Embarrassing confession
I enjoy watching people cry on reality shows.
Month: January 2004 (Page 3 of 6)
Word of the Day
“So what happened to the $87 billion we gave you last week?”
Dean Esmay’s been touting Operation Give, where people can donate toys, clothing, etc. to Iraqi children. I know this puts me even more firmly in the “godless commie insane Saddam-lover” column, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m all for humanitarian effort. But this just seems to me like a P.R. campaign designed to put a warm and fuzzy face on the Iraq war. We destroyed your infrastructure, but here’s a Slinky! Now don’t we all feel so much better!
Of course, I’m evil, so consider the source.
Captions
I’ve been fiddling with the closed captioning on the new big TV lately. I find I like putting it on the “info” setting, because that often tells me enough when I’m channel surfing to know if I should pause – it’ll show the movie title, etc.
So this morning, I switch over to NBC to watch Tim “I Hate Hillary” Russert on “Meet the Press,” and the closed captioning read, “Saturday Night Live.”
You can’t make this stuff up, people.
I predicted last week while having lunch with some friends that if George W. Bush gets another term as President, by the end of his term The Onion will have gone out of business. The reason? Irrelevancy.
The middle distance
I’ve been fascinated by computers since I was little. I remember seeing a TRS-80 Level I on a counter at Radio Shack and being almost insanely excited. My father broke down and bought one for me, and I spent countless hours watching the two little asterisks blinking in the upper right corner of the screen as a program loaded from cassette tape. (Anyone else remember this?) And then there was the Commodore 64, and then the Mac, and on and on.
And then there was the web. What a limitless expanse for someone like me. So while I was working as a glorified office manager at WEAC, I started fooling around with web pages. I loved it so much that I finagled a web job there that didn’t exist before I came along. I built new systems that solved problems; it was fun and challenging and used all my talents.
I love the web because it combines design, writing, library science, computers, public relations and all kinds of other disciplines into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s magic.
And I loved the web so much that when things got stifling at WEAC, I chucked a safe and secure job in favor of web freelancing full-time. It’s been frustrating at times, but I love taking a client’s idea and making it into a finished site. Follow your bliss, Joseph Campbell said, and in a lot of ways I think I’ve done just that.
Lately, though, I get the impulse a lot to chuck all my computers out the window and go build furniture. Well not furniture exactly, but I get the impulse to create something in the real world. Scott told me the other day that he’d like to be a baker. That sort of thing. Maybe I could become a chef. Or a printer. Or a painter. Something physical, that’s not just pixels on a screen.
I feel like I’ve spent half my life staring at a screen, and no matter how compelling the images on that screen are, it’s got to get old eventually. Right now, it feels pretty old.
I want to look into the middle distance occasionally, and not just to rest my eyes.
Electable
I was talking to David last night about the relative merits of the various Democratic presidential candidates. Although he and I both like Dean, David’s feeling now is that other candidates can carry more middle America swing states than Dean can.
That may well be true. As for me, I keep coming back to the idea that either any of the Dems can beat Bush, or none can. Either we’re just too far gone into insanity, and Bush wins, or we snatch ourselves back from the edge, and the Democrat (whoever it is) wins.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the idea that this President, basically a joke when inaugurated, has gained huge support through national tragedy. He’s a failure by any objective measure, but it seems clear that a lot more people support him now than did in 2000. That’s scary and sad.
Berets for all!
David has an interesting take on his visit to Madison over the weekend. Read and behold.
The Cooler
“The Cooler” is really two movies. One is a sharply written and acted love story between William H. Macy and Maria Bello, two damaged people wandering through the endless night of Las Vegas. The other is a thickheaded melodrama about the rundown casino where Macy and Bello work, run by old-style thug Alec Baldwin. The first is a pleasure; the second is not.
Macy is great as usual as Bernie, a “cooler” who gives casino winners a shot of bad luck just by being near them. And Bello, who I had only seen before in about five minutes of “ER,” is fantastic as the damaged casino waitress Natalie. When they are on screen, you watch and wait and wonder with great anticipation. It’s an off-kilter love story that deserves its own movie.
Unfortunately, we also have to spend a lot of time with Baldwin’s casino manager, and it ends up feeling like “Goodfellas” put on by community theater. I understand you need conflict to make a movie. But it seems to me Macy and Bello provide plenty of that already, in subtle and refreshing ways. Baldwin putting the mafia-style hurt on various characters just ends up being a distraction.
Overall, though, I would definitely recommend this movie. I just wish they had had the confidence to let the romance take center stage.
Sci-Fi Geeks for President
On The Daily Show tonight, Carol Moseley Braun both used the Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” salute, and quoted Dune (“Fear is the mind killer”) when talking about terror alerts. I found this cool.
UPDATE: She’s dropping out. I’m glad she’s endorsing Howard Dean, but in a way I’m sad to see her go. As Jon Stewart said last night, “Why is it the candidates in the back of the pack are the only ones making any sense?”