It seems to be the topic du jour, so here’s my reaction to yesterday’s election results (which I’m sure won’t surprise any of my three loyal readers): I’m pleased. Pleased that the brakes can now be applied to the runaway “unitary executive” and that the rubberstamp Congress which enabled it has been disbanded.
I’m sure everybody out there is glued to the TV waiting for election returns, but just in case you need a break from the grim spectacle of our political process, check out this precious artifact from a simpler time:
It’s a wonderful reminder that Star Wars used to be a movie instead of a franchise, that the droids were once considered the central characters of the story, and that people simply loved it instead of wanting to analyze and debate it to death. It amuses me to no end that Gene Shalit compares it to Rocky and predicts that it will be “one of the biggest money-making movies of our time.” If only he knew.
Oh, yeah, that little princess girl was really cute back then, too.
To hell with all this election stuff, the really important news of the day is that Britney is divorcing the odious K-Fed! Our long national nightmare is over! It already seems that the sun in shining a bit more brightly…
Well, I fulfilled my civic duty this morning, for all the good it will do. Election results in Utah are highly predictable, not to mention one-sided, and if you happen to be on the, ahem, minority side — which I am, if you haven’t figured that out by now — voting tends to feel like an exercise in futility. Still, you’ve got no room to bitch if you don’t vote, right? And my three loyal readers all know how much I like bitchin’, so…
My actual voting experience went much more smoothly than I anticipated. I’ve been somewhat apprehensive about these fancy new computerized voting machines with their new-fangled touch-screens and all. I don’t trust them, to be honest; I worry about them being hacked or secretly programmed to produce a particular outcome. It’s all too easy to imagine my vote simply vanishing into the aether of cyberspace, or else being transmogrified into a vote for those other guys. I’ve also wondered what happens if the machine has a problem, and the only people available to try and fix it are the typical polling-station volunteers who tend to be so old that they still think color TV is a passing fad. And for today’s election, at least, I worried that the lines would be terrible because the machines are new and a lot of people would be slowed down by the learning curve.
To my surprise, however, the lines moved quickly, the machines struck me as very user-friendly — even my parents, to whom e-mail remains a deep and unfathomable mystery, had no problems figuring them out — and my concerns about security were somewhat mollified by a back-up system that generates an actual paper ballot. (If you haven’t seen the voting machines yet, your votes are recorded on a paper roll similar to a cash register receipt. The paper stays inside the machine, presumably for security reasons, but it passes through a little window so you can review it and make any changes before you hit the “Cast Ballot” button.) I’m still generally suspicious of the new machines and would prefer that we return to tried-and-true paper-balloting methods, but the back-up helped me to rachet down my paranoia a notch or two.
I have seen reports of local problems with the machines, but in my precinct, at least, everything was fine. The biggest problem I had was finding my polling place, because it seems to change every other election. One year, it’s held at my old elementary school; the next, it’s at the new elementary school that was built a decade or so back. This year, it was back at the old school, but my parents and I thought it was still at the new one, so we wasted a good 15 minutes driving around town. (We went to vote at the same time, but travelled in separate cars so I could go to work afterwards.) I suspect we looked like we were re-enacting the climax from the original Pink Panther movie, that farcical sequence where half-a-dozen different cars keep whizzing through a quiet village center from different directions.
Well, now, this is just childish: it appears that the NRCC — that would be the Republicans, kids — has orchestrated a nationwide campaign to annoy people into voting against Democrats by repeatedly telephoning the same households over and over with recorded messages that appear to be made by or on behalf of Democratic candidates. It sounds like a desperation tactic to me, and a pretty damn silly one, too, but there is anecdotal evidence that it may be having an effect. The mainstream media has thus far ignored the story, but thankfully Josh Marshall (among other politi-bloggers) has been on his toes; scroll back through his archives to see how the situation developed.
I can’t begin to tell you how much I despise this kind of sleazy, prankish nonsense, and I despise it even more when it appears to actually work. I fantasize about the day when we may witness some dignified, grown-up political discourse in this country. In the meantime, keep in mind that if you’ve been getting a lot of annoying “robocalls” over the past few days, the blame may not fall where you think, and anyway there are more important things to consider when you cast your vote tomorrow…
Huh… here’s an interesting factoid I’ve just run across: it seems that Cheeta, the chimpanzee who co-starred with Johnny Weissmuller in all those Tarzan movies of the 1930s and ’40s, is still alive. Now 74 years old, he holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest known (non-human) primate. He lives in an animal sanctuary that bears his name and a mission to “provide residence, care, and rehabilitation for homeless or unwanted ex-show business primates.” Much like Norma Desmond, the retired ape reportedly passes his time watching his old films and painting. Yes, painting. As in art. You can even buy one of his canvases, if you so desire. The money goes to support the sanctuary.
I don’t know why, but I find this story positively charming…
Last weekend, I watched one of my favorite old movies, The Guns of Navarone. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you immediately add it to your Netflix queue. It’s a 1961 wartime adventure starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn as commandoes tasked with destroying a Nazi artillery emplacement that guards a vital sea passage.
As the cliche says, they don’t make ’em like this anymore. War movies these days, on the rare occasion that somebody actually makes one, tend to be self-important, self-conscious, and burdened with the need to say Something Important. Guns isn’t like that; it takes its subject matter seriously enough, even allowing David Niven’s character to make a couple speeches about the pointlessness and horror of it all, but the film’s overarching goal is to entertain, not to enlighten, and it succeeds wonderfully in that regard.
I did notice something on this latest viewing that’s had me thinking, though.
Space.com has just posted the latest on the search for those missing slow-scan television (SSTV) recordings of Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. (I’ve blogged about this search previously here, here, and here.) To cut to the chase, they haven’t found them yet.
The inquiry into the whereabouts of the SSTV tapes has not proven easy.
Budget cuts at NASA in the post-Apollo years meant that many day-to-day records were discarded. Jobs and entire divisions that dealt with data records were eliminated.
Since there was no official requirement to archive data like this, [Bill] Wood added, the SSTV tape could have gone the same way that many old television programs did: TV stations degaussed the tapes and reused them.
That’s a perfectly horrifying thought…
My favorite college instructor was a leftover hippie who lived on a sailboat on the Great Salt Lake. He was an anachronism in the conservative climate of the late ’80s, but he was cool and I learned a great deal from him about philosophy and life and how to approach new ideas. Last I heard, he’d been forced into an early retirement and had moved his boat to Puget Sound, a victim of interdepartmental politics and changing notions of what constitutes a good teacher.
Now I hear that another professor for whom I have some fondness has been denied tenure. The reasons cited in the denial letter (which is published in its entirety here) sound almost like the sort of “guilt by association” nonsense of the McCarthy era:
Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By Dr. Jones’s own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged. Though the committee may have overstepped the boundaries of its evaluation, I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor.
Fools. Bureaucratic fools.
Carrie Fisher was on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last night. For my money, Ferguson is the best late-night talk-show host we’ve got — Letterman and Leno are both way past their sell-bys, and I have never really warmed to Kimmel or Conan. Craig, though, is a hoot with his self-deprecating streak and naughty attitude, and Carrie is much the same; put the two of them together, and it’s guaranteed entertainment. Most of last night’s segment consisted of Craig giving her a bad time for having played Princess Leia in Star Wars and how, 30 years later, that’s still what she’s best known for. Carrie gave as good as she got, though; her funniest line, and the one I want to share with you now, was this:
George [Lucas] owns my likeness, you know. That means everytime I look in the mirror I have to send him a couple of bucks.
Ah, good times, although I imagine Carrie’s delivery is better than mine. If I can find a video clip, I’ll post it up…