Fiat Lux

A week or so ago, I uploaded an "unusual" shot of Bear and Gimi on the desk. Lately they've been hanging out there more and more. Typical cats -- they change their habits just to prove you wrong!

Is it the gently wafting odor of hypocrisy?

“I want my finances in order, my kids trained, and my wife to love life. I want good friends who are a delight and who provide protection for my family and me should life become difficult someday . . . I don't want surprises, scandals, or secrets . . .

-- Rev. Ted Haggard, Senior Pastor of New Life Church, as reported in Harpers Magazine.

The president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals, who has had regular talks with the White House and vocally opposes gay marriage, resigned on Thursday after being accused of having a sexual relationship with a male escort.

Ted Haggard, who denied the accusation, also temporarily stepped down as senior pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the church said in a statement.

-- Yahoo! News.

Echinde isn't wrong when she suggests that it might not be the right thing to be calling out this man's private imperfections. We're none of us free from flaws, myself least of all.

But I do think that when you have someone who is such a significant part of the moralizing Christianist forces that want to reshape the world in their image, and that person that turns out to be secretly fond of those 'sins' (their words, not mine) he castigates in public, he deserves to be called on it.

UPDATE 11/6: Tristero weighs in:

To defend hypocrisy of the sort that Ted Haggard practiced, where he went out of his way to preach that perfectly normal behavior is a deep sin while repeatedly, and in secret, enjoying the behavior himself, is to advocate precisely the kind of moral relativism the right accuses liberals of practicing (but we don't). There is nothing shameful about same-sex attraction and there is nothing morally wrong with two consenting adults doing whatever intimate acts they both enjoy. Haggard's hypocrisy was not that he hid an immoral act. It is that he enjoyed his perfectly normal desires while enthusiastically preaching the lie that they are abnormal

OK, I now know what trinket I want as a graduation present.

Apple is now selling their iPod Nano RED Special Edition in an 8 GB version.

Mmmm. Shiny red nano-y goodness.

We got a phone call a couple of hours ago from a real live person, reminding us to go vote tomorrow and making sure we knew where to go. I forgot to ask if the caller was from MoveOn or not, though. My bad.

And yes, we're all set for tomorrow. We're walking distance from the polling place, which is a plus. Coming from NYC, driving to go vote feels a little unnatural to me. (So does driving to synagogue, but that's a different issue).

San Mateo uses electronic voting machines, apparently. This will be my first experience with them, and I can't say I'm happy about it. I don't think this deep-Blue county is likely to be subject to Republican shenanigans, but I may ask for a paper ballot anyway.

One of the many tasks I dealt with this weekend was going over the various state and county propositions on the ballot. When we first moved to California, I would approach each one with an open mind and weigh them carefully to decide whether each was an idea worth my approval or not, but in the ensuing years, I've come to believe that the whole proposition system is deeply flawed. These days, I approach all ballot propositions from a default position of "No" unless I think that there's a damn good reason to vote otherwise.

Four propositions made the cut this year -- 1E, 86, 87, and 89 -- although in two cases (87 and 89) my support is pretty soft. I still might switch to "No" when in the voting booth. The rest of the ballot goes straight Democratic, although I'll be holding my nose when I get to Bustamante's name.

I do not know what the House and Senate will look like this time tomorrow. I'm reasonably confident we'll finally have Speaker Pelosi, but only barely. I do not think the Dems will take the Senate. We most definitely will not have the veto-proof majorities in both houses necessary to push through much of what we want to accomplish. But so long as we can at least take one chamber of the Congress, we'll be in a position to put the brakes on some of the worst impulses of this administration and start implementing some oversight onto past excesses.

That's a good start.

And 2008 is not all that far off anymore. I just hope that the Hillary juggernaut doesn't suck the life out of the process. We need more debate, more voices, and more options, not less.

Our local polling place was doing steady business but no long lines.

Interstingly, there was only one electronic machine per precinct, and most people were opting for paper ballots. I asked one of the poll workers why only one machine was available, and he said, "There were supposed to be five, but they had some problems, so we only got one."

Anyhow, our votes are cast. I hope the polling place doesn't run out of paper ballots!

MovableType's internal post count says that this will be entry #1000 into my blog. A rolling over of the counter, as it were.

How fitting. Because this is all I have to say to you tonight:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:
the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, the honorable Nancy Pelosi!

YEE EFFING HA!!!!!

WOOO HOOO!!!!!!

It's nice to actually win one for a change.

It's so very, very nice to actually feel good the day after Election Day! I didn't get a heck of a lot of work done today, but I'm smiling a lot. I wonder if I'll feel this happy in 2008?

Glenn Greenwald has a lengthy "day after" piece that is worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists -- well-intentioned though they may be -- need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one's beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn't be replicated).

Karl Rove isn't all-powerful; today, he is a rejected loser. Republicans don't possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can't magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don't have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their "San Francisco values" and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody).

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious -- a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games -- can all be overcome. They just were.

Indeed.

Now, onward and upward!

I'm off work today, the sun is shining, and it's been a good week. Here's the top 10 that iTunes had for me this Friday:

1) By My Side - Godspell
2) I'll Forget You - The Scarlet Pimpernel (Concept Album)
3) Banu Hoshch Legaresh - Subliminal
4) Heartbeat City - The Cars
5) You've Got A Friend - James Taylor
6) The Heart Brings You Back - Blues Traveler
7) Everything Is Everything - Phoenix
8) When I Grow Too Old To Dream - Mandy Patinkin
9) No One is to Blame - Howard Jones
10) Peaceful Easy Feeling - The Eagles

Rock on!

The 2008 campaign season, I mean.

Vilsack's in.
Feingold's out.

I'm sad about Feingold. I'm not sure he could have won, but I really wanted to see him try.

Who's next?

Actually, it wasnt all that strange., but the fact that I can actually remember any of it several hours after I woke is a little unusual.

The dream:

I was sitting in a Starbucks in a new town. Perhaps I was having a conversation with someone, or perhaps I had just finished the conversation. And then, I turned around and asked the barista behind the counter for a job application.

It doesn't take a professional headshrinker to guess that I'm processing some anxiety about my upcoming graduation. I started the path to my MBA in the expectation that it would help me get back onto the career track I was jerked off of back in 2002. But expectations are one thing. Finally, the time is coming where I find out whether that was a good decision or not, and I'm scared.

Small wonder I'm dreaming about running back to the security of Starbucks, even if in the light of day, it's obvious that doing so would be a massive waste of my tuition. You don't need an MBA to pull shots and wash out the steamed milk pitchers.

Seen in Flickr today. Apparently it's a gag, not for real.

On the one hand, this type of commercial would be a natural extension to the existing "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" campaign Apple has been running.

On the other hand, would doing so give the Zune too much legitimacy? Probably.

It is really easy, especially here in urban, sophisticated California, to make fun of rural Texas. So when I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal today, I have to say, I was really impressed. I have a student subscription, so I'm not sure if the article is firewalled or not. I'll excerpt as much as I can.

At the sound of a tone blown over a large conch shell, 17-year-old senior defensive tackle Alex Kautai threw off his helmet, freeing a mane of curly black hair. He shouted several sentences in a foreign tongue and waved his arms as 93 visibly agitated teammates gathered behind him on the sidelines. Alex Kautai of the Trinity Trojans does the haka dance in Bedford, Texas.

On cue, they dropped into a wide, crouching stance and began the ritual known as the haka. "Ka Mate! Ka Mate! Ka Ora!" (We're going to die! We're going to die! We're going to live!), they chanted in unison as the fans went wild. For the next 60 seconds, the players acted out an ancient battle in which a big hairy man saves the life of a Maori chieftain.

With each phrase, the players slapped their thighs, arms or chests. They stomped back and forth, symbolically thrusting and jabbing at the enemy. At the end of the dance, Mr. Kautai jumped in the air and landed on one foot, his right fist in the air and his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he sneered fiercely.

[snip]

Most of the 24 players of Tongan descent on the Trinity football team weigh between 250 and 308 pounds and stand at least 6 feet tall. Besides that, they are quick, so the combination makes Trinity an intimidating force on any high-school field. The Tongan players helped transform Trinity into a Texas football powerhouse.

Last year, Trinity won the Class 5A Division 1 state football championship. It went undefeated in this year's regular season and administered an old-fashioned 40-14 whupping to the Permian Panthers. Trinity begins the first round of state playoffs Friday night against nearby Arlington Martin High School.

"We do the haka to ignite the breath of competition. It means that I've got your back and you've got mine," said Mr. Kautai, who stopped shaving and let his hair grow long this season to make himself look even more intimidating than he already does at 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds. He likes to splash water on his face and hair before the haka so it will fly off in a mist as he performs the movements.

[snip]

The team first performed the haka for fans at the beginning of the 2005 season. Concerned about seeming to taunt opponents unfairly, the coach restricted the haka performance to the sidelines at the end of the field where most Trinity students sit.

It was an instant hit. Today, the stands closest to where the team performs the chant are full an hour before kickoff. An eerie silence falls over the stadium as soon as the tone is sounded on the conch shell as fans strain to hear the haka leader urging on the team.

Fans wave haka signs and wear black "Got Haka?" T-shirts. Rather than race to the parking lot to beat the crowd at the end of the game, hundreds of people routinely wait 20 minutes or more for the team to do the haka one more time.

The team has performed the haka at elementary-school assemblies in order to fire up the children before state-mandated tests. It has performed for the City Council. Before last year's championship game, one fifth-grade class learned the haka and performed it to cheer on their newfound heroes.

Very cool. And this is Bush country, deep-red, rural Texas, mind you. Perhaps there's hope.

Yesterday, while I was up on campus at an all-day class thing (ugh), Scott met with our friend Katie to plan out the menu for Thanksgiving. I won't be doing much for the festivities other than acting as Scott's prep cook, but I will be making the stuffing as well as an appetizer.

I originally found this recipe on, of all places, the now-defunct webvan.com site back in the fall of 2000, when Scott and I were getting ready to cook our first big Thanksgiving dinner. I've made it pretty much every year since then. It's tasty and not at all difficult; the biggest challenge is the prep time, which can take a while what with all the chopping and bread drying.

Anyway, here it is. I'd be happy to e-mail a file with the recipe on request:

Cornbread and Sage Dressing

Ingredients:

1 9” x 9” cornbread
1 16-ounce loaf sourdough bread
2 cups diced bacon
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced carrot
2 tablespoons fresh sage chiffonade
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 cup half-and-half
1 cup chicken stock

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375° F. Cut the cornbread and the sourdough bread into ½ inch cubes. Spread onto baking trays and bake for 15 minutes or until the bread has dried out. Set aside in a large mixing bowl.

Cook the bacon in a large frying pan over medium heat until it begins to crisp. Add the onions and carrots. Cook until the onions soften and start to turn translucent (about 5 minutes). Add the sage, salt and pepper. Turn heat to low and cook an additional 10 minutes.

Add the contents of the pan to the mixing bowl and gently mix with the bread cubes. Add the stock and the half-and-half, continue mixing until the dressing is moist and well blended. I usually use my hands for this but a large wooden spoon is good too.

Put the mixture into a 13” x 9” x 2” greased baking pan. Cover with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove cover and bake an additional 15 minutes or until the top is crispy.

Substitutions:

If you want to add more turkey flavor, use turkey stock instead of chicken and/or spoon some turkey pan drippings onto the dressing.

Use 1 teaspoon dried sage instead of fresh sage if you can’t get fresh.

If you can’t get sourdough bread, then nice peasant bread would work too.

Notes:

This is dressing, not stuffing, and should not be cooked inside the bird.

I use a cornbread mix to make the cornbread, but if you want to save time, buy one from a store.

Prepping the bread can be done the day before and the bread kept, loosely covered, overnight. Use day-old bread for faster drying.

I usually use beef bacon instead of pork due to having been raised in a loosely kosher home, although given that there’s also half-and-half in the mix, this recipe is in no way kosher. If you used all kosher ingredients and replaced the half-and-half with more stock, it could be, though.

Sorry I've gone dark. Scott had a health issue come up and I've been focused on dealing with it more than anything else right now.

He's going to need surgery, which will probably take place in December, but assuming all goes well with that he should recover completely.

So now I have something else to be thankful for tomorrow.

We cooked up a storm. Well, Scott did most of the cooking and I helped.

We ate a lot.

And now, I think I'm going to bed.

I don't hit the malls on the day after Thanksgiving. After having put in a few years in retail during the hoilday season, any small amount of joy I might have taken in the hype, the sales, and the "official" start of the holiday season got ground out of me.

Plus, it's really getting crazy out there in shopping-land. Last night, as we drove home from dinner, I saw a line of people already waiting outside the CompUSA in San Mateo. There's something seriously wrong with you if you feel the need to stand outside in the cold all Thanksgiving night just so that you can buy some discounted electronics at a sale the next morning. What's next, taking the whole family to stand on line all Thanksgiving day and eating your turkey in a pup tent in the parking lot, just so you can be first in line?

Pure insanity, as far as I am concerned.

However, I'm not a hardcore Buy Nothing Day person, either. I did venture out to Trader Joe's to buy a gallon of milk and some crackers late this afternoon.

Spending all day on his feet Thursday was really pushing it for Scott, so we're been staying very close to home since then. I've been playing with the new coffeemaker I bought off of woot.com, am finally caught up on all my back episodes of Studio 60, and Scott's been wresting with an installation of Vista on his computer.

I've urged him to put up a post here detailing some of the challenges he ran into and how he solved them, so that once Google gets it, other people will be able to find some solutions. Perhaps he will.

We need to venture out at some point for a few supplies, and we might even get to a movie later on. Thrilling, I know. I need to start posting something more interesting here.

Bear at the window. This time I cropped the ugly printer stand out.

Well, file this one under "maybe I shouldn't be writing about this because I am white," but I wanted to say something about Reverend Jesse Jackson's new campaign to pressure the entire entertainment industry to never use "the N word" again.

I understand the impulse, but I think it's a stupid move. Removing a word from the common vocabulary does nothing to eradicate racism. A large part of the power of words is their context. If anything, censorship adds power to the word in question, and does nothing to keep people from expressing their bigotry.

The word "boy", for example, is generally neutral and harmless. But when spoken in a certain tone of voice and addressed to an adult black man, it becomes a racist and derogatory word. And on the other hand, Chris Rock made that word which I cannot say into high comedy.

Or to take an example that's a little closer to my own experience, the word "jew". Spat out of the mouth of a skinhead in a voice twisted by anger, it sounds and means something completely different than it does if said by someone whose heart is not full of hate. And removing the word won't make him hate me any less.

All of which is not to say that I think it's a good word or that it should be used more, of course. This is all about context, and it seems pretty obvious that the context in which that word is acceptable is extremely limited and narrow, as it should be.

Like I said, it is possible that I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the word really is so bad that nobody of any color should ever say it again anywhere or in any context. But even so, for Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson of all people to be telling others what they should and should not say seems a little hypocritical.

This is amazing:

Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks.

A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.

[snip]

The new analysis reveals that the device's front dials had pointers for the sun and Moon—called the "golden little sphere" and "little sphere," respectively—and markings which coincided with the zodiac and solar calendars. The back dials, meanwhile, appear to have been used for predicting solar and lunar eclipses.

The researchers also show that the device could mechanically replicate the irregular motions of the Moon, caused by its elliptical orbit around the Earth, using a clever design involving two superimposed gear-wheels, one slightly off-center, that are connected by a pin-and-slot device.

[snip]

By winding a knob on its side, the positions of the sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus could be determined for any chosen date. Newly revealed inscriptions also appear to confirm previous speculations that the device could also calculate the positions of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—the other planets known at the time.

Really, I have nothing to add. I'm blown away that the Greeks could do all that mechanically.

People can do some really amazing things.