forward to The Day After Tomorrow. It probably won't be a great movie, but I do enjoy end-of-the-world flicks. The Core sucked out loud, so it's possible for them to be just horrible, but this one at least looks like it's going to have good scenes of mass destruction. Appeals to my inner misanthrope.
In other news, there's a sequel to The Whole Nine Yards coming out, entitled, predictably, The Whole Ten Yards. The trailer makes it appear as though it's following the same mold that Analyze This/Analyze That established, which strongly suggests the sequel will be much worse than the original. 9 Yards was, I thought, extremely funny with great performances from Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry and Kevin Pollack. It's kind of a black comedy, since so much of it orbits around hit men and their marks, but Perry as an extremely cautious dentist with an extreme bitch of a spouse (who was taking out a contract on him), was hysterical.
I don't know, but I take it from this article that John McCain, another man who has some intimate familiarity with the trials of combat, wouldn't regard John Kerry as "easy meat for the terrorists."
Today the Vice President of the United States, Mr. Dick Cheney, was speaking hypothetically about the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Sen. John Kerry, stating that if Senator Kerry had been president, Saddam Hussein would still be in Baghdad, and if he had been president back in '91, Hussein would still be in Kuwait.
Now that's a clever bit of hypothetical hyperbole. One could pretty much say anything one wished to say about "if..." Here's something that's indisputably not hypothetical: When the incumbent president's father had the job, after the armed forces of the United States forcibly ejected Hussein's forces from Kuwait, the incumbent's father's administration, of which the current VP was a high-ranking cabinet member, encouraged the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to rebel against Saddam and then promptly abandoned them when Hussein's forces moved in to crush the rebellions.
That's a pretty sterling testimonial to character and intestinal fortitude in the face of adversity. Kind of like that whole Vietnam draft thing.
And it's also indisputably not hypothetical that the incumbent vice president's former company was granted a multi-billion dollar non-competitive contract after we started a war and invaded another country, for which it promptly began overcharging the United States government.
Yes, we can't stand President Bush, but we're so frightened of "the terrorists" that we'll vote for him because we think a President Kerry would be "easy meat for the terrorists." A guy who has actually been in combat, and exhibited some capacity to perform commendably in combat, would be "easy meat for the terrorists." Those, scary, scary terrorists.
Is Kerry an ideal candidate? No. There is simply no such thing.
Is he better than what we have now? Well, there's only one way to find out, but I'd say the present standard isn't a formidable hurdle.
Who is John Kerry? I have no earthly clue. To me, he's mostly a cipher. But there are a few people I'd listen to. Maybe Kerry's the kind of guy who only really comes into his own when he's asshole deep in the shit like he was in Vietnam. He doesn't seem to me like he'd be someone who would be "easy meat for the terrorists." If his boat crew is standing with him today, I'd say those guys know something about John Kerry that we ought to consider. Maybe they're only standing with him now for their fifteen minutes of fame. I don't happen to believe that, but maybe that's it. I'm more inclined to believe that they believe something about him and that they'll do this for him now because of that. They're keeping faith with him now. There's damn precious little of that sort of thing anywhere in America today, and when you see it, it seems to me it's something you ought to consider.
Dying is easy. Living is hard. Everybody gets to die. What you do between the moment you're born and the moment you die is, in some measure, up to you. Do you want to make fear the center of your life? Your call.
To me, since we're all going to die anyway, it seems to me we ought to spend the brief time we're here trying live our lives for some things we believe in, instead of compromising those things for the illusion of safety in response to our fear.
AKMA has written some pretty interesting things on the notion of signification and accountability. I'm not a wizard for philosophical vernacular, but I can work a dictionary with the best of them. Signification is the act of making known by signs or other means. The meaning of signs is part of a larger philosophical subject called semiotics.
I have some difficulty understanding some of what AKMA has written, because he ventures off into some pretty esoteric language of the sort academics are fond of, presumably for its precision and clarity; though the "rest of us" can find it pretty opaque. But I'll try to express in my own words what I think AKMA is trying to get at, although I confess, the second post doesn't seem to track with what I thought the first post meant. Perhaps a problem in semiotics itself.
In AKMA's first post, he points out that every external action signifies something. That is, we seem to say things about ourselves and about the world whether we intend to or not. The problem is, some of that signification is intentional on the part of the transmitter, and thus subject to some measure of control; while much of it is intentional on the part of the receiver, who is not subject to any measure of control by the person signifying. A trivial example might be where a hand gesture in one culture is a sign of friendly greeting, while in another culture it is an offensive sign of disrespect. I was advised during my navy career to largely refrain from hand gestures involving digits when overseas. A thumbs-up in one culture may have the same meaning as a middle finger in our culture.
In his first post, I thought AKMA was suggesting that so much of what makes signification meaningful is not subject to the control of the person signifying; and that we should probably exercise some restraint in concluding what particular signs mean, thereby exercising a degree of tolerance for things which we may find offensive or objectionable.
This seemed to provoke a response from some readers who seemed to be reacting to, and objecting to, what I perceived as AKMA's point: That when discussing what a particular thing means, we ought to be mindful of the fact that sometimes we insert a meaning that wasn't the intention of the person who made the sign. The folks commenting seemed to suggest that people signifying should not be let "off the hook," so easily.
In his subsequent post, AKMA seems to "revise and extend" his remarks to incorporate the notion of accountability, even for something over which one has no control, and this is where I have objections.
Accountability is, to me, a very precise term, although dictionary definitions don't do it justice. I believe most of us understand that accountability is the notion that one is responsible to some authority for some standard of performance or conduct of a duty. I am accountable to the federal government for the prompt payment of my income tax. If I fail to carry out this responsibility which has been assigned to me by law, then the IRS is the agent with the authority of the federal government to hold me accountable. Holding me accountable means I have to present my account, my explanation, for how I carried out my responsibility. If I did everything properly, nothing happens, or perhaps I get a kudo. If I failed to do everything properly, then my account of how I performed my duty will reveal the deficiency. When the authority is confronted by the deficiency, it has the means of imposing remedies. In the case of the IRS, it may garnish my wages and assign fines and penalties.
In other words, in order to be accountable, there must be some authority that is competent to receive the account, to render a judgment, and authorized to impose a remedy. Absent any authority, I am not accountable. For instance, if I fail to pay my taxes, I'm accountable to the IRS, I'm not accountable to my next-door neighbor. Even though a reasonable case can be made that my failure to pay my taxes has been a transgression against my fellow law-abiding, tax-playing citizens, including my neighbor, they don't have the authority to hold me accountable. He can't come over and punch me in the nose for not paying my taxes and get away with it.
AKMA seems to assert that he has some accountability to anyone who receives any of the signification he emits. That if he offends someone, even unintentionally, he is accountable to that person. I don't believe that can be the case, unless one takes the position that one is subject to the authority of every individual receiver, and is willing to accept whatever remedy they wish to impose.
Now, I understand the general point AKMA is trying to make. If I'm in Blogaria, where the thumbs-up is an offensive sign of disrespect, and I am enjoying a friendly encounter with an indigenous Blogarian to whom I give a vigorous thumbs-up when he asks me what I think of Blogaria, then the chances are I've offended my new friend. If he responds as though he were offended, and I am surprised and taken aback, then I should try to learn what has prompted his reaction. Upon learning that I've just committed an offensive faux pas, I should apologize as a remedy. This is perhaps not the best example, because you can make the case that any relationship between two people relies on two equal authorities, and the maintenance of the relationship requires the mutual recognition of each authority and the shared responsibility to maintain the relationship. But I believe, in general, this is the kind of accountability AKMA is embracing.
But this doesn't scale well. Take, for example, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Much has been made of purported evidence of anti-Semitism in the film. Gibson himself denies any anti-Semitism in his intent in making the film, but some observers believe it is nevertheless plainly visible, and some observers are offended. Who, in this case, is Mel Gibson accountable to? I submit he is accountable to no one, as there is no authority that he is subject to who can call him to account, judge him and impose some sanction or remedy. Now, Mr. Gibson is subject, as indeed we all are, to the the law of consequences, perhaps more precisely, unintended consequences.
In the case of Gibson's movie, a number of theological authorities had received a copy of the script and attempted to influence Gibson into making a different movie, one that those authorities believed would address certain shortcomings in his film. Gibson refused, and seemed to be even offended that they would attempt to interfere with his creative effort in such a way. While one might debate the wisdom of his actions, in general, I'm sympathetic to him, even to the point of applauding his decision to ignore the recommendations of the authorities. Does that signify that I am anti-Semitic? I don't believe so, but I have no power over what anyone else wishes to believe, nor am I accountable to anyone else for my opinion on Mel Gibson's actions. Nor is anyone else accountable to me for their opinions regarding the movie or Mel Gibson.
As a consequence, one probably won't find any of those theological authorities endorsing Gibson's film as an authoritative account of the passion of the Christ. And that's just fine. What it is an authoritative account of is Mel Gibson's vision of what the passion of the Christ was, as it has been informed by his faith. We can criticize the work from the standpoint of whether or not the story it tells is consistent with what current biblical and theological scholarship tells us the story was. We can criticize it as a motion picture with respect to acting, plot, cinematography, sets, costumes, dialog, etc. We can object to those elements of the movie we may believe are anti-Semitic. We can choose not to see the movie. We can even criticize Mel Gibson for making his movie, if that's what we feel like doing. But that's not holding him "accountable." Nor should we presume to try do so.
We're not accountable to everyone, because not everyone is an authority over us. We can only do the best that we can, the rest is not up to us. We can try to learn from consequences, and we shouldn't try to escape consequences for the very reason that they can sometimes offer us valuable lessons. Even if sometimes those lessons are lost on those most in need of learning them, and by that I'm referring to those who make the consequences.
I just had the pleasure of an AV iChat with none other than AKMA who has recently acquired a brace of iSight cameras to facilitate maintaining the bonds of matrimony across the barriers of space and time as his wife goes off to complete her doctorate at Duke. It was fun talking to AKMA and seeing a couple of cameo appearances by his kids. For what it's worth, AKMA sounded much different than I expected just from reading his writing, as did Pascale Soleil when I first chatted with her. Al Hawkins, Doug Miller, Steve Vore, Euan Semple and Dr. James Vornov's voices were all somewhat consistent with my expectations. I had expected AKMA's voice to be much more "soft-spoken," but he's got a pretty deep resonant voice. It'll be interesting reading his weblog and "hearing" his voice instead of the one my imagination assigned.
Anyway, back to iSight... Lighting has consistently been something of a challenge for me using iChat AV. I have a desklamp that I turn on to illuminate my face at night. During the day, this room gets decent light, so it isn't necessary. But at night, the only light in this room is from two hall lights behind me. If I turn on the desk lamp and leave the hall lights off, I get the floating face effect. Which is kind of cool for, like, Halloween; maybe not so cool the rest of the time.
I noticed AKMA seemed to have a related problem, as his image appeared rather dim and with low contrast. The iSight is capable of better imaging in low light, but somehow that hasn't seemed to have been a priority with the engineers at Apple.
Well, I happen to have a ViewSonic AF90f+ montor. It's a consumer-grade 19 inch CRT monitor, but one of its "features" is something they call UtraBrite mode. It's intended for use in video games or when watching DVDs, and indeed I do use it for that. This evening I decided to see if perhaps by using the UltraBrite feature, I might brighten up AKMA's image. Indeed it did. It was still relatively low contrast, but there was more brightness and visible detail. An interesting side effect was that I noticed that the illumination of my own face improved significantly, as displayed in the little self-monitoring window within the iChat AV window. It wasn't just the brighter image generated by the CRT, it was the light from the CRT illuminating my face more. I'm not sure it would have done so if I hadn't had a number large number of windows open with white backgrounds, but it's an interesting tip nevertheless: You may be able to improve you lighting by using a brighter than usual setting on your monitor, and having a large white area on your screen. If you view your iChat sessions in full-screen mode, it probably won't help unless the other party is in a bright setting, but it's probably worth a try.
Using Apple's Remote Desktop, I was able to pop into my parents' computer, turn on iChat AV and start a chat with myself back here. The view from the camera at my parents' place told me no one was home. AppleWorks was already running, but I could have started that too; anyway, I created a new document in AW and left them a note!
It would be really cool if we all had some more bandwidth. I can do these things, but it isn't very pretty. Enough bandwidth, and it'd be just like being at their machine.
Halo is still absorbing too much of my life. Hey, it happens. I now believe I need a better computer. Sigh. There's a hardware hack I've read about that suggests late-model 867 MDD machines like mine actually have cpus rated at 1GHz onboard, and all that is necessary is to use some kind of pen that lays down conductive ink and bypass a couple of surface-mount resistors and we're off to the races. Halo only uses a single processor, so I'm not sure how much help 133 more MHz would be. It's quite playable, but I've seen how smooth it played on Chris's AMD machine and I'm a little envious. I'll have to think about it some more.
In other news, I downloaded and installed the latest version of Plucker for the Mac. Plucker will download a given web site and convert it into a document that can be loaded into your Palm handheld and read with the Plucker reader application. On a whim, I tried to download all the Time's Shadow and Groundhog Day entries hosted on .Mac and install them on my Clié. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. Except for the graphics, in spite of fact that I thought I had configured everything to download and install the graphics as well.
In any event, it's another way of getting information from your Mac desktop onto your Palm handheld. If you like using Tinderbox and you would like a simple way of moving your Tinderbox notes to your handheld, you could set up a simple html export template that would even preserve hyperlinks within your Tinderbox document and export it, then have Plucker convert it and upload it to your Palm.
My dislike of mobile phones was reaffirmed this weekend as I visited Books-a-Million. I was looking for a particular book in the young readers' section, when a woman came along with her small son. Her cell phone rang and, naturally, she answered it.
I normally try not to pay any attention to things like this, but she was standing right next to me. I don't recall any of what she said until I overheard her say, "Don't you hang up on me," which is apparently what happened next.
So the phone rings again a few moments later, she's still standing next to me, and now I can't help but pay attention, even as I try not to. She's talking to someone else now, who is apparently in close physical proximity to the first caller. She's quite irritated and orders the other person to put the first caller back on the line. At this point I'm guessing she's talking to her husband and one of her other children.
She then moves a few feet toward the end of the row and proceeds to interrogate the person at the other end of the call. Apparently this other person, I had the impression it was a son or daughter, was involved in some kind of athletic event that day. I don't know which sport because she kept saying "games," but that didn't seem to make sense with the rest of the context. I got the impression it was an individual sport because she kept asking "How many games did you win today?" And then, "You think you can hold your head up because you won only one game?" She was shaming the other person for their performance! If it was a team sport, well, then it's even worse. At least on a team, losing isn't solely one person's responsibility. If I had to guess, I'd say it was tennis.
She then goes on to berate the other caller because winning only one game was nothing to be proud of. Then demanding to hear two good reasons why he or she should be allowed to continue in whatever form of athletic competition this was, and why the mother shouldn't call some other individual, who I gather is a coach or trainer of some kind, and tell him it was over. I found my books and walked away, leaving her there ranting into her phone.
It was just a very depressing display. This woman couldn't necessarily be said to be verbally abusing the other party, but she was definitely mentally abusing him or her. She seemed genuinely angry that the person she was talking to had not won more games, and she was taking it out on that person. First, that's nothing to get that angry about. Second, if it were something that needed to be discussed, it shouldn't have been done over the phone, and certainly not in a public place.
I felt depressed, a little angry and helpless. A number of thoughts went through my mind. I wanted to take the lady's phone away from her and crush it under my foot. I wanted to tell her that no sport was worth what she was going through and what she was putting the other party through. I felt sorry for the person at the other end of the call who had to endure that sort of thing from a parent or anyone. It was harder to call up any sense of compassion for the woman on the phone, but I did end up feeling sorry that she found herself in those particular circumstances in her life.
That lady wasn't angry about the winning or losing. She was angry about something else in her life. I'm all too familiar with how those sorts of things happen. You walk around every day with all this fear and anger inside and you're not even aware of it because it's become "normal." Then something comes along that gives a pretext for allowing that fear and anger to manifest itself, even if it's inappropriate, and a few seconds later, somebody is wondering what the hell is wrong with you. And you know there is something wrong, but you don't pay any attention to that because that's just more fear to cope with, and you're quite full of it. So you tell yourself you're all right, it's all these "other" people who are screwed up. Or you make an excuse and call it "stress," which, of course, it is. But it's stress you own and can do something about, you're not a victim of it. Except in your own mind, where it's not your fault.
It's an old story. If I had her number, I'd call her and tell her about it. But I'm pretty sure she wouldn't take my call.
If you're interested in one (well, maybe two) of the more balanced treatments of The Passion of the Christ (allowing, for the moment, that one who has not actually seen (that would be me) the film can assess what is, or is not balanced), you could do worse than read AKMA's two most recent posts on the topic, here and (wait for it...) here.
We're fast approaching the day when we'll have powered exo-skeletons a la Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. This would be a boon for folks like my dad who is having greater difficulty in walking. He lost most of the muscles in one of his legs during a bout with necrotizing fasciitis (the flesh-eating bacteria), that nearly did him in almost a decade ago. His surgeon didn't think he'd be able to walk again unassisted, but he did. Pretty cool, that.
Religion is one of those things you're never supposed to talk about in the wardroom. I guess it's pretty clear why now.
Speaking of blood-fests, does anyone recall any controversy regarding racism or sexism or any other "-ism" in Kill Bill? I don't, but think about it: You have a white woman kill a black woman in her home practically in front of her child. Then she goes to Japan and the white woman kills an asian woman. Well, two asian women and lots and lots of asian men. And she dismembers a white woman, but keeps her alive to deliver a message for her.
Racist? Who knows? Probably not. Probably just a coincidence. Or maybe it's just "art." I don't know.
Was it too violent? All those severed limbs, bodies writhing on the dance floor spurting blood - too violent? Violence in the service of art? Again, I don't know.
But hey, it's Quentin Tarantino! So it's okay. Roll credits.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else." It's a tired old saw which is no less depressing for all its truth.
We have imperfect candidates and, it seems to me, an even more imperfect electorate. I'm not sure which is worse, but if I had to put money on it, I'd say the electorate is usually more of a problem than the candidates.
Some people write about candidates "earning my vote." What does that mean, precisely? What does a candidate have to do to earn someone's vote? If someone asserts that a candidate has done nothing to earn their vote, what does that mean when in the very next breath the person says they'll vote for the candidate anyway? What is so valuable about one person's vote that a candidate could be said to have some obligation to "earn" it?
This is one of the great fictions we enjoy believing about ourselves, that we're all such discerning voters. We cooly and rationally assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various candidates. We examine their positions on the issues of the day. We study their records and try to form some mental model of how they'll act in a position of greater responsibility. And, of course, we'll look for the candidate to do something to "earn" our vote. Presumably, this means they'll engage our intelligence in some way, and display sound judgment and keen insight by expressing some position on an issue that happens to be the same as ours. That will "earn" them our vote! Naturally, we also expect our candidates to be gifted orators, with a smooth and charming demeanor. Unless we're looking for the populist firebrand, in which case we'll look for someone who doesn't grow hoarse from haranguing speeches week after week, rallying the populist power of the "grass roots." Good hair is not to be dismissed, either. But for God's sake, don't be dull! We need to be inspired every four years! We need soundbites from uplifting speeches every night for the better part of a year so we can feel good about our country! So we can feel like we're a part of the process! Especially if they slag the other guys! Inspiration! That's what it takes to "earn" my vote! I need to be inspired! If you don't inspire me, maybe I'll just give it to you, even though I don't really want to. You disappointed me. You let me down. Heavy sigh. What has this country come to?
I go to McDonalds and I stand at the counter and I ask myself what the Filet of Fish has done to "earn" my purchase over the Big Deluxe. Doesn't everybody? What does the menu selection at a fast-food restaurant have to do with selecting future presidents? More than you might imagine.
We're such a burdened people. We know it's our responsibility to vote, but damn if these political parties don't keep sending us these uninspiring, imperfect candidates. Unless, of course, you happen to be a fan of one. Then, you know, it's a different story. One man's day-old dishwater is another man's second coming of Christ. One man's "earning" is another man's "pandering." And we all desire things our imperfect candidates cannot deliver. Such is life. Fortunately, it does afford some of us, the piously opinionated and ever-so-informed among the electorate, the opportunity to sit comfortably by the sidelines and carp and complain about the poor choices we have. It seems life does have its little compensations.
And what is "nothing?" It seems to me that a candidate, however flawed, however imperfect, however much I may disagree with them, simply by virtue of placing themselves in the field, and especially by prevailing over other candidates in a series of primaries, has "earned" my serious consideration of them for the office they seek. My responsibility is to vote. Who I vote for is my choice. I may not especially like any of my alternatives, but at that point, that's not up to me. What is up to me is who I choose. It may simply be that I'm voting against someone more than for a particular candidate. But any candidate who gets themselves on the ballot, any candidate who has undertaken the effort to perform public service in an elected office, any candidate willing to endure the grueling, intrusive, abusive and lately increasingly surreal process of campaigning, has "earned" my vote, whether for or against. It seems almost a shame that voters don't have to go to any comparable effort to "earn" their right to vote.
My fascination with Halo is waning a bit, thankfully. I'm only spending two or three hours a night on it. On the other hand, I did grab my son last night and run up to Best Buy to pick up two Logitech MX510 Performance Optical mice, the preferred rodent of gamers everywhere, one learns. I also picked up a copy of Halo for Chris at the full retail price because I wanted instant gratification on playing it online with him. So that was kind of expensive.
Chris informed me that a "TKer" is a "team-killer," someone who kills fellow teammates for the perverse thrill of it. I've encountered some of those. I've even managed to kill a few of my teammates unintentionally, usually with the warthog. (It's not a precision weapon.)
One of the things I find interesting is that I'm not upset by getting killed repeatedly. At the end of each match, a summary screen shows your ranking with the number of kills, assists and deaths you had in that match. My number of deaths is usually twice my number of kills, or more. Apparently, this is used as a ratio that may be indicative of one's performance, much like a batting average. Some of the players are extremely upset by getting killed. Sometimes you'll have an opposing team-member camped in the area where you "re-spawn" after dying, and you'll be killed again before you're even back into the game. This can get especially frustrating, I just think it's funny. I charge at the 'hogs, I try to leap over them (that never works), I don't duck or evade well, but I have a lot of fun. The only real frustration I have seems to be with the effectiveness of my weapons. It seems like I hit the target but the target doesn't go down as easily as I seem to do when I'm hit. That may be a function of accuracy, with headshots being much more effective than center-of-mass shots.
Anyway, got the new mouse home and hooked up. I couldn't make it work with Logitech's latest driver - it kept saying no Logitech mouse was detected. So I played around with the Kensington's settings a bit to see if I could get a little more accuracy from the trackball. I discovered in the process that Kensington's system preference doesn't allow me to assign a keystroke to one of the buttons of my trackball. That kind of sucked, and I made sure I had installed the latest updates and rebooted, so it wasn't that kind of issue.
Finally, I just decided to go with what I had and I launched my first multiplayer game with me as the host. My DSL connection only offers 256k upstream, and the Halo docs recommend 384k for 5-8 players, so I just used the slower 128k setup which only allows four players. I wasn't sure if it would work from behind the NetGear router, because the game reported its IP address in the 192 range. Nevertheless, it seemed to work because I quickly had three other players. I could see their ping times and they were all in the 200-350 range, which seems too high to play well. I tried to communicate with them, but only one seemed interested in answering my questions regarding how well the game seemed to be playing. He (or she) indicated it seemed to be playing fine.
Four players is too few for capture-the-flag, so I figured I'd try the higher speed setting even though I don't have the bandwidth for it. That game launched, but nobody joined. Chris called and he said he was ready to play, but he couldn't see my server. His game reported over one thousand available servers, while I was only seeing about 550. He said he wanted to host a game, so I looked for his server, but couldn't find it. I finally remembered I could join a game by typing a specific IP address, so I got his address and joined the game immediately. It was a death match and he quickly demonstrated the efficiency that thousands of hours of playing Counter Strike can give you with respect to killing your virtual opponents. I think I managed to knock him off about half as many times as he killed me. We tried a different map with vehicles and I ran over him with a warthog. I did a little better in that game because I knew the map, and I could come at him from places he didn't see or expect.
His computer shut down the match unexpectedly, and he reported that he seemed to be having trouble keeping the game running. It may be related to his video card, something about DX9 and he only supports DX8 or something.
Of course, all this has whetted my appetite for some other online gaming experiences. I'm going to have to brush up on my Warcraft 3 and see if there isn't some fun to be had with that. And Giants: Citizen Kabuto has an online mode that seemed pretty interesting which I've never tried. Unfortunately, that's mac-to-mac only and I'm not sure how many games are even hosted on any given night. Only one way to find out though!
These ideas get into my head and they don't leave me alone, they just keep buzzing around. It reminds me why I really, really do need to get back into a regular practice of meditation. Maybe I can open a window here and let this particular bee out and I can get back to fretting over something else, equally inconsequential.
It seems to me that the fearful faithful might enjoy somewhat greater success if they approached the phenomenon of Mel Gibson's little motion picture from the standpoint of faith rather than from fear. I think it might not garner them as much attention in the short term, but in the longer term I think it would be more successful from the standpoint of what they might wish to achieve in the world.
It seems to me that any account of Jesus Christ is flawed, to begin with the gospels. My understanding is that we essentially negate that fact by making the dogmatic assertion that everything in the bible is the divine word of God, a product of received wisdom and not the fallible recollections of human beings. But I think we can all agree that everything else after the bible, to include every movie ever made, is flawed in some way.
Now, we can focus attention on the flaws and seek to attract attention and compete for authority, which doesn't seem to me to be what Christ's charge to his disciples was; or we could celebrate the fact that someone of Mel Gibson's stature would bring to the screen a dramatic account of a key event in the Christian faith to a very wide audience. Rather than focus on Mel Gibson's vision, use it as a springboard to draw attention to your own vision - if you own your faith in the same way that Mel Gibson seems to own his. What part of Christ's life inspired you to take up your vocation? What part of Christ's life would you like to make a movie of, if you were someone like Mel Gibson? Of, if that's not the right way to phrase the question, what part of Christ's life would you have liked Mel Gibson to make a movie about, and why is that so meaningful to you?
It seems to me that Mel Gibson has done something every Christian theologian could welcome, and that is to draw attention to Jesus Christ. What's to be afraid of in that? Well, in truth, there are some things one might be afraid of, but one might be afraid of crossing the street as well. The point is, the world is the world, and I think we're better served, in the long run, proceeding from the aspect of faith rather than from fear.
I was raised a Catholic, but I'm probably not much of a Christian. I have too little faith in the groups of people that make up particular religions and churches. I don't have any particular axe to grind in this fight, other than I think I have a tiny inkling about the nature of faith and fear. Love is faith in action, and if Christ's death on the cross isn't an example of that, then I'm confused. We're supposed to love our fellow man. Love is faith in action. Where is the faith in Mel Gibson? Instead what we have is fear in action. Faith serves faith, fear serves fear. You can't make fear serve faith. It seems to me this is stuff these guys should already have figured out.
Venture capitalists are people with a great deal of authority. They are a good example of the authority of money. People who are perceived as having a great deal of authority usually garner a great deal of attention, but sometimes that attention comes from a narrow segment of the population who are in some manner subject to that individual's particular authority. (As an example from another area, more people pay attention to Mel Gibson than to theologians.)
Now, if a venture capitalist desires greater attention as a means of expanding the appearance of his or her authority, it seems likely that they could leverage their authority as a venture capitalist with other high attention earners who are normally subject to their authority, like entrepreneurs. (Successful entrepreneurs are themselves authorities, but of somewhat greater precedence, they are also successful attention-earners.)
Entrepreneurs receive attention from a wider audience who, in return for favorable attention from the venture capitalist, draw favorable attention to the VC from the wider population at large. Would-be authorities within the wider population then compete for attention from the new authority figure by helping to draw even more attention to the VC, and, in return, get to exploit the reflected authority of the VC through a kind of reciprocity relationship over the exchange of attention. (It may help to think of this as name-dropping and ass-kissing.)
This kind of attention and authority has all the substance and weight of shaving cream. In the near term, everyone gets their dopamine receptors filled, but trying to turn this array of authorities and attention-seekers into an entity that actually accomplishes something will fail, because the only thing it is designed to achieve is to serve the needs of the individual egos.
In other words, it won't change the world. And I think it pretty much sums up the point of social network software.
In an article in the Washington Post entitled Divide and Bicker, Howard Kurtz describes the internal dissension that existed within the Dean campaign. It's a fascinating example of how different types of authorities exist and compete with one another in a group.
I don't think it's clear just yet how much this internal struggle contributed to the Dean implosion. Certainly, it didn't help. But I think part of what allowed this sort of struggle to take place is Dean's own leadership, or specifically, the lack thereof. Probably another good reason why he's not the nominee.
It was a beautiful day today. It's kind of amazing to me how a little warm weather and sunshine can make so many things seem possible.
Last night I said that AquaMinds had renamed NoteTaker 2003 to just NoteTaker. It turns out that's not the case. It still calls itself NoteTaker 2003. So I guess it's already behind the times.
I haven't been inclined to comment on The Passion of the Christ because I'm not terribly interested in the movie. I'm a little more interested in the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson, which is, I think, the Main Event, not the movie.
Why is this movie getting so much attention? I don't think it's because of the subject matter. Wasn't there another movie about Jesus that came and went last year and barely anyone noticed? If this didn't have Mel Gibson's name attached to it, if it was an independent film by some unknown filmmaker, would it be garnering this much attention and criticism? I suppose it's hard to say for sure, but my hunch is it would not.
Part of it is Gibson's celebrity, which makes him an object of great attention by many people. I think it's also likely that the kind of people who are criticizing Gibson through criticism of his movie are also the kind of people who ordinarily don't pay much attention to Mel Gibson and celebrities like him. But I think these people are very sensitive to the numbers of other people who pay attention to Gibson, and this makes them anxious.
People do confuse attention with authority, and Mel Gibson has even claimed a certain amount of authority in making his film. He used Latin and Aramaic to add authenticity to the film, but also for artistic reasons. So naturally he gets criticism because he used the wrong languages (at least in some of the scenes) - so it's not authentic!
I think what's interesting is that the conventional authorities on the crucifixion of Jesus are upset. On their best days they don't garner the kind of attention a movie star like Mel Gibson does. Here's a guy who isn't an authority (in their, perhaps legitimate, view), who is getting all this attention as though he were! This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. So, how to attract attention to legitimate authorities? Through controversy! Raise a stink! It's anti-Semitic! Is it anti-Semitic? I have no idea. From what I've read, it seems to me as though people are reaching a bit. But again, if it were some unknown filmmaker who didn't have a father who is supposedly a holocaust denier (I don't know if he is or not, though I've read several reports that indicate that he is.), would the vast panoply of liturgical and theological authorities be arrayed against Gibson? And, just to be "fair and balanced," there appears to be no shortage of other religious authorities who endorse Gibson's movie.
Again, I don't think all the hoo-hah has as much to do with the content of the movie as the person of Mel Gibson as the auteur. It's violent because Mel is violent. It's anti-Semetic because Mel's dad is a holocaust denier. It's bloody because Mel belongs to a branch of the Catholic church that has largely rejected Vatican II. So, basically, what's bad about the movie is a reflection of what's bad about Mel. How dare he make a movie about something he knows nothing about! Why the very nerve!
But here's the thing. Mel is the authority on his faith. Mel is the authority on his vision of Jesus' sacrifice as it is informed by his faith. I don't know if he's right or wrong; but I admire his effort. Here's a guy who owns his faith. Now, is that necessarily a good thing? Not always. Is Mel Gibson a bad person? Well, he's human, so he's not perfect. He seems like he's been a decent sort of guy. I don't think he's evil. I don't think he made this move from fear, I think he made it from faith. I think most of the people who are criticizing him by criticizing his movie are doing so from fear, not from their own faith.
I'm probably not going to see the movie. I think I've read all the plot spoilers by now. But I have enjoyed observing the controversy, and I think there's a more interesting story in all that than in the content of the film.
Okay, we're still on the air. Now, do we have anything to say? Let's see...
I watched a little bit of the Oscars last night. I don't recall if I've watched any of the other recent ones. I didn't stay up very late in any case. On matters of appearance and fashion, I thought Sandra Bullock looked great; I thought Charlize Theron looked a little too tan, almost orange. Liv Tyler looked great. Jamie Lee Curtis, who I adore, didn't look so great, I thought. Jack Black and Will Ferrell were hysterical in their musical number. And I like Ben Stiller. I just have never really liked Sean Penn. Billy Crystal was great. I liked The Lord of the Rings a whole lot, but I thought it just kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the awards.
I've been listening to the soundtrack CDs of The Return of the King and Gladiator. I have to say, Gladiator is the one I will listen to most frequently. TROTK is nice, but it's pretty dull. I really love Into the West, and I think it's a far, far better song than Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. For what it's worth, I don't think we'll ever hear, "the Oscar-winning Annie Lennox," just as we never hear, "the Oscar-winning Bruce Springsteen." But, back to the soundtrack to Gladiator - whoa! First, I have to say that now I do prefer the live version of Now We Are Free which is available at the iTunes Music Store. I think it's more dramatic, and while the soundtrack version is consistent with my memory of the movie experience, I find the live version is much more congruent with my emotional memory of the scene it's from. That said, the rest of the soundtrack is just fantastic. I'm sure it's a matter of taste and there are a lot of synthesizers, but it is dramatic, compelling stuff. I want to run out and buy a 1KW amplifier and giant subwoofer for my planet-stomping SUV and have track 3 cued up on my commute home so when I hear some guy with his subwoofer blasting out some hip-hop thing, I can just crank up Hans Zimmer and deliver some real low-frequency excitement. I'd worry a bit about creating a sink-hole though.
I haven't watched Lost in Translation again yet, but it's on my short list of things to do, so perhaps this weekend.
Just installed a new update to NoteTaker, version 1.8. They've dropped the year from the application name, which is a wise move. Haven't played with it yet to see what they've done.
Kodak has also updated EasyShare for compatibility with Panther. I haven't used it much since iPhoto 4 came along, but it's still a very nice app, and it's free.
The weather is slowly improving. Today it was warm, though very gray. I'll settle for warm at the moment. I'm really looking forward to spring. I hope it's a nice long one and we don't jump right into a hot summer. Either way, I'll be happy the cold is over.
Halo has been sucking many hours out of my life. Online play is a lot of fun, though I am beginning to get a little tired of it. Some maps are better than others, and sometimes the people hosting the games set things up such that it's just carnage rather than any kind of strategy or tactics. I tend not to enjoy the death-matches, even though I am rather fond of running over people in warthogs. I haven't mastered the vernacular yet either, I don't know what a TK'er is. I gather a "camper" is someone who sets themselves up in a covered position and simply remains there sniping at players as they respawn. Some of the players' behaviors are decidedly juvenile and selfish. If I happen to grab the sniper rifle and someone else wants it, some of them will think nothing of either hitting me or shooting me to get the weapon or vehicle they want. Paybacks are a bit of a trick because there's no way to find the guy who did it unless you point a weapon at each of your teammates long enough for their name to appear over their heads, so there's really little in the way of consequences for that sort of behavior. Still, it's a lot of fun most of the time, and when you get a particularly bad group, you just leave and find another one. I now understand my son's frustration with "lag" too.
Well, there's your cheese sandwich for the day. I probably have enough time for a few more rounds of Capture the Flag before taps...
It's been a while since I've done this, so something may go awry. I need to create an archives page, and link in the old Time's Shadow stuff. It's kind of tedious, so who knows when I'll get around to it? Soon, I think. But not tonight. Let's see if this works...
