I love this, and I’m not sure why: NPR’s ombudsman scolding NPR for producing and airing music commentary that’s too “hipper-than-thou.” The ombudsman (Jeffrey Dvorkin, whose last major public acts were to criticize those who got their information about NPR from blogs and to assert that NPR would continue to ask permission from people seeking to link to material on its website) intones:

For some listeners, the music sounds harsh and the journalism that attempts to explain it, sounds equally irritating (and impenetrable).

Here’s brief quotes from some of the reviews he thinks are impenetrable:

“Tweedy uses savage, wild lunges to punctuate the verses and sometimes to inject a little danger into otherwise lovely songs.” [June 21 review of Wilco’s new album A Ghost Is Born.]

“They’re disciplined little gems of composition, poison-pen letters set in the first person and caustic, coffee-shop observations propelled by not particularly heroic desires. The best of them tell about being deluded in love or not being able to let go of an old flame.” [June 9 review of Magnetic Fields’ new album i.]

“Morrissey has always seemed to be a walking paradox, both playful and morose, ambiguously asexual, political but hopelessly self-involved, which is why You Are the Quarry is still a classic Morrissey album.” [June 4 review of Morrissey’s new CD.]

Now, I can see where sometimes NPR’s CD reviews are a little on the patronizing side. But what’s so “inscrutable” about the quotes above? Would this column have been written, I wonder, about any of NPR’s jazz reviews? Or are jazz reviews supposed to be condescending?

No, it seems that the rock reviews are guilty of the horrible crime of “alienat[ing] mainstream NPR listeners,” according to Dvorkin. The ombudsman, in the midst of wanly complimenting another piece, this one on Timbaland, that “alienated” some “mainstream NPR listeners” because his “sound was jarring and very un-Morning Edition-like,” then completes the circle by writing, “Like some who wrote in, I initially confused Timbaland with a well known pop singer called Justin Timberlake.”

Dvorkin sounds a lot like the Newsweek reviewer who wrote of the Beatles in February 1964:

Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified Edwardian beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically, they are a near disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of yeah, yeah, yeah!) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.

At least that reviewer didn’t whine that the Beatles were “alienating” mainstream Newsweek readers.

Would we ever move back to California? Sometimes I fantasize about it, I admit it, despite being in complete agreement with Steve that there is much more room to breathe here in Michigan. I think of places I love in California, like the Bay Area, parts of Los Angeles County, the desert area around Palm Springs, the farther north around Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, and I wish that I could go back (if there were a place in California that was acceptable to Steve and I both) because there are many things about the state that I love and miss—its beauty, its vibrancy, its energy, its native home-ness (for me, anyway).

But then I read articles like the one that appeared in today’s Los Angeles Times. A key quote:

Home prices have so far outstripped income growth in California that the average worker would need to save every penny he earned for more than eight years to buy the average house. In Wisconsin, that worker would need less than 2½ years of income to pay cash for a house. [Emphasis mine.]

With stats like that, only an independently wealthy or insane person would want to head to the Golden State. (The two categories are not mutually exclusive, unless you’re an independently wealthy person who likes taking big gambles that an inevitable big earthquake or a firestorm won’t eventually destroy the property you buy. Those are real dangers in California, especially along the coast.)

But the same article adds:

The 2000 census tracked movement of college graduates around the country and found the metropolitan areas around Atlanta, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix were top magnets …. Experts say the migration inward has accelerated since the census, as housing prices in California and New England have soared …. Though the colder, grayer Midwest has proved a less attractive draw, cities such as Minneapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Madison, Wis., are also beginning to lure professional families from the coasts.

So, yes, with apologies to those Wolverine natives upon whose territory I’ve encroached, I suppose I’m technically part of that group that was “lured” to Ann Arbor from California, though I imagine that the reason for my “lure” was more practical than most. (Steve lived in California for 5 years, but he would bristle at being called a Californian. He’s a New Mexican at heart, and always will be.)

But the prospect that much of the rest of the country is on track to be “Californianized”—by that I mean an influx of Californians with money to throw around ratcheting up housing prices (and other costs of living) in parts of the country not heretofore affected by the skyrocketing costs of housing on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts—is absolutely depressing. (Though I seem to have noticed far more New Englanders here in Ann Arbor than Californians.) And I say that as a now former Californian.

We took a little drive to Saline, where we noted that the Dairy Queen is much nicer than the ones in Ann Arbor. We then went over to Curtiss Park and sat by the river for awhile. It was most pleasant … the nicest stretch of weather I’ve seen in quite some time.

I tend to prefer Chelsea to Saline, for some reason. It just has a different look and feel to it that I like better, although I can’t explain it. Still, it was nice to get away. As I’ve said many times before, if I want to get away from home here, it’s a simple 10-minute drive. In San Francisco, it took six hours and you were on crowded, insane roads all the time.

It’s nice to have some space to breathe.

I’m making progress on getting all the various pieces of AirBeagle working with new layouts. I added the new photo galleries portal page today as well as a new gallery.

Here’s what works from the nav menu at left:

• Bike – Adventures in the bike lane
• Dayley – The return of the Dayley Bayley
• Fly – Airliners and flying
• Live – Asquared – where you are now
• Print – Books
• Screen – Cinema
• Teach – Grad School and Education
• View – Photo Galleries (to be expanded)

There’s still lots of work to do, but we’re getting there. The other links will go active as I get those sections done.

It was a beautiful day and would have been perfect for riding, if only my first bike wasn’t still in San Francisco and the new one wasn’t still in the store, unpurchased.

The nice man at the UPS store here in Ann Arbor tells me it will cost roughly $150 to ship my Bianchi from San Francisco and it has to be put into two boxes. It cost over $400 new. So I suppose I’ll have to do it.

From the movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden:

‘The whole history of the world is the story of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish … all that’s bad around us is bred by selfishness … sometimes selfishness can even get to be a cause, an organized force, even a government, and that’s called fascism.’

Amen.

It’s been a very nice, temperate few days in southeastern Michigan. The high humidity of a week or so ago seems to have abated for the moment. No rain in the past few days. The highs have been mild, in the low to mid-70s. The sky has been a perfect shade of bold azure. The conditions remind me a lot of good Bay Area weather. The squirrels are back out in force again, tormenting the poor befuddled beagle and making their daily appearances at the back patio for bread. I haven’t been able to enjoy the weather (or do much else) because I’ve been fighting a harsh tonsil inflammation (and my seasonal allergies, which have inexplicably returned after a couple of months in abeyance) for the past several days. We did go out briefly yesterday, because I had to pick up my paycheck at the university cashier’s office. We considered getting in line for Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but the line, while not around the block, was definitely not short, and I still wasn’t feeling all that well. Maybe next weekend.

So, let’s see if we’ve got this straight.

Virgin USA has its corporate headquarters in New York, but its flight ops headquarters will be clear across the country in San Francisco.

They need to hire 3,000 people from pilots to baggage handlers in the next year and start running ‘low-cost’ operations to compete with JetBlue and Southwest sometime in 2005.

They haven’t decided which planes to buy and no routes have been announced.

So their first order of business?

Why, « spending millions to secure naming rights to Candlestick Park in San Francisco », of course:

‘Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his hunt for new revenue for the cash-strapped city, has proposed entering into a naming rights agreement for the ‘Stick with the San Francisco 49ers who play their home games at the city-owned stadium. The football team, in turn, would make a deal—and probably some money in the transaction—with a company that wants to put its moniker on the wind-blown stadium in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. The mayor’s office now has five companies interested in competing for the sponsorship deal, according to Newsom administration officials. They are: Virgin USA; banking giant Wells Fargo & Co.; Monster Cable Products Inc. in Brisbane; Macromedia Inc., a San Francisco internet and multimedia software firm; and Organic Inc., a digital services firm in San Francisco.’

How ‘bout a three-way deal? Name it Organic Virgin Monster Point. But I digress.

I am mildly curious why an airline with no pilots, planes or routes is negotiating with the City of San Francisco to spend millions to put its name on a crappy football stadium.

Sounds like they’re already off to a great start …

From the Jack Ryan 2004 Website:

‘Jack Ryan on the Defense of Marriage:
‘I believe that marriage can only be defined as that union between one man and one woman. I am opposed to same-sex marriages, civil unions, and registries. I believe that we are all equal before God and should be before the law. Homosexuals deserve the same constitutional protections, safeguards, and human dignity as every American, but they should not be entitled to special rights based on their sexual behavior. The breakdown of the family over the past 35 years is one of the root causes of some of our society’s most intractable social problems-criminal activity, illegitimacy, and the cyclical nature of poverty. As an elected leader, my interest will be in promoting laws and educating people about the fundamental importance of the traditional family unit as the nucleus of our society.’

From The Smoking Gun:

‘In what may prove a crippling blow to his U.S. Senate campaign, divorce records reveal that Illinois Republican Jack Ryan was accused by his former wife, actress Jeri Ryan, of pressuring her to have sex at swinger’s clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans while other patrons watched. … The salacious charge leveled at the politician was made by Jeri Ryan, who has starred in TV’s “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Boston Public,” in a court filing in connection with child custody proceedings (you’ll find a portion of that heavily redacted September 2000 document below). The performer alleged that she refused Ryan’s requests for public sex during the excursions, which included a trip to a New York club “with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.” … The Ryans were married in 1991 and, in November 1998, Jeri Ryan filed for divorce citing “irreconcilable differences.”’

The court filing also states that Jeri Ryan fell in love with another man after she and Jack started having problems, but before the divorce went through.

Traditional. Republican. Family. Values.

Don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out, Jack.

Hello, Senator Obama.

PS: Tristero sums things up nicely:

‘The GOP: home of public sex orgy lovers (Ryan), high-stakes gamblers (Bennett), drug addicts (Limbaugh), adulterers (Gingrich, Hyde), avowed Hitler admirers (Schwarzenegger) and racists (Lott).’

He adds that if that seems an extreme characterization, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the above slings on an hourly basis.

A group of right-wing ‘bloggers, responding to President Gore referring to them as ‘Brown Shirts,’ have proudly donned the mantle and are featuring a logo on their sites which has a photo of Sturmabteilung leader Ernst Roehm on it. A swastika was on there as well, but was removed because it was ‘offensive to some.’ They wear the logo as a badge of honor and slam any naysayers by hiding behind a cover of ‘it’s only satire.’

They also say it’s in the tradition of gays calling themselves ‘fags;’ co-opting the insult robs it of its sting.

While I’m all for that (and it has the added benefit of taggin’ ‘em so you can immediately know they’re fascists without havin’ to read their claptrap), I wonder if they really know what they’re doing? I doubt it.

After all, surely any intelligent individual would pause and think long and hard before identifying (even in the cause of ‘satire’) with the movement which was principally responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people between 1933 and 1945. Right?

I honor his accomplishments, but for god’s sake can we shut up about Lance Armstrong already?

Since I’m starting grad school and parking and transportation around central campus is a pain, I decided to start biking it.

Only problem: My very good and nice and fabulous Bianchi Lynx bike is still in San Francisco because I had problems attaching it to the Jeep securely enough for a 3,000-mile trip to Michigan and so had to leave it behind.

It’ll cost about $150 to ship it and my ex-roomie will have to go to some pains to do it.

In the meantime, I need a really good bike now. I’ve narrowed it down to basically five choices:

• First choice (tie): Marin Bikes Bobcat Trail hardtail alloy mountain or Trek 7500 FX hybrid
• Second choice: Marin Bikes Hawk Hill hardtail alloy mountain
• Third choice: Marin Bikes San Anselmo hybrid street
• Fourth choice: Giant Bikes Cypress LX

Some of my thinking: I like the hybrids, but if we move to Santa Fe or a similar place in a year, it might not be versatile enough. I want disc brakes and the Trek doesn’t have them. The Trek is also $150 or so more than the Bobcat Trail, but I like the wheels better. The others are kind of also-rans. The Hawk Hill is a step up from the Bobcat Trail, but curiously doesn’t have disc brakes.

I took six test rides Tuesday; two at a shop in Chelsea and four at Ann Arbor Cyclery, which was an enjoyable experience. Both places were very helpful and non-pressuring. If I buy a Marin or the Cypress, I’ll buy from AAC, since it’s halfway between here and campus, so if something goes wrong, I have a convenient repair point.

Decisions, decisions.

This appears on the front cover of the hyped-to-death Karen Joy Fowler novel The Jane Austen Book Club (Miss Austen would be most amused by her post-mortem fan club; or maybe mortified).

What does this even mean?

“If I could eat this novel, I would.” — Alice Sebold

Reading it so you don’t have to …..

A full-page ad hawking Toni Morrison’s new line of handsome paperback editions of her novels “with deeply personal forewords reflecting on each work.” (I’ve never been able to finish the first chapter of a Toni Morrison novel. Maybe it’s just me.)

An ad for a new book called How to Have Children with Perfect Teeth. And, no, it’s not about genetic manipulation (I don’t think).

A review of a first novel by a Brit named Paul Burston called Shameless. The novel’s about the gay dating scene, so the title is absolutely appropriate. Apparently the problem with the book (although not a problem for the reviewer, who thinks it’s just dandy) isn’t its title but its content; the reviewer says the book “makes the gay singles scene ‘cute’” (the gay singles “scene” is about the farthest thing from “cute” imaginable) and that the author/narrator is comparable to “Bridget Jones’ gay brother.” Oh, great. Just what we need.

Reviews of four collections of short stories, kind of a departure for the NYTBR. One is by Julian Barnes (“helps sustain a reader’s faith in literature as the truest form of assisted living”), another by E.L. Doctorow (“His is a reasonable imagination”), and one by David Foster Wallace (“Too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man”). One is a first collection by a Canadian writer named David Bezmozgis (“The collection is appealingly anthropological”).

A review of the first volume of the letters of Isaiah Berlin, published by Cambridge University Press (“Merely as a human story, Berlin’s life was astonishing”).

Reviews of a book about the murder of a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga (” … on Oct. 14, 1976, screams pierced the warm, inky Tongan night”) and a book about abuse at a school for the mentally disabled in Waltham, MA, in the 1950s (“documents the Dickensian abuse daily endured by the boys at Fernald and its consequences”).

Last but not least, a very odd essay by Cristina Nehring titled “Books Make You a Boring Person.” Her thesis is that book lovers are dull, pathetic, desiccated snobs, which is curious considering that her essay has been published in what is arguably the single publication that panders to more book snobs than any other in the world. Is it because she shops at Barnes & Noble that she is so bitter? Would a trip to Borders improve her mood? (" ‘Absolutely not,’ I wanted to yell, and fling my Barnes & Noble bag at his feet. Instead, I mumbled something apologetic and melted into the crowd.")

Here’s her key graf:

There’s a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book lovers. Long considered immune to criticism by virtue of being outnumbered by channel surfers, Internet addicts, video maniacs and other armchair introverts, bookworms have developed a semi-mystical complacency about the moral and mental benefits of reading. “Books Make You a Better Person,’’ a banner outside a Los Angeles school proclaims. Books keep kids off drugs. They keep gang members out of prison. They keep terrorists, for all we know, at the gates …. To be a reader these days is to be a sterling member of society, a thoughtful and sensitive human being, a winner.

Actually, come to think of it, this may be her key point:

Books were a mixed bag, and they still are. Books could be used or misused, and they still can be.

Which, is, um, enlightening. Wow. I never knew that a book could be “misused” before. Gee.

“Even a hint of idolatry disables the mind,” Nehring sonorously and pompously intones, reminding us finger-waggingly to be critical readers while making a golden calf of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she quotes three times in the space of two paragraphs. (She also ignores any discussion of a topic that Emerson would have found vital, namely, what is it that books are supposed to do to us? Is reading a book or other text merely a one-sided proposition? Nehring appears to think so.)

Best of all, Nehring is a whiz at straw-man argument. “Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them—or at least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues,” she warns.

I have not met a single person, book-lover or not, who does that, but maybe I don’t know the people that Nehring claims to know. She says, “We all know people who use a text the way others use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds.” Maybe that’s how Nehring uses a text, but I doubt that anybody I know uses any text that way. If anything, books help “stave off” the over-hyper amphetamination of modern culture: they still a mind that is too jumbled with facts and sensory input from cell phones and websites and TiVos to settle down. Books are a meditative experience, not a filling-the-emptiness experience.

“If only we [would] disperse the pious fog that is gathering around book culture,” Nehring sighs. Well, I’d rather have a “pious” book culture any day of the week—a culture that at least makes a pretense of still respecting intellect and history—than what passes for culture in this age of reality TV, screeching pundits, and teen-flick glut, but I suppose that makes me a dull snob.

I can’t speak for myself, not being objective (maybe I do over-venerate books), but the people I work with, go to school with, and am friends with, and most acquaintances I have met, love books for all the usual reasons: books are a complement to life, they make life much richer, they help make life understandable and better to negotiate, but they are obviously no substitute for life, and I have never met anyone who thinks or professes that they are.

The man who exposed serious security flaws in airport security was « sentenced to probation this week »:

‘A college student who says he hid box cutters on airplanes to expose weaknesses in security was sentenced Thursday to two years supervised probation and fined $500. Nathaniel Heatwole also must serve 100 hours of community service and reimburse his parents for up to $500 in legal expenses. Heatwole, 21, of Damascus, Md., told U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm that his intentions were constructive and he never meant to embarrass security officials or put anyone in any danger. But the judge said Heatwole’s actions “produced an opposite effect.” The best way to bring about change is “civilly, rationally, and openly,” Grimm told the student.’

Shame on that activist judge. They should give Heatwole a medal … and jail the people who failed to provide good security at the airports and aboard the ‘planes.

United is reporting that « it lost $94 million in May alone »:

‘United Airlines said in a bankruptcy court filing Thursday that it posted a net loss of $93 million in May its efforts to return to profitability complicated by near-record jet fuel costs. The nation’s No. 2 carrier, which is seeking an additional $500 million in financing after trimming its request for federal assistance, pointed to a $9 million operating profit for the month as evidence its restructuring work is paying off.’

Its restructuring work may be paying off, but UAL CEO Glenn Tilton is telling employees « the hurt will continue to be put on them »:

‘Speaking to employees after submitting United’s slimmed-down request for federal assistance, Tilton said in a recorded message that the company is seeking potential debt and equity financing to cover the $500 million difference from the previous bid. Without specifically mentioning further concessions by workers, he reiterated that United will have to “dig deeper” on costs. “We are going to have to maintain a relentless focus on cost improvement,” Tilton said on the employee hot line. “United has to continue to meet the demands of a competitive marketplace, and cost reduction is going to continue to be a major part of everything that we do,” he said. “We’re going to have to do everything we can to be successful as we exit bankruptcy.”

’… Employees have made $2.5 billion in annual concessions since United filed for bankruptcy-court protection in December 2002, providing about half the company’s estimated $5 billion in lowered expenses. Many fear their pensions will be targeted by any outside investor, particularly with United facing billions of dollars in pension obligations in coming years.’

So they’ve given up $2.5 billion, face the ruination of their retirement futures and are still being warned they will have to give more.

Meanwhile, CEO Glenn Tilton makes how much a year?

Well, he’s apparently taken a pay cut himself, but still makes over a million a year in total compensation according to Forbes, down from around $4 million in 2001.

Bless his heart.

So after all the wrangling and expense, not to mention the Republicans’ largest expansion of the federal government in American history, « airport screening is being returned to the private sector » by the Transportation Sicherheits Dienst:

‘Airports that want to replace government security screeners with privately employed workers can do so by early next summer, the Bush administration told Congress on Thursday. Thomas Blank, assistant administrator at the Transportation Security Administration, told the Senate aviation subcommittee that airports will have three options: remain in the federal system, use a private contractor to hire and train screeners, or run the screening themselves. They can apply for a change in November.’

Oh, this promises to be fun …

Just when I thought I’d never agree with anything Dale Peck said, he goes and says this in an interview with Ellen Heltzel:

Why does literature have to be so boring? And why, when it is funny, does it have to be so juvenile? Dave Eggers does the post-modern, “I’m talking about the book that I’m writing inside the book I’m writing. Isn’t that funny?’’ No, it’s not funny. It’s a lot funnier on “The Simpsons” than it is in Dave Eggers’ book.

It’s somewhat amusing to see that John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that was on Stanford’s Summer Reading List for incoming freshmen when I was getting ready to enter college, is still a fixture—this year it’s on the UC Berkeley Summer Reading List. (Oddly, Stanford doesn’t seem to have its reading list—if it’s still doing reading lists and hasn’t fallen behind Berkeley in that category too—online.)

I didn’t particularly like the novel when I read it back then, partly because it was so cynical. Maybe it’s time to revisit it.

It’s also gratifying to see Samuel Pepys’ diary on the list, though of all the books, including selections by Neal Stephenson and Will Self, I would wager that it’s the least likely to be read.

An Okie brings new meaning to the term ‘Activist Judge:’

‘While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself, state officials charged yesterday in a petition to remove the jurist. According to the below complaint filed by the Oklahoma Attorney General, Donald D. Thompson, 57, was caught in the act by a clerk, trial witnesses, and his longtime court reporter (these unsettling first-hand accounts will make you wonder what’s going on under other black robes). Visitors to Thompson’s Creek County courtroom reported hearing a “swooshing” sound coming from the bench, a noise the court reporter said “sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up.” Thompson, the complaint charges, even pumped himself up during an August 2003 murder trial. The AG’s petition quotes Thompson (pictured above) as admitting that the pump was “under the bench” during the murder case (and at other times), but he denied using the item, which was supposedly a “gag gift from a friend.”’
—The Smoking Gun

The Smoking Gun charmingly titles the article, ‘Here Comes the Judge.’

Thompson is the same judge who in 2002 barred enforcement by the state Health Department of anti-smoking rules in restaurants, then promptly left town for a two-week vacation, dodging all questions. He also issued an injunction at one point enjoining the state from enforcing the voter-approved cockfighting ban. He was reversed both times.

I’d never really listened to the lyrics of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” before (it was playing in the Village Apothecary when I went in yesterday afternoon). Not bad for a pop song, but what unbelievably irritating lyrics: “I’m gonna soak up the sun/Gonna tell everyone/To lighten up.”

God, the combination of Pollyanna-ish reverie and finger-wagging judgmental bossiness is almost overwhelming. And here I’d thought it had just been a mellow Beach Boys ripoff.

Lollapalooza 2004 has been cancelled this year due to crappy ticket sales. Perry Farrell, in a message posted on the festival’s official site, wrote, “It is with heart gripped despair that I inform you of Lollapalooza’s disbandment for the summer of 2004.”

Yes, well.

It seems that unless you’re a crowd-pleasing baby-boom act like The Eagles or Fleetwood Mac or Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen, or you’re a younger-generation draw, nobody’s going to want to shell out the bucks to see you live.

Of course, outrageous ticket costs, crappy live shows, and obnoxious crowd behavior may also have something to do with the trend, but whatever.

So much for alternative rock’s lasting power. This must be the final nail in Kurt Cobain’s coffin, I suppose. Not to mention Morrissey’s.

People like to refer to places like San Francisco, Austin, Ann Arbor, Madison and Berkeley, etc., et al, as leftist bubbles … Ann Arbor is often described as something like ‘50 square miles surrounded by reality,’ or some such nonsense.

Sometimes, it appears there might just be something behind it, I must admit. Case in point tonight: Berkeley:

‘Residents of this left-leaning city will have a chance to vote in November on whether they think prostitution should be a crime. An advocacy group announced Wednesday it had gathered nearly 3,200 signatures, about 1,000 more than needed to get the initiative on the ballot. … Beyond its symbolic value, the ballot initiative would order the police department to give the “lowest priority” to enforcing anti-prostitution laws.’
—SFGate.com

Okay, fine. Many in the rest of Amurrica might say these people are out of touch with reality.

But right-wing fascist middle Amurrica is hardly immune to living-in-a-bubble syndrome itself. Case in point: My ancestral hometown, Duncan, OK, which just finished a week of celebrating the 80th anniversary of the founding of Halliburton, that behemoth much in the news these days.

And the articles in my former employer’s rag, The Duncan Banner, are perfect examples of bubble-ism themselves: they praise the company to the hilt while never once mentioning Dick Cheney or any other nefarious goings-on. A quote from an article entitled, ‘Big Red Flies High’ about a banquet in the company’s honor:

‘State Sen. Daisy Lawler and Rep. Jari Askins, U.S. Congressman Tom Cole and Duncan Vice Mayor Carl Bowers read proclamations issued by their respective levels of government naming June 19 as Halliburton Day in both the city and the state. Askins also read a similar proclamation by Gov. Brad Henry. Cole said he was especially impressed and touched by Halliburton’s many contributions when the Murrah Building was bombed in Oklahoma City in 1995. He talked about Halliburton’s key role in raising the funds for the memorial that now stands at the site.
’“When that tragedy happened for our state and we wanted to memorialize it, do something about it, Governor Keating went down and saw Dick Cheney, when he was the CEO of Halliburton, and said, ‘I’d like for you and your people to lead the fund-raising effort for us.’” Cole noted. “When you go to that memorial and that magnificent tribute to the darkest hour of the country and state’s history, Halliburton helped make it happen.” He also pointed out Halliburton was instrumental in the drive to put a dome on the state capitol building. The company contributed $1 million.
‘Cole added, “I think what I really appreciate the most about Halliburton, as an American and not just as an Oklahoman, is when I was in Iraq last October, and I saw the extraordinary services that you provided to our men and women—food service, supplies, logistics, whatever was necessary, at enormous personal risk and enormous personal sacrifice.”
‘Cole presented Halliburton officials with a certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for its support of the United States military, especially during the recent Iraq war.’

Well, my goodness. Halliburton, savior of Amurrica. There’s not a whiff of real reporting here, and not a whiff of balance. I don’t doubt that Halliburton has done many good things in the last 80 years for many people, myself included. For 20 years, it fed me, clothed me, housed me and paid for my undergrad education; even then, however, it was all through my father’s very hard work in the sheet metal shop of the main manufacturing center.

But I guess I’ve just forgotten over the last 14 years since I was a small town print reporter just how much raw boosterism there is in that job. The reporter would probably have been threatened with tarring and feathering had she brought up Dick Cheney’s millions and the gas price gouging and the ripping off of the taxpayers and the no-bid contracts and the treatment of employees and the breaking of the unions in 1974 and destruction of striking workers and so on.

I know those people around Duncan; they threatened me within an inch of my life (and with literal tarring and feathering) after I wrote an editorial column that had the unmitigated audacity to advocate that Oklahoma schools should concentrate on academics over athletics. I got nasty phone calls, death threats, the works. I was told to never show my face again in a small rural school district; I made a point to attend the very next school board meeting. Nothing happened; I stared them in the face and they melted away like the typical fascist cowards they are. But I digress.

My original point still stands: Most communities are bubbles, no matter how big or small, no matter where they are geographically. It’s a myth perpetuated by the fascists that only left-wing enclaves are bubbles; it’s a way to isolate and marginalize them.

But I guess if we’re all going to live in bubbles, I’d prefer a progressive-to-left one than one so divorced from reality and the wider world and consideration for the common good.

I love Duncan in many ways, on many levels. I wish it didn’t have an inferiority complex and sell itself so cheaply to major corporations like Halliburton, Family Dollar and Wal-Mart. I wish it was able to retain the wonderful small town character and charm and grace evident in its downtown, as opposed to the abomination that is north US 81, jammed with strip malls and big boxes and ugliness with no charm, no grace, no character. It’s been a wonderful place; it could be better.

But it’s still a bubble, every bit as much as Berkeley.

June is much busier in ASquared than May, I’ve noticed. Besides the usual skateboarders and bike riders and summer students, there is now also an abundance of elderly polyester-wearing gawkers making their way through the arches and along the pathways of central campus. The immigrant cab drivers are now waiting for fares outside Michigan Union every day instead of once every couple of weeks. Rollerbladers blithely course down State as though it’s an amusement park palisade. Ambrosia is frequently packed (no rhyme or reason to the crowd patterns, though; it can be empty on a sunny day, packed on a rainy day, or vice versa). The three frumpy Mormon missionaries make their rounds every day like clockwork. The fourth floor of the undergrad library, which was just as frequently deserted as not last month, is now dotted with students as late as 7.00.

It’s a gorgeous, temperate evening. The beagle and I walked down the street and just sat on the lawn for quite awhile, watching things go by.

In the distance, you can clearly hear the UM band blasting away at Hail to the Victors at the practice field. The summer is starting off beautifully.

So how do you like our new clothes? Much better, I hope. Here are some notes about the new design/location:

• You might not have noticed, but our URL is now asquared.airbeagle.NET; thanks to our new Textdrive hosts, I can finally, without extra cost, use the .net domain I’ve been paying for for two years. Since most of our journals are really not commercial endeavours, they belong on .net. Hence the change. Feel free to either update your bookmarks or continue to visit the old site; I’ll keep a redirect going there for quite some time.

• Asquared, as always, looks the very best in Firefox or Safari on both windoze and Mac platforms. If you’re still using that abomination known as Internet Explorer by those complete idiots in Redmond, well, then you pretty much deserve what happens to you. Or was that too harsh? Seriously, the best browsing of any site is with a web standards-compliant browser and Firefox is the best. Some IE issues do exist with this new design: the rollovers of the nav bar won’t work in IE for windoze and there may be some spacing issues. Again, use something other than IE to see asquared or miss out. So sorry; it’s just that every time lately I’ve designed a web standards-compliant site, IE can never render it correctly. And, frankly, I’m fed up with it. Thanks for your understanding.

• The two archives links at left aren’t quite working yet. I still have to restore some old content from the old hosting provider. I should be able to get that working this week. Commenting and permalinking and category archives are working just fine, however.

• Some of the ‘Explore’ links at left won’t work yet because those new journals haven’t been built. I’m working on it as fast as I can and they will all be finished by the time I start grad school for real next Tuesday.

• Thanks, as always for reading us and supporting us with link-backs. We’re happy to be here!

Bill Clinton:

‘I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski.’

George W. Bush:

‘I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.’

Pardon the mess around here, but we’re getting very close to finishing this one off. As of today, you can read the main posts, but other things may be wonkiy or not work. I still have to work on archives and comments. But I’m getting there! Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Yesterday, I left work and it was raining, and it was even approaching cold out. Glad I wore a long-sleeved shirt. Today, on the way to work, it was back to high 70s and high humidity. Glad I got my hair cut today because longer hair and humidity don’t go so well together. Oh, well. I’d rather have schizophrenic weather than monotonous weather any day of the week. Thanks, Michigan weather, for never being boring.

Re the recent cicada infestation, the eminent arbiters of the New York Times have pontifically decreed that it was all a huge hypefest:

This article is based on the latest available scientific information, which is: If you haven’t seen your Brood X cicadas by now, you probably aren’t going to for another 17 years.

Complaints should be directed to the bug experts who predicted that a biblical swarm of periodic cicadas, Brood X, would sweep like a curtain of white noise across the Middle Atlantic region in June. Or at least that is how it sounded to the swarms of reporters who breathlessly predicted that the bug storm of the young century was headed for the region’s windshields.

So: instead of blaming themselves, as usual, the media will find somebody else to blame. I don’t recall reading a single, and I mean a single, article in which a scientist or entomologist quoted said that there was going to be a cicada infestation of biblical proportions. In fact, many scientists I saw quoted said that although there would probably be a significant cicada emergence this year, there was no way of telling how large it would be. The media ignored this cautionary note, or else buried it in the story so it wouldn’t be noticed among the screeching about the cataclysmic invasion of beady-eyed insects.

Scientists, remember, are the ones who urge caution at every turn (for the most part, anyway). The media are in the business of hyping non-events into events and events into catastrophes. It must be enormously disappointing to editors and news programmers east of the Mississippi that the Brood X Emergence was not the Brood X Pestilence.

Fair warning after visiting two Targets in two days and being fed up:

Next time I’m in a store and I hear some fool idiot shouting on her cell phone screaming, ‘Can you hear me now?’ I shall do violence to that cell phone.

Ain’t nobody gonna be able to hear nobody now after I get done stompin’ that obnoxious cell phone into a million pieces …

A nice day (again). Perfect for a drive out to Matthaei Botanical Gardens, where, as you can see in the photos in the previous post, I finally got my cicada fix.

We saw tons of cicada wings littering the pathways, a couple of dead cicadas, and we encountered one actual live cicada sitting on a blade of some kind of weed. Steve tried to pluck it off the weed and it thrummed furiously as it hopped away to another weed. We heard many more in the brush. Probably not millions upon millions, because most are presumably dead by now, but certainly thousands. They all seemed to be clumped in one small area of trees off the beaten path not far from Dix Pond. You could hear their frenzied humming, increasing in intensity, and then it died off. It’s definitely unlike anything I’ve ever heard before in my life.

The cicada I saw was larger than I’d pictured them being.

Matthaei would’ve been a great place to visit even if our goal hadn’t been to hunt out cicadas. It’s a vast and beautiful park. It’s definitely something that I would single out as one of Ann Arbor’s main assets.

The Conservatory was pleasant, full of exotic plant life and topped off with a surprisingly unshowy koi pond.

We saw all kinds of critters on the trails. We saw not one but two deer, one of which must have stood staring at us for over three minutes until we tentatively advanced ever so slightly forward. It let out a fearful (but also somewhat haughty) snort and was instantly gone. We saw hundreds of amazingly colored dragonflies, some bright green like an old soda pop bottle, some black, some black-blue, and a couple with huge white heads and translucent black wings. At first I thought the beating wings I was hearing were cicadas, but they were dragonflies. We saw a couple of skittish chipmunks, one huge brown squirrel, and what looked like a pondful of smallish black fish. There were buzzing things everywhere—flies, gnats, bees, wasps, mosquitoes. You couldn’t really walk anywhere without having to swat something out of your face or ear. Annoying though it was, it was also a sign that the park’s first priority isn’t pleasing its human visitors, which I appreciated.

Of course, humans tend to be by far the most amusing wildlife in settings like this. Apart from the occasional yowls and screeches of kids who hadn’t been given their morning dose of Adderall, Steve and I both chuckled at the spectacle of one woman who, on one of the most gorgeous and temperate days we’ve had in southeastern Michigan in weeks, complained about the weather and whined, “Let’s go back to the house where it’s cool!” As we were rounding the last corner on the way back to the parking lot, a family that was clearly on some sort of staged Father’s Day nature walk looked anything but happy about the whole experience. A couple of frowning teenagers in the group fiddled with the leaves of a couple of the plants on the trail and sulked. The man who was clearly the Head of the Household harrumphed over one of the teens’ attempts at identifying the plant life and barked that it was something else altogether (the implication being, of course, that the kid didn’t know what he was talking about). The coup de grace was the dad practically shouting “Let’s keep moving!” as though the entire family were a group of sullen soldiers on some sort of re-enactment of the Bataan Death March. You have to wonder why people who aren’t prepared to enjoy themselves bother to go to a place like a botanical park, where there are no video games, no TVs, no concession stands, no interactive exhbits, no tour guides to hold your hand, no bells and whistles—where there is nothing but miles of unadulterated, unfiltered, unmediated nature, nature, nature.

Someone wrote a letter that was published in today’s Ann Arbor News bemoaning the (cheap) admissions charge for Matthaei. The examples of activity in the letter, though, were all things you can experience for free. You don’t have to pay anything to walk the trails and see the glories of nature, less than six miles from the center of town. It’s difficult to know what this letter-writer was bellyaching about, unless the whining is based on some secondhand anecdote or some baseless assumption made without actually setting foot in the park’s grounds.

An incredibly beautiful day ….. and surprisingly temperate given the last several days of high humidity.

The most amazing thing I saw today was outside the kitchen window, along with the usual array of unidentifiable birds hopping around in the grass: a bright red cardinal on the telephone wire, standing out against the slate-blue sky. Fantastic.

Reading it so you don’t have to …..

Laura Miller thinks I’m OK – You’re OK and Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, which were on 85% of the bookshelves in California in the 1970s, were “brainy and challenging … by contemporary standards.” (Relevance? The former is being reissued in paperback next month.)

Stephen King is no JRR Tolkien.

David Leavitt thinks that Patricia Highsmith’s final novel (published in Britain in 1995 but not in the States until now) is “pedestrian at best, ungainly at worst.” Funny, you could say much the same about almost everything Leavitt’s written since Family Dancing.

David Fromkin isn’t sure that John Keegan’s book about the invasion of Iraq is on the pulse of history, what with all of those bothersome questions about the “link” between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida and all.

Dick Morris thinks that the Clintons are the embodiment of evil, but he apparently wouldn’t mind a job in Hillary’s administration if she gets elected in 2008.

Helen Fielding’s written a boring new novel about a style reporter who becomes a spy after falling in love with a man who resembles Osama bin Laden and woos her with Cristal.

Charles Taylor is offended that the writer of the new book about Philip K. Dick seems to never have heard of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night or anything by Tom Wolfe.

David Sedaris’s outsized celebrity has left him with nothing to do but cannibalize himself and ponder the fact that his life story has been optioned by an unnamed Hollywood director.

One of the writers of “This Is Spinal Tap” tears Andrew Sullivan a new one for referring to one of the actors in the film as one of its “architects.”

The editor of Kyle Smith’s Love Monkey writes a letter insisting that the book is selling way better than the Book Review claims it is.

And: a review of a new Colm Tóibín novel about Henry James by Daniel Mendelsohn, who has got to be the Book Review’s single most florid and (unexplainably) poorly edited writer.

One sentence in the review has 109 words, a historically inaccurate appositive phrase enclosed in parentheses, and a subordinate clause nested in em-dashes between an uncharacteristically declarative independent clause and what must be the longest, clumsiest, and most turgid coordinated independent clause written since Henry James kicked the bucket.

The sentence also includes the graceless and anachronistic “Atlantic-hopping young manhood,” which is supposed to sound slick but actually sounds vaguely sleazy and would probably make James politely excuse himself from the room to puke.

As to what this convoluted sentence is trying to say, your guess is as good as mine. Mendelsohn manages to consistently and unabashedly violate Strunk and White’s Style Reminder Number 6:

Do not overwrite. Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.

Very humid today (though not that hot). But I have a feeling this is just the beginning. The real pressure-cooker heat days haven’t even started yet. It’s days like this that places like Juneau start looking attractive.

I think we’re finally getting a handle on this TextDrive/TextPattern thing and it’s beyond cool, once they get the jams kicked out.

Now that TextPattern is working again for the most part and the servers are reasonably stable (momentary e-mail hiccup was tonight’s problem), I was able to add the other airbeagle domains that I’ve had for a couple of years but always just had parked, unused, at GoDaddy.

So yet another redesign is in the works for next week, my last free week before I start grad school. And this one is a doozy, involving multiple domains as well as the usual graphical stuff. The plans:

This ‘blog, which is all fiery political and stuff, will move to its own domain: airbeagle.us, which I’ll use exclusively for that kind of thing.

AirBeagle.com will see diminished usage; it will become mainly a site for my resume.

AirBeagle.biz will be the site for information about my communications consulting activities.

The main activity will be centered on AirBeagle.net, which will be a network of our blogs, including aSquared, the education blog about my adventures in grad school and teaching and so on.

I haven’t quite decided what to put on AirBeagle.org; I’m still thinking that one through. The most likely thing is the list of soldiers/sailors sacrificed to the Boy Emperor’s extremism, which I desperately need to update.

I’m also considering StevePollock.info or .us for biographical and more inward-looking blogging.

But we’re already pretty dang narcissistic around here already …

Auto redirects will be put in place so you won’t reach deadends; you’ll just have to watch where you end up and adjust bookmarks accordingly.

It’s all so much higgledy-piggledy fun!

I was wrong when I wrote a while back “Nothing in Washtenaw.” Apparently the cicadas are all over Superior Township. Weird.

There’s a thread over at LISNews about Bloomsbury and James Joyce and Ulysses and the whole hundred-year mark thing. I’m greatly enjoying the history. It’s a nice break from non-stop Reagan worship and electioneering news. But I have to say that, although I had a brief moment a week or so ago when I thought I might be brave and studious and librarian-ish and perhaps more than a little pretentious and try to tackle the vast Joycean behemoth, I stopped in front the shelves on the third floor of Hatcher where all the multifarious Joyce editions and critical commentaries and facsimiles of the original manuscripts reside, and I knelt in front of all those overwhelming books, and I lost heart almost immediately. Too much, too much, there is such a thing as too much of a thing. And such it was. My praises and respects to you, Mr. Joyce, but tackling your masterpiece will have to await another day.

We’re back, it seems. Thanks to some hard effort by David in San Francisco and advice from Jason at TextDrive, the Beagle is back. Did you miss us?

A hot, humid, sauna-like day is just turning interesting … they announced a tornado warning for Washtenaw County and blew the storm sirens in Ann Arbor.

Radar indicates a possible tornado 14 miles west of Chelsea, moving east at 35 mph.

I tried to call Frank at work, but the UM Libraries are evacuating staff and students to the basement of the building.

The beagle is asleep upstairs, but I stood outside as the leading edge of the storm passed. It was quite exhilirating. But then the rain came and, yes, I do know enough to come back inside outta the rain.

Could be an interesting afternoon!

There will be some sorta higgledy-piggledyness on airbeagle.com today and maybe into tomorrow; I’m switching the site to a more sane and less snarky, less corporate hosting provider. Had enough of LunarPages … their trashing of my Movable Type installation and subsequent arrogance about it, plus their ‘maybe Textpattern is okay and maybe it’s not’ and ‘we disabled secure FTP access back in January because we think it has a security hole, but we’re not sure and we’re not bring it back’ were all the last straw.

The new hosting provider is brand spanking new: TextDrive, brought to you by the same good folks who produce Textpattern, the CMS that runs AirBeagle. AirBeagle is the 229th site to be hosted thusly. And we can now say that AirBeagle is hosted by the Oliver Dog and the Hugo Dog, Pompignan, France’s greatest Weimaraners; their dad is TextDrive/TextPattern’s creator, Dean Allen.

If you’re reading this, then AirBeagle is still being hosted by LunarPages. If you come back later and something weird is happening, well, bear with us through the reconstruction/retooling process. And thanks for stopping by!

There will be some sorta higgledy-piggledyness on airbeagle.com today and maybe into tomorrow; I’m switching the site to a more sane and less snarky, less corporate hosting provider. Had enough of LunarPages … their trashing of my Movable Type installation and subsequent arrogance about it, plus their ‘maybe Textpattern is okay and maybe it’s not’ and ‘we disabled secure FTP access back in January because we think it has a security hole, but we’re not sure and we’re not bring it back’ were all the last straw.

The new hosting provider is brand spanking new: TextDrive, brought to you by the same good folks who produce Textpattern, the CMS that runs AirBeagle. AirBeagle is the 229th site to be hosted thusly. And we can now say that AirBeagle is hosted by the Oliver Dog and the Hugo Dog, Pompignan, France’s greatest Weimaraners; their dad is TextDrive/TextPattern’s creator, Dean Allen.

If you’re reading this, then AirBeagle is still being hosted by LunarPages. If you come back later and something weird is happening, well, bear with us through the reconstruction/retooling process. And thanks for stopping by!

The funny thing is that the Ann Arbor News ran an article today indicating that the first Washtenaw cicada sightings have occurred:

The emergence of the periodical cicada in the past week in northeast Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor Township is the first sighting in the state, according to Michigan State University entomology professor Howard Russell ….

They were first sighted last week in Ann Arbor near Oak Trails Montessori School. In Ann Arbor Township, they’ve been spotted near the Matthaei Botanical Gardens on Dixboro Road.

Paul Girard, horticulture assistant at the University of Michigan Matthaei Botanical Gardens, first noticed the mass of “nymphs” (juvenile cicadas) a few weeks ago as they emerged from their underground burrows and started molting. Last week, they started shedding their shells.

“There are millions and millions of them,” he said, against the backdrop of the young male adults’ mating chorus. “They definitely like it when it’s warmer out here, over 65 degrees.”

Their piercing chorus, he said, “sounds like frogs in the spring, but a little different. The first time I heard, it was almost like an old (movie’s) spaceship kind of noise, coming across the sky.”

Coooooool …..

Update: I’m on Cicada Mania (in the June 9 updates section on the main page)! I was the first to send them the Ann Arbor News link about the cicadas, I guess. Woo hoo!

From the ‘Sorry we tortured your uncle, raped your wife, blew your kid’s legs off and destroyed your home and livelihood, but at least we’re giving you cheap gas!’ Department:

We’re paying $2.09 in Ann Arbor for a gallon of gas this week. Meanwhile, « Baghdad drivers are paying 5 CENTS a gallon, » thanks to the billions of dollars we’re sending them:

‘While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline—a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers. Before the war, forecasters predicted that by invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein, America would benefit from increased exports of oil from Iraq, which has the world’s second-largest petroleum reserves. That would mean cheap gas for American motorists and a boost for the oil-dependent American economy.

More than a year after the invasion, that logic has been flipped on its head. Now the average price for gasoline in the United States is $2.05 a gallon—50 cents more than the pre-invasion price. Instead, the only people getting cheap gas as a result of the invasion are the Iraqis. Filling a 22-gallon tank in Baghdad with low-grade fuel costs just $1.10, plus a 50-cent tip for the attendant. A tankful of high-test costs $2.75. In Britain, by contrast, gasoline prices hit $5.79 per gallon last week—$127 for a tankful.

…

The U.S. government paid even more last year for Iraqis’ gasoline—between $1.59 and $1.70 per gallon—when the imports were contracted to Halliburton, the Texas oil services giant formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. … Iraqi drivers protest that the price difference between a gallon of gas in the United States and Iraq is fair because the average Iraqi earns around $1,000 per year, a thirtieth of the average U.S. wage.’

Ain’t it all lovely? Yet one more Neo-Con lie. But, hey. We broke it, we bought it, I suppose.

No cicadas in Philadelphia this year. The Philadelphia Inquirer theorizes that it’s possible that an increase in concrete in areas where cicadas may have laid their eggs in the past 17 years may account for the absence, but an entomologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia says that the outbreaks of cicadas were just as “patchy” in 1987.

According to the Inquirer article, most of the 2004 cicadas are appearing in the forested areas between Baltimore and the DC Beltway. There are tons of cicadas in the suburbs of Philadelphia and in Chester County, but none in the city itself. Almost no cicadas in Nerw Jersey south of Princeton.

And, of course, still nothing in Washtenaw.

[Link courtesy Cicada Mania.]

The hagiography being written (presumably with an eye to sainthood and a spot on Rushmore, as well as his name on everything that will sit still and some things that won’t) claims the dearly departed had the highest approval ratings and was the most beloved president of modern times.’

Facts: The highest approval ratings recorded by the Gallup organization:

Ronald Reagan: 68%

Bill Clinton: 71%

Total term average approval ratings recorded by the Gallup organization:

Ronald Reagan: 53%

Bill Clinton: 55%

Final approval ratings recorded by the Gallup organization in the final weeks of their administrations:

Ronald Reagan:
21-Oct-88: 51%
11-Nov-88: 57%
27-Dec-88: 63%

Bill Clinton:
15-Dec-00: 66%
5-Jan-01: 65%
10-Jan-01: 66%

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

‘Facts are stupid things.’