fling93 loves fishies

An Unforgettable Super Bowl XXXVIII

I think that Super Bowl commercial from H & R Block with the Willie Nelson advice doll was a lot like the Super Bowl itself. It started out boring enough, but had an ending that made it special (if you missed the ad, you can watch it here. You had to have seen last year’s ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox to get the last reference, but it’s hilarious).

And I have my usual rambling reactions. I’ll try to organize them as best I can…

American Presidential Candidate Selector

Well, I usually try to avoid memes, since I figure you can find those everywhere, but in this case, some of you are probably curious about where I end up (plus most of the other topics in my to-blog queue involve a good deal of work).

So I took SelectSmart.com’s 2004 American Presidential Candidate Selector quiz, and here are my results…

My Top Ten Films of 2003

I haven’t really followed the Oscars that closely ever since Forrest Gump beat out Shawshank Redemption, but in light of the somewhat recent nominations, here’s my list of — well, not the best films of the year, but the best films I’ve seen that you might have overlooked…

Not Renewing Giants Season Tix

Well, I was hoping to write this Friday or Saturday, but I play in a 9 Ball pool league in the APA, specifically the South Bay APA Leagues, and my team made it to the Tri Annual Tournament, which we played all day on Saturday — and won! Not much help from me, since I lost my match, but I at least closed the gap a little at the end, and those points did matter since our team ended up winning that round 51-49.

Also, my copy of iLife ‘04 came in on Friday, and I’ve been playing around with GarageBand. I actually have a bit of a musical background on several instruments, so I’ve been meaning to try my hand at songwriting for some time, but never got around to it. I’m sure I’ll eventually need to upgrade to something like Cubase, but for now I just needed a kick start. I’ll be sure to post some of my stuff here for your amusement.

But the real reason for this post is that individual tickets for the San Francisco Giants’ 2004 season go on sale today at 11 AM PST, which can be purchased from the Giants website here, at Tickets.com outlets, Giants Dugout Stores (except the one at Pac Bell… er… SBC Park), or at today’s KNBR/Giants Winter Fanfest, also at 11 AM at Pier 48 (in San Francisco, of course). I went to it last year, and it was pretty cool, but I think I’ll be too busy playing with GarageBand today. Besides, I already bought my tix for the 2004 season a couple of days ago because I’m an Xtreme Rewards member.

Of course, last year we were season ticket holders (up in View Reserved section 310, row 13 — still a great view, though), but we didn’t renew this year. Oh, I’m still a Giants fan (hey, I’m posting this, aren’t I?), and will still go to about ten games this year, but there were a couple of reasons we decided not to renew. And let me explain why…

Rain Songs

Well, okay. I’ll succumb to another “meme” (but I plan to do another more substantive post tonight on my GarageBand experience, so I’m sure you won’t mind). This one’s an inadvertent one, courtesy of David (via Elkit), who lists his Top 5 songs about rain. But, knowing me, I can never limit my lists to just 5, so instead, here’s my Top 10 favorite rain songs…

My First GarageBand Experience

Well, right after writing my SF Giants post on Sunday morning, I eagerly fired up GarageBand and spent the whole rest of the day (and Monday and Tuesday evening) playing around with it. I’ve been itching to try my hand at songwriting for the longest time, even going so far as grabbing a copy of CakeWalk Home Studio several years ago (I think this was before Windows 95, actually), but I never really got going. The most I ever did was merely transcribe the theme to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

So needless to say, I was looking forward to this, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. This is definitely a great program to get started with, no matter what your level of musical expertise (or lack thereof). It comes with a large selection of loops where you can drag onto your song. Even more, it’ll automatically transpose a loop to match the key of the song so that it’ll sound right. Loops are actually pretty useful for the musically inclined who intend to record every single track manually, in that they can quickly kick start a song by being a placeholder that gives you a good idea of what the final song will sound like pretty early in the process (which actually did come in handy in the song that I wrote, which I’ll provide at the end). And it also comes with a large assortment of professional sounding software instruments that you can play using the virtual keyboard or your own external MIDI instrument (MIDI-to-USB interface is not included, but can be found inexpensively at most music stores).

TV News Good and Bad, but Creative Power Is Slowly Shifting

Got some good news, and some bad news. Well, let me start with the good news (since the bad news flows better into my main point). Remember, the re-imaging of Battlestar Galactica “mini-series” by Ronald Moore? Well if not, you can read my review to jog your memory.

As you might have guessed, this being the good news, Slashdot reports that the new series has been greenlighted (greenlit?) by the Sci-Fi Channel. Ronald Moore talks a little more on his plans for the show here and here (although spoilers from the “mini-series” are revealed in that second link). Sounds promising, especially if the series is as good as the “mini-series” (come on, it was really a two-hour pilot of a show they weren’t sure they were going to make). We’ll see.

And as for the bad news, it’s really bad. Via Whedonesque, Variety reports that the WB will not renew Angel for a sixth season. WB’s official press release is here. How’s that for a Valentine’s Day present? Well, I was wondering why the 100th episode (with Cordelia) was so crappy. This was clearly a storyline that was intended to take a while to develop, and then the writers were suddenly scrambling to tie up loose ends (much like X-Files and Babylon 5 had to do).

So, what to do now? As always, there’s petitions you can sign, but they tend to have mixed results. The reality is that there’s not a whole lot of options, but I think that developments are slowly percolating to change the nature of all media, which I’ll get to again later.

East vs. West in Capacity to Die

This doesn’t really have anything to do with any current events, but I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, since it provides some useful background in analyzing foreign policy.

A while back, I stumbled upon this insightful article by Charles William Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The article is quite long, but well worth reading. It covers the various issues surrounding the use of force by the United States after the Cold War, but I just want to highlight one minor point:

Nor does greater precision in delivery of weapons necessarily clear the way for a more ready resort to force. It is not at all certain that others calculate the costs of resistance as U.S. policymakers hope they will. As advanced countries have repeatedly learned, in a struggle between the technically sophisticated and unsophisticated, there is often a mismatch in political determination just as large as there is in technical capability. The West in general has a high capacity to kill but a low capacity to die. The equation is often reversed among the targets of the West’s wrath. America learned about the differences between capacity and determination in Vietnam, the French learned in Algeria, and the Russians in Afghanistan. And that is the overlooked lesson of U.S. involvement in Somalia.

No Deficit Trap, Just Two-Party Politics

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (via Praktike from American Footprint, temporarily on hiatus), mentions the trap:

Some say that Bush created the huge deficits to squeeze government, to force cuts in public investments and social programs. Democrats who focus excessively on deficit reduction are falling precisely into the trap, especially when political timidity impedes reversing the tax cuts.

This is the whole “starving the beast” scenario. I typically hear this argument from conservative supply-side proponents (which Praktike and Stiglitz are most definitely not) after I’ve explained the Laffer curve to them (it’s amazing how many supply-side proponents don’t even know why it’s called “supply-side” and not “demand-side”). They typically retreat to say that at least the tax cut will constrain government spending.

Well, if that were true, why didn’t “starving the beast” work in the Reagan era, where tax cuts were accompanied by huge spending increases?

I think I know why…

Evil Empire and the Economics of Baseball

Well, the Yankees obtaining Alex Rodriguez has all the fans (especially Red Sox fans) in a snit. It’s refreshing to hear a voice of reason, and I couldn’t say it any better than my favorite sports columnist, Ken Rosenthal, of the Sporting News (the magazine isn’t what it used to be, but Rosenthal still churns out quality content), who says, Ahem! The Yankees are not evil:

Imagine, if MLB had adopted a fairer system that based revenue-sharing contributions on potential and not actual revenue, the Yankees still would pay more because they play in a large market. But they wouldn’t be punished for making extra money. Nor would other high-revenue teams.

“The Yankees generate more revenue than the Mets, but (Mets owner Fred) Wilpon shouldn’t be paying less to the system than Steinbrenner; then you’re penalizing Steinbrenner for being good,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor and author of the book May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy. “You want to reward owners for being good. Otherwise, they have no incentive.”

Emphasis mine. Hey, I’m a Mets fan (well, the Giants are now my team, but I still root for the Mets when they aren’t playing us), and I have to say he makes sense. Look at what happens with the perverse incentives we have now:

On Marriage

Update 2/16/07: Before you read this, I should mention that Erika and I filed for divorce at the beginning of the year. While I think a lot of what I say here is still valid, we obviously made our share of mistakes, so you may want to take this post with a grain of salt. I don’t regret marrying her, and we are still good friends, but it will take a while before I decide exactly how to incorporate what I’ve learned into this piece.

Well, due to all the recent hubbub over gay marriage and discussions of a federal amendment to “defend marriage,” I’ve been giving the whole marriage and divorce issue some thought and thought I’d weigh in on it and what I think really ought to be done (which is not what you might expect). Of course, what started out as a reposting of a short four paragraph comment turned into much more than that (covering more about marriage in general than gay marriage). So I’ll cut the small talk and just get into it.

Sidebar Additions & XFN

As you might have noticed, I’ve done some pretty heavy-duty writing here as of late, so I’m taking a bit of a breather to play Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on the PS2. But you may have noticed I’ve tweaked the sidebar a bit. It now includes more of my recent posts, as well as a new list of testimonials for my site, which should hopefully get more people to realize what a really strange blog this is. I’ve also made several long overdue additions to the blogroll.

And another change, albeit a more subtle one that most of you won’t notice, is that this site is finally XFN friendly. Basically, XFN allows you to specify what actual human relationship you have with the people you are linking. I know your browser probably doesn’t show them any differently (I think there’s a way for me to set up the style-sheet to do that), but for now you can take a look at the relationships I added here.

As you can see, nobody out there considers me their friend (except the fishies, who don’t know how to write HTML). You might also assume that at least nobody out there considers me their enemy, but this would actually be an incorrect assumption because XFN doesn’t (yet) have “enemy” as one of the values to choose for the “rel” attribute.

Richard Perle Resigns

Hmm, nobody else seems to have picked up on this yet, but Richard Perle has resigned:

Richard Perle, a prominent adviser to the Bush administration known for his hawkish views on Iraq and other national security matters, has resigned from the Defense Policy Board, saying he wanted to avoid being a lightning rod for criticism of the administration during a presidential election year.

Perle submitted his resignation from the board — a bipartisan advisory group with no decision-making power — in a Feb. 18 letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated,” Perle wrote. “I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the president at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign.”

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed the resignation and said Rumsfeld has accepted it, thanking Perle for his long service on the board, which spanned 17 years. The resignation was first reported late yesterday by Knight Ridder.

The full text of his resignation letter is available here:

My Stunning Rendition of "Ordinary Day"

Well, Return of the King for the PS2 didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I was a bit disappointed by the game, but I’ll save that for my full review.

Meanwhile, I’ve still been fiddling around with GarageBand, but now with my new toys: a Tascam US-122 USB Audio/MIDI Interface combined with a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone. The SM57 is supposedly pretty legendary and ubiquitous in recording studios (now I recognize them sometimes in music videos) and is, of course, the microphone that even the President uses. It also got a pretty good review from mojo pie’s Steve Langer. They also have a neat article from Dan Richards about building a mic cabinet which says it’s a pretty good microphone to start out with — and it costs less than $100 (see what I mean by lowered barriers to entry?). Eventually I’ll probably add a low-end condenser microphone.

As for the $200 Tascam US-122, there are cheaper audio to USB interfaces out there, but one of the real draws for me was that it had phantom power XLR inputs required by condenser mics. Plus several people on the forums seemed to have good experiences with it, including Ben Whitehouse, who also has an excellent piece on building a home studio. And plus, the local Guitar Center had a returned model for $40 cheaper.