BillSaysThis

We’re watching the MTV broadcast of LIVE 8 – The Long Walk to Justice and 24 minutes in we’ve heard exactly two songs, maybe six minutes max, of music. I don’t really begrudge the commercials, the bills need to get paid and there are plenty of PSAs too, but all the VJ self-promoting blather is beyond annoying and the 10 second per tune highlights were useless. Okay, Black Eyed Peas with the Marleys are back on now with a Bob Marley classic. Hope this is not going to be the pattern all day, is all I will say.

Matt, I suppose OS X is cool but it is not by any means the the final upgrade. [file under Mac fanatics]

I’ll give it a try. From Stu Nicholls.

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Looks good to me. If you’re seeing this through the RSS feed, you need to come to the site to experience the effect.

Burnham’s Beat: Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google? Let’s just say YOWSA! doesn’t quite capture it.

For those of you not yet acquainted with bill:politics, Boycott CNN!.

Google’s first response to the problems caused by their update last Thursday, Layout Solutions, pretty much rates a two on a scale of 1-10 in this blogger’s eyes. Very little and very late. I have yet to receive a response to my email to the support team nor has anyone from the company responded to any of the messages on either of the two user mailing lists. That old itch is flaring up again.

Wil McCarthy has written some interesting, well-informed speculations of a future that may yet come to pass where the tiny little machines of nanotechnology essentially remove the material limits of our current existence. The future described in Bloom, though, is one for which I cannot imagine any sane being wishing. Calling it “a novel of terror” is an understatement: in the opening pages we’re told that 99.9+% of humankind perished in a kind of grey goo industrial accident twenty years before.

Two groups of survivors now live on outposts in the asteroid belt (the Gladholds) and the Jovian moons (the Immunity). Among the latter, life is six days of overtime a week with no vacation or sick days and a population dribbling away as fewer and fewer children are born each year; space closer to the Sun is dominated by the so-called Mycosystem and the Immunity focuses much effort on preventing enchroachment into its cavernous cities. The leadership decides to send an expedition tasked with dropping detectors at the polar caps of Mars, the Moon and Earth–since cold is one of the few defenses left against it, any movement into these frozen zones by the technogenic life would signal imminent danger.

Of course no mission of this stripe is so straightforward nor easily accomplished. Even among the humorless Immunity some believe the Mycosystem must have evolved at a pace that in twenty years will have brought them nearly to the level of a god and so the mission of the Louis Pasteur is blasphemy. The crew, days away from readiness, is forced to make an emergency departure when several believers make an attack that kills one member.

McCarthy has a deft hand. All the while taunting his readers with the horror of being incorporated, an atom at a time, into this all too plausible nanolife, he offers a mental sanctuary by telling the tale in the form of a crewman’s memoirs and opening most chapters with quotes from books written by him in the story’s future. Very well done and despite the foreknowledge of survival, the ending is not as simple or pleasant as expected. Reading the climactic chapters last night I waited in vain for the scene where the story turns happy like a Hollywood movie surely would.

Other bits are done well too. The Immunity polity is drawn as a place of grim survival with little room for even virtual escape in off hours and so the discovery by our narrator that one of the other crew has a young son takes him by surprise. The technology, from the Mycosystem to fusion powerplants to the interplanetary spaceships to the VR-like zee-specs, are reasonable extrapolations from today with little extra necessary for dramatic effect (cf. Mundane SF).

Overall the only complaints I have are a tourist excursion sidebar visit to the Gladholds and a somewhat deus ex machina confrontation with the Mycosystem that furnishes the climax. Neither reach a meaningful level of real discomfort for me, I came away happy to have read Bloom.

recommended

So said many signs in the stands at Spartan Stadium tonight, and so say I. The Galaxy continued their season-long road slump as keeper Kavin Hartman and his central defenders gave us two own goals in about four minutes as they simply could not communicate. Donovan was booed loudly on his pre-game introduction and every time he touched the ball.

The first San Jose goal in the 37th minute came off a sweet double pass, Davis to Cerritos with Moreno jabbing his foot out inches in front of the LA goalline to stab the ball over. That was the only meaningful action of the half though for my money the referee blew several big calls including a foul that ought to have been a penalty kick and yellow on Hartman for taking out Brad Davis; somehow the man in the red shirt gave the card to Davis for diving.

The second half started with a lot of back forth until the 54th minute when the Galaxy got in close, forcing Pat Onstad to make four saves in a bam bam bam sequence, easily the key defensive stand for us, and after that the heart seemed to whoosh out of LA. Give him credit, Landon ran the field end to end the entire 90+. The two own goals by Michael Umana and Tyrone Marshall followed in the 65th and 68th.

Onstad upped his home shutout streak 416 minutes and the Quakes moved to three points back of tonight’s losers, remaining in third place in the Western Conference. We’ve got a busy week ahead, hosting the Colorado Rapids Wednesday night and traveling to Texas next Saturday for a faceoff with first place FC Dallas. FCD, along with New England, are clearly the class of the league this season and despite missing Eddie Johnson and Richard Mulrooney through injury are still taking points left and right.

Schedule notes: MLS will get a burst of change after the midweek matches through much of July. First, many of the top stars (Dwayne Derosario, Canada, and Brad Davis, USA, from the Quakes) move to national team duty as the CONCACAF squads chase the Gold Cup trophy from July 6-24. Further, several top European clubs come over for preseason friendlies against league teams and each other (including AC Milan, Chelsea, Real Madrid, CD Chivas de Guadalejara) winding up with an MLS Best XI lineup facing EPL’s Fullham FC as this year’s All Star game on July 30.

Monmouth University, which back when I was in high school didn’t put on such airs and was known as Monmouth College, is holding a symposium on Bruce Springsteen in September. Over 160 professors and such will spend several days presenting papers and discussing such thrillers as the influence of Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens on the rocker’s lyrics. Cool beans–I’m enough of a Springsteen dork that I’d probably go if I still lived in the area.

You’d think that the institution, also known less formally as Yale by the Wales, would be at least promoting the event on some notable place on its website but I’ll be smacked if if I can find it anywhere. How many more high profile events can there be in the next three months? Good thing I can read about it on the Iowa City Press Citizen!

By the way, the weirdness is still here. I wrote to Blogger Support and posted a note to the user support mailing list but got nothing that helped. The Google people didn’t even respond over the course of an entire business day though several well-intentioned people on the list proposed ideas. Still funky and not in the way Phil and Dave used to joke about.

Rob’s got the same gunk.

Later: Phil shoots and scores! Here’s what he said, in case you’re suffering from this too:

“For some reason (and I’d be interested in hearing a rationalization – maybe they thought they would clear floats from their inserted images, with a sledgehammer?), someone decided that Blogger should automatically insert a clear: both; before and after every post, as a part of the post body where you can’t avoid it. Since the clear property says “don’t allow any floated elements on my (left|right|both sides)”, that makes doubly sure that if your layout consists of a sidebar created with float:right, then your post will start below it.

Luckily, it looks like you aren’t using the clear property anywhere yourself, so adding

div {clear: none !important}

to your stylesheet ought to overrule their… interesting idea about what they ought to do in your posts.”

This should handle the problem until Google dudes get their act together.

[I wrote this letter to the Public Editor of the Times but their email server claims the mail address published on the guy’s web page is invalid. Welcome to the 21st Century, right?]

I’m writing not because of any partisan concern regarding today’s article Public Broadcasting Chief Is Named, Raising Concerns but because it tipifies a failing in the Times (and other major newspapers as well, to be sure): inserting a nearly new, though related, topic at the end of an article and not delivering the main dish of it. Specifically:

In the floor debate, some Republicans continued to call for a trimmed-down public broadcasting budget. Representative Ginny Brown-Waite, Republican of Florida, said “Americans should be shocked” by how profitable the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is through its marketing of popular programs.

That’s a pretty significant assertion and one I haven’t noticed any coverage of in other Times articles. Even if it has been, it’s almost 90 degrees from the major point of the article. As a reader I expected to see the Next Page link where the reporter would add responses and elaboration of such a serious charge.

But no, the article ends in the next sentence with a cute mention of a Big Bird prop.

If you’re reading this on the page and not in an RSS reader, I’m trying to work out some strange behavior that’s affecting only the first (most recent) blog post, inserting some width that’s forcing the line the post’s timestamp is on below the right hand links list. I didn’t change anything that I know of, though I did try out the new Blogger image inclusion tool to no particular benefit.

2nd try: Now it’s between the post title and the first line of text. Er…

3rd try: Really, I got nothing. There’s no change in my Blogger template or stylesheet. Sometimes I just hate this web stuff. And then I take my medicine.

4th try: Trying all sorts of little template changes to no avail.

Bummer!

Short version: See it.

Longer version: Batman Begins continues the recent tradition of comic book superhero movies using the first film to tell the character’s origin story. But while other movies (Spider-Man, Blade, Hellboy, yeah, I’m looking at you, Hulk, well, I got not clue not having seen the crapper) depend on some fantastic or supernatural explanation, writers David Goyer (who also wrote Blade) and Christopher Nolan (who directed this one, having previously written and directed the much more intellectual Memento and Hollywood version of Insomnia) provide engineering support barely out of the reach of current military development for Batman’s entire array of equipment. Though it doesn’t hurt that Bruce Wayne is one of the wealthiest men in the film’s corporate America to justify his access to it.

Acting: We saw this with the Big Guy and walking out he wondered whether the acting or the script was more responsible for our mutually agreed assessments. Then he said that almost certainly it’s a six of one, half dozen of the other situation. Beside Christian Bale as the Bat, the cast is full of good names: Morgan Freeman as the tech supplier, Michael Caine as Alfred, Cillian Murphy as the psychotic psychiatrist, Gary Oldman as Gordon the copper, Liam Neeson as the leader of the League of Shadows (I can’t say if his character is good or evil but he does drive the plot), Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe, Rade Serbedzija and, of course, Tom Cruise’s fiance.

That last quip also points to one of the movie’s weakest points, the almost pitiful attempt at a romantic component. As if the studio execs said to Nolan that he needs to stick something in to give female viewers an extra hook except that in thiscase the hook landed in someone’s lip. The last conversation between Wayne and Katie Holmes’ Rachel Dawes was especially pitiful as it was almost an exact lift from the cematery scene between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in the first Spider-Man.

Fortunately that’s just about the only such conversation. The pair’s other (adult) conversations are concerned with the main plot; the closest they come to such gushy feelings is their confrontation outside Wilkinson’s hang out that launches Bruce Wayne on the path to becoming the Caped Crusader.

For a change, this is also a big Summer action flick that doesn’t depend so heavily on computer generated special effects that the computer programmers are more important than the actors (Revenge of the Sith, this time I’m looking at you). Not that special effects are bad IMO but they need to be used to help tell the story and not in place of one (Sky Captain and many others). Nolan and Goyer take us from A to B to C simply and clearly without asking us to unreasonably suspend our disbelief.

definitely recommended–could be this year’s Bourne Identity or Spider-Man.

George Higgins was a writer whose prime time ended just a few years too soon for him to be everywhere on the web, with a personal site, publisher sites and fan sites; mostly one finds academic overviews and book sellers with copies of the few novels that remain in print. He passed on in 1999, still writing but for the most part his reputation remains focused on his first three published novels.

The most famous of all is the first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, due to both stunning quality and a decent film version starring Robert Mitchum. Coming off a few years of practicing criminal law in Boston from the mid-’60s, its arrival in 1972 offered a new view of a crime novel: beyond gritty but delivered almost entirely in realistic dialog complete with a regional accent that jumped off the pages.

The Digger’s Game a year later was more of the same (the third novel in the sequence is Cogan’s Trade); the title itself is a prime example of Higgins’ burned in local style–how many of you aren’t surprised to find out The Digger of the title is a nickname for the main character? Me I’d always expect the title to be just “Digger’s Game” if we’re talking about a person. You go most of the book anyway not really knowing or remembering his given name, just The Digger.

If you’re looking for omniscient authorial overviews, insights or descriptions this isn’t the right book. Almost every paragraph is wrapped in quote marks, no pretty adjectives or adverbs to telegraph the meaning. People talk to each other, sometimes they tell stories or reminisce about previous escapades, in short, harsh sentences. Do this, I did that, why’d you do the other, that’s the basic sentence structure throughout.

So The Digger’s Game is a good read. Different and at just over 200 pages in the edition I have Higgins doesn’t have space to get boring or abstracted. If I had to point out one significant flaw, which doesn’t really bother me, its the two separate stories that are only artifically connected by the event–a trip to Vegas–that sets everything up; otherwise they run in parallel and, to some degree, mirror each other but essentially are two novellas jammed together to make a better marketing proposition.

recommended

The Seattle Public Library is making excellent use of RSS. For all I know they’re far from the first to do so but definitely the first I’ve noticed. If only Mountain View Public Library could do the same. [via Scripting]

If you were thinking of making time this weekend to come look over Casa de Lazar with an eye towards buyin’, I have some bad news for ya. That’s good news for me and the Sweet One, of course. We got a contract on the place yesterday–now we have to find the next rest stop. Saw a couple of places after work that fill the bill. Thanks for the positive wishes, Karl and Garret.

Hey Robert, let’s throw a little gass on the fire. Check out Nicholas Carr’s post When in China and explain to me how BillG’s high falutin’ words of less than a decade ago don’t crash up against the waves of reality that is the current MSN China policy on exactly the same subject.

Really, why do people other than the victims’ families and community care? I know, America is all about the celebrity news these days and what’s better than a star of Jackson’s magnitude facing such nasty criminal charges? Pedophile, or not, that so few people were surprised much by the indictment is not a good sign for me. That he was acquitted is probably a good result since the prosecutor seemed (from the furthest remove I could manage) to put on a crap case.

This isn’t a second OJ deal in the sense that Simpson’s lawyers were like artists playing to a carefully selected jury, although then too the DAs didn’t match up well. Jackson–IMO–probably did some shit that crossed over the line I’d draw between appropriate and bad behavior but nothing that rose to the felony level. To some degree, the current high visibility of child molestation cases didn’t help him nor did his odd public personality. He’s no Catholic priest or Boy Scot troop leader, though, pulling little kids in to give or get sexual favors.

If I could get one positive change out of this, which I sadly acknowledge is not going to happen any time soon, the news media would stop setting up like camp followers outside every celebrity trial or travail to deliver hundreds and thousands of hours of nearly content-free coverage. Play repeats of Knots Landing or Bonanza, I don’t care, just stop shoving this crap down our throats. Please.