Oh. My. God.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann comes out spraying a delicious 50/50 mixture of napalm and bile over the complete and raging clusterfuck that was the federal government’s response to New Orleans. He pulls no punches — nor should he.
All posts by Dan
Bump
I’ve upgraded the WordPress instance for the site to 1.5.2. Give a squawk if you notice anything amiss.
Innocent Blood
Coming back from the party late this evening, I walked through the door to find feathers on the floor. Oh, great, I thought. The cats have savaged the feather duster. Then I saw the sad little body lying on the carpet. Oh. I only wish they’d savaged the feather duster.
Damn.
The mess won’t be hard to clean up: while there seems to have been no shortage of feathers, there was very little blood. The kids’ unattended porch privileges will have to be revoked permanently.
I feel like I owe the dead bird an apology. Something along the lines of, I’m sorry. Your death was pointless, unnecessary, and doubtless terrifying. I am ultimately responsible, and I would make amends if I could.
At times like this, I reflect that it’s strange to be affected by the death of a creature no larger than my fist when I’ve just returned from an evening out where I sampled lamb, chicken, beef, and pork, among other things. I’d like to think that the difference lies in the bird’s death having served no useful purpose, but if forced to be honest with myself I’d probably have to admit that it’s nothing more than the hypocrisy of a carnivore who has someone else do the butchering for him.
Katamari Birthday, Paul
My friend Paul recently marked his fortieth birthday, and today we celebrated the event at his home. Much fun was had and even more good food was eaten. There was air hockey, and pinball, and — thanks to a collaborative effort involving Bill, Rob, and Paul, among others — there was Katamari Damacy, a game I’d never played before despite having owned it for several months now. (The TV’s been dead since December, and I haven’t gotten around to repairing it.)
In case you’ve never heard of it, Katamari Damacy is a silly, strange, and above all exceedingly Japanese game that manages to be disarmingly charming despite its considerable weirdness. The premise almost defies explanation, but the gameplay is mind-bogglingly simple: run around the landscape with a sticky ball, and roll things up into it. When you begin, your ball is tiny, and can only pick up small things — pushpins, paper clips, coins, and so forth. As it grows, though, it can pick up ever-larger items: small animals, people, bicycles, large animals, and, eventually, cars, ships, and buildings.
The controls are equally simple, requiring the use only of both thumbsticks. (This is especially fortunate from my current perspective. Playing did ultimately hurt my wrist, but I can’t say it wasn’t worth it.) Past acquaintance with a tank-piloting game, such as Battlezone or Assault, is surprisingly helpful.
I can’t explain just what’s so insanely entertaining about running around firing nothing, destroying nothing, and in fact doing nothing besides rolling up crudely-modeled objects into a ball. I can only report that it is, in fact, deeply addictive fun. I might still be playing had my wrist not stopped me. Part of the amusement, to be sure, are the indignant squeals and shouts you hear once your ball is big enough to start picking up living things.
Another part is the promise of having your performance cuttingly critiqued, at the completion of every level, by the King Of All Cosmos, surely the most eccentric diety ever to carelessly abuse the Godhead. Think Simon Cowell in an outfit that’s equal parts Liberace, Carnival in Rio, and Mummenschanz, and you’re in the right ballpark.
It’s fun, and all too rare, to experience something that lives up to its billing. Katamari Damacy delivers.
Careful With That Coax, Eugene
In the past couple of months I’ve tracked, on two separate occasions, cable-TV signal-quality issues down to improperly-terminated coaxial connections. Both times someone seems to have decided that the end of the center conductor should be flush with the end of the surrounding screw-on collar.
No.
For the record: when you strip coaxial cable, you’re supposed to expose one-quarter inch — sixteen sixty-fourths for the mathematically disinclined amongst you — of center conductor. The collar of the RG-6 Quad compression-fit F-connector I happen to have at hand is, according to my caliper, eleven sixty-fourths of an inch deep. The center conductor is supposed to protrude. Don’t trim it flush unless snow on your television screen and irksome connectivity problems with your cable modem are your idea of an afternoon’s entertainment.
Amateurs.
Cans and Can’ts
The list of things you can and can’t do with a broken wrist is surprising and unituitive.
Type? Slow, but manageable.
Drive a car? Not even particularly hard, except when you want to turn and downshift at the same time. (Of course, if I’d broken my right wrist, it’d be a whole other story.)
Tie your shoes? Tricky. Very tricky. I’ve taken to wearing laceless shoes for the duration.
Wash dishes? Forget it. Impossible. Cannot be done. Using the dishwasher is another thing I’ve taken to doing for the duration. (I hate the dishwasher. It spots like anything.)
Sticks and Stones
Of all the bits of dubious folk wisdom floating around, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” has long been the one I’ve regarded with the most suspicion. I’ve been pummeled, and I’ve had tongue-lashings; I know which produced sore spots that lingered longer. But now I have the final, missing piece, the definitive proof.
Brothers and sisters, I am here to testify: the old adage is bullshit.
In the month just ended, I broke my wrist, and I witnessed the disintegration of two personal relationships that had meant something to me. No points for guessing which hurt more. Give me cuts, bruises, scratches, and contusions, and watch me smile as I bleed. Just don’t give me angry words and freezing silences.
Fetch me a Ten-Story Fork
The Space Shuttle Discovery made it down safely. This is a good thing for many reasons, the very least of which is that I won’t look like a ghoulish little shit for writing what follows.
Immediately after Discovery‘s launch, NASA announced that it was grounding the fleet until such time as it could be assured that the falling-foam problem, already thought to be fixed, really was fixed. Make no mistake: I applaud the administrators who made the doubtless-difficult decision to give astronaut safety a higher priority than public relations, and I don’t mean to kick them while they’re down.
But this seems like a good time to cast a critical and unforgiving eye upon the Shuttle program as a whole. I mean, we’re talking about a launch vehicle that was designed more than a quarter-century ago, and has killed an appreciable fraction of its highly-trained passengers. It never worked that well to begin with: it can only get up to Low Earth Orbit, for one thing, and therefore needs an additional booster to launch most satellites and probes.
As ‘reusable’ launch vehicles go, it winds up throwing a goodly amount of material away. The main fuel tank — source of the falling foam that doomed Columbia — burns up the atmosphere and is thus a complete write-off. The solid-rocket boosters are nominally recoverable, but at such expense that it wouldn’t be significantly more expense to build new ones every time. (They disassemble into segments for transport after recovery; the gap between segments is supposed to be sealed by O-rings — the infamous O-rings that hardened in the cold and allowed a jet of flame from the SRBs to lance into Challenger‘s main fuel tank, destroying the entire vehicle.)
All of this is very old news.
It’s fashionable again these days to whine and piss and moan the old refrain that America is losing its competetive edge, that all the good jobs are going overseas, and so on ad nauseam. So let’s do something about it. Let’s put our heads together, let’s loosen the purse strings — and for fuck’s sake, someone please promise Burt Rutan free drinks or whatever the hell it is he likes, if that’s what it takes to get him to join the huddle — and let’s design and build something truly audacious, so that we can finally send the Shuttle off to its well-earned retirement.
Christmas in September
The audiobook version of Anansi Boys will indeed be unabridged. And there’s even a pre-encoded-for-your-convenience MP3 CD version, which I’ve pre-ordered, of course.
Serious Profession
Neil Gaiman has a new book coming out next month, Anansi Boys. (Judging from the title, it could be set in the same universe as American Gods. Or it could be a differet beast entirely. I’m sure I could find out, but that would be peeking.) At any rate, I hadn’t known this was coming, and am excited about it.
The audiobook will be read by Gaiman’s friend and sometime collaborator, the blisteringly funny Lenny Henry — the man who brought Gareth Blackstock, the title character from “Chef!“, to such memorable life. I hadn’t had a clue this was coming, and I’m ecstatic about it.
Henry has a beautiful voice: rich, resonant, and mellifluous all at once. To hear it reading Gaiman’s evocative prose should be an absolute treat. If the audiobook version is, as I expect, unabridged, its release will likely mark the first time I favor an audiobook over its print counterpart.
But see what Neil has to say about it, and judge for yourself.