To me, the industry this looks most like is the music industry, which within my lifetime has (1) foisted a media change that more than doubled the price of a standard unit of music (2) attempted to foist two more media changes that would have perceptibly lowered sound quality (3) attempted to ignore the Internet as a delivery system (4) attempted to destroy the reputation of the Internet as a delivery system by suing random music consumers and/or their elderly relatives (5) not released more than a handful of decent records this century.
And all the bamboozlement that we see in today's media, a/k/a McCain's "base," looks to me just like aging rock critics gushing over Madonna's ability to reinvent herself back in the day.
I'm just another infrequent commenter that has a problem with xeger@39.
The way I remember it, reality is whatever still exists even when you refuse to believe in it. I'm thinking of the scene in Aguirre the Wrath of God where, late in the trip, one of the conquistadors is trying to deny that they're in the fix they're in, saying "There is no river, there is no raft." Then an arrow suddenly pierces his leg, and he says, "There is no arrow." He dies soon enough. Obviously faith does not save him.
Or is there a level of sarcasm I'm missing?
Paula @#39, Rikibeth @#40: A college student was shot in the eye with a pepper pellet from a gun that was advertised as non-lethal. The pellet went through her eye into her brain and she died. I believe it was eventually decided that the police had used the gun improperly (duh).
There's a Cambodian dish called Loc Lac that's close to this, beef in a basil and lime sauce. It's extremely delicious.
Ah, but you didn't.
Will you spot me a Niger memo?
Hiatt's also conveniently forgetting the aluminum tubes.
Erik @ #70, Garrett @ #58, Brooks @ #53:
Hmm, I recognized the Guitar Hero controller, but I thought the other one was a conventional Fender Stratocaster-- except it was missing its strings and bridge. Do I have to go look at it again (shudder)?
Among the myriad other offenses against utility, common decency, etc...
The guitar in the bed photo has no strings on it.
Count me among those who think the "debunkers" didn't actually debunk anything. Many of them have tried to confuse the issue with the known problem of touch screen machines, and said that just because there are actual paper ballots involved, the counts from the scanning machines must be accurate. Sorry, the scanning machines are themselves computers that can be hacked in much the same way, and because voters never see their workings, we're not even aware of their anomalies (unlike the anecdotes of the voters who said they selected Gore and the screen came up "Bush"). To say that nobody would dare cheat because the ballots could always be counted by hand is insufficient until somebody actually counts them by hand, which is why Kucinich is stepping up to the plate.
As far as I can tell, Bradblog is one of the best aggregators of the available information. Apparently there is a persistent discrepancy of about 7% between the polling and the results, and apparently this discrepancy is most evident in the (larger, more urban, more establishment) communities that use optical scanners-- the smaller polities that count by hand reported results closer to what the polls predicted.
I agree with Teresa that nowadays everything makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist, but I don't think the Clinton forces fixed it, I assume if anyone did it was the Republicans, as usual-- they read the same polls as the rest of us, and they see that their chances of eking out another 50%-plus-one election are better against Clinton than against Obama or Edwards. But I'm with Kucinich on this, I want a recount.
Do not want. The new layout and procedures have seriously degraded the information-to-mouse-clicks ratio. I can't afford to open every link that looks like it might be interesting, only to discover that it's just another rant I could've written myself.
Fragano's almost right, but I think Rudy's real audience is that peculiar fragment of the media that Atrios calls the "village." For no good reason, they drive our national discourse-- usually over various cliffs.
It occurred to me that we'll know Rudy really is the heir apparent if there is no indictment of Bernie Kerik reported out before the statute of limitations on his (alleged) crimes expires, which is said to be next week. And we'll know whether he's the Village's choice by how much coverage, and of what sort, the indictments get.
Re #3: Heh, indeed, has Travis sent an MS yet?
j h woodyatt @325: Are all sinners people? If not, then who are these unpersonal sinners?
Corporations.
I can't define sin properly, but I tend to assume it has something to do with coercion. Most interactions we have with corporations involve an attempt, by force or guile, to get us to do something we don't want to do. Ergo...
I think it's beautiful.
Has anyone yet suggested that you title your (hypothetical?) book Flaming Sword of Moderation?
Late to the party, as usual. (Day jobs are the curse of the posting class.)
My observation, unqualified though it may be, is that there is a subtle carrot/stick going on in Making Light that may not be replicable in other fora.
Everyone who's read this for any length of time knows about disemvowelling, which truly is so effective as to border on the marvellous.
The reward is even more subtle. It's when you post something that somebody else finds useful and interesting enough to reply to, and engages you. This is, of course, one of the motivations for trollish behavior, although they corrupt it by conflating *any* response with one that actually evaluates and expands upon their text. But, way junior member of this community that I hope I can claim to belong to, I was very happy the day I posted something that got a reasoned response.
And I don't (think I) know any of you in real life, although I'd love to.
Now I fear I've just become a meta-troll by implicitly begging for an attaboy in this post!
Off topic, something SpeakerToManagers posted set off an idea in my head. I've been obsessing lately over Rudy Giuliani's sudden acceptability among the wingers. Now I see how he does it. He's channelling Bugs Bunny!
Tina @#69: It seems to me that making your own CD has more "indie cred" than self-publishing a book, even though in most respects it's exactly the same process.
I've done both (although in the project for the real label I was a sideman, not the official creative force).
There are other factors that emerge out of that basic dichotomy. (Stop me if you've heard all this before.) A label deal is usually structured so you have a sum of money advanced (loaned) to you, out of which you budget what it's going to cost you to make the recording, and you deliver the finished recording to the label for pressing and distribution. In the overwhelming majority of cases this means you book time in a recording studio, hire a producer and/or engineer, and try to capture magic on tape as quickly as possible. (Unless you're Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd or someone like that, and can take as much time as you feel you need.) My "professional" recording took about six days to record, because we were pretty well rehearsed, and a gratifying number of tracks on the finished CD were first takes. (The rest of the deal, as in book publishing, is that you still owe the label for that advance, and in theory you pay them back out of your royalties. It is a rather small minority of CDs that recoup their advances. I don't know the comparable figures for books.)
In a whole 'nother band (and one which put more faith in the idea of improvisatory spontaneity), we accumulated tapes over the course of years, and when we felt like making a CD we picked them over, looking for performances with some magic in them (and adequate technical standards) and paid the thousand dollars to have it mastered and pressed. We sell it at our infrequent gigs, or trade with other bands, or give it away to new friends, and still have a stash in the basement. I don't think we quite broke even, but because we're an abstract instrumental band with a strong improvisatory component, and moreover we're lazy, we don't have much of a constituency anyway; there are many working musicians either more tuneful or more diligent than we are who follow this model and make a career of it.
The differences as I see it involve a bunch of tradeoffs among time, money, autonomy and indeterminate professional standards, many of which don't analogize well to book publishing-- for example, you can't reasonably expect any author to write a publishable novel in a week, even given Harlan Ellison's shop window stunts.
Except maybe in the sense that what passes for copy-editing in Publish America product kinda resembles excess distortion or tape hiss on a homemade CD. There was something of a trend back in the '90s to revere "lo-fi" recording as a sign of authenticity; critics who bought into that should probably be invited to read Atlanta Nights. But in my view that's a matter of insufficient diligence on the auteur's part. Once you decide you have standards, it's your own responsibility to meet them.
Tina @#56: Touring musicians should always carry copies of their CDs in their luggage. If your CD sells in a store, you make (at the level I'm at) maybe a dollar, payable sometime over the next year, *if* the record label *and* the distributor are honest about their accounting, and nobody in the chain has gone bankrupt. (One CD I played on had a bunch of copies in stock at Tower, requiescat in pace.) If you sell it yourself at a gig, you get to put the entire purchase price in your pocket immediately, at a point where you're probably wondering how much gas it's gonna take to get to the next gig, and your profit is the difference between that amount and what you paid for it. (Even corporate labels will probably sell you your own CDs in quantity for $7 each or so. Of course you'll forfeit the royalties on those, but see above.)
Plus whoever buys it may well be impressed by the personal touch if you autograph it, and be that much more likely to come see you again. And at least s/he bought it, which may not happen if your CD isn't in stock in the shop, or your fan doesn't find it before getting distracted by something else, or is short on cash this week...
#247: I doubt it was within the state's power to get the money allocated, no matter how badly the "conservatives" there wanted it. As you know, it was part of the Army Corps of Engineers' budget, which is (a) a federal agency (b) a political football. The money appropriated for levee maintenance and strengthening was roughly one third of what the experts asked for.
Also, seems to me there was some indication that even the work that was done wasn't done right-- something about how parts of the levee system that were supposed to have foundations in concrete turned out to just be sitting in silt, and nobody would have known the difference if they hadn't fallen over in the deluge. Where in the taxonomy of conservatives do we situate the contractors that cheat the public weal out of services they've contracted for and paid for?
Inge @87 (and others, passim):
It occurs to me that Vanderslice is probably not thinking that there are hordes of congregants at the megachurches that the Democrats could compete for if we only spoke dogwhistle language better. I'm assuming she's thinking about edge cases, people who aren't predisposed to one or the other party, and end up thinking that maybe Republicans should win because (they say) they believe and (they say) the Democrats don't, but if we incorporate more faith talk into our stump speeches, we'll nullify that advantage.
What concerns me, and I think what concerns Atrios et al, is that the type of faith talk she proposes isn't the stuff based on Matthew 25:40 or the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, it seems she would have us hedge on abortion rights.
On the other hand, she is a consultant, and Kos, Atrios, et al would argue that she hews to the conventional wisdom among the consultant class. And I probably agree, except that I can think of one instance where the obligation of Christian charity was employed for political purposes, by a red state politician, and lost miserably, by about a two to one margin. This was in Alabama, if I remember right, where Governor Riley tried to pass a graduated tax that would have soaked the rich some but left the vast majority of his constituents better off. And most of the churches in Alabama came out against it. So maybe that sort of activist faith is not perceived to be a winning issue.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 10 |
| 2007 | 13 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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