The Phantom City

How contentious does an election have to be to make Garrison Keillor angry? I think we just found out.

BTW, a wonderful example here of how Google AdSense can work in sublimely ridiculous ways. On each page of the In These Times site that I visited, there was an ad for “Republican Singles.”

Pretty site. Good sense. Browse Happy.

If dissent is unpatriotic, then apparently Senator Kennedy dissented his way all the way on to the no-fly list.

(Of course, my first thought was that past legal troubles…ahem…might have something to do with it, but that should only affect his voting status in Florida. Oh, wait, he’s white. Florida doesn’t care about revoking his right to vote.)

Seriously, though, if the terrorist watch list includes possible terrorist aliases like “Edward Kennedy,” how do folks named John Smith ever manage to get on board a plane?

Courtesy of The New York Times (free registration required)

Is it a story of greed, ambition, and ruin? Well, no, but it is a story of incompetence and indifference, and what happens when you can buy and sell a post office.

Courtesy of The New York Times (free registration required)

Okay, so it turns out we’re not the only two people watching this show. (The premiere episodes, at least, turned out to have been pretty highly rated for UPN.)

And, looking on some message boards, we’re definitely not the only folks who like Mose — it’s MOSE, not MOSES, English — the best of all the people in the house.

However, I’m almost willing to guarantee, from the same boards, that we’re the only folks who like Ariel, the spaced-out vegan who believes cows might be aliens. Heck, I think she and Mose might work out as a couple. Too bad they’d probably have to live around cows.

Wednesday nights, UPN — if you can figure out what channel that is. (Same one that shows Enterprise. There, that might help at least three or four viewers.)

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

President George W. Bush
August 5, 2004
Remarks by the President at the Signing of H.R. 4613, the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005

I realize we’re in the middle of fighting Evil, one medium-sized country at a time, but growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I still have a healthy respect for the nuclear weapons issue. (You know, the one that says we’re glad they haven’t been used in a while and we know the probability of their being used approaches 1 every time another country develops them.)

From what I recall, as late as 1994 a primary concern of our government was making sure nuclear weapons capability wasn’t spreading around. We didn’t do a great job, but hey, it worked somewhat well for fifty years or so.

So what is happening nowadays, in this administration? Lately I’ve seen:

• While we have sponsored a treaty to keep countries from developing highly enriched uranium and plutonium, we are balking at the idea of actual inspections and verification.
• North Korea is developing land- and sea-launched missiles that can reach the United States, and we aren’t talking much about it.
• According to this post, a man who helped buy ballistic missile submarines for North Korea is celebrated at some of the highest levels of our government. (In the interest of clarification, the full claim is that the Japanese trading company that sold the subs is affiliated with the Unification Church.)

Are we so busy nation-building in Iraq after a war to protect us from weapons of mass destruction rumors of weapons of mass destruction that we are ignoring the real WMDs? Have we become so concerned about terrorism that we have forgotten the terrors of total war? (Okay, on that last sentence, I think it would be hard to say our current administration’s foreign policy is really oriented towards terrorism — or anything else sensible — right now.)

“Republicans Look to Harvest Amish Vote” - AP

I can see U.S. 250 near Wooster, Ohio now, packed with buggies heading towards the polling places on Election Day.

Possibly as an antidote to the mind-altering tedium that is the working world, Lorrie and I decided to watch three documentaries on DVD over the weekend:

The Kid Stays in the Picture
Very good. Based on the book by the same name, the documentary tells the rise, fall, and rise again — sort of — of Robert Evans, possibly the movie industry’s most influential producer during the Seventies (The Godfather, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby, etc., etc., etc.). Since the movie is narrated by him, and the story is told completely from his perspective, part of the fascination is how much could possibly be real. However, no matter what, it’s a great Hollywood story.

Extras: Okay, since it includes some film footage referred to during the movie, as well as a couple of good acceptance speeches by Evans. However, watching Dustin Hoffman doing his Robert Evans impression over and over again, and seeing the vaguely stoned reactions from some of the random celebrities at an awards ceremony, may not be worth sitting through.

Devil’s Playground
Also quite good, although it turns out it could have been better. A documentary primarily shot around the turn of this century, it follows Amish youth as they participate in the rite of rumspringa, which starts when they are 16. In this rite, young Amish are given the chance to join the church, but are first set free to explore what the world has to offer, the better to work out any doubts. (Joining the church is permanent. If you renounce it later, you will be shunned by the community. However, choosing not to join the church after rumspringa is a respected, but discouraged, choice.)

It uses a typical documentary structure of following and interviewing some particular subjects about their choices and their final decisions. The choices faced are interesting, and the consequences of those choices can be devastating. (Without going too deeply into it, you don’t start watching this movie with the idea anyone will receive death threats from crystal meth dealers. Of course, the kid that does could probably get into trouble if he was sealed into a padded room.)

Extras: While the VHS version of this movie would be worth watching, the DVD version affirms it as a great documentary, just for the inclusion of some deleted scenes that were cut out late in the editing process. Those scenes should have been left in.

Home Movie
The director of American Movie — highly recommended — interviews five people about their unusual homes. The people living in the homes are definitely the subject of the movie, since the homes themselves don’t get a lot of play except as backdrop or prop. However, this is an eccentric bunch, with the possible exception of the woman who lives in a tree, who just seems to have lived an unusual life. Probably the weakest of the three documentaries, but it had some strong competition.

Extras: Okay, but not essential. Check out the Monsanto House of the Future bit, however.

Went to the Sarah McLachlan concert in Raleigh Friday evening. While we’re both fans, neither of us had seen her in person before now, and I was a little worried about how the whole singer/songwriter thing would come off in an arena (the RBC Center…or Centre, since RBC stands for Royal Bank of Canada).

Of course, I had forgotten that Sarah is Big in Canada™, and that usually means Good Live, no matter where you see the act. (Think Rush.) The RBC Center is a good venue for that sort of concert — it was built recently to house hockey and basketball, meaning the seats would need to be fairly close to the court area. She hit the usual hits, as well as a fair amount of material from the latest album, much as one would expect, and the crowd was really into it. We got two encores, one that was probably planned and one that perhaps was not. (Oddly enough, someone threw a broken lighter up onstage during the concert. I’m not sure what that was about. Those floor tickets were too expensive to buy just to show up and throw hard objects.)

Anyway, we’ve been having pretty good luck with arena concerts. While most we’ve gone to have been in the outdoor amphitheater type setting that seems to be ubiquitous, we have been to see Bob Dylan in Winston-Salem — which was probably my favorite concert, with near-front-row tickets for Tom Petty coming in a close second — and now Sarah in arenas, and those have worked out well.

Check out the tour if you can. It’s ending its North American run in September, so you’ll want to get tickets now. Hopefully she’ll start coming through here regularly, like Petty does.

Note: I will have to give the concert an award for most gratuitous use of a glowing stump, however. During the setup, we watched a fellow working diligently in a giant tree stump on the stage. The stump’s interior was covered in a fabric that was underlit with red light, suggesting lava…in a stump. So, you figure something cool is going to happen, right?

During the middle of the set, something starts to rise up out of the stump. Is it lava…smoke…a special guest star? Nope, it’s a drum set. To supplement the perfectly good drum set already being played by Ashwin Sood, who promptly got up and went over to play the new drum set with whisks instead of sticks. Oh well, I guess there’s an advantage to being married to the lead singer.