July 2007 Archives

I think.

If you're reading this, you're looking at the new host. Speak up if you've a mind to.

The Thrill is Gone. BB King with Gary Moore.

This is too late to help much but, if you are in Manitoba this weekend, you might want to consider a trip to Icelandic country for the 7th annual Gimli Film Festival running from today (July 27) through to July 31. One of the features of this festival is a 35' outdoor screen on the beach on Lake Winnipeg.

There will be over sixty films and shorts ranging from Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, The White Planet to Neil Young: Heart of Gold and The Rocket.

Hopefully, I will be able to take in a couple of films. I used to see about 100 movies a year including a couple of film festivals and film societies but, these days, it's more like one a year. This looks like a nice, laid back event.

Urgent update: see below

Really, you can’t, no matter how truly madly deeply and sincerely you admire that icon of modern republican virtue Patrick Fitzgerald, no matter how much you think he deserves a chuckle after all he’s been through, not the least of which would have to be accepting ambiguous and vaguely unsettling praise from the back-stabbing flaccid criminal enabler attorney general who is his boss, Alberto Gonzales.

This is just a squib to let lovers of adorable American law-enforcement guys republican virtue know that PatFitz finally agreed to speak publicly about something more than the narrowest evidence he can put before a court at this very moment. No, he didn’t quite do what so many of us are still hoping for – ie, outline the full criminal conspiracy that Dick Cheney has been running as a fourth branch of the American government for some years now. Fitz just agreed to be a good sport and appear on a National Public Radio show called “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!” in a segment called “Not My Job,” where distinguished people subject themselves to teasing questions on subjects that are not their normal specialties. (Weblink to audio at post’s end.)

As my fellow lover of hopelessly shy smart guys who need some female advice about their ties republican virtue Godammit Kitty says, there was an upside to Fitz’s appearance on Thursday evening at Chicago’s Millennium Park. When a guy is getting repeated standing ovations from a crowd of 8,000 people, you gotta figure that the White House talking-points aren’t working on everybody. No underlying crime? Tell it to the judge (Reggie Walton, if possible). And so much for “nobody cares” and “this is just inside-the-Beltway stuff,” as Kitty says.

Unfortunately, the teasing our Patrick got seems to have centred on scooter jokes:

``We are so not going to ask you any questions about Scooter Libby,'' NPR news anchor Carl Kasell told Fitzgerald during the taping. Instead, he was peppered with questions about other scooters: the two-wheeled scooter made by Segway Inc., Scooter the stagehand from television's Muppet Show and former New York Yankee Phil Rizzuto, also nicknamed ``The Scooter.''

And then at the end, the hosts apparently insisted on giving our boy a child’s scooter as a gift:

He didn't personally say anything that could be construed as partisan or belittling. He even seemed reluctant to take the scooter.

Gosh. That was so not the way to treat our Fitz, as any addict fetishist lover of republican virtue would know. Patrick Fitzgerald does not make light of criminal convictions. They make him sad. He speaks of them with scrupulous, fastidious correctness, within very narrowly correct boundaries, and they always make him sad.

The Patrick Fitzgerald that we addicts fetishists lovers of republican virtue know would not have wanted that scooter. What were you thinking, NPR? How could you so misunderappreciate your national treasure?

The program was broadcast this morning; it won’t be available on the NPR site until Sunday after 7 p.m. If you’re a Canadian, don’t bother listening to last week’s show – I did that for you, and I promise you, it will just depress you. Even on NPR, they are having a lot of trouble resisting the faux-news culture.

Greetings and thanks to Little Pink Clubhouse for “Patrick Fitzgerald is wearing a RING? My life is over!” "It's a good day to have a crush on Patrick Fitzgerald," and other light classics.

Urgent update: I just listened to the broadcast, and I take back the mean and negative things I said about "Wait wait ..." Up to and including the segment with Fitz, which takes you more than halfway through a 48-minute broadcast, the show is actually very funny. So, like, enjoy.

Just a tiny squib. I read where George Bush called the Iranian government "belligerent, loud, noisy, threatening".

. . .

Just imagine that was me pausing like Jon Stewart, with that look on my face. Yeah. Near infinite number of elephants in the room forming a gravity well so deep no light can escape, cosmic black hole around which a whole galaxy of mendacity swirls--meet kettle.

Taj Mahal.

Bonus track: Fishing Blues.

Saw Michael Moore's movie “Sicko” the other day, and there's been plenty of talk about it, and I think that while it's mainly about American health care, it has interesting implications for Canada.

OK, so first of all, Sicko says nice things about Canadian health care, which is pleasant. Obviously we're way, way better than the barbaric system to the south of us. So anyone who wants us to move towards a more US-style system should really be shutting up now. It's not surprising that Canadian pundits are lining up to slag the movie; they really don't like hearing that our system works better than privatization. But there are some other issues about Canadian health care raised by the movie.

Basically, Sicko makes two things clear to me. First, public medical care is better than private. Second, as first-world public care systems go, Canada is distinctly lacking, and our system's shortcomings have nothing to do with any inherent problems with public care.

Another in my occasional murfles about fantasy and science fiction. Partly because I recently saw another rant about how science fiction is dead or dying and it's all the fault of those Fantasy barbarians at the gates and their mindless pap.

Now, it's true that lately fantasy seems to sell better than science fiction, which is a pity because I like science fiction. And there may even be something to the idea that fantasy is often “easier” in some sense. It is perhaps easier to write hack fantasy and have few notice that it's hack fantasy than to write hack science fiction and have few notice that it's hack science fiction. To do a decent job at either, you have to know some stuff. To do a decent job at science fiction, you have to first and foremost not flub up the science too badly, and science fiction readers and reviewers are pretty sophisticated about that—sure, they'll forgive or even not notice some hand-waving around key or traditional SF tropes like faster-than-light travel and so on, but if you try to talk science-y and make mistakes, you're in trouble unless it's Star Trek. To do a decent job at fantasy, you have to not flub up the mythology or the historical/cultural feel of the settings, and in my humble opinion, as a general rule you have to treat fantastical elements with a feel that makes them something different from, something less and more than, Arthur C. Clarke's “sufficiently advanced technology”. Clarke knew his technology and his SF, but I don't think he knew diddly about magic or fantasy or mythology. It's a subtler set of requirements, and I think the audience is less likely to reject fantasy that fails it as long as there's some plot and a sympathetic character or two and some whiz-bang.

And yet, there's stuff going on in fantasy, often even fantasy that more or less fails to meet the demands I just placed, that belies the idea of mindless escapism (not that I have much against escapism).

So soon after reading PLG's great rant against the latest fascistic madness south of the border, I find myself watching that most American of media - a motion picture - on the tube. It is a sixties classic, selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, no less!
Just before one of the characters (George) is savagely slain and the other (Billy) is brutally beaten by a gang of racist rednecks, they have this dialog:

George (Jack Nicholson): You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.

Billy (Dennis Hopper): Huh. Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened, man. Hey, we can't even get into like, uh, second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we're gonna cut their throat or something, man. They're scared, man.

George: Oh, they're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.

Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.

George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.

George: Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Billy: Mmmm, well, that don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.

Easy Rider - 1969

The song is Leadbelly's The Midnight Special. The artists are Odetta and Creedence Clearwater Revival. I figure you can sort out which is which.

It says here that, “The U.S. Government is soliciting bids for a project that, if implemented, could see travelers facing lie detector testing at airports, border crossings, and other high traffic venues.”
So, the idea is they're gonna to start giving polygraph, aka “lie detector” tests to everyone who flies, crosses the border, or, uh, goes to “other high traffic venues”. Dunno what they're gonna ask them--”Are you a terrorist?” or maybe “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an anti-Bush organization?”

Now, this is obviously ludicrous to anybody sane, as the link points out in no uncertain terms. Polygraph tests don't work worth a damn, for starters. And even if they worked far better than they do, as the place I linked to points out, the number of false positives generated would be beyond massive. There are after all very, very few actual terrorists; for every actual terrorist who failed a test, you'd get tens of thousands of non-terrorists. In the end there will surely be so many false positives that if they ever do have an actual terrorist go through and fail, they won't notice. Kind of like the no-fly list, which apparently they don't put the names of people they think really are terrorists on in case it warns them that they're under suspicion.

But then, none of that is the point, is it?

'Cos I missed another Friday night.

Robben Ford. Worried Life Blues.

Eben Moglen just delivered a speech to a bunch of lawyers in Edinburgh which, bizarrely, is the most powerful activist statement I've read in ages. I suppose there are two reasons—one is that it is deep, powerful and erudite, radical in a very strong sense of the word. The other is that a refreshing thing about Free Software people is that while the rest of us spend much of our energy bemoaning the evils of empire and our inability to make a political dent, Free Software people are confident that they are winning. For instance, on Microsoft, you can't get much more confident than this dismissal:

But that's sufficient, I believe -- we shall do their business as we have meant for the longest time to do, and the world will be a better place when we have done. That's just the beginning. That's only a matter of clearing brush away. The monopoly isn't in any intellectual sense interesting, it isn't in any ethical sense tolerable, it isn't in any economic sense necessary, it's simply a thing that happened to happen and that we will soon be finished making no longer there.

But as to the radicalism—well, I don't know where to start quoting, and I will find it hard to finish. I don't agree with everything he says; he seems to imagine that “free markets” would in theory generally work, even as he discusses community-based economic models utterly alien to such markets. But there's so much inspirational material here that I'm not disposed to quibble.