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Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
A Double Standard on Dissent. The president's party took an early run this week at shutting down criticism with an all-hands-on-deck attack on Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, a Vietnam-era veteran who had the nerve to criticize the diplomatic failures leading up to this war.
"I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war," Daschle said on Monday, "saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country."
The way the Republicans reacted, you'd have thought Daschle had endorsed Saddam Hussein for reelection. "Those comments may not undermine the president as he leads us into war," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert. "And they may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come mighty close."
But a different standard seemed to apply after President Clinton launched his 1999 air campaign in Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians from another dictator. — EJ Dionne, Washington Post
[Follow Me Here...]
10:46:45 PM Permalink
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Orbiter. Orbiter - A Free Space Flight Simulator Starving for a high realism space simulator ever since Microsoft's Space Simulator was discontinued? Look no further than Orbiter, a free realistic space simulator written and maintained by Dr. Martin Schweiger. How realistic? You might want to start off by consulting NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Basics Of Space Flight to get you grounded so to speak. This is a free, non-commercial simulator that uses accurate math and orbital physics (more or less) to try to model space flight. However hard it may appear, after orbiting Earth with the high-res (8192x4096) mod-pack installed, or sitting on the launch pad with the seamless OrbiterSound 2.1b sound environment installed, you will be well rewarded for reading the manual and participating in the dance of the heavens. (Even if all you want to do is fly around the solar system!) [MetaFilter]
Oh boy, this looks like lots of fun. I wish I could afford the time to dig into it.
10:21:00 PM Permalink
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Fortune: There's a Killer App on the Loose--But I'm on the Case. [Tomalak's Realm] [Scott Mace's Radio Weblog]
Well, I got this one several links in the chain down. An interesting piece: the killer app to come will be for managing email: getting rid of spam, sorting stuff, making it accessible. I was reading with interest, but despite a lot of good stuff, I have an aversion to Outlook; I'm a Eudora user (though I think this week, I'll give Outlook a run). Then I saw this paragraph:
The thing I'm most leery of is how these companies (including the one I invested in) plan to thrive. Each product is based on working with Outlook. Makes sense; 70% of office workers in large companies use the program. But it's also unstable and undependable, making it hard to maintain add-ons. And there's nothing to keep Microsoft from just integrating the best parts of these add-ons into future versions of Outlook.
I keep hoping that since they haven't done anything to it for a long time, Qualcomm has a fantastic new version of Eudora on the way. Then there's also Chandler to look forward to.
10:04:44 PM Permalink
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I've always enjoyed the novels of Philip Jose Farmer. I remember reading The World of the Tiers novels in Junior High School. The Image of the Beast/Blown and are radical sexually adventurous novels, as is A Feast Unknown. I've read Jesus on Mars a couple of times; it's a fun strie that pretty much is summed up by the title: a mission to Mars finds Jesus living there, preaching to the natives. His Riverworld series, in a bunch of novels, is a great conceit: everyone who ever lived wakes up on the banks of a great river. It gives Farmer a way to combine some fascinating characters: Mark Twain, Alice Hargreaves (the model for Alice in Wonderland), Nero, and more. The series never seemed to live up to its potential to me, though it was really enjoyable reading, great imagination. Tonight I'm watching the TV adaption on the SciFi channel, and enjoying it quite a bit.
8:13:18 PM Permalink
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Forever Young
We just returned from a preview performance of ACT's Young Conservatory presentation of "Forever Young: The Music of Bob Dylan." My daughter takes some classes at ACT, so we've known about the show for a while.
It was a good, entertaining show. Seeing Bob's songs done by voices other than Bob's is always a little strange to me, given how much of his stuff I've listened to and how many times I've seen him. When covers succeed, and are performed by committed performers, they help remind you of how great the songs are, and can sometimes make you think of them in new ways.
This show consisted of 26 songs, virtually all of them well-known. Probably predicatably, the producer, Craig Slaight, didn't dig too deeply into the catalog for material. All but about a half a dozen songs were from the golden age of the sixties; but again that's probably to be expected, and not a lot different than what you get at a lot of Dylan shows.
Seeing the songs done by teen-agers brought new life to a lot of them; a different perspective. "Positively Fourth Street" fits right into a high school hallway.Though it talks about "many a year past and gone," "Bob Dylan's Dream" is also another young person's song. Others that worked very well for teenagers were "Boots of Spanish Leather," (nicely done as a duet with the boy and the girl taking their respective verses), "All I Really Want To Do" (a girl rejecting some suitors). I greatly enjoyed these performances, plus "Ring Them Bells," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and more. With only a couple of exceptions, the songs were arranged for piano, and even when I didn't enjoy the performances a lot (rare), I liked the piano.
There are some lesser-known songs that would have fit in well here. "Trust Yourself," for example would have fit in well with some of the points they were making, and "With God on Our Side" would have fit in well with the times; I think the performers would have done well by these songs.
The songs were generally "staged," or acted out. Most of the time, this worked well, and gave the performers something to do on stage (since they were generally only singing, not playing as well). The performers often bought out himor in songs that is all too often missing. sometimes the staging was distracting and beside the point. "Mr. Tambourine Man," though nicely sung, suffered from too-literal. Also, interspersed between most of the songs was some stuff from R.D. Laing, all about relationships and growing up, etc. While this was generally apposite, it was ofte pretty obvious; Dylan said it all much better than Laing, and without coming out and saying it directly. Since Laing seems to be a young person's writer, though, it probably appeals more to the performers and the rest of the audience than it does to me.
At its best, this show reminded me of how I felt when I heard this material as a teenager. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and Blonde on Blonde were the first Dylan albums I really inhabited, and the former really seems to be a young person's album (especially given Dylan's age when he wrote and recorded it).
All in all, I enjoyed this quite a bit. You get to know the performers, and several of them are very good. They are committed to the material, and do it well (and make no more lyric mistakes than you'll generally hear at a Dylan concert). If you're in the Bay Area, and are curious, it's not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
5:28:14 PM Permalink
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Attempts to liberate the Middle East, to bring it democracy, are a series of failures going back to Napoleon , who marched into Cairo declaring,... [Arts & Letters Daily]
An early quick victory with "coalition" troops welcomed with dancing in the streets is something to be applauded and hoped for. It's good sto see that even in crowded Baghdad the missile strikes seem very targeted. But even the Wall Street Journal who seems to see Dubya in near Messianic terms, realizes that his loftier visions are not too likely to come to pass.
Napoleon proclaimed a similar new era of equality and respect for "true Muslims" as he marched into Cairo in 1798, killing a thousand members of Egypt's ruling caste. He was accompanied by 100 French scientists, researching an encyclopedia and spreading European "enlightenment" to bemused Egyptian intellectuals.
"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion," said Napoleon as he entered Cairo. "Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!"
Napoleon's real goals involved France's colonial rivalry with Britain. He sought to outflank the British and frustrate their efforts to find a new route to India. But the French committed a fatal error, repeated by nearly all Western powers since: attempting to divide and rule by appointing minority groups to govern hostile majority populations.
9:05:08 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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