Funk Babblings

This seems to be all over the blogs in the last couple days, but it deserves to be everywhere....

Saturday night was the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, in which the White House press have dinner with government officials from the President on down. The press reports afterward seem to have focused on Bush's comedy routine with a Bush lookalike, but the real highlight was the final speaker, Stephen Colbert. In his I-support-the-president persona, mercilessly skewered most of his audience, including Bush (sitting ten feet away), the Washington press corps in front of him, and some other government attendees such as John McCain. The audience reaction was somewhat muted, both because much of the audience was targeted and because they were amazed he had the guts to say what he did directly to his targets. As I watched it I was certainly amazed that he was saying these things to this audience.

C-Span has RealVideo of the whole event; Bush's routine is about 53 minutes into it, and Colbert's follows at about an hour and six minutes into it.

There are a few different sources of just the Colbert speech. Here's one: part 1 / part 2
And a transcript at dKos.

Update: Bush wasn't exactly pleased with Colbert's performance.


Meanwhile.... "President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." This is the guy who hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years -- why risk the chance of Congress overriding a veto when you can sign the bill while declaring that you won't obey it? And he can have his government listen in on your phone calls without fear of a court stopping them. Because after all, it would certainly be easier if this were a dictatorship, just so long as he's the dictator.

OK, so not much happened on Sunday. So here's another bit of Saturday:

Around lunchtime I was driving through North Canton and came up behind a car in the left lane that was going a bit slower than the rest of the traffic. I moved right to pass (yes, passing on the right) and looked over at the car I was passing....

The driver had the sports page balanced on the steering wheel, and was reading it while occasionally trying to watch the road out of the corner of his eye. Or occasionally look at his toddler passenger.

Last Friday night I was number 30 in line to get the new Harry Potter book at Borders.... but because I was just standing in for a friend who'd had to leave, I didn't get my own copy until the next day at the grocery store. Over the past week nontacitare and I have been leapfrogging through the book, with her usually stopping exactly a chapter ahead of me -- without knowing where I'd stopped. (I often just remember the chapter or page number rather than marking the page.) However, she had started out with a list of spoilers, and first skimmed the book verifying them all, while I struggled all week to avoid any hint of spoilers.

I finally finished the book tonight. Some of my thoughts along the way....

( Here be spoilers.... )

I hope to write soon about some other books I've been reading lately.

I've always been a do-it-yourself kind of person. I figure, why pay somebody else to do something that I'm perfectly capable of doing myself? Part of it is that I like having control over what I'm doing, and being aware of the whole process. (I even make my own return-address labels, using my printer's own graphics language.) So I do my own taxes, rather than paying somebody to do it for me. Not only that, I don't even use tax software, partly for the same reasons I don't use an accountant, and partly because none of it runs on Linux.

I started my taxes a 8:30 last night. I took the results to the post office at 1am. Every year I realize sometime around the end of February that I (supposedly) have all the information I need to start on my taxes -- "maybe I could get it done early this year!" -- and every year I wait until almost the deadline to get it done. I've often been among those lining up at the post office in the last hours before midnight on April 15 (and one year I resorted to filing an extension), so this year I was actually early.

But getting to that point required descending through The Three Circles of Tax Hell.....

( Read more... )

Does anyone here buy music from Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS)?

I don't, because their music is encrypted in a form that's both incompatible with Linux and most non-Apple players, and too restrictive for my taste even within those parameters.

But I drink Pepsi (no jeers from Coke people please, anyway I drink a lot more Cherry Coke from the office vending machine), a third of Pepsi bottles are giving away an iTunes song, and I don't often bother to "cheat" to be sure not to get a winning bottle, so I am starting to accumulate some winning caps. So far I have three (worth a whole 99 cents apiece!), and I'd hate to see them go to waste. Anyone want the claim codes?

Of course, if I really wanted to bother, I might be able to use them myself.... The same guy I can thank for being able to play DVDs on Linux has released a program that runs on Linux and allows downloading unencrypted versions of songs purchased from iTMS. (Of course that server is getting hammered now. News.com.com.com.com has a story explaining the whole thing.)

I'd rather just give them away though. So leave a comment if you want a free song from iTunes.

Like me, you may have overlooked an important anniversary last weekend -- the 72nd anniversary of the Reichstag fire.

Thom Hartmann's column marking the occasion (much of which has been published before) should be required reading for all Americans.

The U.S. government now requires publishers to seek licenses in order to publish works by dissident and non-dissident writers from sanctioned countries.

"These are countries that pose serious threats to the United States, to our economy and security and our well-being around the globe," Millerwise said, adding that publishers can still bring dissident writers to American readers as long as they first apply for a license.

That's funny, I don't remember the first amendment saying anything about "if the government grants a license."

(Our local paper buried this story on page G-7, a few pages beyond the advice columnists and letters to Santa.)

I'm a bit numbed by the election and the political outcome (about which I may have more to say later), and have been focusing more on issues closer to home that I have a little more control over.

But if you're the sort of person that still wants to deal with the big issues right now (masochist!), here are a couple of articles....

• The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
  
• Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz

I finally finished the last of the bag of "low-carb" bagels I accidentally bought. What is this insanity? "Low-carb" bagels? I want carbohydrates in my bagels! This takes the whole low-carb nonsense to a new low. Of course they were the worst-tasting bagels I've ever had, which is what made me notice the "low-carb" tag on the bag in the first place. That'll teach me to look closer when I'm at the store. Normally that brand (Lender's) is the best that can be found in an Ohio supermarket, and it didn't look like there were any other variants (other than the usual flavors) when I chose these. (It's even harder to find good bagels in Canton than it is in Columbus.)

Someone please let me know when I can go to the store and find real food again. It's bad enough that finding veg-friendly food is difficult without making everything from scratch, and I have to sort past the vegetable soup made with beef broth and the beans&rice made with chicken; I can forgive that, for I accept my minority status as a vegetarian. But now I have to sort past all the reduced-carb "food" too?

Did I mention that the low-carb fad is nonsense?

Recently our local pagan group has had quite a bit of discord. In their efforts to bring harmony, some in the group equated that discord to chaos, and equated chaos with evil. The following is based on my response to those opinions. I'm interested in what others think of these things. ( Read more... )