I'm 4 years late on this, but Brian Wilson presents SMiLE is an amazing, amazing album. Everyone said it was at the time, but I didn't believe it could be, the story was too good to be credible, I guess. Reflexive cynicism really does get in the way.
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(3)
10:36:31 AM,
Monday 22 September 2008
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I just did the 50 mile loop of hub on wheels, the annual ride around Boston. Took me a bit over 5 hours, with a flat tire in the middle. I had never ridden more than 35 before, and really haven't been cycling much this year. Thankfully the last 15 miles were along the waterfront. The very best thing about the ocean is that it is flat. After 25 miles, my ability to climb hills was just gone. Next time I'll pace myself better. Keeping up with the spandexed people for the first 5 miles was not worth it. 18mph was not sustainable, and the difference in exertion between 18 and 14 is in no way proportionate to the difference in speed. Next time, I'm already thinking about next time. What's wrong with me?
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(1)
02:47:46 PM,
Sunday 21 September 2008
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Last Huey Long related post... Blue Ribbon BBQ sells potlikker! I have never had potlikker. It seems like the sort of thing that just about has to cure a cold. Look for a review later. Meanwhile, here's a newspaper clipping from the IHT...
1931: Corn Bread Battle
NEW YORK: The north heard echoes today [Feb. 19] of the corn pone controversy which is raging unabated below the Mason-Dixon line where several eminent southerners far from their native heath aired their views for the press. The issue, raised first by Governor Huey P. Long of Louisiana and the Atlanta "Constitution," is whether the pone should be dunked in "pot likker" or whether the "pot likker" should be poured over the bread after the latter is crumbled. Irving S. Cobb, originally of Paducah, Ky., the author of "Eating in Two or Three Languages," became serious for one of the two or three times in his life. He was raised on pone and "pot likker" the proper way: to butter the pone while it is hot and eat it between sips from the mug, said Mr. Cobb. Emily Post refused her view on pone-eating etiquette, declaring it a case of "when in Rome, do as the Romans do." If dining with a dunker, dunk, if with a crumbler crumble, was the gist of the etiquette authority's counsel.
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(1)
05:33:52 PM,
Tuesday 16 September 2008
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I have spent a fair amount of time playing Spore and still have no idea if I like it. Obviously writing the creature editor, and making everything flexible to work with anything you could make, was a fantastic project. But the game, eh. I'm to the tribal mode, and it's 3rd rate WarCraft, with a clunky interface, and I never liked WarCraft in the first place. Cell mode was a deeply mediocre arcade game with flashy graphics. Creature mode was just an excuse to play with the creature editor, but the creature editor is so awesome that we'll call that a success, but it worried me a bit, it was the sort of deeply thoughtless gameplay only tolerable to half-conscious obsessives of the sort who got into the Sims. The 'genetic' aspect of the game is non-existant to the point where it could just as well have been written by Creationists, and seems like it may well have been written by LaMarckeans.
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(6)
06:10:34 PM,
Sunday 14 September 2008
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Reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It's like a book that was written specifically for me: Jane Austen meets english folklore, set during the Napoleonic wars, with Terry Pratchett's footnotes. The prose is like cold crisp lettuce. It isn't as sharp as Austen, but it aspires to be, it coopts it shamelessly, with great big flashing signs pointing out that it's Austen-like, and it's awfully good. Though I suppose I was similarly delighted at this point with 'To Say Nothing About the Dog" so I should wait to see if it can maintain the brilliant clarity it has so far. Just went and looked at the lists for the Hugo and Nebula. The Hugo has a much better track record on novels.
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05:27:15 PM,
Sunday 14 September 2008
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Hey! Internet! Who among you has lived in a vertical townhouse type place, with shared walls but no shared floors/ceilings? Is the noise level/privacy significantly better than a more horizontal apartment? We're dabbling in the shallow end of the single-family real estate market around here, and my determination not to buy a condo is starting to erode.
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(6)
11:24:52 AM,
Sunday 14 September 2008
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Started reading The God That Failed, a collection of 6 autobiographical essays from 1950 by ex-communists about why they became and later renounced communism. I hadn't ever quite realized that Freud and Marx both appeal to the same target demographic of self-important angst-ridden egomaniacal windbags, but once you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world. (This is in response to the 1st essay, by Arthur Koestler ... I don't think I'll bother running out and reading his novels)
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(3)
01:13:41 PM,
Thursday 11 September 2008
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Finished the Huey Long Biography. It's a wonderful book. I suppose it would be generally catagorized as a sympathetic biography, but I don't really believe in any other kind. Almost everyone is a decent human being inside their own head; books about monsters have lies at there center (I'm thinking in particular of the Penguin Lives Napoleon). It is a great place to think about the limits and purpose of democracy, and what sorts of compromises to political reality are needed, and whether we actually want genius and greatness in our politicians. I want to read something about Harold Washington next, I think; they seem like two different approaches to the same problem, neither of them completely successful. He was far, far more principled than I would have thought possible. There's a kind of justice, though, that a politician who lived and breathed the politics of personal destruction should be remembered mostly through the pictures painted by his worst enemies. It's hard to say a 900 page book should have been longer, but it does end very abruptly with his death. The closest it comes to discussing the long-term effect he had on Louisiana politics is Huey Long's own fears on the subject. (He was rightly worried what would happen to the system he established in other hands). Just as a story, it's woefully incomplete. It really isn't at all clear what would have happened if he had lived. Though, unlike many political assassinations, it really does seem like there's no way he could have. Someone was going to kill Huey Long. Still not very interested in reading any of the novelizations of his life, though it's very clear why they were written. Anything seemed possible in 1935.
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(4)
11:55:28 AM,
Tuesday 9 September 2008
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I was wondering about the McCain slogan: Country First. It's vaguely unusual, saying country rather than America. But then, America First has a rather mixed history.
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(1)
08:07:30 PM,
Monday 8 September 2008
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Audio from Huey Long's Share our Wealth speech in 1935.
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(1)
07:15:27 PM,
Monday 8 September 2008
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There are signs near the ocean for Russells farms, nice little homemadey farmstandy signs, red on white, saying "pick your own apples". You could add the word "damned" in quite easily. However, the apple-picking public probably wouldn't find this as amusing as I do.
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(1)
03:54:21 PM,
Sunday 7 September 2008
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I'm ready for this storm to break. It's been gray and dank all day, with the wind coming from the wrong direction.
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(1)
07:05:37 PM,
Saturday 6 September 2008
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site & script courtesy of Moss
