HBO smackdown

I'd rank the quality of HBO's dramas as follows:

1. The Wire
   
2. Deadwood
   
3. The Sopranos
   
4. Entourage

Agree? Disagree? Where would Weeds fit? Six Feet Under? How many consecutive sentences can end in a question mark?

Bzzzzzz

Do you people know about mosquito tones?

The short version, A tone outside the audible range of hearing of most people over 30. This means that you can get phone calls and receive text messages in class or school without teachers hearing it.

Follow the link for sample tones, but count me a skeptic. As a fuddy duddy 36 year old, they say I'm only supposed to hear the tones up to 14.9khz. As it turns out, though, I can hear every tone up to 22.4khz. Except, that is, for 15.8khz where there's either a hole in my hearing or my speakers.

Fact checking

The federal excise tax on gasoline generates annual revenues which equal approximately 2/3 of the amount the federal government spends yearly on highways.

Please note: (1) Federal monies for road building and maintenance are not limited to highways, so the total federal spending on road building and maintenance exceeds excise tax revenues by more than the 50% that these figures taken alone would indicate; and, (2) The federal gasoline excise tax is not used exclusively for highways, so contributions from the general fund amount to more than 1/3 of the federal highway budget.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

---

Addendum:

dr: I think public transportation should be free. Actually, no. There's research showing that people undervalue free services, so there should be a nominal charge.

sp: But then how would you pay for public transit? Taxes on people who don't use it? That wouldn't be fair.

dr: But we already pay taxes for lots of services that we don't use. For example, lots of federal dollars go to building and maintaining roads. So we're already subsidizing transit.

sp: All of the money used for roads comes from gasoline taxes.

dr: That's ridiculous. Do you have any idea how much money the federal government spends on roads?

sp: The gas tax is really high. That's why gas is so expensive.

dr: The gas tax isn't high, and it isn't why gas is expensive.

sp: nyah! nyah!

Bowling alleys all look the same

I think suburbia is a great (maybe the great) American socioeconomic achievement, whose virtues far outweigh its vices, and that using the levers of government to encourage families to leave the suburbs would represent a deep betrayal of what I take to be the heart of the American Dream. (Which is a cliche, sure, but also a reality.) When it comes to global warming, therefore, I'm all for telecommuting and fuel-efficient cars and various other ways to reduce our carbon footprint; I'm not for any plan that stands athwart suburbanization, yelling stop. |Ross Douthat|

But what is this great thing about suburbanism that makes it 'the heart of the American Dream'? Ross doesn't specify, but here are a few possibilities:

• Good schools
  
• The opportunity to own one's own house
  
• That the house has a yard
  
• Safe neighborhoods
  
• A final factor which shall remain unmentioned, but which I shall evoke by asking you to imagine the filling of an Oreo cookie

That's all I can think of. For what it's worth, I tend to think that good schools, lawns, and safe neighborhoods are the main things that pull people out to the suburbs and that except for lawns all of those things are unmitigated goods. But I also think that we could make urban schools better and urban areas safer if we had a mind to. As for owning one's own house, I have to ask: is it really so much less satisfying to own a condo?

Addendum: The trick is to follow the links.

For Kotkin, these are all good things, overall. The suburbs are a triumph, not a torture chamber: They're the place where "we've created the first mass middle class in the history of the world where people own their own land and their own homes," which is an achievement to be celebrated and sustained, rather than denigrated and abandoned. People love living in them: Suburbanites are happier and enjoy a more vibrant civic life than other Americans, and it's not just bigoted whites hiding out in gated communities; immigrants, in particular, are voting for the suburbs with their feet, to the point where the best ethnic cuisine in the country is increasingly served way out in the exurbs. And America's more suburbanized, multipolar cities are democratic in a way that places like New York and Boston and San Francisco aren't, because middle and working-class families can afford to live there, and there's none of the social bifurcation that divides, say, Manhattan between the super-rich and the service-sector poor who wait on them. Suburbs were originally championed as a progressive innovation, Kotkin pointed out, by everyone from Engels to Thomas Carlyle to H.G. Wells, and in spite what Desperate Housewives, Weeds, American Beauty, The Ice Storm, Pleasantville, and a thousand more chronicles of bourgeois anomie would suggest, their expansion remains a sign of progress rather than the reverse.

Dilemma

On the one hand, this looks like just the kind of self-consciously artsy fartsy film that makes me want to soil myself. On the other hand, it's hot today, and if I go to the movies after work my apartment might be tolerable by the time I get home.

I suppose I could go see SiCKO again.

Sincerity is the new irony

"My position is irony is dead (...) but at the same time, just to return to old-fashioned sincerity, and particularly the kind of sentimentality that that draws in with it...we don't need it. So that's why we've created the New Sincerity. A perfect example of the New Sincerity is Evel Knievel. There's no way to take Evel Knievel literally. It's impossible. The man has a leather jumpsuit and he drives a rocket car. The leather jumpsuit has red, white, and blue stars and stripes on it. It's absolutely preposterous. On the other hand, there's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel ironically. He's too awesome. He has--I don't know if we've mentioned this--a leather jumpsuit with the Stars and Stripes on it and a rocket-powered car. That's why we appreciate Evel Knievel with the New Sincerity."

link

It's post-postmodernism. It gives you the ability to be in a Journey tribute band - and really mean it.

John Derbyshire agrees with me

... almost.

The main reason the 1950s looks so good to so many of us is that in moving from the old order to the new, we lost much of our civilizational confidence. You may say that that confidence was misplaced, or an illusion; you may even say that it was obnoxious, and good riddance to it [yeah, something like that --ed]; and you may be right on all points. There is something awfully attractive about civilizational confidence though. Like innocence, once gone, it can't be recaptured. Those of us who recall it shouldn't be blamed for missing it.

The lack of confidence might have began with the dirty, stinking hippies, but at least Derb and the gang still had the Cold War to keep them going. Without the Cold War, they are really in a fix.

But is it good on rice

Oh my god, they're breeding an army.

gymnosophist

[Origin: 1400–50; late Middle English from Latin 'gymnosophistae', Indian ascetics from Greek 'gymnosophistaí', naked philosophers]

n.
One of a group of Jainist philosophers, existing from ancient times to c1000, characterized by refusal to wear clothes and the abandonment of caste marks; a member of the Digambara sect.

Annals of strange behavior

While walking around this afternoon I came across a man standing on a street corner taking pictures. His camera was a lot like my dad's old Pentax, so naturally I looked at it pretty closely while waiting for the light to change. It had what looked like, at first glance, a long telephoto lens. But it wasn't! I guess you could call it a periscope lens. The glass at the end was fake. Or, rather, it was real glass but it wasn't a lens. Instead, there was an opening near the end with an angled mirror peeking through it. He was pretending to take pictures of something across the street, but was actually taking pictures of the people who stood next to him while waiting for the light to change. Odd.

She's not bitter

`Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again -- the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics -- the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy -- although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust -- could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem -- but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.

link, probably via boingboing.

Quote of the day

"As with so much of the Clinton presidency, the act was tawdry but unthreatening to a Republican Form of Government." -- Sanford Levinson

It was not I that sinn’d the sin, the ruthless Body dragg'd me in

• Kung Fu Monkey -- L33T Justice (via)
  
• The Phil Nugent Experience -- Gabba Gabba (via)
  
• Walt Whitman -- The Singer in the Prison

You behave son or we'll throw away the key

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush was asked directly how he could be certain that all 120-odd executions he has presided over as governor of Texas were carried out against guilty defendants. He replied that he was, indeed, certain that nothing like what had happened in Illinois had happened in Texas on his watch. "Maybe they've had some problems in their courts," he said. "Maybe they've had some faulty judgments. I've reviewed every case, . . . and I'm confident that every case that has come across my desk, I'm confident of the guilt of the person who committed the crime." |source|

---

"In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is. And, you know -- yes, sir."
|George W. Bush, May 31, 2005|

---

"I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

"My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting."
|George W. Bush, July 2, 2007|

Morgellons Desease update: I got your vector right here

Interestingly, delusions, such as contagious diseases, can be spread from one susceptible person to another susceptible person. This is how the Internet can serve as a "vector" or transmitter of illness.

Sociologist Robert Batholomew recently suggested the "World Wide Web has become the incubator for mass delusion and it (Morgellons) seems to be a socially transmitted disease over the Internet."

While it's true that there has been an internet explosion of snake-oil treatments trying to cash in on folks who think they have Morgellons, I think it's a little early to conclude that the whole thing is a hoax. Let the CDC do their job, and then report on it. Jeeze.

Authority and influence

Related:

• Garfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
• The Bellman: America!

Jughead changed my life, and then Goober changed it back

I don't know if there are any hipsters out there wearing one of these hats ironically, but I caught a few minutes of the Andy Griffith Show last night, and Goober wears it with the kind of sincerity usually reserved for a ball cap or a kippah. Perhaps this was meant to reveal something about Goober's character. For my part, I couldn't quite get my head around the choice.