Yup, That's Me

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 88% Existentialist 75% Modernist 56% Fundamentalist 31% Romanticist 31% Cultural Creative 25% Postmodernist 25% Idealist 0% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

Quiz via Dark Bilious Vapors. No surprises. I suspect the high "Fundamentalist" rating that Len also shared (follow the link) is a result of a lot of "strongly agree / disagree" answers, not a religious appelation necessarily. My high "Existentialist" rating doesn't mean that I'm a nihilist either. I believe life's full of meaning and purpose, just that we must find and adopt it for ourselves; it's not given to us by outside forces.

And I -- I Wanna Beeeeeeeee-eee Anarchy

HW Saxton says I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk. Regular readers know that I love punk rock and was into the music back in the day. I grew up in Northeast Alabama, not exactly a hotbed of punk shows, so I didn't get to see many bands, but I bought music and magazines at a furious pace. The folks at Charlemagne Records in Birmingham used to love to see me coming because I would regularly drop $60 to $100 every visit.

A long time ago, back before The Ramones could count to 4, before the Black Flag so proudly waved, before The Clash had enough rope, before X marked the spot and before the Sex Pistols backfired punk was knocking at the door. Now in 2005 "Punk" is just another genre in your local music emporium. A product to be bought and sold at the local mall.

Even the most suburbanized suburbanite can now take a trip to their local mall and come out two hours later as an Insta-Punk. Just add beer, a little attitude and voila: Dude yer a punk. Just walk the mall, any mall, anywhere U.S.A from Maine to Mississippi, Alaska to Arizona, Nevada to New York and you too can be Punk Rock and I mean it maaaaan. Stop by Hot Topic pick up some creepers, a pair of Docs or some Chuck Taylors, drop into the local hipster hair emporium "Hair 'Tis" or whatever, get pierced, tattoed, pick up some black clothes and a handful of CD's and there ya have it. You are a punk rocker, congratulations.

Well anyway you have the outward trappings of some such a thing. You are an individual, different than everbody else, into something new and hip, not just another jerk in oversized clothes & a backwards baseball cap (speaking of which no one should be allowed to wear but catchers) no, you are walking and talking statement on the vitrues of non-conformity just like the other 7 or 8 million of the non-conformists out there. Punk Rock, shmunk rock. There was a time that I thought it was new, interesting and cutting edge. Well it was new and interesting for a couple of years. But like any other pop culture movement in crashed and burned within a few years of inception in regards to momentum but it did leave behind it an interesting recorded history.

I understand the sentiment. Back in the day, I wore t-shirts and jeans and had a Johnny Ramone-style bowl cut. But I listened to a lot of English prog rock, American metal and hard rock too; I also wore my leisure suit and polyester print shirts with stack-heel shoes at the disco on the weekend. Yeah, I know....

But that was the point. Go look at the earliest pictures of punk rock bands and their fans. They dressed exactly like the mid-Seventies suburbanites and city dwellers they were! It was only after the Ramones went to England and ignited the punk rock movement there that the "punk rock look" was codified. The English took the Ramones' leather and jeans and added the studded bracelets and spiked hair and wild makeup. That was the influence of the English art school students who were disproportionately among the early punk fans.

But the ethos of punk, regardless of Saxton's bitterness at its cooptation by Big Music Companies, was "anyone can start a band." You didn't have to be good looking, you didn't have to be polished or professional, you didn't have to be smart, you didn't even have to be able to play! Just get up there and make a noise. Play what you want to and the audience will find you.

It happened with the birth of rock and roll, when what we now call rockabilly bands exploded all over the country. Then, when the Beatles came, it happened again. (Watch WKNO's schedule for the episode of Memphis Memoirs that deals with the phenomenon locally.) The late Sixities psychedelic explosion. Punk rock. Grunge. Any day now, we'll see yet another rebirth. It's about time.

The next generation throws off the shackles of the previous, rediscover the simple joys of making noise and start the cycle. Companies move in to make a profit, but being businesses they have to channel and control things for distribution and marketing purposes. Everything's codified, packaged and sold. Rules pop up, then stereotypes. Then the next generation throws off the shackles....

Punk rock was my turning point. You can look at my record collection and see the clear divide in pre-1975 and post-1975 music. I still listen to a wide variety, as I always have to the consternation of friends, but a short, fast, clever song played with gusto will always win my heart. Doesn't have to have great production, nor great playing. The singer can be nearly incoherent or inchoate. If I can hear the infectious love in the song, the sheer joi de vivre of playing, then I'm there too.

Up and down the Westway
In and out the lights
What a great traffic system
It's so bright!
I can't think of a better way to spend the night
Than speeding around underneath the yellow lights

London's burning!

The Blogcritics entry now has a pretty cool discussion thread going. There are first-hand reminiscences of the early LA scene and the police brutality that marked it.

Do Gooders

Excellent short review of Blogcritics.org: Do Gooders by Mona Charen is up at Blogcritics. Shorter sample:

True liberalism—the idea that personal freedom is a high, if not the highest, political virtue—respects a person’s right to do as he pleases. But it also refuses to insure the free person of the negative consequences of his bad choices. True liberalism works because it assumes that people will rationally consider the possible outcomes of their actions and choose what is in their best interest. A truly liberal society is thus a moderately conservative one precisely because most people will not make choices that carry large personal risks.

The liberalism Charen criticizes, then, is not true liberalism, which is also known as classical liberalism or libertarianism. Rather, it is the deformed liberalism of the Great Society, which maximized individual choice and minimized personal risk. Not surprisingly, people began to make bad choices because they knew that the government had stretched a “safety net” beneath them to catch them when they fell. And fall they did. A direct line of cause and effect stretches from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter, from the Great Society to malaise, from the zenith of post-war American liberalism to its nadir.

If I had the money, I'd buy this. I guess, instead, I'll have to see if the local library got a copy.

Science Geekery

I apologise for the geekiness, but damn this is cool. First, we locate a crashed spacecraft on Mars, and today NASA releases a picture of one Mars satellite taken by another! Yeah, it's just a couple of blurry blobs, but this is the first time one satellite has photographed another in orbit around a foreign planet. Very cool.

So Much For What They Stand For

Via Instpundit comes this link to John Cole's lament over the Republicans:

Let's run through the checklist:

Federalism- nope, don't need it.

Limited Government- nah- useless.

Fiscal Responsibility- forget it- outdated.

Tradition?- Whatever, loserboy.

Fair play?- For credit card companies, not for you.

State's rights- a quaint idea.

Separation of Church and State- Fuhgeddaboutit!

Limiting entitlement programs- nonsense!

Compassionate conservatism- meaningless buzzwords.

You'll have to read the original post to get the supporting links and further remarks.

And yet this doesn't mean I'll ever support a Democrat. With a Republican, there's at least a chance that we'll get the occasional spasm of party principle that means smaller, limited government, less spending and less intrusion. That never happens with the Democrats. They are the party of The State, Big Momma, Big Brother.

The questions are these: How do we cripple the Democrats for a generation or two? How do we get the Republicans back in line? How can we get more than two parties into the American national political system?

The Democrats themselves seem to be taking care of the first problem by themselves. As they see their power wane, they get more shrill and lunatic in their pronouncements. After all, you can only cry "Hitler!" so many times before the villagers stop coming to see what the fuss is about. Eventually, they'll leave you to go back to the village and their lives and jobs.

There are two streams now in the Democratic party. One is seeking to mimic Bill Clinton's successful move to the center. Some of those centrists are already-sober-sided folks like Joe Lieberman. Some are Hillary Clintons and Harold Fords, who see electoral success in the shift. America has a long history of cyclical change between conservatism and activism. We are in the conservative cycle right now and likely can be for some more decades.

The other stream in the Democrats evolved from the Sixties Left and was possessed by anti-war and anti-Bush hysteria. MoveOn.org (How ironic that name is, eh?), Mike Moore, Howard Dean, et al. are working hard to grab their reins. But do they have a positive agenda to push? It seems not. They mostly can be defined by what they oppose: the definition of reactionary. They aren't pushing any platform or agenda of change other than "Get rid of Bush and the neocons! Bush lied; people died. No blood for oil! Liar, liar, pants on fire! Bushitler! Chimpy McHalliburton!"

Like most fantasist, they have mistaken the symbolic for the real. The ability of humans to abstract the concrete has led to dangerous notions. People who believe in magic believe that everything real has an "unreal" counterpart. Just as the real can be moved and reconnected, so can the "unreal" be moved and reconnected. But where they fail is that believing that where abstracting from the concrete can happen, so does reifying the abstract also produce real-world results.

That, I think, is why you see so many art-damaged types in protests on the Left. They are, first of all, exemplars of American individualism; but also folks who believe that symbolic dissent is just as important -- if not more patriotic -- than action. They also believe that manipulating the symbols of their enemy will produce changes in their enemy. Magic, if you will.

Most of America looks at what the post-Sixties generation has wrought on the nation -- casual sex, hollow marriage, alienation, loss of traditions -- and isn't happy. Sure, the Left brought equal rights and opportunity to minorities and women, but the groups that formed to achieve this have institutionalised now and seek to find further relevance to their continuing existence. Just like unions are fading after changing the workplace, so are these lefttist activist groups. They haven't found the next frontier of change yet.

But in their wake, we have the wreck of American traditions and the family. No, not all traditions are good, but we have the benefit of a widely educated populace that can look back on recorded history to see what's worked and what hasn't. It's no longer a question of righting fundamental wrongs but of fine-tuning the new landscape. But there are those who want to take us closer to utopia (a word that literally means "no place," by the way, and so continue to tinker with the workings of a running engine.

They must be stopped. Cold and hard. Republicans are getting their chance to do that.

The problem, of course, is that Republicans aren't using this opportunity to advance their cause, but rather to get their slice of the pie. Having seen Demcrats create a massive system of vote-buying via government projects and handouts, they merely want to hijack that system for their own personal benefit. Principles be damned.

I think that, just as the first Republican leaders of the new majority were holdovers from the minority days, people who didn't know how to lead from power and so had to be replaced, their successors are merely thinking reactionarily. It's time to skim off that next generation of leadership and find the statesmen who lead from principle. Right now, it's not an easy thing.

The Bush administration has consistently shown an electoral willingness to abide "go along to get along" and RINO Republicans to assure party wins. Time and time again, in state races and federal races since 2000, they will accept those who know how to work power rather than those who wish to use it for principle. Lamar Alexander, Arlen Specter, Richard Riordan, Elizabeth Dole, and I'm sure you can name many, many more. A lot of very principled, stand-up conservatives have been passed over to assure political wins instead. Ask Ed Bryant; he can tell you.

At the State level, look at the Republicans who let personal debts to Lt. Gov. John Wilder determine their votes, not the wishes of the people who elected them, nor the principles which they profess to hold. We have a State Senate Republican majority, but a Democratic Senate leader who still plays by the old rules and sympathies. Real change delayed by weakness of character from venal men.

It will take a rising class not yet there to push these people aside in the Republican leadership. It will take voter urging and action. State and Federal leadership in the Republican party has been top-down for decades now. It takes real action and effort to effect fundamental changes, but it can be done.

The blogosphere is our brief window of opportunity. With it, conservatives (and libertarians) can create the conditions of change that will force the money-men and their lackeys at the wheels of power to shift. Take a look at the race for Senator Frist's seat. Even though the Nashville money men have lined up behind Bob Corker (a RINO at best), there is significant momentum building up in the blogosphere for Ed Bryant, the most conservative of the candidates in the race. That momentum can translate into awareness, if we work it, and into action if we follow through.

Already, Bryant is the favorite of a majority of conservative political bloggers in Tennessee, by a very wide margin. Some have already offered alternative, successful, plans of action to his major opposition -- Van Hilleary. A tremendous discussion, aimed at effecting a particular result, is happening right now, when most of Tennessee still isn't paying attention. We can, if we work hard, create the landscape that makes the road lead to our destination long before most Tennesseans are thinking about the trip.

What's working at the State level can be applied nationally. We, the voters after all, drive what happens. The media, the spin machines, the party PR folks, may try to control the microphone, but we own the building. Parties depend on volunteers, and if those volunteers are motivated conservatives they will define the actions that follow. If necessary, a lot of Republican office holders can be tossed out and replaced, repeatedly in a winnowing process. It may be slow going at first, but these kind of things develop a synergy that produces faster results as they build.

So, a Democratic Party that's the modern day equivalent of the Whigs. A chastened Republican party that's been reminded of their principles. Now what?

Here we move from the realist to the dreamworld, I'll admit it. I've long believe, as many other have, that America should be represented by only to political parties. Such a reductionist us v. them, A or B, up or down, this or that mindset just doesn't encompass the vastness and complexity of America. I think America can easily support five major parties.

First, the Democrats can split in two. One, into a labor-based, working people's party that focuses on keeping Big Business in check and getting a Fair Deal for working Americans. Mildly socialist and not really socially focused. Call them the Mondale Democrats or Social Democrats. Let them keep the old party name. I suspect a lot of African-Americans would end up here. I think this party settles at 25% of the electorate.

The other half is farther over to the Left and encompasses those who want to redesign the nation and society. Very socialist, activist, the party of change. Use the modern Green Party as the seed and let them keep this name. Probably 10 percent of the electorate.

The Republicans also divide in two. The big part becomes Rush Limbaugh-style conservatives. Pro business, free markets, pro-globalisation, not at all interested in social issues except as they tinker with markets and business. East Coast Rockefeller Republicans. I think they, too, end up around 25%.

Then we have the social conservatives, those who wish for an explicitly Christian nation, as we had until the early 20th century. Call them the Christian Patriot party, which I think describes them well. I think this is about another 10% or maybe more. Depending on how the nation changes while the political shift is happening, this could be higher, and would reduce the new Democrats and new Republicans.

Neither the new Greens nor the Christian Patriots should be thought of solely as the farthest edges of the Left or Right. They are the homes for those who make common cause with sympathetic centrists who aren't heavily motivated to change.

Then you have the Libertarians, those driven to reduce the reach of government at all levels and in all areas. A lot of former Republicans end up here, dissatisfied with the stance of the New Republicans and some Democrats as well. This is maybe 5% of the electorate.

How does work get done when power is divided so much? Not a lot happens, actually, unless a true majority wants it. Every party has to make alliances to get a win.

This post has gotten too long, as I sometimes do. We'll end it here since we've drifted into the dreamworld.

To return to my original point, giving power back to the Democrats is not the cure to Republicans losing their way in the run to the pig trough of power. Smaller government that cannot have spoils to give is the answer. We can't get there with Democrats. Not now, not ever. They must be crushed first.

Next we bully the Republicans and lop off a few heads to make the point. Then, in the unbalanced political world that results, when the unwieldy whole is going to topple of its own precariousness, someone takes over the Reform Party as a neo-libertarian agent of change. We can remake the map of politics for a better future.

Original Intent

Ann Althouse, reading through the Constitutional discussion of the Founding Fathers, finds an interesting passage from the Constitution's primary architect on the Senate's "advise and consent" function:

Mr. Madison, suggested that the Judges might be appointed by the Executives with the concurrence of 1/3 at least of the 2d. branch. This would unite the advantage of responsibility in the Executive with the security afforded in the 2d. branch agst. any incautious or corrupt nomination by the Executive.

And in comments, someone finds this:

Mr. Madison moved that the Judges should be nominated by the Executive, & such nomination should become an appointment if not disagreed to within days by 2/3 of the 2d. branch.

And, of course, it must be said that this isn't strictly a filibuster, as the nominees are locked up in committee by a gentleman's agreement that proxies for actual oration from the podium. Frist is doing well in holding the line so far, as witness all the "compromises" being offered by the Democrats in recent weeks, but he should first make the Democrats actually stand and speak. Let Americans, through a sympathetic press which will highlight a lot of what the Democrats say, see for themselves.

On the other hand, the Republicans are losing the PR war. It's hard for most Americans to discern the principle being upheld here by Republican insistence. Senate committee cloture rules? The filibuster? The President getting every nominee he puts through? That last one faces the modern schoolhouse training that says no one gets everything they want; we all have to compromise. Everyone gets something. Of course that's ridiculous -- teachers and principals get everything they want in school, no? -- but childhood training is hard to derail.

Speaking of sympathetic press, I happened to catch NBC Nightly News the day that British MP George "Show Me the Money" Galloway appeared before the Senate committee investigating the Oil For Food scandal. NBC showed a long and complete quote from the forceful Galloway (though it was full of lies and disinformation that were never challenged, much less pointed out), then Brian Williams summarised the questions and statements of the committee members, without attributing them, in less time than Galloway got. No mention was made of committee majority chair Coleman's poor performance, nor of Democrat Carl Levin's pointed and successful questioning of Galloway. From what you saw, you'd think Galloway gave a truth to power smackdown to the war-mongering American Senate, rather than a rhetorical performance in service of a despicable man's personal ass-saving.

Some Republicans still don't seem to remember that the mainstream Washington press corps is not their friend.

From Around the Blogosphere

The Life in Memphis post down below has gotten a lot of readers this week. (Thanks Mark for your post pointing to it.) One of the commenters, EJ of Scenestars, has a post with some observations of his own.

If you have a post with some Memphis thoughts in it leave a link in comments!

Wally is a darn good writer. He's a great read, but best of all he loves a lot of the same music I do. (Royal Court of China, anyone?) Freakin' sweet. In this post he looks at the brazen greed of record companies.

Here’s what the record company is paying me to review this album: nada, zip, nothing, a big fat zero. Sure, not very many people will see the review here, but thousands upon thousands will see it at Blogcritics, plus it’s likely to be out there on the net as long as this present version of society exists. That’s a damn good return on what has to be a minimal investment for the marketing department of Epic Records. A press photo, a couple of Xeroxed copies of blather about the new album, and a CDR with no cover can’t cost much. The watermark is probably the most expensive part. It’s enough to make this unpaid reviewer question what he’s doing. Everybody’s getting fat and rich and I’m helping them for nothing more than what’s likely to be a tepid Oasis set that I can’t even give away as a gift.

He also writes of fantasy bands, and if you're all really nice this weekend, I'll post my own fantasy band page. (It's not what you're likely thinking, either....)

Darth Vader as a Hero

A unique take on the Star Wars saga from Tyler Cowen. Try this sample:

By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with "enhanced blood"? That the rebels' victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?

No spoilers for the new movie, so read away.

Photoshop Phun Wednesday

A couple of wiseacres have posted some photoshopped images. Seems a little tit for tat is called for....





Y'all have a nice day.

Why Firefox Rules

I've evangelised on this blog many times for the Firefox web browser. It is superior to Microsoft Internet Explorer in more ways than I can list here. It has better features, more user controls, better security, and will render webpages more accurately on your computer. Installation is a snap, and the installer will do most of the work for you! You can even install it on your computer alongside IE if you just want to test it out. Trust me, once you've used it a while, you'll have no desire to go back. It's just that good.

Now comes yet another reason to switch: GreaseMonkey User Scripts. These are easy to install controls that let you alter the construction of web pages! This goes beyond just changing background colors, link colors, fonts and sizes, and so forth. It's not just the extensions you can add to Firefox to individually customise your browser to your liking.

GreaseMonkey goes beyond universal alterations; you can adjust individual websites to suit your tastes or needs. Permanently. Sites like Blogger, CNN, Amazon, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, Deli.cio.us, eBay; you name it. You can remove whole sections of web pages, like annoying columns of advertising. You can change the appearance and behavior of forms. You can resize columns of text. You can add pieces of one website to another -- for instance, like adding a price call from one site to your personal Amazon page for comparison purposes. You can tinker with LiveJournal and Blogger, to get them to behave. Go to the GreaseMonkey website and scroll the list of scripts; it's quite literally mind boggling what you can do. People have donated hundreds of scripts that affect dozens of websites. More are arriving all the time.

I'm only starting with this, but I'm amazed. It's given me ideas. I hope most of you have followed Brock's advice and used AdBlock and FlashBlock and BugMeNot for the Commercial Appeal website. Now, we can go even further. Like creating a GreaseMonkey script for the Commercial Appeal website that only displays the side nav bar and the content column, erasing all the bothersome advertising. Or doing the same for the local television news station websites, cleaning up their clutter to improve load times and readability. Imagine the possibilities....

Personal control and infinite customisability are among the touchstones of Firefox, after standards compliance and keeping the program clean and small. (The current version is smaller than 5mb!) With GreaseMonkey, it's just gone to a whole new level.

Flogging Dead Aliens

An interesting observation on why Star Trek and Star Wars won't go away just yet. But it's not just creative bankruptcy.

Add to that, that both ST and SW make boatloads of money for their studios -- in licensing, merchandising, product placements, etc. A big part of the Star Trek revenue stream for Paramount is stuff: tchotchkes sold to fans. Magazines, CDs, DVDs, coffee mugs, mouse pads, t-shirts, books, clothing, figurines, toys. Tons of stuff. Very profitable, too, at the prices they charge. Most television series season box sets can be had for between $35 and $60. Not Star Trek, where they routinely cost $90 to $120!

They'll be back in different form, but in a way that keeps fans buying stuff. Because that's what it's all about: buying stuff.

BTW, all I want is my Flash ("The Fastest Man Alive!") movie. And maybe a Legion of Superheroes movie, if DC ever gets off their butt.

And on Star Trek, I deeply wish now that they'd just let the franchise lie dormant for maybe ten years, at least. Give everyone else a chance to age and retire, or get too entrenched in their new careers to come back. Then have a completely new creative team (and production, costume, set, make-up design teams as well) come in to re-invent the series for the next generation of fans. Won't happen, of course, but a fan can wish.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Words of Wisdom Frist Will Not Heed

Kevin Patrick, writing at GOP Bloggers, has some important advice for Senate Majority leader Bill Frist about how to handle Democratic obstructionism over judicial nominees. He notes that Frist appears headed toward a Democratic trap.

Unfortunately, nothing today tells me that the current leadership sees the obvious parallels between the brinksmanship of 1990 and today. Additionally, nothing in the GOP leadership shows me they can procedurally out-maneuver an admittedly savvy opposition (they out-maneuvered the GOP on Bork, out-maneuvered the GOP on the 1990 budget, and out-maneuvered the GOP on the 1995 government shut-down).

Unless something un-dramatic happens and the GOP simply insists on a 24-hour, non-photo-op, talk 'till you are wasting the public's money and reading out of a phone book filibuster, the GOP will likely go to the extra-ordinary measure of going "nuclear" and lose the judicial nominee war (the Supremes and the 2006 and maybe 2008 elections), even if they win this current judicial nominee battle.

The whole read is short, and worth your look-see.

And I agree: let the Democrats talk their heads off in an actual standoff at the Senate podium. Make them stand there and fill time, for hours or days on end. Let self-important maroons like Kennedy, Byrd, Biden, Boxer, et al, run on at length for all of America to marvel over. There is absolutely no downside for the Republicans in doing this, and much to gain.

But I don't think Frist has the spine nor the vision to do it. He's slightly better than the grovelling Trent Lott was, but he's no tactician.

UPDATE: Chris Davis, that Pesky Fly Guy, just about pops a blood vessel over this post. Apparently the whole concept of "alliance of convenience," a staple of Democrat power, blows his mind when others try it.

I'm guessing he's got the tired old cliche of Libertarians as sexual libertines and drug users who want to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, damn the consequences and you, too, still in his head. Democrats and Republicans both believe people need government to protect them from themselves, an interesting view of humanity to say the least, and utterly self-serving of those who want power for themselves. I believe people should be left alone, to form society and communities as they see fit. If you find that unpleasant, then go form your own community in your own image or convince me that mine is wrong. Otherwise, leave me be.

Those who can't take care of themselves? To paraphrase a favorite saying of mine: "Be a good example or we'll just have to make you a horrible warning to others." The failures make the rest of us stronger. You may find that ugly, but it's how the world works. You go and form your own organisation to help them. Likely you'll find a lot of folks willing to help, generously so. Just don't make me support your crusade against my will, or take my money to do it. To those of you who now reflexively scream "Selfish bastard!" I remind you that I worked in a treatment center for nearly a decade, at less than minimum wage. I put my money where my mouth is.

I'm also a conservative, not in the narrow political sense but the larger sociocultural sense. Some changes are good, but experimenting with society (through government control) to create a utopia is just wrong. A pure conscience doesn't give anyone the right to tell me what to do, left or right. Ideas not grounded in reality, or only reached through pure philosphising, only harm society and should be avoided. For example, families are the best way of raising children. Society, and not government, should be backing that fundamental truth.

There's a problem, of course, between a democratic government -- where the individual is the base unit -- and a family-based society -- where the family group is the base unit. Extending government into the family gets us... well, where we are today. Make government retreat and let society sort it out. Will some folks be unhappy? Sure, but that the nature of life. Deal with it.

Democrats can make all the noise they want about being the "party of the people." They are not. They are the party of government control and social tinkering. Republicans have their own problems, but let's get the monster of government off our backs first, and then we'll deal with them.

Let me close this with a great and a propos quote from Neal Stephenson:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir.... We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.

Chris brought up Stalin but I'll remind him that it was a Democrat, Roosevelt, who dealt with him in the Forties. The overweening and ambitious Roosevelt knew he was deathly ill, but ran for an unprecedented fourth term anyway. By the time he got to Yalta, he was nearing death and unable to stand up to the robust Stalin. It took Republicans and a few anti-Communist Democrats (remember them?), being fought every step of the way by Democrats of the Socialist and Communist Left, to kill off the Soviet Union.

Anyway....

We Have Lift-Off!

My buddy Mark went to East Tennessee this weekend to launch a special rocket. He met with huge success. He has pictures, too! Go on over, read the story and congratulate him. As you'll see, launching rockets of this size and power isn't an easy thing, but is very exciting.

More here, here, and here.

Life in Memphis

You read about it in the paper, sometimes, and you see it on television almost all the time, but life in center-city Memphis can sometimes be awful. I don't know what to say when I read about stuff like this.

On my own street (Monroe, just down from Sekisui), I presently live next door to a drug dealer. He has spotters and assistants at four of the six apartment buildings on the block. Traffic is low, but I always have someone I don't know hanging out just outside my apartment. Back in January the TAC squad conducted a blitz raid on an apartment across the street that netted four people, a lot of money and a very sophisticated video surveillance setup aimed at the street! We can't get folks to move into our building because they come by at night to check out the street, see what's happening and never come back. The landlord claims to be doing something, but it's been more than a year now, so you have to wonder....

A neighbor and good friend was dead in his home for three days before anyone knew. His landlord was out that evening cleaning out the apartment without trying to locate his next of kin. The guy doing the work stole everything worth anything (down to cans of food and rolls of toilet paper!); a couple of thousand dollars, at least. We found his personal papers in the street and ended up getting help from the Veteran's Hospital.By the time we located some family, everything had been trashed, stolen or picked up off the street. The landlord claimed to the family that everything was locked in storage and unavailable.

My first neighbor was a Vietnam vet with mental problems. He would regularly bring over tins of potted meat or tuna to trade for a couple of bucks to buy a beer. One Sunday morning, at a too-early four AM, I heard him screaming "Oh God! Oh Jesus!" over and over in genuine religious fervor. He spent most afternoons and evenings sitting on the breezeway outside in a chair by his door, with his tinny radio blaring, yelling incoherently whenever the neighborhood children got too near the street, like a real-life catcher in the rye. He was actually pretty nice, but like most folks with strong mental illnesses, he could be unpredictable and prickly.

A current neighbor likes to crank up his stereo on the weekends when the weather's nice or friends come over. It's a DJ quality monster that I can hear from my back bedroom two apartments over, with all the doors and windows closed. It's even louder than my television, sometimes. But, he doesn't do it all the time, and his taste in music runs to Seventies R&B and soul, and funk, which is fine by me. I figure he's a kind of karmic payback for all the years I tormented my Birmingham neighbors with my monster stereo and my punk rock. That's been one good thing about the street, is that we have very few folks who blare their stereos.

I saw a guy get shot in the ass in the middle of the block. Another neighbor was found trussed up and murdered in his apartment several years ago; he appears to have picked up someone in Overton Park for casual sex gone horribly wrong. The murder was never solved. We had an arsonist for a while, who was setting dumpster fires. He must have moved, because the fires finally stopped. Just a couple of weeks ago, a sherrif showed up at my door (gave me a fright, I tell ya) asking about an elderly neighbor in the back who had been missing for five days. He appears to have died, as his apartment was unceremoniously emptied out into the trash. Once, a drunk wandering down the street walked halfway up my apartment stairs, mumbling to himself and ignoring everyone outside, opened his pants and began to relieve himself over the side into the yard! Then he wandered off.

Remember about three - four years ago when there were pipe bombs being set off around Shelby Farms? About the same time some neighbors saw a couple of rednecks toss one into the dumpster behind what's now Turner's (Was the great but trashy River City Donuts at the time.). It blew, about 11PM on a Sunday night, loud enough to send me out of bed and the dumpster lid across the street. Flames at least forty feet high. The police and fire department came out, but oddly it didn't even make the news.

Just last fall, I heard a car screech and career into a building on the corner. They sheared off a street sign at ground level and slammed into the wood and glass front, sending the sign midway into the inside! The car zoomed off down the street, leaving some parts of its bumper at the scene, but the police only cursorily investigated. I'm guessing the driver figured paying for the damage to his car alone was cheaper than paying for the damage to the building too, and then going to jail.

It's an odd street. The west end is all cheap apartments badly managed. Lots of transients, usually, but right now we have too many empties. And one boarded up unit from a recent fire. Had I not been there, the fire department wouldn't have been called in time and the whole building, including my apartment, wouldv'e burned down. Things used to be working people and family friendly when I first moved here about a decade ago but in the past few years a succession of ex-public housing residents and several drug dealers have tanked it. I briefly had one neighbor who was such project trash she would stand outside in her purple velour nightie, cut deep up top and just below her crotch, hollering at people at the other end of the block. And she weighed close to two hundred pounds. She thought she was being sexy.

The east end is all nicely maintained, single-family homes, with SUVs parked outside, though you rarely see any of the families outside in their yards. Very rarely. Loeb Properties owned a couple of empty lots in the middle of the block that for many years were vacant and functioned just like a pocket park for the street. Wonderful in the summer, under the shade of a 100' high oak. They recently built a pair of spec houses. The people who bought the first one only stayed for a few months before they put the house back on the market. Still, that house is directly under that oak, right on top of the root system, and right in the path of lost limbs if we have another Hurricane Elvis.

The dichotomy is striking between east and west. You'd think the rising prosperity of the east would bring up our end, but the two halves keep moving farther apart.

Traffic is a real problem for us, being one block off Union. Lots of folks taking shortcuts of one kind or another (Belvedere, Madison, Poplar) and speeding through. It was a real worry when we had more kids on the block, especially in the afternoons. Typical modern urbans with radios going, phone in one ear, not watching the road, roaring down the street in a real hurry honk honk! Sekisui parking overflow is another problem. They get packed on Friday and Saturday and the suburbanites just park anywhere they can, blocking sidewalks, drives, etc, and ostentatiously worrying at the folks walking past them, the folks who live here!

I don't have a problem walking around day or night, but then I'm six foot, three hundred pounds, with a buzzcut and a permanent scowl. That buys me a lot of caution on the part of criminal opportunists, I've learned. That and my bossy, middle-class whiteman demeanor. Lots of folks just assume I'm in charge of something and so aren't eager to mess with me. They also assume I'm ex-military, which is fine by me. Like I said, I don't often get messed with.

But I do worry about breakins when I'm not home. I got a rude shock a while back when someone I'd seen down the block, who'd been living there a while but I hadn't met yet, was able to tell me my daily and weekly schedule in pretty good detail. It surprised me how many folks have eagle eyes and a jealous watchfulness. Now with all the drug and hooker traffic of the past few years, I worry about opportunity crime. Like the crackhead neighbor when I first moved in who stole a rocker right off my front porch just a couple of days after I bought it. I've had any number of plants taken as well. Anything that can be turned into a rock.

It probably sounds more dangerous to you than it really is. It certainly horrifies my middle-class family that I love living here. But I do. The endless blocks of cookie-cutter, anonymous condo buildings downtown and on Mud Island, and in the county out East, irritate me. How do you tell some one how to find your particular cube? "Take the first right. Go to the back. Count three buildings and I'm on the corner upstairs in the one just over from them." Sheesh.... Every, every, trip anywhere requires driving; often a lot of driving, just for simple errands. I can walk to everywhere I need: bank, post office, laundry, lots of restaurants, grocery stores, other shopping (Home Depot!), book stores, movie theaters, you name it. Midtown is the only place that offers that convenience. Murphy's nearby has outside festivals several times a year which make it hard to sleep, but the music's frequently good and it's free. Sometimes the bands playing inside are loud enough to hear over here!

I like the blurred rushing noise of traffic, the occasional ambulances and police sirens rising up together in the night like the howling of wolves, the snatches of conversations passing by, bands playing in nearby clubs, the even rarer horns from Mississippi River traffic like ghosts of history, the parade of homeless. (Though I've noticed in the past nine months or so that the neighborhood's homeless are vanishing. I wonder what's happening?) The trade-offs are real and sometimes costly, but the benefits are worth it. And we do it without hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidy and tax breaks from City Hall, and propping up by numerous quasi-public agencies!

Take that, Downtown! You guys are the doughnut hole to the chewy rich goodness of Memphis. We don't have the benefit of every tourism and PR effort to prop us up. Nor the ceaseless rah-rah of the daily paper. We have the intentional neglect of our City's leaders, thank you very much. Downtown has the spit and polish, the self-inflated importance, the plastic Disneyland version of Memphis; we have the funk, the genuineness, the damp sweat of an endless Memphis summer.

Midtown really is Memphis, and it definitely takes a certain amount of character to live in it. Not the enclaves of fearful white prosperity dotted around like forts on a map of 18th century western America, but the real, hurly-burly Midtown. Where you and the homeless guy down the block have a nodding acquaintance. Where you know how to get across Union Avenue traffic during rush hour. Where you have neighborhood institutions and they know you, too.

Welcome to Memphis.

Rules of Computerdom

Slightly edited from the list at Jerry Pournelle's site:

1. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

2. A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.

3. The programmer's national anthem is 'AAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHH!!'.

5. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for 'still doesn't work.'

6. Computer analyst to programmer: 'You start coding. I'll go find out what they want.'

7. Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.

8. Hidden DOS secret: add BUGS=OFF to your CONFIG.SYS

9. Hit any user to continue.

10. I wish life had an UNDO function.

11. If your computer says, 'Printer out of Paper,' this problem cannot be resolved by continuously clicking the 'OK' button.

12. It said 'Insert disk 3...' but only 2 fit in the drive.

13. Microsoft Windows: computing While U Wait

14. 665.9238429876 - Number of the Pentium Beast

15. I have yet to meet a C compiler that is more friendly and easier to use than eating soup with a knife.

16. My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.

18. 'To know recursion, you must first know recursion' (Mr. Mike sez: My favorite!)

19. Life's unfair, but root password helps!

20. Mountain Dew and doughnuts... because breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

21. Hey! It compiles! Ship it!

22. 'Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

23. Intel: We put the 'um...' in Pentium.

24. Helpdesk tip #2: When the support analyst says 'Click...', wait for the rest of the sentence.

25. BREAKFAST.COM Halted...Cereal Port Not Responding

29. Smash forehead on keyboard to continue.....

30. Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...

31. All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

34. "There is an old saying that if a million monkeys typed on a million keyboards for a million years, eventually all the works of Shakespeare would be produced. Now, thanks to Usenet, we know this is not true."

35. "A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street."

36. C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.

37. A computer scientist is someone who, when told to "Go to H---," sees the "go to," rather than the destination, as harmful.

38. 1010011010 - The Binary Number of the Beast

39. APATHY ERROR: Don't bother striking any key. Application has reported a "Not My Fault" in module KRNL.EXE in line 0200:103F

40. "The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a software patch and a user with an idea."

Dim Bulb Briefly Glows Bright

The latest Newsweek has a great article on John Edwards that relates this story:

It's traditional for out-of-work politicos to head to Harvard's Institute of Politics for genial wonk talk. It's also traditional for failed veep candidates to put major distance between themselves and their old campaign. The two customs intersected when John Edwards stopped by Cambridge last month. Over lunch, Edwards held a Q&A session with students, faculty and political bigwigs, including Kerry-Edwards campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, a visiting fellow at the institute. Edwards was asked for one lesson he'd learned from the 2004 campaign. His answer: "Don't listen to Mary Beth Cahill." The response in the room was stunned silence, observers later recalled. "No one laughed when he said it, and Mary Beth grew bright red," said one attendee. "It was very awkward."

Speaking truth to avarice! At last, it appears that someone at the top of the bill in the Democratic Party has realised, and is acting on, the truth that campaign directors Cahill and Bob Shrum are to victory what radioactivity is to life.

Cahill and Shrum have enriched themselves quite handsomely at the Democrats' expense. They have long, painful histories of continually losing national campaigns, and yet they always seem to insinuate themselves into the Democratic nominee's leadership. For conservatives and Republicans, that's great news. Let 'em keep sending the party over the cliff!

Activists on the Far Left, lots of folks in the Democratic base, and press sympathisers who would just like to see a win have complained about this pair for years and years. But Edwards is the first ticket-topper and potential candidate to break the wall of silence. Will they finally be exiled?

You See? I Told You: Susan Adler Thorp Dept.

I thought I had blogged about this, but can't find any posts on the subject via a Google sitesearch. Ah well.

Susan Adler Thorp was the political columnist for the Commercial Appeal for many, many years. She was legend for her partisanship. During the 4-week period surrounding the last County Mayoral election, she used to her column to write attacks, both personal and vicious, against AC Wharton's opposition, George Flinn. Five of the ten columns she wrote did that. She never wrote positively of Wharton, except when she attacked Flinn first. Shortly after Wharton won, Thorp suddenly quit the CA to take a job as communications director for the new administration.

Despite having written numerous times about personal abuse of public office by many, many people before her, Thorp used her office and connections to make sure that a former, disgraced County employee got a significant rise in his pension. Wharton did not fire her; she was forced to resign. (Keeps her resume clean. Doesn't muck up her pension.) She later took to the media to absolve herself of any wrong-doing. Apparently, using public money and public office to make sure that a friend gets taken care of isn't unethical.

Shortly after that, WMC/5 television announced she was joining them as an advisor. I distinctly recall seeing a story about her coming aboard that mentioned she would also serve to provide connections and open doors for WMC reporters that they might not otherwise obtain. I called it "wheel greasing" and still stand by that characterisation.

That story seems to have gone down the memory hole. Enter Thorp's name into the new WMC/5 website search function (about damn time!) and you return a single entry. That's bizarre, to say the least, given how often she was in the news herself, for a while.

Anyway, News Director Peggy Philip has always maintained to me that Thorp's addition to WMC/5 wasn't about "wheel greasing," but other unspecified things. If I recall correctly, initially there were questions about whether she would have an on-air role similar to the one she had in her CA days as political commentator for WREG/3. Those questions were waved off vaguely or evaded.

I used to jokingly call Thorp "The Crone" because of her unfortunate appearance in those days. Once she brought a sharp nail on a skeletal finger to her face, to do a "television scratch" that wouldn't damage her make-up and it came to me. She also went through hair colors and styles briefly, so it will be interesting to see if she retains her usual appearance or tries some television "sizzle." This being WMC, I'm betting sizzle.

Why, you ask? Well, according to the Commercial Appeal, Thorp will do on-air editorials and commentary for WMC after all. In the name of the station!

"This is an opportunity for me to remain active in what I love the most, which is news and commentary," Thorp said. "It's just a different medium for me."

Thorp has been consulting for Channel 5 for the past few months. She provides background and contacts to the station's reporters.

You see? I told you.

"We just felt this was another dimension of our newscast we needed to do something about," said Channel 5 general manager Howard Meagle. "The opportunity came along with Susan to have someone who actually has the capability and knowledge to frame good editorial positions for our station."

Meagle said editorials -- they likely, but not necessarily, will air weekly -- are a natural extension of the station's newscasts.

Former Channel 5 general manager Bill Applegate performed editorials, but they have been absent since his departure more than four years ago.

"I think it's something that will inspire debate and thought," said news director Peggy Phillip.

Peg, they will inspire more than that. She will be watched like a hawk, not least by this blog.

"The editorials will focus on issues that affect Memphis and the Mid-South," Thorp said. "It could be any issue -- the future of Shelby Farms, the future of The Pyramid, it could be a commentary on taxes, or I could go back to my old stomping grounds, politics."

They will come as the result of discussions by a still-being-formed editorial board.

Will Thorp's editorials, which will have the name and reputation of WMC attached, be vetted before broadcast, as this article implies? Or will she be given loose guidelines? Will they rely on her past experience in journalism and public spokesperson to guide her?

I told Peg to her face, and repeat it here, that this will end in tears. Thorp will abuse WMC for a friend or a cause one day. She has a history of doing this and there's no reason to believe this Crone has learned new recipes for her cauldron.

I hope that video as well as transcripts will be available on line. This will be interesting....

Thorp will only be the second on-air commentator, after the stentorian, predictable and pompous Norm Brewer at WREG/3. She is a liberal Democrat, like every other commentator or editorialist in the local media, save the equally predictable and pompous Mike Fleming at AM 600 WREC. Will anyone, ever, bring a right of center or even an unexpected voice to the local media mix? I'd be deeply surprised.

That's why you have me.

Irrelevant To The End

Tina Brown says good-bye to her unseen cable talk show Topic A. It was a bottom dweller even among cable shows, frequently garnering fewer than the minimum Nielsen rating of 250,000 out of a nation of 280,000,000. Further proving why folks like her have no useful justification to tell us what to think, she says:

The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was “I am taping my own show at that time.” Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn’t have own talk show

Talks shows, the blogs of the rich and connected! Who knew?

Sorry, I'll Pass

I posted a while back that I'd sadly lost a longtime personal ritual: Sunday lunch with the Sunday Commercial Appeal. The CA just wasn't worth the $2.00, nor was it much of a read.

Shortly afterward, I realised rather belatedly that Andrew Smith's Cap'n Comics column had disappeared from the already anemic Sunday Arts section. I emailed Andrew, asking what happened (he didn't say) and how it felt to be an employee of a newspaper that didn't run his own syndicated column (he didn't say). He did, however, forward my email to Chris Peck, editor in chief and architect of the "new" CA. Here is Peck's reply:

Hi Michael,

Sorry you aren't a regular reader of the CA these days.

We've got a whole lot of great new stuff in the paper.

Hope you will take a look,

Oy.

A week or two ago, I talked with Mark Richens, who does the Memphis Scene blog for the online CA. He mentioned he was editing the Sunday Page Two and had started a "blogroll" column, quoting notable bits from national blogs. Mark doesn't strike me as a dummy, he's actually quite clued in, so today I decided to give the Sunday paper another whirl.

Sad to say, it's still not worth $2.00.

Look at the front page: only three stories. One a "mother and child" story apparently themed to Mother's Day, but updating the tabloid "switched babies" story of Bridget Merriweather. The big headline? "She never quit," about a young woman overcoming adversity, accompanied by the requisite feel-good photo straddling the fold. Rounding out the "news?" An article on the annual Duck Stamp competition coming to Memphis. Across the bottom of the page are blurbs pointing inside the paper to deeper stories, on less important topics like the first statement from newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, upcoming nuclear non-proliferation talks, and a whole page of East Europe-after-WWII stories tied to President Bush's speech in Latvia.

Page Two is the same catch-work. The long column of contact information, subscription rates, etc. "Preview: The Week Ahead" which is easy to read quickies. A "newsmaker" story under a "Got A Minute?" headline on the oldest of the last surviving Munchkins. Sheesh.... Only Richens' "Blog Roll" snagged my attention enough to read. Mark picked multiple-paragraph selections from three blogs (Lawrence Kudlow, Defamer and Oxblog) that showed a good ability to spot the core points being made.

The rest of the front page section is the new style: maybe an eighth of a page of actual news story surrounded by advertising. Pages of this. The rest of the sections all seemed lighter than in the past, as though there are fewer pages per section.

Viewpoint is the same new tapioca. David Waters' "faith" column is yet another political screed. Wendi Thomas writes about a basketball player; yet more Fizzlies advertising and FedUp Forum boosting. Yawn. Predictable as always; nothing new to add; nothing unexpected. Same for "humor" columnist Bill Haltom in the "Downtown and Midtown Appeal" section. With all the great writers in Memphis waiting for their chance, we get this tired bore. You have to wonder what purpose these people serve. Is it their ability to fill 1000 words on a regular basis? To take what their peer groups are saying, or what they read in their daily reading, and regurgitate it for the lumpen masses? Jeez, give me their slots and half their salaries and I'd knock it out of the park for 'em twice a week.

Today's guest columnists look at the renaming of some City parks. Oddly, their thinking is in line with the paper's also-stated editorial opinion, which is largely middle of the issue. "Respect feelings but don't forget other's feelings, too." The same old issue splitting that seems to mark the new CA: find two majority opinions (regardless of complexity), take some points from each, force a compromise, walk away satisfied with yourself. I actually miss Ol' Piss'n'Vinegar. Susan Adler Thorp was dishonest, biased and willing to use her column for personal and political agendas, but she at least had strong opinions. As evil as she was, she at least brought new information to the table and made important connections. (Not least was serving the Wharton campaign before she jumped ship at the paper to take an important job with the new Wharton administration! Smooth connection, that.) The PC milquetoasts the "new" CA prefers seem carefully selected to be bland, or properly button-pushing.

Politcal reporting from around the state or neighboring states? Not today! We're not even the MidSouth anymore, but some re-oriented viewpoint called Greater Memphis, as though everything around the city are just subservient appendages and not real, distinct, historical communities. News from Tennessee that's not Memphis-centric has all but gone, as though the state ends just before Hickory Withe and Munford. News from Nashville is as likely to have an AP byline or Tom Humphrey's byline (He's a writer for the Knoxville News-Sentinel for heaven's sake!) as that of their own Nashville reporter, Richard Locker. News from Arkansas or Mississippi has also disappeared, even though the southern tier of "Greater Memphis" is three counties in Mississippi that are growing faster than the titular City. But those things aren't part of "our story" in MEmphis, are they? It's all about the Memphis at the "new" CA. The new Greater MEmphis section is the catchall for what was once Metro (Yet another conceit. The metropolitan dream is dead and reborn in the more centralised Downtown Memphis. Everything else is an error waiting for Downtown to correct. Quit whining. Once Downtown is fixed, everything else will fix itself as a consequence. Shut up and sit down.)

All the arts and cultural stuff (except Travel, which still rates its own section, as travel is a lucrative ad market) is jammed into the "M" (Hey, it's all about MEmphis.) section, which isn't any bigger but also carries a larger load now. The good news is that stuffy elitist Freddy Koeppel is greatly diminished, almost buried; the bad is that books and magazines in general are nearly gone altogether.

Today's "M" even has an article on bloggers. Or at least bloggers who want to promote "literary" books. The kind that might sell a hundred copies around town, but we are all supposed to desire to read for self-improvement. The genre reviews are gone, too, it seems. At least those addressed a greater number of Memphians than the latest difficult novel about unpleasant people in depressing situations with ambiguous and distasteful endings.

Anyway, it's good to see the CA embrace bloggers. Well, some of them. Despite three years of hoping, the paper has yet to address the local blogging scene. It's exploding more than ever today, and yet the "new" CA has yet to cover it! Stories are being broken in Memphis' blogosphere, brought to light, discussed and dissected, but I guess that's one thread of the Greater Memphis narrative the paper would rather not weave into its story. On the one hand, it's a telling omission that says how the "new" CA approaches the massive industry changes blogs are precipitating. They insist on subsuming blogs into the historical institution of the newspaper, keeping a wary distance and watchful eye on these "journalists without rules."

Their experiment (Which is what the "new" CA is for Scripps; an experiment in reversing the decline of newspapers. It's being watched closely by the parent corporation.) is to advance the USA Today breakthrough and tweak content to connect to previously unserved parts of the community. The "old" CA was built around politics and crime. Frankly, I wish politics still carried some weight with the new crew. No one has the heft, reputation and institutional reach of a community newspaper. They can be places 95% of the community can't go and contact folks we don't know exist. They have the staff to cover the government and political meetings that will affect the community far more profoundly than the story of a woman overcoming adversity.

But the "new" CA values people and stories over boring old politics, mostly. Too bad. I don't want to read that. I want access, coverage and the bright, unrelenting light of publicity on the darker parts of local politics and government. You want to read about newspapers reinventing themselves digitally and relevantly? Try learning about the Greensboro, North Carolina or the Oh My News experiments.

The rest of the paper? I couldn't care less. The "new" Sunday CA is a slimmer product, fewer pages where "innovation" is pushing out "content." White space and blocky bits are the rule, as though the New York Times and the Washington Post, the nation's number two and three papers, haven't kept their classic, text-crowded look successfully. It's missing most of what I like a newspaper for. It's trading fluff and "look at us look at you" for necessary purpose.

I'm sorry Mark and Andrew and Chris. It's still not worth my money. I feel no guilt any more about not reading the CA. I don't feel that I'm missing anything important.

Star Trek: Enterprise Kicks In

Tonight's third-from-the-last Enterprise was just great. It echoed, in all the good ways, classic Star Trek. As Earth starts exploring farther and farther into space, we keep encountering more and more aliens, who come to Earth for science, business and diplomacy. A lot of Terrans become xenophobic in reaction (We learn a bit more about Col. Green, from the original show. Of course, there's still the lingering resentment of Vulcan paternalism that was present in Enterprise's first season.) and a "Terra Prime" reactionary movement starts causing problems. The episode deals with racism and apartheid in an SF context, which allowed some great moments.

Possibly the best was when Trip and T'Pol infiltrate a Lunar mining colony to find out more about the Terra Prime leaders. The under-praised Peter Weller (Robocop, Buckaroo Bonzai, Naked Lunch, etc.) plays the leader perfectly: driven, cold, ruthless and a true-believer. (It was a perfect casting choice.) Of course, they are caught and Weller meets them, then gives the requisite Evil Overlord speech about his motives. It builds to him staring at T'Pol saying he wants to prevent "human and vulcan...." Here he pauses with a snarl on his lips. I was leaning forward, wishing, "Say it. Say it! 'Miscegenation!'" But they wimped out and went with the less loaded "relationships." Oh, so close.

They cast a pair of African-American actors in roles as top lieutenants to Weller's character, both a predictable and bold choice. But rather than point up -- either explicitly or ironically -- the absurdity contemporary Americans feel when watching these black men advocating the same treatment to others that they experience or their ancestors experienced, it's just left there. It seems a point could have been made and it would have really knocked audiences on the head.

I just hope next week's Part Two can uphold the groundwork laid out in Part One. And it's a shame that just as Enterprise finally finds its voice, and a really good voice it's turning out to be, that the show is being killed. On the other hand, I think it's a good thing to put the series out to pasture for while. It's tired and needs a rest.

That said, another film is likely to hit theaters next Summer or Fall. A script is being written for a show set between Enterprise and the original Trek. It will be cast younger than previous shows. It's supposed to have a "Big Premise." I'm not holding my breath for this one, as it still has the cold, dead hand of Berman and Braga all over it.

They need to let everyone -- everyone! -- go and start over in a few years with all new people, all new concepts and assumptions, all new attitudes and outlooks and design philosphies.

On the gripping hand, I have to say that seeing the USS Defiant bridge light up and come to life at the end of Part One of "In A Mirror, Darkly" brought a surge of delight to me. Seeing how beautiful the brightly lit and primary colored, cheery, set looked, compared to the dark and techy, dour, Enterprise set, only makes me long for contemporary television production to get over its obsession with darkness, greyness and color-leaching. Done with modern construction and production gloss and lighting, it was a welcome change to see the actors pop out from the colorful background. More please!