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Breaking Blog Silence Again

Posted September 19, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been getting myself settled into a new semester, teaching at two local colleges. I’m almost stunned at how much more I’m enjoying teaching now that the whole dissertation/grad school thing isn’t hanging over my head.

Over at theLogBook, Earl has finished overhauling the episode guides and putting them into a WordPress-based format that adds some new navigation and search options. I think the new look is pretty sweet, and it does reinforce how much easier it is to add content when you don’t have to code it. (I’m coding the very minimal syllabus pages for my courses, so that XHTML manual I bought isn’t going entirely to waste . . .)

The R.E.M. geek in me has been having some fun this week. The band was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame this past weekend, and Bill Berry participated in the festivities. If you go to Murmurs.com, you can seee YouTube video of the performances at the induction. A little lower on the page there’s a clip from a tribute concert a few days before, where the band showed up to play a couple of songs. I think I prefer the performance at the 40 Watt Club. I think the sound mix wasn’t quite right on the V broadcast of the induction. Plus, there’s something about the shots of middle aged folks at their banquet tables trying to dance to Begin the Begin that kinda reinforces the whole best-days-are-behind-them vibe that’s surrounded the band for a few years now. Like I mentioned to my classes the other day, you know you’re getting old when your favorite band has released more best-of compilations than new material over the last four years. The band, minus Bill, says they’re going back into the studio soon to make their next album. From a selfish standpoint, I hope they kick the energy level up a notch. But if they’re still doing stuff they like, more power to them.

Pattie and I just watched the first episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin got the band back together, all right. Thank goodness for DVD and DVR, because the television season looks like an embarrasment of riches.

More on democracy later this week. Promise. 🙂

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Big Music Aims at, Hits Foot

Posted August 24, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Pete Yorn’s new album Nightcrawler comes out next week. Ordinarily, I would have already pre-ordered it. Possibly twice. (But probably not.) But Yorn’s on Columbia Records, and they’re owned by Sony, and Sony has a recent history of putting obnoxious software onto its music CDs that can royally mess up a computer. From the news reports I’ve read, Sony has cleaned up its act. But now I’m seriously wondering whether it’s worth it to me to order a CD that might damage my machine. So rather than protecting an artist, Sony’s created an incentive for me to not purhase his work.

And the punchline is, if I decide to purchase it over iTunes to avoid this problem, the artist will likely see less of a cut. What a racket.

Filed in Culture and Media

Something’s Wrong with This Picture

Posted August 22, 2006 By Dave Thomer

The Marines have announced that they need to fill 1200 roles in the “global war on terror,” and they don’t have enough volunteers to do the job. So they are recalling inactive Marines who are part of the Individual Ready Reserve. The Reuters article I linked to explains a few key points.

  1. No one can say exactly what the global war on terror is, or how long it’s going to last, or exactly who it is we’re going to beat and how we’re supposed to do it. Now that seems to be the kind of fuzzy mandate that can eat up your volunteer pool and then some. Which leads to
  2. Some people call these callups a “back door draft.” Now, these Marines agreed to be available for recall as part of their contract. So this is part of what they signed up for. But it’s worth noting that the Marines look for volunteers from this pool of inactive Marines, and they couldn’t meet their needs. Which says something about how attractive service in the military seems right now, which brings us to
  3. Outside of the fact that being involved in a couple of difficult occupation/nation-building exercises is a bit of a turn-off, maybe this says something about our social priorities. I keep meanign to research and write a separate Policy essay on this, but my shorthand feeling is that if your job description is to possibly get shot and/or run into a burning building to save or protect my life, you really ought to be paid damn well for it. For a nation that believes in supply and demand, we don’t appear to be showing much demand for people to fill these vital but dangerous roles.
Filed in Public Policy

Quick Link – The Nature of Ability

Posted August 22, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Lemme just point you over to a discussion on hyper-textual ontology about the concept of “natural ability” and its relationship to effort, level of interest, and those things about ourselves that we generally feel like we have some control over. In the comments, I press the notion that “natural ability” means something. But on an even-numbered day, I might feel differently. I do think that if we’re going to take seriously the idea that we are embodied beings, it makes sense to say that those bodies might have some specific constraints built in. But I will add the caveat that this is all working from our current understanding of nature, matter, and physicality, and sometimes I think those notions are going to get a serious thrashing one of these days.

Filed in Philosophy

Blogging Dewey: Keeping the Connection

Posted August 17, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Peter Levine offers a cautionary tale on his blog about service learning programs in education. Levine sees such programs as a valuable tool for building the skills that people would need to be deliberative citizens – he sees a direct connection between a method of educating and a particular kind of political environment. He sees parallels to many of the reforms Dewey advocated. He then argues that many of those reforms lost their direct connection to a desired political outcome, and became more compartmentalized and separated from a larger social view. Levine sees the same thing possibly happening with service programs, as other priorities take hold. Not to say that any of the other priorities are bad, but that if we’re really going to build a better democracy, we have to pay attention to how we prepare ourselves to live in it.

Levine also participates in the blog at deliberative-democracy.net, which worth a look-see.

Filed in Philosophy

Late for the Crossover

Posted August 16, 2006 By Dave Thomer

I wound up being disappointed in DC’s Infinite Crisis crossover in large part because, as I said in an earlier post, the main draw for me was Phil Jimenez drawing the crap out of the DC Universe. For whatever reason, that didn’t quite happen – Jimenez was unable to draw every page of every issue, and a number of fill-in artists had to pinch hit. Now, sometimes that meant pages of George Perez drawing the crap out of the DC Universe, and I really can’t complain about that. But some of the other artists took the sheen off a little bit.

On the other hand, at least DC didn’t take a shotgun to its own foot the way Marvel apparently is with its Civil War crossover. The next issue was supposed to be out tomorrow. Instead, it will be out a month from tomorrow. And a huge amount of Marvel’s line will also be delayed, because those books depend on the main Civil War series in order to make sense. And there are new series scheduled to launch when the series concludes, and now they’ll be delayed.

To get a sense of why this is very, very bad for comics retailers, check out Brian Hibbs’ post on his Savage Critic blog. Retailers are gonna take a very serious hit to their cash flow, and that could have ripple effects.

I guess DC announced that they’re resoliciting the next issue of All-Star Batman and Robin again out of sympathy. Sheesh.

Filed in Comics

The Moral of the Story?

Posted August 14, 2006 By Dave Thomer

I just got finished reading my daughter her bedtime stories. Tonight she wanted to read a couple of short board books from a Disney Princess set she has. (I’ll let Pattie grumble about the marketing bonanza that is the Disney Princess brand, but anyway.) All of the stories in thsi set are supposed to have little lessons about being a good person, and hey, I can understand the idea there. But there is something that bugs me about the tone of these books. In one of them, Jasmine goes to the market to buy herself a necklace, but decides to spend her money on a new hat for Aladdin because making someone else happy is supposed to be more important. Now given that Jasmine and Aladdin are the princess and prince of the realm, I’m thinkin’ Jasmine could have struck a bit of a two for one deal with the merchant, or at least bought on credit, but I really shouldn’t be nitpicking the plots of children’s books. That much, anyway. The thing that bugs me is the whole woman-sacrifices-her-own-interests-to-please-her-man implication, and maybe I shouldn’t be imposing gender politics on a Disney book . . . but given the aforementioned prevalence of the brand, if I’m not going to impose gender politics on a Disney book, what good are gender politics?

The whole set is full of this stuff. Cinderella teaches the mice proper etiquette. Ariel learns not to go too far away from home because it’s dangerous out there. Belle spends so much time reading that she doesn’t help her father with an experiment and the experiment goes badly. (Why didn’t Belle’s father go and get Belle?) At least Snow White teaches the dwarfs to pick up after themselves.

I dunno. Gimme Dora the Exporer any day. And not just because Dora has access to a chocolate tree.

Filed in Life in Practice

Metafiction for Preschoolers

Posted August 13, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Been doing a lot of story-reading at bed time these days, and it strikes me that Grant Morrison is considered a genius, in part, for breaking the fourth wall and inserting a metafictional component into his comics like Animal Man and Invisibles. Meanwhile, thanks to Jon Stone and Liz Smollin, we’ve been feeding the same concepts to four-year-olds for years in The Monster at the End of This Book. The whole story relies on the main character realizing that he is a character contained within the physical object of a book and trying to interact with the world of the reader. Deep stuff, man.

And an excuse to read with funny voices.

Filed in Comics

Memory’s a Strange Thing

Posted August 12, 2006 By Dave Thomer

So every so often I do a Google search on my name, just to see if stuff from Not News has popped up in unexpected places. (At this point it’s amazing how often my name is attached to various message boards, ratings polls, and so on, but anyway.) On a recent search, I found a blog post that mentioned me in connection with a comic book discussion forum I moderated back when I was in high school. Besides finding it amusing that someone would mention this over ten years later, I was struck by the fact that the blogger got just about every detail other than my name wrong. Part of me is amused by this. Part of me is obsessive compulsive and feels like I should do something to correct the record. But then I get into the question of reliable is my memory after all these years? So for now I think I’ll stick with being amused.

Filed in Life in Practice

Oil Hogs

Posted August 11, 2006 By Dave Thomer

For some anecdotal evidence that we 1) need to find some alternate sources of energy and 2) might want to continue being cautious about the whole idea of drilling in ANWR, check out this article on BP and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline. Apparently BP had not been particularly diligent in its upkeep of the pipeline, failing to regularly perform a procedure known as “pgging” (check out the article for a fuller explanation) in favor of cheaper means of checking on the pipeline. Federal regulators finally forced BP to do the more thorough check after they had a spill elsewhere that left hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil on the tundra. They discovered that there was significant corrosion i nthe line – in two places, the steel was only seven hundredths of an inch thick.

That’s a big reason to be concerned about the push for more drilling. You have to take the possibility – maybe even the probability – of an accident into account. One solution might be to have stricter environmental regulations and a rigorous inspection scheme as a safeguard – but then, most of the folks arguing for more drilling are the ones arguing against tougher regulations and enforcement. Doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

Filed in Public Policy
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