18 December 2008

My favorite music of 2008

My friend Mike inspired me to do this. Here are some of my favorite records that came out in 2008, in alphabetical order:

Agathe Max "This Silver String"
Bohren & der Club of Gore "Dolores"
The Breeders "Mountain Battles"
Brightblack Morning Light "Motion To Rejoin"
The Bug "London Zoo"
Dan Friel "Ghost Town"
Goslings "Occasion"
Growing "All The Way"
Health "Disco"
Ho-Ag "Doctor Cowboy"
Hot Chip "Made In The Dark"
Icy Demons "Miami Ice"
Meho Plaza "Meho Plaza"
Mount Eerie "Black Wooden Ceiling Opening"
Parts & Labor "Receivers"
Santogold "Santogold"
Thunderhole "Animals, Monsters, & Fat People"

Great records I discovered this year but didn't come out this year include:

Amy Winehouse "Back To Black"
Animal Hospital "Memory"
Aphex Twin "Selected Ambient Works Volume II"
Apples In Stereo "New Magnetic Wonder"
Brian Eno "Here Come the Warm Jets"
Can "Delay 1968" and "Ege Bamyasi"
A Certain Ratio "Sextet"
David Bowie "Low" and "Heroes" and "Lodger"
Delta 5 "Singles and Session 1979-1981"
Dri "Smoke Rings"
Evangelicals "The Evening Descends"
Health "Health"
Justice [the title is a cross and I'm not sure how to do that]
T. Rex "Stars and Cars"
The Meters "The Meters"
The Microphones "The Glow Pt. 2"
Red Bennies "Announcing"
Six Finger Satellite "Severe Exposure"
The Slits "Cut"
A Sunny Day in Glasgow "Scribble Mural Comic Journal"
Television "Marquee Moon"
Unwound "Leaves Turn Inside You"

15 December 2008

The Nuclear Option

Given our impending climatological doom, many scientists, bureaucrats, pundits, and my father have been suggesting a nuclear energy renaissance in the United States. There are three main reasons I believe this option should stay permanently off the table:
  1. It's too expensive. The Rocky Mountain Institute makes the financial non-viability of nuclear plainly clear. How non-viable are we talking here? Try twice the cost of wind.
  2. The waste is geopolitically and environmentally toxic. I think we're all familiar the arguments and facts on this one. Why this alone doesn't rule nuclear out completely is testament to humanity's painfully myopic decision-making tree.
  3. It's not renewable. If "energy independence" is as big a goal as everyone claims these days, we should be avoiding tying our fortunes to yet another non-renewable fuel source proven to destabilize the regions where it's found.
Why are we still even considering this?

13 November 2008

People of Earth: To Thine Own Email Address Be True

I have a fairly common last name. It's not Smith or Jones or anything, but it's been around the English-Speakers Surname Block a few times. And I have a very common first initial (i.e. not 'Q'). Those two things -- very common first initial followed by fairly common last name -- comprise my email address with a popular webmail provider.

I guess I was an early adopter and scored an amazing username with them, because increasingly over the years I have received more and more email directed to people with the same last name as me, but a different first name beginning with the same letter. That's fine; I usually just say, "Hey, it seems like you're looking for a different [first initial] [last name], this is [first name]." And they apologize and move on.

Increasingly often, though, it isn't emails directed at people who aren't me, but account updates of some kind originating from people who have erroneously entered my email address as their own when purchasing plane tickets or ordering a book or, say, accruing points with a popular hotel chain. Thus begins our current tale.

I received my first email from the HHonors program at Hilton Hotels on November 7, 2008. Needless to say, it was not intended for me, but it was "My Way Account Summary and Deals" update. The email's almost-illegibly-tiny footer warned me, "Please do not reply to this email. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered."

So, adding insult to injury, I had to track down a contact email for these people. I politely informed them of the situation and "David" responded to me one day later. Clearly he had not read my email, however, because this was his response:

Thank you for your message to Hilton Reservations and Customer Care. It is my pleasure to assist you today with your request.

For security purposes, please respond with the United frequent flyer account number and birth date that we have on file for you.

Once we have verified your account, we will be glad to process your request.

If you have any further questions regarding your HHonors account, please don't hesitate to let us know.
I replied:

I can't supply you with that information since it wasn't actually me who signed up for your program. Whoever [dude's name] is, he erroneously typed in my email address instead of his when signing up. I suggest calling him to get the correct address.
Someone named Ursula responded to that message with:
As you have requested, your email address has been removed from our distribution list. Please allow 3 weeks for our systems to be completely updated. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

If you have any further questions regarding your HHonors account, please don't hesitate to let us know.
I received my next HHonors missive a few days later. It was a mass mailing.

Dear people of Earth, please endeavor to remember your own email address. Thanks.

30 May 2008

Dear Afterlife Overlords

For as long as I can remember, I have harbored this fantasy that when I die, there will be some benevolent being or beings who will answer all of my questions about the mysteries of life and the universe. I never remember caring much for other purported aspects of "Heaven", like good food or clouds or temperate weather etc. I want(ed) answers!

As my good friend Fred* pointed out, it would be like the bonus features at the end of the DVD of your life.

So, though I am now nearly certain that I will never get this wish for answers fulfilled, I would like to begin recording the questions I would ask here. Feel free to add yours in a comment.

+ What the hell was going on before the Big Bang?

+ Is ESP bullshit?

+ How many native people lived in the Americas before white people and their diseases killed most of them?

+ What's the deal with the Voynich Manuscript?


*Not his real name.

22 April 2008

Donate The Rebate!

As I'm sure those American readers out there are well aware, our federal government will be sending out rebate checks to most taxpayers this May in an effort to stimulate our faltering economy. Given the ballooning federal deficit and many challenges facing our country currently, I feel this rebate is recklessly ill-advised. To boot, many economists predict it will have almost no effect on the economy whatsoever.

Thus, I intend to donate my rebate to organizations doing the work I wish my federal tax dollars were doing. I encourage you not only to do the same, but also to take that further scary step of urging those around you to do it too! Crazy, I know.

09 February 2008

2008 US Presidential Election, Vol. 3: Space Nixon

Anyone else think Republican candidate Mike Huckabee looks like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Richard Nixon?

06 February 2008

2008 US Presidential Election, Vol. 2: What Makes A Good President and the Vulnerability Of Hope

I just read an article in the New Yorker about the role of charisma in making a good leader called The Choice: The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency. The article contrasts Clinton as capable of navigating the government's beauracracy toward incremental (but lasting?) change and Obama as a transformational idealist capable of bringing disparate groups together around common interests (I'm paraphrasing, possibly ham-fistedly). I am willing to buy into these characterizations somewhat, but was left wondering which type of person would make the better president.

So I started trawling the internet for articles by presidential historians (PHs) about what sort of president is the best sort of presdient. It seems that most PHs consider the best presidents in US history to be George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To quote a Rolling Stone article by a PH (about why Bush may go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever):

"These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office."

(As a sidenote, by contrast: "Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.")

Randy Allgaier, in a very thoughtful post on his "unabashedly liberal" blog The Alligator, calls this ideal person The Transformational President, and comes to the conclusion that Barack Obama has the potential to be just such a president.

I voted for Obama yesterday in the Democractic Primary process for similar reasons to what Allgaier outlines in the above blogpost. (I'm not a registered Democrat, but my state has open primaries, so I went for it.) Since then, however, I've been having a bit of a crisis of conscience. It's taken me a day or so to figure out what was brewing, but I think a big part of it is this: In the furor over Obama, I have somehow let down my very cynical guard toward politicians, and now that I have, the prospect of disappointment is making me feel very vulnerable. What follows feels very much like a confession, given how totally naive I think it is to let oneself become enamored of politicians or to let oneself look for transformation in the political process.

First, I will be bitterly disappointed if Obama does not achieve the nomination. Second, if he does, I will be bitterly disappointed if he does not win the national election. Third, I will be bitterly disappointed if he wins and governs badly, becomes embroiled in the typical political scandals, panders to this and that special interest, ignores issues I find to be of near-crisis-level importance currently (climate change, our disastrous pre-emptive foreign policy, education primarily).

Yes, to dare to dream of a transformational leader feels very good, but the cynic in me feels incredibly vulnerable now, considering what recent history tells us about politics in this country.

17 January 2008

The Graphological Implications of Rampant Computer Use

Here's something I've been thinking about off and on since about 1999. It was at that time, when I was working at the Strand Bookstore, that I acquired a copy of Your Handwriting Can Change Your Life by Vimala Rodgers.

Yes, handwriting analysis, or graphology, may well be the worst kind of pseudo-science (though certainly trumped by astrology and phrenology); however, I do find it an interesting construct when considered as a metaphorical extension of Freud's "superego" (Not his actual superego! His idea of it. (Furthermore, don't jump to the conclusion that I habitually turn to Freud for useful commentary on human emotional structures. It's an occasional turning, to be sure.)). In handwriting, we find one of the clearest and most cross-culturally consistent expressions of self-as-social-arbiter. Diaries aside, when one writes something, one intends for it to be legible; one is seeking to be understood, to communicate.

Given the psychic and cultural position of handwriting, what does it mean for (probably mostly Western) humanity that we are now transitioning away from handwriting entirely now, toward typing?

I hypothesize that this trend augurs a (possibly very scary) split between the self and its connection to the social world that surrounds it. How much more two-dimensional are our written communications now that they occur almost exclusively via typed text?

Perhaps other forms of expression will pick up the slack, or maybe the importance of our actual prose will come to dominate in a way that is equally expressive. Barring such creative work-arounds, though, I worry for each of our bridges between ego and superego.

16 January 2008

2008 US Presidential Election, Vol. 1: Civic Duty

I was just walking home from work and saw that the little sandwich board sign the town puts up to alert people that an election looms had been covered with snow. I had dutifully walked out onto the median and started kicking the snow off of it when two twenty-something, urban-clad white guys appeared.

One asked if it was relating to the primary, sort of implying that I had maybe erected the sign to begin with and I said, "Yeah, the primary is on February 5th. I didn't put this sign up, I'm just..." "Doing your civic duty or some shit?" "Yeah, I guess." We all chuckled.

I assumed they'd walk on and was just glad I'd escaped being made fun of or hit on, but no, they wanted to chat politics. "We gotta get that asshole and his crony friends out of power for good," said Guy One. I asked who they were going to vote for (hoping that my assumption that they WOULD vote would maybe motivate them to actually do it). Guy Two immediately shouted, "Hillary!" Guy One was incredulous. "Why, man? It's just the same bullshit." "Because then Bill would be back! Bill was the best." "Nah, nah. She wears the pants, man. Bill's just hanging out in the background, puffing on a cigar... or a spliff..." More chuckles and then a sly glance my way to see how I'd respond to that.

I said gamely, "It's hard to tell who's wearing the pants in that relationship, isn't it?" More chuckles. Then, from Guy One, "You smoke at all?" "Occasionally, yeah," I said, not exactly lying, but speaking a truth from five years ago. "It's hard to find a dealer around here, huh? Maybe not for you -- girls get offered puffs everywhere, all the time right?" Luckily, my street had arrived. "Not in my experience, man, but it was nice talking to y'all! Vote!"