Pawlenty and Springsteen

wtf...let me get this straight - there weren't politics in Springsteen's music before?  Sure, Pink Cadillac and Cover Me might not exactly be subversive, but Prodigal Son and No Surrender certainly aren't apolitical.  And Pawlenty would go to a show with R.E.M. to see Springsteen before Springsteen said he was choosing Kerry?  yeah, right.  Bummer - I guess this means I won't be able to get tickets to Toby Keith because he'll be taking my seat.

 

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty opened his weekly radio show Friday with "Born to Run," but followed by saying he was "heartbroken" that Springsteen had gone partisan.

"I really appreciate his music, but I wish he wouldn't interject his music with politics," said Pawlenty, cochairman of Bush's reelection campaign in Minnesota. He said he was "going to have to miss" the planned Oct. 5 show in St. Paul where Springsteen and R.E.M. are slated to play.

Boston Globe Link

Everyone can be Leni Riefenstahl!

A co-worker  told me that Michael Moore was the new Leni Riefenstahl.  And now I hear that it may have been the writer of the The Day After Tomorrow (below)?  What about Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) is he the new Leni Riefenstahl too?  What about Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason (The Hunting of the President) - can they both be Leni Riefenstahls, or is one of them Leni when she's like younger, and the other one when she's older and all wrinkled looking, which is how I remember her?  Some people (Washingon Post) even compare Verhoven (Star Ship Troopers and Show Girls) to Riefenstahl, and who can argue with that.  That pretty much makes it a good argument to use, because basically, when all is said and done, you're not comparing anyone to Leni Riefenstahl, you're just comparing everyone's movie to Show Girls.  Those GOP b*stards are cunning! 

 

Wall Street Journal Compares The Day After Tomorrow director to Leni Riefenstahl:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200406070001 

My Daughter Is Confused

So, my father in law spent his time with my fifteen month old daughter teaching her to say "Bush" in retaliation for the picture we took or her leaning against a John Kerry sign in our yard.  This might have been annoying, except that now every time she sees a fish, like when we're reading "The Cat in the Hat", she says "Bush" - I can't bring myself to explain the difference, and I'm not sure I could.  On the other hand, we received a nice card from John Kerry for donating to his campaign, complete with a postcard sized picture of him on the front - my wife tells me that Eryn found it on the steps yesterday and hauled it all over the house chanting "Daddy".  Either my wife is in trouble (and incredibly sneaky), Eryn has decided my politics are politics she shares, or Eryn has greatly misconstrued the amount of hair I have - then again, she never gets to look at it from the top unless it's time for a piggy back ride.

This, that and the other thing - part I

Can Seinfeld sue me for using that as a title?

Well, the picture thing is a bust. I've been helping my wife try to link to Yahoo picture albums at her blog Poo-tee-wheet and having no luck at all - seems that Yahoo tries to force you to include a session id or something at the end of the JPG extension in order to force you to go through their site to see the pictures - darn annoying - but I guess it probably saves them the trouble of several billion hits to linked pictures. So, I reaquainted myself with FTP - for some reason I thought I needed to use CoffeeCup FTP or something like it, but then remembered that I could just the ftp. prefix through IE and treat the site like another directory. Works great if we do it that way through our web space. Just slow as heck on a dial-up connection.

A visit from the DNC

Probably not the DNC per se, but at least a nice Democrat who was wearing his DNC button. Where ever he is, I'd like to apologize for not handing him a soda and being a bit friendlier - over the years I've developed a paranoia about anyone who comes to my door as they are invariably either:

1.) religious
2.) selling magazines
3.) soliciting donations under the guise of a charity, but really something else (even if it's a PAC with which I agree).

top it off with trying to wash Eryn's high chair tray and conduct interroom communication with my wife, and I was a little out of it. He noted that it was really nice to see someone with a John Kerry sign in their yard (I shall get a link out here, I have a picture of said sign) and that he hadn't been to a lot of friendly doors. I at first assumed he meant in my neighborhood, but most of my neighbors seem to be immigrants (Asian and Hispanic), duplex dwellers (of which I was once one) and at least one house w/a lesbian couple, people I sort of assume are Democrats (or at least not Bushies). Of course, maybe he started on the far end of my side of the street, that seems to be the white, young crowd in the neighborhood. Or maybe he was referring to Eagan in particular, a far more Republican locale than my previous neighborhood in Richfield, and home of our illustrious Governor, Pawlenty (he's a local soccer dad).



While I don't expect this to in any way reach the door-to-door Democrat I met yesterday, I'd like to extend a virtual apology nonetheless - I owe you a beer/soda and some friendly conversation to make up for my distractedness (guess I can send an email over to Democrat central in St. Paul and see if they know who was over here yesterday - we'll see how that goes, I'm a notorious procrastinator, non-follow-up-er, generally the reason I don't volunteer myself, although I can beg off at the moment because I have a kid).

Email Test

Well, the email test, sending postings to the blog w/o actually having to log on and use the website, seemed to work fairly well, but I noticed you have to go on and republish the site at some point, otherwise the postings just queue up and wait for you w/o actually showing up on the blog. So I can blog all day and then suddenly publish half a dozen posts - I've noticed a number of blogs I like seem to operate on that schedule, so I wonder if that's what they're up to as well.

Bicycing

The most amusing piece of email that crossed my desk today was an ongoing conversation with two friends about G.W.'s second mountain bike tumble.

AP Mountain Biking Story

First of all - who bikes 18 miles in an hour and twenty minutes on a challenging trail? I'm not saying it's not possible to maintain that speed on a mountain bike, I'm just saying it doesn't seem likely if you're really off roading it. I did a spin around Lebannon Hills the other day, about 8.5 miles, including the 4 miles involved in getting there and back, and it took about eighty minutes - when you get to the rocks, the trees near your elbows and the stumps you simply bounce off of, you're lucky to go faster than a crawl - and, I'd like to note, lying on the ground recovering from a fall counts against your average speed.

Second, 1200 calories? One hour on a bike trainer for me, dripping sweat until I'm soaking my practice carpet, at two hundred and fifty pounds, burns under a thousand calories. A one hundred and sixty pound individual burns significantly less, about 340 an hour (depends on the speed) according to calorie counters. Does he have to mark up everything? I figured the reasoning was, G.W. is carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders, so if there are 290 million people in the U.S. at one hundred and sixty pounds,each burning 340 calories, that comes out in the 94 billion calorie range (about what we're spending on Iraq) - he can use any portion of those. He chooses to use the calories expenditure of three people losing money because of his tax change/medicare policies, etc. He had 93.9-odd billion calories to spare he could have claimed and somewhere three poor people didn't lose weight.

The article itself is hilarious if you read it carefully - $3,000 mountain bike, toe clips (not clipless), the reporter watching G.W. lying there instead of helping him, the medics who must either tail him in a car or also expend 1,200 calories each at 18 MPH, the implication that John Kerry is some sort of dilletante for riding an expensive road bike and that $3,000 mountain bikes are you run of the mill blue collar bikes - I'm reading a bit into it there, but I don't think they'd deny they were implying it.

He pants hard, emitting low "hrrr, hrrr, hrrr" grunts with each stroke of the pedals, his shoulders bobbing up and down.

Yep...good stuff.

A day late and a computer short, part II

Did I mention I have to use IE5 because the hard drive on this laptop is nice and small? So if you see spelling errors, blame Blogger - if I can afford a rich editor for IE5+ and NN for my web project using my personal credit card, then they can certainly afford one for here.

Anyway, didn't I promise an autobiography (or autobibliography as I so nicely put it before I edited it)? I noticed that I can fill in a rather extensive biography in the tool that comes with blogger, so I'll do that instead. Sort of pseudo entry for this evening. Feel free to peruse my favorite books, movies, etc. I'll try to find a 55K picture of myself on the web tomorrow that can serve as an avatar.

Testing a picture

Thought I should run a test to see if I can get pictures into my site if they're uploaded to my home page. Here it goes.

A day late, A computer short

So I have a nice pentium with a decent modem on it downstairs, and instead I'm relegated to trying to create posts with this nasty old laptap via a 19.2 connection while sitting at my second hand kitchen table (which used to be the conference table for the Third District Nurses Association, sort of the local union, but not quite). For a while I thought maybe the problem was my phone lines, but this old piece of junk never loses its connection and the one down stairs does nothing but lose its connection about every three minutes. I guess I should have known, if you can maintain a telephone conversation, you should be able to maintain a data connection. That means the only thing it can be is the computer itself and that's distressing - no viruses, so there's just something intrinsically wrong with it - I thought for a while it might be the graphics card, but heck if I know why a bad graphics card might create an issue with my modem connection. I know it's not the hard drive (ghosted and replaced) or the memory (which all seems to be registering as there, active and healthy), so it has to be something conflicting with something else and redoing all the ports and IRQs that the hardware was associated with didn't do anything last time and the system monitor doesn't show anything in particular sucking up all the CPU, so I'm starting to think it's just schizophrenic and I should worry about finding a new machine for $450 and use that one as some sort of fileserver for photos. I wouldn't feel so bad about it if it weren't the fact that the thing has been almost unusable from a gaming perspective and video perspective (for the MPEGs of Eryn) for the last year and half - pretty much since we moved it from the duplex in Richfield. I could simply clean it completely and start from scratch, but that sounds like a headache beyond imagining.

Welcome to A Nod to Nothing

I thought perhaps it was time to officially kick off my blog.  Like most bloggers, I don't really have a clear idea what it is I want to talk about as a theme, but I'll work on it in the first few posts and see if I can't come up with something.  I could focus on Westlaw books in movies and on television, but that deserves more of a website sort of treatment. So, what kinds of things are going on - what do I want to talk about?  Let's start by noting that this last weekend I had the twenty year reunion of my high school bicycling group.  Like most teenagers, that means that the bicycling took place before we were all old enough to drive - pre-motorized vehicle, mostly pre-opposite sex - ages fourteen and fifteen (two trips) to be precise.  One trip to northern Wisconsin (Copper Falls) and one to northern Minnesota (Grandma's Marathon).  I can't say I hadn't seen those friends since I was 15, but I certainly hadn't seen a number of them since graduation.  We (Ben, Mark, Jenny, Jason [Jenny's boyfriend from Canada, not an official reunion member], Dwain, Dwain's son and myself all biked from Monticello to Rockford (Lake Independence) to commemorate our training ride.  Ben was thoughtful enough to recreate the puking incident of one of our original members (at only three miles into the ride), and we all had a pretty good time reminiscing about Jenny's wheel rolling off, her third degree sunburn, streaking, baby powder fights and other fun.  I'll add a few links to the pictures from that weekend when I get them uploaded to Yahoo.

http://f1.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/s_mcvay/slideshow?&.dir=/e7f0&.src=ph
 
Tomorrow: An autobiography that I didn't feel like making my first post.