This is a difficult election for me. I have a longstanding dislike for “Maverick” John McCain and I find Barrack Obama very likable. I didn’t want McCain in 2000, and he’s done nothing to change my mind since. Obama is a very appealing candidate and I can think of several reasons to support him.
So what’s the problem? Why is this so difficult for me? In brief: A McCain administration, IMHO, will be just another disappointment for conservatives and further erode the credibility of the Grand Old Party; An Obama administration scares the bejesus out of me politically, but is likely to be at least competent in the execution of its agenda.
I just realized exactly how self-indulgement my previous post (You Are Your Aesthetic) was. My appologies to anyone who actually read it. And my advice to anyone visiting this blog is to skip that post. My next post should be at least a little more interesting.
Soobee recently linked to this online quiz which tells you “what your taste in art says about you.”
I wasn’t suprised at all by my results: I’ve known for a long time that I favor Abstract, particularly Cubism, with a strong secondary preference for Impressionism paintings.
I’ll tell you later what this supposedly says about my personality, but I really want to talk about another aspect of this.
After taking the test I found myself thinking about why I love abstract and like impressionist art. I’ve taken a lot of flack over the years for my attachment to Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Gris, Miro, Kandinsky, lèger…
My conservative friends believe that it is either an affectation or that I have been seduced and misguided by those leftist with whom I occasionally associate. But that is not the case.
I know what I like and, in a sudden moment of unexpected lucidity on the M66 bus the other day, I realized why Abstract, particularly Cubist art speaks so insistently to my soul, and why Impressionist art is so appealing to me. Continue reading
I’ve checked my connections: I’m getting to my router at top speed, my router is getting to my cable modem at top speed, but everything after that is just brutally slow. Pinging my providers name servers can take up to 700ms!
UPDATE: OK, I just found something about Earthlink (my provider) speed problems “north of Atlanta.” I’m pretty sure that NYC is north of Atlanta, so that probably includes me.
Darnit! I needed the internet today to do some research.
UPDATE: Well, it looks like things are back to normal, but now I’m too drunk to do anything productive.
UPDATE: Service problems again this morning (Sunday, October 26). The problem has been with nameservers, but I don’t know at what level. I was able to ping and even connect to websites by IP address (the few that I knew off hand) but no luck if I tried to address them by name.
One kind of interesting outcome of this: I haven’t received a single piece of spam since Friday. That’s unprecedented. I know my mail is working OK and I have a good connection to the internet because my servers report in every morning from an undisclosed site in Florida. They’re all running fine, talking to each other, and dispatching email messages to me according to schedule.
Did anyone else have any problems with internet service this weekend?
And, apparently, there’s no plausible deniability possible, they caught us with our beaks hanging out:
One of the pigeons was caught near a rose water production plant in the city of Kashan in Isfahan province, the report cited an unnamed informed source as saying, adding that some metal rings and invisible strings were attached to the bird.
A second pigeon was picked up, but it is not clear from reports if the two pigeons were working together. Of course, the future looks none to bright for either operative:
The source gave no further description of the pigeons, neither their current status nor what their fate will be.
It’s not just because I’m madly in love with the governor of Alaska (both politically and in an adolescent way). She was a knockout on SNL last night (in a couple of ways there too). And for the first time that I can recall, I am in total agreement with Alec Baldwin when he says that Sarah is: “…way hotter…” than I expected her to be. Red or blue, this is just funny:
This bit comes as close as anything I’ve seen to an acknowledgment that the race is over and it’s OK for Sarah to participate in a sketch that comes this close to crossing the line without worrying about the political repercussions. None the less, the cool with which she accepts this mini-roasting speaks volumes on her behalf and the kind of person she is underneath the campaign gloss.
Both sketches were genuinely funny, not least because Sarah was so good…so at ease, so well prepared. In both bits she comes across as very poised and intelligent and very, very comfortable with who she is. It is abundantly evident that Sarah is un-apologetically Sarah all the time.
I’m confused. I had understood that global warming was recent and getting worse each and every year.
Now I’m given to understand that Alaskan glaciers have been receding since before the industrial revolution, except this year has been so cold that they’re expanding again.
Doesn’t that go against the irrefutable scientific consensus on man-made climate change? Yes, yes, I know: year-to-year variability will result in some anomalous situations and global warming doesn’t mean that every year is incrementally warmer than the previous year.
We’re not talking about a little more or a little less snowfall here. From the article:
One of the largest areas of shrinkage has been at the national park of Glacier Bay. When Alexei Ilich Chirikof first arrived in 1741, the bay didn’t exist at all — only a solid wall of ice. From that time until the early 1900s, the ice retreated some 50 miles, to form the bay and surrounding area.
It’s not just that this year was so very much colder than last year, it’s that this appears to demonstrate that the planet has been getting steadily warmer since before humans could possibly have been putting a significant amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Is it possible that global warming is a natural phenomenon that scarcely notices the contributions of humans?
Yes, I am well aware that McCain was trying to interject a bit of self-deprecating humor and, yes, I fully understand AP’s intentions in publishing this picture with no attempt to provide context. But, all-in-all, I still think this moment in time pretty well captures where this election cycle is and where it is going.
C’mon McCainiacs…It’s funny. You know it’s funny, so lighten up a little.
