Posted 8/10/2002 02:26:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
STRATOCASTERS AND SOFTWARE: What software designers can learn from the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, from Cooper Interaction Design, by way of The Fender Forum.

Posted 8/10/2002 02:08:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BAVARIAN ANTI-SEMITIC WORKS: Little Green Footballs shows a BMW map with something curiously missing... Israel.

Posted 8/9/2002 09:12:59 AM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH'S BIG ADVENTURE: As he did last year at this time, Jonah Goldberg is hitting the road, only this time, he's blogging about it. Hopefully he won't end up looking like this at the end of his current trip.

Posted 8/9/2002 09:05:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
FAIR FIGHT: Stanley Kurtz says that "In an audacious and ingenious move, the Center for Individual Rights is suing the agency in charge of enforcing the government's anti-discrimination policies for its own longtime sponsorship of discriminatory hiring", and adds:

Affirmative action thrives on secrecy. Politically, morally, and legally, its injustices and irrationalities cannot survive the light of day. The American people believe too deeply in individual rights and basic fairness to tolerate the reality of discrimination that travels under the deceptively innocuous label of "affirmative action." That is why legally mandated reporting requirements of government programs have so often been affirmative action's undoing. Even now, the Center for Individual Rights, through its immensely important cases against the University of Michigan, has a very real chance of bringing affirmative action in America's colleges and universities to an end. Yet without the public's right to know the reality of this state university's practices, that chance would have been lost. Now, once again, with the case of Worth v. Martinez, the Center for Individual Rights has succeeded in using the government's own reporting requirements to expose the shameful truth of so-called affirmative action.

Excellent article--and well worth checking out.

Posted 8/8/2002 10:13:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTERESTING SYMMETRY: I just finished watching an episode of HBO's "Hard Knocks" training camp mini-series, and then read this thread on what it's like to be a recording engineer with a band that's new to recording. It's an interesting behind the scenes look at why albums invariably take much longer to record than any sane human being thinks they should and why so much money is wasted in the recording industry. It has its share of PG-13+ language, but it's a fun read if you're interested in how a rock band is recorded. UPDATE: Here's week two of the same diary.

Posted 8/8/2002 11:15:51 AM by Edward Driscoll
ITALIAN AND GERMAN-AMERICANS WERE ALSO INTERRED BY THE US, according to a Weblog named "Assume the Position", which has links to several articles and Web sites with pretty conclusive evidence that Japanese-Americans weren't the only "hyphens" interred by America during World War II. ATP also proves that Studs Terkel doesn't know his WWII history very well, by snarkily quoting from him!

Posted 8/8/2002 11:05:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
ONE BRAVE JUDGE: Overlawyered.com says that "Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Ramos 'told lawyers for six law firms that were awarded $625 million for their work in the historic 1998 tobacco settlement in no uncertain terms that he will examine whether the fee award is unethical'." Interesting that with the press obsessed with the pay of CEOs, and the ethics of corporations in general, that this story is going largely unreported.

Posted 8/8/2002 09:49:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS BUSH MORE FISCALLY LIBERAL THAN CLINTON? That's what this National Review Online article, written by Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute, says.

Posted 8/8/2002 09:09:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOING DIGITAL: Michael Powell, Chairman of the FCC, orders all new televisions to have a digital tuner included in them by 2007. (Back in the '90s, as I recall, the goal was 2005.) I've written about HDTV in several articles "on dead tree". I'll never forget interviewing Jeff Taylor of Reason for an HDTV article of mine that was the cover story in the February 2001 issue of Nuts & Volts, when he told me that:

“At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was."

But hey, how about a compromise: if the FCC is going to order television manufacturers to include digital tuners, can't the manufacturers demand that the silly V-Chip be quietly deleted along the way?

Posted 8/8/2002 08:47:15 AM by Edward Driscoll
COOKING THE BOOKS? Bob Novak says:

The Commerce Department's painful report last week that the national economy is worse than anticipated obscured the document's startling revelation. Hidden in the morass of statistics, there is proof that the Clinton administration grossly overestimated the strength of the economy leading up to the 2000 election. Did the federal government join Enron and WorldCom in cooking the books?

Later in the article, note the classic Clintonian "non-denial denial" when Novak first asks then-Undersecretary of Commerce Rob Shapiro, ''Did you cook the books?''.

Posted 8/7/2002 08:58:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEXT BIG ISSUE IN AMERICAN POLITICS? Patrick Ruffini says it could come from the Bay Area, and its absurdly inflated housing prices.

Posted 8/7/2002 08:07:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
FIGHTING A GOVERNMENT BACKED MONOPOLY is the subject of Glenn Reynolds' (aka the InstaPundit alpha-uber blogger) latest Tech Central Station column.

Posted 8/7/2002 08:02:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
FLY FREE ON 9/11/02, if you fly on Spirit Airways, in what's probably a very smart PR move. Hell, it got them mentioned here, in National Review Online and on my Compuserve home page. I wonder how many takers they'll get.

Posted 8/7/2002 07:57:31 AM by Edward Driscoll
YOU'RE EITHER WITH US OR...you're Saudi Arabia, who won't allow US troops on their soil for our second, and (ideally) decisive smackdown of Iraq.

Posted 8/6/2002 09:38:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
ON THE DICK VERMEIL SCALE OF CRYING I rate fairly low--I don't lose it all that often, but this one caused me to.

Posted 8/6/2002 08:09:39 PM by Edward Driscoll

DAH-DA-DA, DAH-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH-DUM: Stopped by the Barnes & Noble in the Citibank building near the hotel Nina and I are staying at, and wandered through the music section. Just for giggles, I looked for the soundtrack for 1975's Rollerball, the music to which I’ve always liked, but could never find, because it was never actually issued on CD, and the original album must have had a very short pressing, judging by how quickly it was out of print after the film left theaters. Until now. I had to double-check the cover to make sure it wasn’t the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-remake-barrel-version with Jean Reno, LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Fortunately, it wasn’t. I was holding the real deal, from the film starring James Caan, directed by Norman Jewison, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn. Rollerball was made during that fallow period of science fiction films that bracketed Stanley Kubrick’s epic, but elegiac 2001: A Space Odyssey (still the best science fiction film, ever. If you have an evening to kill, I’d be happy to tell you why, how it was made, what the ending means, etc.) and George Lucas’ Star Wars, which proved there was an enormous market for science fiction, provided it was fun, fast paced, and didn't require a whole lot of brain cells to be engaged while watching it. I won’t go into depth about Rollerball, the movie, because I’ve already written about it a couple times, first as a 1998 review of the DVD, and more recently, in an email to Orrin Judd, which he graciously posted (with my blessings) on the Brothers Judd book review site (as opposed to the Brothers Judd Blog). A few moments ago, I called 2001 elegiac. Not surprisingly (because every science fiction film made after 2001 borrowed in some way from it until Ridley Scott created a bold future-retro look for Blade Runner (which every science fiction film set on Planet Earth made after it seemed to borrow from)), elegiac was the word for the soundtrack of Rollerball. Perhaps because Kubrick made such good use of Khachaturyan’s Saber Dance adagio, Previn (or perhaps Jewison) suggested Albinoni’s classic Adagio, which had already been used to nice effect in Orson Welles’ suitably creepy version of Kafka’s The Trial. While the tune most associated with Rollerball is Bach’s demonic sounding Toccata in D minor (notice how accurately I nailed the melody in my attempt at scat-typing above), the soundtrack always appealed to me because of its early 20th century classical compositions by Shostakovich and the afore mentioned Albinoni (I know, but see the footnote). There’s a headiness to those harmonies, a slight dissonance, particularly on the Shostakovich pieces, without entering into the clanking silliness of most 12-tone pieces (which signaled the death knell for 20th century classical music as a creative force, until, arguably, Philip Glass's minimalism and much more understated harmonies). Previn’s original compositions alternate between dissonant pieces on early 1970s synthesizers and (for contemporary sounding “source music” during a party scene in the film) slightly stiff sounding take-offs on the funk being created at the time by Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters. The Headhunter-style stuff is certainly pleasant to listen to, but it’s the Bach, Albinoni and Shostakovich pieces that make the CD a worthwhile listen. Curiously, the CD’s accompanying booklet spends more time analyzing the film’s poster artist, Bob Peak, than they do the choices behind the soundtrack selection. Peak’s artwork, included in the booklet is certainly dramatic and colorful, but a little balance in behind-the-scenes information would have been nice. Rollerball, the film has aged relatively nicely, since it’s easily the most action-filled of a series of fairly dreary films churned out by a Hollywood that just couldn’t see beyond the edicts of Kubrick’s 2001, until George Lucas found a galaxy far, far away that was fun. Rollerball, the soundtrack has a handful of amazing pieces that remind that Hollywood could make good soundtracks until it became a division of MTV. FOOTNOTE: Tomaso Albinoni was an 18th century composer. However, his Adagio, easily his most heard work, was reconstructed from a fragment of manuscript discovered in the Dresden State Library after the Second World War with very 20th century style harmonies in 1945 by Remo Giazotto. According to this site, Giazotto was:

a Milanese musicologist who was at that time completing his biography of Albinoni and his listing of Albinoni's music. Only the bass line and six bars of melody had survived, possibly from the slow movement of a Trio Sonata. Giazotto "reconstructed" the now-famous Adagio in about 1945, based on the surviving fragment. To him it suggested a piece that would be played in church, so he added an organ. It is perhaps ironic, that Albinoni's rediscovery by the wider public in our own times was largely based on this ever-popular piece which Albinoni would only barely recognize.

Posted 8/6/2002 07:09:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PENTAGON IS BEGINNING TO CONSIDER SAUDI ARABIA AN ENEMY: Talk about a long-overdue wake-up call.

Posted 8/6/2002 07:06:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
SORE LOSER: That's what James Bowman calls Al Gore. UPDATE: InstaPundit links to a Howard Kurtz piece about Al and Joe's messy divorce.

Posted 8/6/2002 06:27:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
SPURRIER UP TO HIS OLD WAYS IN WASHINGTON: Steve Mariucci was not happy with Spurrier keeping his A-team offense in to run the score up.

Posted 8/6/2002 06:22:17 AM by Edward Driscoll
GREETINGS FROM THE BIG APPLE: Nina and I made it safely into New York on Saturday, and then drove down to New Jersey to visit my parents for the weekend. We're now back in the Big Apple, to visit Nina's mom, who is not in the best of health at the moment. The flight in from California, on American, was actually rather pleasant, thanks to the combination of the in-flight movie (Spider-Man, dude!) and an hour or so long infomercial on one of the in-flight audio channels for a box-set of late period Miles Davis recordings for Warner Brothers. I had forgotten just how good that stuff was--Miles was a bit like Tina Turner in the sense of taking fairly pedestrian sounding 80s synths and drum machines and making the music his own: the very definition of transcending the material. The unpleasant part was coming and going: I don't think I've seen a filthier American airport than Oakland's--what a trash-spewn dump. Our plane arrived in New York a half-hour early Saturday night (yay!) and then sat on the tarmac for an hour (boo!) because of a plane already in our gate with mechanical problems. I picked up a copy of Cigar Aficionado at the Oakland airport (surprisingly, the PC-mavens of Jerry Brown's town haven't banned it yet), and read lots of stuff I had already read in the blogosphere: air travel stinks, Wireless Internet rock, and Scott Ritter has gotten very weird lately. Advantage: Blogosphere!