Are my eyes really blue?

Read on below the jump (or follow the link) for the flip side of my post-before-last…and an endorsement.

Continue reading “Generation Gap”

Things are different over there. Two examples:

1) Motherwell’s Phil O’Donnell, a former Celtic player, dropped dead on the field during a match in December. This Sunday, the remaining members of the 1991 Motherwell team (which won the Scottish Cup with a 19-year-old O’Donnell) and the 1998 Celtic team (which O’Donnell led to the regular season SPL title) will play an exhibition at Celtic Park to raise money for O’Donnell’s family. It’s expected to be a hard sellout.

2) Tommy Burns, a former Celtic player who ran the player-development program, died last week only 51 years old. For those unable to attend the funeral Mass, Celtic has put a PDF of the Order of Service up on their website for fans to download.

And of course, today, two months after most of the footballing world gave them up for dead, Celtic completed the race back to the top, knocking off Dundee United with a Venegoor of Hesselink goal in the 72nd minute, while Rangers fell 2-0 at Aberdeen. And just like that, Celtic wins the SPL title for the third straight year, their longest such streak since Jock Stein and the Lisbon Lions in the late 1960s.

All 90 minutes. All 38 games. If there’s one hallmark of the Gordon Strachan era, it’s this: until the last second has ticked off the clock, Celtic have a chance to win. Consequently, we’ll see you in Europe again next year.

If you can hear the crowd at Paradise all singing “Fields of Athenry” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and not get a chill up your spine, you should probably see a doctor and determine whether you are in fact dead. Sirius just paid for itself. =)

I am sure, in retrospect, that it was easy to make a case in the 1970s that the world was coming apart. The streak of assassinations (Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy again) made it seem like shooting a prominent leader would become a recurring feature of American life. The price of everything was skyrocketing at the same time that the economy was deteriorating – a process that we’d come to know as “stagflation,” generally driven by artificial cost increases on major commodities (in this case, OPEC’s production controls to help pay for the Yom Kippur war in 1973). The military was, quite frankly, in shambles – done into the ground by protracted conflict in Vietnam and the soul-sucking nature of the draft and its aftereffects. And it seems like an unnaturally large chunk of the prominent celebrities of the Depression-War-Postwar era died in the 1970s, which I can only guess was the logical result of people with shorter life expectancies becoming prominent as a result of mass media (e.g. film and radio on a national scale).

You only have to go back and look at the magazines from the time to see the general despair. People genuinely thought that offering amnesty to draft evaders would undermine military readiness (“Who in the hell is going to fight the next war? The Soviets will not be deterred by the peace symbol”, etc). People actually thought that busing was going to bring about racial Armageddon (read J.Anthony Lukas’s landmark Common Ground, but set aside about a month to do it). People were retreating wholesale into nostalgia (consider George Lucas, who created Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and who financed his project with the money made on American Graffiti. Just consider how highly rated Happy Days was and you’ll get the picture, never mind Grease).

Kevin Phillips is sharp as a tack, no doubt, and he has spent years disavowing the fruits reaped from his landmark The Emerging Republican Majority, but he will always wear a scarlet letter. Two of them, in fact: PP. “Positive Polarization.” There was a conscious, deliberate effort by Team Nixon – starting around 1966 and continuing through the downfall of the administration in 1974 – to portray America as “us and them.” Them, obviously, to consist of war protesters, blacks, feminists, campus radicals, drugged-out rockers, dirty hippies, etc etc – the great unwashed Other. And Us, to consist of…well…”real Americans.” What he created sold like nothing since Coca-Cola. To this day, forty years on, the pundits rant on and on about the need to win “real Americans.” The “heartland.” Those proud rural Caucasian sons of the soil who embody “real American values.”

Lil’ Kev sold the idea that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove made their millions on: that there is some mythical America back in Pleasantville around 1955 or so, before the Negroes got all riled up and the beatnik jazz appeared (background loop of “Take Five” here) and the foreigners and colored folk got into the rock and roll and mad the kids all want to smoke reefer and hate cops (change background loop to Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower”). His crime wasn’t in making people imagine that things were so great and wonderful and simple and perfect in some long-ago American Avalon cloudcuckooland…his crime was in making people believe that you could go back to it.

The irony is that all of a sudden, it’s 2008, the economy is going to hell, oil has smashed through the $100/bbl barrier, American forces are bogged down abroad, and there’s a sinking sense that everything’s turning to shit…and it’s all landing on people who came to power as the logical result of the Phillips plan. The GOP, as currently incarnated, is the apotheosis of the predictions in The Emerging Republican Majority – white, Southern, suburban, traditionalist – and right now, over two-thirds of the country thinks its standard-bearer sucks out loud.

The moral of the story is actually not political at all, and is in fact directed against myself. Said moral being: don’t get too caught up in nostalgia, because that perfect realm you remember wasn’t perfect then and is in any case unattainable now. There’s nowhere to go but forward, or else perish where you stand.

November 2004. The period known as “Black October” has carried on all the way through into November. We still have a ton of stuff to do, not nearly enough resources to do it, we’re undermanned, our manager has been fired and our director is running us in an absentee fashion. We’re not working ahead at all; everything is pretty much to-the-day and we’re struggling to get gear out the door.

I clearly remember this: I would go back to my bench, which was at the other side of a huge pile of…everything. Returned equipment, new equipment, etc etc. I re-arranged that stuff for a while until I had a clear space around the bench, barricaded in by walls of cases and boxes and etcetera, easily six and a half feet high all the way around. On the other side of the wall, random stuff piled high where people had left it. The only way in or out was a passage just wide enough to slide a roller case through – less than 3 feet wide at best – and was blocked by a pallet jack loaded down with 600 lb of desktop machines, so I could easily pull up the drawbridge.

I sat there, no sound other than the tinny streaming radio from the UK and the occasional chime of a rebooting system, and churned out laptops for eight hours straight. Sometimes nine or ten. It was mind-numbingly dull…but it wasn’t customer-facing, it wasn’t physically strenuous, I could sip on a Dr Pepper and hear some music in the background…basically, all the alone-time I needed.

Man alive, what I wouldn’t give now…not to be customer-facing, and to be able to just build up the wall and get to work.

…and not about politics, either. But I will say this: one of the things I’m most looking forward to is a Democratic majority greater than 52 in the Senate, so that the new majority leader can expel Joe Lieberman (Likud-Connecticut) from the party.

There’s apparently a tradition inside the Beltway that states that nobody is more to be honored and respected than somebody who claims to be a member of one party while routinely taking a gigantic Deuce McAllister all over said party. If Holy Joe wants to go into the pages of the New York Times and heap endless slander on a party that put him on their Presidential ticket 8 years ago, I don’t really see why the Dem leadership shouldn’t put his ass on the street.

If you work for Coca-Cola, you ought not be taking out full-page ads about how unsatisfying the taste of Coke is.

Also, just for the record, if you’re one of the 4% that’s still voting for Ralph Nader in 2008, you are too stupid to live and should be put in a home rather than allowed to vote. I’m only going to say this one time this season: politics ain’t therapy.

So I’m flipping through the iTunes Music Store, because the wife is looking for some obscure track, and I find myself on a list of “90s One Hit Wonders.” And looking over the 75 or so tracks, I think about the fact that the list includes some stuff I remember from undergrad, and some stuff that reminds me of those early days in Washington DC, and I can’t conceive of the fact that those were in the same decade.

There are some pretty sharp lines of demarcation. For one, I didn’t even *have* an email address until I left undergrad (it was eWorld, if you must know). For another, I didn’t really become a full live participant in the Greater Zone Community until after grad school was done and flunked out with. And I know I’ve mentioned it before, but in a span of six months in 1997, my entire life was completely transformed – my residence, my relationship, my career path, my bloody time zone for crying out loud.

Looking back, it’s absurd to even consider 1990 and 1999 part of the same lifetime, let alone the same decade. You could make a case that the transformation in my life since 1999 is considerably less drastic, even taking into account marriage and homebuying and the like.

Another hard drive failure. Ticking noises too – this one’s almost definitely a drive failure at the hardware layer. I decided that enough was bloody enough and bought a brand-new 250 GB unit from Fry’s, and incredibly, it took less than two hours from the time I got home for everything to be back to normal with an extra 90 GB of storage space.

You can rest assured that I’m putting all the virtual machines back on here. XP, Vista, and two different Ubuntu flavors, plus a local .Mac disk and some more of the movies and ripped TV shows (every ep of Coupling and Father Ted both!) now that I have room on the local drive coupled with adequate backup space for the whole thing. I guess I’m making a permanent jump to the quarter-terabyte world…this drive is literally a thousand times more capacity than I had in the hard drive of my first Mac fourteen years ago. (“Moore’s Law…been very, very good to me.”)

Good thing I passed the bloody exam, hm?

So I passed the one test for the ACSP today – without taking the course at all. Got 86 out of 90. Now, in fairness, it’s kind of a nubs certification – it’s OS X Leopard only, no Server or anything off the workstation. But it’s a cert, and that’s a line on the resume that indicates that, in the opinion of Apple Computer, I’m competent to work on 10.5-based systems. Which will help matters considerably.

Now, if I can pass the OS X Server test? And get ACTC without taking the class? I. Am. BULLETPROOF.

Geoff Lloyd, on this incident involving Suggs and the Pet Shop Boys:

“Someone must have spiked one of Suggs’s drinks with maybe, like, eighteen other drinks.”

Say what you like about Howard Dean, but you can’t argue with the results: took back the House, took back the Senate, and so far, 3 for 3 in special elections, each one in a more conservative district than the last. Tuesday night, it was Mississippi-1st, a district Bush carried with 62% in 2004, a district that had a Republican incumbent previously, where the National Republican Congressional Committee dumped over a million dollars, where they ran ads tying the nominee to Obama, to Jeremiah Wright, to everything but Osama Bin Laden.

The Democrat won by 8%.

Now, Howard Dean didn’t make Bush as popular as herpes, or hang the economy around the GOP’s neck like an albatross, or stretch the Iraq war out to five years and counting. But because he stuck to his guns on the 50-state strategy, when all that happened, the mechanisms were in place to capitalize on them. And as a result, the GOP has dipped below 200 seats in the House for the first time since…well, it would have to be before 1994 at least.

When you can’t even win by playing the “crazy colored preacher hates America!” card in Mississippi, you are in what we political scientists refer to as “deep deep shit.” Alan Abramowitz (who interviewed me on my official visit at Emory back in the Triassic Era) has put together a 3-part test based on a matrix of GDP growth, net approval rating (approve minus disapprove), and whether the incumbent party has 8 or more consecutive years in control, and right now, his model predicts a 14-point margin of Democratic victory. Now obviously, there’s plenty of time for the economy (and the perception of same) to change, or for the approval rating ratio to improve, but whoever’s running things at the RNC will go to bed tonight puckered tight enough to crap diamonds.