Wombat in Beijing

Mmmm...beer....

Greetings from behind the Great Firewall

Howdy all. Tunneling in via proxy to send greetings from Beijing. Richard aka The Peking Duck and I are about to head to Qingdao, Home of Beer. What more reason do I need to go?

It's been a packed trip, and I'll put up a more substantial post when I have some time.

Friday Cat Blogging!!!

The Sorrows of Empire, Pt. 2...

People who know me in real life know that I was never an Obama fan. I couldn't see what the fuss was about, frankly. I didn't like the "awesome God" talk, the strange mutability of his policy positions from the beginning to the end of the primaries –- which went beyond the normal and expected political calculations, in my estimation. I didn't like his neo-liberal Chicago School advisors. I didn't like the nearly substance-free campaign, the emphasis on marketing and branding, that big "O" that looked like a groovier Pepsi logo. But this wasn't something I could discuss with a lot of people usually on my side of the political fence and on a lot of online venues where I'd generally find allies. Conversations about Obama seemed to turn unpleasant almost instantly; if you weren't onboard there was something wrong with you.

(just to be clear, I have no patience with the "OMG Obama is a Muslim Socialist!!!" rhetoric, particularly when available evidence points to nearly opposite conclusions)

I wasn't silent but I was not vocal enough; I don't like confrontation that turns ugly and personal, and I felt like nothing I could say made a difference anyway. Bringing it into this blog felt particularly pointless. I now see that although I was willing to challenge people in person (and on other blogs), I was reluctant to take too public a stand, as small a number as my "public" may be. It was a form of cowardice on my part, and one that I regret.

I'm a good liberal as both RL and online acquaintances most likely know. I voted Democratic in the presidential election because the alternative was unacceptable -- I was not going to hand the car keys back over to the Party that had driven the country into the ditch for the last eight years. I wasn't happy about my choices, but I figured at the very least we would have a somewhat more rational foreign policy and a significantly better environmental one.

Basically, I voted for the polar bears.

I need to get to work and I don't have the time or energy to write a long post enumerating all the reasons I'm pissed off disappointed with the Obama Administration, and anyway, I'm not great at writing those kinds of pieces. I tend to sublimate my political anger into my fiction -- raw, bloody grist for the mill.

So, to keep it short, here's the list: the financial bailout, i.e., "the socialization of risk and the privatization of profit," which is to say, "everything for the people who caused the problems in the first place, nothing for the working and middle class", the incredible hypocrisy on DOMA, DADT, the "health care reform" that started with a fatal compromise and ends, I'm guessing, with huge giveaways to the insurance industry and little, if any, improvement in care...

And this, which is the worst of all: the continuation of the Bush Administration's extra-legal tactics in the "war on terror" and the continued shredding of the Constitution and the rule of law. Glenn Greenwald, linked above, has the essential summary of how the Obama administration is considering an executive order to allow prolonged detention without charges. For me, the money graph is this one:

There has now emerged a very clear -- and very disturbing -- pattern whereby Obama is willing to use legal mechanisms and recognize the authority of other branches only if he's assured that he'll get the outcome he wants. If he can't get what he wants from those processes, he'll just assert Bush-like unilateral powers to bypass those processes and do what he wants anyway. In other words, what distinguishes Obama from the first-term Bush is that Obama is willing to indulge the charade that Congress, the courts and the rule of law have some role to play in political outcomes as long as they give him the power he wants. But where those processes impede Obama's will, he'll just bypass them and assert the unilateral power to do what he wants anyway...

One of Greenwald's commentators cites Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, the basic premise of which is that the American economy has become an increasingly militarized, hollow shell, our republic, an empire supported by arms, where a series of bases substitute for colonies. Everything the Bush administration did, both at home and abroad, supports Johnson's view; the Bush administration was wholly given over to the military-industrial complex; and the extent to which Obama is willing to continue the abuses of his predecessor provides further evidence of the essential truth of what Johnson proposes.

When then-Senator Obama, the presidential frontrunner, voted for the FISA bill he had earlier promised to filibuster, the writing on the wall was writ large enough for anyone to see.

Empires do not willingly transform themselves back into republics. And holders of power do not willingly give up power.



(Shorter Obama: "We had to shred the Constitution in order to save it.")

Paging Doctor Kush?!

Okay. I think marijuana should be legal, period, and I fully support the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. But what's going on in Venice is just...weird.

There are so many medical marijuana "clinics" within walking distance of my house, it's crazy. Six, at least. Some look more or less like doctor's offices...low-key, discreet. And then there are places down on the boardwalk called "Doctor Kush Clinic" and "Kush Sunset Co-operative" staffed with hip-hop dudes in oversized lettermen's jackets emblazoned with fluorescent green cannabis leaves, and girls in bikinis who urge you to "Come upstairs and get high legally!"

I mean, come on. Our pot policies are seriously whack. Legalize it already.

We interrupt this commercial with tonight's program...

I call my house "Shack by the Sea." It's a bungalow built around 1912, and though it has its charms, they are best described as "bohemian." Perhaps "rustic." Anyway, the walls are thin and the lots are small here, so sometimes I have more insight into my neighbor's activities than I would like to.

Currently my next door neighbor is a guy - maybe two - I haven't quite figured that out yet - youngish, in film/TV. A certain cable channel that I won't name, but let's just say, when I came home and there was a film production going on next door that featured a pretty girl in a French maid outfit, I wasn't entirely surprised (no, it's not the Playboy Channel - nothing that interesting).

This afternoon, they seemed to be having a business meeting of sorts out in their front yard. Two or three guys talking about marketing strategies. Viral marketing. Web 2.0. Social networking sites. Branding. I heard it all, any time I went into my bedroom to fold clothes and change the sheets.

Would that I had a flame-thrower.

You know, I just. Don't. Care. I don't care about this stuff. I don't care about business, spread sheets, the profit motive, guys in suits, advertising, marketing strategies, not any of it. I don't care. I recognize that you need to market your work, I get that. But what I don't get is how we've come to a place where the marketing and the brand have superseded the content and the idea.

Our last two Presidents were elected because of branding and clever marketing, and their performance in office demonstrates the almost total disconnect between the brands being marketed and the policies that were supposed to be associated with those brands.

There's so much that's terribly wrong with this, with a business and political culture where clever marketing is used as a subterfuge, to disguise the "product" we're being sold, where the image overrides the substance.

Meanwhile, my beloved California is about to experience the shock doctrine, the endgame of years of a dysfunctional state government kicking the can down the road instead of making the structural changes that desperately need to be made in order to have a rational budget that delivers needed goods and services and raises the funds necessary to do so. It's profoundly disturbing. Maybe it's going to take everything falling apart before we can put it back together, but in the meantime, poor and disabled people will literally die if the proposed budget cuts go through. I don't have the energy to complete the rest of this equation, the "meanwhile we give millions/billions of tax cuts to corporations/federal bailouts to wealthy bankers" - you know, it's a cliche, all the more depressing because it's true.

I don't know what the answers are, don't know how it is we can reorganize our economy to provide decent jobs for more people, what it means to be productive in an age where the last thing we need to do is to keep buying more cheap plastic crap just to keep everyone working, here and around the world. There have to be better ways to organize ourselves, better ways to live. I'm not talking about some utopian fantasy here, just a society where work has value, lives have meaning, and where people earn enough money to live decently.

Okay, /rant. I have work to do.

Bad Blogger, no donut...June 2009 edition!

I've been busy with some, er, work...I will report on at least some of said "work" soon...

In the meantime, is this love, or another passing fancy?

Belated Happy Internet Maintenance Day!

And a belated Happy May 35th as well...

Ai Weiwei "harmonized"

(image grabbed from archinect.)

Artist/architect/activist Ai Weiwei is probably best known in the US for designing the iconic "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium in Beijing and then disassociating himself from the project in protest of China's "disgusting" political conditions. But his art has long had a political component, and lately his activism has been nothing short of fearless. In recent months, Ai has investigated the casualties in the Beichuan quake, in attempt to fully document the names of the victims, many of them children. In the last week, he reported being harassed in a pattern all too familiar to Chinese activists - visits by anonymous authorities, invitations to "chat" and "drink tea."

At 7:40 pm, I exited the embassy, which has at least three levels of prison-like security. Listening to Ms. "Human Rights" Pelosi, I was struck by the amount of money that could turn a once-crafty heroine into an obsequious, felonious old bag. Even more ridiculous is the claim that the US Embassy inherits from ancient Chinese styles. Gag.

So that my mobile phone wouldn't be confiscated by US Marines, I left it in the car. When I returned my mother's phone call, she said anxiously that four plainclothes policemen were waiting at home and were continually asking about my residence out by the airport road. I immediately said I was coming home. It had been a few days since I'd seen her.

What happened afterward is like an absurdist novel gone bad. The seemingly nice domestic security officer was not carrying a police ID, and I refused to talk with someone whose identity was unknown. He said his colleagues had ID, I said my comrade was Clinton. He began to talk about feelings, something I avoid altogether. I had to ask them to leave, and then called 110. The mincing 110 response — two pitiful policemen who hadn't brought any ID. They said, it was you who called us, so I said, I'm a tax-payer, and he said, we've got badge numbers on our uniforms and there's a police car outside, so I said, where's the proof you didn't steal them, so the two of them had to go back and pick them up at the station. Then we all went to the station, and the officers there were a little surprised to see a domestic security officer being brought in to make a statement. One officer did both the questioning and the recording. It was a little comical, but I benevolently signed my name. Then they refused to issue a written acknowledgement of the report, saying, we were just talking and it wasn't a crime. I said, I didn't call 110 for fun, and then I called lawyer Hao, but the signal was poor in Shanxi, so I called Liu Xiaoyuan, who said that state security had chatted with him in the past. The domestic security officer I had reported vanished. I stormed out of the station and, I'm not exaggerating this at all, said, you've wasted tax payer money, you're dishonorable, you're pathetic. If you don't unlock the door, your station's not going to have a door anymore.

I strongly recommend you go to Danwei and read the whole thing, which also includes a post by lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan on the right of Chinese citizens to refuse to "chat."

Two days ago, Ai Weiwei's blogs were shut down. The last entry, titled "I'm Ready," was translated by China Digital Times. Be sure to read that too.

UPDATE: According to Danwei, Ai Weiwei has a new blog: http://blog.aiweiwei.com and Twitter account @aiww. If it is Ai Weiwei, he's only following one person on Twitter, "There is no Ai Weiwei on Twitter." Which sounds about right...

(NOTE: "Harmonized" is China Netspeak referencing one of the official goals of the Hu Jintao leadership, building a "Harmonious Society." Anything insufficiently "harmonious" invites censorship)

Glorp....

Road trip!

The Good...


The Bad...



And the Ugly...

Sunday cat blogging...

Because it's a holiday weekend...

When Cuteoverload isn't enough...

Go to Zooborns! BABY LION CUBS!!!!!!!

Never thought I'd be a pro-wrestling fan...

But I'm with "friend of blog" Evil Willow...I am liking Jesse "The Body" Ventura!

"Yes We Can!"

"But that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to."

Jon Stewart's Moral Kombat...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
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My Name is Other Lisa, and I am a Trekkie

I refuse to call myself a "Trekker." It's way too pretentious. But yes, I know the Star Trek episodes by name. I can recite much of the dialog. I have been to a Star Trek convention - only one. I've gone to the San Diego Comi-con a bunch of times though. That was actually where I first saw the Star Trek bloopers. Talk about different times - the convention was held at the El Cortez Hotel in downtown San Diego. I may have already hit double-digits, age-wise - but we are talking tween as opposed to teen (I'm guessing I was about 11). My dad dropped me and my younger sister off at the convention and said to have fun and he'd pick us up later. We had a blast. Do kids get to do stuff like this any more, just run around on their own all day at a comic book convention?

Anyway, I have a long history with Star Trek. The original series only, thank you very much. The one that was truly iconic. All the other iterations are just TV shows. So I pretty much had to go see the new J.J. Abrams "reboot" (NOTE TO CULTURAL ARBITRATORS: Can we eliminate the term "reboot" as it applies to a new version of an old cultural product. And while you're at it, would you please remove "mash-up" as well? Thanks. Much appreciated).

Today I walked to Santa Monica and plunked down my $9.50 (and THIS for a matinee! I am so spoiled by free studio screenings). My thoughts:

First, AMC Santa Monica, fix your damn screen. This was the big screen theater and the bottom half of it was all scuffed and had, like, huge water-marks on it or something. I mean, this big damn blotch on the lower right that you'd see every time the scene had any kind of lighting. I thought about leaving but figured most of the movie would be in outer space, which tends to be dark. I had reckoned without the bridge of the Enterprise, which as some have remarked, resembles an Apple Store. But I did forget about the ugly blotch and skid-marks after a while, and anyway, those weren't the movie's fault.

On to the movie.

The story: meh. I mean, another time travel story, Kirk, he is teh REBEL, and uh, red matter? Huh? It's best not to think too much about the story; it falls apart on close examination.

The direction: I could have lived without so much shaky cam, but that wasn't as distracting as I'd feared. (NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD FILM DIRECTORS: Shaky Cam and Lens flares actually do not create realism. These visual devices have become a cliche). So it was okay.

The cast: here's where the movie rocked. Really. When you have actors who are so closely identified with roles, as the actors who played the crew in the original Star Trek, it's really hard to imagine anyone else playing those parts. But this is where the "iconic" nature of the original Star Trek comes in. Those weren't actually caricatures, they were archetypes. Who knew?

I'd had serious doubts about Chris Pine, and if I were Queen of the Star Trek universe, he wouldn't have been the guy I'd cast. He's too young. Too callow. But you know, he had the cocky, arrogant, womanizing part down, and at the end, I swear he was actually channelling the Shat. This is a good thing, no matter what anyone thinks.

Zachary Quinto. Great job. I'd read reviews complaining that he was too pissy, too insecure, too emotional, too conflicted. Um, guys who wrote these reviews? Did you ever actually watch Star Trek? That's the character! He's actually a little too sexy for Spock, who in spite of his teen idol status back in the day, was not really sexy. He was repressed, and he was the guy with whom so many fans identified - super brainy, doesn't fit in, pretends he's in control when he's really not - except he was also super-cool! Which most fans were not, but wished they were.

Karl Urban - wow. Now here's a guy who is much more attractive (IMO) than Chris Pine, and he's playing Dr. McCoy. Cool! Hunky McCoy! He was just spot-on. He actually wore a pinky ring, and those of you who are Trekkies like me know the significance of this. More McCoy in the next movie, please. They need to get that Star Trek triad thing going.

Simon Pegg - inspired casting. More Scotty next time out as well.

The rest of the crew were okay. They did give Uhuru something to do, and that's a good thing, but I can't say that Zoe Saldana is a really knock your socks off actor, or maybe it was the part. But she was okay. And John Cho - isn't he too old for Sulu? And, not as cute? Though at least he got to fence.

But, you know, whatever. I'm old school, but I'm not a purist.

The other than main crew casting...Bruce Greenwood - VERY good. He owned it.

Spock's parents...eh. Okay. Didn't stand out. I stand alone in thinking that Winona was actually a little better than Ben Cross, but what the hell was that outfit with the breast shelf?! I'm a little miffed with certain aspects of messing with canon here, plus the inconsistent performance of the transporters, but, well, I won't get into that. This is a spoiler-free zone.

Eric Bana as the villain Nero - well, it's not his fault. Not a particularly interesting part.

So, my recommendation. Do the sequel. Write it better. Keep it focused on the characters, because that was the part of this that really worked.

Oh, and the music. Sigh. Typical boring hero movie. The first Star Trek had some seriously kick-ass music. Weird stuff from real composers. Great music. Iconic, even. This score was another typical grandiose theme, a little tribal percussion for the bad guys thrown in, whatever.

And then, at the very end, finally. They played the original Star Trek theme. A kind of lame version, I thought. But still. They played it. And that's Star Trek.

Now, if only they'd used Shatner's original narration....seriously, guys. That would have been cool.

Waiting is eating my brain...

How is it that it's Thursday night - well, technically Friday morning - and I haven't written a post since Sunday? Where did the last four days go? Did I actually do anything?

Well, a little bit of writing - and by the way, the next writer-type person I hear/read who says that they have to write all the time, they can't stop the words, they enjoy writing so much, the words just flow through them, it's quite possible that I will reach through the Interwebs and throttle them, because I don't even want to talk about where it feels like I'm pulling the words for this latest thing from...since hitting 40K a couple of weeks ago (whenever that was), I've managed to achieve a grand total of 3,000 more words. Sheesh. That's pretty sad.

Oh well. The last book I wrote wasn't always a joy to write either, and it came out okay in the end. Though I'm still not sure about this one JUST DON'T THINK ABOUT THAT DON'T THINK ABOUT THAT DON'T

Redrum Redrum Redrum

M'kay.

Pretty much what's been going on is waiting. Lots of it. I've had an interesting little writing gig with a Chinese publication (more on that some other time), I've been squeezing out my little dribble of words on the WIP, waiting to hear about the book that's out in the cold cruel publishing world, waiting to hear about a job, waiting to hear about...well, a bunch of other stuff. Which means I'm waiting to figure out what I'm going to do about my house, about where I'm going to be and how I'm going to get there. And of course under those decisions are a geometrically multiplying decision tree of many other little decisions. With a ticking clock.

Feh.

Okay, I'm at least going to exercise some control over one of the things that I can control, and that's this irritating WIP.

500 words, baby. That's all I'm asking for tonight. 500 words...

UPDATE: I think the internet is eating my brain too. The amount of time I have wasted following and even participating in stoopid internet sh1t-storms is just embarrassing. I swear I was more productive back in the dark days of dial-up.

Brain bleach needed...

Ugh. Here's a question about writing I frequently ask myself: why does writing so often take me to unpleasant, dark places? What does this say about me? Obviously I have some control over the process, right?

This particular internet field trip started out, not exactly innocently but routinely. I needed some information on a notorious cluster of bars in a Mexican city. Photos, if possible. I'd never been there (and wouldn't likely go) but I don't like to just make stuff up - to the extent that I can have a real place to picture in my head, the happier I am as a writer — unless I'm writing speculative fiction and just, you know, making sh1t up — oddly, those completely created environments are very vivid to me. I can picture exactly what everything looks like.

My last book was set primarily in China, and it featured a number of net bars and karaoke clubs. I've been to enough of them to create plausible environments. Mexican tourist bars, art bars, even a few dodgy ones, I've been to plenty of them too. But not this kind of place.

So, research. And yeah, in a way, I hit the mother lode. All the descriptions I needed. Pages and pages, post after post on a chat board for a "club" that's all about men who like to pay for sex.

It was disturbing, though maybe not in the way you'd think. I mean, men have been paying for sex for a few thousand years at least, and I was not unaware of this fact. It was the insular nature of it, the "community" aspect, the jargon they used, the way they rated the girls according to looks, enthusiasm and performance, the fact that I had to keep running to the Urban Dictionary to understand what they were talking about, what each particular combination of initials stood for.

By the time I reached the place where one member was calling out certain newbies for not posting their "field reports," you know, for taking information from others and not reciprocating, I was nodding my head and thinking, "yeah, that's not fair, this guy's been really generous about sharing."

I think the post that got to me the most was from a guy who wanted to get information about typical tourist activities and popular places to go in the area. Because as many times as he'd been to this town, he never went to any of them; no, he stayed at some sleazy hotel by a br0thel and went out for cheap wh0res, and that was all he ever did. And he wanted to make sure he could lie plausibly to his coworkers, about, you know, what he did on his vacation.

Ick. I think I'd better get over to Cute Overload. I need kittens and puppies, stat.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood...

I've been busy with various projects, including an attempt to translate a Chinese-language Hollywood Reporter that was way above my skill set (but definitely a great learning experience). Mostly I'm waiting for a few things to sort themselves out so I have a slightly better indication of what I will do in the next couple of months.

In the meantime, I'm trying to enjoy my neighborhood and surroundings. Who knows how much more time I'll have to spend here?

Yesterday I took quite a long walk, up through the Santa Monica Airport, stopped at the Whole Foods up on National & Barrington, then walked down Barrington to Palms, up to the Trader Joe's just on the other side of the 405 Freeway, then back down Palms and home. About a seven mile circuit. I needed Trader Joe's Almond Butter and hummus, and I like to have a destination when I walk. An excuse, really.

It's a great walk. I particularly enjoy the stretch through the Santa Monica Airport. Something about seeing all those little planes parked neatly alongside Quonset hangers, the DC3 monument (an actual DC3 mounted up on a stand), all this fills me with an odd sort of nostalgia. I've always loved airplanes. Not that I'd actually want to fly in the little ones, mind you, but they remind me of when I was a kid, and my dad had the aeronautical models from his work at Ryan Aviation, and the little Matchbox airplanes I had myself. You pass through the airport, and at the end there's a dog park and a people park where little kids learn soccer.

Then, down Barrington and over to Palms. This is a residential neighborhood, mostly, nice, mostly modest houses (pricey due to the location), mature trees, pretty yards. Up Palms past a municipal park, kids playing softball. It's a diverse neighborhood, different ethnicities, nationalities, ages. One thing I've noticed, on this walk, in my own neighborhood in Venice, is how friendly most people out on the sidewalks are. You'd think in this age of economic downturn and desperation that you'd feel more of that, more fear, but instead, I get the odd feeling that people are warmer than they used to be. It doesn't matter who they are, where they're from - if I smile, 99% of the time I get a smile back, a "Hi there!" a "How are you?"

Of course, I live in an affluent area, overall, solidly middle-class to wealthy with not many poor people, but still, I wonder if something has shifted, just a little. For a city where supposedly nobody walks, a lot of people are out walking in my part of L.A. Walking their dogs, talking their kids to the parks, jogging down the leafy streets. And smiling at each other.

Bonus Sunday Cat-Blogging!

Taken with my cellphone camera so maybe not the best quality, but how cute is this?!

Friday Cat Blogging!

Because we could all use some cute after the last couple of days...

Rage on, Shep!

I tweeted this but it really deserves its own post: Shepherd Smith unloads on two torture apologists...



H/T to digby.

Sick

I've frequently wondered why the Bush Administration was so into torture. It's pretty clear that you don't get reliable information from a person you torture, and I have to think that the officials who pushed for it knew this, on some level. I concluded that they wanted to use torture the way that repressive regimes throughout history have used it: as a means of control, an awful example of the power of the state and how it can be turned against enemies of the regime - be they terrorists or dissidents.

I also thought that at least some of these people, and I'm not sure which ones, but some of them among this group of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Bybee, Yoo - some of them got off on it. Sadists who enjoyed the exercise of power over others. That it was done in the name of protecting the state gave them the necessary cover to justify what they did.

Then just now, I read this report from McClatchy:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime...

..."There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

If the evidence didn't exist, manufacture it. Torture prisoners until they told you it was true.

Nothing was going to stop the Bush Administration from having their war. Not the truth and certainly not justice.

Champagne tastes...

...on a beer budget...sigh...that's me. Of course I'm not actually that fond of champagne, and I really love microbrew beer, so...my point being, I like nice stuff. Not in all areas; there are many many things I just don't care about, but functional things, I'm a sucker for good design, and have I mentioned my strange bag fixation?

And audio-visual equipment. I've just had to stay away from this kind of thing because I know how I am. No plasma TVs for me, and I've had basically the same sound system for...well, parts of it are 30 years old (but lemme tell you, I really did my research on that 40 watts per channel Kenwood amp!).

Not surprisingly, the audio has been slowly dying for years. Rather than replace it, I just largely stopped listening to music in my house. Which is strange, given how much I love music, my many years of playing in bands, etc. I did buy an iPod but rarely used it. I don't like walking around with earbuds, screening out the rest of the world. Besides, it never sounded good to me.

But as I contemplated packing up and moving around (at least for a while), I kept staring at all the CDs racked around Shack by the Sea (we're not even going to discuss the vinyl), thinking, well, it would be nice to have music with me, wherever I am. Plus, loading all the CDs into my computer is something I can do that doesn't finally, irrevocably say, "Yes, I am moving." I'm leaving that decision till May 1st. May Day, you know...plus, if I do move, I'll need something to help other than baseball games and America's Next Top Model marathons.

So, I went down to the Apple Store to check out iPod speakers. "So are you pretty familiar with these systems?" I asked the closest clerk.

"Not really," he said, a little sheepishly. "I bought the Bose and didn't really listen to anything else."

The Bose, of course, was the most expensive dock they offered.

The two of us had a listen to the various systems. You know, not bad. The new version of the JBL donut (the Onstage III) sounded decent; the Logitec Portable okay, if a little tinny, and the Altec Lansing was pretty nice too. Then I listened to the Bose Sound Deck II.

"Oh," I said to the clerk. "Okay. I get it. Thanks a lot." He smiled.

After a few days of contemplation, I went back and bought the Bose. I'm listening to it now, and what can I say? It's great having music in the house again.

I'm just glad they didn't have the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin at the store. Not only does this get rave reviews for sound quality, it's called "the Zeppelin"! I'm not sure I could have resisted...

(the Apple Online store has a good selection of speakers, including all those mentioned above. Another nice-sounding speaker I might recommend is a JBL not included on the Apple site, the Radial Micro. I'm not sure which model I heard, and I haven't listened to it side-by-side with anything else, but it seemed to handle tricky classical stuff pretty well).

Bad Blogger, no donut...April 2009 edition!

Okay, I've been negligent. Busy with a variety of things. Right now I'm pushing to get to 40K on the WIP by the end of the weekend. We'll see how that goes. And I'll try to post something interesting as well...

The human impact

Watch this clip by my extremely talented friend, Nikki Corda, from an upcoming documentary about the effects of the economic crisis in Las Vegas. I love this woman's attitude.

This must be shared...

SNORK! Shanghai Slim linked to this in the comments on the post below. I didn't want anyone to miss it. Do you think they chose the soundtrack to entice potential "Top Gun" types to become blimp pilots?!

Finishing what I started, or unhealthy obsession?

I can't help it. I'm fiddling with the airship script again...it'll only take a couple of days. I swear. I figured out how to solve something...a bunch of somethings...well, we'll see.

Did you know that airships could form the basis of a "greener" system of travel and transport?

Other Cassandra

I spent a big chunk of the day sorting through boxes of paper and and photographs - I had never quite gotten around to organizing all of the stuff I'd brought home from 15 years work at the studio - and once started, I sort of got on a roll. I'd been storing the work material in a little bonus room where I'd stashed a few other boxes of...well, I wasn't sure. They'd been out there for a while. One turned out to be writing and memorabilia from high school up to the point I lit out for China, back when. The other was primarily clippings, as was a good portion of the stuff from work.

I've long been a clipper and a saver, less so an organized filer, unfortunately. The older box of clippings had articles dating from the late eighties up till a few years ago (nowadays I clip less paper and archive a lot of data bits instead). A lot of the material was China-related, but there were a ton of articles about the environment, things like the Pacific Garbage Patch, tree-sitters, estrogenic substances causing gender confusion in frogs; the drug trade (weird, because my new book has that angle, and I hadn't even remembered that I'd been collecting the material), character studies (the world's greatest female sommelier, a man who can speak just about any language), places I might want to travel, strange science, stories about Los Angeles and San Diego, my favorite teams the Padres and the Chargers, and of course, airships. A lot of the articles are related to things I was writing or thought that I might want to write (like, you know, the airship thing). Other subjects were maybe tangentially related to writing but were more reflective of my lifelong interest in politics and how "the system" works.

I had a college-level political science class when I was a senior in high school, and when I reflect on it, I realize that this class influenced me on a profound level, forming the basic frame through which I view politics and institutional organization.

I can't even remember the name of the instructor. She taught at one of San Diego's better community colleges and came to my high school to teach this one "advanced class" for interested students. I remember that she was middle-aged, really ordinary-looking, not particularly distinctive in how she taught - I mean, she didn't jump around or dress up in costumes or use a lot of fancy audio-visual materials. She wore heavy-framed glasses and navy suits. But she must have been a subversive at heart. She chose wonderful textbooks that were well-written and persuasive, and I still remember some of their fundamental arguments. One was that institutions, be they government bureaucracies or corporations, tend to develop institutional imperatives that transcend and frequently conflict with their stated purpose, the most basic of which is that organizations, like any organism, want to survive and perpetuate themselves. Another was that America is run by a collection of "interlocking oligarchies," in which elites shuttle between business and government, and that it is primarily the interests of these elites that the government serves.

So, going through my boxes of clippings, I found articles I'd saved from the late eighties on to Bush II about income inequity in America, the rise in the gap between the rich and the poor, the fall of real wages, corporate malfeasance, financial manipulation, the privatization of risk, the perils of potential global financial crisis, currency meltdown, etc., etc., etc.

I didn't save most of them. I can find plenty of material today that says the same things.

Yeah, "no one could have predicted" our current crisis. Come on. People have been laying out the fundamentals of it for years.

(p.s. Here are some of the textbooks we used in that class....
Karl Deutsch, "Politics and Government: How people decide their fate," Thomas Dye, "Who's running America: institutional leadership in the United States," - the version I used is currently unavailable, but Dye apparently has published updates from Reagan through Bush II).

Who knew?

A little murder really tightens up that sagging middle. I mean, the book's. My sagging middle requires abdominal crunches and more cardio.

Feel-good item for the day....

From the San Diego Union:

As a wayward young whale nicknamed Diego was swimming around in San Diego's harbor, a group of 24 San Diegans were on a whale-watching trip on San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California.

They ventured out in groups of eight in small boats for a tour led by the S.D. Natural History Museum. The gregarious gray whales gave them a warm welcome. They rubbed up against the hulls of the boats. Mothers pushed their babies toward the visitors, and the babies opened their mouths to have their tongues and baleens stroked.

What amazed museum executive Jim Stone, though, was one baby whale who dived and came up with a mouthful of red seaweed. The youngster brought it to the people in the boat, like a bouquet of flowers.

Stone, a longtime aquarium worker knowledgeable about marine mammals, said the baby clearly was bringing a gift. The passengers graciously accepted it.

(H/T sdlorac)

Well, this is kinda cool!

Red Oxx plugged my blog for plugging their stuff. Cool!

If I do move to China, I am so getting another one of their bags...