Are my eyes really blue?

All the hemming and hawing going on up on the Hill is leading me back to something that’s been stirring at the back of my head for a while – this whole notion of splitting the difference, that the truth is somewhere in between, and that there’s some sort of “straight down the middle” position that is the ideal of everything.

Horseshit.

This is exactly the sort of lazy thinking that makes “moderate” the grand virtue of Imperial Washington. For people who don’t pay attention to actual politics, “moderate” is the supreme virtue – despite years of polling that shows almost all “moderates” or “independents” have a partisan preference and that those who don’t have a tangential level of political knowledge or awareness at best. And it’s a notion that has been exploited over and over with the phenomenon of the Overton Window – if you move the level of what is acceptable or conceivable far enough in one direction, you shift the midpoint in that direction as well, and drag the entire argument your way just by virtue of people’s willingness to split the difference.

A blogger from Kentucky nailed this years ago, with a hypothetical where he had a painful wart. Some pundit argued that the only solution was to cut the Wildcat’s arm off. The Wildcat responded that he wasn’t cutting his fucking arm off. Enter another (I think it was actually Joe Lieberman) who argued that in the interest of compromise, the Wildcat should cut off his arm at the elbow – and a chorus of pundits sang the virtue of sweet moderation and berated the Wildcat for not accepting such wisdom. In fact, after a little digging, here it is. Enjoy.

This idea of “split the difference” has been known to be idiotic ever since Solomon took a long look at the baby and went for the cleaver. Sometimes you just can’t split the difference. And even if you were to try it, it’s ridiculous to assume that the 50-yard-line is always the place to cut.

Formal logic has a name for this: the golden mean fallacy. Unfortunately, logic took a walk in our lives a long time ago.

* If you honestly think that the United States would just sit back and say “well, there’s all our secrets dumped on a website for the world to dig through, ah well, easy come easy go” and do nothing – if you really think any government, under any President, would just say “cat’s out of the bag, let it slide” – kill yourself. Because you are a mental defective and are too stupid to participate in society.

* Now, what should the government do? Hell, what can the government do? Here we get to the party piece of the Internet – it’s distributed and robust and redundant and literally impossible to shut down altogether. Going forward, there should be a lot more circumspection about what sort of data is appropriate to share internally and with who – we went from a system of mutually locked-out silos to one where apparently three million people have clearance rated Secret or up. Seriously, how many people in the Defense Department need access to diplomatic gossip from State?

* Everybody is up in arms about the Library of Congress blocking access to the site, or defense contractors shutting down access to the site – let me explain something from the position of somebody who’s done time in government IT. If information is restricted in any way, you have an affirmative obligation as a government IT employee to maintain that restriction. Even if classified material leaks – hell, even if “sensitive but unclassified” material leaks – you are still obligated to treat it as appropriately classified until the appropriate authorities make a change in that classification. So if you’re running the network, and there is an exposed site sharing that information, you are legally obligated to restrict access to that site. Sure, somebody else broke the rules, but as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you are still on the hook to discharge your duty with regard to information security. It may seem ridiculous, but that’s how it works, so pull the stick out of your ass if some people are still trying to do their job in the middle of this shitshow.

* There seems to be an attitude in some quarters that having all this in the public eye is a good thing, because government should never have secrets from “the people.” Setting aside the fact that “the people” are generally assholes, that’s not what you’ve got here. What you’ve got here is government secrets exposed to everybody. Does anybody seriously think that the business of the government should be 100% transparent to everyone in the world at all times? Say hi to the other Smurfs when you go back to fantasy gingerbread land.

* Everyone keeps banging on about the Pentagon Papers, trying to draw some sort of parallel – the 1971 leak by Daniel Ellsberg was a good thing, so therefore this must also be a good thing. The difference there is that, to the best of my recollection, the Pentagon Papers were entirely germane to the Vietnam War. The current flood of information coming out of the Wikilinks leaks is not limited to the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, but instead touches on almost every aspect of US foreign relations, military or otherwise. In a way, this is less effective – instead of the story being the actual revelations of things going awry in Kabul or Baghdad, the story is just that there were revelations – details not important, maybe some of the more salacious stuff briefly – and then becomes the whole cat-and-mouse of “will they arrest the guy, will they shut down the server, blah blah blah.” This is the sort of place where leaking to the New York Times or the Washington Post in the 70s meant that the pertinent stuff would get edited into some sort of narrative. Just throwing it up into the wind in 2010 means that the media will run with the meta rather than the content. Typical.

* And finally, we come to the bit that most people outside the right wing are ignoring: PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who is supposedly the source of the most massive leak. He’s going to catch a court-martial. As well he should. In any profession, there are things that are not compatible with the requirements of the profession. If you’re a therapist, you don’t sleep with your patients. If you’re a pro athlete, you don’t bet on your own team. And if you’re an Army intelligence analyst, you don’t ship hundreds of thousands of government secrets to a foreign website. Maybe he thought he had good reasons, maybe he was even right about those reasons, but you know what? That makes no difference at all. At the very least, he’s headed to an intimate familiarity with Leavenworth, at worse – well, I don’t know if the Army is prepared to give him the Danny Deever, but before you leak classified information, you should think long and hard about whether it’s worth the consequences. If he dies, he dies – buy the ticket, take the ride.

…and consider the situation the President is in, one step at a time:

1) From day one – literally, from the moment he was inaugurated – Obama has faced a unified front of opposition. Uniform and unbending, focused on one thing and one thing only: NO. For all the talk about “moderates” like the two idiots from Maine, or speculation around a Scott Brown, there has been no meaningful instance of any – ANY – Republican Senator breaking ranks to side with the Democrats. And make no mistake, the Senate is where the action is, because it’s the only place in the political system where a minority with 2/5 of the vote plus one has the power to dictate what can even come up for a vote.

2) In the face of this opposition, the only way to get anything at all done is to put together sixty votes in the Senate. And thanks to the huge wins in 2006 and 2008, the numbers were there once Arlen Specter defected – barely. With exactly sixty votes, the Senate Democrats were at the mercy of the most conservative of their members – so for all the talk about out-of-control liberals from the retarded media hyenas on the right, the Obama Administration has spent two years with the tune being called by the likes of Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman. Forget about the wild-eyed radicalism of a Ted Kennedy (RIP) or Barbara Boxer or Al Franken or, hell, pick any talk-radio-boogeyman you like – inasmuch as the Democrats were falling in line, the ones doing the falling were the ones on the left, giving in to the most conservative Democrats just for the sake of getting something, anything, through the process.

3) If the left wants to lash out at some Democrat, there’s one target and only one: Harry Reid. Harry Reid, who did nothing to squeeze a loyalty commitment on cloture votes out of his caucus. Harry Reid, who chose to leave the filibuster rules intact knowing full well that the GOP had shattered the filibuster record in the previous Congress – and watched as they went on to shatter that record. Harry Reid, who had to pull out a miracle finish to beat an opponent who was advocating armed revolt against the federal government. Harry Reid, the man who shit the bed.

4) The GOP’s plan worked brilliantly. It was predicated on the absolute loyalty of their base, the absolute incompetence of the press and the absolute ignorance of the public. They were able to sandbag the entire political process in the Senate, the press duly reported that the Democrats couldn’t get anything done in Congress, and the public promptly punished them for their shortcomings.

5) Obama is now faced with a House in the hands of the enemy and a Senate that no longer has the option of begging together sixty votes – in short, the Congress is closed for business vis-a-vis the Democratic agenda. Any grand vision for the progressive future is officially dead on arrival.

6) Obama has two choices now. He can hew to the good line, thump the bully pulpit, raise hell at every opportunity – and hope against hope that his battle cries will get a hearing in the press above and beyond “President rages impotently while nation’s economy burns to the ground.” Or he can try to hammer out the best deals he can get, while he still can, and try to do something to move the needle while hoping against hope that things rebound in time for 2012.

Now, the usual suspects on the bong-watered granola-shaver left are screaming about a primary challenge, maybe Kucinich or Feingold or something like that. No. Grow the fuck up, hippies. The alternative to Obama isn’t Rachel Maddow, the alternative to Obama is Mike Huckabee. If you’re very lucky. If you’re not, well, let’s hope your visa application comes through before Sarah Palin gets sworn in.

Unless.

If everybody to the left of, I don’t know, Richard Lugar can somehow get it together and figure out who the problem really is, we might get somewhere. Obama’s not the problem, hippies. And the dirty fucking hippies are not the real problem, Mr. President. You know who IS the problem? The army of bloated redneck zombies known as Republicans. Put one-fifth as much firepower into shooting the zombies as each other, and maybe, just maybe, you can attract enough attention to move the needle on public opinion.

But for now, Obama managed to get the middle-class tax cuts extended, plus a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and some other stimulus, in exchange for $120 billion worth of tax cuts for people who don’t need them or deserve them after the last ten years. It sucks, but that’s the price of doing business right now. That price may change later. Until then, everybody needs to take a deep breath, grow up, and focus on who the actual party at fault is here. Hint: it’s largely white and old with an annoying Southern accent.

Well, Google hasn’t been half shaggin’ busy this month, have they? Google Books was inevitable, and is quite frankly redundant in a world where I’m already stuck into Kindle for fifty books, but the rest of the week’s announcements merit some attention.

Android 2.3 (codename: Gingerbread) looks pretty damn nice. There seems to be a bit of Snow Leopard-ing happening here: more features, sure, but the bulk of effort put on refining and polishing what’s there already. The UI is cleaner, the keyboard on-screen is greatly improved, the power management is supposedly quite a bit better, things like that. Some of the features are very impressive – built-in support for wi-fi sharing of your 3G connection, or SIP support for easy-peasy VOIP – but the fact that even Google concedes up front that carriers will probably strip those functions out should tell you all you need to know about what the weak link in Android is.

Samsung’s Nexus S looks like a treat, too. The latest “pure Google experience” reference phone comes with Gingerbread and no carrier tweaks, and can be bought unlocked…for the same $529 as the original Nexus One. The good news is that Google has gone to school on the bust that was the direct-sales model for the Nexus One, and the S will be available at Best Buy. You can also get it for $199 on T-Mobile – which is probably the way you should go; with no 850/1900 G3 or any CDMA support, the only reason to buy it unlocked is if you want to go month-to-month on T-Mob; even the unlocking isn’t that much of a feature when T-Mobile themselves will gladly unlock your phone 90 days into the contract. Feature-wise, it’s more or less on a par with the industry standard: gigahertz processor, dual cameras with 5.0 MP and HD video on the primary, 16 GB built-in storage. The curved glass of the AMOLED display is intriguing, certainly, and if the Gingerbread modifications to power management work out, it should be an all-day gamer on par with the iPhone 4. I think the guy at TechCrunch was right: it won’t make you throw your iPhone 4 in the sink, but it will absolutely make you want to move from any other Android phone.

The last thing is the Google Chrome OS-based device, netbook or whatever. I think this one is a year late; this time last year, a lean whippy cloud-based netbook for $199 would have been a game-changer. Instead, we’ve got a 12-inch netbook that will come along “sometime in 2011” with a browser-based and “web apps” and some sort of pervasive Verizon connectivity (though you can bet THAT will cost you – 100 MB a month ain’t shit if you’re using anything stronger than a smartphone).

Now, in a world where everybody wants tablets (and desperately wants Android to support bigger than 480×800 resolution), a netbook with virtually no storage and a working model based on permanent persistent Internet access may be a tougher sell. My question is how viable are “web apps” in a world where you have, well, a web browser? Apps make a lot of sense for a smartphone, because you have to repackage for a 4″ screen form factor and work around things like Flash and Java, but many of the things you’d use an app for on, say, the iPhone – Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Texts From Last Night – work just as well if not better as their respective websites. Then again, an OS designed to run in a browser may require an app-based solution to work effectively with a tablet – so now you have to wonder whether there’s a two-prong approach with Android and ChromeOS as competing visions of how to do tablet computing.

And then there’s the money angle – what are people prepared to pay for these things? I recall saying last year that there’s no reason Google couldn’t bring these things in for $200 or less. Obviously this was in a pre-iPad world, but I think the price point is still somewhat relevant – factor in the webcam and the 3G modem and you make up for the offset cost of cheaper RAM and Flash storage. If Samsung can deliver this for $199, then this is the purest vision of cloud computing yet: you have just enough hardware and software to run the interface, which in turn points out to the cloud for storage and apps and probably not a small amount of processing power; after all, you can do the heavy lifting elsewhere and just send the results back to the UI, which lets you get by with very little onboard CPU…

Google will probably still sell a million of these. It’s your grandmother’s laptop, basically – as long as the connection’s live, the OS is ridiculously simple and reinstalls itself at the first sign of a glitch, and everything else is a webpage. It’s definitely a unique vision for where computing is headed, spearheaded by the one company with the cash to burn on it and the most to gain from being your one-stop cloud for everything.

If/when Google and Facebook finally get together, brace yourself.

ETA: One big thing I missed initially: it looks like we’re going to be six months until these things ship to the general public. That’s six months for more tablets to ship, almost certainly including a notional iPad 2. We’re going to get the Chrome OS netbook fully a year and a half after the thing was announced. I’m not sure how big a bet I’d want to put on these things given that bit of information.

When I first moved to Nashville, there was a mall at every point of the compass and one practically under me. Rivergate to the north, Cool Springs Galleria to the south, Bellvue to the east and Hickory Hollow to the west, and Green Hills just down the road. And I spent a lot of the 1994 Christmas season darting between them.

Green Hills was closest, and hands-down the most posh. (Ten years later it would get Nashville’s first Apple Store.) It lacked a bookstore, but it was right down the road from Davis-Kidd and not far from Bookstar, so there were plenty of options for that anyway. It was there that I would duck into Mozarella’s, sit at the bar, order a loaded baked potato with potato soup, and get filled up quick while bypassing the half-hour wait for an actual table. For me, this was quite the innovation, which should tell you something about how thrilling my life was.

Rivergate, in the north, was the oldest mall – it had the same feel as Eastwood Mall back home. One level, old buildings, but it was a huge sprawling ramble of a mall. Hickory Hollow, in the west, was your typical bog-standard two-story suburban mall, while Bellvue, to the east, was a smaller more boutique-type mall whose exclusive stores started moving to Green Hills or Cool Springs Galleria, south of town and HUGE. It was still possible to leave the office at 4 and hit all five before they closed, even at the height of the Christmas madness, because I was just that bloody minded.

I think part of it was just that the malls represented a big chunk of novelty – a new town meant new TV and radio, new stores, new highways and byways to learn, and I wanted to just run around and soak up the difference, whether it meant Caster-Knott or Dillard’s for department stores or Boston Market for dinner or Lightning 100 on the radio or the Channel 4 local news or the pseudo-beltway of 440-to-40-to-24-to-65. New side-routes to learn (the “invisible beltway” of assorted pikes and parkways), new hole-in-the-wall dining (the taqueria on Nolensville Road), and to cap it all off, positioning such that a whole array of clear-channel AM broadcasts became clearly audible, from St Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and New Orleans. In short, instead of just being in a new and different bubble, it felt like the jumping-off point to a bigger and wider world.

Bellvue’s closed now, and Hickory Hollow and Rivergate are reportedly circling the drain. Nothing really stays how you left it. But it’s hard not to think of Christmas and not think of dashing through the malls, picking up the leather coat that became the Elk, splashing out on more Vanderbilt stuff just because I went there and I had room on the credit card – the only holiday where I went from the Herd back to the Argonauts without missing a beat and belonged twice over. And because surprisingly, Northern California’s mall scene is nowhere near what I would have anticipated all those years ago…

So here’s how it would look twenty years ago, before even the Bowl Alliance was a gleam in someone’s eye, and the Big East was a basketball league:

ROSE: Oregon vs Wisconsin. 1 versus 4, and a real banging matchup natch.

SUGAR: Auburn vs TCU. 2 vs 3, setting up nicely for the winner to be national champion if Oregon falls.

ORANGE: Virginia Tech vs Oklahoma, which should work out nicely for the Hokies.

COTTON: Arkansas vs Stanford, which ought to be an offensive barnburner.

FIESTA: Boise State vs, I don’t know, Ohio State or somebody, who cares.

NOWHERE CLOSE TO JANUARY 1: Connecticut, which at 8-4 shouldn’t be anywhere better than the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.

What have we learned, kids?

1) The BCS doesn’t make anything better, and has a way of screwing good teams while helping out those that don’t deserve it.

2) Conference champions don’t deserve automatic berths in BCS bowls just by virtue of being a conference champion.

3) The Big East, by virtue of adding TCU, may now be the equal of the new-look Mountain West (Boise, Nevada, Fresno State, Air Force, and San Diego State all have at least the same record as Connecticut).

4) The WAC is no longer of any concern for BCS purposes, seeing as how it’s filling out its gaps with teams that are still in I-AA this year.

5) This is the weakest season in years for the Pac-10 (which couldn’t fill its bowl allotment) and the SEC (which was supremely lopsided) – and yet their champions, probably for just that reason, are the two undefeateds meeting for the title…

6) …on January 10. There are bowls now scattered over a span of almost three weeks. This is ridiculous.

7) New rule: now that there are 12 regular season games, you should have to post 7 wins to be eligible for a bowl. Any bowl left without teams shouldn’t be played anyway. A bowl is not a participation trophy.

8) Once again, look me in the eye and tell me that what we have now is better than how it was 20 years ago.

January 9, 2008

…for the last couple of years, I’ve been repeating the trope that elsewhere in the world, when you ask somebody “Tell me about yourself,” they will start off with something like “I’m from Tokyo,” or “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m a Celtic supporter,” or “I love to knit,” or something like that, but that in America, they will inevitably lead off with what it is they do for a living. I don’t know where I heard this or I would cite it properly.

However, I was doing some rough math earlier while out on a walk. Figure the alarms start going off between 6:30 and 7 AM – let’s call it 7, because both phones and both wristwatches are bleating their hellish symphony while those chuckleheads on the tube are clucking away at the latest doings of that Spears whore, and if you can sleep through all that, you probably need to check into rehab yourself. So 7 AM. Figure you’re in the office by 8:30, but it’s not exactly quality personal time in between – shower, get dressed, try to figure out where you’re supposed to be this morning, maybe take five minutes personal time getting your coffee on the way in. Then 8 hours on the job, plus an hour lunch, which let’s face it, unless you’re out with the Rifles of the EUS at the pizza place, isn’t really quality personal time either. So home somewhere between 5:30 and 6. All in all, let’s call it roughly 10 hours a day sucked up with work, or at the very least, where work is looming unavoidably.

So home between 5:30 and 6, nothing to do for tomorrow. Now what? Figure about five hours to yourself, for your home life, for your lovely bride and a nice dinner and whatever TiVo caught for you, and occasionally you have folks over for a nice dinner or maybe you run out to an Adult Bible Study class (stop laughing. STOP IT) or who knows, maybe you just park yourself on the porch and smoke and make fun of people trying to parallel park in your street. Then off to bed sometime between 10:30 and 11 and thrash about trying to fall asleep knowing that in 7 hours, the cacophony is going to strike up again.

So on a typical weekday, work rules about 2/3 of your waking life. Weekends are better; you generally get the whole thing, which is nice. But in a typical six-days-and-on-the-seventh-he-rested, you’re putting in 50 hours for work and taking 55 hours for yourself, with 49 in sleep mode. (49-and-a-half if the priest is really droning at Mass.) So if work is taking up…calculator widget…47.62% of your waking life as an adult every week, it stands to reason that your job will be a pretty big part of who you are, right? I mean, being a Redskins fan is normally what, 4 hours on gameday plus maybe 10 or 15 minutes of website and news reading other days? Say 6 hours a week during the season when you’re really being a fan to the exclusion of all else, and in the off-season, probably 2 hours a week max unless you’re watching the draft, and if you’re watching the draft, you are a sad, sad little man. But even during the regular season, the Redskins, your pride and joy and a huge chunk of your life for the last, oh, 18 years (good GOD how has it been 18 years?) – the Skins take up right about 12% of the time that your job does.

So in the final analysis, your job cannot be something that contributes to your net total of misery. Maybe you have to cut the grass, which is godawful and is 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Maybe you have to meet with the tax attorney – another 2 hours of misery. Maybe you screwed up and wandered into a theater showing The Thin Red Line – THREE hours you’ll never get back AND they fleeced you our of twenty bones in the process. But if your job is making you miserable, that’s almost half your waking life and two-thirds of your weekday pounding away at your soul.

So at the very least, you have to find a job that doesn’t make you wake up every morning going “Oh God, not again.” It doesn’t have to be your life’s purpose, it doesn’t have to fill your heart with joy, but at the very least, it has to be something you can just do without sinking into misery…

After almost a year of chucking and ducking and paperwork management and assorted bullshit, I have finally got all my retirement monies out of previous 401(k) arrangements and into a rollover IRA…with an actual professional manager running it. It’s mildly amusing to me to see “wealth management” in this guy’s business name, as the amount I’ve got him running probably amounts to a germ on a mite on a chigger on a flea on a hair on a wart on a frog on a knot on a log in the sea of finance.

If I’m honest, that’s unsettling right there. I was in grad school until age 25, then blew off the whole notion of “retirement savings” until I turned 33, got married, and got a full-time staff job out here. That’s a non-trivial amount of time to let something go – even a rudimentary index fund should have almost doubled my money by then – and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I don’t see how I’m going to be able to retire before 60 at least (and from the looks of things, they’re really trying to push that closer to 70). But then, twenty years ago I was just getting out of high school, which doesn’t seem like THAT long ago…which is disturbing. I want plenty of time for the money to build up, and plenty of time before I get old, but then, I want to be able to make something of my retirement when it happens…

Shit, this is going to get existential in a hurry. Better cut it off. What’s left over in the bin from NaBloPoMo?

The last time I finished November with three rivalry losses and a sinus infection was 2007. The Christmas season didn’t get much better after that. Part of it was the comedown of returning from London, Paris and York to my workaday job, part of it was realizing I’d caught the bait and switch and that said job was essentially two shitty part-time jobs slapped together into a single sub-contract, and part of it was just wrapped up in the Dysfunctional Family Christmas ™ that really bottomed out that December. All in all, it was a prime capper to the third-worst year of my life (and the only thing keeping it out of second was that I couldn’t drink in 1986), and the new Kanye West single “The Good Life” mocked me from my iTunes. If one of our friends hadn’t scheduled a cocktail party for December 28, I don’t know how I would have made it through the trip.

This year looks brighter, football notwithstanding. I’m not going to be heading out of town for the holidays, in all likelihood, and the drama will be at arms’ length with my relations in the old country. I have a pretty good feeling about this Christmas season, although that may just be me being hopeful. Christmas is a season unto itself in my reckoning, set between Late Fall and Winter, and a time for ordinary service to be suspended in favor of lights, songs, James Bond flicks on the DVD player, and as much socializing as can be managed.

Christmas has always been a mixed bag for me ever since I got to be too old for toys. 1986 was particularly dreadful, because I literally knew every single present I was getting before I even went to bed on the 24th – and everything just felt empty. After that, my mantra was “I don’t care what I get, big or small or whatever, just surprise me.” Two years later, Christmas was movies and hanging out with my team and a riotous New Year’s party and I don’t remember a single gift I got except for a certain gray fedora that went on to be iconic for a year. 1994 may have been the best Christmas ever – me home from grad school in my big leather coat and a Vanderbilt cap while my girlfriend was out of town for two weeks and my high school gang was all back together, and school hadn’t yet gone pear-shaped, and we had the Internet for the first time and life was full of promise. Come to think of it, 2008 was pretty damned awesome, with the thrill of getting to leave my job for my current one and have three weeks to kill alongside a rack of great tunes and the sun shining on the green hills of California through December as Vanderbilt bore down on its first bowl game in twenty-five years and I watched Cal defenestrate Miami at AT&T Park through the haze of post-flu hangover.

So what about this year? It’s had its ups and downs, for sure. I remember in 2006, all I wanted was a dull moment after the whirlwind of…well, of the last ten or fifteen years, to be honest. I wouldn’t say 2010 was a dull moment, not when you start with Alabama vs Texas and drag your mother and her husband through five countries in two and a half weeks and get hailed on at a football game and bust out of the NCAA tournament on a shot you’ll be seeing on the highlights for twenty years and down a shit-ton of absinthe while watching the SAINTS win the Super Bowl and officially lift the ceiling on what your co-workers are prepared to believe about you. But it wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it could have been, and that’s more or less what I needed this time around.

There we go. I think I hit 500 words or so every day, which means I did about 15,000 words. It’s no NaNoWriMo, but that wasn’t on the cards this time out. Maybe next year – although if I had a nickel for every year I’ve planned to write my Great American Alt-History Novel for NaNoWriMo, I’d have 35 cents.

Merry Christmas to all…and to y’all a good night.

I was only vaguely aware of Police Squad! when it was on TV – I didn’t actually watch it, and I didn’t realize it was a spoof, so you can imagine how confusing the credit sequence was for me. I also didn’t see Airplane! until college at least (look, it was Alabama, what do you want from me?) so I was pretty cold coming into The Naked Gun over Christmas break in 1988.

We almost got thrown out of the movie theater. We were roaring. I mean, serious gasping-for-breath-Oh-God-I’m-gonna-die howling. I was literally, no lie, doubled over walking out of the theater, my gut hurt so bad. It was like I’d done three hundred crunches – which I pretty much did. Hell, years later at City Stages 1994, my buddy Ken was bewildered – “There’s no way Nordberg shot his wife!”

No human being alive before or since has made me laugh like that. Well done, Mr. Nielsen. People may argue for Barenaked Ladies or Molson XXX or Chris Jericho as Canada’s greatest export, but I was there and I know better and I say it was Lt. Frank Drebin.