I'm currently listening to "Upward Over the Mountain" by Iron and Wine on my new iPod headphones. The in-ear ones, as opposed to the standard earbuds that come with it. Dang. They fit pretty snugly, so they do a great job of blocking outside noise, and the quality is just to die for. I'm talking this is at least as good as my surround sound at home.
I also got a car charger for the thing, so I can listen to music for more than 8 hours at a stretch while on the go. This is important, because in 4 hours and 37 minutes, I will be deparating Chattanooga for Pennsylvania, where I will be seeing my family and a friend I haven't seen for months. I will be driving back Sunday afternoon. Obviously, having the iPod crap out midway through Virginia like it did last time is simply not acceptable. Now we're good to go.
The one day I decide to go into blue chips the market takes a dive for the second day in a row. Yay. I'm down four points and change from 9:30 this morning, amidst strong earnings reports and good economic indicators. Whee.
...is now Charles Taylor of Salon describes Quentin Tarantino's lastest offering, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and I think he's right. The film was brilliantly executed, masterfully shot, and skillfully directed, but at the end of it I was left with a massive "So what?". The only conclusion I was able to draw from the films is that yes, Quentin Tarantino is indeed a film geek who doesn't necessarily like the way the film-going public tends to enjoy action flicks. Okay then. I'm glad we got that out of the way. As far as I could tell, Kill Bill was simply an exercise to find out exactly how many references and homages Tarantino could stick together without a break. The answer? Way too damn many to have them be anything other than references to things Tarantino thinks are cool.
I'm at a show right now. It's at some Nashville venue, in what appears to be a more skillfully executed version of Chattanooga's Fathom club. Not that this is a good thing, but it does have the advantage over it's lesser brethren of being a halfway decent venue.
Tonight it's Pedro the Lion, Ben Kweller, and Death Cab for Cutie. Guess which one I'm here for. Hint: it's not the first two. Pedro finished his set about twenty minutes ago, and he was good. I've not actually listened to him before, and after tonight I'm going to have to do something about that. Ben Kweller just went onstage, at which point I left the show for the lobby and found this terminal w/lovely net access. The reason I'm out here and not in there? Because Ben Kweller, an artist with whose person and work I was previously unfamiliar, is a pretentious little wanker. He jumped on stage like he was the shit, and proceeded to cover "Ice Ice Baby". What the hell ever. Death Cab should be on in half an hour or so, and then things will be okay.
...of a few people I used to know when I read this. I'm sure most of the people I know would be reminded of someone in their past. "There but for the grace of God..." I suppose.
The guys at MacHall have put out an absolute gem. I really hate the whole hippie thing (damn it people, the 60s ended four decades ago, and that was a good thing!), and things like this just make me happy. The following description is just great: a "hippy-dippy commune swarming with rejects from the Summer of Love... too full of ideals and peyote to unwedge their Birkenstocks from their own asses." The current Republican leadership annoys and scares me, but I'll take them over the Dems any day.
Sam Brown draws the wonderful explodingdog.com website, previously mentioned by the estimable Rob. The Morning News has an interview with Sam, as well as a story by Kevin Fanning illustrated by Sam, and a shorter piece. Good stuff.
Some researcher at Cornell just published a study finding that poverty is linked to numerous, broad-spectrum psychological, health, and socio-economic hazards in children. I don't know about you, but this strikes me as being on the excruciating side of painfully obvious.
I ran across an idea recently, I think on Wikipedia, but I don't exactly remember, that I liked. It has to do with categorizing the political spectrum in terms of whether one prioritizes means or ends.
The Machiavellian "ends justify the means" has an inversion, but one that isn't commonly expressed "the means justify the ends". I think that if you put these statements in opposition to each other, you can get a pretty accurate image of the political spectrum.
For example, the "liberals" on this spectrum tend to have an "ends justify the means" mentality, which is to say that they seek just ends over just means. They are more concerned with equal possession of wealth, but not very concerned with ensuring that the means used to arrive at this homogeneity in wealth are just. They are more than content to "rob from the rich to give to the poor", regardless of what the rich might tend to think about this, because they value the justice of equal amounts of wealth over the justice of acquiring that wealth. Likewise, observe that it has been historically been liberals who tend towards revolution, for the justice of their goal is seen as being important enough legitimize any means necessary for attaining it. The typical "bleeding-heart liberal" can be found here, but it is only a short step from "bleeding-heart" to "bloody-heart".
On the contrary, "conservatives" on this spectrum pursue a "means justify the ends" mentality. They are more concerned with ensuring a just method of attaining and maintaining wealth than in who actually has it. They strenuously object to "robbing the rich," because they value the justice of distribution more than equality of ends. In essence, the end is legitimized by the means used to produce that end. Thus, if a properly functioning legal system produces an inequality in society, they are generally more than happy with that, because the end was arrived at justly, even if justice of the end as such is in question.
The drawbacks to both of these positions should be obvious. The extreme "liberal" can be found in totalitarian states, terrorist revolutionaries, and anarchists. They are willing to trample over the people they are nominally attempting to save in order to bring about their cherished ends, more often than not rendering those ends out of reach in the process of pursuing them. Likewise, extreme "conservatives" can be found in hard-nosed capitalists who, provided the forms are observed, care nothing for the poor and disadvantaged. They are willing to accept any end, provided it was reached in a legal manner.
I think this could be a useful tool for evaluating the political philosophy of political candidates.
Yeah. This is apparently my first post in almost a month. Unlike some of my cohorts I am now unable to blog at work, which kind of takes a big chunk out of the day, you know?
On March 15 I transitioned to the main service floor, where I now spend 40 hours a week either answering the phone or waiting for it to ring. It's not bad, really, because I mostly enjoy helping people with their insurance problems, and in between I can read. But not surf. At my place of employment, surfing on company time can and does get you fired. So I've finished four novels in the past two and a half weeks. None of them were all that good - pulp sci-fi and fantasy mostly - but that's because I'm interrupted every few minutes. Anything of real quality would suffer under that kind of dissolution, but lighter fare works just fine.
This morning I came across this post by Josh Ellis and it resonated, so I linked to it. The longer I'm out of school, the more the whole artist mystique pisses me off. As much as a little sensitivity is a great thing, there's a limit.
On a lighter note, I also give you this. Relevant quote: "Let's face it: any script kiddie with a pair of pliers can put Red Hat on a Compaq, his mom's toaster, or even the family dog. But nothing earns you geek points like installing Linux on a dead badger."