Personal Musings category archive

The dogs bark to go out.

I open the door.

I say, “Don’t come back.”

They go out and they always come back.

What am I doing wrong?

I love numbers that end in three zeroes.

I hope that this is merely the first cohort.

The hotel I’m at, in a small town in the country, has 52 rooms. And six rooms rented. I have a wing to myself.

Granting that it’s the off season (most of their business are vacation travellers breaking their trips to Myrtle Beach and points south) and a competitor (Holiday Inn Express, yecchh) has opened down the street, making two hotels in a one-half-hotel town, but even so . . . .

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How can I watch my Law and Order reruns when the location of the network port in this hotel makes it almost impossible to see the tee vee?

This means that historians and journalists will have to do work the old fashioned way: by actually talking to carbon-based life forms, going to archives and libraries, and looking at stuff that they can touch and feel and hold. Because there is a world outside of Google:

The problem, researchers discovered, was that Google has had trouble reformatting the newspaper images and gaining rights to display some of the older publications. It has, at least, temporarily removed some of the archives from public view.

There is an idealized view of the Web that sees it as a storehouse of human knowledge, and in the sense of the breadth of what I can find with a random Google search, this is true.

But for all its openness, the Web has proven to be a leaky vessel for historical preservation, with much of its treasure trove lost in a maze of altered Web pages, broken links and deleted sites.

As much as I appreciate and enjoy the richness of the inner tubes, from email to Usenet to the World Wide Web, and as much fun as I have had messing about in that world, I try to remember that there once was and still is a world that exists outside of an ethernet cable.

Anyone whose horizon stops at the edge of a screen lives a small life indeed.

Movies that aren’t worth watching aren’t worth renting.

Blockbuster Inc., the world’s largest movie-rental chain, hired the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP to explore a possible bankruptcy filing, a person familiar with the situation said. Blockbuster fell as much as 86 percent yesterday before trading was halted.

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I want think that this explains my problems.

But, naaaaaah.

The Leftie Blogoshere, though it is a relatively small self-contained place overlapping the left side of the main stream, has made it okay to be a “liberal” again through its aggressive willingness to describe itself as, well, “liberal.”

The spectacular crash-and-burn failure of Republicanism has, no doubt, helped.

There is really no point to cleaning the house until the snow melts, now, is there?

Why you shouldn’t talk politics at a family dinner.

One becomes certain that the Department of Homeland Security’s (which should never have been created and was one, maybe the only, thing Bush was right about and Democrats were wrong about–and should have been named the Department of Domestic Security if it had to be) stupid color-coded terror alert system, which was always directed more to promoting the fear that Bushism thrived on than at providing useful information, is on the way out when it becomes the subject of a poll at Parade dot com.

R. I. P. Paul Harvey.

In the olden days, I used to listen to him on WAMU-AM, which used to be one of the best radio stations in the country. (Now it’s just another wingnut talker).

He never let a fact stand in the way of a good story in his Rest of the Story feature.

Addendum:

Harry Shearer has an appreciation, starting about 30 minutes into the show.

I am completely and thoroughly convinced that all the Barack Obama birth certificate kerfuffle wouldn’t be going on if the man were pink like me.

Field Negro lays it out.

If my insurance was with an incompetent, bankrupt company, I’d look elsewhere also.

(The good news is that none of my insurance companies are in the news.)

When I was 13, I was conservative too, like this young ‘un.

All the white folks around me considered themselves conservative, and, ultimately, Goldwater swept the county.

Why? They were horribly afraid that the evil Democrats were going to end Our Way of Life: Jim Crow segregation. There was other reasons also, but that was the the main one. And, remember, this was in a part of the South where the outward trappings of segregation were nowhere near as brutal as they were in parts of the Deep South.

What happened?

Answer below the Fold

“Reality television” is to today as dance marathons were to the 1930s.

I don’t know why it rubs me the wrong way, but it does. I really dislike hearing a man refer to his spouse as “the wife.”

Yeah. I know the arrow is supposed to point the other way.

But that’s the Republican equation.

Witness this column from the Guardian:

California has apologetically invested in liberalism – and has reaped a toxic asset. The Golden State is headed towards the kind of public-sector meltdown usually reserved for third-world banana republics. Unemployment has skyrocketed to nearly 10%. The public education system is one of the nation’s five worst. California has the country’s dirtiest air and most gridlocked roads. And we have a government so dysfunctional that even sober onlookers are considering the merits of a constitutional convention. It’s often said that California’s present determines the nation’s future. If that’s true, Americans may need to begin stocking up on firearms and canned goods.

There’s much more at the link, but I didn’t want to waste any more electrons on it.

The author leaves out what necessitated this budget: decades of misgovernance under Republican Economic Theory, which, from passing Prop. 13 to requiring a super-majority to pass a state budget, has left California virtually ungovernable.

He left out that, the day before the budget was passed, California was shutting down. And what is government? It’s not Nyarlothotep, though it’s seldom perfect, just as you and I are seldom perfect.

It’s police, fire fighters, food and housing inspectors, persons who serve the public (and, by and large, persons who, unlike bankers, don’t get bonuses for failure). Government is the engine that makes civilized society possible.

Republicans don’t like government, therefore they must not li–oh, never mind.

Who are these people and why does anyone care about them?