perfidy

It seems that Joe Wilson has something of an agenda. Wilson said:

"Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both."

So why was this guy accepting a secret mission from the Bush administration to go to Nigeria in the first place? A lot of people who were aghast at the idea of independent counsels a half decade ago suddenly seem enamored of them now.

And Bob Novak has written another piece, here, that pokes some more holes in the scandal in waiting. But, go ahead, investigate, we need to be sure. But this looks less and less like a story with legs to me.

MIT has expanded significantly the course offerings through its
OpenCourseWare program. Over 500 classes in 33 academic disciplines are now available.

I'm diving into two courses, Systems Analysis of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Numerical Methods of Applied Mathematics I. Exciting and stimulating material. Oh, and I'm going to take Mechanical Assembly and Its Role in Product Development and Beginning Japanese I.

Actually, I think I'm going to check out some of the political science and history stuff. Pretty cool.

In response to Johno's post about Sterling's Luddite screed:

Bruce is an insightful and clever guy, mostly. What he is willfully ignoring here is the provisional nature of all technology. As the Connestoga wagon was relentlessly consumed by the recreational vehicle, so all technologies are on death row, waiting for their final appeal to fail. Then they are replaced by something cheaper, more efficient, or better. These ten technologies are no worse, or better than hundreds of others. What he is offering is a purely aesthetic evaluation of the technologies he'd most like to see replaced by their more advanced descendents.

For example, coal, while not an optimal solution to our energy needs, is a good enough fit that it provides for a quarter of our energy requirements. Certainly, orbital solar power satellites or the perennially twenty-years distant cheap fusion power would be better in most respects. Less environmental impact, cheaper, less waste, and fusion reactors look really cool on the back of a DeLorean. However, the primary stumbling block to the adoption of these superior technologies is that they do not yet exist.

All technologies, with certain exceptions, are awkward compromises between cost, performance, and safety. Like the joke about NASA, "Better, faster, cheaper: pick two." We could all wish for the inhead, superultramegahigh definition tv with the dolbyphonic 9.3 3D surround sound that comes straight from the ether directly into your cranium. And it won't scratch like a DVD! But the premature destruction of these technologies would not advance the process of getting their replacements. With coal, most obviously.

But as a space nut, I take particular exception for his call for the immediate demise of space travel - just as it looks like the whole thing might be going somewhere. Given Sterling's general political leanings, I would think that he would be happy that private grass-rootsy space exploration endeavors are on the verge of actually working. Killing what little we have now would make it impossible to get to the next, better stage.

On the topic of the Blues and music industry perfidy, Fat Possum Records has a page up on their site taken from the New York Times explaining why Fat Possum Artists didn't participate in Martin Scorcese's "The Blues."

It boils down to this: Fat Possum treats their artists well, and didn't think that the rates the producers were offering for use of the music were close to fair. The publishers for the film-makers responds, as does Bobby Rush.

Last night I was idly flipping channels before hitting the sack when I came upon the third episode of Martin Scorsese's The Blues, directed by Richard Pearce.

Fuck.

The Blues is a gigantic thing that most people (and most fans for that matter) never explore beyond the tourist areas populated by the national-touring giants of the trade. I personally started out with Hendrix, Stevie Ray, BB King, and Robert Johnson, and had to blaze my own path into the high weirdness from there.

My favorite blues-- the realest stuff-- are the performances that seem just a little tacky, and the singers who are too weird to be true. If I'm not a little repelled, yet totally drawn in, it's probably not hitting the mark. For my recorded fix, I'm a huge fan of everything put out by the people at Fat Possum, from the white-boy skronk of the Black Keys (hello, Akron!) to the offkey broken-down shambling of Bob Log III and Cedell Davis. I will make exceptions to this rule to include the transcendendental players like Guitar Slim or Robert Cray, who can help you achieve enlightenment with one bent note. But in general, the weirder the better.

Consequently I was a little afraid that Martin Scorsese would do to the Blues what he did to New York in 1863. That is, I was afraid he'd make it visceral, dirty, and cruel but then fuck it up by using electro-trance music and casting beautiful people. HA! Could I BE more wrong?

I flip on WGBH. The Blues. Onscreen, Bobby Rush is dressed in a red, blue, and gold silk brocade shirt and electric blue hip-huggers. His head sports jheri-curl. He is playing to a mixed-race audience in a bowling alley, and singing a song called "Pecked by the Right Hen." The crowd is going apeshit. Bobby stalks the makeshift stage like a lion tamer, working the crowd. The crowd works back. Then the camera pans right, and we see the sight. A young, schoolmarmish woman has jumped onstage and is shaking her booty at the crowd, such booty-shaking as to make a Pastor recant. She shakes and shakes and shakes and shakes and shakes and it becomes clear that Bobby Rush is taming no lion... he's only hoping to contain the booty. Bobby sings to the booty. Bobby talks to the booty. Bobby begs the booty for a little mercy. Bobby introduces the booty to the crowd, and the crowd hollers back. Bobbys's shirt slithers and shimmers like it's going to take a verse. All the while, this woman shakes her ass like it's on hinges.

Bobby finishes the song, and we cut to church. Bobby Rush, in a nice brown suit with a gold tie, grinning and mouthing the pastor's words as he sings a gospel song. Intercut a tour-bus interview in which Bobby Rush explains that the same people who are out on Saturday are in Church on Sunday, the only difference being to whom they are petitioning for salvation.

And that's it. You better BELIEVE I'll be tuning in for every remaining episode, and buying this set on DVD. The soundtrack? Ehhh, maybe, if I get tired of my Otha Turner bootlegs.

For me, it's nice to sit in BB King's Blues Club among velvet curtains, dine on a twenty-dollar steak and take in a show by the great Duke Robillard. It's even okay to sit in a Texican joint in Marblehead, Massachusetts as the Cat Sass Blues Band pounds the joy out of "Got My Mojo Working." But goddamn it if the bowling alley isn't the place to be. It's what Greil Marcus called the "old, weird America," and it do feel a bit like home.

[update] Cross-posted to blogcritics.

I'm not so sure what to make of this. Science Fiction great Bruce Sterling has an article in the "Technology Review" titled "Ten Technologies That Deserve To Die."

His list, without his explanations:

• Nuclear Weapons
• Coal-Based Power
• The Internal Combustion Engine
• Incandescent Lightbulbs
• Land Mines
• Manned Space Flight
• Prisons
• Cosmetic Implants
• Lie Detectors
• DVDs 

Wha? 

The automobiles are scaring the horses! Where are my pants? Now, I'm with Brucie on removing land mines, lie detectors, and perhaps maybe newcular weapons from the minds and hands of man, but what the hell? If you read the list closely, Sterling isn't so much arguing that all these technologies are EVIL, per se, (though he certainly has a hate on for coal power and the light bulb), as arguing that they are deeply flawed temporary solutions to problems that will one day be solved through the power of... technology. No argument there, but the whole thing seems a little overheated, not to mention unexpectedly curmudgeonly, coming from someone who once fell in love with the revolutionary possibilities of the fax machine.

[update] Now, with working link! 

I have gotten so tired of entering my name and address for interweb registrations that I went to the post office website to look up the zip code for 1060 W. Addison, so that I could consistently enter the same incorrect information for all these nosy marketroid dungbreros. In fact I encourage, nay, insist that from now on everyone should enter the following personal information:

Dick M. Stickrod *
[a valid email address]
1060 W. Addison
Chicago, IL 60613

If they ask for more info:

Female
birthdate - 01/01/1901
Income Range - as close to zero as possible, or the highest.
For the rest, whatever feels right.

* An actual person. I sold him five triple pane vinyl replacement windows with the optional low-E coating for ultraviolet protection. It took me three days before I could look at the name without breaking into laughter, or tears. Three abortive attempts to call before I got through without choking. Nice guy, a bit defensive about his name. But, it's Dick, not Richard, Rich or Rick.

I hadn't looked at the Onion in a while, but this made me titter:

*

I have been guilty of #1, 2 and 5. My favorite part of the Onion has always been the headlines on the right sidebar. Couple good ones in the most recent issue:

• Wildfire Somehow Rages Back Into Control
• Eiffel Tower Washes Up On Delaware Beach

Fun, fun, fun

[wik] From the distant vantage point of the far-future Ministry, the nature of that image is entirely unknown, and unknowable.

Wis ze bang, and the boom, and the boom boom boom boom bang?!

A Texas high school has apologized after the school band waved a Nazi flag during a performance on Friday, the start of the Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashana. "We had an error in judgment," band director Charles Grissom told the Dallas Morning News. . . . 

During a half-time show, a student from Paris High School went running across the field waving a Nazi flag. At the time, the Blue Blazes band was playing the composition by Franz Joseph Haydn that eventually became known as Deutschland Uber Alles . . . .

Let's hear it for the Paris, Texas Marching Band, winner of the September 2003 Perfidy Prize in Inadvertent or Vertent Asshattery. Congratulations, Asshats!

This was the bright idear, which must have looked great on paper: "[Grissom] said it was part of a show entitled "Visions of World War Two," in which the flags and music were intended to represent the warring nations." During Rosh Hashanah. Terrible, terrible timing. 

The ever expanding story about espionage amongst the translators at Guantanamo has, well, expanded. Johno's favorite TV station, WCVB-TV channel 5 (modestly self described as the "Boston Channel") has a report that a third person was arrested at Logan airport, right under Johno's nose. And he says he's serious about the war on terror.

That American military personnel are passing information to the enemy is a very serious problem. This is treason. If they are guilty, the constitution is very specific about what the penalty is.