Realm of the Wombat

From the Hardball Times:

Seriously, has anyone else noticed the parallels between Bonds’ media paranoia and Richard Nixon’s? Consider…

• Nixon mentioned his children and their dog Checkers in a nationally televised speech in a bid for sympathy, Bonds did the same thing with his son.
• Nixon’s VP called the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bonds has called them something similar, though less alliterative.
• Nixon had Watergate, Bonds has Steroidsgate.
• Nixon was forced to retire early. Bonds???

- Studes

We can only hope America looks back at Barry as fondly as we remember Tricky Dick.

The Bay Area is an extremely fuel-consumption conscious culture for two reasons. First, prices are upwards of $2.50 per gallon, which isn’t the highest in the nation, but still pretty bad. Furthermore, people here are just very environmentally aware. Therefore, the area is flooded with Priuses, Civic Hybrids, Mini Coopers, and other efficient vehicles. There’s also a significant number of cars modified to run on biodiesel. The one below advertises that fact. Apparently it’s not very difficult, or expensive, to have your engine converted. Then you can run your car on vegetable oil waste, which you can usually get for free from restaurants and the disposal of which is a problem in its own right. I’m not getting the sled (II) modified any time soon, but maybe if I still had sled I, I’d consider it.

For more information see: Make your own biodiesel and the National Biodiesel Board

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Melissa inquires:

P.S. Do you like how I used the word “dig”? Thank you, Lenny Bruce. Although, I may not be hip enough to pull it off. Hmm…

Then there was this exchange between Odie and I:

Jer: …but I don’t like hot dogs.
Odie: Who hates hot dogs? Are you a communist?
Jer: I got 566 hits in google for the search “‘I hate hot dogs’” although I can’t confirm their political affiliation.
Odie: Oh google is a real good source of authority: I got 15,500 hits for the google search: “I hate America.” Some of them have to be overlaps. Although, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have just done that search on a federal government computer.
Jer: That means for every person that hates hot dogs, there are 30 that hate America. I’d say for such a crude measurement, it’s pretty close.

This is the best post I’ve ever made.

I started a new habit today. It might be a little pricey, but I think it’s worth it. I call it “New Music Fridays.” This plan was inspired by the $2 discount with a student ID on Thursdays and Fridays at Rasputin. They have a ton of used and cheap stuff there, so ideally the discos will be in the $7 range.

So after considering several options from my list, I finally settled on Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True. I realized at the concert the other day that I don’t have nearly enough of his music. With Alison, Watching the Detectives, and Red Shoes, it’s generally hailed one of his best. This album was the first of 12 in a ten year period (1977-1986), which I consider an amazing accomplishment.

Melissa ponders:

If Jesus told W to go to war with Iraq, don’t you think He also would have told him that government employees should have Good Friday off? I thought we were using faith [i.e. religion] to make the rules around here, people!

We must cultivate our garden.

A book dripping with satire? I think I’m going to like it. But only if it’s 100 pages and not 1000, which is why I read Candide and not Don Quixote. Voltaire seems like an interesting guy. He’s quite pragmatic, which I like, but his ideal government would be a benevolent monarch, which I don’t. It’s not so much the benevolent monarch I’m worried about as much as the subsequent malignant one.

Something that came to mind while reading Candide is that I don’t think authors criticize their adversaries so openly anymore. Maybe it’s that I just don’t read philosophy. It could also be that today nobody has writing ability required, or takes the time, to denounce their enemies in a novel. It’s easier to just call your book Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man or Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.

Here are a couple pics I took on the hike in to Muir Woods when Mike, Jack, and Liz were here. Feel free to use them as desktop backgrounds as Mike suggested, but if I see these as postcards for sale somewhere, I’ll track you down. I have the full size for you to cut down as you like or pre-sized 1024×768 images if you trust my judgement.

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In the fashionable nightclubs and finer precincts
Man uses words to dress up his vile instincts
Ever since we said it
He went and took the credit
It’s been headed this way since the world began
When a vicious creature took the jump from Monkey to Man
- Monkey to Man (The Delivery Man)

Elvis. The Paramount. It doesn’t get much better than that. The other time I saw Elvis was at the Greek Theater, and it was touted as a greatest hits tour, so I knew almost every song. This was definitely an album tour as the first 5-6 songs were off newer albums, none of which I had heard. Sporting trademark black plastic framed glasses and silver reflective shoes, he then pulled out a couple of classics with “Oliver’s Army” and “I Don’t Want to go to Chelsea.” The band played for two hours with essentially no stops. Only twice did Elvis really make any sort of statement, and the time between songs ranged from zero, as in the transition into “Watching the Detectives,” to 5 seconds as he’d run to pick up the next guitar from the crew. They sent us home with “Peace, Love, and Understanding” and “The Scarlet Tide,” which was uplifting for me in these politically inane times. There was no encore, but none was necessary. Great show.

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You find out there were many worse jobs in history.

He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.

This is Odie’s favorite book. He described it as 3A Keough Hall, our dorm section at Notre Dame. It’s tough for me to compare the marginalized cast of Cannery Row to the middle/upper class residents of Keough, but I see where he’s coming from. They’re a group of people thrown together essentially by chance. Each has a pretty distinct personality, but they coexist in harmony, for the most part. Furthermore, they’re looking out for each other, sometimes failing, but always with the best intentions. Hopefully Odie will comment to see how close I am to the mark.

One other line that I loved:

There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be.

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

I set out to read Orwell’s classic to compare to Jennifer Government. This battle of negative utopias pitted all-powerful government versus all-powerful corporate structure. In the final analysis, they’re remarkably similar. Consider:

• Ability to eliminate individuality. In both societies, the power has effective control of the middle class. Interestingly, in 1984, the lower class (the proles) have the most individual freedoms. They have no power other than their numbers, and little inteligence, so the government spends little effort controlling their thoughts. In Jen Govt, freedom seems to stem from the ability to pay for it.
• Demonization of foreign ideas. In Jen Govt, people are taught that the strong governments of western Europe are evil because they tax the workers to give money to the lazy. The people in 1984 essentially don’t know anything about the other two superpowers of the world, but their homeland of Oceania is perpetually at war against them, so they must be evil.
• Get ‘em while they’re young. Children are infused with the ideals of the prevailing power in school. The children of 1984 are brought up to be agents of Big Brother, spying on their parents for any incidents of thoughtcrime. The schools of Jen Govt are sponsored by Mattel, McDonald’s, and other companies and teach the virtues of capitalism/consumerism while advertising their wares.

I could find more, but you get the point. Extremism is bad. Of course, these are both works of fiction, and our world is a bit more in the middle, but it’s good to keep an eye out for the symptoms on both sides.

I first heard “pedantic” on a Seinfeld episode (The Big Salad) when George’s girlfriend describes a New York columnist as pedantic. George replies, “He can be pedantic. He can be pedantic!” I saw the word again reading 1984, so I thought I should finally learn what it means:

adjective
Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules
e.g.: a pedantic attention to details