Are my eyes really blue?

The point is, Hillary Clinton has a couple of wins in decertified primaries. They mean a whole lot of nothing, because there won’t be any delegates awarded, and Obama is still sitting on more live delegates in hand – but inasmuch as they contribute to the sense that she will be X, they are valuable wins. But they will only contribute to that sense *IF* the results are presented in that matter.

-January 29, 2008

I could be wrong, but I’m not.

Yes, delegates were actually awarded out of Florida and Michigan. In Florida they were apportioned according to the voting; in Michigan they were apportioned according to a deal cooked up by the Michigan Democratic Party which was subsequently endorsed by 2/3 of the DNC panel empowered to adjudicate the disposition of those delegates.

However, the net impact was, at most, a couple dozen delegates. Out of over 2000 needed to win. All the hue and cry over Michigan and Florida, at net, budged a hair over one percent of the totals. Ultimately, they do Hillary Clinton more harm than good, because back in January, everyone agreed that those were beauty contests rather than viable elections.

Now, with the brain trust of Wolfson and Davis and Penn and etc, they become the last link in a preposterous chain of events that says that if you count primary states only, assume no input from caucus states, count in Puerto Rico and other non-state entities, and assume that not one single person in Michigan would have voted for Obama, then you can almost show Team HRC with a larger popular vote count.

In our reality-based world, of course, you go for the nomination with the delegate-selection system you have, not the one you try to shat out halfway through the fifteenth round of the fight. Yes, caucuses were created to stimulate popular participation and build a base more inclined to activist participation, and superdelegates were created to counteract the influence of caucuses, and Iowa and New Hampshire get their special privileges because…because…shit, I got nothing. Nor does anyone else. At some point, the Dems will revert to a model like the GOPs, and the GOP will move closer to the Dem model to prevent what happened to them this year, and the lion will lie down with the porterhouse.

But until then, we have this, and Obama’s leading it fair and square. And aside from close personal friends and a few delusionals, Team HRC knows it. Even James Carville, the Clinton’s most loyal retainer, is talking about how Barack Obama “can and will” win in November.

Game over. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Dead at age 79.

I saw Bo Diddley once, the first time I went to City Stages, in 1990. I think it was Friday night, and I remember seeing Charles Barkley in the crowd packed into the park outside City Hall. If memory serves me right, Bo Diddley only played four songs, each of which took about 15 minutes and was full of all sorts of improvs and riffs and freestyle action that put every other rocker at the festival to shame, capping the whole thing with a burst of “The Star Spangled Banner” that made Hendrix look like a sophomore in the garage. And Bo Diddley was in his sixties at the time and still churning out an unmistakeable sound.

It’s not often that you and your dad were going to see the same artist at a similar age. The difference is, the old man was sneaking into Boutwell Auditorium for what was ostensibly a “race-only” show (i.e. decent white folks wouldn’t be caught dead) and I was crammed in a public park among 50,000 people of all ages and colors. So I guess that’s something.

* Family’s always trying, isn’t it?

* In high school, when I was first coming to consciousness of sports, my fellows and I all supported the Detroit Pistons. Not only did we see ourselves as the academic-bowl version of the Motor City Bad Boys, we were thrilled to see the Lakers-Celtics monopoly broken. I say that by way of saying that for this year’s NBA finals, I am rooting for plague. Lots of it.

* I bought the oxblood DMs. The string on one of them broke almost immediately. I replaced it with a black lace out of my last East Coast pair of black 1460s, which I think is an appropriate passing of the torch and kinda punk besides. I doubt I will wear them that much – my black Solovairs are much easier to make work with my everyday wardrobe – but the important thing at this point is just to *have* them.

* Besides, you’ll never know when I’ll need to go back in time and pass as a pre-Two Tone skinhead. Along those lines, I now need a donkey jacket and a Lambretta. If you have either, please write in care of I Hate That Poser, Box L-7, Googleburg, CA.

* The new Fratellis single doesn’t sound that much like Costello Music did, although I do appreciate the driving piano throughout. It reminds me of something but I can’t put my finger on what.

* Who knew they were putting an IKEA factory in Danville VA?

* I finished second for the month in the online trivia competition I’m part of. That was almost entirely down to my missing two days – if you’d added two instances of my average score to the totals, I would have finished in first, handily. The moral of the story, as always, is that four-fifths of life consists of showing up for it.

• Vandy’s non-con schedule this year: at Miami (OH), home to Rice and Duke, and away at Wake. Conference home games are Carolina, Auburn, Florida and UT. If Big Six is going to happen this year, it’ll mean winning a few on the road – and of Ole Miss, Georgia, Mississippi State, and Kentucky, the best chance is that we somehow catch Georgia sleeping again. Not the sort of thing you want to hang your hopes on, especially given how many key Commodores just graduated. Still…only 89 days to go.

* My Buddy Vince Sez that if you’re looking for a new HDTV, jump on those Father’s Day sales in the next two weeks.

Finis.

Spring and summer 1990…

Continue reading “Flashback, part 2 of n”

* Darth Vader is Luke’s father
* OJ did it
* Soylent Green is people
* Rosebud is a sled
* Han shot first
* Rose is the Bad Wolf
* Rick doesn’t leave with Ilsa after all (-wink-)
* Joe Namath got into the end zone in ’65
* The BCS sucks goats
* Celtic wins the SPL title off a Venegoor of Hesselink header in the 72nd minute. HAIL HAIL!
* “…it’s a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!”

McClellan isn’t telling us anything we didn’t know years ago. The substance of his complaint is more or less precisely what John Dilulio told us before the Iraq war even started. So for all Scotty’s pearl-clutching, it’s not like he’s got any grand revelations to share, except that he’s only just now realized that three-quarters of the country thinks his old boss sucks and this is his best chance to cash in.

So the only new revelation is that Scott McClellan is a complete douchebag Okay, so there are no new revelations. What I do know is that he’s not going to make any friends to the left of, oh, all the right-wingers he just shat on…oh, whatever. Even I don’t give a shit about this anymore.

First off, where are they getting “7” from? Are we following the NT path or the 95/98/ME path?

Secondly, I’m looking at the demo and all I can see is a bunch of multi-touch stuff bolted onto Vista. The kind of thing that’s going to require tons of RAM, a high-end graphics card, a bucket of VRAM, the latest multicore CPU and a whole new touch-sensitive monitor. It looks like they’re trying to implement that multi-thousand dollar touchscreen table on a PC.

Thirdly, what is the point? I’ll tell you the point: to try to get your attention with something shiny for a year and a half (as if they’re ever going to deliver an OS on time) while distracting you from the fact that Vista is the worst steaming pile that Microsoft has shipped since Microsoft BOB. Or maybe since Word 6 for Macintosh. I’ll tell you one thing: I have run Vista on Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and I have run XP on both, and there are absolutely no circumstances under which I would choose Vista over XP. In fact, there are no circumstances under which I would take Vista over Ubuntu., because for what I do, I’m pretty confident I can find a Linux equivalent for everything except maybe iTunes.

Naturally, you can have my MacBook when you…actually, I’ve got it booby-trapped with a wipe-script and a half-pound of Semtex, so if you want to try to pry it from my cold dead hands? Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I can sort of understand why just over 30% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I can even understand why 10% of the population thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim. (pdf link)

But really? 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth??

REALLY??

By this math, 54 million Americans need to be lined up and shot. Even if you adjust for everyone who hasn’t made it through 6th grade science yet, that’s just abysmal. I mean, I know I’m a bright kid, and pretty much all my friends are in the good tail of the bell curve, but still, I cannot conceive that there are literally tens of millions of people in this country with a pre-Galileo concept of how the solar system works. No wonder the rest of the world is eating our lunch.

In fact, this is probably going to sound like a heresy wrapped in a blasphemy tied up in lunacy, but here goes:

I don’t know what I need HDTV for.

I mean, what do I watch?

Setanta Sports: not in HD.

BBC America: not in HD.

Doctor Who: not in HD.

Battlestar Galactica: okay, this is in HD, but let’s face it, there’s not much left of it.

all my DVDs: not in HD.

What does the wife watch in addition to that?

Good Eats: not materially improved by the addition of HD, and most eps are probably still std-def

Today Show: REALLY not materially improved by HD. SRSLY.

Going forward, is there anything else?

NFL? Not on your life. I listen to the Skins on Sirius now.

College ball? We’re going to be in Berkeley half the weekends anyway, so only sort of useful.

College hoops? Not until January, most likely.

New shows? Ehhh…may or may not take a chance on the US version of Life on Mars.

Old shows? Not unless Heroes figures out how to suck less.

Long story short: it’s an initial outlay of over $1200 along with an increase in the DirecTV fee per month for minor improvements to a couple of shows. Unless something amazing happens, I don’t see any reason not to wait until after Thanksgiving and see if prices drop.

(All together now: “WHO ARE YOU!?!?”)

…but I clearly ought to be living somewhere urban, given my affinity for public transportation. Besides, it’s tough not to appreciate a cable car operator who says he only has two rules: “Do NOT lean out and do NOT fall off. I’m not coming back for you.” The Hail Mary at the top of the Washington Street hill was a nice touch, especially since I was just thinking about how the brake design on the Powell-line cars is about 130 years old…you’re going to smell something burning, but it’s worse if you don’t.

I like cable cars, I like fog, I like Irish coffee…remind me again why don’t we live in the city? Oh yes, because it costs more than a barn full of high-test gasoline. Sheesh.

Now we’re watching The Graduate and trying to figure out how you get to Berkeley going west on the Emperor Norton bridge. Oh, and where in the hell the Berkeley Zoo is. My guess is somewhere on Telegraph.