I am not a habitual a visitor to rotten.com, as just a handful of the images of human suffering resident there, viewed years ago, were enough to permanently scar my mind.
However, I’ve just discovered that the site also hosts a series of biographical articles. There are few guilty pleasures more guilty or pleasurable than reading a hatchet job done upon a richly deserving target; there are few targets more richly deserving than Karl Rove.
Sometime in the late 1990s, shortly after going on a ten-album buying spree whose haul proved spectacularly unsatisfying, I temporarily gave up on the music industry. I resigned myself to the idea that I would never again buy an album that I actually loved.
Lately, something has changed for the better. Maybe the specter of internet piracy has scared the industry into thinking that it should actually try, rather than just focus on moving product. Maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I’ve just gotten smarter about where I choose to go looking.
Mike Doughty’s Haughty Melodic, released at the beginning of May, was a good start. Recently I’ve gone on a bit of a spree again, and the results have been much more gratifying this time around. The biggest gem in this haul is Kathleen Edwards, a plucky Canadian singer-songwriter who’s apparently categorized as “Alternative Country”. Her sweet-revenge single, “Back to Me”, was punchy enough to sell me on the album of the same title, her sophomore effort, after I’d heard it just once on the radio.
She’s got a simultaneously spare and unsparing way with a pen, and a smoky voice with which to expertly deliver the payload she’s crafted. As for the things she can do with a steel guitar, well, let’s just say that I could listen to the bridges of some of her songs for hours, and have.
Do you think that I’ve changed
I swear I never tried
Memory is a terrible thing
When you use it right
— “Away”
Ordinarily, this would make her my hero, except that:
“As God is my witness, I haven’t the faintest idea what I should do.”
One should beware of judging a man by his manner.
It is possible, for instance, that George Bush’s appointee to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, is in fact a thoughtful and decent human being, rather than the jowly, priggish, self-satisfied good ol’ boy whose image leaps unbidden to my mind every time I hear him speak.
I couldn’t say. All I know is that every time I hear the man’s voice, I think that it’s time to re-animate the moldering remains of William Tecumseh Sherman, because the South has clearly risen again and needs to be put down at least as hard as the last time — and a zombie Union general is just the revenant for the job.
For the nonce, however, we’ll need to settle for a living southern gentleman with which to fight the fire of another southern “gentleman”. Fortunately, Bill Moyers is up to the task.
I caught part of his superb closing address to the National Conference on Media Reform on the radio a few nights back. It’s heady stuff, full of the rhythm and power this preacher’s son must have learned at his father’s knee.
Listen to the recording or read the transcript, and be glad that there’s at least one journalist still alive who hasn’t decided to expediently compromise himself.
One of the incidental consequences of having the Squeezebox 2 — a recent acquisition which I’ll have to describe in detail another time — in the bedroom is a sudden blinding awareness of the craptacular nature of PC clock hardware.
I should explain.
The Squeezebox 2 is a very clever device intended to act as an interface between your stereo and your massive digitized music collection. Connect it to your receiver via RCA cables, connect it to your computer — running the server software — via an Ethernet cable, and you’re off to the races. It sports a dimmable, eminently-legible vacuum-fluorescent display, comes with a thoughtfully-designed remote, and has no moving parts of its own, making it utterly silent and thus something you can put on your nightstand without fearing that it will trouble your dreams.
Part of its cleverness lies in its reliance upon the power and versatility of general-purpose hardware, running easily-modified software — the thing on the far end of the Ethernet cable, in other words — to do the heavy lifting. It has just enough intelligence of its own to ask someone smarter for help.
It never really shuts off, either, unless you pull the plug, which allows it to do the gratifying trick of starting up instantly when called upon. Instead it goes into, at best, a light doze when you hit the Power button on the remote. It can, depending upon your preference, be configured to do any number of things while snoozing, from playing convincingly dead to displaying RSS feeds to showing a clock.
This brings us back to the approximate neighborhood of the original point. In keeping with its “let the server do the work” philosophy, the Squeezebox 2 doesn’t actually keep time on its own, being wholly dependent instead upon the server’s clock. It so happens that I already have a clock on the bedroom wall — an Oregon Scientific unit that tells the temperature and synchronizes itself to WWVB nightly — and thus it is that I conspired to present myself with inescapable evidence of just how awful a job the PC does of keeping time without help.
When I first plugged in the Squeezebox 2, I noticed that its clock was eight or so hours off. “Right”, thought I, realizing that the server’s clock had never been properly set, and proceeded to build and run ntpdate pool.ntp.org so as to prime the hourglass. The Squeezebox 2’s clock and the wall clock were in perfect sync, and I was happy — except that next morning I woke up and noticed that the Squeezebox 2 had gained about six seconds on the wall clock. By evening that amount had reached ten seconds.
Ten seconds. In a day!
Fine. Time to go whole hog and set up ntpd to run long-term so as to determine and eventually correct for clock drift. Only it turned out that ntpd never seemed to get around to calculating a reasonable drift value, let along correcting the clock. Eventually, after recompiling the ntp package with the debug flag set — easy, thanks to Gentoo and Portage — and quite a bit of confused poking around, I figured out what the problem was. My ntpd.conf contained the notrust directive as a parameter to the default configuration, meaning that the daemon rejected each reply it was busily soliciting for lack of cryptographic authentication. Brilliant. (To be fair, Portage tried to warn me about this at build time. Alas, that warning went the way of all Portage warnings, off the far end of stdout. That’s something else I need to correct, and soon.)
With that fixed, ntpd seems to have finally figured out what time it is. At some point I’ll go back and figure out if there’s a way for it to communicate securely with the servers in pool.ntp.org, at least. (Still and all, I have to admit that “spoofed time” is not foremost on my list of personal anxieties.)
Morals of this story:
One: scrap, for God’s sake, the Tcl/Tk-inspired color scheme. Two: ditch the Pogo cartoons. Cuteness is tolerable when your documentation is otherwise up to snuff. When this is not the case, cuteness is nothing but an aggravating reminder to your reader that your attention was elsewhere than where it should have been. Three: focus on making the package as a whole simple, straightforward, and accessible. For openers:
The reasons why it is good to have friends like Paul and Liz are almost too numerous to count. (A place near the top of that list, however, must under any circumstances be reserved for Paul’s pulled pork.)
However, the reason for today — yesterday, really, but I’m slow — is that they know about, and actually attend, cool stuff that’s happening locally. Case in point: Cinema San Pedro. They’ve been talking about it since at least last year, but last night was the first time I mustered the energy to go. As with so many things, I found myself wishing that I’d done it sooner.
The venue is a hoot, for starters. With the consent of the restaurants fronting it, the good folk of the Camera Cinemas block off a section of San Pedro Street, parking a truck with a projection screen on one end, and turning the rest into open-air seating. Plastic garden chairs are made available to all, although one can opt to bring one’s own blanket and forego the chairs entirely.
The feature was 1950’s All About Eve. There are movies that age gracelessly, proving themselves too tighly tied to the time of their production. Others, like Casablanca, are timeless — the ones you hear about for years before you finally watch them, have realization dawn upon you, and say, “Oh. So that’s what all the fuss was about.”
All About Eve is one of the latter. It’s catty, crackling, melodramatic fun. There isn’t a bad performance in the lot, but George Sanders deserves special mention as the recipient of the Coiled Spring Award for Best Delayed Payoff.
Notes to self:
“Your wife’s friend is pretty cute. Is she seeing anybody?”
“Not at the moment. But she tends to go for jerks.”
[Beat]
“I could be a jerk to her.”
The 2005 IDEA Awards make for interesting reading. I don’t necessarily agree with all the choices, but it’s hard to argue that they don’t constitute food for thought.
Plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Most humans do the reverse, inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. Hayao Miyazaki breathes in ink and breathes out story.
I enjoyed Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but Howl’s Moving Castle is the most enchanting of his works I’ve seen to date. To watch it is to quickly find oneself lost in a world where wonder lurks behind every corner and magic may hide in the most mundane of objects. That’s all I’m going to say about the movie itself, aside from “See it.”
I have a fantasy. In it, the major studios, having razed their hand-drawn animation divisions to the ground in the foolish belief that technology trumps the ability to tell an engaging story regardless of medium, realize the depth of their mistake and approach Miyazaki, cap in hand, to plead for his help in reaquainting themselves with the arts they so shortsightedly threw away. In the fantasy, he makes them crawl for it — although from everything I’ve heard about the man, he’s far too kind to engage in such vengefulness, even when it’s deserved.