Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Would you go without food today and exchange everything you were going to eat for a Radio Userland subscription?  Would you then risk your life every day to make entries?  This guy took Extreme Blogging to another level as a Buchenwald resident during World War II.  He traded a day’s rations to a camp employee for a notebook, in which, through words and pictures, he kept a chronicle of life in the camp in hopes that it’s finder would know the truth about it.

Perhaps I can remember this when I feel like it’s too much effort to slam the refrigerator door on my gluttonous muse’s head and put him to work for a few minutes each day.

I suspect he’s either lonely today, feeling left out of the great American Thanksgiving holiday, or just wants to pad his hit count, but Dave Pollard posted a refreshingly lucid explanation for how Trackback works and how to enable it.  He also volunteered to be a punching bag for practicing. 

Duck and cover, Dave!  Incoming! (And thanks!)

Washington State (and Oregon, actually) is more than a little bipolar in both its topography and its politics. Many people, including me before I drove out here from Ohio for the first time, think that the entire state is characterized by rainforest and rushing streams. However, by snagging most of the abundant rainfall as it wheels inland from the Pacific, the Cascade mountain range separates the moist and temperate western side from the sagebrush desert of the eastern side.
The state’s politics are divided along almost the same boundary. It’s as if the rain germinated liberal seeds as it blanketed the west, leaving conservative Republicanism to scratch a twisted living from the desiccated glacial till of the east. (I’m sort of kidding here - I have clients who are personally dear to me in eastern Washington, but they are also people who receive hand-written notes from Congressman George Nethercutt.) The divide is actually a result of the urbanization in the west vs. the agricultural/resource extraction/nuclear industry of the east. Richland High School’s mascot designation, for instance, is The Bombers, and a mushroom cloud is part of their team logo.
The defeat of House Speaker Tom Foley in the 1994 election marked the extinction of Democrats as a species in eastern Washington. Yet Democrats have winnowed narrow victories in statewide offices (two female Democrat senators, a Democrat governor, Gore in 2000) owing to the dominance of urban centers in Seattle, Olympia and Bellingham. The east resents this domination, especially in its environmental regulatory incarnations, but also in its cultural excesses.
Thus it is not surprising to hear of actions such as that of Jack Anderson, a high school principal in Kennewick, who snuffed his school’s performance of a play based on the movie The Breakfast Club due to its language and content. What’s surprising is that the guy is so out of touch with his school that he was unaware of the play’s threat to the morals of women and children while it was being rehearsed for three months, pressing the destruct button only after its initial performance. Here’s what Principal Anderson had to say on the school’s web site under the Thoughts and Advice heading:

Take advantage of every opportunity in high school. Be involved in sports, activities, clubs and learn as much as you can. You will never get these years back and you don’t want to look back on high school in 10 years and wish that you had done better, or had tried out for the school play or run track. High school will give you memories that will last a lifetime. Start building your memories now.

I’ll bet the kids in that play will remember Principal Anderson 10 years from now.

Are you as surprised as I am that Confederate soldiers fought naked?

Oysters Roasting Not my brother’s house

Well, Michigan gave Ohio State a good thrashing Saturday, so the fever has banked itself for another year. There will be a respectable bowl game, maybe even a top-tier BCS bowl (OSU is 10-2, after all), but, as in many past years, the bowl game will be an afterthought and an inadequate consolation to losing to Michigan.
I had flown to Charleston, SC to watch the game on TV with my brothers, their wives and a couple other of their friends. One of my brothers lives in Charleston, the other lives in Atlanta, so it seemed appealing to gather in the warmest venue among us. The weather cooperated - it was in the mid-70s and sunny, and I kind of gloated when I put on sunscreen for the day Saturday, instead of layers of scarlet and grey padding against the historically frigid Ann Arbor gamesite climate. When I was in OSU’s marching band, there were times when playing Michigan we slathered our valves with antifreeze (we were an all-brass band) and used plastic mouthpieces to avoid the “timmy licked the flagpole and now his tongue is stuck and has to be cut off” possibilities of the more musically appealing metal mouthpieces..
All in all, I’d say we took the defeat with an unaccustomed grace. I think winning the national championship last year imbued us with a kind of magnanimity and noblesse oblige this year, and we watched the season unfold with an heir’s detachment, the national championship like a trust fund that insulated us from the life-and-death gut-wrenching anxiety of watching games. There’ll be time enough to savage the coaching staff next year, when the anesthetic will have worn off.
The oyster roast was nicely stage-managed by my Charleston-resident brother. I prefer my oysters raw to cooked, relishing the saline juice and coppery tinge to the meat. However, I enjoyed the preparation this weekend. My brother built a fire in the middle of his field and eventually coaxed a hot bed of coals. He spread them out, put a grate over them and poured out a bushel of oysters in their shells. We took care to pluck them off the fire just as a seam formed in the incomprehensible construction of the shells. The result muted somewhat the sea-born taste, but the chargrilled quality that replaced it was quite satisfying, and no doubt safer from a bacteriological standpoint.

Jennifer at Synaesthesia and I have engaged in a desultory dialogue about college sports, limited to a great extent by my need to spend Saturdays watching football instead of blogging. She is at a large land-grant university in the Big Ten, and is peeved at the ability of sports to suck economic and psychic resources out of the university, as well as at the boorish behavior it engenders in its fans. I agree with her, and think it’s a weird shotgun marriage between an entertainment conglomerate and a high-stakes public venture charged with educating people and raising the level of discourse and technical competence in our society. It makes as much sense for colleges to sponsor football teams as it would for municipal fire departments to operate waterslide amusement parks. (Actually, that makes a LOT more sense).
But that’s my intellectual side (undernourished and of feeble incandescence) talking. My sentimental side says there’ll be time enough in the bleak midwinter (see below) to discuss this as well as the lunacy of a region (Seattle) that can’t fill potholes, or properly route and fund any sort of non-highway mass transit, spending half a billion dollars blowing up one stadium and replacing it with two. My sentimental side says THIS IS MICHIGAN WEEK, FERGAWD’SSAKE, the 100th renewal of the Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry, and, for another week or so, I’m just gonna go with it.
Thursday night I’ll board a redeye flight from Seattle en route to Charleston, SC, where I’ll join my two OSU-alum brothers and a couple of their less-savory friends for the weekend to roast oysters and bay like Low Country curs at the television during the game on Saturday. This gathering will not be characterized by the angst and interpersonal complexities of The Big Chill (those were Michigan grads, after all), it will be awash in blood lust and gluttony. The explanation of how these OSU fans can spend all that money and travel time and miss the stadium where the game is actually being played by 900 miles will have to await a more lucent and reflective moment.

It’s that time of year in Seattle when the rain envelops the house like an aqueous living thing, making digestive gurglings in the gutters and downspouts. Combine that with the glacier of darkness advancing inexorably as we approach the solstice, nibbling constantly at the habitable space of daylight we so profligately enjoyed in the summer, and you have a perfect recipe for stupefying lethargy, or at least a reason for another drink. The sun, when visible at all, is as evanescent as the Girl From Ipanema, except the glimpses you catch are not from a table at a sidewalk cafe, but from the 20th floor of an assisted living facility, and may merely be a calendar on a windowless wall, for all your ability to focus.

The Seattle City Council is nominally non-partisan. That is, candidates for council positions do not register party affiliations when they run. In reality, ideology of candidates usually runs the political gamut from left-leaning Democrats on the right to Planet Lovetron on the left.
I’ve always flattered myself that I could discern even the most minute political nuance, even when the game is designed to obfuscate, and in yesterday’s election I believe I can categorically declare the Eyecandy Party as a definite loser. Check out the photographic evidence, and I rest my case. Heidi Wills, top left, lost her bid for a second term to David Della, top right. Judy Nicastro, bottom left, also lost her bid for a second terrm to Jean Godden, bottom right.
Godden’s only claim to any stake in public life is as a columnist for the Seattle Times and, years earlier, the P-I. Her columns are formatted like a gossip column, but deliver no useful information, and seem to be simply compilations of voice mail she gets from idiots about town, the best of which are reports of clever vanity license plates. The Times suspended her column during the campaign, and a pained but stoic city somehow pushed forward.
This election season in Seattle has been buffetted by some unaccustomed influences. We were the darlings of national media in the early 90s, occupying first place on almost every “liveability” index, and were boosted culturally by the ascendancy of grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. Then Curt Cobain and Grunge died within 12 months of each other, the WTO “riots” were plastered all over the news and Boeing, the longtime sandbox bully in Washington, moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, delighting all of the poor devils who had to move from Seattle to the godforsaken shores of Lake Michigan.
Meanwhile, as the urban core of Seattle has maintained and perhaps even increased its leftward lean (”Baghdad” Jim McDermott represents a large swath of the city, and squanders his opportunity to be influential by disappearing from view for long expanses of time, only to surface with some stupid stunt), its power in the state and region has been eroded by the relentless swell of Republican-leaning suburbs, producing a political stalemate. The standoff prevents resolution or even developing an approach to serious regional problems, including transportation and initiative-driven gutting of the tax base. Even in polite and consensus-obsessed Seattle, voters can get a touch cranky as the stress level rises. Thus, any incumbent in the city with any serious challenger got whacked. For instance, all four school board incumbents lost (the Eyecandy Party, as far as I can tell, ran no candidates for school board).
So, it’s a city and region in search of a new sense of itself, an identity to replace the cheesy “Emerald City” and no-longer appropriate “Jet City” iconography. They’re down right now, but I still have hopes for the Eyecandy Party in any new formulation.

I’m not sure how seriously to take the precipitous el foldo CBS did over its “The Reagans” series under pressure from the usual horde of right-wing hyenas. On the one hand, it’s kind of startling and maybe dismaying to see how easily “speech” can be suppressed in this political environment.
On the other hand, the Reagans were two of the most vapid people to ever enter public life. Whether a dramatic work presents them faithfully or grossly misrepresents them, it’s bound to be a snooze either way. I’d probably never have watched it.
Maybe it’s more an indicator of how irrelevant network TV has become, when the goons at Fox can mau-mau these heretofore august institutions into 86-ing a piece of puff programming.