Steve Reads

I went to the laundromat to do my laundry yesterday, and in the process managed to be more of an idiot than I’ve been in a while (well, that’s debatable  . . . ). I came in, dropped two loads of wash into the washing machines, and left to take care of some other stuff (groceries, sending mail, etc.). When I came back, I had about two minutes to go on the wash. Perfect.

The problem occurred when it was time to put the wash into the dryer. Without noticing it, I put each load in a new washing machine — not a dryer. I promptly got them washing again, and waited another 30 minutes. This whole time, bear in mind that I thought they were drying.

Somewhere during the “drying” cycle, the R.I. called and we chatted for a bit on my swank cell phone/headset combo meal. The “drying” finished. I came over and felt my laundry, and to my dismay it was — surprise — still wet. I cursed at the shitty dryers that the laundromat had bought, then reluctantly threw a load of clothes in the dryer (for the second time, I thought). I kept talking with the R.I., then decided that I didn’t want to wait around in the laundromat again after all. So I put the second load of clothes in my laundry basket and left — thereby leaving one load of clothes behind in the dryer. A Spanish-speaking woman was gesticulating at me the entire time, probably very nicely explaining to me that I was an idiot. I didn’t pick up on it. Idiots often don’t.

Some of this can be blamed on the inattention that comes from using cell phones (which is why banning their use on the road is a really good idea), but I think a lot more of it had to do with my scatterbrainedness (new word?). Don’t blame me: I had watched three Hitchcock movies that weekend. That’s bound to mess with my head.

A while ago, I bought François Truffaut’s book of interviews with Hitchcock. Back in the 60’s, Truffaut asked to conduct a 50-hour series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, covering every one of Hitchcock’s fifty-some films. Hitchcock agreed, and the result is simply astonishing. As someone who is just figuring out what films ought to be, this book is fetish porn.

I’ve used the book mostly to help me think about Hitchcock films I’ve just seen. My NetFlix list has almost all of Hitchcock’s films that are available on DVD, and I’ve been progressing through them one by one. After I watch each, I read the corresponding part of Truffaut’s book.

I just read this hilarious paragraph in the introduction:

To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner. The nature of Hitchcock’s cinema is to absorb the audience so completely that the Arab viewer will forget to shell his peanuts, the Frenchman will ignore the girl in the next seat, the Italian will suspend his chain smoking, the compulsive cougher will refrain from coughing, and the Swedes will interrupt their love-making in the aisles.

Some writing makes you laugh. This one just made me smile. It evokes a particular carnival image of the theatre that I’ve not felt in a long while.

I wonder if I just wasn’t paying attention to how bad previous presidents were. I noticed Clinton’s weakening of privacy laws (CALEA, Clipper, etc.), his general lack of conviction (leading to such monstrosities as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), and his habit of being radically centrist. And I was in eighth grade when the first President Bush was in office; I loved the Gulf War as much as anyone else who watched television, so I had no problem with Elderbush. I wasn’t old enough to understand, but I guess that’s beside the point.

But never before now did I despise a president as much as I loathe George W. Bush. I’ve never seen someone who is so starkly unqualified for office — any office — and who manages to make all the wrong decisions.

The latest is Axis-of-Vice-Presidential-Evil Dick Cheney’s fight to keep secret his decisionmaking for Bush’s energy policies. There’s a good deal of evidence that companies like Enron bought and paid for the policy that Bush settled on, namely one which favored oil and mocked environmentalists. In the wake of the Enron scandal, the Bush Administration wants to distance itself from that company. To do so, it is invoking something like executive privilege. That is, it wants people to believe that current and future presidents won’t speak confidentially unless they know that their discussions will remain secret. This is an obvious evasion.

The entire Bush presidency has been like this: justifying its iniquities with heavy terms like “executive privilege” and “patriotism.”

Somehow the conservative intelligentsia is going along with it. I’ve read hardly a single critique of the president come from George Will’s mouth, for instance. He mildly attacked the president for protecting the steel industry, but otherwise he’s been behind Bush as much as the next man. I don’t understand. Intelligence and free thought are not the exclusive domain of any one party; why does any Republican have to toe the line when dealing with this godawful president?

The music industry is up in arms about downloading illegal MP3s. I don’t see it as a big deal, for a few reasons:

1. Of the music that it’s illegal to download, remove all of it that shouldn’t be copyrighted because the copyrights should have expired long ago. And when I say “should have,” I’m not just being opportunistic: the copyright law has been extended many times in the last 50 years. Each extension has been drafted by an industry group for self-serving reasons. In short, many of those copyrighted works are only copyrighted under false pretenses.
2. I’ll be honest: I have no problem downloading music that someone like Britney Spears or Dave Matthews publishes. They already make lots and lots of money. I feel as badly about downloading their music as I would about sneaking into a baseball game without paying. Poor overpaid superstars.
3. It’s not clear that downloading music actually decreases industry revenues. A lot of people download music to sample an album; if CD sales are down, maybe it’s because MP3 downloaders discover crap before they dole out $15 per CD. Moreover, it’s not clear that those who download music would have bought the corresponding album to begin with.
4. The harder cases to defend are those of the struggling artists on whom the music industry hasn’t bequeathed a contract. The Wilcos of the world come to mind here. They’re not millionaires, so it might behoove us to buy their albums. There’s a possible counterargument, however: we hate the recording industry, whereas we love artists. We’d like to destroy the former, and encourage the latter. We’d rather find ways to pay artists directly, while explicitly denying money to the industry. How about donating directly to artists? How about I send a $15 check to Wilco every time I download an album’s worth of their songs? The music industry’s entire revenue model might change — indeed, the “industry” might disappear. There are better ways of financing musicians than through the big six recording companies. Maybe we could get more Wilcos and fewer Aerosmiths.
5. There’s a more general idea at work here: the notion of “ownership” of an idea (in contrast with physical property) is inherently fuzzy. Elvis Presley “stole” the work of blues musicians, if we want to use a verb like that, but still he was able to copyright “Hound Dog.” Windows 95 rips a lot off the Macintosh, but it’s still copyrighted. We have to face the fact that creators steal from everyone.

The recording industry ignores all these issues when it speaks to Congress, as it did at a recent hearing. It just uses the rhetoric of theft, when that analogy is clearly dated.

I’m rereading Plato’s Republic, and I’m reminded of how funny the structure of the argument seems. Here’s a paraphrase:

Socrates: We agree that the just is the same as doing what is good for oneself?

Glaucon: Yes, that seems right.

Socrates: And pooping is good for onesself?

Glaucon: Surely.

Socrates: So then it would follow that pooping is just?

Glaucon: That would follow.

Socrates: And yet sometimes pooping hurts us. Is that not so?

Glaucon: Surely it does. When there’s bad toilet paper, especially  . . . 

Socrates: So then sometimes what is just is that which hurts us?

Glaucon: Yes, that follows.

Socrates: And who is best able to decide what hurts us?

Glaucon: A doctor, of course.

Socrates: Quite so. So then a doctor is best able to decide what is just. Is that not so?

Glaucon: Indeed, Socrates. You have just turned my definition of justice upside-down, again.

I understand the point of Socrates’s arguments — namely, to show that his respondents aren’t thinking as clearly as they should, and to build with them toward some objective knowledge by removing the false ideas. But along the way, the specific examples seem pretty silly to me. And Socrates is always up against straw men; it’s never a fair fight.

Moreover, I read Karl Popper’s magnificient The Open Society and Its Enemies a while ago, one of whose points is that the Socrates of The Republic is not the real Socrates. The former Socrates is smug and convinced of his own rightness, whereas the latter Socrates emphatically understood his own ignorance. I think one of Popper’s biggest complaints about Plato is that he gave people license to believe in their knowledge of objective reality, and thereby paved the way for dictators to think themselves infallible (in a one-sentence nutshell containing a two-volume work). It’s interesting to keep Popper in mind while reading Plato.

For some reason I was just reminded of the all-too-precious cute kid from Jerry Maguire (the one who scolds Tom Cruise for saying the word “fuck”). For some reason I’d love to see a newspaper article about him titled “Cute movie kid eaten by sea monster.”

Stop looking at me like that.

Little by little, I am becoming the CGI mastuh. I am also losing sleep.

The whole site has been changed over to CGI now, to ease administration. If I did my job correctly, no one will notice (except for me, when I update it). If you find any errors, please let me know.

I have the greatest shower ever. My apartment has a weird system: during the summer, it’s powered off something like excess steam, result being that it’s not a very hot shower. That’s okay during the summer.

But now, my landlord has kicked in the “continuous-oil” system, whose result is that I can take infinitely long showers that are as hot as I want them to be. Without turning the dial very far this morning, I had an almost blisteringly hot shower. The shower is closed off from the rest of the bathroom by a plexiglass window that runs all the way to the ceiling, so enough time spent in the shower leads to almost suffocating steam.

I submit that this is a good thing. For one, I can always crack open the shower door and let some of the steam out. But you have no idea how great the steam is for shaving. When I was shaving in the shower during the summer, I’d always cut myself because the water wasn’t hot enough. Now, with intense steam and intensely hot water, I have skin that’s smoother than a baby’s bottom.

Thus begins six or eight months of blissful showers. I love life.

Somehow without noticing it, I became a member of the middle class in 2001. How did this happen? Can I get off? And if I can’t, when do I get my government-sanctioned minivan, 2.5 kids, and hair weave? Because I think middle class is a bad place to be without them.

Oh, also I thus far lack a sense of existential ennui. When do I get that?

I think the best thing for the computer industry would be if Microsoft disappeared. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of their low-quality products. I’m sick of their egomaniacal attitude toward the software industry. I’m sick of the inertia that they impose on the rest of the industry, forcing it into three-month cycles to push out more and more features along with more and more bugs. I’m sick of their continual lies and evasion about the security of their products. I’m sick of their habit of attacking their competition on spurious grounds (e.g., “Why buy Lotus Notes? It’s just email, and we have Outlook” or “Open source means the end of the software industry”).

If Microsoft were a better company — were more innovative, rather than always borrowing other companies’ ideas, cheapening them and marketing them well — I don’t think they’d have to worry about Linux or the open-source movement. Their monopolistic attack on the software industry led a group of very talented developers to think about destroying them; large enough bullies have all sights trained on them. As a result, the open-source movement will probably kill Microsoft eventually. It’s just a matter of time.

In one of the few times that I’ve really cared whether a conversation with a “customer-service specialist” was recorded, I just called Sprint PCS (slogan: “Home of cluster-fucking our customers”) to ask for some help reducing my bills. Their landline service provides a “Friends and Family” plan, where — if I understand correctly — you can get discounts on the few people you call most. I happen to spend ungodly amounts of cell time on the phone with my friend Chris Rugen, such that my phone bill has been in the $200 range for longer than I care to think about. I thought maybe Sprint PCS could help me.

Turns out they can, if I agree to a two-year contract. It also turns out that my customer-support representative is an algorithm — and not a very good one at that. He has about six possible options in front of him, and he cannot deviate from those options. He also managed to tell me a few times that “You might could  . . . ”

Really, Jethro?

I hate to pull any kind of cultural rank on what is probably a very fine school system that produced this customer-service specimen. The problem is less with Jethro than with the company for which he works — a company that only provides decent service around Boston, while charging exorbitant fees.

If the problem is that Sprint is taking a major business gamble by building a huge wireless network, then this is a problem of governmental policy; maybe the government should be subsidizing this kind of network. Whatever the reason, I’ve learned to loathe Sprint, and I hope very soon to complain loudly to them. If they don’t help me cut my bills, I’m going to encourage all my friends to move to Verizon.

Some women combine intelligence, charm, wit, and beauty into a really irresistible package. Of these women, some make me fantastically jealous. Others just make me lustful. A third, select group are almost enough to make me weep. I’ve run into two of these women within the past few days. This is no good. No good at all.

I’m listening to NPR right now. The host just asked “Is war [in Iraq] inevitable?” I hate the very phrasing of that question: we’re humans; it’s not as though nature were forcing us into war. Nothing is inevitable unless it’s dictated by logic or by virtually certain natural laws — things like the motion of planets. Politics and war are not inevitable.

I just watched Notorious, the old Hitchcock film. Again, astonishing. What strikes me the most about old movies is how much more care went into every shot — indeed, into every frame. Many, many times throughout the film, I wondered in my head where I could buy framed posters of those frames. The final shot — Sebastian walking back into the house, to be greeted by his business associates — is nearly perfect. An earlier one, with the poisonous coffee cup in extreme closeup while the camera focuses on Ingrid Bergman’s face (and by the way, I see what Woody Guthrie meant), hangs around for so long that eventually you forget about the coffee cup; the effect is disarming.

As always with Hitchcock, there’s a woman who is absolutely helpless, an emotionally distant man, and some kind of sadistic power relation. Here, almost everyone is weak relative to someone else: Cary Grant is at the whim of his Washington handlers; Bergman is under Grant’s thumb and that of Grant’s handlers; Sebastian can’t escape from his German business associates; the servants are all Sebastian’s; and so on. More than the typical Hitchcok movie I’ve seen, this one is about power relations. Hitchcock does it incredibly well, as always.

Turns out that if I pay a reasonable amount extra every month on my loans, I can have them paid off in four years. That’s not bad at all. This excites me greatly.

As anyone could have seen from a mile off, President Bush is still pressing for war even after Iraq allowed unconditional weapons inspections. It’s one thing to press for “vigilance,” which can just mean “making sure that they live up to their promises.” It’s quite another to insist on military action, which is what Bush appears to be doing. His speech before the United Nations, and his pledges to be unilateral, all seemed like plaster smacked onto a corrupt foreign policy: “Let’s go through the motions before we bomb Iraq.” I don’t think he’s even pretending to go through the motions anymore; he just wants to bomb.

Why not set an ultimatum: we’ll send in inspectors; if at any point they’re denied access, we’ll attack?

My cynical mind says that this is an election-year trick for the Bush administration. Wars always help politicians; they especially always help those politicians who push for greater military spending. Even more, they help politicians whose domestic agenda is deeply flawed. If the domestic economy is doing badly, wars never hurt. If the domestic economy’s troubles partly come from corrupt corporations with deep ties to the president, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see the president pressing for war.

And it’s worked: have you seen or heard any coverage of Enron et al. in recent days? Except for the occasional New York Times editorial, I know I haven’t. So one of the sad conclusions of this altogether sad warmongering episodes is: demagoguery works.

Here’s a letter I just sent to my Congressional delegation:

I write today to express my intense disapproval of the president’s warmongering, and to ask that you do everything possible to keep him in check. Congress should exercise its role as a coequal branch of the U.S. government, not rubber-stamp the president’s decisions. President Bush seems to view Congress as a subsidiary of the White House; throughout the “war on terrorism,” he has acted alone — not only within the world community, but within the U.S. government. If Congress doesn’t stop his power-grab, we will have set a dangerous precedent that future demagogues will build on.

The president has used this war on terrorism to distract Americans from his wretched domestic policy. We have forgotten about the Enron scandal, even though there are many unresolved questions about the Bush administration’s role within it. We have forgotten about “corporate accountability,” a buzzword that we all knew was vacuous; Bush would never harm his friends. We have forgotten about the flagging economy, which Bush has done nothing to fix. And now we’re about to enter a war whose timing near an election doesn’t seem coincidental.

Let’s review the upcoming war:

Bush seemed intent on fighting until the world community expressed its disgust. Then he backed down, and pretended — we all knew he was lying — that he was going to take foreign leaders’ opinions into consideration. He spoke before the United Nations, delivering an ultimatum: Iraq must admit inspectors, or face a war. As of yesterday, Iraq had agreed to admit inspectors. Bush is still pressing for a war. This is a war with little support from foreign nations, little support among the American public (60% would prefer that we not go to war or that we only go if we have U.N. support, according to a recent Gallup poll), and apparently little support within the administration. That is, it had little support within the administration, with very public disagreements among top cabinet members, until Bush railroaded them into agreeing with him.

In short, this is a president who doesn’t take anyone’s opinions into consideration. He doesn’t take Congress’s opinions seriously, ignores the international community, ignores his cabinet, and ignores the majority of the American public. This is a president who only listens to himself. He calls it a tightly run corporation; I call it demagoguery.

Someone has to stop this, and I urge you — as senators — to do your part. I urge you to stop this war until there is time for public debate. I urge you to strengthen the Congress’s role in the “war on terrorism” — a war which has led to the loss of American civil liberties. In the quest to end terrorism, we might very well end the great American democratic experiment. I hope you’ll keep our democracy strong.

Thank you,

Stephen R. Laniel

I’ve been reading all about XML in recent days, and I’m really excited about the things it can do. Abstractly, it’s just a set of rules defining the structure of data; XML views documents as trees, with nodes (“leaves,” for the arboreally [rather than technologically] minded) such as “paragraph,” “WebLogEntry,” etc. If your data are structured well enough, XML opens up a whole set of possibilities for things you can do with it. For instance, one neat thing I saw today is that XML lets you perform some basic math on your documents, such that you could have it automatically number footnotes, captions and so on. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Another neat thing is called XML Transformations. Among other things, I could use it to write one version of a document in XML, another in XHTML 1.0, another in HTML 4.0, and so on. This would help everyone: there would be different versions of my Web pages for different browsers. Browsers with more features could see better-formatted content.

As a geek and as a babbling sort of writer, XML excites me. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

This Weblog is now in XHTML 1.0 format, which is a start on the road to pure XML. XML is the direction in which HTML was supposed to go: it’s a pure content-description language, rather than a formatting language. In these Weblog entries, for instance, the content looks like

 <div class="subtopictitle"> Title of blog entry </div> <div class="subtopicbody"> This is the stuff inside each blog entry. </div> 

The <div> stuff is effectively a kludge smacked onto HTML to make it look like XML. People want to add their own tags to indicate logical divisions that the ordinary HTML tags don’t accommodate; <div> helps with that.

Ultimately, I want to be able to do something like

 <subtopictitle> Title of blog entry </subtopictitle> <subtopicbody> This is the stuff inside each blog entry. <subtopicbody> 

which gets rid of the kludges and preserves the structure. XHTML is a start.