Apparently, this sex toy thing is quite the issue for Alabama. The state has appealed the decision which permitted sex toys to be sold therein. You know, if sex toys were legal in Alabama, the legislators would have something to distract them from ineffectual prudishness.
Population: One
I saw the most egotistical band in the world last night. It’s hard to top the arrogance of calling yourself The Band, but they did it; these guys call themselves The Music. Bold claim. I can’t say they entirely lived up to it.
Not that it was bad stuff, mind you. They’re unapologetic straight-ahead guitar-driven British hard rock, with a lead singer (Robert Harvey) who looks like Frodo and sounds like a youthful Robert Plant. The lead guitarist, Adam Nutter, derives his style from Hawkwind, and the rhythm section — Stuart Coleman on bass, and Phil Jordan on drums — seems antsy every time they have to slow below a hundred beats per minute. All very good and effective.
At their best moments, they have this interesting multilayered effect. Phil’s cranking out rock solid beats at a pace which threatens to overrun the rest of the band, Stuart’s hitting his notes with mechanically lovely precision, Adam’s journeying off in a completely different direction with waves of space-noise feedback, and Robert’s crooning shallow lyrics with utter conviction. The thing is, it’s like walls leaning against each other and happening to provide mutual support: they don’t seem to have any particular relation to each other, and it’s just luck that it forms a coherent whole. Maybe it’s as if the last four Led Zeppelin fans on Earth met in the ruins and decided to play a gig without rehearsing. Interesting stuff.
Unfortunately, sometimes our metaphorical walls don’t support each other and it all comes crashing down. Other times, the songs sound like they were written for no better reason than to support a cool combination of riffs and drum beats. The pieces are there, but the coherent whole can be lacking.
Then again, these guys are all under twenty, so it’s hard to fault ‘em too much. If they make it past the hype phase, they ought to be just fine. The official story is that they just randomly hooked up and formed a band out of boredom, but Robert’s voice is too good for that sort of coincidence; I suspect their metoric rise through the UK pop charts was planned. Like I said, there’s going to be a hype phase. Still, there’s also the potential for something else beyond that.
In other words, it was well worth the ten bucks.
So, was the Wellstone memorial too political?
In my tradition, one of the things you do at wakes is vow to carry on the work of the deceased. It’s OK to be really emotional about that; emotion is part of what a wake is for. Emotion represents respect for the dead. It shows you cared about him, or about her. I would expect that, at a politician’s wake, his close friends would want to make strong statements; that they would exhort the attendees to “keep his legacy alive.”
On the other hand, if some random Senator from Iowa showed up and started making campaign speeches, that might be kind of tacky. You don’t really want strangers at your memorial. (I may be too hard on Tom Harkin, here. Perhaps he was a close friend of Wellstone.)
The New York Times says that “the crowd put away any pretense of the nonpolitical.” Maybe so, but if there’s one thing that’s obvious about Wellstone it’s that politics were his passion. He cared about doing good. How could those eulogizing him not talk about something he cared so much about? To ignore politics would be to ignore an important aspect of his life.
That makes it hard to tell those who were sincere from those who were abusing the event. I suspect there were some of each. As always, we live in a flawed world full of flawed people.
In sharp contrast to the previous: I also like apes. Thanks, Max!
I can’t ever resist a good discussion of online identity. This one seems to me to assume that pseudonyms must by nature be fragmentary. I think that this is true if you assume that our online identities are discrete units, without overlap, but I also think that such an assumption would be false.
I can’t speak for the law bloggers whom TPH discusses, but for me, a pseudonym shares many aspects of the “real” me. Alice, at least, seems to agree with that. I speak English; so do my theoretical pseudonyms. I’m sarcastic; so, generally, are they. On the occasions when I’ve had reason to construct a shield around my identity, it’s been a matter of thinking about what I want to change rather than building a persona from scratch.
(Once I went so far as to deliberately change my punctuation habits, since my semi-colons are fairly distinctive to those who know me. I suspect most law bloggers don’t go as far. Should they? Would your professor recognize your writing style? Ah well; I digress.)
So, in any case, I have to disagree. Pseudonyms don’t diminish, because they aren’t necessarily limited.
TPH also says that he wants the “psychological benefit that comes from identifying myself with the things that I say…” which is an understandable desire. I don’t write for publication under a pseudonym because I want people to know that’s me. However, I’d suggest that you can also gain psychological benefits from constructing a well-known persona. Specifically, it can be proof that your ideas stand up even when separated from any biases people may have regarding you specifically.
Also, in time, your pseudonym may well gain the same sort of respect that you have — and then it’s just a matter of whether or not you identify with that pseudonym. My online chat nickname is Garrett, and it’s not a separate personality, but I do have somewhat different habits when I’m speaking under that name. This is no different than the salaryman who behaves one way at the office and another at home. Does he find his workplace achievements less meaningful because they’re attached to a somewhat different persona? No, and I don’t find praise directed to Garrett to be much different than praise directed to Bryant. It’s all me at the core.
I think, finally, that the concept of writing anonymously as opposed to pseudonomously is a bit of a straw man. At the very worst, in the blog world, you’re identified by your URL. On Usenet, your email address is an identifier. I don’t know many (if any) who have chosen to write each individual packet of words with absolutely no identifying information whatsoever.
This meandering brought to you courtesy of the aforementioned Alice, whose links are of superior quality.
One of the things I’ve come to terms with is my gadget habit. It’s there, I can control it, it’s fun giving into it once in a while. Right now was not the optimal time to do that, but I did anyhow. Thanks to EBay, I got myself a nifty analog video converter. What will I use this for? I have no idea. It just offends me that there’s a type of media in my apartment which I can’t convert to digital form. I can scan books and pictures, I can rip my CDs to disk, but I can’t turn a stupid videotape into Quicktime? Totally unacceptable.
However, now that I’m about to have it, I’m seriously tempted to put together a little video with Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” for the soundtrack and clips of tag team wrestlers breaking up pinfalls for the video.
ColorMatch 5K: bookmarked cause it won’t work under Mozilla derivatives, as far as I can tell. Conceptually cool, though. Perfect for design gimps like me.
I’ve thought to myself, from time to time, that J. K. Rowling’s world is just a little bit on the bigoted side. The Washington Post has an nice editorial on the subject. Mind you, the tendency isn’t reserved for fantasy — it might have been interesting to cross reference Slan for an example of the same thing with a scientific spin. (Hey, that review was written by Tasha Robinson. She used to be a housemate.) When it gets right down to it, the distaste of technology we find in the Harry Potter books is just another avenue through which we express our desire to be different.
Link ripped from the pages of Tapped, which is worth reading.
One more quickie… people have observed that the University of Arizona campus was a weapons-free zone, and that this didn’t prevent the recent shootings. This is about as significant as pointing out that the UIowa student shootings didn’t take place in a weapons-free zone. If you don’t know how many people decided not to go on a rampage due to the policies in either case, you don’t know anything.
I’m anti-gun control as a matter of policy. I’m just tired of stupid people who obsessively twist every tragedy in the world to suit their political agenda.