My Life in the Bush of Wombats

7:29AM - In case you hadn't been warned: It's starting again

Florida. Where "democracy" is more than a promise, it's a threat.

Thanks to smofbabe for the pointer.

Palm Beach County's absentee ballot points voters to confusion, some say

"People aren't going to understand this," he said of the ballot, which instructs people to connect an arrow to vote for the candidate of their choice. "It's just going to be a mess again."

From the butterfly ballot to the broken arrow, Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore is setting up the county for another election meltdown potentially, said the Delray Beach retiree, who was communications director for Children's Hospital in Miami and a communications specialist for the Palm Beach County School District.

Kemp and others wonder why LePore had to complicate matters by using the broken arrow when voters could be asked simply to fill in a circle to indicate their vote, known as bubbling in.

"People have to bubble in a lot of things today, but I've never seen where you have to connect an arrow," he said.

The second section of the article points out this:

Absentee ballot demand up

Fueled by Democrats who say voters shouldn't trust touch-screen machines and Republicans who have long pushed absentee ballots as a way to increase voter turnout, elections supervisors say requests for absentee ballots are shattering old records.

With a week to go before Friday's deadline to request mail-in ballots, Palm Beach County had received a whopping 30,752 requests — nearly three times the 11,472 requested before the 2000 primary.

People are rightly afraid that their votes aren't going to be counted. Evidence is that Ms. LaPore is afraid that they will.

2:48PM - History Repeats

The details change. The song remains the same.

The moral equivilent of a serial killer
And his CIA friends
Call the shots from the White House
But now that we own the media too
Those stories just aren't run

That sure was easy wasn't it?
More crack--more panic--more cops--more jails
You see emergency--total war
You see a black face--you see a crackhead
You see a black face--you see Willie Horton with a knife
You see Willie Horton with a knife
You see one Willie Horton you've seen them all

Just like Rome
We fell asleep when we got spoiled
Ignore human rights in the rest of the world
Ya might just lose your own

--excerpts from Jello Biafra, "Full Metal Jackoff", 1989

The architect of the Willie Horton ad is a prime mover in the "Swift Boat Liars for the Truth" ad. Which is why this has been on my mind.

3:54PM - Why I love Dan Savage

Though not in that way, of course.

From his August 19 column:

That said . . . bestiality is one of the "big three" perversions that I'm simply never going to budge on. I will always disapprove of fucking animals, molesting children, and eating poop. (A scat scene with a lamb would hit the trifecta of my disapproval.) Yes, yes, I know: A mind is like an umbrella--it only works when it's open. But if you're going to have a closed mind about just three things, fucking animals, molesting children, and eating poop are good picks, don't you think?

9:47PM - Digging down

fafblog. Again.

oh no! somebody broke the liberation.

So it turns out that like a day after the Iraqi handover a bunch of guys from the Oregon National Guard caught Iraqi jailers torturing Iraqi prisoners, which is really bad. But they rescued them, which is really good! But then their superiors told them to give the tortured Iraqis back to their jailers, which is really bad again.

. . .

"You gotta use discipline on a young country," says Giblets. "Otherwise it won't grow up with the right values. Spare the gonad electrocution, spoil the child."

This isn't a joke; this is real, actual news.

In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices--metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one identified as a 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their back and legs.

The soldiers disarmed the Iraqi jailers, moved the prisoners into the shade, released their handcuffs and administered first aid. Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson of Albany, Ore., the highest ranking American at the scene, radioed for instructions.

But in a move that frustrated and infuriated the guardsmen, Hendrickson's superior officers told him to return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw. It was June 29--Iraq's first official day as a sovereign country since the U.S.-led invasion.

The incident, the first known case of human rights abuses in newly sovereign Iraq, is at the heart of the American dilemma here.

For over a year now, the first defense of the neo*cons has been, "It's better in Iraq with Saddam Hussein gone."

The occupation army is by small steps but steady making that statement no longer true.

9:19AM - Knights of the Dinner Table: Online Strips

The folks at Kenzer stopped creating new material for their online Knights of the Dinner Table Online site.

However, they've been running reprints for some months. Last week, they started running one of the best storylines they ever did, "The Barringer Rebellion". It started on July 30, and they're reprinting one page per weekday. IIRC, the story ran about sixty pages, so it'll be wrapping up sometime around Halloween. (Unless I'm misremembering and it actually ran 80 pages, in which case Thanksgiving.) It's a hoot.

11:33AM - More Fafbloggy Goodness

Fafblog. Increasingly indispensable.

The Legend of Benjamin Healy

"They say he could skin an eat an army of Vikings in one go an still have room left over for their boats," says Giblets. "For their army of boats."

"They say he could could crush an elephant in one hand but lived at peace with the tiniest creatures of the forest," says me.

"Cept when he was crushin em in one hand to show people how he could crush em in one hand," says Giblets.

"They say no mortal woman was enough for him so he made one himself outta whiskey an liquors an ale," says me. "An he loved her like a lumberjack made of eating loves a woman made of ham."

10:47AM - RIP: Courageous Catt, 1991-2004

Our beloved cat, Courageous, finally succumbed to FIV this morning at around 6:30. She had been steadily weakening for the last week or so, but we believe that she was in little or no pain until she finally died of anemia.

I hope to be able to write more about her over the next few days. She was a superb cat and we will all miss her terribly.

9:12AM - As good a summary as I've seen

I don't think John Kerry and John Edwards have all the answers. I do believe they are sincerely interested in asking the right questions and working their way toward honest solutions. They understand that we need an administration that places a priority on fairness, curiosity, openness, humility, concern for all America's citizens, courage and faith.

...

It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities--respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals--that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.



--Bruce Springsteen, 5 August 2004

12:32AM - I know I'm easily amused

And I know that I'm punchy because I've been sick all week an I shud go t bed but man fafblog make me laugh.

Fafnir on Barack Obama:

But the most important thing ever to happen ever in this convention or in the news in general is Barack Obama who spoke last night an who is just some state senator right now but who is gonna be senator an president an space pope some day an I will vote for him over an over an over again because he speaks so so good an even though I dont know who he is or what his policies are or what he wants to do I am sure he is the biggest thing to happen to anyone since God at least! An even though I do not remember exactly what he said I think it was about unity an goodness an the beauty of beautiness an how America is made of candy an how we will triumph over adversity even though bad non-candy-comprised people may try to stop us because of HOOOORAAAAAAY! An then he ascended into the skies.

Giblets and Fafnir tag-team John Edwards:

Now we knew that "strength" is a big theme in this convention but I am especially impressed with how Edwards is makin use of it here especially with the "WE WILL BURY YOU."

Yeah but notice how long it took him to get his shoe off an pound it on the podium. Looks clumsy Fafnir, an I bet Fox News is gonna play that over an over again. It is a little known fact that Nikita Kruschchev brought an extra shoe with him to the UN so he could pound it at a moments notice.

An of course George Bush wears a boot around his neck at all times just in case. Wears it to bed even. He calls it "Snuggleboot."

and

I almost feel like the speech is uneven at times like when John Edwards goes from talkin about big corporations gettin tax breaks for cuttin American jobs to talkin about feeding the strength of America's armies by drinking the blood of the terrorist's dead.

I think it just shows John Edwards's youth an inexperience. Everyone knows you eat the heart of your enemies to gain their strength. Drinkin the blood is useless. Now Dick Cheney is a vice president I trust to know about eating another man's still-beatin heart.

and then Kerry:

Wow what a reception with the clappin. First of all what do you think of the music Giblets? I know it goes with the Vietnam theme but is "Holiday in Cambodia" inappropriate?

No Fafnir "Holiday in Cambodia" is not inappropriate. It is approriate cause it rocks.

Also you will recall that a number of people suggested Kerry make reference to Ronald Reagan in this speech an this is the first allusion. Remember that in 1980 Reagan walked out to the Dead Kennedy's "Kill the Poor."

9:46PM - Listening to NPR on Asimov

silvertide posted a pointer to a long piece from the July 18 Morning Edition which, as silvertide said, is intelligent and interesting, treating the questions of faithfulness to the source seriously, with discussion of the issues from Geoffrey Landis (who is reasonable) and Harlan Ellison (r) (who is Ellison). It's nice to see it when the outsiders seem to understand what the insiders actually think.

One thing jumped out at me during the piece. Asimov's widow, Janet Jeppson, mostly recuses herself from the discussion, I suspect in large part because she doesn't control the film rights to Isaac's work. It transpires that those rights are controlled by Asimov's daughter, Robin (who is not interviewed for the piece).

This, in turn, reminded me of an amusing amusing anecdote about Robin Asimov in one of Isaac's essays, about watching the film Fantastic Voyage with her as he was writing the novelization. At the end of the film, the miniaturized sub-mariners rush out of the defector's body just in time to avoid expanding back to full size inside his brain and killing him. However, they leave the corpse of one of their party behind, along with the submarine. Robin, then measuring her age in single digits, leaned over to her father and said, "Won't the submarine expand and kill him?" Issac said that yes, it would. "Why did they leave it behind, then?" "Because people in Hollywood are not as smart as eight-year-old girls."

Robin's not an eight-year-old girl any more, I guess.

9:35PM - Neat thing

The Sad Song by Fredo Viola. Beautiful video for a beautiful song. Recommended by officialgaiman.

8:51PM - June Spam

For the last few years, I've chosen one month to be my spam survey month. This year, I shifted from July to June because I had hoped to use my data to train a new spam-filtering system by, say, July 4th, but I haven't done so yet.

Anyway, here are the numbers:

Total e-mails received on my Panix account, June 2004: 8088

Pieces automatically tagged as spam by Spamassassin: 4575
Other pieces of spam or e-mail malicious code: 750
Mail from one or another of my high-volume mailing lists: 1153

Number of e-mails actually directed more or less at me: 1610. This includes some lower-volume mailing lists, "acceptable" advertisements (e.g., monthly updates from the Quality Paperback Club), and other mail not actually written specifically for me.

That means that on a typical day, I got 79 pieces of unfiltered e-mail in my mailbox, of which one-third (25 a day) were spam or maliceware. In addition, I got twice that many pieces of spam which I never had to look at. Nearly 15% of the spam I received was not caught by Spamassassin. That's a much lower success rate for Spamassassin than last year, when it caught more then 95% of the spam and maliceware.

9:15PM - Not Dead Yet

But I have been very busy and, today (and probably yesterday and back a couple of days before that) down with a cold. I've been posting some to Usenet and working my way through a two-week backlog of LJ posts.

Nothing much going on besides work, political arguments, comic books, and sick rats, about the last of which I believe that nellorat has been keeping you all up to date. She's about to leave for a week to visit her family and to attend Mythcon. I had a very pleasant Birthday weekend over July 4th, visiting my family (they came here); I got wonderful presents from Charles "The Sparrow" Sperling and Sarah "sarah_ovenall" Ovenall, and from my blood family and my family of marriage, including comics, books, games, a bunch of delightful recorded music, and little gewgaws.

That's pretty much it. I hope to post some more interesting things over the next few days, but I wouldn't bet money on me actually doing so.

12:34PM - Mr. President, Your Elongated Nose Is on Fire

(Also posted to nycgeekpolitics.)

This has been posted various places, but I wanted to have a note of it here as well.

The frequently annoying pundit Nicholas Kristof recently announced that calling George Rutherford Bush a "liar" only "polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern". (Link is to the New York Times; free registration required, and it will probably expire in a couple of weeks.)

For the past two decades, the cesspool was dug and filled by the Right-Wing Noise Machine--something that Kristof shows that he realizes but doesn't understand, when he compares calling Bush a "liar" to the right wing accusing Clinton of murdering Vincent Foster, as if saying pointing out the truth about Bush were somehow comparable to spreading slanders about Clinton. (Paging Adlai Stevenson, anyone?)

But I can't just walk away by saying that, of course it's true that Bush is a liar. In any non-cesspool discourse, statements like that deserve at least a smidgeon of documentation. Fortunately, the eminently quotable Andrew Northrup has made a little list

He has lied about his time in the National Guard, and lied about his criminal history. He lied about his relationship with Ken Lay, he lied about who would benefit from his tax cuts, and he lied about stem cells. He lied about his visit to Bob Jones University, he lied about why he wouldn't meet with Log Cabin Republicans, and he lied about reading the EPA report on global warming. He lied about blaming the Clinton administration for the second intifada, he lies constantly about how he pays no attention to polls, he lied about how he loves New York, and he lied about moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He lied about finding WMD in Iraq, he lied about making his decision to go to war, he lied about the CIA's dismissal of the yellowcake rumors, and he lied about the IAEA's assessment of Iraq's nuclear program. He lied about funding the fight against AIDS in Africa, he lied about when the recession started, and he lied about seeing the first plane hit the WTC. He lied about supporting the Patient Protection Act, and he lied about his deficit spending, and now my wrist hurts.

There are so many Bush and Bush-administration lies (aluminum cylinders, Atta in Prague, Nigerien uranium, "we have found the weapons of mass destruction") that it's not surprising that Northrup found his wrists hurting, but I have to add one. This list leaves off one of my person favorite of Bush's lies--the "Trifecta", in which Bush claimed that he himself had said something that, in fact, Al Gore had said.

In this space last week, it was noted that President Bush often tells audiences that he promised during the 2000 presidential campaign that he would allow the federal budget to go into deficit in times of war, recession or national emergency, but he never imagined he would "have a trifecta." Nobody inside or outside the White House, however, had been able to produce evidence that Bush actually said this during the campaign.

Now comes information that the three caveats were uttered before the 2000 campaign -- by Bush's Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore. The Post's Glenn Kessler found in the archives this promise from Gore: "Barring an economic reversal, a national emergency, or a foreign crisis, we should balance the budget this year, next year, and every year." Gore said that to the Economic Club of Detroit in May 1998, then repeated it at least twice more, in speeches in June and November of that year.

In its pettiness, blatancy, and incompetence, the Trifecta lie sums up the entire Bush usurpation of America. Don't get over it.

Finally, I have to recommend this clip from the Daily Show discussing the blazing state of Dick Cheney's pantaloons. (Warning: non-streaming Real file, 3.9 MB and worth every bit.)

10:10AM - A commonplace I've been seeking for the last several months

For the last several months, I've been trying to find the original text of a sentiment that I've had brought to mind frequently, and finally I got it.

It is from noted anti-war writer David Drake; it was originally written down in the afterword to his novel Counting the Cost (1987), though I'd heard him say various forms of it before and after that.

When you send a man out with a gun, you create a policymaker. When his ass is on the line, he will do whatever he needs to do.
And if the implications of that bother you, the time to do something abut it is before you decide to send him out.

I've been paraphrasing this as "When you fight a war, you are allowing your foreign policy to be created by scared eighteen-year-olds with guns", which puts the emphases in different places. I like Drake's particular phrasing a great deal and I'm glad to have it settled.

10:06AM - One year ago

Slightly under a year ago, I was asked to write a small piece, not a memorial but a memory. It was intended to have been read in a memorial Roman Catholic mass, which I'm sure would have simultaneously annoyed and amused its subject. For reasons never understood, it was not read, and I saved it for today.

( The text of the memory )

I add this now.

( Two verses )

11:07PM - Happy Birthdays

To marykaykare (which I had not known) and to w*i*es, who, since she doesn't list her birthday on her Info page, may not want it to be generally known, but I know it and I still wish it to her.

10:25PM - Windows Networking: Why does it suck so?

Yesterday I finally set up my new computer. It's fast, it's got a good network connection, it's running Windows XP (a fairly recent release, with all fresh security patches).

After many hours of tinkering with XP network settings, Norton Internet Security, goat entrails, and cetera, I managed to get it to connect to the file shares on my old Win98 machine. Well, sorta. I can see my older machine (Y) from my new machine (A), get directory listings, and so forth, but when I actually try to do file copies, they crap out--very little or nothing gets transferred before the connection gives up (which often takes five minutes or so, with nothing transferred in the interval).

It's actually probably unfair to solely blame Windows Networking, though. Direct TCP/IP connections--say, an FTP connection--over the household network *also* suck, with transfer rates as low as 1K per second. (I can get 300K/second or more on connections to servers outside the household network, from either machine.) And TCP/IP connections are still unreliable, crapping out at unpredicable points.

Here are some of the details. The machines are both connected to an 802.11a wireless network, routed through a D-Link DL-704 connected to a D-Link wireless access point. As noted above, both connections are pretty strong and reliable. I enabled IPX/SPX networking on A to allow it access to the shares on Y.

Can anyone make suggests for improvement which don't involve abandoning Windows? (I need Windows XP for some work-related projects, which is why I bought the new machine in the first place.) I'm suspecting that the network router or the access point is doing a crappy job of routing packets within my household network; is there any way to test this hypothesis, or improve it?

10:07PM - Some comments I wrote in other peoples' LJs

In response to a post from nancylebov about whether Dumbledore is doing a good job running Hogwarts:

In the cases of both Hagrid and Trelawney (the divination teacher), Dumbledore has kept people on staff to whom he feels an obligation. In Trelawney's case, though, I'm not sure that anyone else would do much better than she does; the evidence within the novels (mostly, admittedly, from Hermione's trash-talking about it) is that divination is the least reliable part of magic and that when true fortellings happen, they do so completely at random. I think it's amusing to see a bunch of wizards tying their brains around superstitions....

As to the question of Dumbledore's competence: In the fifth novel, we finally get to see him in action as a wizard, and it's clear that he is, indeed, the most powerful wizard of his age, or very close to it. He's also deeply wise. But that doesn't mean that he's always on top of things, because his opponents are numerous, skilled, and well-coordinated, and Dumbledore's potential allies often don't believe there's a threat. He mis-handled things badly in the fifth novel by foolishly trying to protect Harry from The Big Picture, and he doesn't follow through with Harry's private lessons with Snape; both of these have terrible results.

On the specific question of Buckbeak, Hagrid's job requires teaching students about dangerous creatures. He well understood how to handle a hippogriff and correctly told the students what to do to keep themselves safe. Malfoy had to disobey his teacher and disregard his lessons to get injured, in a situation in which he had been warned there was a serious danger. While this wouldn't be allowed in a modern American school, what the third-year students are learning at Hogwarts is by its nature more dangerous than what a typical 13-year-old in the real world would be learning. Malfoy should have understood by that point in his education that when a teacher says that something is dangerous, that teacher should be believed.

---

In response to a post by redbird in which she notes that she had occasion recently to cross between subway cars while the train was moving, I decided to record one of the odd bits of my life habits:

I pass between cars frequently.

To get home from midtown, usually take a northbound 4 train, getting on at Grand Central or Union Square. If it's anywhere near rush hour, the train is crowded, but less crowded at the far ends than at the middle. For some reason, more people sit in the northernmost car than the southernmost, so I usually head for the southern end of the train. However, once I get to Woodlawn, I want to be at the northern end of the train, because that's where the only exit from the station is located. So I often walk the length of the train somewhere between Burnside and Woodlawn.

I don't do it as much as I used to, because the new model of train cars actually make it harder to open the doors from outside the car--it takes both hands, which is really stupid. (It only takes one hand to open them from inside.) So these days I mostly just sit in the back of the train and walk the length of the platform at the end of the line instead.

---

jimhenley posted a very funny restaurant review of KFC's new Roasted Chicken Dinner. He really goes to town on the green beans.

According to chemical analysis performed by William Poundstone (described in one of the Big Secrets books), the "eleven herbs and spices" in the KFC breading are salt, black pepper, flour, and MSG. Period.

Do they force you to take beans and rice with the roasted chicken? The potato wedges would be my first choice for a starch side at KFC, and my memory is that both the slaw and the greens are pretty decent as a vegetable. Of course, I get a full day's regimen of vitamins in pill form here in the amazing future world of the 21st Century, so I don't actually *need* to eat such low-tech "food" except for the fiber. But still I like the taste of green veggies.

---

On a post by redbird about the National Day of Mourning for, as she put it, "the man who invented the Taliban" (a somewhat inaccurate but still important characterization):

It was widely reported that this was the first presidential Day of Mourning since LBJ's death in 1973, but that turns out to be false. According to a couple of pieces online, including one at Google Answers, there was a National Day of Mourning for Nixon in 1994. The practice began with Kennedy, and there has been a National Day of Mourning for every president who has died since 1963. However, I don't know if the stock markets closed for any previous president.

---

Incidentally, the B component of the minihaha collective posted an awe-inspiring review of Eigensinn Farm, a restaurant run out of a farmhouse two hours north of Toronto. B's reviews are generally extremely good--the Minicon 34 Restaurant Guide, which B wrote with K, the other component of the minihaha collective, was nominated for a Hugo for Best Related Book--but this one was particularly good. Unfortunately, it's currently friends-locked, so you can only read it if you're on minihaha's LJ Friends list. Let's hope they decide to unlock it; this is a review which needs to be read more widely, especially by someone like docbrite, who also does great writing about food.

---

That's enough for now.

6:48PM - Votes and the counting thereof

A couple of people posted links to the remarkable anti-Diebold campaign posters. Go read them, if you haven't.

The first one has a quote which I have on a t-shirt in a different form--my shirt says, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." and attributes it to Stalin. The poster gives it as "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." and notes that it's apocryphal, which I'm sorry to discover, since it was such a wonderful pairing of sentiment and source.

There's a good discussion of the quote on About.com which notes a good possible source:

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." --Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 1972.

11:20PM - Rat update

The bad:

I believe that supergee has already posted the news that Dr. Butch's cancer is inoperable. Right now, he's in no evident pain or even reduced facilities, although it would be nice to know whether progress is being made on the whole breeding endeavor. We have no idea how long he has; I know he'll make the most of it.

The good:

Aimee Semple's foot is doing fine. She has had no post-surgical probelms and had the suture taken out today with a minimum of complaint. The biopsy is back on her growth, and it's definitely not cancer.

Isabella, Aimee's mama-moodle, is also doing great--the swelling from the kidney infection is tremendously reduced, and Dr. Gross is optimistic that the antibiotic shot she received today will be all she needs. (She'll get a followup inspection next week just to be sure.) And their mite problem seems to be on the run at this point; one more treatment at the end of this week and with luck all of the rats will again be mite-free.

This good news almost counterbalances the fact that our hot water heater died yesterday morning, spewing several gallons of water in the file room and necessitating an expensive replacement. Almost, kinda.

Oh, and we have a poltergeist; today two different pictures have fallen off walls in rooms I was not in.

9:10PM - Both of the Sides are the Same

Last night, I was trying to think of ways in which Bill Clinton (and Al Gore as his right-hand man) were on the same moral level as Rutherford Bush and Dick Cheney. Specifically, I was trying to remember if Clinton ever openly supported a military coup against a democratically elected leader of a nation. Bush has done so twice since Sept. 11th, in Venezuela and in Haiti, and possibly other times I'm not thinking of.

I suppose that with a deep stretch, one could view USA/NATO support for the Kosovars against the Serbian government could be counted that way, but that's really pushing it. And Clinton stumbled into the wrong side of the worst genocide of the 1990s, when the US ended up providing support to the refugee camps after Rwanda, which were run by included the architects of the genocide.

Anything else?

8:55PM - A note on the third Harry Potter movie

As noted in my previous post, I'm working through a two-week backlog of Friends Lists posts, and a post from negativeq about the film helped me realize one thing that I quite liked about the film but which might be off-putting to many viewers.

nellorat said that she saw a number of reviews which said the film was pitched completely at the cogniscenti, that only people who had read the book could possibly understand what was going on. We have a solid counterexample of that in our own family; supergee, who has read none of the novels, had no problem at all following the third film. However, I do agree that the film moves very quickly from point to point and often leaves it to the viewer to make significant connections. The incluing is done at a ferocious clip, and people who aren't familiar with the

This does make me wonder how anyone is ever going to make an even remotely satisfying version of Order of the Phoenix. The pre-Hogwarts section alone--the first two hundred or so pages of the American version of the novel--could easily take two hours of film to handle properly. Maybe a series of films per novel, the Kill Bill of the wizardly world? I'm not as worried about the adaptation of Goblet of Fire; the plot in that is more bloated and less intricate, and I suspect it will compress down to a satisfying 150-180 minutes. But Order of the Phoenix--man, a lot happens in that, and almost all of it is important....

(As to things I missed from the book: I hadn't noticed until sarah_ovenall mentioned it, but, yes, the shape of Harry's petronus isn't explained, and that's a shame. A bigger shame is not explaining the origin of the Maurader's Map. Either of these would have taken only a sentence or two from an appropriate character and would have, imho, added significantly to the film's development of the theme of Harry's deep-rooted connection to his father. But the film wasn't a poor one for those gaps, and otherwise I thought that the handling of the material for adaptation was very skillful. I wasn't sad to see Quidditch's role tremendously reduced, although Prisoner is the first of the novels in which Rowling can be seen to understand exactly how little sense the rules of Quidditch make. I also agree with Sarah's observation that the main characters spend far too much time in muggle street-clothes and not enough in their classroom robes.)

4:44PM - A comment about explicit sex

Sliding slowly back into posting again. I'm just under two weeks behind on my Friends List and came across the introduction Neil Gaiman wrote for one of the collected volumes of Reed Waller and Kate Worley's "Omaha," The Cat Dancer. This is the concluding paragraph:

Omaha The Cat Dancer is a soap opera, but it's drama, not melodrama; it is a funny animal comic, but the funny animals are real people; and it's neither erotica nor pornography -- simply a story in which the virtual cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love (just as they do in the world you and I inhabit) -- delineated with an unblinking charm which has the odd effect (for me, at least) of making one wonder where all the sex has gone in the other fictions one reads or hears or sees...

Roger Ebert's book on movie cliches points out that 95% of the sex scenes in big-budget films show the first time that the characters involved have sex together. One of the virtues of "Omaha" which is implicit in Gaiman's assessment above is that the acts depicted therein are more likely to be between--or, occasionally, among--characters who have long-standing relationships. (As the series went along and the status quo was shaken, this was less true--a lot of scenes showed new partnerships forming. But for the central relationship of the story--Omaha and Chuck--I don't think we ever saw their first time together, even though we saw several flashbacks to early points in their love affair, including their first date.) This not-looking-away after the first time was very important to the story, because it underscored that sex is a continuing part of the lives of humans and doesn't go away after the First Encounter.

Over the NYRSF Work Weekend last week, one of the people in attendance explained to all assembled that in his experience, most of the explicit or semi-explicit sex scenes in novels are superfluous--that the same narrative effect is achieved by leaving things to the reader's imaginations. "Omaha" proved, again and again, that character, plot, mood, all the aspects of story are all as much at play in sex as in any other human activity.

12:06PM - A commonplace

From Sadly, No!

There's dumb (D.) There's fucktard dumb (FD.) And then there's clueless fucktard dumb (CFD.) That was somewhere below CFD.

The context really isn't all that important, is it? (In fact, it was about someone displaying a complete sub-CFD understanding of how polling works. The morons are really running scared this month because even dressing Rutherford in a cloak of the tanned skin of The Gipper isn't saving him in the polls.)

12:03PM - Bonzo's Apotheosis

I still don't have time for real posts, so here's a (slightly amended) post from Atrios which well captures my reaction to the last week's news coverage:

• The House and Senate did not both come under Republican rule during Reagan's time.
  
• The Berlin Wall did not come down when Reagan was in office.
  
• Reagan is not the president who left office with the highest approval rating in modern times.
  
• Reagan was not "the most popular president ever."
  
• Reagan did not preside over the longest economic expansion in history.
  
• Reagan did not shrink the size of government.
  
• Reagan did preside over what was at the time the "biggest tax cut in history" but it was almost instantly followed up by the "biggest tax increase in history." [And then followed again by a huge tax increase. And then again, in his second term.]
  
• Reagan was not "beloved by all." He was loved by some, liked by some, and hated by some with good reason.
  

I disagreed with both the broad strokes and details of almost all aspects of Reagan's economic domestic policy, social domestic policy, and foreign policy. This is a man who launched his presidential campaign with a speech about "state's rights" in a town known, nationally, for the murder of three civil rights workers and subsequent cover-up.

I wouldn't wish Alzheimers on Stalin. I wouldn't wish the burden of watching one's husband suffer through two decades of Alzheimer's on Lady MacBeth. But that doesn't wash away supporting Saddam Hussein and the contras, nor the (until then) most irresponsible fiscal policy in American history, nor the Meese Report on Pornography. Reagan was one of the worst presidents America has ever had and was an amoral thug wrapping himself in ultraChristian exterminationist rhetoric. Let's not forget that.

10:02PM - Hey, sarah_ovenall

Go check this out.

The rest of you, go check it out, too. It's a superb animated music video. But especially sarah_ovenall.

(20 MB .mov file--Quicktime or equivalent needed.)

Link courtesy of agrumer, brought to my tardy attention by my dear nellorat.

Fixed to add the actual link to the actual video actually. Thank you, actual janetmiles.

9:38PM - Reagan's Legacy

Leave it to other people to document the actual accomplishments of his presidency. I have realized, instead, what the proper tribute to The Gipper is:

Work as hard as you can to preserve Reagan's undisputed position as America's worst two-term president.

11:44AM - It's like a sick joke

Through Neil Gaiman's blog, I discover that the comics artist Reed Waller has a blog. Through that, I discover that Reed has reconciled enough with Kate Worley to do 92 pages of new "Omaha," the Cat Dancer material, enough to conclude the many storylines which were left open when they had their acrimonious falling-out in the late 1980s. That's the "good news" portion of the joke.

The punchline is that Kate has serious cancer which is responding poorly to treatment. She's a long way from a death sentence, but goddammit. Anyway, she's writing, her spirits are up, and let's all hope for the best. Kate is accepting donations of money, goods, and goodwill from all and sundry; details are available at Flayrah, a blog of furry fandom.

11:50PM - I should be in bed, but Iraq calls to me

Josh Marshall tonight points out that Sy Hersh's New Yorker article (cited yesterday) and a major article in Newsweek by John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff converge, from apparently independent sources, on this conclusion about Abu Ghraib: The US set up an official black ops program to perform torture on suspected terrorists and then expanded that program onto Iraqi detainees.

Once you've officially set up a policy of torturing The Worst, it's a path of very small steps to start treating everyone in sight as The Worst. This is one of the reasons that civilized nations don't torture.

Of course, the Current US Occupying Force in the Oval Office has been deliberately blurring the line between "terrorists" and "Iraqis" since September 11th, 2001, and they've been handsomely rewarded for that.

Oh, and we're pulling troops from South Korea to fight in Iraq. Way to go, Rumsfeld!