Author: Tim Jarrett

Fog and shades

My “excitement” over the rain beginning again on Wednesday was premature. Today we’re back to sunshine. And fog. I usually come in at the southeastern side of campus, which runs alongside low ground next to Marymoor Park, and this morning the fog was still heavy along the whole drive despite the morning sunshine.

Our friend Bethany was in town on business this week (she“s on Senator Murray’s staff). We met her for drinks last night. Which is to say, Lisa met her for drinks and I followed about half an hour later, having got stuck in traffic on the 520 bridge. In the meantime, they had moved on to Nordstrom’s for some boot shopping. As I said before, they both have impeccable taste, so it was quite a sight to watch the two of them run through Nordstrom’s inventory. Afterwards I ran back to work for a rehearsal of “Accidents Will Happen” (more on that shortly).

Why is this a houseblog entry? Because this morning I stumbled out of bed and downstairs to hang our newly arrived blinds in our front bedroom. Nothing like hanging blinds first thing in the morning to really get the day going. The only difficulties I ran into were a broken drill bit (the tip of one of my two 1/16th-inch bits broke off in the wood, fortunately leaving me enough to work with to finish the job) and a small problem with the measurements. I had measured inside one section of the frame, but then our window contractor came back and used that to put in the screens (since the windows swing out, the screens have to be installed inside the windows). So I had to go one molding section out, and as a result the blinds don’t fit as snugly as they might. But they’re installed and they work great.

Tonight is our housewarming finally, after all the procedures and address change (have it done at https://www.us-mailing-change-of-address.com). I hope to have some good pictures to share.

Scripting News Awards: Dave fesses up

Dave is going to do the Scripting News Awards again. In the process, he fesses up about something that’s puzzled me: how I got in the running last year:

“It’s quite interesting to look at the lists a year later. For example, the scripting category has boomed. Last year it was hard to find any weblogs about scripting.”

Which explains both why I was one of the four and why I didn’t get that many votes. It was just a small pool.

George: Who is the keiretsu???

George isn’t sure if he’s part of the keiretsu. The way I figure it, he’s part of my keiretsu, and so are Esta and Greg. So are Esta and Greg part of George’s?

This is one of those crazy questions about Internet content association that don’t come up in online communities. If we were all in a common community and interacting with each other in this way, George and Esta would start interacting with each other directly at some point. In this respect, it’s easy to see how closely blog relationships resemble the relationships between their authors.

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Boston Charlie

A year ago today, I was desperately trying to get into the holiday spirit with some Boston Charlie. It strikes me that it’s about that time again…

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley’garoo!
Don’t we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby lilla boy, Louisville Lou?

Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly welly cracker n’ too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, ’lope with you!

Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly gaggin’ on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Duck us all in bowls of barley,
Ninky dinky dink an’ polly voo!
Chilly Filly’s name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly’s jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!

(Thanks to Walt Kelly for the lunacy and to the Pogo Page for the Charlie.)

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Blogging towards Bethlehem

All kinds of seasonal observations going on today. George points to online Advent devotionals hosted by his church. (I believe this is the first church website I’ve ever seen that has message boards.) The December 1st devotional has particularly sage advice: “Perhaps this Christmas, rather than following the cultural rules of yuletide—shopping, decoration, cards, parties, busyness, you might mark the birth of the Lord of the sabbath by acts of mercy and compassion upon those who have need.”

I could have used that advice last night as I struggled to finish decorating our tree (the one I abandoned from exhaustion on Sunday night). It took forever. Apparently new Christmas light strings are deliberately shipped as twisted masses of wire. Three hundred untwisted lights later, we started hanging ornaments. How is it that, despite only having done one Christmas tree prior to this, we had something like eight boxes of ornamental glass balls? That’s a lot of glass for one tree. Lisa likes the end result, but I’m still trying to get used to the result. I grew up with plain white lights and these are colored, which contributes to the cognitive dissonance I experience when I look at the tree (ceci n’est pas un Christmas tree, or, as David Byrne would say, “This is not my beautiful tree!”). But I think it’s growing on me.

Back to Advent devotionals. Mom sent a finding from her church’s devotional booklet: a reprint of Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.” Mom is nothing if not au courant with happenings here in the Northwest, as our ten day long sunshine spell just broke today. It seems ironic to think about Plath in any sort of Christmas context, but this poem grabs both the catch of breath on finding the sublime in nature and the waiting through fatigue for miracles to come.

The last is probably the hardest bit. But I’m coming to realize that we all have to “[trek] stubborn through the season of fatigue” and “patch together a content of sorts.” Or as Anne Sexton writes in The Awful Rowing Towards God, “The story ends with me still rowing.” Or as Dave likes to say in a different context, “Dig we must.” After all, what’s the alternative? Whatever it is, I think waiting for the miracle beats worrying about the rough beast around the corner.

On finding one’s funk

Driving into work this morning, KEXP was playing some Beastie Boys (“Shake Your Rump”) followed by some Digable Planets (“Where I’m From”). I was enjoying the hell out of it. Then I realized I was thirty, in a silver Passat, driving to work, and grooving to funk.

I now know what was wrong with me for the last few months. I lost my funk. In retrospect, it has been missing for longer than that. After seeing the P-Funk All Stars at the 9:30 Club with Craig (he may remember what year, maybe 1998 or 1999), I gradually stopped listening to funk. It may be hard to believe, but there was a time that Parliament and James Brown, together with a smattering of hip-hop, were in steady rotation on my CD player.

It’s high time for me to go back and dig out those tracks. After all, as George Clinton says in Funkentelechy (the song from which my new tagline–“[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “tagline” hasn’t been defined.]
”–is taken), “You may as well pay attention ’cause you can’t afford free speech.” I ask you, has there ever been a finer collection of one-liners tied together by funk:

  • When you’re taking every kind of pill/nothing seems to ever cure your ill
  • Oh, but we’ll be pecking lightly, like a woodpecker with a headache. ’Cause it’s cheaper to funk than it is to pay attention. You dig?
  • Would you trade your funk for what’s behind the third door?
  • Step up and dance until I tell you to come down!

I won’t be trading my funk again.

Quick tasting notes: Orchard Street Jingle Ale

The Northwest has a wealth of small independent breweries, and each seems to be in the holiday spirit with the production of holiday ales. (For those who haven’t had the pleasure, a holiday (also known as Christmas ale, winter ale, or seasonal ale) is a one-off ale, usually dark, brewed with various spices.

I had resolved to make notes on each of the holiday ales I’ve tried this season; alas, I’ve let the Pyramid Snowcap and one other whose name escapes me by without taking notes. But Orchard Street Jingle Ale is far too good not to review. Dark and sweet almost but not quite to the point of heaviness, apparently spiced with ginger and cinnamon, complex and satisfying. If you’re in the small distribution area of this beer, you’re lucky. I’m going to try to get up to the brewpub to check this stuff out from the tap (they’re in Bellingham, so it might have to wait a while; no official web page that I can find).

On the difficulty of changing one’s address

I wouldn’t have thought that moving this blog to a new server would take so long. On one level, it’s done: all my old data is on the new server, happily cooking along, and I’m directing all the new content to the new site. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that there are a lot of blogging infrastructure tools out there that have a long memory. Google is one of them. There are about 7,270 search results for me at my old address (which still has a page rank of 6), compared with only 184 at my new one. Bear in mind that both sites have the same content. Google just hasn’t finished spidering the new site.

This is partly because very few people have updated their links to my site. Most people’s blogrolls have been updated, but links like my blog of the Apple keynote have not.

And, of course, despite my plea, there are still a ton of people hitting the old site’s RSS feed with aggregators–Radio, Frontier, and NetNewsWire. Sigh. I appreciate the attention, folks, but you’d actually get fresh content if you came here.

The irony is that Dave Winer was one of the folks who worked to design and implement RSS redirection, the “I’ve Moved” notice for RSS subscriptions, but it hasn’t been implemented in Manila yet.

The other thing that set me off

I should post a link to the other article that set me off this morning, also in the Washington Post: “In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects: Those Designated ‘Combatants’ Lose Legal Protections.” The Post is coming around to points that I started making last year:

…under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen’s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

The article says that part of the debate is about who gets to declare someone an enemy combatant. The administration wants the power to reside solely in the president, with no checks save re-election. Says Solicitor General Theodore Olson: “Who will finally decide [whether the decision to designate someone an enemy combatant is a right or just decision]? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”

Personally I think the Constitution has been pretty clear from the start that the job of the judiciary is to make the decision that the executive branch is acting rightly and justly. But then, what do I know? I’m just a Grouchy Blogger.

Grouchy Blogger Civil Liberties update

I have been deliberately not blogging about matters political, including our charming Attorney General Singin’ John Ashcroft, for a while. But the latest report in the Washington Post, that Ashcroft urged his staffers to deny FOIA requests, tipped me over the edge.

The story is bad enough. The Justice Department has in the past withheld data that it knew made its positions untenable, including enforcement of gun laws (Reno) and failure to prosecute terrorism cases (Ashcroft); now it’s implicitly promising its staffers that they will be shielded and supported if they decide to deny a FOIA request in part or whole, thus institutionalizing the denial of access to data that could prove it acted in error. The subtext is scarier. It is emblematic of the Bush Administration’s, and Ashcroft’s blatant disregard of the laws and Constitutional framing that they have sworn to uphold that Ashcroft has reversed the direction of the previous administration to consider all government information public unless there is a pressing need to keep the information secret. The author of the article, James Grimaldi, writes, “Justice Department bureaucrats, with Ashcroft’s blessing, are trying to muzzle the watchdogs.” It seems to me that that’s not all they’re trying to do.

John Ashcroft is conspiring, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to draw a dark cloak of secrecy over the workings of government. At the same time, he is lifting all the restraints that have kept our government from trampling the rights that our founding fathers fought for.

Now is the time to act. Write your congressman. If they’re a member of the Republican majority, maybe they’ll stop serving in Bush’s chorus long enough to think about what they’re signing up the country for. If they’re in the Democratic minority, maybe they’ll have an awakening of conscience and start acting like a principled, visionary opposition party.

But act. Before Bush and Ashcroft succeed in making dissent illegal.

Payback will be hell

Good morning! Thirty years is far too short a time with all of you. As Bilbo Baggins once said, I feel I know less than half of you as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as I should.

And thanks to Esta for the technicolor reminder of my mortality. Never fear, dear, I’ve got September 20 circled in my calendar for a few years hence…