BillSaysThis

Suzy Sandor, with a letter to the editor in today’s NY Times, complains that partisan primaries alienating and disconnected. This is a very strange, disconnected position, one that didn’t make any better sense a when it was on the ballot here in the November elections; while California voters were wise enough to defeat Prop. 62, I’m still not over the 46.2% of voters who cast yes votes. While the current two party system leaves much to be desired in providing quality candidates, allowing anyone to vote in any primary simply deprives the primaries of their actual meaning–to allow the members of a particular party to select their own candidate for a general election. Non-partisan primaries would most likely destroy the parties; if that’s the unstated goal of those behind these efforts, this is the wrong means to get there.

Congratulations, Matt Leinart on winning the 6th Heisman Trophy awarded to a USC football star. One more big thing to do this season: Lead the Trojans past Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl the same way you beat their QB and RB today at the Downtown Athletic Club. Suh-weet!

I’m of two minds about today’s match although both of them are unhappy with this result. One thought is that Everton, tied for second for the moment with Arsenal and having already won more games than in all of last season, are playing above their heads while we are missing four or five of our preferred starters though injury and had a tough match in midweek which Everton didn’t, not having qualified for Europe. The other is that this is a derby in which the Reds had an eight game winning streak and Benitez made a couple of puzzling choices in assembling the side; why were Alonso, Nunez and Finnan not on the pitch at the open?

Another question, which may be an artifact of the television broadcast rather than on the pitch actuality: Didn’t Everton have a player offside when Carsley made his goal-scoring shot? There was very definitely a blue shirt behind the last visible Liverpool defender and though he wasn’t involved in the play (even had his back to the goal) he also was at least partially blocking Kirkland’s view. I’m not sure exactly how the passive offsides rule might play in here but then again neither of the commentators made a mention nor did Benitez in what I saw of the post-game interviews.

Definitely an annoying outcome after Wednesday’s triumph against the Greeks, not to mention the glorious victory over Arsenal two weeks ago. You can talk about giving players like Alonso rest but, geez, couldn’t that wait until the much lower pressure of Tuesday’s match against Portsmouth?

Our top story tonight: Generallissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Chevy Chase, Weekend Update, Saturday Night Live, 1975

Chase had a recurring bit in the Weekend Update segment during his short time on SNL, which Jane Curtain continued with a time or two, in which he would mention as newsworthy the fact that Franco, the recently deceased dictator of Spain, was still dead. However, in a sense, Franco actually wasn’t dead then and still isn’t now. Not that he’s alive in the sense that you are or I am today but that he hasn’t slipped into that ethereal, ambiguous place we call the past.

When someone dies, people usually give the comforting advice that deceased isn’t really gone as long as she lives on in your heart. So when everyone who knew that person finally passed on as well, 10 or 50 or whatever years later, death was truly final and that person extinguished. With exceedingly few exceptions, relatively speaking, that extinguishing is true for every single human born prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not counting surviving census (and similar materials), only major historical figures have anything still known and alive about themselves.

Since the Industrial Revolution began, however, modern media has been born and evolved. Newspaper archives and personal journals are probably the oldest such records and since Daguerre’s (or Talbott’s) and Edison’s inventions we’ve been preserving sounds and images. With the invention (and continuing improvement) of digital storage, nearly everything that currently exists in the various analog formats and everything stored digitally is being preserved and,with the right approaches, will never be lost. In a sense, then, none of us will ever truly die again. Are you reading this while I’m still alive or after spelunkering through drafty archives of the web’s birthing far down the road?

Set in a strange Latinized, banana republic America, masked and anonymous is as odd as you might expect from the combined creative efforts of Larry Charles, who came to fame as a writer on the epitomy of the big nothing, Seinfeld, and Bob Dylan (who co-wrote besides starring). The country is engulfed in a corrupt, eviscerated national gang war where no one can walk in a straight line or deliver one.

Because this is a Dylan movie, nearly all the parts are played by name, or at least recognizable, actors: Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Bruce Dern, Jessica Lange, Christian Slater, Chris Penn, Luke Wilson, Cheech Marin, Angela Bassett, Steven Bauer, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Fred Ward, Robert Wisdom and Tracy Walter.

The movie uses many of Dylan’s own songs, sung by him, sometimes by others, some even in other languages–Dylan plays a lost and now found ’60s singer named Jack Fate, pulled out of prison to be the star of a benefit concert put on by Goodman and Lange that no name star in masked‘s America is willing to play. Though unspecified higher ups require Jack to play a set filled with songs about rebellion and revolution, such as The Beatles’ Revolution, The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock; of course he performs none of them, the closest is his own Blowin’ in the Wind. Finally, Fate is the son of the country’s (dying) dictator though only he and a select few (seem to) know this.

Plenty of the dialog surely sounds like it could be Dylan lyrics. “Sometimes when I dream my dreams become my reality,” said Giovanni Ribisi. “Imagine yourself being reincarnated in the civil war in Babylon,” said John Goodman (who looks more like a whale than any famous mainstream actor since Marlon Brando in The Score). “The seeds won’t grow if you plant them on the carpet, or the hardwood floor,” says Jessica Lange. Hell, Wilson beats Bridges to death with an old bluesman’s acoustic guitar!

The big question is does Bob Dylan act in this film or just walk through it? To me that isn’t terribly meaningful–hasn’t he been acting out in public since the earliest days of his career?

recommended

Now that the highly lauded Google Suggest is out in the wild, how long will it be until some enterprising developer updates the Firefox search box to include it?

Cringely on the IBM-Lenovo deal: “Losers in the deal are HP, Intel, and Sun. Especially Sun. Those guys are in trouble.”

Compare, consider and contrast, though all leave a bad taste.

I had lunch at Yahoo! yesterday with a couple of friends, the very famous Jeremy Zawodny (who submits this visual proof taken with a tiny, USB flashdive-sized camera) and the internetly-anonymous SpoFite WorldCup2002. Very enjoyable, interesting discussions. Jeremy moves in some very high levels: he had lunch with Macromedia co-founder/Web pundit Marc Cantor the day before and was chatting with one of Yahoo’s co-founders and another C-level exec while waiting on line to get the sandwich he ate with us.

Everyone’s got to be a fan of Peter Sellers, the man was a comic genius even if he did seem to be burning out just before his death at 54 in 1980. He made so many classics, among them The Mouse Who Roared (which deserves much more acclaim than it seems to get), Dr. Strangelove (which does get the acclaim it deserves), the four Pink Panther features (a role he got at the last minute when Peter Ustinov–you’ve got too be kidding me–backed out) and Being There (his last serious effort).

HBO continues its tradition of producing the best made for television movies with The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a real yet somewhat surreal biography starring Geoffrey Rush (have you seen him in Lantana?) as Sellers, Charlize Theron as Sellers’ utterly stunning second wife Britt Eklund, Emily Watson as first wife Anne, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards (writer/director of the Pink Panther flicks, among many other great films), Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubric (who directed Strangelove) and the absolutely exquisite Sonia Aquino as Sophia Loren.

The movie is based on a serious biography by Roger Lewis and focuses on Sellers the man; it isn’t a frothy recap of his films but a psychological portrait of a man who thinks he really isn’t there. By the climax, when we see Sellers reading and then becoming determined to make the film of Jerzy Kosinsky’s novel Being There, director Stephen Hopkins no longer needs to make explicit the actor’s inner emptiness (as he’d done frequently at earlier points) nor his remarkable similarity to the book’s lead character–Rush and Hopkins collaborate to show us via facial expressions, (lack of) conversational ability and physical isolation.

Another interesting device Hopkins uses is to play on Sellers’ own common ploy of playing multiple parts in a movie by having Rush take over another character’s monologue, dressed and made up as that other character, switching while the camera briefly swings away from their face. The first time this happened, as Sellers’ father speaks, I almost didn’t catch it but once alerted it was noticed each time. The monologues by themselves are another device as they’re spoken directly to the audience (breaking the fourth wall is the term, I believe) and a mixed bag since they deliver a good bit of that explicit messaging that Hollywood insists film audiences require. Truly great films generally understand we don’t, so let’s just put this down as pretty good.

recommended

Yesterday I saw her two blocks over: she walks in snow (another neat photo from g)

The Reds register an amazing turnaround at home today–why oh why couldn’t the programming viziers give us one match that doesn’t feature Real Madrid or Manchester United on the US feed–needing to outscore Greek side Olympiakos by three goals in the second half to advance in Champions League play and driven by their recently-returned captain Gerrard, my boys do just that. Gerrard himself put in the third goal to ensure we reached the final 16. And once again the underrated Neil Mellor makes himself a factor by scoring three minutes after coming on in the 78th for the apparently still injury-constrained Baros. Next round is a home and home set in late February with the draw to be held a week from Friday, our opposition will be interesting indeed, the possibilities are the non-English group winners (excluding Monaco, which won Liverpool’s grou): Bayer Leverkusen (meaning Landon Donovan could be on the field against us), Juventus, Lyon, AC Milan, or Inter Milan.

On the fantasy side of things, I had a pretty poor Matchday 6 but still am on top of the small SportsFilter table.

Matt Marshall, a business reporter for the Mercury News, exposes Jigsaw, yet another business founded on the concept of selling personal information to any and all bidders in Jigsaw: Give us your business cards, earn extra cash. Though the recipients of this startup’s largess isn’t you or me, not the individual whose information is being put into the database, rather getting paid are the people to whom you (or someone) at one point gave your information.

That’s right–you traded business cards during a meeting or social event and now that person is being enticed to enter your information into Jigsaw’s system. The pitch given in Marshall’s post is this is the next evolution of social networking, taking the more abstract implementations such as LinkedIn or Friendster to a more useful, business value proposition because the database contains (presumably) valid corporate contact information.

While Marshall does include a trivial attempt at balance by using the last paragraph to ask one user “What about privacy concerns?,” overall I think he’s published a terrible piece of reporting (this will also appear in his Tuesday column in the Mercury News). Seriously, just because I gave someone my business card does that mean I want it published in yet another corporate database to which anyone can buy access? More importantly, he doesn’t ask why the company is justified in paying someone else for my data and not me. Uggh barely expresses my disdain for the article and the company.

Later: Marshall updated the post to include a Q&A with Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler, in which Fowler completely absolved the company of any real privacy issues, including spam; the newly-added portion does not address my question about who ought to be paid for the information. Here’s the most relevant extract:

Q: How does a business or person opt out information being given to Jigsaw and then redistributed like spam?

Fowler: Jigsaw is not a list that members purchase and use for SPAM. Members do get contacts on Jigsaw but use them for one-to-one, BtoB sales purpose. Spamming is strictly prohibited. Asking how to opt out of Jigsaw is like asking to opt out of Hoover’s or InfoUSA (can’t be done).

In other words, this company is hardly better than so many other bottomfeeders that have decided to use the Internet for their advantage, and screw you to anyone who doesn’t like it.

For some reason, I don’t really like to write here about trips TS1 and I are going to take before they happen; maybe it’s just the paranoid in me. So now the truth can be revealed, laid bare for examination.

Right now, Vegas is in the grip of a cowboy invasion. That’s right, the town is infested with men wearing big white or black 10 gallon hats and ladies who think rhinestones are meant to be decorating every piece of clothing they own. And that’s cool even though it isn’t my taste. The last time I looked I wasn’t being paid for fashion opinions, much less held up as the second coming of Mr. Blackwell. For the last 20 years, the National Finals Rodeo has been the big event in Las Vegas in early December and let’s just say the fans attending wear shirts, jackets and hats proclaiming allegiance.

Then again, there’s always something big going on in that city. I remember one year, probably 1990, when I foolishly thought it would be cool to attend Comdex. Now Comdex used to be the biggest trade show in the United States, attracting over 200,000 people for a week in early November, until it crashed and burned a couple of years ago in the undertow from the Dotcom Crash.

Sheldon Adelson, he got out while the getting was good. The man made a pile of money as Comdex grew from a little get-together for PC and peripherals vendors into that huge event that made such a demand on the city that taxis and hookers from all over the western United States were brought in for the week and Las Vegas Boulevard was one long parking lot from 9 a.m. until midnight. Shel, though, he saw the big money coming all year round and so he tore down the Sands and its convention center, something he’d already bought off that one week show, and built an amazing showpiece on the ground.

The Venetian, which may or may not be the class of the Strip, you could argue the Bellagio tops it easily and I even heard one vote for Mandalay Bay, but to me this is just an immensely impressive resort. It’s huge, but so are a bunch of the other newer hotels and more are on the way, and the Bellagio probably has a similarly tasteful decor. But only the Venetian, of course, has the gondolas and only Adelson thought of going quite that far in bringing the real experience to Vegas (compared to, say, New York New York, Paris and the Luxor). Too bad the pricetag is in line with what I’ve said because it means that I’m not likely to have the chance to stay there any time soon.

We stayed at the Excalbur. Hey, times being what they are, we needed to get a very economical package if we were going to take the trip at all. Yes, it’s a budget hotel and the shower, dresser , room door and view could all use an upgrade and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re also on a budget but still want to be on the Strip. It wasn’t a terrible place, mind you, and for the most part you’re only in the room to sleep shower and maybe rest up from all the walking.

Walking is something you do a lot of in Vegas, especially if you’re not of a mind to sit at the table or machine and gamble for hours on end. Even though you need to take a cab if you’re going more than two hotels down the street–don’t ask about the vaunted Monorail that was supposed to break this absurd aspect of a street full of hotels–these hotels are simply huge. Places like the Ballagio, Caesars Palace and the Venetion can take eight or ten minutes just to walk past on the sidewalk and their insides even longer.

Excalibur, Luxor and Manadaly Bay are all owned by the same company (it also owns the Monte Carlo and Circus Circus) and these three are next to each other at one end of the Strip, and you can walk from the New York New York end of Excalibur all the way to the far side of Mandalay Bay without going outside but we’re talking about three miles, given all the odd twists, turns and escalators to be navigated. Though you will end at a nice place, an aquarium that apparently compares well to the one in Monterey, Of course then you have to walk back, though there is a tram that connects them as well but not at particularly convenient locations. What the hell, it was an interesting walk, lots to see, window shopping in the small shopping centers that every hotel in the city now seems to contain, restaurants of every price level and cuisine and not a bad way to spend a chunk of an afternoon walking off lunch.

We had thought of going downtown to Freemont Street Saturday night and seeing the medieval jousting dinner show Sunday but one turned out to be too complex without a taxi (a bus was recommended and that just didn’t work) and the other lacked both utensils and, well, an odor conducive to eating. So we hit the buffet at Harrah’s Saturday night and the Italian place, Regale, at our hotel Sunday.

I dropped my cell phone out of jacket pocket in the cab Saturday night while reaching into the pants pocket for cash. This is not uncommon in Vegas and so they have a nice lost and found office where you can often claim your stuff the next day. I got lucky, had an honest cabbie and so mine was there and after getting back my phone (from which no international calls seem to have been placed) we went over to the Venetian to check it out. Vivian even got paid $20 buck for a few minutes of time to do a market research survey on sink faucets and then we both watched a movie trailer (something really terrible looking, where Tommy Lee Jones tries to do comedy the way De Niro did recently but with nowhere near the same quality of material) and gave our opinions.

Flew back at dinner time tonight and except for a 30 minute delay because of light rain near SFO had no trouble at all. Maybe we just picked good times to fly but in neither instance did we have much of a line at all at the airport security checkpoints and with such a short trip no checked baggage to wait around for either.

Good trip, a fun place to spend a few days once every year or two. Nice to be home and sleeping, as soon as I finish this, in my own bed.

CollyLogic | CSS Multi-element Rollover Generator

Sometimes, saying nothing is better than saying something.

Niall Kennedy, in the short, provacative Gator EULA prohibits uninstallers, makes a post that surprises me with its useful yet unfriendly to his employer information. I agree with his apparent perspective that Claria software should be uninstalled from any computer it infects.

More: Ed Felten posts a 30,000 foot hatchet job overview of the Gator EULA. Summary: “It has to be one of the worst EULAs ever written.” Agreed.

Microsoft has released their new blogging tool, MSN Spaces, so I’ve created an experimental version of BillSaysThis there. The site seems to be bending under the traffic at the moment so I can’t get at the Help but my initial impressions are, hey, what do you expect for free. There are some nice touches but definitely some fit and finish issues that are lacking but important to me.

Okay, now I got into the Help. Apparently some of this is a We don’t want to be friendly to Firefox thing: “If you are using a Windows operating system with either MSN Explorer or Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, you can use the rich text tool to format your blog entries exactly the way you want.” Swell.

So I suggest you read UN warns of AIDS tipping point in China, Russia and India and recognize that though we here in the United States may seem mostly safe and protected, that is far from certain. Another scary thought in a scary world.

Seems like a smart idea to me. The project would significantly increase the carrying capacity right near where my parents live, so I know the writer isn’t kidding in claiming this might be the worst congestion point in the area and that the number of huge warehouses, not to mention new housing developments, are simply exploding.