September 2008 Archive
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September 25, 2008
More Tab Dumpage
First a quick update on TheLittleguy - we're pretty sure he's topped 20 pounds. Today he is 14 weeks old. He is a giant among babies! He's demo'd a few proto-giggles for us, although doesn't giggle consistently quite yet. He's slowly, slowly getting better at tummy time, although he still hates it. He enjoys the baby yoga and baby massage class I take him to and he loves having his teeth (gums) brushed before his bath. He also likes to chew on Dad's arm for fun.On to the tab dump..
- Merlin Mann, who helped make blogging about GTD and related productivity stuff a little cottage industry has become a bit disillusioned with it all and is rethinking what he's doing with his site. Kottke has the rundown. Mann's essay "Better" is thought-provoking. It's the productivity guru's version of the advice to not be lukewarm and to remove stuff from your life that is not really useful to you. In my own sphere (my GTD system, btw, has gone all to hell during the pregnancy and post-partum babycare), I've been thinking lately that while I can be pretty ruthless about getting rid of stuff sometimes, I have a harder time letting go of sources of ideas. For example, I keep piles of unread magazines around, I subscribe to way too many weblog feeds, I have a whole bookcase full of unread books, and so on. I think I need to become better about culling sources of input that just chew up my time and offer very little return, all the while provoking guilt and anxiety while sitting there being 'unread'.
- How SEC Regulatory Exemptions Helped Lead to the Collapse, or, as Atrios likes to call it, the "big shitpile" that we the taxpayers are going to have eat thanks to gross mismanagement and an irrational anti-regulatory fetish on the part of too many. The Republicans have finally found something government is good for - transferring wealth from you and me and other poor and middle class folks to the very wealthy. As a reader over at TPM pointed out:
Is it just me? With this last enormous bail out of our Wall Street Investors/Corporate America, I have this picture in my mind of these cartoon Republicans sweeping out the last of the people's money from the vaults. It took eight years, but they managed to get it all. The War/Private Contractors, the Oil Companys, the deregulation and fleecing of America. These Republicans started their tour of duty eight years ago with the coffers overflowing, flush with cash.
Too bad we wasted all those billions upon billions in Iraq, huh? - Eve Ensler on the nightmare that is Sarah Palin:
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered.
[...]Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an e nvironment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
[...]This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
<=> | in: Civil Rights & Feminism / Energy & Environment / Federal Politics / Parenting / Personal Organization / Religion & Politics / Republicans
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September 24, 2008
More Tabs and Stuff
First, by popular request, here's a link to TheLittleGuy's Amazon wishlist. Suggestions of things we should add to it are welcome. Now, on to clearing out some more of these open tabs in my browser.- 6 Food Mistakes Parents Make. So far, TLG shows no sign of having food issues. That is to say, he's doubled his birth weight at just three months and shows only the slightest signs of slowing down. He doesn't seem to care whether I eat broccoli or garlic or curry or whatever. And he will drink breastmilk warm or cool. He is a man on a mission! His father and I are both omnivores and not particularly picky, although for years as an adolescent I refused to put tomato sauce on my spaghetti (I'm over that now.) Nevertheless, I fear having a picky eater, not least because I will seriously lack patience for dealing with it. On the other hand, he's packing on enough reserves from breastmilk now that he'll probably be able to afford to turn up his nose at a few meals down the road. Ha!
- Another parenting tip - Wil Wheaton writes about playing games with kids - Rules 17a and 17b seem like they'll be useful:
Rule 17a is a house rule we invoke when we're learning a new game. It basically states that, at any time, a player can say, "You know, I just realized that I did this stupid thing that I wouldn't have done if I had a little more experience in the game. I'd like a do-over." If the majority of the players agree (and we always do) then we just back up a little bit, and play on. It reduces the risk of doing something bone-headed that you can't ever recover from, and it keeps the game fun.
[...] Rule 17b: Depending on your kid, the game, and some X factor that I leave to you as a parent, you could give your child up to three "roll again" markers, like poker chips or glass beads or whatever, that she can use at any time to re-roll a particularly bad dice roll. They can use it whenever they want to, but once the marker it used, it's gone for the rest of the game, so your child will have to choose very carefully about when she's going to use it. This would be especially great with a couple of smaller kids, because the parent isn't put in the position of awarding do overs and giving the appearance of favoritism [...] - I thought the point made in this article - that Sarah Palin is Future Shock personified - is spot on. The entire m.o. of the Republican party in my lifetime is to appeal to people's worst natures, fomenting fear of the other, fear of change, fear of the future, and rewarding reactionary wingnuts in thrall to a cynical theocratic and authoritarian impulse. Surely, surely Palin can be the nadir of this wave of this brand of politics and after this nutty election is over we can start to move on from it. Anyway, the pullquotes:
What I do remember sticking with me was the notion of accelerating change, an idea which did then and still does make the hairs at the back of my neck tingle. I also quite clearly remember Toffler’s most succinct definition of the syndrome which gave the book its name, a definition which didn’t even necessarily refer to anything technological: to suffer from future shock was simply to be paralyzed by “too much change experienced in too short a period of time.”
For a long, long time thereafter, I’d sit in idle moments and wonder just when future shock was going to happen. In my childish conception, it was something that would happen all at once, be precipitated by some obvious event - the proverbial straw - and stand out just as vividly and obviously as an outbreak of the flu when it did roll across the land. It took me years to understand the words as pointing toward something more poetic and metaphoric than clinically diagnostic. It’s a thought I’ve had occasion to dig up and reconsider this last week. Because this is what I’ve come to understand: Here we are. This is it.
[...] The gloss of down-home authenticity - the mooseburgers, “snow machines,” and other rustic tat that figure so centrally in her instant legend. The young-Earther retreat from science and all its methods. The palpable resentment of coastal elites (even as this time around it doesn’t seem that term is shorthand, as it so often is, for “Jews”). The instinctual, immediate recourse, upon achieving even the most local and limited sort of power, to the heavy-handed suppression of free inquiry. The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon.
What you get when you swallow too much change too quickly isn’t a mass outbreak of twitching, hebephrenic breakdown, nor some neo-Amish wave of technological renunciation. You wanna know what it looks like? A hockey mom and former beauty queen with an upswept ‘do and a pregnant daughter in high school. Sarah Palin is future shock personified. - Catherine Jamieson has opened the Utata Gallery and Art Center. This looks amazing. I wish I lived closer (it's in Vancouver.) I also wish I had time to do some proper photography. Alas.
- Bit overtaken by events, but I appreciated Obama's response to the Republican faux outrage about his 'lipstick on a pig' remark:
This whole thing about lipstick. Nobody actually believes that these folks are offended. Everybody knows it’s cynical. Everybody knows it’s insincere.
I would like to see more of him calling out the usual Republican phony bs for what it is.
<=> | in: Federal Politics / Parenting / Photography / Religion & Politics / Republicans
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September 23, 2008
Reducing Open Tabs in FF
No time to do proper blog entries; no time or brain-energy to fix my broken blogs and websites. Booo. Time to just do quick links using the tabs I've got open in Firefox at the moment. Here we go:- Fire Jim Bowden laments what a poor job ownership of the Washington Nationals is doing. It has been pretty much a disaster of a season. I don't expect playoff contention, but the team has mostly been a farce this year. Terribly disappointing, as I was hoping to use baseball as my fun distraction during TLG's first few weeks and months. A team this bad is not really fun.
- Awhile back I linked to a youtube of John Legend singing "Pride - In the Name of Love" and wished I could get the audio somewhere. It's finally been released on a cd. A Barack Obama fundraiser cd no less!
- In Lipstick on a Wingnut, Katha Pollitt explains some of the many, many things that should frighten any thinking person about Sarah Palin being able to even glimpse the White House from her house.
It takes chutzpah for a mother to thrust her pregnant teen into the world's harshest spotlight and then demand the world respect the girl's privacy. But then it takes chutzpah to support criminalizing abortion and then praise Bristol's "decision" to have the baby. The right to decide, and privacy, after all, are two of the things Palin wants to deny every other woman, and every other family, in America.
And her hypocrisy on women's fundamental rights as human beings is only the beginning. - Balloon Juice with a fine rant on this bailout craziness:
In other words, folks spent years making billions upon billions of dollars on risky transactions, more money on the stock of companies that was artificially high based on those transactions, more money bundling all those transactions into more transactions, and made a killing, and when it turns out the whole thing is a big pile of shit, you and I get the god damned bill.
I do not ever want to hear another damned word about the free market. I don’t want to hear another thing about letting the market regulate itself. I don’t want to hear about the free flow of capital. I don’t want to hear about government getting out of our lives.
None of it. From superfunds to super-bailouts, I am tired of other people getting rich being irresponsible and then being told I have to pay to clean it up.
<=> | in: Economics / Federal Politics / Music
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Coolest Kid
An old friend of mine told me that she really started to fall in love with her firstborn when he was around 3 months old. TheLittleGuy just turned 3 months old and I can totally see what she's talking about. He's now got a personality and opinions and interacts - I think we got the coolest kid; sorry, everybody else.We've gone on several outings over the last few days and he's been very good on all of them. Today it was just me and him out of the house for more than 3 hours - he was good fun (or snoozing) the whole time. I think I'm going to try to go out on more dates with him while I'm still on leave from work if he's going to behave so well while we're out and about! (Knock wood - I know, I know - with kids, all patterns are subject to change without notice.) Anyway, here is my handsome boy at three months old:
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September 8, 2008
The Economist on Peak Oil
From the June 21st-27th, 2008 issue - cover: "The Future of Energy." The lead editorial states on page 17:[In the early 1970s] a spike in the price of oil coincided with a fear that natual limits to supply were close. The newspapers were full of articles on solar power, fusion and converting the economy to run on fuel cells and hydrogen. Of course, there was no geological shortage of oil, just a politically manipulated one. Nor is there a geological shortage this time around.However, the feature article "The power and the glory" on page 3 of its subsection states:
Oil is no longer cheap; indeed, it has never been more expensive. Moreover, there is growing concern that the supply of oil may soon peak as consumption continues to grown, known supplies run out and new reserves become harder to find.
<=> | in: Energy & Environment
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September 5, 2008
This and That
One of my projects while on maternity leave (haha - I know how laughable this concept is, but allow me my delusions) is to one way or another get through a large pile of unread periodicals. I figure, if I don't read them while I'm on leave and not working, then I'm never going to read them. I can't quite bring myself to just toss them (yet), so I'm trying to skim through one or two per day. If progress continues as slowly as it has, I may start tossing some, though. The piles are really starting to bug me. As is always the case when I do get around to skimming periodicals, I find stuff that's worth mentioning or blogging about. Here are a few things I've come across recently:Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, may be the purest expression yet of his fabulating impulse. Set in a faraway time, the 1500s, and dividing its pages between two storied lands, the Mughal Empire and Renaissance Florence, it is replete with princesses and pirates, mysterious strangers and long-lost cousins, enchanted waters and magic cloaks. But what it does not contain is as telling as what it does. The Enchantress of Florence exhibits none of the complex allegorical structures, dense systems of allusion or broad political implications--in short, none of the satanic ambition--that both weigh down his major works and give them weight. The result, if relatively slight, is probably Rushdie's most coherent and readable novel.I also liked the reviewer's conclusion regarding Rushdie's take on the importance of storytelling and family - topics that are much more salient in our house these days:
The passage suggests the underlying unity of Rushdie's two great commitments: storytelling and family. Storytelling is the place where families begin. Families know themselves through the stories they tell themselves about themselves. Family trees are storybooks in graphic form. Like Lady Black Eyes, long-lost relatives come back all the time, in the stories we tell about them. Like Niccolò, we are defined by the family stories we carry within us. But at the same time, families are the place where storytelling begins. The first stories we know are the ones we hear from our family, about our family. Childhood is the time of stories, the time when everything is still possible and every story is still true. If Rushdie's magic realism is meant to re-enchant the world in the wake of modernity, it is also meant to re-enchant it in the wake of adolescence and adulthood. But again, with a bittersweet ambivalence, he seeks to incite two simultaneous and contradictory reactions, and perhaps 10 years old is exactly the age he wishes to make us. On the one hand, the childhood sense of open-mouthed wonder. On the other, the dawning skepticism that looks up from the page and asks, "But is it really true?"
The 158,000-square-mile Phoenix Islands Protected Area, covering about 12 percent of Kiribati's watery domain, holds some of the world's most pristine coral reefs as well as a great abundance and diversity of tropical marine life. And it's the first reserve to place such a large area of open ocean off-limits to commercial fishing. The reserve is one of the planet's ecological bright spots, the boldest, most dramatic effort to save the oceans' coral reefs, the richest habitat in the seas. No wonder the I-Kiribati (pronounced ee-kiri-bahs, which is what the people call themselves; the country is pronounced kiri-bahs) want to showcase the reserve as a uniquely un- spoiled center for marine science, recreational diving and eco-tourism.Neat stuff. There's video of the reef at the site. Also, there is a major new exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History: Sant Ocean Hall; it opens later this month. Sounds pretty nifty, as well. It includes a lifelike replica of a 'right whale' - not just a generic right whale, but a specific one named Phoenix; the replica took three years to develop. So many places on my list of places to take TLG once he's a bit older - I'm sure there will be many, many, many trips to the Natural History Museum and other Smithsonian destinations; Mama can't wait!
<=> | in: Books / Entertainment / General Musings / Meta / Parenting / Personal Organization / Science / Tourism and Travel
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September 1, 2008
Meta Thoughts on This Here Blog
Comments here have been broken forever, I know. The current plan is dump MT and transition to WordPress sometime RealSoonNow and then comments will be back. While I've been on maternity leave I've had a sudden surge of interest in redoing all of my websites again. The presence of TheLittleGuy and his (reasonable for a baby) demands poses some challenges for implementation, but it's on my list of BigToDos while I'm away from work. We'll see.Anyway, since TheGuy works from home and I've been home with TLG, we've had a number of conversations recently about blogging. And, we've been each other's audience for all sorts of things we would blog if we were updating our sites. Suffice it to say that many terribly brilliant, insightful, and oh-so-savvy things have been said in this house the last few weeks -- too bad we don't run a tape recorder sometimes! Hee.
TheGuy's been resurrecting some old content on his site and one of the things we've discussed is how the tools tend to coerce a particular bloggin style/format that isn't necessarily what works best for each person. I think I might try adopting his old style of one post with just a few random comments rather than feeling like each post needs to stand alone. Titles will end up being things like 'this and that' probably. But it might let me feel like I can post a bit more frequently. We shall see.
