October 2003 Archives

Happy Halloween to both all my readers.

I haven't gone out yet, but I've already witnessed the most frightening costume. The award this year goes to Napster, the new online, micropay system sponsored by the RIAA, disguised as the company that they drove into the ground.

Not that you'd notice the disguise. According to their site, Napster is "back," although they tend to do the doubletalk by speaking of Napster purely in terms of the brand rather than any functionality or software. And then there's the "safe harbor statement" (??):

Except for historical information, the matters discussed in this press release, in particular matters related to demand for the Napster service, relationships with certain corporate partners including marketing partners and hardware and software manufacturers, relationships with content providers, and product development, are forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties such as decreased demand for our products, increased competition, failure to develop new products or improvements to existing products, failure to maintain business relationships with our partners and general economic conditions, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

Um, yeah. I'm thinking about adding this to my blog, so that I can promise that reading it will help people lose weight, make friends, and increase happiness overall. You know, forward-looking statements that are subject to uncertainties (such as weight gain, ostracization, or clinical depression) that could cause actual results to differ. Is it just me, or do there seem to be more of these "it's okay for us to lie" caveats floating around lately?

The highlight for me of the Napster site, though, was the opportunity to see the Napster Partner Brand Usage guide (available in the Press Room off the Napster information link). Maybe I'm just new to this kind of stuff, but reading page after page of demands that the brand maintain particular size ratios between the kittyhead and the name, and only appear against background colors with sufficient contrast, struck me as a little anal.

A close second was the list of corporate partners marshalled by "Napster" for its "rerelease": in addition to the RIAAligopoly, "Napster" is brought to us by Gateway, Microsoft, Roxio, Samsung, and Yahoo! Stop the counter-culture carousel--I'm getting dizzy!!

Anyhow, I hope that someone, in a couple of years, writes a book about the rise, fall, and subsequent implosion of one of the most potent Net brands ever, because I can't imagine that it's going to last. Napster reaped the benefits, and paid the price, of being the first to challenge the recording industry--now it's just one of many, and not even the best, legal alternatives out there. And it's taken so long to reconstitute itself that not even their (admittedly kind of hip) commercials are going to be able to bring it back, I suspect.

Napster's flatlined, and nothing I saw on their site suggests that there's anything to 2.0 but a desperate attempt to capitalize on its corpse.

There's a new piece in Salon, an interview with Camille Paglia. Paglia, you'll remember, is the quasi-liberal, quasi-academic answer to Rush Limbaugh, kind of loud, kind of obnoxious, more often correct than her critics are comfortable admitting, etc.

Anyhow, she makes for entertaining copy, and this interview is no exception. At one point, she takes on weblogs:

Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit.

I'm going to leave this alone, except to note the overwhelming sense of irony that reading it gave me. And then,

No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs

There's more, but I'll leave it to someone else. People on the Media Ecology Association listserv were chirping about Paglia a couple of months ago, when she mentioned the MEA on CNN. Fact of the matter is, however, that she's got no business whatsoever talking about this stuff. Her thoughts are overwhelmingly preoccupied with celebrity, with larger-than-life media figures (it's no accident that the bulk of her interview deals with presidential candidates, Limbaugh, Madonna, Cher, etc.). The kind of archetypal media celebs that Paglia admires (and indeed, wants to become) are the products of the mass mediapoly. They aren't going to come out of weblogs, and so, she has no interest in that phenomenon. She's got no sense whatsoever of the possibility that there are media models beyond the ones she has spent (and built) her career gushing over. Here's a little more from the interview:

Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium -- I don't log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose.

"In my view?" How about in the view of everyone who's written about the Web in the past ten years? And what has Paglia been doing to avoid trapping others on muddy pages crammed with indigestible prose? Oh yeah, she's "completing a book about poetry and a new collection of her essays."

Good luck with that.

So I'm out running errands today, and I stop by the post office to turn my mail back on. On the way, I pick up a nail in one of my back tires without realizing it. I go in, do the mail thing, and get back outside and into my car. The guy next to me tells me about the flat, and quickly drives off.

No problem. I get out the spare, take off the flat, blah blah blah. But here's the thing. The PO is pretty busy late in the day, people getting off from work, etc. Probably twenty separate people pull in while I'm changing my tire. And you know what? Not a single, f'ing person stops to make sure I don't need help. I didn't need help, but not a single person stopped to ask if I might need 2 of their anywhere minutes to call a car service or a little help with the change. And did I mention the jerk who sat in his car two parking places away, and watched me for twenty minutes without offering any help?

Welcome to 21st century America, land of the self-righteous, materialistic narcissists, who are more than happy to slap American flags on their own cars when it's a matter of bombing the crap out of people who don't believe the same things they do, but who can't be bothered to even offer assistance to someone who's having trouble with their car. Sigh.

Did I mention that it was raining? Have a better day than I. Please.

Partly in honor of Jenny's "sexy" makeover on her dissertation blog, I thought it was high time that I deploy some of my own CSS skills, and add a seasonal flavor to my own blog. It's a little garish, yes, but then, so is this time of year.

Speaking of sexy makeovers, I caught a piece of the Lakers' cakewalk over the Mavericks tonight, and I was left with two overwhelming impressions. First, it looks good for the Lakers, assuming that Malone and Payton don't collapse down the stretch. Second, the Mavs uniforms look like they were made out of Glad trash bags, turned inside out and sewed together. I know that this is some sort of marketing thing that every sports league has bought into--new uniforms means new product, new demand, new revenue, blah blah blah. But these are the worst looking uniforms I've seen in some time, and the NBA has offered up some real stinkers.

At least the blog will change back to something a little more palatable in a couple of weeks.

This is a little belated, I admit, and I suppose that part of the reason is that very little happened on my final day in Austin. In part, this was alcohol-related--it took us a while to get up and going on Sunday.

Jenny and I spent a little time at BookPeople, where I devoted a couple of hundred dollars to keeping Austin both weird and unchained. I can't tell you how delightful it was to visit a big bookstore whose selection wasn't driven solely by the bestseller lists.

A little Thai food and a little HBO Sunday lineup later, and my final day was done. Travel on Monday was pretty par for the course--got home last night.

In all, a great trip, and a desperately needed vacation. Thanks, JFTB.

Day 4 represented my exposure to a broad cross-section of all that hipster culture in Austin has to offer. First, Jenny, Dew, and I visited Mojo's, where we had the opportunity to drink a little coffee, and swap dog stories with dreads-wearin', tat-sportin' hipster gal who watered the outside ferns before she drove off in her VW van. I kid you not.

But that was only a prelude to the day's central event and ultimate highlight, a trip to see Lost Boys through the eyes and quips of Mr. Sinus Theater at the Alamo Drafthouse. I was an on-and-off fan of MST3K (not having addicted myself to digital cable until I came to Syracuse), but I must say that (a) it's even funnier live, and (b) it's a blast to see/hear the process applied to the 80s teen movies that I took far more seriously when I was a kid. Oh my god, but this was hilarious. It was me, Jenny, Kyle, Diane, Michelle, and Mark (who gets a link here only as an attempt to shame him into putting at least as much effort into his UT site as he did on his Penn State incarnation).

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention my brush with man-krush fame, a chance to swap remarks with John Erler. John is slightly shorter than the lead singer from the old Australian band Midnight Oil, but you're pretty much on the right track if you start there. Said John to me, "Any friend of Jenny's is an enemy of mine." And I like to think that his jokes about Plato's cave, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn were just for me...sigh...

Afterwards, we stopped at Cuba Libre, a bar next door to the Alamo. Unfortunately, the Ricky Martin and Penelope Cruz look-alikes featured on their website weren't in attendance that evening. There were, however, dozens of yuppie hipsters who undoubtedly each drove their SUVs to be there and to look good. Wow. From the description on the website:

As darkness falls, "CUBA LIBRE" will slowly transform into a stunning, upscale lounge. Until the Cuban embargo is lifted, this is the closest you'll get to Cuba without leaving the mainland and harrowing shark-infested waters.

Don't ask me why they needed to capitalize their title and put it in quotes. They do it with all sorts of terms on the site. One can almost imagine them getting the copy from their web designers...

As darkness falls, "INSERT CLUB NAME HERE" will slowly transform into a stunning, upscale lounge....

Their speciality drink was a concoction of rum, lime, and mint, and was quite tasty, but the tables were soldered to the floor, and all the chairs/benches faced in one direction. With six people, it wasn't exactly conducive to conversation. And let me just say, if a room full of sharp-dressed, yuppie hipsters is as "close to Cuba" as I can get, then Cuba's even farther away than I thought. And don't even get me going on the guy who was wearing a black trenchcoat with chains hanging from it and sporting the Billy Idol 'do. He was a mullet short of passing for Kiefer Sutherland from Lost Boys, and may have in fact dressed up for the show. I can only guess...

ps. And while we were there, the Marlins won. Stat of the night: since the Marlins were created, they've won no division titles and two World Series. By comparison, the Atlanta Braves have just the one World Series trophy. Kind of bizarre, if you think about it. For my purposes, the sight of the Marlins celebrating in Yankee Stadium makes their mound party at Wrigley a lot easier to take...and you can't help but feel good for Ivan Rodriguez, who labored with crap pitchers for years and years in Texas and had to sign a 1-year deal, only to lead that team to the Series. Good for him. Pudge is this year's Gracie...

Day 3 in Austin started a little more slowly, thanks in large part to the amount of alcohol with which Day 2 ended. Still, we managed to get going eventually.

The highlight of the night may have been sitting in the stands for the Fragments' 8-5 loss. After spotting the opponents 5 runs, the Frags roared back and made it a game. But what made it the highlight was the fact that the game was played at what must be the finest venue for intramural softball ever devised. Multiple fields (4 or 5 at this spot), all lighted (games at night), an apparently trained umpire crew (2 per game), groomed fields, restrooms, concession stand, bleachers for every field, no bottles (we had to resort to canned beer), no taunting, no swearing, no trash talk. Okay, those last three or four aren't so great. But I'm willing to kick my expensive trash talk habit in order to have facilities like that. It puts to rest any question I once had about where, when you have more money than God, you spend it. Deluxe softball facilities. I can only dream.

Let's see. What else? Had a Freebird burrito for dinner. Freebird is a lot like Subway, except it's burritos instead of sandwiches, and it's tasty instead of Subway. I'm surprised this hasn't caught on elsewhere--we were in and out in 10 minutes with individualized, yummy burritos. Very nice.

Had my ass handed to me on NBA 03 for XBOX. I know exactly why I don't own one (XBOX, not ass)--I would never get any work done. It's struggle enough as is. Closed out the night with a viewing of the Two Towers, which I hadn't seen since I saw it in the theatre last yr. Reminds me why I should be looking forward to the third installment, and I am.

We're about to hit the coffeeshop, so time for me to skedaddle.

Welcome to Austin, day 2. If you read slashdot, metafilter, or similar collective sites, you know that they have gatherings from time to time, in various locales. There's something kind of appealing, I suppose, about finally putting faces to names, getting first to know people through their language, etc. I had my first one of these, where I got to hang out with a good number of the usual suspects from Jenny's blog. We all met up at Opal Divine's last night and closed the place down a couple hundred dollars of drinks later. The players:

Jenny and Kyle (our hosts, previously mentioned)
Josh (who introduced us to the caste system among scooter owners)
Kevin (responsible for the tale of the puking giant)
Nadav (steadfastly opposed to any website whose address contains a tilde)
Debbie (expert in the crucial differences between Hebrew and Yiddish)

I should also mention Kelly, our waitress, who provided the table with no small bit of amusement by refusing to continue to serve Josh, because he was "walking funny" and/or "talking funny." Our overall impression of Kelly wasn't especially favorable--she didn't seem thrilled to be there, and she didn't crack a smile until the very end as the table tried to convince her that yes, Josh really drank a big glass of water and thus deserved one last vodka tonic.

As always in situations with virtual strangers, I was pretty much the quiet kid at the table. But not completely silent, esp after a few beers. And I had a great time. I'm sure there was more than this that happened on Day 2, but the lack of caffeine is interfering with my memory...

Stayed up two nights ago in order to make my 6 am flight, and arrived in Austin yesterday at around 11 am CST. In the 24 or so hours since then, I

• visited the home offices of the DRC at UT
• shopped at the hipper-than-thou organic/veggie grocery store
• had the first truly good Mexican food I've had since I left TX 6 years ago
• started meeting the blogatis personae from Jenny from the Blog (Jodi, Mark, and more to come)
• hung out with Jenny and Kyle (whom I'm staying with)
• got to chat for a while with Diane, a friend of mine from UTA whose position I "took" at ODU a few years back
• got a full night's sleep (exhaustion will do that for a body)
• started playing Morrowind on Kyle's XBOX
• fully enjoyed and exploited the Airport connection at casa Edbauer
• broke out the shorts and t-shirts currently prohibited by Syracuse weather

That's all I can think of at the moment. There's an immense amount of freedom in anonymity--as I explained to Leon, the former semiconductor engineer who's currently a security guard at UT, and who chatted with me over a smoke. It's important to just hang. And easier to do when the high's reaching 90 and your job is more than a thousand miles away.

The blog, it's getting jealous.

I'll be leaving for a five-day on Wednesday, and I have more than my share of chores in between now and then. So, despite nasty stares from the blog, I'm going to let it sit idle for a couple of days. Hopefully, I'll be able to throw down some entries from Austin, TX, which is where I'm headed. Hopefully, my blogwriting will be accompanied by 80-degree weather, t-shirts, shorts, and a margarita on the patio next to me as I bang away on my laptop.

Tomorrow, once I've thought on it a little, I'll have a review of Mystic River, which I saw over the weekend. Rather than forming my thoughts coherently today, I've mostly been skipping around. The results:

(from smh.com) The spirit of US President George W Bush has been trapped in a clay pot and tossed into a river in northern Thailand after being cursed by hundreds of farmers protesting US agriculture policy.

(from "Modern Flirting" in the Washington Post) "It sounds cheesy to say, 'Will you go out with me?' " says Julia Gick. "You might say, 'What's up with us?' " If there is something "up with us," you may not be boyfriend and girlfriend, Maura Cassidy continues. "Maybe you say, 'We have a thing,' " says Cassidy. "Then when you break up you can say it wasn't anything."

(from CNN) For the last 43 days the American magician [David Blaine] has been suspended in a glass box next to London's Tower Bridge, with water as his only sustenance....He has endured ridicule from the public, with eggs and golf balls hurled at his box. Spectators have cooked food nearby and bared their breasts or buttocks at him.

Came across the following report from TV Week:

Fox decimated the competition Wednesday night with Game 7 of the National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and Florida Marlins. It was Fox's highest-rated League Championship game ever and the highest-rated on any network in at least 10 years in adults 18 to 49 and total viewers. The baseball game gave Fox its highest-rated night in five months among adults 18 to 49 and total viewers.

I must admit, as much as I am drawn to even implicit praise of the Cubs, that I am beginning to really resent the way that sports talk inevitably drifts towards these kinds of discussions. A Cubs-BoSox series probably would have drawn record TV audiences, I know, but I really don't need to hear FOX officials telling me so. It's that kind of garbage that taints the NBA (Stern wants the Knicks/Lakers/Bulls to do well so that the ratings are high, blah blah blah) and puts the referees' integrity into question. That's not what baseball needs.

It wouild take a lot more time and space than I have here to talk about what baseball needs, and even then, I'd probably be wrong about some of it. But what we need to realize is that baseball is a fundamentally different activity than, say, football. More even than pro basketball or hockey, baseball is a long, narrative activity that its fans follow every day. There's a big difference between those of us who watch it on ESPN and those who watch it on FOX. The latter are the fans who want the Event, the dream matchup, the power primetime ratings. That stuff is great, but the fact of the matter is that baseball will never match up favorably with the Super Bowl or March Madness, at least if our criteria for that match are the one-shot, Neilsenesque, sound byte criteria that tend to obscure any other values. All it takes to realize the problems with this approach is a quick list of the quality that disappears from our networks and the crap that lasts.

Oh well. The "story" for the next two weeks will be how FOX missed out on a huge payday bc the Series is Yankees v Marlins, even though it won't be as bad as last year's Giants-Angels series in terms of ratings. And the Chumps That Be will keep working on ways to turn baseball into something that it's not, so that FOX can squeeze another $50K per 30-second slot from its advertisers. So that I can have the image of a cosmetically overhauled Fran Drescher cavorting with male models in Old Navy Painters Pants seared into my retinas. Ack.

It looks as though I'll begin the slow morph back into a more general purpose weblog, and a little sooner than I'd planned. The Marlins just concluded their comeback from 3 games to 1 down, and knocked off Zambrano, Prior, and Wood (the latter two at Wrigley) in a row to clinch a trip to the World Series. I'm happy for the 16,000 actual Marlins fans, the ones who attended their regular-season games.

As for us Cubs fans, the nonsense about the curse continues, much to my disappointment. Let's review. The Cubs:

• Had the single biggest turnaround in win-loss percentage in the majors this year
  
• Won their division with a team that should have finished 3rd (both in terms of talent, and in terms of run differential)
  
• Went to the playoffs with only one pitcher who won more than 15 games, four who lost at least 10 (inc. Wood), a team BA of only .259 (11th in the NL), only one everyday player batting over .300 (2 if you count Lofton post-trade), and so on and so forth
  
• Won a playoff series for the first time in 58 years
  
• Beat the Braves, who typically own the Cubs year after year, and stole Maddux back in the day.
  
• Played October games in Wrigley
  

Yes, like any and every fan who grew up knowing and desparing of the Cubbies, I was greedy. I wanted to see them kick a little American League tail. But if this season was the result of a curse, then there are going to be 28 other major league ballparks turning away goats next year. The Cubs had a great season, our first in a long, long time, and if it didn't end up in the World Series, we're a better team than we were last year, and we clearly now have some management looking to make us even better.

So don't talk to me about curses. If curses were real, I'd lay one on FOX. Out of one side of his mouth Lyons was complaining about how poorly the Cubs fan who interfered with Alou was being treated. Of course, every chance he freaking had, Lyons used the fan's name, thereby guaranteeing that those of us who didn't want to know it could not forget it. The sooner they retire him (Lyons, not the fan) the better as far as I'm concerned. If anyone at FOX was genuinely concerned about how the fan was being treated, they wouldn't have been bending over backasswards to fan that fire by using his name over and over.

Oops. Sorry about that. What I meant to say was: Don't talk to me about curses. I'll be spending the winter months fantasizing about Miguel Tejada in a Cubs uniform, and reminding myself that Pudge was only signed to a 1-year deal by Florida. Jim Hendry? You out there?

Having spent some portion of my education simultaneously engaging and avoiding Greek and Latin, I have nothing but sympathy and admiration for those who persist in making Classics their life's work. I know that this sounds a little sarcastic, but honestly, it's not. Most people won't make the argument that our students/graduates don't need to know how to write, but classical languages don't benefit from the same perception or protection.

That's a serious open for what is actually a post about a hilarious site that came across Metafilter today. A LiveJournaler has posted a translation of one of the top ten guilty pleasure one-hit wonders of the 1990s. Yes, it's a translation, into Latin (and back again) of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back." I know that this song is wrong, on so many levels, but I fell over laughing while reading the translation. To wit:

clunes, aio, maiores esse!
(Her buttocks, I say, are rather large!)
nec possum credere quam rotondae sint.
(Nor am I able to believe how round they are.)

Needless to say, it's not quite in meter. But it makes me appreciate the Web just a little bit more knowing it's out there. Enjoy.

As both all of my readers know, I prefer to receive most of my news, not to mention culture, from Scotland. Yeah. Anyway, here's a nice little piece from Scotsman.com, bringing you "Scottish news direct from Scotland," and you get it scot free, Scottie! Anyway, it's called "A Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Unsung Heroes." A sample, you ask?

Without [Ted] Nelson the internet would not exist.

Without [Tim] Berners-Lee only a few academics would use it.

Without AS Douglas et al computers would not be as massively popular as they are.

Without Jennifer Lopez the world would never have had to endure Gigli.

Guess which one's a multi-millionaire.

It's not, perhaps, as grounded in the understanding of the Net that characterized Steven Johnson's article a couple of months ago on Googleholes on Slate, but the concept here is the same. When we engage with our networks at the level of individual user, as most of us do, there are inevitable distortions that emerge from the aggregate patterns. One is that Lopez appears exponentially more important than Nelson, Berners-Lee, and Douglas put together. Another is that, according to Johnson, search results skew from "general information" to commercial sites. Guess which category is more likely to produce multimillionaires.

When I'm stalling on my first book, I'm thinking carefully about these kinds of network behaviors and what implications they hold for rhetoric. That's book 2. Wait for it.

The mouse almost won. And the fact of the matter is that I'm praying that it got in through the crappy, hole-ridden screens on my windows. If it didn't, then I may have to (a) tidy up my apt to the nth degree, and (b) invite the exterminator by for a nest hunt, neither of which keeps me up nights with eager anticipation.

Fortunately, I have logic on my side. I blocked off room by room, and then routed my new fuzzy friend into a box, tipped it over, and set him outside. Unfortunately for him, the feral cats come out around midnight. But then, he's small and dark, so it's probably a fairer contest than he had in here.

I can coexist with the spiders, as long as they leave me alone, but I've got no room in my life for the mice. You hear that, mice?

Okay, I admit it. I wasn't exactly blown away by Sterling's list of ten technologies that have to die. But tonight's rainout in Boston offered me the rare opportunity to tune in to 60 Minutes, where I came away convinced about the old internal combustion engine. In the process of watching a story about SUVs, I learned that:

• SUVs are classed as trucks (ok, I knew that one)
  
• as such, they fall under a tax incentive program on the books since the 80s
  
• said incentives amount to a $25-100K tax break for anyone who purchases these vehicles, as long as 50% of their use is business-related.
  
• the federal government is currently paying dentists, accountants, lawyers, et al., to drive to work in an SUV
  

Charming. And we got to hear one of the chief engineers of GM tell a national audience, with a straight face, that the reason existing improvements (related to fuel economy) aren't being implemented is because of consumer desire. Turns out that it's more important to us as a nation to be able to drive up hills without slowing. Did I mention that the next commercial I saw was for Ford trucks, which are "bigger," "badder," "built Ford tough," and have the highest horsepower in their class? Turns out that GM trucks get fewer miles per gallon today than they did in 1990. But that's okay. They're badder, after all. And $2 a gallon is such a small price to pay so our dentists can drive Hummers. Hummers that the gov't buys for them, and that we pay for in fuel price hikes.

You see the word rundown, and of course, you're thinking about the latest cinematic offering starring Stifler, the Rock, and Christopher Walken. Me, I'm reliving the delicious end to the Cubs victory in game 3 of the NLCS.

But here's what's driving me nuts: the cannier-than-thou yapfest that's passing for expert commentary on both FOX and ESPN. Some of my favorites:
--Jeff Brantley telling everyone to throw out the book less than a day after joining in on the criticism of Dusty Baker for pitching Prior into the late innings of Game 2.
--Al Leiter being wrong on nearly every single pitch he tried to predict. Every time a pitch went inside, the pitcher was "setting the batter up" for something low and outside. When the next pitch was inside, all of a sudden, the pitcher was "doubling up." Uhhh...what?
--My all-time favorite came from the DS, though. Psychotic Steve Lyons praised a baserunner for getting a good jump from second base with two outs when someone dropped a fly ball. Wow. Nice insight, Steve.

There is plenty of drama in both series, without these hacks trying to build it themselves. If I lived within range of WGN, I'd probably turn the sound off on my television. And let's not even talk about Jeanne Zelasko.

It's been way too long since I wasted a pitch blew a blog entry on a completely random website. And in that spirit, via metafilter, I offer the Nipsey Russell Funky Palace.

I must admit, though, that I was quickly driven away by the sheer craptacularity of the site's design. Remember how everyone designed pages back in 1996 when they discovered animated GIFs? Nipsey isn't the only old school entertainment on this page...

Had I not had to shield my eyes shortly after visiting, I was dying to check out the "celebrity buzz" about Nipsey.

And no, I'm not talking about the Cubs' loss in gm 1 of the NLCS.

Rather, I found out yesterday that Neil Postman has passed away, and although his passing has not attracted the attention that Walter Ong and Edward Said have, he was arguably as important as either of them, at least from the perspective of technology and media studies. In many ways, Postman was the bridge between the early technology thinkers (Ong, McLuhan, et al.) and the Internet generation.

I met Neil in 1995, I think, when he visited UTA to deliver a talk based on some of the material from The Ends of Education. Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly aroused my interest the most at the time, and I remember Neil taking the time to sit (in the UTA student center/cafeteria?) with a group of us graduate students, and to talk with us about those books, as well as a range of issues that I would now understand as media ecology. I never ask scholars to sign my books, but I did ask Neil to sign Technopoly for me. He was one of the people who made it possible for me to imagine myself as a media/technology expert inside of academia.

Addendum: One of his former students, Jay Rosen, has posted some of his recollections and thoughts about Postman's career and contributions.

Ahhh...the first Tuesday in October, and the eyes of the nation turn to California, to witness the latest stage in the campaign for Schwarzenegovernor. All eyes, that is, except for mine.

It's also Primary Day in Davenport, Iowa, my hometown, and my father, the current mayor of Davenport, is bidding for a second term. In Davenport, the primary is non-partisan--anyone who can collect the signatures goes on the primary ballot, and the top two vote-getters go on to face off in November.

As I write this, the polls are only just closing, so it probably will be a couple more hours before they know the results. Stay tuned for updates on Decision '03...go Dad!

Update: With 100% of precincts reporting, the results of the Davenport mayoral primary are as follows: Charlie Brooke: 42%; Niky Bowles: 34%; Robert Swanson: 24%. This is a good sign -- unlike the regular election, where name recognition often pays off, the incumbent sometimes suffers from voter complacency. For the challengers, this is the first election they appear in, and their supporters are often out in force. That's my optimistic thumbnail, anyway. This means that my dad will face off against Bowles in November...

In case I forget later today, I should wish my brother Tom a happy 32nd birthday. I don't know that he even knows that my weblog exists, but on the chance he's reading this in the archives...

Happy birthday, Tom!

The Cubs are hosting the NLCS, against the only team in the NL playoffs less likely to have made it there than them, the Florida Marlins. On the downside, I suppose, we won't be treated to an endless parade of Moises v. Felipe or Dusty 2003 v. Dusty 2002 stories. On the plus side, the Cubs and Marlins are two teams with great young pitching, they were both effectively wild card entries into the playoffs, and they have both arguably overachieved to get there.

And, praise be to all good spirits, I won't have to listen to that godawful chant out of the Atlanta fans. It took all of a month for me to want to kill the rally monkey from Anaheim--the Chant has been going for 12 horrible years.

Now if the BoSox can just hold up (umm...I mean cowboy up?) their end of the bargain and take the As tomorrow and the Yankees after that...

...two things. First, before someone jumps me over it, I just found out that Lost in Translation is currently playing in Syracuse. Clever me, I didn't even think to check before assuming that I'd have to go to Ithaca. Fortunately, I was also going down there for the annual Friends of the Library used book sale, otherwise, I'd have done an hour in the dark, rainy cold for nothing.

Second, I forgot to mention what may prove to be my singlemost favorite movie scene of the year. There's a scene in LIT where Murray, Johansson, and some of her Japanese friends go out and karaoke. Murray does a version of the old Brian Ferry/Roxy Music tune "More Than This." It affected me enough that I came home and downloaded it over dial-up. I can still feel the ache as I type this.

Clearly the question is no longer whether I'll see it again in the theater, but when.

I must admit that I was a little wary. First, there was the whole nepotism factor--Sofia's last name will always be Coppola, and with that comes the inevitable danger that a movie she both writes and directs will be an exercise in self-indulgence. Second, there was some kind of shift in the way that the movie itself was being sold. Bill Murray was laugh-out-loud funny in Rushmore, and I was getting the sense that the trailers/promos were shooting for that audience. Nevertheless, I was willing to bop down to Ithaca to take a shot. The last couple of movies I've seen haven't lived up to expectations, so I was willing to drive the hour to reverse the streak.

And Lost in Translation did just that for me. This is easily the best American movie I've seen all year, a movie that could not have been made by a major studio. The three characters are Murray, Scarlett Johansson, and Tokyo itself, and with all 3, Coppola allows them room and time on camera to breathe and live. There are few scenes that I would describe as crucial, and the result is a collection of small scenes, lines, and gestures that add up to a poignant convergence. The direction is subtle and skillful, and the love story that results is unlike anything I've seen in a long time. It'll take several days, I suspect, for the mood that LIT builds to wear off. And Murray is flat-out outstanding. In Rushmore, there's a mature, almost cynical humor to his performance that was brilliant, but in LIT, he layers on a melancholy longing that I found dazzling.

I don't normally gush over movies, but Lost in Translation was a movie that was easily worth full price. If it comes up to Syracuse in the next month or so, I'll probably go see it again.

Since I've morphed into a sportsblog for the time being, I feel obligated to mention the story that led every local newscast, and appeared above the fold in yesterday's Syracuse papers: Rush Limbaugh's nonsense about Donovan McNabb.

To the delight of this member of the coveted 18-34 yr old male bracket, Rush resigned from his "dream job" on ESPN's NFL coverage. The funny thing about it is that, regardless of whether his comments were meant to be racist, his comments were futilely stupid. Honestly, beyond any sort of facticity or truth, what does it really matter if the media roots for a particular player or coach? Who really cares?

For every player in the NFL, there are 100 who don't possess the talent to make it, and that estimate is probably low. The worst player in the NFL (who probably plays for the Bears right now) is substantially better than 99% of the people who played football in college--there's no one who doesn't deserve some attention. And if some get more attention than others, for whatever reason, what is horrible about that? We had to listen for four years (that included 2 MVP's) about how Kurt Warner stocked grocery store shelves before getting his shot and moving at light speed from unknown to Super Bowl QB. Yippee skippee. Talk about a quarterback who benefitted from a system. Team success has followed McNabb wherever he's been. Is it all his doing? No. Does he play a big role? Of course.

To focus on whether or not the media overrates one player or another is the kind of parasitic navel gazing that we don't need more of. I don't care. I want analysis, performance review, predictions, etc. I want coverage of the sport, not coverage of the coverage of the sport. When they hired Rush, ESPN was shooting for the latter, not the former, and that (as much as the fact that I can't stand Dimbaugh) was why I wasn't watching any pre-game on ESPN this season.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to spend the next 8 hours in meditation and preparation to watch Prior on the mound tonight.

Over at Kottke is the following remaindered link, to an article by Bruce Sterling for MIT's Technology Review titled Ten Technologies that Deserve to Die. The technologies?

Nuclear weapons, coal-based power, internal combustion engines, incandescent lightbulbs, land mines, manned space flight, prisons, cosmetic implants, lie detectors, and DVDs.

I must admit that I was a lot more interested in this piece before I read it than I found myself when I finished. I like Sterling's work quite a bit, and I'm even willing to buy into the whole futurist thing he's been futzing with--I shelled out $25 for Tomorrow Now willingly.

At the same time, most of these entries, which range from the obvious to the trivial, left me nonplussed. Don't get me wrong here--I don't disagree with what Sterling has to say about each one. But some of them are basically symptoms of larger problems--I'd feel a lot better about figuring out how to deal with the cultural conditions that lead to cosmetic enhancement, for example, than banning one of the shortcuts that people use to satisfy said conditions. The quality of DVDs (and CDs, for that matter) are a reflection of the virtual monopolies in our entertainment industries, a societal fetish for new, shiny tech, and retro copyright laws.

There's an implied determinism to this discussion, the idea that an entire cultural, social, legal, political ecology can be distilled into a specific technology or technologies, that leaves me ambivalent, I guess. I couldn't quite get into the spirit of this piece, any more than I can get into the idea that there's a new technology or medium that will solve our problems. C'est moi.

Apparently, there was a little flare up from the offices of the Yankees a couple of days ago, when Steinbrenner pissed and moaned expressed his dismay over the fact that the Yanks' first game of the playoffs had been bumped from prime time in favor of the Cubs-Braves. Never mind that the Yankees embarrassed themselves by losing to a team that hadn't beaten them since 2001. George's point was that the Yankees were the #1 team, #1 market, blah blah blah, and that they deserved Fox's prime time slot.

Turns out that, today, tickets went on sale for the NLCS in Chicago, and not only did they sell out in a matter of a few minutes, but ESPN was reporting that they had received 12 million calls by noon (ticks went on sale at 8 am). That's quadruple the Cubs' season attendance, and I'm pretty sure that, even if a fraction of that total watched Game 1, the ratings for the Cubs game provided all the rationale that FOX needs to suggest that George might want to shut the hell up.

Guess what? Absolute dominance is b-o-r-i-n-g. There's not a lot of intrigue when your team is spending twice as much money as any other team in the league. I like most of the players on the Yankees, but I don't really enjoy the fact that they vacuum up the talent from MLB every year, and can afford to make colossal mistakes that no one else can. It's getting close to the place where they're bad for baseball, despite the success of the As, Twins, Marlins, et al. It's getting to the point where other teams are successful despite the Yankees, not in comparison to them. They may make the most money, sell the most jerseys, and cry the loudest, but the Yankees are only the 6th or 7th best story in this year's playoffs, and that's what chaps George the most, I suspect.

I know, I know, a non-Cubs-related entry?!

From Datacloud, I borrow the following link which captured my interest for a while: USNews.com is asking people to vote for the most important Documents that Shaped America. They offer a list of 100, allowing you to vote for 10. As Johndan notes, the chronology stops in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act.

What's interesting to me about this isn't necessarily the question of whether any documents from the last 40 years qualify, although that's a question worth asking. Rather, I'm curious about the reverse implication, the idea that America has been shaped by documents. How much longer will that really be the case? The list already stretches some media boundaries by including a transcript of John Glenn's communication and an aerial photograph of Cuban missiles. Why not the Watergate tapes? Or the video of the Challenger explosion? Elvis and/or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show? The front page of the first edition of USA Today? How about the Xerox/Macintosh/Windows GUI?

It would be an even more interesting list to me, I think, with the title "Interfaces that Shaped America."