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Color Commentary

Roger ClemensI’m not sure how this happened, but I’m now a pretty dedicated follower of baseball, having recently got into the habit of checking the American league standings nearly every day to see if the Yankees can hang on to their precarious lead over the Boston Red Sox. This is unremarkable except for the fact that professional sports in general, and team sports in particular, have left me cold for most of my life. But as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a real soothing quality to this sport, and what’s more I’ve been seduced by the endless depths of its statistical undercurrent.

On the other hand, my progress has been slower in developing an appreciation for the somewhat lackluster personalities of baseball’s ‘stars.’ These guys generally don’t have a particularly interesting message to communicate to the world beyond the expert feats of athleticism they commit on the field. After watching ball all season, I’m at a point now where I’m pleasantly indifferent to the worldview of most major league players, which isn’t such a bad way to enjoy the sport, really. Until, that is, one of them opens their mouths and says something substantially uninformed about the world beyond the ballpark.

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On This Day

A year ago today, we informally closed our office on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, from fear of some recurrence of terrorist activity and, at least on my part, out of a sense of confusion. It wasn’t clear to me how we as a nation should act or behave, how we should honor the dead, and what bearing my personal enmity for the way that the Bush administration had been prosecuting the war on terror should have on the way I conducted myself on 11 Sep 2002. It seemed best to sit out the day quietly, abstaining from anything remotely inappropriate.

There was a lead-up of anxiety to that one year anniversary, but this year, the milestone seems to have practically snuck up on us without fanfare or expectation. I’d wager that today, much more so than last year, so many of us woke up this morning and headed off to work with virtually no compunction or sense of danger, even those living in or heading to lower Manhattan. Now that it’s here, we still mourn the day’s historical loss, but otherwise we feel a kind of detachment from it, too. To some degree, we seem to feel safer, or to be willing to resume our illusion of safety.

For me, what’s saddest about that day, beyond the tragic deaths we shouldn’t ever forget, is the lasting damage that the attacks have had on the fabric of our life, principally taking the form of a government run amuck, one bearing less and less resemblance to the America that our forefathers envisioned with each passing day. The attacks have, in many ways, achieved their effect of undermining democracy by essentially brokering a willing exchange of civil liberties — the defining trait of American character — for an illusion of safety. I wouldn’t even describe it as safety, but rather a kind of comfort in which danger is displaced to more convenient locales. The attacks effectively installed a regime of mendacity at the helm of American government, and they have led us dangerously off course. We need to replace George W. Bush in the 2004 election for President of the United States.

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To Sleep, Perchance to Dream… of Fixes and Tweaks

Subtraction LogoWhen I get the time, I’m going to make a few fixes to the Movable Type templates running Subtraction.com, including: Fixing the cookie problem on the Remarks feature so that it will actually remember information like it’s supposed to. Fixing the Search templates, which have become a total mess since upgrading to MT 2.64 (and possibly moving over to a Google search). Fixing the Elsewhere section’s archives, which doesn’t currently allow direct access to individual posts.

Also, I’m hoping to tweak and/or add a few new features, including: Integrating the Elsewhere archives — at least in some fashion — with the main posts. Establishing a ‘glossary,’ which is an idea I’ve come up with for cataloging concepts and ideas that I refer to regularly. Adding a widget that will allow readers to email links of their favorite posts to friends because, hey, who doesn’t want to do that? And finally, one day I’m going to get around to creating a gallery of masthead images from the home page, and maybe those old covers from version Five.0 of the site, too.

All of this will happen as soon as I figure out how to stop sleeping.

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Dem Dems, Round Two

Sharpton and Lieberman at the 2nd Democratic Presidential DebateA lot of my friends didn’t even realize the second Democratic Presidential Debate was being held this evening in Baltimore. In fact, I hadn’t thought that a second debate would even take place until Thu 25 Sep, owing to the fact that the schedule of debates on the Democratic National Committee’s Web site said as much. It took some hunting on the Web to find when exactly it would be aired and where I could watch it.

Conspiratorially speaking, there might be a case that there was deliberate lack of media attention paid to this event when you consider that it was sponsored by the Congressional Black Congress, and held on the grounds of the principally African-American Morgan State University. To be fair though, the debate isn’t even mentioned on the CBC’s official Congressional home page, nor on the CBC Foundation’s own Web site.

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That’s My Bush

D.C. 9/11: Time of CrisisThanks to the handy-dandy new DVR in my cable box, tonight I was able to watch Showtime’s dramatization of the Bush White House in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis.” Oh man, this thing was a hoot. I would almost say that it’s a completely worthless, clumsy piece of right wing propaganda, to say nothing of its shallow command of scripting, acting, filmmaking and drama… But there is in fact some inherent value to be found in its jingoistic melodrama, and that is a level of camp not seen since the days when Adam West ran around Southern California in a pair of gray tights.

The script for this historical fiction is loaded with groaners so heavy with histrionics (and pock-marked with innumerable dramatic pauses that never seem to want to end) that the final result is gut-bustingly hilarious. Take, as but one example among dozens and dozens, this line uttered by Bush — who has been wildly reimagined as an heroically intelligent, even-handed and profound statesman — utters to the uncharacteristically reserved and deferential Cheney: “I’m going to need you at my side at all times… consigliere.” Truly, this is the stuff of drunken, riotous midnight movie screenings. Good job, Showtime!

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A Case for Analog

Sony DSC-F505There’s a rule of thumb that I’ve picked up in my ten years or so of buying digital toys of all sorts, from PCs to peripherals to PDAs: every device has its own quirky, unintended operational shortcoming that, if it’s not readily apparent at the time of purchase, will make itself known soon enough, and will drive me completely bats.

The latest evidence of this is my Sony Cybershot DSC-F505, a digital still camera that’s pretty long in the tooth now anyway, but has been repeatedly beset by a few infuriating defects over the three years or so I’ve had it. First, the battery it shipped with started failing to hold any meaningful charge, and I’d get only a minute or two of power from it.

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That Lovin’ Feelin’

In spite of the beautiful weather, I spent a lot of this weekend indoors, seated in front of my computer. Since we moved into this new apartment, it was the first full weekend that I’ve had complete use of my workspace, thanks to the wireless networking that I did a week ago. I’ve been working on a new project, a Web site for a new client, that’s driven entirely by a series of Movable Type weblogs.

A good chunk of my Saturday was spent sketching out the site with a paper and pen, trying to get my head around a clear method for interweaving at least three and possibly as many as six separate weblogs into a single, seamless site. The hardest part was figuring out a clear, concise method of visually representing the relationships between each; it was a fun challenge, and I think I was able to bite off a good chunk of it pretty successfully by the time I called it quits earlier today. Inside of thirty-six hours, I had a reasonably robust prototype up and running, and many of the major conceptual and technical challenges had been sorted out.

It made me think that I miss this part of Web design, the part that’s intensely personal, where a single person can take an idea from paper to Web in just a matter of days. This immediacy was the quality that originally drew me away from print design and to the Web, when I found that my ideas could be rendered online without interference or obstacles. It’s nice to be intermittently reminded of this original seduction; each time it happens, I rediscover at least a little, well-preserved part of my tarnished passion for this business.

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Hot Donkey Action

Democratic Presidential Debate

What I was thinking during tonight’s Democratic Presidential Debate in New Mexico was mostly that there are a heck of a lot of candidates, and that the ones on stage weren’t even all of them! The Reverend Al Sharpton was a no-show due to travel difficulties, and Wes Clark has yet to end his painful teasing and toss his hat into the ring. I also wondered if anybody could really tell these people apart; I don’t mean political junkies like myself, I mean any average person flipping around on the television and hearing most of these candidates speak aloud about their positions on the major issues for the first time.

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Different Thinking

Finding favorable writing about the Mac on the Web is easier than finding the names of your senators and representatives in Congress. Though the platform has a relatively minor share of the computing marketplace, there’s no shortage of highly enthusiastic voices — old and young, articulate and visceral — generating an endless litany of pro-Macintosh rhetoric.

Yet the nature of this writing, while invigorating, often fails on the point of making truly persuasive arguments for buying a new Macintosh instead of a new Windows machine, and certainly on the point of providing objective or sound reasoning. Which is to say, most of what you’ll read on the so-called Mac Web amounts to a kind of benign dogma. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve noticed a small number of articles of notably impressive quality, all of which are worth reading for Mac diehards, interested computing agnostics and maybe even for inveterate Windows users.

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Wake Up, It’s September

Apparently, this September inherited very little from July and August, and summer has left town. Weekend trips to the beach and vacations in New England are past, and now made to seem too swiftly squandered and insufficiently savored by today’s cold, wet introduction to autumn. When I left my apartment this morning for work, the sky was an underbelly of cloud cover and depressingly gray, and it promised soon there’d be morning commutes with no light at all.

It made me think of kids reluctantly, crankily returning to school for the first time today, and how this cold weather is an unfairly frank harbinger of a long schoolyear. Without a week or more of warm weather in September, to say nothing of an Indian summer, there’s no transition away from the luxury of summer vacation and into the grim schedule of the fall semester. Instead, there’s just a cold, wet abruption. What I mean to say is, today I’m glad I’m not a kid. Tomorrow might be different.

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