Remains of the Day

Shotgun wedding

I am saddened at the thought that the McCain campaign could descend to the level of a made-for-TV wedding between Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, but given that it would probably be televised on Fox, I must admit some self-interested daydreaming about how many views it would generate on Hulu.

Now that the stock market is in the toilet and my retirement looks to be further out in the future, I'm readying a backup plan. Assuming the McCain campaign loses the election, I will try and convince Sarah Palin to let me and a camera crew follow her family around for a reality TV show called The Palins. It would be the highest-rated reality show of all time.

Some possible names for the show:

• The Simple Life 6
• Raising Alaska
• Raising Trig
• Bristol and Levi: The Newlyweds 2
• Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, Trig, and Alaskan Grizzly bears, oh my
• Where in the World is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray

Warner Home Video announced two Blu-Ray editions of The Dark Knight to street Dec. 9. The limited edition will come in a Bat-Pod display case and, if the art is correct, looks to include a small replica of the motorcycle.

Amazon has a sign-up page for the Blu-Ray release, and it will likely flip into a pre-order page shortly when the SKUs come through.

I wonder if there will be an in-video option to toggle to pillar boxing just for the IMAX sequences. On a TV it actually will reduce the viewing real estate, but you'll see the full frame of the IMAX print.

Hertzberg on Palin's Couric interview

Okay, we've probably squeezed all there is to squeeze out of the Katie Couric interview of Sarah Palin, but Hendrik Hertzberg's comments in his New Yorker blog left me with a few final chuckles.

COURIC: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

COURIC: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.

This seems to be a case of incoherence of thought leading to incoherence of syntax. Pronouns wander in search of antecedents like Arctic explorers in a blinding snowstorm. Homophones confuse the transcriber. For example, one of the Governor’s answers could as sensibly, or insensibly, be rendered as

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And they’re…

In the “Putin rears his head” answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. “We send those”—those? those what?—”out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia.” Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.

Timbaland

Sasha Frere-Jones discusses Timbaland in this week's New Yorker.

When you hear a rhythm that is being played by an instrument you can’t identify but wish you owned, when you hear a song that refuses to make up its mind about its genre but compels you to move, or when you hear noises that you thought couldn’t find a comfortable place in a pop song, you are hearing Timbaland, or school thereof.

Presidential Debate 08 - round one

If you're interested in watching or reviewing the first Presidential Debate, we have the full video up at Hulu.

We also have plenty of clips and post-debate commentary here and here.

The post-debate polling indicates a strong win by Obama, though many pundits preferred McCain. What an odd role reversal. For once, Obama appealed more to the average voter, while McCain appealed to lots of pundits.

McCain threw out terms like earmarks that political novices don't understand, and that hurt him during the economy section. Obama looked at McCain and seemed more congenial (yes, John, we know you are not Miss Congeniality, your running mate is the beauty pageant queen), while McCain would not look at Obama and came off as more elitist and fiery. If we went to Howard Lederman in the corner, I think he'd say McCain threw more punches and seemed more aggressive.

McCain seemed agitated a few times. I wonder if at one of these debates, Obama will be like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men and decide, screw it, I'm going to press him. The moderator will try to cut off Obama as he shouts at McCain over and over again, "Did you order the code red?!" and finally McCain will finally look at Obama and shout, "You're Goddamned right I did!"

Not the most scintillating debate. I wonder how many viewers made it through to the bitter end. I did policy debate in high school (yes, I was a debate team dork, and yes, I saw that Kirk Cameron movie about policy debate), and that seems a better format for determining a winner than these Presidential Debates. We had to have note cards and cite evidence, whereas our Presidential Candidates can say whatever they want during the debate without any challenge until post-debate analysis.

So here's my proposal: Policy Debate format, two on two, Obama-Biden versus McCain-Palin. They alternate being on the affirmative and advocating a resolution. I would cough up $49.99 to see that on pay-per-view.

Election tweets

A ticker tape for the modern generation: election.twitter.com

Hypnotic.

Are you havin' a laugh?

The drama and theatrics surrounding the election are both horrifying (the "McCain croaks and Palin becomes President of the free world" scenario is so terrifying to contemplate in its not insignificant probability that it needs a name, like a Robert Ludlum novel: the Palinus Paradox, or the Terminal Regression, or the Persephone Vector, or something of the sort). But if you ask, are you not entertained? I must confess I am enthralled.

Watching Palin in interviews is like watching the British version of The Office for the first time: viscerally discomfiting yet spectacularly absurd. We're watching a potential President of the most powerful nation on earth being checkmated by Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. Oh, that David Foster Wallace were alive to dissect the Palin phenomenon.

If there's anyone celebrating, it's Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, their writers, and every one out there trying to get a laugh.

*Note: the last video is actually not a spoof by Tina Fey. That is actually Governor Palin speaking.

That New Yorker Obama cover

It's all the rage. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart spoof it for this week's Entertainment Weekly.

The Nation spoofed the New Yorker cover just a week or two ago.

I might just have to find someone to go in on with me for this as a pairs Halloween costume.

PC Guy!

Damn, I missed PC Guy at the Fleet Foxes concert at the El Rey the other night!

How I would have loved to ask him about the latest Microsoft "I'm a PC" ads.

It's called a carousel

My favorite moment from season 1 of Mad Men is in the last episode: Don Draper's presentation of an ad idea to Kodak for its new slide projector.

"It let's us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again, to a place we know we are loved."

Diesel turns 30

This video promoting Diesel's upcoming 30th anniversary party? Clever.

I'm not sure if it's SFW or NSFW. Depends on the quality of your mind's eye, I suppose.

Loosely Based

My brother-in-law Mike and his brother-in-law Nik wrote a graphic novel that is going to be published by Arcana Comics. The title is Loosely Based and there's a link here with some preview pages. Congrats Mike!

HD video from DSLRs

The Nikon D90 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Canon's SLR names are way too convoluted) both shoot HD video in addition to serving as DSLRs.

But one problem of shooting HD video with a CMOS is that since there is no real shutter like on a motion picture camera, each "frame" is captured by simply capturing lots of images per second with that CMOS. If you read it 24 times a second, you get 24 frames.

But if the CMOS doesn't refresh fast enough and the camera moves while the CMOS is refreshing, the bottom of the CMOS might be reading part of the image from a different time than the top of the CMOS, and that rolling shutter produces a bad motion wobble or skew (what Jim Jannard calls "jelly movement") as in this sample video footage from the D90.

Here are some sample unmodified Quicktime movie files from the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Suffice it to say no serious filmmaker will be throwing away a camcorder after purchasing either of these DSLRs (unless that child you're filming doesn't move much; what, little kids run around?).

I'm sure they're fine still cameras, though. So few people make large prints anymore, so digital SLR resolution has been sufficient for their primary purposes: web galleries, 4x6 prints.

Joan Holloway

Any guy who watches Mad Men will understand why I share this clip of Christina Hendricks of Mad Men, better known as Joan Holloway. I don't know how accurate Mad Men is, but if it is, they don't make office managers like they used to.

Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.

That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.

So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.

Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:

• Discussion boards
• Channels, including new ones like anime (Naruto or Mushi-Shi, anyone? Death Note?) and Food and Leisure (Giada!)
• Improved queue management, including the option to separate out subscription alerts from expiration alerts
• Show recommendations - at the bottom of each show page, we recommend other shows you might like based on what people are viewing.
• New TV and Movies homepage layouts

There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.

Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

Okay, I will go collapse now.

Human - Carpark North

I saw this video for "Human" by Carpark North during a Scandinavian music video screening at the LA Film Festival earlier this summer. It was by far my favorite of the bunch which is saying something considering the series included a new Gondry-directed Bjork video.

The talented Martin De Thurah directed. If you're willing to navigate down through a Flash site, you can find a higher-res version of the video here.

Democrats are from Mars, Republicans are from Venus

UPDATE as of 9/18/08: FiveThirtyEight has Obama pulling back ahead in Electoral College Projections. Maybe the combined vetting of Palin by the Web and the MSM and McCain's inability to say anything coherent about the current financial crisis have stamped out the bounce from the RNC.

***

Democrats everywhere are in a depressed state as McCain has taken a slight lead in nationwide polls. As McCain and Palin continue to feed misinformation, the Democrats and Obama supporters continue to post refutations. How, they wonder in frustration, can Republicans continue to believe this misinformation?

A study offers a potential answer: using reason and logic to argue with Republicans doesn't work. In fact, it may just further entrench them in their beliefs.

A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. But what's even more disheartening is that refuting misinformation may cause people to believe the misinformation even more strongly than they did before hearing the refutation.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

If this means that some Republicans actually believe that John McCain invented the Blackberry, then I give up.

But what is a Democrat to do? How do you appeal to people who don't respond to logic or reason?

Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, tries to answer the question of why people vote Republican in this article at EDGE, and in doing so, he tries to suggest some adjustments to the Democratic message. His hypothesis is that Republicans want moral clarity, but Democrats continue to bombard them with messages based in reason.

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

Haidt notes that when emotions take hold, logic and reason are suppressed, and so policy-based messages by Democrats fail to resonate with Republican voters.

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

If it's not reason and logic that's failing to resonate with Republican voters, what is missing? Haidt identifies five moral foundations or dimensions that people value and thinks that Democrats only hit on two of them.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

Some other excerpts:

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

If this is true, it could explain why trying to win an election with a strategy based purely on reason and truth is so difficult, and why Republican misinformation is so effective and durable. Obama wants to run a campaign based not in the same old political attacks, but it's clear to Schmidt and the McCain campaign that an election fought on those grounds is not one they can win.

Fears of the Dark

Trailer for an animated horror film.

Lance's return

In this Vanity Fair profile, Lance Armstrong elaborates on his plan to return to cycling with Team Astana to ride a few major races in 2009, including the Tour de France, where he'd be shooting for his eighth win.

Why did he decide to come back?

The impetus to come back, he says, sprang upon him quite unexpectedly over the summer, in Colorado. Armstrong had an epiphany on August 9 after placing second at the Leadville Trail 100 Mountain-Bike Race—a 100-mile “Race Across the Sky,” which climbs to more than 14,000 feet. That ascent, cycling upward in a crosscurrent, tripped something primal in him. “It wasn’t a lightbulb going off,” he says, but a realization, combined with a gradual frustration “with the rhetoric coming out of the Tour de France. Not just the Tour on TV but the domestic press, the international press, the pace, the speeds at which participants rode. It’s not a secret. I mean, the pace was slow.

“Then Leadville, this kind of obscure bike race, totally kick-started my engine. For me it’s always been about the process.… The process of getting there is the best part. You start the season a little out of shape, a little heavy. You get in better shape. You lose some weight. I mean you’re just crafting this perfect program. For several weeks I [had] trained [for Leadville] and went riding by myself. Obviously beautiful territory and fresh air, just feeling fit, losing weight, getting strong—living a very healthy lifestyle. I thought, This might be fun to try again.”

Reading this, I thought two things:

1. Yes, it might be fun to try again. Cycling, that is. All the inactivity from my Achilles rupture has been wearing on me. Even in physical therapy, the most I can do is a bit on a stationary bike and some simple balance, flexibility, and strength exercises. Not having a way to work off energy is killing me. And so I imagine suffering on a bike with only nostalgia and yearning. Cycling in LA is terrible with all the angry, aggressive drivers in their cars fighting for road space, but if you can get out to the mountains in Malibu, there's some peaceful pavement to be found.

2. I need to go back to the Tour de France next year. I went three times, but it's been a while since I've been back. A bit of cycling through the Alps, a few days in Paris, watching Lance chase tour victory number 8 at the age of 37? 38? There are worse ways to spend a week or two in July. Can I heal in time to get in that type of riding shape? Probably not, but it's easier to stay on training with a trip to the Tour and the NY Marathon locked into the calendar.

Earlier in the article is an interesting story about how the LiveStrong bands came into being.

The real breakthrough had come in 2004. Nike came to him with the idea of having people wear plastic yellow LiveStrong wristbands—the color of the jersey worn by each day’s leader of the Tour de France. “I thought it was a terrible idea,” Armstrong told me. “I didn’t think it worked. Seemed like a loser. They were going to give us five million of these bracelets to sell for a dollar. But they also were going to donate a million dollars to kick it off. So I looked at that and went, ‘Sweet. We’ve never had a million-dollar donation. We like that!’ I didn’t know where we were going to store all of these silly yellow bands.”

It's fascinating how often good ideas are almost thrown out. I've read of so many instances recently. There's a lesson to be learned there, but that's a bigger topic for another day.

Banksy hits New Orleans

Banksy paints a new series of his politically-themed graffiti in New Orleans.

Kakutani on DFW

Michiko Kakutani remembers David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives.

George Saunders on Sarah Palin

George Saunders drills, baby, drills in the humor column of this week's New Yorker. It will feel like a tragedy to half the country if McCain/Palin win the election, but on the bright (semi-dim?) side it will arm our humorists with four more years of material.

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.

OK Mooray. Get corecting agin!

Karl Rove says McCain ads have gone "too far"

Straight Talk Express has to stray far off the track for even Rove to call out McCain. Rove also says some of Obama ads have done the same, but I challenge any rational person to prove that case.

What's sad is that McCain once was one of the more appealing politicians for his willingness to offer "straight talk" and buck his party. But he's now made the deal with the devil that is the conservative core in his desperation for the Presidency.

It's doubly sad to witness this given David Foster Wallace's suicide. Wallace's writings on McCain during the 2000 elections were collected into a short book: McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.

Wallace saw some hope in McCain then. I have no doubt he would have been, or perhaps already was, deeply disappointed that McCain betrayed the Maverick.

Big Z!

The first no-hitter thrown by a Cub in my lifetime!

As a group, we Cubs fans are Catholic in our fatalism, and recent arm discomfort to Zambrano and Harden had us wondering if a strong regular season was just prelude to entering the playoffs short-handed. Some see the glass half-empty; Cubs fans see cracks in the glass itself.

For those of you who bleed Cubbie blue, MLB.com has video of every out (just the last pitches, so it only takes 4:32).

David Foster Wallace dead of suicide

David Foster Wallace was found dead in his home on Friday after an apparent suicide.

Very tragic. I loved his work, especially his essays.

Filter madness

What happens if you take a normal picture and then apply every Photoshop filter to it, one after another?

Geek references in Oscar Wao

The Stranger

We were able to get one of Orson Welles lesser known movies for Hulu. But it's still Welles. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Palin on the Bush Doctrine

Well, I'm mostly preaching to the converted here, but the thought that Palin could be one McCain health issue away from being our President is terrifying.

In a perverse way, I wish it had been Chris Matthews instead of Charles Gibson in the interviewer chair. It's probably better that it wasn't, though, as Matthews would have eviscerated her on her ignorance of the Bush Doctrine, and that might have come off looking mean-spirited and prompted accusations of sexism from the McCain camp.

There's a reason they've been sheltering her from the press. Drill, media, drill.

I can't help but think that Hillary Clinton could cement her status as a Democratic hero if she'd step out of the alley and face down Palin. Clinton would run circles around Palin. Like Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday stepping out of the shade to take out Johnny Ringo, Hillary would go down in history as a feminist hero by taking down the woman who's inherited the title of most divisive woman in politics.

UPDATE: Rebecca Traister writes in Salon of the same desire for Hillary to rescue feminism. Traister concludes the article:

Which leads us to my greatest nightmare: that because my own party has not cared enough, or was too scared, to lay its rightful claim to the language of women's rights, that Sarah Palin will reach historic heights of power, under the most egregious of auspices, by plying feminine wiles, and conforming to every outdated notion of what it means to be a woman. That she will hit her marks by clambering over the backs, the bodies, the rights of the women on whose behalf she claims to be working, and that she will do it all under the banner of feminism. How can anybody sleep?

The Amazon users' verdict on Spore: DRM bad

The restrictive DRM of Spore is one of the primary reasons it currently receives an average rating of 1 star at Amazon. That's across 2,123 reviews at last count, spurred on in part by the organizing power of the web, where DRM is a dirtier word than most four-letter words.

What is Spore's DRM? From what I've read, you have to connect to the web to activate the game the first time you install it, and you can only install the game on three computers before you have to call EA for permission to install it again. I have an old copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter that I bought years ago that had a similar DRM model, and I have to concede it's been a real hassle over the years. You have to be very careful to retire a computer from your installation count when you get a new computer or install a new operating system or have a hard drive fail on you, and you're stuck keeping that box of software around forever.

I hate DRM, it never thwarts the people it's focused on. Take iTunes. I buy a song on iTunes on one computer, and getting it to another computer is a hassle. If I copy the song to my iPod or iPhone, I can't pull it back down to my other laptop, even if both are computers I register among the 5 that I authorize to play those songs. I can never remember which computer my iPhone is synced to, but keeping my music in sync between all my Macs is way too difficult. This is probably due in great part to pressure from the music labels, but regardless of whose fault it is, the honest consumer suffers.

On gaming platforms, DRM is a tough pill to swallow when the competition from consoles is so stiff.

Meanwhile, Metacritic gives Spore an average review of 86 out of 100. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle as the web tends to attract polarized opinions. I haven't played Spore, but I doubt it's a 1-star game if you consider just gameplay. But as a form of mass protest, this is an effective one. If you're Electronic Arts, you sure as hell better listen and respond. Brands are meaning, and those meanings are written by more than just Will Wright and the employees at EA. And if you're on the fence about buying this game, you're going to hesitate when you see the following user review distribution.

Maybe the Democrats need to spread rumors that McCain and Palin come with DRM.

Chairlift gets uplift

[via Buzzfeed] Every time a new iPod is introduced, Apple features it in a commercial set with music from some obscure indie band that rides the publicity to newfound fame.

The lucky winner this time around? Chairlift.

View the new iPod nano ad.

Most anticipated fall/winter movie

The movie I'm most looking forward to seeing the rest of this year? The new James Bond film. It introduces Mathieu Amalric, he of the fascinating French face, as the villain.

The latest trailer is out, and it's hot. Is it any coincidence that the return of Bond to a heavy-hitting movie icon coincided with his return to the Aston Martin as his car of choice? It heralded the return of a more severe Bond, of extreme and discerning taste, and it served as a bridge to the Bond of old, breaking ties with the intermediate BMW Bond years (let's just sweep those under the rug).

The theme song, "Another Way to Die," will be a duet between Jack White and Alicia Keys.

Red working on a DSLR competitor

After taking on the motion picture camera industry, Red is now coming after Nikon and Canon with a DSLR replacement targeted for late 2009. They're calling it a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera), which brings to mind the recently announced Nikon D90.

What is the Red DSMC? No one knows yet. Jim Jannard says its the product in their pipeline that he's most excited about.

Intriguing.

Helvetica, the brand logo typeface

This poster makes an elegant case for Helvetica as the most popular corporate brand typeface.

Title sequence of Thank You For Smoking

From Art of the Title, a Quicktime movie of the gorgeous typography of the title sequence of Thank You For Smoking.

New iPod Nano

If the new iPod Nano, supposedly to be unveiled on Sep 9, doesn't look like the pictures on this web page, this 3rd party iPod case manufacturer is going to have a lot of wasted inventory (another leaked photo via Engadget seems to echo the previous photos).

I use my iPod all the time, but it's harder to get excited for every next iPod release. The differences from one iPod Nano to the next aren't that significant anymore; they tend to center on greater storage for the same price. The major form factor benefits have been realized.

Not that there's still not huge revenues and value to be extracted from the iPod line. Google's search ranking algorithms haven't noticeably improved (to my eye) for many years, but they continue to rake in cash because no competitors have been able to leapfrog them.

YouTube's first 100,000,000 view video

It's the video for Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend."

Palin

Back from the Dylan concert, I watched two of the Republican National Convention speeches on tape delay on MSNBC. First was Rudy Giuliani's speech. Rudy has gone off the deep end, and after that speech, any lingering crumbs of goodwill from his 9/11 performance have been cleared away.

But the speech everyone is talking about is Palin's. As a vessel for rallying the conservative base, she was perfect. She was remarkably self-assured, and if disregard for irony is courage, then she was fearless in her assault on Obama. If the VP's job is to attack the opposing presidential candidate, Palin seems as eager and willing to take on Obama as Amy Winehouse was to beat up her husband. That crowd was fired up, and the Republican party seemed to get its mojo back.

Of all the politicians who've spoken at the conventions, her life story was best at conveying that she's just like one of us (whether it's true or not). George W. Bush seems like one of us because he comes off sounding like an underachieving frat president. Palin seems like the tough hockey mom she says she is. Democrats saw Dubya win the last election in part on his folksy charm, and Palin has an element of that. Her life story allows the Republicans to put some weight behind their elitist attacks against Obama because she serves as a foil to his best-selling book-writing, Harvard Law Review President past.

But the Republican party always gets behind its candidate, so the Democrats had to expect it, even if the candidate is McCain. How did her speech play to independents, and Hillary supporters, and Democrats in general?

I think it will rally Democrats just as much as it rallies the Republicans. The few Democratic friends I've spoken to are livid over her speech and its largely facile attacks, and two of them jumped online immediately to make big donations to the Obama campaign. I caught myself with fuming from time to time at what seemed to be a certain smugness on her part. Who does she think she is? If you look to Palin's speech as a roadmap for how the Republicans are going to approach the next two months, we should expect a clear return to the type of divisive attacks that Obama has wanted to avoid. Palin fired up her party, but she also lit a fire under the opposing team.

I was struck, in the Democratic Convention, by how many times speakers stopped to praise McCain. I heard no such concessions from Giuliani or Palin. They had no qualms about resorting to a sarcasm which left them looking particularly vicious and petty. In my mind, this helps the Democrats because it opens the door to attacking Palin more aggressively. If she is as tough and antagonistic as she seemed in this speech, the Democrats should be able to take off the kid gloves. Charges of sexism won't stick. Hell, she made Biden look like the one who should wear a cup to the first VP debate. This is an important opening that the Democrats need to seize. The Democrats need to go after Palin's vulnerable spots, and there are many, so that she can't remain this abstract, attractive attack dog.

Palin's attacks also crossed a line. They tried to paint Obama as a egotist who cares little for America. Whether you're for him or against him, I doubt many independents will buy that he's a preening narcissist. The bluntness and exaggerated nature of her attacks made her seem tough but simple-minded.

Criticizing Obama for being elitist while belittling his work as a community organizer is the type of obliviousness to irony that Republicans are very good at (honestly; their focus on message is just good politics). It plays great when preaching to the choir. But does Palin have the weight to make the charges stick?

I don't think she does. I kept thinking throughout her speech that I was impressed by her command of the crowd and terrified at the possibility that she might become our President. Her speech was so light on actual policy talk that I couldn't help but feel that she was a movie character, from the story of any average person thrust into the White House unexpectedly who impresses everyone with their folk wisdom. If there's a war breaking out between two foreign countries, she's not the one I want answering the 3am phone call. Maybe if there's a rabid moose on the loose, but not if she needs to jump in and mediate between, say, Georgia and Russia.

Did her speech play well to Hillary's sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits? I'll be curious to see the polls. I suspect just as many professional women are appalled by Palin as thrilled. Finally, despite her youth, in attacking Obama with arguments that seem so partisan, she only offers more of what has turned so many young people off of politics.

I could be entirely wrong. I'm no political expert. But I can't help but be drawn in. This Presidential election is the best new drama on TV. Can it win an Emmy?

Pot, Kettle, Black

Experience? Leave the family alone? Sexism? Whose playbook is that?

Bob Dylan

I saw Bob Dylan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium tonight. I've never heard Dylan live before. He's more mythical to me than real, seen mostly in black and white photos, documentaries, and movies, played by a variety of actors.

I'm a lifelong developing Dylan fan. My first real exposure to Dylan came in high school as one of my friends was a huge Dylan fan and would play Dylan in the tape deck of his car all the time. Recently I found a good deal on Amazon for a used copy of the Bob Dylan SACD box set, and I've been working my way through it, one disc at a time. His sound transports me back in time and across America like a musical road trip in a convertible with its top down, with the wind tousling my hair.

I will remember tonight, but not for the venue. The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium is fugly, and the acoustics of the cement-floored space are awful and muddy. The speakers were balanced to lean to the left, and it sounded like Dylan was singing from a space floating about 20 feet over the left third of the stage when he was in fact standing about two thirds of the way to the right of the stage most of the evening.

It's a credit to Dylan's songwriting that despite the terrible acoustics (which made his already incomprehensible lyrics sound like the language used in Apocalypto), my toes were tapping the whole time. Given the state of my Achilles, that's no small feat. I nearly fell over from exhaustion a few times--for some reason, tearing your Achilles reduces your endurance for standing--but managed to stay upright to the bitter end, through the second song of his encore.

As a fan of speech, I admire Dylan for his sui generis command of the rhythms of English language. He really is the poet laureate of American music.

NOTE: You can download "Dreamin' of You", a previously unreleased track from Tell Tale Signs, from BobDylan.com.

If You See Something

Bernie Hou, who used to do the online comic strip Alien Loves Predator, now has devoted himself full time to the online comic strip If You See Something.

The latest entry is a beaut. It's titled Google Releases New Chrome Browser.

It's that mother of three in Detroit

One political speech tactic I've heard a lot recently which doesn't work for me is the reference to some person the politician met on the campaign trail. Here's an example from Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic Convention:

I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn’t have any health insurance, and she discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head, painted with my name on it, and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children.

I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps T-shirt who waited months for medical care. And he said to me, “Take care of my buddies. A lot of them are still over there. And then will you please take care of me?”

And I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage, that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn’t know what his family was going to do.

Hillary is not the only one. All the politicians have been going there. Here, from Obama's DNC speech:

...more work to do, for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now they're having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay 7 bucks an hour; more to do for the father I met who was losing his job and chocking back the tears wondering how he would pay $4,500 a months for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on; more to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her who have the grades, have the drive, have the will, but doesn't have the money to go to college.

If it's an attempt to connect with people in similar situations, perhaps my eye-rolling is simply because I can't relate to any of the anecdotes. Or maybe it's an attempt to show your bond with and empathy for the average American.

But something about the lack of specificity strikes me as disingenuous. I'd feel much closer to political candidates, frankly, if they wrote a blog, or had a Flickr account showing photos of them meeting with Americans on the campaign trail.

UPDATE: George Packer, writing about the Democratic Convention, observes:

I’ve seen very little mention in the press of the half-dozen citizens who told their stories immediately before Obama was introduced, but from where I sat (in the end-zone seats, to the right as you faced the stage), Barney Smith and Pam from North Carolina and the others were more effective than any high-profile speaker all week in arguing that Obama is on the ordinary American’s side. Before eighty thousand people in a packed football stadium, and thirty-eight million more on TV (beating the Academy Awards, the Olympics opening ceremonies, and even the final night of “American Idol”), the ordinariness of their voices and the unremarkable details of their lives rose to a level of high dignity.

So perhaps the Democrats solved this, not by speeches, but by having actual Americans speak at the convention. I didn't see these videos on the Democratic Convention site, but they should be.

UPDATE 2: The videos are there, though it took some digging to find. The title of the video is American Voices Program.

Convention vs. Convention

If we're to judge the quality of the two conventions by the quality of their streaming video, then hands down it's a victory for the Democrats. The Democratic Convention site had, and still has, high-def video using Move and Silverlight. The Republican Convention site has fuzzy YouTube videos.

Maybe the poor video resolution will be flattering to McCain's complexion. There is some element of this disparity in online experience that is consistent with the Luddite image of the Republican Party, especially McCain, relative to the Democratic Party.

W, the movie...er, film

I made the mistake of visiting the site for WTheMovie.com, which is a surreal satire on the presidency of George W. Bush, instead of WTheFilm.com, official site of the upcoming Oliver Stone satire about the presidency of George W. Bush.

You may mistake the movies for each other via the URL's, but once you've watched the trailers you're not likely to confuse the two.