Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

David Edelstein: “The movie is only OK, though. It gets hobbled out of the starting gate because Andie doesn't go to bed with Benjamin right away; and if she doesn't sleep with him and then start in at once with the "I love you" stuff, the experiment doesn't have the naughty zing you've been primed to expect. Most guys will put up with anything before sex. The filmmakers must have been afraid of losing their mainstream audience if they made their heroine deceitful and promiscuous, so they end up dynamiting their premise.”

Emphasis in original. read more →

Chris, on A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq by Christopher Hitchens, a book I have not read (I am confident that I've read most of the essays contained in it, however): “there is real evidence in the book that Hitchens genuinely cares about the well-being of Iraqis, which is more than I can say for a great many pro-war folks. Still, not a single piece in the book is free of idiotic remarks, fallacious inferences and all the rest. There's precious little honest argument, and almost no attempt to actually engage with positions other than his own. There is, in fact, almost no evidence that he even understands the more plausible anti-war arguments, since his attention is riveted nearly continually by the weakest and silliest anti-war arguments.”

Since I don't provide a comments form on this weblog, but some of those who link to me do, now's your chance to go to Ryan Overbey's response to my "listening" entry and make your points. Do note my grammatical error in my comment to his response, which, I assure you, was unintended. (The grammatical error, not the comment.)

Little bit on the nerdy side, but that's okay. I was a bit on the nerdy side this fine early morning.

sillygwailo: man, pico has to stop being the way I code PHP
idlyadam: yeah... emacs all the way.
sillygwailo: too much saving, loading in the web browser, oh look, another parse error, going down to about line 108, finding out it's line 86....
sillygwailo: oh well, I'll code this way, then buy Zend Studio or something, and reminisce about the days when I did it all by hand in a Unix text editor
idlyadam: hehe
sillygwailo: better to cut my teeth this way
sillygwailo: or something.
sillygwailo scrolls to about line 78...
sillygwailo: of course there's a library for what I'm trying to do
sillygwailo: but do I care?
sillygwailo: NoooOOOOooo.
idlyadam: of course, if you used emacs you could just do m-x goto-line <ret> 78
sillygwailo: bah
sillygwailo: none of that for me
sillygwailo: plus that would be of no use when the error is quote-unquote on the last line of the file
sillygwailo: since the error could be anywhere
sillygwailo: luckily it's usually where the cursor is, because that's where I last inserted a bug
idlyadam: usually
idlyadam: you might check out EditPlus...
idlyadam: it allows you to use FTP to edit remote files...
idlyadam: not very secure, but effective nonetheless.
sillygwailo: hmm.
sillygwailo: nah. I must resolutely use a shell account
sillygwailo: FTP is counter-revolutionary

Sacha reports about an important checklist: “Why resort to sleaze-ball tactics when you can just use three pieces of information to statistically improve your chances?”

Christopher Hitchens: “Mr. Dean was simply appalling when he spun a yarn about a preteen girl supposedly impregnated by her father, and used it against parental notification of abortion. A physician has no business with demagogy of this kind even if the story is half-true, which in this case it apparently was not. And imagine the contempt that Mr. Dean must have felt for the pro-choice audience on whom he road-tested this potential but ultimately self-defeating fund-raising tactic.”

Hitchens makes no mention of the Internet other than to note that many a conspiracy theory about Sept. 11th originated from it, one or two of which Dean may even have fallen for. I have to wonder what the effect of Dean potentially not being a candidate either for President of Vice-President will have on future campaigns with regards to the Internet. Kerry and Edwards have been successful despite not having a major following on it, and while I'm an optimist in the Internet's continued growth, both in terms of size and power, if either Kerry or Edwards win, there will be Democrats in the future who will point to them and say "see? They didn't need the Internet, why should I?" And they'll have a point.

Betsy Devine: “From my point of view, Howard Dean has already won. He has turned the Democratic primaries from a banal centrist teaparty into a spirited critique of George W. Bush. Candidates like Kerry and Edwards who once were politely suggesting that Bush might have gone just a teeny bit too far got pushed by Howard to point out that Bush's presidency has been a major disaster to our economy, our children, and our friendships abroad.”

Dean can claim part responsibility for this, but that does not make him a winner. It's a little hard for me to accept anyone as a winner of anything if by their own definition and measurements—in Dean's case, being the Democratic nominee for President—they fail to achieve their goals.

Fred Wilson on Wes Clark's exit from the race: “He was good, but not great. He was a rookie and understandably made some rookie mistakes. But none of that changed my opinion that he'd have made a great president. Because he is a great leader.”

You know, if he said "player" instead of "president", he'd be accused of spouting sports clichés. Whatever. If I must tip my hand, Clark was up until now my favourite of the Democratic candidates, largely because he was general with real achievements—even though at the time, I (wrongly, in hindsight) opposed one of those achievements—but not insignificantly because of how he described meeting his wife. Sure, it was any one of coached, acted or exaggerated, but it was an effective display of humility. He may or may not be human, but in that quote, he sure comes across as one. It's funny that people don't understand why Clark wouldn't call Bush a deserter, but it's an easy one: as a former general, he has a pretty good idea of what a deserter really is.

Jay about me and my piece on "listening": “he's not afraid to say crazy shit like this that I know people won't be too happy about. (I don't think it's crazy, but I can imagine many who would.)” Yeah, crazy like a fox!

He also writes: “Women (or anyone really) who expects you to listen without comment to their problems is asking you for permission for them to use you, plain and simple. Richard doesn't seem to be saying that he won't talk to women, just that he won't be a puppy who sits around and licks cuts.” An important phrase here is "or anyone really", because I may have over-emphasized women in that case, when men are equally capable of moaning and groaning. As for the last sentence, I don't deny ever being a “a puppy who sits around and licks cuts”, but Jay gets the right impression that I've done enough of it, and it's time to be, as Jay says I already am, “a True Playa™ [who] writes about how to deal with all his mad Hunnies™”.

Sacha is a British Columbian who has a radical solution to the current federal government and Liberal Party scandals (yes, plural): “The solution is simple - break up the country. Since the country is too big to be managed effectively without the massive amount of corruption we see today, the confederation that should have never been joined together should break up. Whatever the media may have to say about the issue, British Columbia and Alberta does not need Canada and Canada does not need us. It's a rather romantic notion that you have a country that spans coast to coast, but when its central government is embezzling ridiculously large amounts of taxpayer's money on the single party that runs the government, it's time for a drastic change. Getting rid of the politicians that lead the country will change nothing since the bureaucracy will still continue to exist - instead, get rid of the country.”

(Between you and me, I'm surprised he didn't advocate annexation with America.)

KFX: “Today, I laid that to rest. I've come to realize, that like an old tattoo, it represented who I was but not what I've come to be. I am not nineteen anymore, and though I'm still as punk rock as fuck, I do it now on my own terms, by my own definition. Punk rock isn't a jacket, it's an attitude. Time to shed my second skin and begin me second life.”

There was a cute ASOW on the bus today wearing a leather jacket with a plaid skirt and boots, talking to her slightly-older-than-her male friends. I had busted out my Powerbook (which is my status symbol) because of her cuteness, and ironically came across KFX's post. She did not strike me as very "punk rock", but that didn't matter. The leather jacket suited her.

An attendee of the Citizen Cope concert in Seattle (I recently attended the Vancouver show) has this to say of the show: “It strikes me as odd that several Cope songs incite girls to sway and cuddle with their boys. While the songs are fantastic and soulful, are you not LISTENING TO THE WORDS? Why is a song about a penitentiary being on fire suddenly an Al Green-like makeout song?”

Robert Scales approached me yesterday at Moose Camp asking if I could write briefly about deSmogBlog's redesign, and I told him I'd be happy to, after having subscribed to their RSS feed and listened to their occasional podcast. The project is an interesting idea: they are pointing out what they believe to be rhetoric that is designed to obfuscate the truth about climate change. The Left has had a hard time in the past 30 years with the strong challenge from the Right, which both simplified and strengthened its message (among other things). If I understand it correctly, deSmogBlog looks like one effort to both simplify and strengthen the climate change message.

It feels necessary to disclose that after Robert asked me to mention deSmogBlog's redesign, he gave me a desmogblog.com jacket. It's a nice enough jacket, but I didn't expect it: I had agreed to do it because he asked nicely and I already subscribed to the site's feed. I don't really need it, so I'll be dropping it in the clothes donation bin around the corner from my place, so that someone not as well off as me can have something to protect them from the elements.

Also, Bryght, the company I work for, hosts the site, and Raincity Studios (which also designed Just a Gwai Lo), designed deSmogBlog.

Been seeing a lot of copies of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi getting handed out at Northern Voice 2006. I've had the book for a couple weeks now—the publisher, which is blogging, kindly sent me a review copy with a nice note. I'm halfway through the book now, and it's a nice combination of historical and cultural commentary from the author i.e. excerpts from Iranian weblogs written in Persian translated into English. In other words, so far a good combination of context and primary readings.

I'd love to see a lot more books that translate weblogs written in languages I can't read into English. Chinese would be the first language I'd push for, since I've long forgotten how to read the 200 or so characters learned in university, but excerpts of articles written in Brazilian Portuguese and Korean are languages I could see as being books I'd buy.