<p> I don&#39;t know what else to say, <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&amp;amp;category=19270&amp;amp;item=5535890757&amp;amp;rd=1&amp;amp;ssPageName=WDVW">go look for yourself.</a></p>

<p> …at least insofar as Achtung Baby is listed as one of U2&#39;s best albums. Regardless of whether you agree with Chet&#39;s assessment (I certainly don&#39;t–I think U2&#39;s discovery of irony was a watershed moment for them), <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/music/14pare.html?oref=login">the article in the NYT is worth reading</a>. And just so you know, they&#39;ll be on Saturday Night Live this weekend.</p> <p> Oh, and if anyone by chance has a copy of U2&#39;s <em>last</em> last performance on SNL, I&#39;d appreciate a copy–specifically the rendition of Elevation that interpolated Instant Karma.</p>

<p> So, I have to wonder, does it ever occur that people in Hollywood set out, ??<a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0063462/??-like">Producers</a>, to intentionally make a really, really bad movie?</p> <p> Because, honestly, I can&#39;t come up with any other reason that <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0118604/">An American Werewolf in Paris</a> would have been made. I scanned it–ah, the joys of <a href="http://tivo.com/--only">TiVo</a> because I have a lot of affection for <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0082010/">An American Werewolf in London</a>, an altogether better, if lower budget, movie that, like <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0074812/">Logan&#39;s Run</a>, has the added bonus of having <a href="http://imdb.com/name/nm0000256/">Jenny Agutter</a> (who, I find, has not actually been in a movie I&#39;ve seen since 1987) nekkid.</p>

<p> So, knowing that I was going to be suffering some bad allergies when I got back in town post-election, I made an appointment with my doctor, with the intention of reviewing the drugs I take for them (and the related asthma), but the doctor decided to turn it into a full physical checkup since, well, I hadn&#39;t had one in four years.</p> <p> Heck, I haven&#39;t been to the doctor at all in two and a half years–I&#39;ve been healthy.</p>

<p> Never, ever, ever go three months without playing guitar.</p>

<p> Funny enough, though, <a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005639.html">Bush is a worse one</a>.</p> <p> Of course, Bush makes no pretense of being a Catholic–or even of going to a church–so, in this wierd, upside-down world we live in, that means he&#39;s <em>less</em> subject to criticism than Kerry.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp#109830395050849655">You can go see the whole thing if you want to:</a></p> <blockquote> <p>If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I&#39;d certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan&#39;s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.</p>

<p> Well, first, <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp">I&#39;m glad to see William Gibson is back blogging.</a>.</p> <p> But, much more important than that, <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp#109820696339947239">Peter Weir</a> (whose film <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0076299/">The Wave</a> I should probably view again sometime, to see if it&#39;s as confusing now as it was when I saw it at 10 or 11) is currently slated to direct a movie of Gibson&#39;s novel <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0425192938&amp;amp;itm=2">Pattern Recognition</a>.</p> <p> Although I haven&#39;t re-read it yet, I think PR is probably Gibson&#39;s best novel, period. Yes, better than Neuromancer, if, perhaps, less ground-breaking.</p>

<p> (can one imagine having any other sort with her, and then being derided mercilessly for at least 18 hours on the site?), I imagine I&#39;ll have to restrict myself to being amused by her use of such amusing phrases as</p> <blockquote> <p>…<a href="http://www.wonkette.com/archives/tiny-jon-stewart-and-his-crushed-self-esteem-023725.php">but that&#39;s why the baby Jesus invented mixers, buddy.</a></p> </blockquote>

<p> When you know people who work at, or have worked at, some large company, like, say, eBay, or Amazon, they always seem to get hooked into the &#34;wierd shit&#34; list for whatever the purveyor is.</p> <p> Thus, Alex Yan brings to my attention both <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search.html/sr=3-5/qid=1098124101/ref=sr_3_5/002-6239427-1189612?%5Fencoding=UTF8&amp;amp;node=3415301&amp;amp;rh=a%3A3415011%2Ca%3A3415301">weaponry</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_c_4_0/002-6239427-1189612?%5Fencoding=UTF8&amp;amp;node=3402211&amp;amp;no=3402161&amp;amp;me=ATVPDKIKX0DER">mascot costumes</a>.</p> <p> Furries, anyone?</p>

<p> <a href="http://x180.net/Journal/2004/10/13.html#imac">Read the whole thing here</a>.</p> <blockquote> <p>The new iMac G5 that I hinted at a few weeks ago has arrived. Of course, the first thing I did was open it up and admire it like the techno-porn star that it is.</p> </blockquote> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> The inimitable <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/">Fafblog</a> succeeds in making <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_10_fafblog_archive.html#109770844064284783">a pointed commentary</a> about an ideology that focuses on 3500 fetuses and yet pointedly ignores the suffering of millions.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.geocities.com/pkdlw/MIHC.html">What did Philip K. Dick know?</a></p> <p> Will Shetterly <a href="http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-if-george-w-bush-had-been-elected.html">rebuts Patrick Neilsen-Hayden&#39;s alternate-world scenario in which Bush won the 2000 election</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://quiz.ravenblack.net/videogame.pl">Which pre-1985 video game character are you?</a></p>

<p> While–should I get back to any sort of substantive posting before November 2, which is unclear at this point–I may <a href="http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/10/an_indecent_dis.html">link to things other people have to say</a>, or discuss the way my involvement in all this has changed me, I don&#39;t think I can continue to talk about my feelings, because it&#39;s obvious that when I do so I am unable to rise above fairly corrosive incivility.</p> <p> So I&#39;m going to stop. I&#39;m unlikely to convince anyone, no matter how well I document the compulsive mendacity, or the failed programs or the disastrous policies, if I can&#39;t even begin to make the case at anything less than a primal scream.</p>

<p> <a href="http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2004/10/sunday_in_the_p.php">Writing about his experience at NY is Book Country</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>It gave me a good feeling inside watching these two bats go at it. When I began Attack Poodles, full of the idealism that accompanies the arrival of the first advance check, I dreamed of writing a book that would drive a wedge between ordinary Americans, that would bring strangers together and have them turn on each other within minutes without quite knowing why. And on this Sunday afternoon in New York came proof that I had accomplished my mission.</p>

<p> …and you don&#39;t understand what a lying, moronic, sycophant George Bush is, well, fuck you.</p> <p> For everyone else, <a href="http://www.democrats.org/support/index.html">give</a>.</p>

<p> The scary part, though, is the fact that it appears that <a href="http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2004_03_late-night-knowledge-2_9-21_pr.pdf">watching the Daily Show will make you as familiar with election issues as watching cable news</a>.</p> <p> &#34;But I thought you liked the Daily Show?&#34; you say.</p> <p> I do. Quite a lot. But it scares the fuck out of me that the electorate is being so ill-served by the not-fake media.</p> <p> Incidentally, you should also <a href="http://www.wonkette.com/archives/the-ostewart-factor-021688.php">read the transcript of Jon Stewart&#39;s appearance on the O&#39;Reilly Factor</a>, and then tell me which person is the asshole.</p>

<p> Taken by putting together the words that appear most often in searches that arrive at this blog:</p> <p> bow the down poodle one before you serve blonde concrete</p>

<p> I find <a href="http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/three_years_lat.html">Matt Yglesias</a> has a great statement of disappointment that so much echoes my own.</p>

<p> Oops, I let my note get synced over before I wrote the entry.</p> <p> Anyway, the other day I watched <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0229340/">Dinner Rush</a>, which is an amusing enough little film. There are many worse ways to spend a couple of hours.</p> <p> However, I also caught pieces of <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0265666/">The Royal Tenanbaums</a> today, and that lookd to be a much more impressive way to spend your time.</p> <p> <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0120804/">Resident Evil</a>, on the other hand, should be avoided at all costs. Milla Jovovich could have done the whole movie naked and I still wouldn&#39;t be able to say anything good about it.</p>

<p> Led Zeppelin III was, I think, the first album of theirs I ever owned. And now, sixteen years later, I&#39;m just now noticing that the background guitar on the right-hand channel leading up to the chorus is going through an amp with a heavy tremelo effect.</p> <p> I think Jason Boyles once suggested, based on more recent work (the Black Crowes live disc he appeared on), that Page was really not a great player live. I would dispute that–the DVD they released a couple of years ago has some great playing on it, and singlehandedly revived my interest on We&#39;re Gonna Groove–but it&#39;s also beside the point: I think Jimmy Page was the first rock and roll guitar player to think in terms of orchestration of guitar.</p>

<p> So, Anne and I spent the weekend in New York with a friend of ours, Allyson Edwards, and several other of her friends to celebrate Allyson&#39;s birthday.</p> <p> The fact is, I&#39;ve only ever been in Manhattan one other time, in May of 2003, when my occasional boss, Tim Brack, had Chet and I up to i.e. Marketing&#39;s backwoods-NJ HQ for a design-and-work meeting and dragged us into Manhattan one night to meet some of the people from Universal. It was fun, but I only saw a fraction of it over the course of a few hours.</p>

<p> …<a href="http://missourilovescompany.blogspot.com/2004/08/irony-flavored-goodness.html">that I&#39;m not the only one who can no longer distinguish whether I&#39;m being honest or cynical</a>.</p> <p> I think I actually startled one of the people I&#39;m working with when I suggested that you would no longer be surprised or disappointed by people if you just adopted the simple philosophy of, &#34;People are no damn good.&#34;</p>

<p> …it&#39;s probably not much of a suprise to hear me say that the age difference doesn&#39;t matter a bit and if that whole Cameron Crowe thing doesn&#39;t work out, Nancy, I encourage you to give me a call.</p> <p> Which is an especially obtuse way of saying that I just saw some CMT (of all places) thing with Heart on it (and Wynona, so I guess that&#39;s the connection), and Nancy Wilson is just as hot as she was when I had a crush on her when I was, at a guess, 8.</p>

<p> I&#39;m sitting here at the coffee shop listening to a CD that appears to heavily feature remixes of the White Stripes&#39; Seven Nation Army. The one that&#39;s on now is only okay, but there was an earlier one that was, uh, I think the current parlance is <em>slammin&#39;</em>, though at my age I can only try to use such words with a healthy leavning of irony, as well as the knowledge that I might be mistaken in its currency, especially since I remember it from a 17-year-old Prince track…</p>

<p> I just don&#39;t know. I mean, I really have no clue at all. No, that&#39;s not true. I have lots of clues, and I have theories and ideas, and they all end up falling apart when I try to articulate them.</p> <p> Now, I should note that I probably missed the first twenty minutes of the movie, but I&#39;m not unfamiliar with what happens at the beginning, so I don&#39;t feel like I&#39;m missing the key ingredient that makes it all work.</p>

<p> From Paul Krugman today:</p> <blockquote> <p>The fact is that the mainly private U.S. health care system spends far more than the mainly public health care systems of other advanced countries, but gets worse results. In 2001, we spent $4,887 on health care per capita, compared with $2,792 in Canada and $2,561 in France. Yet the U.S. does worse than either country by any measure of health care success you care to name - life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever. (At its best, U.S. health care is the best in the world. But the ranks of Americans who can&#39;t afford the best, and may have no insurance at all, are large and growing.)</p>

<p> bq.. For the past five years, Sun have been doing their determined level best to go out of business.</p> <p> I think they&#39;re disappointed every morning when they get into the office and it&#39;s still there.</p>

<p> …you should look at DB_File or, on newer installs, BerkeleyDB. It turns out (I had some vague recollection of this, and it turned out to be important for my wanna-be-a-hero project) that you can use Berkeley DB to access a text file as if it were a perl array.</p> <p> This is pretty cool. And fairly efficient, too.</p>

<p> That, having been at work until 8:45, and not getting home until nearly 9:30, one will then be tempted to sit around and talk and watch the Olympics until nearly 11:30, even though you know you&#39;re going to try and get up extra-early the next morning.</p> <p> On the other hand, I did get to see the hot girl-on-girl action that was the reaction of the US Women&#39;s Beach Volleyball team to winning.</p>

<p> So, yesterday someone commented somewhat facetiously about using XSTL for grabbing a certain bit of information out of an XML file. I suggested that this would not be the biggest abuse of XSLT I&#39;d ever seen, or even perpetrated, given that I wrote a Dia-to-SQL stylesheet that even handled referential integrity (which is harder than you&#39;d think, because Dia is a drawing program, and regards those lines between boxes as just another element; it doesn&#39;t understand what they mean).</p>

<blockquote> <p>Let&#39;s just say my days of testing limits have come to an end, the result of age, exhaustion, and possibly wisdom.</p> </blockquote>

<p> Presumably this means that at some point it&#39;s going to start slamming doors, smoking dope, and shouting at us that we can&#39;t possibly understand what it&#39;s going through.</p>

<p> Anne made me use that.</p> <p> Anyway, I&#39;d continued to feel underutilized–I was spending an inordinate amount of time reading email, or watching logs be parsed into mysql (which is about as interesting as watching paint dry, and somewhat less interesting than watching mold grow).</p> <p> This was depressing and frustrating. I&#39;m here, and although I am being paid, I&#39;m dealing with being away from home and putting off projects for other customers and so forth, and I&#39;m not being paid enough to endure that <em>and</em> be idle.</p>

<p> On my flight back home Friday night, they had Dennis Miller doing the safety briefing.</p> <p> I think Dennis Miller is a lot less amusing now that he appears to have given up sugar or cocaine or degenerate sex with howler monkeys or whatever it was that fueled his late-80s, early-90s Weekend Report delivery.</p> <p> Maybe he was High On Life, but I kinda doubt it.</p> <p> On the way back to DC on Sunday, though, they had the most amusing, or at least appropriate, selection (though still nowhere as good as Chuck Berry for delivery; Chuck really seemed to get into it): <a href="">James Carville</a> and Mary Matalin.</p>

<p> <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/stories/2004/08/22/dontTalkWhileImInterrupting.html">Discourse in the modern age</a></p> <p> It&#39;s only missing some &#34;Bow down before Giblets! BOOOOOOW DOOOOOOOWN!&#34; action.</p>

<p> I haven&#39;t written about the Alexander McCall Smith books before, though I liked the first very much, and just finished the second, which I also liked. This is, in part, because I don&#39;t feel like I have the eloquence to do them justice.</p> <p> These books are spare and beautifully composed, and they are almost enough to restore my faith in humanity. They are the work of someone who either believes in the goodness of people, or is able to present an exquisite front–something I could never do, personally. When I tell my co-workers that I believe that people are No Damn Good, I&#39;m only half-joking.</p>

<p> Before heading to Washington, I bought an iRiver IHP-140. This is a 40GB iPod-alike that knows how to handle <a href="http://xiph.org/">OGG Vorbis</a> files, has good linux support, etc.</p> <p> I&#39;ve been fairly impressed with the unit, really–like the iPod (as I understand it) you just mount it as a drive, dump stuff on it, and, later, play it. It&#39;s a nice accompanyment on the 30-minute walk to and from work, and it&#39;ll be nice company on the various bits of transportation necessary to get me back home this evening (Yay!).</p>

<p> Sorry I didn&#39;t actually get a daily update out the last couple of days. A new work week brought, well, you know, <em>work</em>.</p> <p> I did have the strangest dream Sunday night, though.</p> <p> It started off normally enough. I was back in High School. I was taking some test for which I was woefully unprepared, and it was not going well.</p> <p> You know, one of the ur-anxiety dreams, at least for the sort of people I hang around with.</p>

<p> So, I have a TV in my room, and thanks to a $5 splitter, I have &#34;more&#34; cable than we have at home–for instance, HBO.</p> <p> So, having gotten the splitter in place, and having figured out that this TV is old enough that it doesn&#39;t just figure out that it&#39;s attached to cable, I&#39;ve now got The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen playing.</p> <p> Ewwwww.</p> <p> Now, in the case of Big Fish, the book and the movie are profoundly different, while being ultimately the same story–it&#39;s a great thing when it happens, because what it means is you&#39;re getting the story as it will best work in the respective media; Blade Runner is another instance, and there are others that I can&#39;t bring to mind right off.</p>

<p> Got up moderately early, got ready, grabbed the laptop, went to the coffee shop and read some email.</p> <p> At about 9:15, I headed out to the apartment. I am moved in.</p> <p> Then I had to go nearly to the far end of the red line to get to a TJ-Maxx where I picked up some sheets and a pillow (I&#39;m sure Chet&#39;s rolling his eyes at my negotiation skills at this point).</p>

<p> By way of <a href="http://discourse.net/">Michael Froomkin</a>, a <a href="http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1281369,00.html">Guardian report on new thoughts on T.Rex&#39;s growth patterns</a> reports the following:</p> <blockquote> <p>The T. rex in the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park famously snatched and devoured a lawyer cowering in a lavatory. Palaeontologists have since heartlessly adopted the lawyer as a standard unit of dinosaur diet.</p> </blockquote>

<p> So I got up this morning at 7ish, showered, talked to Anne, got ready and out the door at about 8am. I decided to check out Murkey Coffee, a local place I had found on the web that had free wi-fi (though I didn&#39;t bring the laptop along), and is roughly halfway between the DNC and my new spot–an ideal place to start frequenting, assuming I liked the coffee.</p> <p> While I had passed it walking back from seeing the place on Thursday, I didn&#39;t stop in because I was soaking wet, and I just wanted to get some food and get back.</p>

<p> …I&#39;d think <a href="http://www.democrats.org/blog/display/00010894.html">this was a brilliantly snarky comment</a>.</p> <p> Yeah, the Trib requires a login, but do you really need to read the story to know what it&#39;s about?</p>

<p> Julia Child <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/08/13/obit.child/index.html">has died</a>.</p> <p> I don&#39;t know what to say that others might not say about her personally.</p> <p> But I can relate one amusing story.</p> <p> When we were living in Cambridge, Karl Fattig came to visit us; I don&#39;t remember if this was connected with him applying to Bowdoin or if it was after he had moved to Bowdoin and he was just coming down to visit Boston. I actually think it was the latter.</p>

<p> Because I don&#39;t intend to censor. Hey, I figure I didn&#39;t sign any NDA, and people have the right to understand their political process, as the people working for the &#34;operators&#34; see it. And they think it&#39;s all about money. Period.</p> <p> Regardless, Tuesday was a long, hard day because I was sleep deprived and maybe a little depressed, and I&#39;d been assaulted with the names of at least seventy-three people, which is certain to reduce me to a coma.</p>

<p> First, the big news: I have a place to stay. It&#39;s nothing elaborate–a room in a house on 13th, near Logan Park–but I met both the landlord and the other guy in the house and hit it off really well. It has a kitchen and washer and dryer and a bathroom that I will only have to share if they bring in a person for the third room, which the landlord is not sure he&#39;s going to do. If he does, he says he&#39;ll give me a break on the rent.</p>

<p> First things first–I&#39;ve not gotten all that far in the book. Partly it&#39;s because I haven&#39;t been reading as much as I normally do, but partly because after two or three pages, I often glaze over a little bit; it&#39;s nothing if not dense.</p> <p> But it&#39;s also interesting. It&#39;s the first generally recognized history text, and the list of things it is the primary source for is pretty amazing.</p> <p> Apparently the Histories are the only source we have for information about the Battle of Marathon (an appropriate reference given what&#39;s going on in Athens).</p>

<p> So, I disabled my laptop yesterday by deleting (intentionally) the old static /dev directory–I mean, I&#39;m using udev, which builds the thing dynamically (and really, it does a very fine job), and a comment in the /etc/init.d/udev script suggested that it could be removed.</p> <p> So I did.</p> <p> There was no immediate havoc, but I couldn&#39;t reboot–the moment the kernel went to hand over control to /sbin/init, init would complain that it couldn&#39;t open an initial console.</p>