Are my eyes really blue?

Bullet points tonight.

• I have over 2000 words already typed and saved...but it's all on politics, and I'm burnt out. There's really nothing more to say until the psychodrama of the nomination process plays out. So that stuff will have to wait.

• Interesting speculation tonight that most of the Congressional superdelegates have already made up their minds, and that Obama has most of them - but is slowly dribbling them out in order to maintain the steady uptick in delegate count even in the face of adversity (and incidentally to avoid having them antagonizing potential donors who they need for their own races). If true, then the showrunners for Team Obama are bloody brilliant, more so than even the Begala-Carville tag team in 1992.

• My little Motorola MOTOFONE F3 from back at Christmas has a problem: the battery life is shit. Seriously, the thing will go dead in three days from a full charge...if left alone on a table TURNED OFF. Apparently this is not an uncommon problem. By contrast, my Sony Ericsson Z520a (which is my international-use phone) will last four days with normal use, turned on 24/7 with Bluetooth active. That is absolutely insane. I'll hang onto the F3 as a backup, certainly, but the days when I was tempted to try carrying it instead of the iPhone are long gone.

• Maybe there's going to be a new iPhone, maybe there's not. I don't know nothin' about nothin'. However, I feel safe in saying that if there is a new iPhone, and if it does have stuff like 3G or GPS or etc, then there must have been some kind of improvement in battery technology superior to what the original has, or else they have done something extraordinary in terms of power management. Because 3G will suck your battery dry in jig time, which is the sort of thing that would have killed a first-generation product in the marketplace.

• PAUSE FOR FART!

• seriously, if you didn't see that episode of Graham Norton, well, it was outstanding. Especially when they hauled that guy off on a forklift.

• I sent my grad school ring out for repair and it was received a week ago, and I haven't heard a peep. I'm starting to get antsy.

• I'm actively seeking a new job. Mainly because the current one, in almost every way that matters, is like two part-time jobs crammed together, with all of the accompanying inconsistencies, conflicts, and utter lack of benefits. I still think I did the right thing to leave my previous job when I did, given that there was no hint that things would get any better (to all accounts, they haven't) - but I miss things like, oh, feeling like you can afford to call in sick when you're too weak to get out of bed. Or being able to drink from the water fountain without worrying about how many chemicals and heavy metals you're ingesting. Or, hell, having an email system with more than two-nines reliability.

• Problem is, I'm not sure what I'm qualified to do at this point. I have about the most useless degree you can have in modern society - in fact, I have two of them - and what I do is constrained by the fact that I've spent ten years backing the wrong horse if you're interested in pursuing an IT career. Not that I regret it for a second - it's MUCH easier to get into the field the way I did, especially when I did - but it sort of limits my options when I go job hunting. Unless somebody's willing to pay me to drink and blog all day?

• Not looking forward to the trip south, except for possibly getting to see my cousin and his wife, who are the only people in my side of the family who are remotely like me. But what blows my mind is that once you start north from downtown, you don't hit another Starbucks for a hundred miles. NOT CISED.

Auburn Crocs.

Back from another first-Sunday-in-May trip to the old patch. Given that next month is ten years since the old man passed, you'd think I would have been in a much darker mood - and that even before the layover that lasted four extra hours because United Airlines momentarily forgot that an airplane needs a crew to fly. And yet I made it mostly OK.

Part of that came from getting to spend the afternoon Sunday with my double-second-cousin and his lovely bride. (His grandfather and mine were two brothers who married a pair of sisters from up the holler, thus the double.) I suspect that this is going to be a recurring feature of spring: drinks on the veranda somewhere in Southside coupled with a rousing game of "Can You Top This," embarrassing Southern family edition. He won this year, hands down, on a matter of elective biology too heinous to repeat here.

And then, today, after packing up a lot of stuff that should have been much more emotionally trying (my dad's class rings, my mom's original wedding bands, $270 worth of the family silver coinage and just try sliding THAT past airport security), I was actually glancing through my baby books. You know, the ones with all my test scores and early report cards and first cut hair and first lost tooth and medical history and blah blah blah.

And apparently - no wonder I forgot this - I seem to have left a trail of urine in every mattress from here to South Carolina for the first six years of my life. To the point that they had me on two kinds of drugs - one for the wee problem and one for "nerves."

Now, I think doctoring was different back then. I was born on the 1st and didn't come home 'til the 6th. I cannot FATHOM any hospital keeping mother and child for five days when it was a regular uneventful birth with no complications and nothing gone awry. I mean, that's longer than my first niece stayed in the hospital and she was at least five or six weeks premature. When I had my tonsils out in January of '76, in an attempt to do something about my chronic rhinitis, I was in the hospital for TWELVE DAYS. I've had family members laid up for REAL medical issues - serious lighting candles at Mass stuff - that were in and out of the hospital in half that. Medicine has changed, kids, and don't let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, the older I get, the better I was. I say this because I saw various test scores, report cards, the original letter that gravely informed my parents that I was eligible for special education services at a different elementary school than I had been slated to attend. And apparently, I peaked around age 6 in terms of being light-years smarter than my peers. There was stuff written in those evaluations that was just embarrassing to read (and I'm not talking about the "He especially enjoys Gilligan's Island" comment).

So I guess the moral of the story is this: if you want to be the kind of superstar that would make Kanye West weep with humility, you can't bother yourself about getting up to have a piss.

I don't think I'm going to be let to try this at home.

"...a depressingly high rate of self-destruction prevails among thise who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books."

- V. O. Key (pray for us), Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949

Good ol' Valdimer Orlando - patron and father of contemporary Southern studies, whose portrait hung in the study center when I was in grad school. He had it dead right. Suicide is an occupational hazard in Southern studies in much the same way that, say, black lung is for coal miners or blown knee ligaments are in the WNBA. Not hard to see why, either: consider the words of W.J. Cash, whose book is the first wellspring of all study of Southern politics - and who hanged himself in Mexico City in 1941.

In the mind of the South, any sort of deviation from the prescribed norm is suspect at best and to be violently opposed at worst. It's the sort of thing that leads to preachers railing from the pulpit against Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. It also leads to things like massive underfunding of special education (especially gifted programs), bulldozers running over Dixie Chicks albums, the school-sanctioned LGB club at Birmingham-Southern College having to meet in undisclosed locations, and a 40% statewide vote against doing away with the laws against mixed-race marriage...in the year 2000.

The old man didn't care for it - if you came around at the right time, like say election night in 1990*, you could hear him grumbling about the "redneck mentality" that kept Alabama in the basement - the hard kernel deep in the cracker soul saying "ain't no man living can make me do nothin'." He knew that at some point, you have to give a little to get along in a civilized society, and that eventually you'll have to allow for something that isn't exactly your thing. And that at some level, you have to have a social process and respect for the order that creates - and eventually, you will have to enforce that order.

Which leads to one of my favorite stories. I wouldn't say the old man was a crusader in the field of civil rights or anything, but he was a Kennedy delegate in his college's mock convention in 1960. And so, when he was teaching a history class in 1963, and word came over the intercom that the President was shot dead in Dallas, and one student let out a cheer, the old man - almost eight years into severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis - bodily jerked the kid out of his desk with one hand and backhanded the bejesus out of him with the other. Now in 1963, JFK was about as popular as cancer in the state of Alabama, but I can assure you that nobody in 8th grade ever again thought it was appropriate to publicly celebrate the death of a President.

I am - as if there were any doubt - my father's son. And we were both definitely Lawful Neutral.

* It does bum me out that the last state election he experienced was the return of Fob James. Had the assorted medications and resulting kidney failure not donked him off, I am sure he would have been dancing a Fred-Sanford-esque jig on election night 1998, when the Fob was drummed unceremoniously out of office in favor of a Catholic of Jewish descent.

I has a Want.

Seriously, I know it's ridiculous, but you couldn't get this stuff in Alabama in the mid-80s. Or two-tone. Or new wave. Or, in fact, any of the stuff that I could have really used half a lifetime ago when I wasn't even remotely too old for this shit.

I know I've written at length about my rejection of the whole "rejuvenile" phenomenon, but I think it's a little different when you're discovering all the things you missed out on. I got kickball, I got cupcakes, I got everything you probably need to get out of childhood. To be honest, much as I grumble, you could make a case that I got most of what I should expect to get out of adolescence, too. Especially when you take into account how much Hollywood lies to you, and that real life is nothing like locker movies. (Shame, too, because I got a lot out of Heathers.) But I have discovered a lot of stuff that was out there at the right time - only it never got past the Wallace Line, and thus I didn't stumble across it for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

OK, maybe it really is never too late to have a happy childhood. Maybe too sad, too pitiful, and/or too ridiculous, but not too late. Which means the only real question is....can I get away with 8-eyelet oxblood 1460s?

It's over. After everything that happened, after all the shit-slinging of the last two weeks, despite everything that came down the pike, Team Obama delivered the predicted crushing victory in North Carolina - and more impressively, are at this hour running less than 4% behind Team Clinton in Indiana, and that without any returns from Lake County (think Gary, Indiana - which should be an Obama stronghold for multiple reasons). The net result will be at least +3 delegates for Obama and an increase in the popular-vote lead by about 180K or so.

And that's the end of it. Despite her best stand, despite the momentum from Pennsylvania, despite the return of the Rev. Wright and the first serious racial ad in North Carolina, despite shots of Crown and guns galore, Team HRC will end the day further behind Team BHO than when the day began. They are not closing the gap at all - they are falling further behind in delegates, in votes, in superdelegate commitments, and in fund-raising.

Bottom line: there is no way for Hillary Clinton to become the nominee without subverting the expressed will of the party-in-electorate.

Ballgame.

ETA: make that +6 net for Obama and +217K votes. MSNBC is reporting that Team Clinton has cancelled all appearances tomorrow. And the head of the Republican party in Lake County has publicly avowed that there is no shady dealing going on; the calculation of over 11,000 absentee ballots has to be factored in and he has confidence in the results. Of course, he has to be uneasy that Democrat turnout beat GOP today by over 3-1; couple that with the fact that almost a quarter of Indiana R's voted for somebody other than McCain, and you can't get too sanguine about perhaps the most reliably stalwart GOP stronghold in the Middle West...

One of the most irritating parts of the whole Democratic primary has been the chortling from the Republican side that the Democrats "have finally come around" on the matter of Hillary Clinton. As if sixteen years of bullshit is somehow vindicated by the exasperations of five months of primary trench warfare.

Listen up, and listen good: the reason the hardcore activist Democrats - the ones who turn out for primaries, the ones who organize caucuses, the beating heart of what political scientists call "the party-in-electorate" - cannot stand Hillary Clinton is twofold:

1) She was insufficiently anti-Republican;

2) In an attempt to grasp for the nomination, she embraced everything the Republicans attacked her with throughout the 90s and after.

Let's be honest here: nobody who voted for the Iraq War was ever going to pass muster with the resolutely-antiwar Democratic core. John Edwards came closest, and he had to shovel coal hard and fast in the cause of economic populism to build any kind of following, and it was good for a poor third in Iowa. Hillary Clinton was still running her husband's offense: triangulate, split the difference, and go along with the foe just enough to disarm the avenues of attack. And, as Joe Gibbs painfully learned, what worked like all hell in 1992 isn't going to get the job done in 2008.

The Clinton offense works from a position of some strength. Even at the height of the Gingrich revolution, Bill Clinton was still President, and still had the power to make himself relevant (as he famously asserted). For the entire decade of the Noughts, the Democrats have basically been without power. They had some control of the Senate for a few months in 2001, but after September 11, they were never going to be anything resembling an opposition. They went along on the war, just as the Clinton offense dictates, in an attempt to take it off the table as an issue. But they got clubbed with it anyway, lost big, and spent four years basically irrelevant to the process. Even after barely regaining control of Congress, the Ds were hamstrung in the Senate by three roadblocks: a feckless majority leader, a minority party willing to shatter the record for filibusters, and a majority that hung on the single vote of the only Likud Senator. With no leverage and no bargaining power, the Democrats couldn't possibly move the ball with the old Clinton techniques.

For the last seven years, the GOP has actively run over the Democrats like a tractor-trailer over a rooster. Dems have been consistently accused of being Al-Qaeda sympathizers, Sadaam apologists, feckless bong-watered granola-shaver hippie weaklings just dying for a chance to surrender to The Terrorists and submit to some sort of Islamic dictatorship. Hell, their 2004 Presidential candidate's three Purple Hearts were famously derided as "band-aid injuries" by GOP convention delegates. As a result, a whole lot of Democrats got pissed off beyond recognition, and demanded a candidate for 2008 who would fight back, tooth and claw. And they almost immediately rejected Hillary Clinton as a palatable candidate, because at the critical moments, she hadn't punched back.

The rest of the story tells itself. Despite her name recognition and early lead, she was outmaneuvered in Iowa - and once a viable "anyone but Hillary" candidate emerged, the activists flocked to him. Even still, she might have held on - but when Obama rattled off a dozen straight wins, she ultimately chose to go into Pennsylvania and embrace the very people and tactics that had been used so viciously against her husband and his administration. The image of Hillary Clinton sitting down with Richard Mellon Scaife - he whose money underwrote the anti-Clinton slime machine for a decade - created the impression that she'd sold her soul to the devil. Her embrace of the Karl Rove school of campaigning clenched it. To borrow Heinrich Böll's phrase, once she partook of the Host of the Beast, there was no turning back.

If Team Hillary had bothered to work up a Plan B - if they'd plotted beyond Super Tuesday, if they'd made an effort to hit back in the Potomac, if they'd bothered to learn the rules in Texas so as not to lose the state days after the fact - maybe they wouldn't have been forced into desperation in Pennsylvania. And if they'd been willing to take a chance on the high road, play it straight, keep beating the drum for experience and grinding out the hard work of governance, and stayed clear of buying into the GOP memes about secret Muslims and latte-drinkers and "real Americans", maybe they could have closed the gap and kept superdelegates in play. As it is, she's managed to piss off the kind of people who could have been her base, who should have been her base - and who definitely would have been her base, if she hadn't taken the ball on February 5 and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it.

Ultimately, that's what drove Democrats away from Hillary Clinton - not that she was inherently some sort of cloven-hooved bitch succubus, because they knew better than that. But she fumbled a sure thing - and in 2008, the one thing the Democrats can't possibly risk is somebody who could screw up a sure thing. When you're trying to avoid a plague outbreak, you can't waste time supporting somebody who's driving the monkey to the airport.

Hillary's a great lady, one of the most formidable figures of the day. But that day's over, and the faithful don't have the patience to let her rage against the dying of the light any longer.

I swear, I will not post five times a day anymore.

If this is true, then two conclusions are immediately possible:

1) Mark Penn is, hands-down, the Stupidest Fucking Person In All Of Human History.

2) HIllary Clinton, by virtue of employing Mark Penn high in her artillery, is completely unfit to run a Presidential administration.

A bunch of kids with a band in Manchester, unable to finance a video for their song, instead played it in front of surveillance cameras - and then used the data protection and freedom of information laws to obtain the footage.

The kids, clearly, are all right.

So as we all wait for the superdelegates to play out, it's time to think a little more about why they are there. To do this, we have to go back in history a little bit and walk it through to the present day. I know we've been over this before, but it bears repeating, so if you'll just step into that Dr. Pepper machine over there...yes, I know it's bigger on the inside than the outside, that's not the point...

(click the jump to depart!)

So my laptop died Saturday afternoon. Serious big-time directory issues, to the point that I suspected hardware failure (attempts this morning suggest that is likely). I have a replacement drive but it is not a known good drive (in fact it dates to last August and I don't know how long it was used before then). It had all better be down to the hard drive, though, because I'm in no shape to splash out on buying a new computer - in fact, if the laptop goes, I will resort to the iMac indefinitely (although restoring all that music will be a right royal PITA) and use the iPhone for all portable computing. Which will at least keep me from parking my ass on the couch and thumping away at the MacBook all evening every evening.

Oh yeah - saw Iron Man last night. It is as advertised. I believe it does for the entire superhero genre what Daniel Craig and Casino Royale did for Bond. I would gladly have turned around and walked right back into the theater for a second viewing.

Anyone have an Asus EEE? Running Linux? What do you think of it?

Say what you like about Howard Dean, but you can't argue with the results: took back the House, took back the Senate, and so far, 3 for 3 in special elections, each one in a more conservative district than the last. Tuesday night, it was Mississippi-1st, a district Bush carried with 62% in 2004, a district that had a Republican incumbent previously, where the National Republican Congressional Committee dumped over a million dollars, where they ran ads tying the nominee to Obama, to Jeremiah Wright, to everything but Osama Bin Laden.

The Democrat won by 8%.

Now, Howard Dean didn't make Bush as popular as herpes, or hang the economy around the GOP's neck like an albatross, or stretch the Iraq war out to five years and counting. But because he stuck to his guns on the 50-state strategy, when all that happened, the mechanisms were in place to capitalize on them. And as a result, the GOP has dipped below 200 seats in the House for the first time since...well, it would have to be before 1994 at least.

When you can't even win by playing the "crazy colored preacher hates America!" card in Mississippi, you are in what we political scientists refer to as "deep deep shit." Alan Abramowitz (who interviewed me on my official visit at Emory back in the Triassic Era) has put together a 3-part test based on a matrix of GDP growth, net approval rating (approve minus disapprove), and whether the incumbent party has 8 or more consecutive years in control, and right now, his model predicts a 14-point margin of Democratic victory. Now obviously, there's plenty of time for the economy (and the perception of same) to change, or for the approval rating ratio to improve, but whoever's running things at the RNC will go to bed tonight puckered tight enough to crap diamonds.

Geoff Lloyd, on this incident involving Suggs and the Pet Shop Boys:

"Someone must have spiked one of Suggs's drinks with maybe, like, eighteen other drinks."

So I passed the one test for the ACSP today - without taking the course at all. Got 86 out of 90. Now, in fairness, it's kind of a nubs certification - it's OS X Leopard only, no Server or anything off the workstation. But it's a cert, and that's a line on the resume that indicates that, in the opinion of Apple Computer, I'm competent to work on 10.5-based systems. Which will help matters considerably.

Now, if I can pass the OS X Server test? And get ACTC without taking the class? I. Am. BULLETPROOF.

Another hard drive failure. Ticking noises too - this one's almost definitely a drive failure at the hardware layer. I decided that enough was bloody enough and bought a brand-new 250 GB unit from Fry's, and incredibly, it took less than two hours from the time I got home for everything to be back to normal with an extra 90 GB of storage space.

You can rest assured that I'm putting all the virtual machines back on here. XP, Vista, and two different Ubuntu flavors, plus a local .Mac disk and some more of the movies and ripped TV shows (every ep of Coupling and Father Ted both!) now that I have room on the local drive coupled with adequate backup space for the whole thing. I guess I'm making a permanent jump to the quarter-terabyte world...this drive is literally a thousand times more capacity than I had in the hard drive of my first Mac fourteen years ago. ("Moore's Law...been very, very good to me.")

Good thing I passed the bloody exam, hm?

So I'm flipping through the iTunes Music Store, because the wife is looking for some obscure track, and I find myself on a list of "90s One Hit Wonders." And looking over the 75 or so tracks, I think about the fact that the list includes some stuff I remember from undergrad, and some stuff that reminds me of those early days in Washington DC, and I can't conceive of the fact that those were in the same decade.

There are some pretty sharp lines of demarcation. For one, I didn't even *have* an email address until I left undergrad (it was eWorld, if you must know). For another, I didn't really become a full live participant in the Greater Zone Community until after grad school was done and flunked out with. And I know I've mentioned it before, but in a span of six months in 1997, my entire life was completely transformed - my residence, my relationship, my career path, my bloody time zone for crying out loud.

Looking back, it's absurd to even consider 1990 and 1999 part of the same lifetime, let alone the same decade. You could make a case that the transformation in my life since 1999 is considerably less drastic, even taking into account marriage and homebuying and the like.

...and not about politics, either. But I will say this: one of the things I'm most looking forward to is a Democratic majority greater than 52 in the Senate, so that the new majority leader can expel Joe Lieberman (Likud-Connecticut) from the party.

There's apparently a tradition inside the Beltway that states that nobody is more to be honored and respected than somebody who claims to be a member of one party while routinely taking a gigantic Deuce McAllister all over said party. If Holy Joe wants to go into the pages of the New York Times and heap endless slander on a party that put him on their Presidential ticket 8 years ago, I don't really see why the Dem leadership shouldn't put his ass on the street.

If you work for Coca-Cola, you ought not be taking out full-page ads about how unsatisfying the taste of Coke is.

Also, just for the record, if you're one of the 4% that's still voting for Ralph Nader in 2008, you are too stupid to live and should be put in a home rather than allowed to vote. I'm only going to say this one time this season: politics ain't therapy.

November 2004. The period known as "Black October" has carried on all the way through into November. We still have a ton of stuff to do, not nearly enough resources to do it, we're undermanned, our manager has been fired and our director is running us in an absentee fashion. We're not working ahead at all; everything is pretty much to-the-day and we're struggling to get gear out the door.

I clearly remember this: I would go back to my bench, which was at the other side of a huge pile of...everything. Returned equipment, new equipment, etc etc. I re-arranged that stuff for a while until I had a clear space around the bench, barricaded in by walls of cases and boxes and etcetera, easily six and a half feet high all the way around. On the other side of the wall, random stuff piled high where people had left it. The only way in or out was a passage just wide enough to slide a roller case through - less than 3 feet wide at best - and was blocked by a pallet jack loaded down with 600 lb of desktop machines, so I could easily pull up the drawbridge.

I sat there, no sound other than the tinny streaming radio from the UK and the occasional chime of a rebooting system, and churned out laptops for eight hours straight. Sometimes nine or ten. It was mind-numbingly dull...but it wasn't customer-facing, it wasn't physically strenuous, I could sip on a Dr Pepper and hear some music in the background...basically, all the alone-time I needed.

Man alive, what I wouldn't give now...not to be customer-facing, and to be able to just build up the wall and get to work.

I am sure, in retrospect, that it was easy to make a case in the 1970s that the world was coming apart. The streak of assassinations (Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy again) made it seem like shooting a prominent leader would become a recurring feature of American life. The price of everything was skyrocketing at the same time that the economy was deteriorating - a process that we'd come to know as "stagflation," generally driven by artificial cost increases on major commodities (in this case, OPEC's production controls to help pay for the Yom Kippur war in 1973). The military was, quite frankly, in shambles - done into the ground by protracted conflict in Vietnam and the soul-sucking nature of the draft and its aftereffects. And it seems like an unnaturally large chunk of the prominent celebrities of the Depression-War-Postwar era died in the 1970s, which I can only guess was the logical result of people with shorter life expectancies becoming prominent as a result of mass media (e.g. film and radio on a national scale).

You only have to go back and look at the magazines from the time to see the general despair. People genuinely thought that offering amnesty to draft evaders would undermine military readiness ("Who in the hell is going to fight the next war? The Soviets will not be deterred by the peace symbol", etc). People actually thought that busing was going to bring about racial Armageddon (read J.Anthony Lukas's landmark Common Ground, but set aside about a month to do it). People were retreating wholesale into nostalgia (consider George Lucas, who created Star Wars because he couldn't get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and who financed his project with the money made on American Graffiti. Just consider how highly rated Happy Days was and you'll get the picture, never mind Grease).

Kevin Phillips is sharp as a tack, no doubt, and he has spent years disavowing the fruits reaped from his landmark The Emerging Republican Majority, but he will always wear a scarlet letter. Two of them, in fact: PP. "Positive Polarization." There was a conscious, deliberate effort by Team Nixon - starting around 1966 and continuing through the downfall of the administration in 1974 - to portray America as "us and them." Them, obviously, to consist of war protesters, blacks, feminists, campus radicals, drugged-out rockers, dirty hippies, etc etc - the great unwashed Other. And Us, to consist of...well..."real Americans." What he created sold like nothing since Coca-Cola. To this day, forty years on, the pundits rant on and on about the need to win "real Americans." The "heartland." Those proud rural Caucasian sons of the soil who embody "real American values."

Lil' Kev sold the idea that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove made their millions on: that there is some mythical America back in Pleasantville around 1955 or so, before the Negroes got all riled up and the beatnik jazz appeared (background loop of "Take Five" here) and the foreigners and colored folk got into the rock and roll and mad the kids all want to smoke reefer and hate cops (change background loop to Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower"). His crime wasn't in making people imagine that things were so great and wonderful and simple and perfect in some long-ago American Avalon cloudcuckooland...his crime was in making people believe that you could go back to it.

The irony is that all of a sudden, it's 2008, the economy is going to hell, oil has smashed through the $100/bbl barrier, American forces are bogged down abroad, and there's a sinking sense that everything's turning to shit...and it's all landing on people who came to power as the logical result of the Phillips plan. The GOP, as currently incarnated, is the apotheosis of the predictions in The Emerging Republican Majority - white, Southern, suburban, traditionalist - and right now, over two-thirds of the country thinks its standard-bearer sucks out loud.

The moral of the story is actually not political at all, and is in fact directed against myself. Said moral being: don't get too caught up in nostalgia, because that perfect realm you remember wasn't perfect then and is in any case unattainable now. There's nowhere to go but forward, or else perish where you stand.

Things are different over there. Two examples:

1) Motherwell's Phil O'Donnell, a former Celtic player, dropped dead on the field during a match in December. This Sunday, the remaining members of the 1991 Motherwell team (which won the Scottish Cup with a 19-year-old O'Donnell) and the 1998 Celtic team (which O'Donnell led to the regular season SPL title) will play an exhibition at Celtic Park to raise money for O'Donnell's family. It's expected to be a hard sellout.

2) Tommy Burns, a former Celtic player who ran the player-development program, died last week only 51 years old. For those unable to attend the funeral Mass, Celtic has put a PDF of the Order of Service up on their website for fans to download.

And of course, today, two months after most of the footballing world gave them up for dead, Celtic completed the race back to the top, knocking off Dundee United with a Venegoor of Hesselink goal in the 72nd minute, while Rangers fell 2-0 at Aberdeen. And just like that, Celtic wins the SPL title for the third straight year, their longest such streak since Jock Stein and the Lisbon Lions in the late 1960s.

All 90 minutes. All 38 games. If there's one hallmark of the Gordon Strachan era, it's this: until the last second has ticked off the clock, Celtic have a chance to win. Consequently, we'll see you in Europe again next year.

If you can hear the crowd at Paradise all singing "Fields of Athenry" and "You'll Never Walk Alone," and not get a chill up your spine, you should probably see a doctor and determine whether you are in fact dead. Sirius just paid for itself. =)

Read on below the jump (or follow the link) for the flip side of my post-before-last...and an endorsement.

...but I clearly ought to be living somewhere urban, given my affinity for public transportation. Besides, it's tough not to appreciate a cable car operator who says he only has two rules: "Do NOT lean out and do NOT fall off. I'm not coming back for you." The Hail Mary at the top of the Washington Street hill was a nice touch, especially since I was just thinking about how the brake design on the Powell-line cars is about 130 years old...you're going to smell something burning, but it's worse if you don't.

I like cable cars, I like fog, I like Irish coffee...remind me again why don't we live in the city? Oh yes, because it costs more than a barn full of high-test gasoline. Sheesh.

Now we're watching The Graduate and trying to figure out how you get to Berkeley going west on the Emperor Norton bridge. Oh, and where in the hell the Berkeley Zoo is. My guess is somewhere on Telegraph.

In fact, this is probably going to sound like a heresy wrapped in a blasphemy tied up in lunacy, but here goes:

I don't know what I need HDTV for.

I mean, what do I watch?

Setanta Sports: not in HD.
BBC America: not in HD.
Doctor Who: not in HD.
Battlestar Galactica: okay, this is in HD, but let's face it, there's not much left of it.
all my DVDs: not in HD.

What does the wife watch in addition to that?

Good Eats: not materially improved by the addition of HD, and most eps are probably still std-def
Today Show: REALLY not materially improved by HD. SRSLY.

Going forward, is there anything else?

NFL? Not on your life. I listen to the Skins on Sirius now.
College ball? We're going to be in Berkeley half the weekends anyway, so only sort of useful.
College hoops? Not until January, most likely.
New shows? Ehhh...may or may not take a chance on the US version of Life on Mars.
Old shows? Not unless Heroes figures out how to suck less.

Long story short: it's an initial outlay of over $1200 along with an increase in the DirecTV fee per month for minor improvements to a couple of shows. Unless something amazing happens, I don't see any reason not to wait until after Thanksgiving and see if prices drop.

(All together now: "WHO ARE YOU!?!?")

I can sort of understand why just over 30% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I can even understand why 10% of the population thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim. (pdf link)

But really? 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth??

REALLY??

By this math, 54 million Americans need to be lined up and shot. Even if you adjust for everyone who hasn't made it through 6th grade science yet, that's just abysmal. I mean, I know I'm a bright kid, and pretty much all my friends are in the good tail of the bell curve, but still, I cannot conceive that there are literally tens of millions of people in this country with a pre-Galileo concept of how the solar system works. No wonder the rest of the world is eating our lunch.

First off, where are they getting "7" from? Are we following the NT path or the 95/98/ME path?

Secondly, I'm looking at the demo and all I can see is a bunch of multi-touch stuff bolted onto Vista. The kind of thing that's going to require tons of RAM, a high-end graphics card, a bucket of VRAM, the latest multicore CPU and a whole new touch-sensitive monitor. It looks like they're trying to implement that multi-thousand dollar touchscreen table on a PC.

Thirdly, what is the point? I'll tell you the point: to try to get your attention with something shiny for a year and a half (as if they're ever going to deliver an OS on time) while distracting you from the fact that Vista is the worst steaming pile that Microsoft has shipped since Microsoft BOB. Or maybe since Word 6 for Macintosh. I'll tell you one thing: I have run Vista on Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and I have run XP on both, and there are absolutely no circumstances under which I would choose Vista over XP. In fact, there are no circumstances under which I would take Vista over Ubuntu., because for what I do, I'm pretty confident I can find a Linux equivalent for everything except maybe iTunes.

Naturally, you can have my MacBook when you...actually, I've got it booby-trapped with a wipe-script and a half-pound of Semtex, so if you want to try to pry it from my cold dead hands? Buy the ticket, take the ride.

McClellan isn't telling us anything we didn't know years ago. The substance of his complaint is more or less precisely what John Dilulio told us before the Iraq war even started. So for all Scotty's pearl-clutching, it's not like he's got any grand revelations to share, except that he's only just now realized that three-quarters of the country thinks his old boss sucks and this is his best chance to cash in.

So the only new revelation is that Scott McClellan is a complete douchebag Okay, so there are no new revelations. What I do know is that he's not going to make any friends to the left of, oh, all the right-wingers he just shat on...oh, whatever. Even I don't give a shit about this anymore.

* Darth Vader is Luke's father

* OJ did it

* Soylent Green is people

* Rosebud is a sled

* Han shot first

* Rose is the Bad Wolf

* Rick doesn't leave with Ilsa after all (-wink-)

* Joe Namath got into the end zone in '65

* The BCS sucks goats

* Celtic wins the SPL title off a Venegoor of Hesselink header in the 72nd minute. HAIL HAIL!

* "...it's a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!"

Spring and summer 1990...