Archives

When Losers Win

Red SoxTo be sure, the Red Sox absolutely, a hundred and ten percent, for sure deserved to win their first World Series in forever last night — it was probably the most well-earned championship we’ll see this decade, if you forget the inconvenient fact that they got into the post-season by virtue of the wild card. Personally, as a fan of the Yankees, it was a weird experience to see them do so well, being so accustomed to wishing ever more bad luck on them. I’ve never bought the image of the team as a gang of ‘lovable losers,’ something they’ve been cultivating with almost obsessive care. This year’s team, in fact, has struck me as having more than its fair share of assholes. Still, I was rooting for them all the way.

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Design for Comedy

America (The Book)The early word is that there’s a Jon Stewart backlash imminent. The fake news anchor’s recent and notorious Crossfire appearance — and the mention of his name and influence in seemingly every article published anywhere about the character of this year’s electorate — has brought us, as a society, ever closer to the day when the man and his television show are officially played out. That will be a shame, but in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the unexpected gift that my girlfriend picked up for me over the weekend: my very own copy “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” the current Amazon number one bestseller from the producers of The Daily Show.

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Lost: 5,000 Songs

iPodWhat an exhausting week I had last week; I was burning the candle at both ends trying to get some work out the door, and it completely drained me by Friday night. In fact, when I was taking a cab home late that evening, I was even too tired to notice that my iPod had quietly fallen out of my jacket pocket, and now it’s lost to me forever. There’s a tiny candle of hope that I hold out for finding it, somehow, through the good graces of Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 information line, which, in theory, is working overtime to help me make a connection with the cab driver (luckily I got a receipt) through the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. The emphasis there is on tiny. I mean, would you try to find the owner of an iPod you found in a taxi cab?

The whole episode pains me to even think about it. I really don’t want to pay another few hundred dollars for what I still consider to be a grossly over-priced product, but I’ve become so attached to the thing, it seems untenable to consider doing without one. That’s a sign of a captive consumer, right? Anyhow, the iPod I lost was a 20 gigabyte, second-generation model from 2002 — so it kind of irks me too that, though the newer versions are slimmer and feature larger hard drives, they have basically the same feature set as mine, with few improvements. At least, not enough improvements to justify spending another large chunk of change on one when, just last week, I still had a perfectly good iPod in my possession. Feel me?

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Ceci N’est Pas Un Opinion

DebateMuch to my dismay, news outlets and politically-oriented weblogs are continuing to devote time, words and breath to the fact that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney, vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter — who happens to be a lesbian — in the course of last night’s debate. You can find all of the details elsewhere, so I’m not going to detail them here. In my opinion, it’s much ado about nothing — Kerry’s reference was both respectful and relevant — and the brewing furor is yet another example of trumped-up indignation on the part of conservatives (however, I admit that even some of my pinko friends found it somewhat inappropriate).

As it happens, this incident is a good illustration of one of the reasons I find it so frustrating and stressful to watch the presidential debates, especially when George W. Bush is a participant.

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Stress Testing

Presidential DebateIt’s a really, really stressful night to watch television if you follow either the Major League Baseball postseason — both leagues are in the first two games of their championship series tonight — or the race for the White House — Bush and Kerry are in the midst of their third and last debate. I keep going back and forth between these the debate and the Yankees/Red Sox game, and it’s like maddening. I can’t look away though. Anyway, as a friend of mine joked yesterday, “I hope the Yankees beat George Bush.”

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Afterwards

I’m back from Sicily as of yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have internet access while I was away, or I would have written several posts about how amazing Italy is; I’m going to try and round up whatever thoughts I can recoup after ten days of sleeping in late, eating decadently tasty food and drinking lots of red wine, and write something here soon.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little fuzzy-brained and jetlagged and a little deflated after returning to the reality of a non-vacation life. Mostly though, I’m feeling incredibly sad about Christopher Reeve’s death yesterday. There’s not an actor’s performance in any film that means more to me than Reeve’s in “Superman: The Movie.” It had a profound impact on the way I saw the world as a child, and it still chokes me up to watch it as an adult. It was acutely painful to see Reeve suffer that horrible accident in 1995, and now to see him go at the relatively young age of 52… I can’t possibly articulate the meaning of this loss in a way that would do it any kind of justice.

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The Italian Job

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving for vacation, headed to Italy for the next week and a half. My girlfriend and I have rented a nice little house in Sicily. Not without a bit of regret, I’ll miss most all of the debates and the start of baseball’s post-season, but I’m sure I’ll find some way to compensate for that. Here’s the plan: eat, relax, sleep, repeat. It’s going to be awesome. In all likelihood, I’ll have zero or very limited access to the world wide internet highway until I return the week of 11 Oct — and the first post to come sometime later, after I de-jetlag myself.

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Bedtime Stories for Democrats

John KerryIn advance of tomorrow night’s first Presidential debate between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, there’s a lot of talk going on right now about the reputation that the senator from Massachusetts has for ‘strong finishes.’ An article in today’s New York Times details Kerry’s history of coming to life in the final stretches his campaigns, most notably in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1996 and in his unexpected resurgence against Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries earlier this year. If it happens, I’ll be delighted — I’ll be ecstatic — but at this point, in spite of the fact that I continue to pump modest amounts of money into the Democratic effort for a November victory (and so should you!), these tales strike me as bedtime stories whispered into the ears of frightful Democrats as they — as we — pray into the night.

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The Shadow Knows

Shadow of GuiltSometimes, in the course of fulfilling obligations to friends or family, you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever, not in a hundred years. Like, you might find yourself somehow agreeing to build a little Web site for your girlfriend’s uncle, who is a just-published novelist trying to promote the recent release of his first ever book, a small-press thriller about murders and arson and suspense and stuff. And that book might feature a cover design which you yourself never would have art directed, whose typography and illustration style might be pretty far afield from the visual style and design rules you yourself prefer. It happens, you know. But you make the best of it and try to deliver as competent and effective a product as you can, something that does its job well, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your own particular interests. And then you just launch it, like I did today with ShadowofGuilt.com… and you take a little bit of pleasure in knowing that, at the very least, you helped out someone you know personally, rather than a huge megacorporation, for a change. What’s more, it’s nice knowing that the whole thing (all three pages of it!) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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The New New NetNewsWire

NetNewsWireFor a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

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