but it is "the great American shout-out." "On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.
Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, “fuggedaboudit!”
This will be a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. We will stop yelling before the president starts speaking. Our goal is not to drown him out, but to communicate. (And vent.)"

Sir Jimmy of Doohan.

...has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and deserves it. See Blogging.la

See also Wil Wheaton's two posts from yesterday: 1 and 2. He was at the dinner (though barely, by the sound of it...)

How long until this "downhome hokey" act wears thin & we all grow tired of the pretend illiteracy from the President? Shouldn't we expect the president to be very precisely spoken? Very clear? Very sophisticated with language?

Political Wire: In an interview with Time magazine, President Bush declared the war in Iraq a "catastrophic success."Sen. John Edwards responds in the Washington Post: "I, like most Americans, have no idea what that means."

Update 9/4/04: As you'll see from the comments I have been persuaded to dig a little deeper here. Turns out this isn't an example of "all hat & no cattle." I stand corrected. (I'm actually sitting...) I still agree w/ Edwards that most Americans have no idea what this means, but hey, here it is:

• Guardian 3/20/03: "Catastrophic success: Amid their excitement at taking on a depleted and demoralised Iraqi army, US commanders are talking about sweeping triumphantly into Baghdad in a "catastrophic success". By catastrophe, they do not mean a disaster, because they are dismissing the idea of thousands of civilian casualties. Instead they are using a negative adjective - catastrophic - to emphasise the positive, in the way that anyone under 21 describes something that is "cool" as "wicked" "
• New York Daily News 7/31/04: "The U.S. General who routed Saddam Hussein's army in three weeks warned before the invasion that a quick victory could lead to a "catastrophic success" because they were not prepared for postwar anarchy in Iraq."

Please also see the comments.

that you see at the lower right of this and other posts is a new blogger feature whereby you can e-mail a link to a post to your friends, so that they will want to come here & read the post. Please feel free to do so. Traffic is good.

I have also rejigged the signature / footer line on my posts in order to look more moveable type & try to clean them up a bit.

Wall Street Journal's illustrated list of RNC Bloggers, via Instapundit: "NEW YORK -- Republican Web loggers are getting ready for their shot at posting convention news and commentary, and they say they've learned from their left-leaning counterparts' experience five weeks earlier.

At Madison Square Garden, the official blogger group will number about 15, a tiny fraction of the estimated 15,000 journalists expected, and less than half the size of the accredited Boston blogger set. "That's just the number we landed on," said convention spokeswoman Alyssa McClenning. She wouldn't discuss how convention planners chose the group, but said the bloggers "reflected a mix of ideologies." Adding to the blend are some delegates and traditional journalists who also plan to blog from the convention."

Richard Posner guest blogging at Lawrence Lessig: "Even in the current, primitive stage of online video world technology, literally millions of people are participating, many obsessively; the use of real money to purchase game money with which to buy equipment, clothing, and other assets in the video world is already a big business. A few years hence, people will be interacting in the video world by brainwaves alone, and in that “no hands” context they may forget who and where they are. The social consequences could be immense, and the political as well if government obtains control of the chips implanted in people’s brains to enable them to play and of the signals communicated to those chips. "

Read the whole thing for an in-depth look at how close we are, and some suggestive thoughts about the social impact of more detailed virtual worlds.

The same day at the Olympics, from NBC and the BBC. This would be an interesting exercise in comparative coverage, I think....

MSNBC: "WASHINGTON - An election lawyer for President Bush who also has been advising a veterans group running TV ads against Democrat John Kerry resigned Wednesday from Bush’s campaign.
“I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election,” Benjamin Ginsberg wrote in a resignation letter to Bush released by the campaign.
“I feel I cannot let that continue, so I have decided to resign as national counsel to your campaign to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn’t distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing.”
Ginsberg’s acknowledgment Tuesday evening that he was providing legal advice to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth marked the second time in days that an individual associated with the Bush-Cheney campaign had been connected to the group, which Kerry accuses of being a front for the Republican incumbent’s re-election effort."

I think the rest of this story provides ample evidence that the connection is more than a Kerry accusation, at this point.

ALA.org: "Banned Books Week emphasizes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one's opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them." That means you!! Check out the 100 most challenged titles of the last decade.

Wil Wheaton also makes a solid observation about retail and marketing. I know this world well from the inside, and would advise you to follow his lead. As Nancy put it... "Just say No!!"

"She looked back at me, blankly, and said, "Can I have your ZIP code, please?"
"No," I said. (You see, it starts with the phone number at Radio Shack, then it's the ZIP code everywhere else, and before you know it, we're giving them DNA slides and submitting to retina scans. We've got to draw the line somewhere, people.)
"Whatever," she said, and typed in the local ZIP code. We completed our transaction, and I walked out of the store."

has brought me the following visitors in the past 24 hrs... I presume from the "next blog" button, which is, I think, a "next most recently published blog" button. Behold:

Lories lil blog! [1]
haley jade [1]
ऊपासना की कलम से [1]
http://qiqi_87.blogspot.com/ [1]
http://freakdeakchillwill.blogspot.com/ [1]

I'm grateful for the increased traffic. ;-) Maybe I should click a little & see where I end up.

3pm: So I clicked through 1/2 a dozen "next blogs", and now I'm convinced I'm the only blogger over 14 in the world..... and that everyone else has tag boards. ;-) I'm also struck by how many of the "next blogs" I've hit were started in the last week. Go Bloggers!!

er,... Not Really. The govt. seems to have given up any effort to even appear responsible.

Washington Times: "Washington, DC, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- The Bush administration has proposed lifting the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.
The National Park Service Thursday proposed letting up to 720 snowmobiles run in Yellowstone per day and 140 a day into Grand Teton for the next three years until final numbers can be established.
The move comes amid separate ongoing court challenges to the ban, one that upheld it and another allowing 950 snowmobiles a day to operate in Yellowstone.
The Bush proposal represents a compromise among the five separate plans examined by the agency to deal with the issue, which ranged from keeping the ban in place to allowing nearly 1,000 vehicles a day into Yellowstone"

Kurt Vonnegut via bookslut: "I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. "

Lileks on the Blogosphere, & the irrelevance of People Magazine, & who cares about Paris' dog or the odd-looking man that Britney's supposedly marrying: "No magazine really reflects the world as I see it. They either magnify an interesting portion beyond its importance, or float off into irrelevance. Which is why I prefer the internet. Every day, a thousand pages. We make it. It’s our magazine. It’s the true pop culture, and the only question is how long it will take before the democratization of information makes the old celebrity paradigm irrelevant."

So I have added a tag board to this blog, which has also added a pop-up ad. I suspect that my dislike of the one will eventually overcome my interest in the other, but we'll see.

Update: 8/21. So that didn't last. Pop-ups irritate me & the more I thought about it the more I thought that a tag-board is really a sort of high-school "Britney kissed Kevin" kind of a thing.

I'm becoming a blog-snob.

The Globe & Mail: "When baseball and softball were first introduced to the Summer Games, the sports were there clearly on the International Olympic Committee's terms. There was no music, there were no hot dogs, no one sang Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh-inning stretch. This was the non-commercial church of sport, free of the vulgarisms that had crept into the North American professional games.
It seemed so . . . quiet. Not just quiet compared with the here and now, when paying customers are assaulted with audio and video and fun, fun, fun whether or not the game is taking place, but quiet even compared with the sedate, reflective days long gone, since those included occasional organ music, or marching bands at halftime.
The folks who run the Olympics, secure in the strength of their brand, aren't exactly prone to making radical changes, to following fashions or trends. But at these Games, there is more evidence than ever that the barbarian hordes have breached the barricades and are pouring in."

From SI.com:

"You have to respect a young kid who bypasses the 200 backstroke, where he
could potentially win the gold and was a lock for the silver, in order to swim
an event where the two best in the world are swimming. In that respect, Michael
risked not getting a medal but did it because he wanted to race the best. That's
something, as a former competitor, I love to see. Even if Michael did not have
another event, this has been an extremely successful Olympics....
At every level in the sport, no matter if you are five years old, or if you
have swum for 20 years, you are judged on your best time. So if you do that,
look at Michael in his events. The 400 IM? Best time. The 200 Free? Best time.
Even his relay splits show he clearly is in form. There's nothing more than you
can ask for that. I can tell you from experience coming to the Olympics, whether
you are swimming one event or eight different events, it's hard to swim your
best time here. The cliche you always hear at the Olympics is, "Time doesn't
matter; it's only the color of the medal." I actually never really believed
that. In the end, you want to perform. And I think that's how Michael has looked
at it."

Update 8/25: Now there's a comment on this post that lauds the writing and the prose, and the detailed understanding of competitive swimming. I am compelled, therefore, to link once again to the source and to declare that I am a linker not a thinker, and that I did not write the passage that I quote here. In fact, I think I will abbreviate my quote and direct readers to the source....

Of course there are a ton of olympic blogs, and almost as many directories. For the local inside scoop, check out miss-information. There's a regularly updated list of olympic blogs, including some goodies.

As for the Olympics themselves? Too big? Too expensive? Too irrelevant? Too chemically adjusted? There seem to be a great many marginal sports featured, (although I guess a sport that I would consider marginal has some devoted fans somewhere.) The whole thing just seems bloated to me.

in transition? From Josh Marshall: "If Bush can win reelection despite the failure of his two most consequential -- and truly radical -- decisions, he will truly be a political miracle man. But as his own nominating convention approaches, the odds are against him."

Those are the words of Washington Post columnist David Broder in a column that appeared in Sunday's paper. And I reprint them because I think they mark a significant milestone simply because of Broder's role in defining conventional wisdom in Washington. Is the tide turning? More importantly, are people noticing?

I'm signed in to blogger in one window so that I can write these posts & in the window that is displaying my blog I have a blue blogger toolbar at the top instead of the usual interactive ads. Odd. I hope someone hasn't installed something subtle on this work PC. Nothing on the blogger news pages.

Update 8/18: This is the new blogger nav-bar. In trying to fix my template to sit closer to the bar now that the big fat ads are gone, I have made all my columns uneven. This I will try to fix asap.

Update 8/19: Blogger nav-bar is explained in all its glory here. Columns are fixed as much as I could fix them, although the center column w/ the posts wants to either start a line lower than the sides, or have no breaks between the posts. Naughty little break tag. I left it in.

J K Rowling recently said that "there are two questions she's never been asked, but which she should be asked. Not 'Why did Harry live' but 'Why didn't Voldemort die?' and 'Why didn't Dumbledore kill, or try to kill, Voldemort?'"

Hmmm. Secrets that the next book may reveal?

BBC News: "The British Embassy in Mongolia has stepped in to help a Devon man whose bicycle was stolen en route to China. Edward Genochio, 27, from Exeter, has cycled about 16,000 km (10,000 miles) since leaving home his five months ago.

But he is now stranded in the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator after a horseback thief stole his custom-built bicycle."

Ed's biking diary

Edward Genochio's site.

From the BBC: "Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott leapt to the aid of a man who fell from a boat into rapids in a north Wales river at the weekend. Mr Prescott was in Bala, Snowdonia, on Friday when he saw a kayaker fall in and cut his forehead.

Graham Cook, 35, from near Norwich, struggled to a quay where Mr Prescott and his bodyguard pulled him to safety."

Salt Lake Tribune, with an acknowledgement that the preoccupations of the media-fuelled U.S. populace are not necessarily those of the rest of the world. "ATHENS, Greece Ian Thorpe once described American swimmer Michael Phelps' quest for eight Olympic gold medals as "ridiculous."
Monday night, the Australian "Thorpedo" went out and proved his theory in the pool. Not that Phelps really did anything wrong, since there's no way to play defense in this sport.
Phelps bettered his own American record in the 200-meter freestyle, and all that gave him was a bronze medal which cost him exactly $1 million.
In one of the most anticipated events in swimming or any other sport in these Games, Thorpe topped defending champion Pieter van den Hoogenband of the Netherlands and Phelps to win the gold medal in an Olympic-record 1 minute, 44.71 seconds.
The American version of this story is not so much that Thorpe won but that Phelps lost, only because his hopes of breaking Mark Spitz's 1972 record of seven goal medals counting three relays became one of the major themes [driving TV audiences] going into Athens." Read the whole thing.

It looks like Rich Bond & Andrew Miller finished their Ph.D's. Awesome. Is that four years? I believe it may be!! Am slightly green with envy but mostly red with excitement!! All the best to both of you as you get your careers started. I'm sure John, Catherine, Kyle, Kate, Greg, Kate and Carl will not be far behind. Then I'll have to get on amazon and buy all their books!! ;-) Go, my friends, Go!!!! I will now resist the urge to quote Marlon Brando: "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am."

that may now apply to bloggers? Posted by Natalie Solent at Samizdata:

It will be found from the Foreign Prints, which from time to time, as Occafion offers, will be mention'd in this Paper, that the Author has taken Care to be duly furnith'd with all that comes from Abroad in any Language.And for an Affurance that he will not, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impofe any Additions of feign'd Circumftances to an Action, but give his Extracts fairly and Impartially ; at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence 'tis taken, that the Publick, feeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairnefs of the Relation. Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact ; suppofing other People to have Senfe enough to make Reflections for themfelves.

I post this whole not for plagiarism's sake but out of a sentimental attachment to the C18th newspapers in Colindale, as well as because of the obvious current relevance of the publisher's pledge. Given that I'm a "linker," this could actually be a very useful blogger's guide.

How long are we going to let Wal-Mart get fat while they strangle the competition? Just wondering. Detroit Free Press: "WAYNE, N.J. -- Toys "R" Us Inc., faced with fierce competition from discounters, particularly Wal-Mart Stores Inc., said Wednesday it is exploring the possible sale of its global toy business as it pursues separating its toy and baby product divisions.
The nation's second-biggest toy retailer behind Wal-Mart said it will explore the possible sale of its worldwide toy business -- both domestic and abroad, as well as its e-commerce division -- and the possible spin-off of Babies "R" Us. It also plans to substantially restructure its toy business to help dramatically reduce operating and capital expenses.
John Eyler, chairman and CEO, said the global toy and Babies "R" Us businesses are at "fundamentally different phases in their growth cycle," and separation would give the baby business more opportunity to continue its healthy growth."

when there's a microphone on: From www.iol.co.za/: "Washington - United States Congressman Porter Goss, President George Bush's nominee for CIA director, could be his own worst enemy when it comes to making the case that he deserves to lead the US intelligence agency."I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified," the Florida Republican told documentary-maker Michael Moore's production company during the filming of the anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11.A day after Bush picked Goss for the top US spy job, Moore Wednesday released an excerpt from a March 3 interview in which the 65-year-old former House of Representatives intelligence chief recounts his lack of qualifications for employment as a modern CIA staffer."

C19th Anachronism. Get rid of it. Count the popular vote properly and use that. Please!! The college should go the way of the conventions. byeeeee!!

From Rebecca's Pocket: "The prospect of a tied electoral college has been getting a lot of play this week. Since this would result in a state-by-state vote by the House of Representatives, it would result in another Bush administration. But everyone has left out an important detail--except for Electoral-Vote.com:

While the Democrats have a chance to recapture the majority of seats in the
House, they have no chance in the world to capture a majority of the state
delegations, especially since a number of the states in the West have one or
two (well-entrenched) Representatives. " Read the whole post at Rebecca's Pocket.