Author: Stagger Lee

…I have bought half a dozen shirts. Pretty nice ones, too – three polo-type shirts and three button-ups (one wrinkle free and the other two of a material that you don’t iron anyway). Now, for those of you who think I slipped a chromosome, let me explain.

Ten years ago, when I started out in high-tech in Washington DC, we were actually still shirt-and-tie four days a week. No lie, everyone in IS was wearing a shirt and tie and nice casual pants. I don’t know what I was doing for shoes back then – it was before the coming of the Docs, so I can only assume I was hitting my old Rockports hard – but long story short, I didn’t look anything like what you’d expect from our industry.

About a year in, we were spared the ties – the whole organization went away from any sort of dress code, by order of the CEO. Nevertheless, I stuck to reasonably decent collared shirts, kept jeans to a minimum, never wore tennis shoes. Five years on, I was wearing Hawaiian shirts, skipping socks altogether from Easter to Columbus Day, and by the time I left they were just lucky I was wearing pants.

Next job was basically in a warehouse. Steel-toed boots every day. Anything nicer than jeans and a formal T-shirt was asking for trouble, what with all the boxes to lift and skids to unpack and etc etc etc. After about a year and a half, though, I got moved into a position where I was driving a desk all day and could afford to dress a little nicer – but not too nice, because we still had to unload the truck every day. So I didn’t bother upgrading from the same shirts I’d been wearing back in DC, and it showed – especially since I was getting another free T-shirt every other month and just wearing those.

Long story short (too late!): with the exception of a couple of date-night-type shirts, I haven’t really done anything for the top half of my wardrobe in half a decade. Now I’m in a position with much MUCH less physical labor, and I can actually try to make an effort at looking decent. And for some reason, probably because I’m 36, I feel the need to start dressing like a grown-up.

So six new shirts (though at least one will probably get returned). NONE of them in black. Or gray. Only one that could reasonably be called dark. I guess this makes me some kind of adult?

Did Chris Matthews actually just say that there’s a great cleavage in society between African-Americans + white liberals and “regular people”?

I misheard that, right?

PLEASE tell me I misheard that.

Because if I didn’t, that worthless piss-haired fuck needs to die in a fire. Preferably while being sodomized by a grizzly. With herpes.

I will have a LOT more to say about this shortly.

Without further ado:

BEST CASE SCENARIO, TEAM OBAMA: the Al Davis. “Just win, baby.” If Obama goes home with more votes in PA than Clinton, that’s the ballgame. Winning the Keystone State outright would dry up the last plausible argument – that Obama can’t win large swing states – and the superdelegates would start falling like dominoes. Not to mention the donors.

BEST CASE SCENARIO, TEAM CLINTON: Double-digit win. Anything over 10% is good, anything over 15% is very good, suggesting not only viability but maybe the beginnings of momentum, or at least the meme that Obama’s hit the high-water mark and will only descend further. Given that Team Clinton started the month of April with a little over $9M in the bank and a little over $10M in debt, a decisive win is absolutely imperative to open the pocketbooks of people whose contributions she desperately needs down the stretch.

TEAM OBAMA IS HOPING: That HRC was too clever by half. The Rove offense relies on driving away loosely motivated voters, and at last check, the surveys are still showing about 6-8% undecided. If those people don’t bother to post, and Philly comes through strong, Obama could close the deal right here.

TEAM CLINTON IS HOPING: That nobody will remember their lead was 20% the day of the Ohio and Texas primaries. Beating Obama by 4-6% may look like a win, but it will barely move the needle on delegate margins. If she actually manages to donk off three-fourths of the lead in six weeks, and the media latches onto the fact, it won’t be good. At this point, it’s not a straight fight; she’s got to cover the point spread, and right now, we’re not even sure what the spread ought to be.

WORST-CAST SCENARIO: A push against the Vegas line, so to speak. HRC wins by 6-8%, not enough to make a convincing case for her own momentum but enough to keep from sending her to live with a nice farm family – which means that, just like Rocky, we’re headed to a bloody split decision…and two fighters being rushed directly to the hospital afterward.

Now, normally this is where I remark about how John McCain is sat on a pile of gold, watching this entire debacle unfold, laughing through his cigar smoke and drinking champagne out of a stripper’s brassiere. However, it looks like McCain’s going to have to accept public money for the general election campaign, which will cap him at $84M. Team Obama has already made it clear they’re not going the public-money route, and given their success at adopting the Howard Dean model for aggregating small donations, they stand to have quite the financial advantage in the general if they get there. Obviously, assorted 527s and other independent-expenditure entities will affect that balance as well.

So I didn’t exactly go to a normal high school. Officially, our mascot was the Tree. We were the Trees. SRSLY. But we didn’t exactly have any sports teams or colors, so it didn’t really work. Besides, the one competitive group I was part of was more frequently known by other names (e.g. Argonauts).

However, inside the student lounge (i.e. big open carpeted room with almost no furnishings that hadn’t been cleaned in about two decades), painted on one of the cinderblock walls was a huge mural of the Thing breaking through the wall. Now, consider this:

1) The Thing is a wiseass.

2) The Thing has powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary man.

3) The Thing cannot disguise what he is and frequently inspires fear and loathing rather than heroic admiration.

4) The Thing is identified with his eye color, e.g “the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing!”

Seriously. Do the math, people.

I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis,” but it comes up a lot in my mind. Today, it came up when looking at the five (5) polycarbonate* bottles in the dishwasher. My thought was this: I only have one coffee thermos, and as a result, it gets washed out on a more or less daily basis. With five water bottles, though, I use one, use another one, forget to wash, next thing I know I’m sitting on five bottles which have been sitting unlaundered for a week and starting to smell a little odd despite having had nothing but filtered tap water in them.

Similarly, I’ve got too many shoes, especially for a guy. It didn’t help that my last company was buying me a new pair of steel-toed Docs every year, but over the course of the last six or seven years, I’ve accumulated a lot of shoes in the attempt to settle on the ideal pair of grown-up casual footwear – and now there are so many shoes that are not quite right that it only makes me look for the one pair that will be just right.

Even worse is my fixation on trying to find a team to support in the Premier League – I have arguments for Newcastle Utd, Aston Villa, Man City, even Chelsea – not to mention a passing interest in the likes of Spurs, Everton, or Fulham – but nothing that clinches the deal and makes it clear which is going to be the team I follow. (And if you look at how the list has grown in the last year and a half, when the original question was “Spurs or Magpies?”, you can see what I mean.)

This is actually the reason why a lot of Apple products function the way they do, especially in the iPod range. They are functionally simplified in the name of clarity and ease of use. A lot of other stuff could be shoehorned in there, but one only has to look at the Zune to see what happens when you try to do too much too fast. And along those lines, I find myself moving more and more stuff into the guest closet, trying to pare down and get to just the stuff I need.

I think like much of my life, this is just a word problem writ large, and if I can solve it, not only will I get an A, but another piece of the puzzle will fall into place. By the way, Jimminy Christmas but Newcastle and Villa are filling up the net today…

*I’m not nearly as het up about the whole “OMG the bisphenol-A is coming to get us all” – it’s been out there as a known potential issue for years, and those fainting panic-bunnies in the European Commission have said it’s not enough to warrant taking them off the market. Plus I’m sure I got exposed to more endocrine-disrupting female hormones just being sat by the bachelorette-party-gone-wrong last night. Besides, the steel bottles will give you something when the chromium breaks down, and the aluminum bottles will give you Alzheimers or something else when the lining goes away, and the lining will poison you slowly, and the soft plastic bottles will make the water taste like petroleum and harbor bacteria, and the pre-packaged bottled water is less regulated than tap water and you can’t reuse the bottles anyway, and…well, you know my solution, and it rhymes with Laker’s Dark.

Fifteen years ago, I remember watching the early days of the Clinton era, when George Stephanopoulos was still handling the daily presser. And I remember sitting there in the den with the old man, knocking down my Crystal Pepsi, and watching this little sawed-off joker answering questions. My dad eyed him dubiously and said something I’ve never forgotten:
“That one looks like they ought to be sending his ass to get the keg.”
As with most things, he was right – I think he accurately assessed George’s full range of competence and skill set. Nothing in the ensuing 15 years has given me any reason to deviate from that evaluation.

We get it! The Sixties ™ were unlike anything in history! The baby boomers were unlike anything that ever came before or since! Things like a half-assed leftist insurrectionist wannabe from THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO are far, far, FAR more important than the fact that we’re paying $4 a gallon for gas, everyone’s mortgage is upside down and oh yeah, WE STILL HAVEN’T BAGGED OSAMA BIN LADEN.
I really don’t want this blog to be all politics all the time, but I swear, I will stop beating this dead horse AS SOON AS THE PRESS STOPS SCREWING IT!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1063a2BushDefeatsTruman.pdf

The PDF linked above details that the approval rating for George W. Bush has not broken 50%…since January 16, 2005.

Now, for our international readers, those under age 14, or those just too stupid to remember Civics class, the President is sworn in on January 20 following the previous November’s election.

Bush the Younger has managed to spend literally his entire second term under the Seinfeld line. He would probably sell his soul to Ted Kennedy for a shot at “even steven” at this point. Theoretically this shouldn’t even be possible, unless something massively awful happened between November and January, and unless the royal screwing Cal football took from the BCS reflected on the ratings of a Texan President, I can’t think of any reason for the bottom to start falling out then.

And yet he still won. Why is that? The Rove offense, kids, and believe me when I say it’s entirely possible to be under 50% nationally and still win safely. As long as you can’t cut through the mud, you will fail to activate lightly-interested undecideds and you will lose to a better-organized and better-motivated base.

Obama’s going to school in a big way in Pennsylvania. He has the “beleaguered” tag hung around his neck like Apple Computer in 1996. He has a ruthless and implacable foe between him and the general, when he would be going up against the living, breathing proof that the “liberal media” is a myth. Either he brings his alpha game for the final 7 days…or the 2008 Democratic nomination for President becomes the 1986 Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama: one long, murderous, soul-destroying slog where the winner’s trophy is full of poison at the end. And John McCain looks more and more like Guy Hunt every day.

I have had it. HAD IT. Spare me any more talk about elitists or small towns or anything remotely close to it. Nobody – NOBODY – not ONE SINGLE F-ING MEMBER of the United States Senate has ANY standing to talk as if they’re some salt-of-the-earth defender of the sainted sons of the soil, manning the barricades against the horrible awful big-city slick-talking wheeler-dealers who are out to sucker the hayseeds.
John Rogers said it better than I ever will so go read it there. Meanwhile, I will nick one quote:
“I am just, I guess, well and truly tired of being told what “Middle America” wants, when Middle America is my age and lives in a goddam city, just like I have for my entire life.”
Arlington, Virginia, is America. Manhattan? America. Los Angeles? San Francisco? Silicon Valley? AMERICA, and don’t you !-ing forget it. Anybody who seriously wants to spend 2008 selling the old “real America” trope needs to cut that shit out with a quickness, because I. Will. Cut. Your. Ass. I mean it.

So I had a little loose money in my pocket and couldn’t decide what to do with it. As it turns out, it seemed like a new Blootoof was a good idea (new law kicks in this summer; hands-free only in the Golden State) and so were my ridiculous new blue shades.

Naturally, as soon as I have spent my walking-around money, I start thinking of things I wish I could run right out and buy, to wit, e.g.; viz:

* Seersucker jacket (stop laughing! STOP IT!)

* New Timbuk2 Coder bag

* New water bottle (because the FIRST FIVE aren’t cutting it?)

* New big Timbuk2 backpack suitable for carry-on and taking abroad

* New duct-tape-wrapped Moleskine Cahier and 0.38mm G2 pens

I think a lot of the problem is exacerbated by the big feature piece in this week’s Economist, all about mobile technology. They go on a bit about the transformative power of the mobile phone (see my post from December about the MOTOFONE F3) and discuss the growth of digital nomadism, warning about the danger zone in which “you can work anywhere” tips into the realm of “you must work everywhere.” And the thing is…I want to be a digital nomad. I want to be able to work from the coffee shop, from the back deck of the pub, from the cigar shop, to do everything off a MacBook and a cell phone. I want, as McClellan Pope did, to have my headquarters where my hindquarters should be. (Look it up, Yankee. I had to.) In short, I want to *need* the stuff that I merely *want*.

The whole suite of articles also made an interesting argument that I hadn’t seen before. We all know that the Internet has a way of making things more self-referential, making it possible to get your news and see your friends and only ever see the stuff you really want to see (which is one reason I’ve tried to make an effort to broaden my political readings the last couple of months). However, the writer makes the case that unlimited technology tends to strengthen the strong social ties (you can be in touch with your friends constantly, even across a continent or two) at the expense of the weak ties (your Twittering from the cafe in the Rue Cler comes at the expense of striking up a conversation with the couple at the next table who have the County Wexford GAA shirts on). Consequently (inventing my own term here), what we’re seeing is not the atomization of society, but the molecularization of society. Tiny clumps of our own kind, at best loosely associated and at worst completely unbonded to larger things.

I don’t know about all this. What I do know is that the five years prior to my first Net access were an unmitigated disaster, and that pretty much anything good that has happened in my life since has ultimately derived from being online. So is that the tradeoff? Are we giving up large-scale structure in order to make sure that the few rogue atoms find somewhere to bond? And ultimately, are we more worried about the health of the compound or the health of the atoms?