Category: Personal

March is the time of year when I go for my annual eye exam. I stopped by the clinic yesterday to make the appointment and noticed that my opthamologist is now recommending a new diagnostic tool called Optomap to patients. So new, in fact, that insurance companies don’t cover it yet and therefore will cost patients $30 over and above their co-payment. Optomap takes about five minutes, according to the nurses, and eliminates the need to have your eye dialated for the exam; the machine creates a digital image of the retinal surface of the eye, which are stored as part of your permanent medical file for future comparison and it claims to enhance a doctor’s ability to detect eye disease conditions. Seems like a good way to spend $30, eh?

It’s official: Raiders name Bill Callahan new head coach and boy what a surprise. Dennis Green was going to forgo the joy of a fishing show. Bill Parcells had finally convinced Al Davis to let someone else have some control. Art Shell was ready, finally, to be a head coach again, or so his agent would have us believe. Green never made it on the radar, Parcells is too anxious to get into Canton, and Shell, well, seems like the consensus is he’s a real good offensive line coach. Davis probably made this decision promoting offensive coordinator Callahan to head coach minutes after getting off the phone with one of the Glazer brothers four weeks ago and since then having the laugh of his life watching and reading and listening to all the speculation on who he’d choose. Local reporting said life was just going on at the team complex in Alameda, with the coaches coming in every day and doing their prep work, evaluating players and getting ready for mini-camps and the draft. The Raiders signed a couple of big name free agents for their defense and both said the lack of a coach was not a factor. How much you want to bet Davis let them in on his joke?

So endeth the coachinggoround for this season…

Thomas Friedman is one of the most important voices on understanding what is happening in the Middle East. His most recent column is A Foul Wind and he gets right to this question. Not his opinion of the likelihood but rather what the young people, the ones who are most likely to act, think about it. Frighteningly, the answer seems to be that these people more and more believe the answer is yes:

“A visiting Egyptian official told me that he was recently speaking to Arab students about Middle East peace and one of them interrupted to say that with just “eight small, suitcase-size nuclear bombs,” the whole problem of Israel could be eliminated.”

For a Jew, Friedman is surprisingly well connected in the Arab world. He points to the recent peace proposal from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah as an important step in getting a moderate Arab voice injected into the debate. Someone better step up to that plate and soon.

Lately, Blogger has been having some serious down time and performance weirdness. Just so the non-bloggers of you understand, the authoring/publishing part of the blogger system runs on Pyra Labs servers; as Steven pointed out, this is a single point of failure from which other personal publishing systems that run on one’s own system are not subject. In practical terms, this means that I cannot publish when the Blogger servers are down. The last few days have had a serious bout of the outties when Ev and Jason began upgrading the servers. Hopefully, the worst is past. Being a careful, thoughtful guy (stop laughing!), I investigated a couple of the alternatives, Movable Type and b2. Let’s just say I spent several hours on each and neither comes close to what I get in Blogger. Movable Type is probably closer but I couldn’t get all the way there. Oh well. Ev, I’m counting on you!

To all the naysayers and wannabes, get down on your knees, listen to me: this weblog made it to a year today. The content may be nearly useless and frivolous but other than the times I was travelling, there are entries for nearly every day of that year. And for the one big trip I took, instead of weblog entries there are the Italy Journal and Book Reviews instead. Thanks to my friends and family for encouragement and input, my fellow webloggers for inspiration and sometimes material, and Evan Williams for Blogger (even if there are occasional outages), it’s been a fun year. Hundreds of posts, a few links to this site from others, over 10,000 visitors since I began monitoring this statistic at the end of last July. Others explain why they blog but I am not so introspective and will say that it’s huge egoboo and a creative outlet.

The very first post was about two near and dear topics, the Sopranos and Rock and Roll and there were 11 posts in all that day. Given my limited understanding of link rot at the time, I’m quite pleased to note that only two of the links from that day are no longer directly reachable, one because I didn’t understand that Yahoo! News items aren’t saved for long and the other because the company folded. Lots of posts have been about the movies and TV I’ve seen, books I’ve read, music I love, politics and world affairs (unavoidable after 9/11), sports, science, and technology. Look forward to more of the same and keep on stopping by.

Just finished watching the 9/11 documentary by the Naudet brothers and James Hanlon on CBS. The effect was like going into shock once again but compelling, a show I wanted to turn off, wanted to pretend was a fiction but just could not as the pictures were all too real. The non-chalant bravery of the firefighters and other emergency services personnel as captured on tape was simply unbelievable; I know I could not have stood in there, climbing up the stairs, helping people, directing traffic, while the chaos was enveloping everything around me. Fighting fires takes a special kind of person and I’m glad there are many of them in America.

Bridge Over Troubled Water has to be one of the most beautiful, uplifting songs written in the modern era. Art Garfunkle’s voice just smoothly rising above a lovely piano part, Paul Simon’s lyrics just offering the kind of warmth and brotherly love we all need from time to time. At the end, when the drums and voice are soaring, the reverb just reaches out and grabs at the heart. “If you need a friend I’m sailing right behind” may be simple words but a wonderful thing to be. One of my all-time favorites recordings.

The other night I was watching the duo’s 1981 Concert In Central Park on PBS and was reminded how much I enjoyed this music and when I went to Fry’s this afternoon and saw this CD for $10.99 I couldn’t resist! The new version of the CD adds a demo version of the title song, with slightly different lyrics, plus El Condor Pasa, The Boxer, and The Only Living Boy in New York. Softer than I usually like, really no electric guitars to be heard, but beautiful, terrific music.

In an sign I am getting older, both artists turned 60 last Fall. For those of you interested in answers to quite a lot of similar questions related to S&G, either as a group, pre-S&G fame, or as solo artists, I highly recommend the Simon & Garfunkel FAQ, part of the The Simon & Garfunkel Online Resource.

Finding ourselves free this afternoon, we took advantage of the matinee prices to see the latest big screen version of Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo; IMDB lists at least six previous films with this title. Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, and Dagmara Dominczyk (new hottie alert) are all strong in one of the oldest love triangles in literature. I also liked Michael Wincott as the warden Dorleac, he reminded me of a Michael Des Barre who could actually act, and Richard Harris as Dantes’ prison mentor. Jay Wolpert (screenplay) and Kevin Reynolds (direction) give us a nicely paced, visually attractive film with Reynolds definitely moving up in class after previously specializing in Kevin Costner bombs–Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and especially Waterworld. Recommended

To some, this is the ultimate James Bond film but to others a complete throwaway. I tend more to the former view. Australian actor George Lazenby makes his only appearance as 007 after a less than ecstatic public reaction to his replacing Sean Connery; Connery returned one more time in Bond 8, Diamonds are Forever. I thought he did quite well, certainly a better Bond than Timothy Dalton and probably as good as Roger Moore. Diana Riggs as the main Bond Girl was terrific and the plot joining Bond with her underworld boss dad against SMERSH and Telly Savalas’ Blofeld surprising and creative. Savalas, of course, has no problem playing the nasty bad guy. The DVD also has a couple of interesting short pieces including one that explains how the crew captured the exciting ski chase scene by suspending a cameraman from a helicopter. For unknown reasons ABC is not showing this movie as part of The Bond Show, even though they have the rights for it. So do as we did and go out and rent it.

Well isn’t this exciting! Or not. But only three days before the first birthday of this site, the visit counter scrolled past 10,000:

Visitor 10,000 was, of course, anonymous since I don’t use cookies or logins or other tracking methods but I can tell from the referrer logs that this person came to the site after searching Google for “George Carlin” +quotes. My Carlin page actually gets quite a few hits and ranks fairly high at Google; on this term, this site ranked 21 and for simply “George Carlin” is 48. Cool.

Of course, I missed out on the huge rush of traffic in the first 4.5 months the site was online since I only started tracking visitors on July 27 and since visitors using Netscape Navigator are not recorded (grrrr! Darn Sitemeter) the total is probably somewhat higher than 10,000. Still, a joyous occasion and I will be sure to get an extra coffee at breakfast this morning. Thanks for all you people who come more than once. [Since Blogger was down for a server upgrade, this was written before breakfast but posted a few hours later. At the time I type this, the counter is up to a whopping 10,030.]

You too can express your opposition to the ridiculous and unconstitutional Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, as I did:

Sen. Hollings,

After the firestorm of opposition that emerged when you previously attempted to introduce the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, I am amazed to read that you are trying to bring this blight on the constitution back to life.

Honestly, how happy are you to be nicknamed the Senator from Disney? And this is one of the nicer things I have read recently about you.

Please reconsider the impact of your proposed legislation on the consumers of this country. Are you really so concerned about the big media companies that you would outlaw Linux and other similar good things?

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Bill Lazar

I also wrote on this abomination of a legislation back in October.

R to the n, where r stands for romance

And n for the imaginary number of love

Gives us an understanding of feelings

That connect us to each other in real time.

Imaginary or infinite, lust makes us grind

Our teeth, upper against lower, for hours

Without even realizing the force expressed

By our painful grimaces, to each other.

Transitively reflecting the momentum

Or the velocity of my affection for you

Against a mirror held up with little more

Than sweetness and the light in your eyes.

Take the intersection of the product above

With the far from quotidian embraces shared

Until you reach the wonderful asymptotic line

Where there is zero distance between our hearts.

Just another oxymoron, I guess, reading Army Official Kept Options on Enron Stock Until January. Thomas White retired from distinguished (so they say) service in the Army as a general and went to work at Enron for over a decade, finishing his tenure there as vice chairman of one of the major subsidiaries and earning many millions in salary and stock options. Last Spring he was tabbed by the Bush Administration to serve as Secretary of the Army and the Senate confirmed his nomination.

Here is the troubling part. White “signed an ethics agreement promising to sell his shares in Enron, as well as his options and his stakes in several Enron retirement plans, within 90 days of joining the government.” But he didn’t do this. In fact, he held on to options in Enron which he didn’t get rid of until they were permanently and obviously worthless in mid-January. White knew they should have been disposed of earlier, as he kept asking for extensions in the deadline which in the end were denied. So he ignored them and acted in his own best interest.

Is Secretary White going to be punished for his rules violation? Apparently not: “The Armed Services Committee will probably not hold hearings into Mr. White’s conduct, one Congressional staff member said, who added that Mr. White’s behavior does not seem to have generated a ‘critical mass’ of opposition.” Sure, just another crumb of distaste and arrogance falling off the Enron table.

Maybe I just miss seeing Vivian. Or it could be the nasty boy who pissed me off in chat. But I saw one of those idiotic FedEx commercials (you know, where the two drones are amazing each other with the way BarfEx comes to the rescue) and I was wondering who to call to put a hit on the advertising genius resposnsible for that campaign. To make matters worse I saw another moronic CapitalOne commercials (the guy loses his wallet in the jungle and the chimps party). I suppose I oughtn’t be too surprised by the general lack of quality in commercials since most of the so-called creative media is not much better. Movie studios are so short of it that they are making any old thing (I just read about another remake of the Lone Ranger today and saw a commercial for the Resident Evil movie). ABC couldn’t even come up with a title for a new comedy show so they are naming it for the timeslot (Wednesdays 9:30) and is so filled with confidence that they ordered all of six (6) episodes. John Grisham tried to stretch with The Painted House and Skipping Christmas but threw it in for the money with his latest retread of all his other legal thrillers, The Summons. Browsing through Costco yesterday I saw that James Patterson, who used to write quality thrillers before degenerating into repetition, has now decided that money talks so loudly that he’s putting his name on what has to be someone else’s work with 2nd Chance (okay, I’m speculating here but this would be typical of big name authors spinning off a series to someone else who has no rep of his own, just look at Tom Clancy). Music, this I can’ talk about because I just don’t really like anything coming out these days except U2. /End of Rant

Vivian and I had the pleasure of sharing Christmas dinner with my friend Nancy, her brother and sister and her mate Jim and his cuter than life daughters. Someone took a picture of the two of us and we finally got it:

In the course of examining the head coaching changes in football this year, I came across a mystery: position coaches being named assistant head coach even though they nominally report to either an offensive or defensive coordinator. I asked Chris Mortensen at ESPN a month ago to explain this and he never did (boo hiss) but now, over at the Sporting News, Dan Pompei answered my question. I expect he and his bosses won’t be too upset if I quote his answer here:

“It doesn’t mean much, really. In most cases, calling someone an assistant head coach is just a way of showing respect to a coach who either has accomplished quite a bit or who is a hot property. In rare instances, the assistant head coach actually is an assistant head coach whose authority is greater than the other head coaches. When Dave Wannstedt was an assistant head coach to Jimmy Johnson in Miami, he was a true assistant head coach.” Of course Wannstedt was the offensive coordinator so this isn’t a perfect example but I get the point. Thanks Dan!

Some people complain there isn’t enough on TV but I am definitely not one of them. And then new shows come on. Like Jeremiah, the cool new post-apocalyptic Showtime series from Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. Opening premise: our world is destroyed as all those people over the age of 13 die when a superbug is released from a lab (or on purpose, this episode doesn’t address the issue and I expect JMS is keeping it in his backpocket) but the kids live. The show opens 20 years later with Luke Perry (Jeremiah) and Malcom Jamal Warner (Kurdy), both all grown up, meeting and finding they need to partner up for survival. Not going to recap the story here further but suffice to say that they find a thriving community living under Cheyenne Mountain, using all the facilities of the NORAD HQ to prepare to relight a tech civilization. The duo take off again at the end, this time as agents of “The end of the world.” The appeal here is that not everything is predictable even when I’ve read dozens of stories with post-apocalyptic premises. The writing is good, the visuals are worth watching, and there’s decent acting. Not surprising for a JMS show, the website is pretty decent, with all the credits, drawings, interviews, and behind the scenes features. Oh yeah, the series is recommended too.

Little Steven Van Zandt has been a musical god of mine since the mid-70s with his work on Born to Run and the first few Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes LPs. Nowadays he splits his time between acting on the Sopranos (yeah, that’s him owning the Badda Bing), his solo career, playing with Springsteen, and leading the revival of Garage Rock. He posted an excellent essay on the history and current status of the genre on his website, which I encourage you to read even if (especially if) you don’t know what kind of music this means. Little Steven writes with a real attitude, the same kind of tone you hear in his music. If you haven’t heard his first solo record, Men Without Women, you don’t know the rock and roll nirvana you’re missing. Anyway, back to the Garage rock, Van Zandt is launching a nationwide weekly radio show called Little Steven’s Underground Garage on April 7, with him spinning favorite tracks and providing commentary. And rumors persist of a new, hard rocking Springsteen/E Street release in the Fall, keep your fingers crossed.