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FMA a Political Mistake?

It’s interesting to see the different reactions of Dubya’s announced support of the FMA (constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriages, for those of you living in a cave). I’m not talking about the whole gay marriage debate, which has been going on for some time (and I weighed in here), but purely how people think of Dubya’s move in political terms. Specifically, whether it was politically motivated, and whether it will help or hurt him.

Because it’s an election year, most seem to consider it a calculated move designed to placate Dubya’s conservative base, which has been getting restless as of late. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post take that angle, and both generally seem to think it was a good move. The Economist thinks it’s too drastic a move for politics to explain it, which means Dubya is probably doing it for ideological reasons.

Me, I actually don’t see it as a politically savvy move, so I’m inclined to believe the latter.

Jennifer Government and NationStates

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Books Inc in Mountain View for a reading by Max Barry from his new novel, Jennifer Government. I haven’t actually read the book, but the premise sounded interesting. Anyway, you can sample Chapter 1 of the book here. And at the reading, Max read the first couple of chapters in the book (um, yes, he did read it aloud for those of you who were wondering if we were telepathic).

Basically, it’s a world where multinational corporations run so much of people’s lives that your last name is the name of the company you work for. For example, one of the main characters is, of course, Jennifer Government, and she does indeed work for the government. Another character is Hack Nike, who — you guessed it — works for next to nothing.

And in Chapter 1 — well if you’re going to read Chapter 1 for yourself, read it now, cuz I’m gonna give away some of the punch line — Hack is assigned to an interesting marketing campaign…

Cinequest, Mindbenders

For those of you in the Bay Area (specifically, the South Bay), you probably know that Cinequest has started again. It’s a great film festival with tons of quality independent (maverick, they like to call it) flicks to choose from. I went to a whole bunch of them last year, and my favorites included Kuutamolla (Lovers and Leavers) and Den Osynlige (The Invisible) (Tuva Novotny appears again this year in Slim Susie).

This year, Ealasaid has a Cineblog 2004 site up, and, unlike me, is a professional movie reviewer, so she got to prescreen many of the films and review them, including a review of Spectres, which features Marina Sirtis (Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Dean Haglund (the member of the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files who looked like Garth from Wayne’s World).

The wife and I went with a friend last night to see the collection of short films they call Mindbenders, which are shorts that bend reality. The last time I caught it was two years ago, and more of them had a sci-fi flavor. This year the collection was more surreal. It airs again tonight (March 5th) at 11:15PM at Camera 3 in downtown San Jose (park at the garage at 3rd St. & San Carlos, which is right on top of the theatre, plus it’s free for evenings and weekends — the parking, not the theatre), so if you’re interested, here are my thoughts:

Cinequest: Spectres Review

Well, the curiosity got the better of me and I saw Spectres today, and well… I didn’t particularly like this film nearly as much as Ealasaid did.

Formula One, Melbourne

Thought I’d point out that the 2004 season of Formula One racing kicked off on Saturday in Melbourne, Australia. Thank god I have my TiVo set to autorecord my wishlist of “Formula One” under the “Sports/Auto” category, or else I’d have missed it, since there is practically zero media coverage of Formula One in the U.S.

Which is partially why I’m bothering to write this. I know most of you probably don’t care, but there is also a lack of bloggers (especially American bloggers) writing about Formula One, so I figured I’d help fill the void.

New AFA.NET Poll

Remember the American Family Association Online’s attempt to gather a poll indicating opposition to gay marriage so that they could forward it to Congress?

There’s a recap of it at Alas, a Blog to jog your memory, but basically the results went 2-1 in the opposite direction that they had hoped, so they predictably decided not to forward the poll to Congress after all.

Well, they’re at it again, sending out e-mails to alert their members about their new poll on “Whom do you favor for the next President of the United States?”, offering Kerry, Bush, and Nader as choices. Unfortunately, my choice, the Libertarian Party candidate (it was Harry Browne in 2000) wasn’t listed, so I decided to pick Kerry just to piss them off.

As of right now, here are the results so far:

That’s right. Nader is ahead of Bush.

Of course, the last poll garnered well over 500,000 votes, so who knows? But clearly, somebody with a little lower-than-average computer literacy didn’t think to send the e-mails notifying people about this new poll to just the people who voted against gay marriage in the last poll (which was clearly their intent). I myself of course support gay marriage on libertarian principles, and yet received this e-mail.

Oops.

If you want to vote, click here (e-mail address required).

Television's Replacement

While pondering on how TiVo allows me to time-shift (especially valuable when it comes to watching Formula One), hearing on NPR about the rise in popularity of Internet animations, and reading on Slashdot on how television is losing out to video games, it occurred to me how television is probably going to evolve — or be supplanted, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps my vision has been thought of by others, because it seems so darn obvious, but I haven’t seen it discussed much before.

(Update 3/20/04
Indeed, combining RSS and BitTorrent technologies achieves what I’m thinking of, as already discussed on Slashdot and in much depth by Ernest Miller in a concept he calls “broadcatching,” but note that much of the discussion is pretty technical, so my take is still worth reading.)

Hmmmm… maybe I should back up a bit. Back in my post about the shifting of creative power, I reported the unfortunate cancellation of Angel, the excellent spin-off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had received a burst of energy this season when Joss Whedon was able to devote his full attention to it after the end of Buffy and the cancellation of Firefly (by the way, Julian Sanchez reports that the Firefly movie has been given the go-ahead — and in other good news, Family Guy will be returning!).

In searching for a silver lining, I did note that developments in film and music seemed to indicate that the barrier to entry in the creative arts continues to drop drastically:

Cinequest: Awful Normal Review

I saw Awful Normal last Saturday and have been meaning to review it for a while, but had a tough time figuring out what to say. But the last showing of it at Cinequest is this evening (March 12th, 5PM at the SJSU Morris Dailey Auditorium), so I can’t procrastinate any more.

Update 5/12/04 Awful Normal will be showing in a couple of upcoming film festivals. It’ll be playing at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival on Sunday, May 16th, 2004 at 5:15 PM in the Women’s Building 3543, 18th Street. It’s also playing at the Santa Cruz Film Festival on Saturday, May 15th at 7:00 PM at the Del Mar, 1124 Pacific Ave, and on Wednesday, May 19th at 9:00 PM at the Riverfront, 155 S. River Street. If you’re in the area, be sure to check it out!

It’s a documentary about two sisters who were sexually molested as children by a close family friend. Twenty-five years after the two families decided to keep the whole thing covered up, the two sisters and their mother work on a plan to finally confront the abuser. The statute of limitations is up, so they have no intention of punishing him, just letting him know that they remember what he did, and to maybe help give themselves a sense of closure.

Short and Sweet? Not Me.

For those of you tired of reading Cinequest movie reviews, I’ll hold off on reviewing a couple of very excellent movies I saw on Saturday, Slim Susie and Dorian Blues. I may get to them later this week, but suffice to say that I highly recommend them if you ever get a chance to see them.

Anyway, according to Halley Suitt:

I think brevity is the soul of blog wit more than ever. Look at my archives and see some of my first year’s worth of posts — too too long and ponderous I think.

Short and sweet — the best blog is a fresh blog full of lots of little posts. Ask him and him and her and him and him.

Well, that’s a matter of what you’re looking for. Certainly, I think the majority of Americans will generally prefer this format, what with their infamous short attention spans and need for constant entertainment to stave off boredom. If all a blogger wants is a lot of traffic, it’s certainly a good way to go.

But personally, I don’t go for short and sweet (preferring blogs and women the way I like my coffee: tall and bitter… oh wait…). So I don’t read any of his example blogs. I’ve actually never heard of many of them, but I also don’t read what seem to me to be the two frequent short-post writers and also two of the most widely-read bloggers on the right and left, Instapundit and Atrios. Why? Well, partially because they update too often for me to keep up with (I stay on top of my blogs using their RSS feeds and getting a new item every few minutes would be too much to wade through). But what few times I have read them, they didn’t really have anything interesting to say. Most of their posts are typically just a link to something else without comment, or a partisan spin on a news event. I suppose this is very appealing to people who need a constant stream of entertainment and news and/or want to have their own world view reinforced (or want ammunition in their political debates with friends).

But this is of little value to me.

My Original Snarkier Marriage Comment

While on the topic of short and long blog posts, I should mention that I do actually regularly write much shorter takes when I am commenting on other blogs. This is because I view blog posts and blog comments as two different kinds of media which warrant different approaches, and I think my long post and short comment on gay marriage illustrate this quite nicely, if I do say so myself. Plus, it occurred to me that some of you who read my very lengthy On Marriage post might be interested to see the original four-paragraph comment that it started as.

Fallout of the Spanish Bombings

I know I have yet to say anything about the train bombings in Spain and the resulting upset win in the elections by the Socialists. This is mostly because there’s a lot of good insights out there to be absorbed. I have to admit that foreign affairs and history are not really my strong suit, but I’m a quick study, so here’s what I have to offer. As always, I’m perfectly willing to be corrected.

Ignore the Spin

Both the conservatives and liberals knew how to spin this long before it happened. If there were no more terrorist attacks, liberals knew they’d say conservatives were overreacting, but if there was an attack, they’d just say the conservatives’ strategy wasn’t working. Conversely, the conservatives’ argument if there were no more terrorist attacks would simply be that it was because the strategy was working, but if there was an attack, it meant we needed to react even more forcefully.

So I advise completely ignoring any such simplistic arguments as partisan politics as usual. There’s more to analyze here. First, there was the whole question of whether the Spanish election results were what al-Qaeda intended. I personally don’t see much doubt anymore that it was, especially in light of the recent evidence. And yes, I also think Spain’s pulling out its troops from Iraq was important, although perhaps not in the obvious way.

MT-Textile and SmartyPants

Here’s a little peek under the hood, which hopefully might be a helpful tip to other bloggers. In case those of you on my RSS feed were wondering why there were so many modified entries, it’s because I finally upgraded to Brad Choate’s MT-Textile 2.0.

For those of you who blog using Movable Type, this plugin is absolutely indispensable (a similar alternative is Jon Gruber’s Markdown, but I’ve not tried that myself, so I don’t know how it compares). It saves me a lot of typing, and more importantly, it lets me concentrate on writing instead of worrying about proper HTML syntax. Of course, it has its own syntax rules, but they’re much simpler, and they don’t take too long to learn. Here are a few examples:

The Message, Not the Messenger

Update 7/23/04: I’ve significantly reworked this essay, specifically expanding the “Sometimes there is a wolf” and “Resist confirmation bias” sections.

As I mentioned earlier, I try to act like a sponge, absorbing as much information as possible so that my opinion will be as informed as possible. I think we should all try to act like sponges. Of course, we’re not sponges, we’re humans, and human tendency is actually to prematurely exclude and filter potentially useful information — for a variety of bad reasons. So it’s pretty valuable to stay aware of this tendency.

Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film that is best experienced when you have no idea where it’s going to go, so let me just tell you straight off the bat that I’m giving it 8 out of 10 cute smiley fishies and that the film is definitely worth seeing. It’s not a Jim Carrey film. It’s Jim Carrey delivering a really good performance in possibly the most visually inventive and surrealistic romantic comedy you’ll ever see.

I know the trailers and all the promotions for the film pretty much give away the main premise, but in the off chance you’ve missed them, just go catch the film and then read my review. It’s a non-spoiler review, and the film is actually still very unpredictable and fresh if you know the premise. I just think you’ll enjoy it even more if you have no idea where the journey even starts off.

My Fantasy Baseball Team

Well, spring is here, and that means baseball. We didn’t renew our Giants season tix (of course, I didn’t know that SBC Park would have free Wi-Fi this year), so I’ll have some more free time. Of course, I expected to spend most of it blogging, but my lil brother talked me into joining a Fantasy Baseball League with him and some of his friends and coworkers.

For those unfamiliar, fantasy sports are games played where a bunch of sports geeks act like owners/GMs and pick (in a mock draft) different professional players to be on their “team.” How well the fantasy owner does in the game is then determined by the real-world stats of their team’s players. Sometimes the teams face-off against each other, and the fantasy league maintains won-loss records of each owner (head-to-head). Sometimes the fantasy league just totals up the stats for each fantasy team in several categories and awards points based on how high you’re ranked in each category (Rotisserie).

I’d participated in a head-to-head Fantasy Football League several years back for a couple of years, and while it was fine, I kinda lost interest in it after one season where I devoted a ton of time researching before the draft, all to no avail. One team drafted poorly and had to scramble to pick up an free QB after the season started — Kurt Warner. The team went on to win it all. Lucky bastard.

But I figured I’d try my hand at baseball, at least to see how I’d do against my brother, a big Yankees fan (I was a Mets fan, and am now a Giants fan). He set it up on Yahoo! as Rotisserie-style scoring, where you get points based on rankings in several offensive and defensive statistical categories, like HR, RBI, K, etc. The first place team in a category gets 10 points, 2nd place gets 9, etc., and the winner is the team with the highest points from the all the totaled categories. So it rewards balanced teams (having a ton of homers more than the 2nd place team doesn’t help).