Me: Frank Lynch
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These are my mundane daily ramblings.
For something
less spontaneous, I maintain The
Samuel
Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,700 Johnson quotes), with a
weekly essay springing from one of
Johnson's quotations.
Email:
frank
dot
lynch2
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dot
net
He'll fit right in. The importation of prescription medicines from Canada is a hot topic, and you would think that opinions on it from the man Bush nominated to head the new Medicare agency would be relevant to deciding whether or not Senators should vote to confirm him. So what's the nominee's response?
Mark McClellan, President Bush's choice to run Medicare, said Monday he won't answer senators' questions about his opposition to importing prescription drugs from Canada before he takes over the government health program.
(snip)
McClellan, at a hearing on his nomination at the Senate Finance Committee, said he would answer the senators' questions "as soon as this confirmation process is concluded."
Yup, more stonewalling...
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That virus from last week, netsky-d,
hasn't completely abated yet. I am still getting infected
emails on it, a full week after it hit the US — and it had
started in Europe even before that. I guess some people just
don't take care of their machines...
Daa-yam. Jimmy Breslin nails the Bush
campaign ads. A must read!
Should the Internet really be free?
And I don't mean just the world wide web (that portion through
which you look at web sites), but also activities like email and
posting to newsgroups. I raise this question again because of a
proposal to charge for email usage as a way of
eliminating spam (each email to each address would have a
charge). Long time readers of this blog know, that as a small
time content provider, I've argued that people should be charged
according to their web usage, which would provide a pool of funds
through which web sites could be compensated. Advertising doesn't
really work for small sites because the buy is too small for the
buyer; and subscriptions only work if the rate of repeat
visitation is significant. Now, I get donations, and am grateful
when I do, but because there are about 5 or 6,000 visits for
every donation, I'd far prefer it if a mechanism were in place
where everyone was charged a penny for every page they see. If
it's not worth a penny to you, it's probably not worth your time,
either: go do something else, like exercise, or reading a
book. I happen to like the idea of charging people to send emails.
Of course, flat rate fees would need to come down to compensate,
but people should be willing to pay for the services they
consume. If they're not willing to pay for it, it isn't that
valuable, now, is it?
An interesting insider view of the
workings of the House of Representatives. Democratic members
who represent New York seem to have achieved little, on the
surface: few bills/resolutions proposed, and fewer passed. But
that's a superficial view, according to the Democrats in that
chamber, according to an
article in today's New York Times. Because Democrats are in
the minority, they say they have to give up pride of authorship
to a Republican in order to have a bill get through. There are plenty of times, these Democrats say, when they have
little choice but to swallow hard and allow Republicans to take
top billing on legislation that they themselves authored in order
to ensure its passage. "You have to decide whether you want to get stuff done when
you're in the minority or if you just want to pitch a fit," said
Representative Anthony D. Weiner, a Democrat who represents parts
of Brooklyn and Queens (and who, according to records, won
approval for two of the 19 measures of which he was chief sponsor
in the 107th Congress, including one that became a law). Mr. Towns, who represents parts of Brooklyn, suggested that
the climate is so partisan in the House that when he has not been
willing to let Republicans claim ownership of a bill he authored,
Republicans "just take it; most of the time, they just take it,"
he said. You even have to wonder about the dynamics associated with
that "two of the 19" figure cited. Was Weiner allowed to maintain
sponsorship of those 19 because they were deemed unpassable,
while others he proposed and wasn't credited for were passed
under different sponsorship? Somehow I'm not surprised to read about this petty
gamesmanship (and I don't assume it was more statesmanlike when
Democrats were in the majority). But when you have House
Republican leaders like Tom Delay — who reportedly recently
got involved in Texas political redistricting in order to
increase the number of Republicans, at the federal level,
representing Texas in the House — you're just not overly
confident that it's going to change any time soon.
Not quite yet, but it's coming, I
promise. The other day someone came to the site and searched
repeatedly for a line of Johnson's: "The true art of memory is
attention." It comes from Idler No. 74, and believe it or not it
is the very next essay on my list to edit for extracts. Honest.
The book is sitting open to that page! (I wish the person had
emailed me with a query, I'd have gladly found it for him/her.)
How rude. And stupid, too. Last
Wednesday evening's local news on WNBC had a sports segment where
Len Berman was considering the New York Yankees' line up, with an
all-star at every position. That is, except second base, where
two relatively unknown players are vying for the starting
position. After Berman ran through each position and its likely
starter (some future Hall of Famers among them), we were given a
clip of Berman interviewing one of the 2nd baseman. Berman asked:
"Do you think you can contribute here?" The player (I forget
which one) was the perfect gentleman in responding to what is,
honestly, a stupid question. Of course he thinks he can contribute here, or he'd be
in a different profession. What's he going to say, Len? How
about, "Gee, Len, when you put it that way, I realize I must not
be able to pull my weight. I think I'll go home." Or, "Gee, Len,
all these other guys are so great, I was figuring on not taking
the field when the other team is up at bat." Or, "You know, Len,
I have nothing to contribute, but if asking questions like that
qualifies you for your job, maybe I'll do the sports
news?" Now, I know what Len was driving at, but maybe he could
have found a less offensive way to ask it? Such as, "Will your
contributions be notice?" That way of asking it assumes
that there will be contributions, and puts the question back in
terms of the performance vs. all the All-Stars. There are
probably other ways to ask it, too, but I don't do the sports, I
only do life.
Walking on the dead. Not only did the
Bush-Cheney reelection campaign shift the date of the NYC
convention to coincide as close as
possible to the third anniversary of September 11, but new
ads they've released use extensive footage from the days after...
Firefighters and victims' families are upset. (So is this
New Yorker, as every American should be.) Over at TAPPED, Michael
Tomasky contrasts the Bush-Cheney behavior with that of Hillary
Rodham Clinton over the same decision. Conclusion? Hillary had more
respect.
Food fight. In a Florida retirement home.
Learning can be a meandering process.
And if it's not carefully directed, you can pick up all sorts of
flies on your sticky brain. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, the
first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary came out, and
it was a trip because it had all these pictures in the margins
that would lead you off in different directions. I remember a
later edition not only had a picture of The Beatles, but under
"decolletage" These thoughts hit me when I visited the web site of Leblon-Delienne, a
French company that makes figurines and other small pieces of
art. When we visited the low countries last summer to check in on
a couple former au pairs (one was getting married and
another had an infant), I picked up a small figurine of Asterix
(carrying a boar) when we spent an afternoon in Wavre before
heading into Brussels. Because I failed to pick up an Obelix
figurine, I occasionally check the Leblon-Delienne site to see
what Obelix figurines might be coming out. Well, their Spring
collection in the Asterix & Obelix line seems to emphasize the Romans and Caesar, so no Obelix posted yet. But I also noticed
this other collection — kind of disturbing, so if you find
things like Teletubbies and Smurfs repugnant, be careful —
Barbapapa. Now, I don't know if I should tell you about my peripheral
investigations on this Barbapapa thing or not. On the one hand, I
don't want to sound like the bumpkin who has accidentally
wandered into the unfamiliar terrain of a football game in Andy
Griffith's What
it was, was football; nor do I want to sound like Patrick
Buchanan in Houston, warning
America about a culture war. But my friends, this Barbapapa
thing doesn't look good. This looks like trouble if it comes to
these shores, I'll say. I'll give you a link, and you're free to
click it, but look, don't say I didn't warn you. Here's a link, and
here are some Google search
results if you want to go further. But honestly, this looks
like the kind of thing that will could corrupt the future of our
country.
I continue to be bummed that I blew my
baseball metaphor in the post below. If I'd only stuck with my
original idea of a starting pitcher staying in the game and
becoming complacent because he knew his ERA wouldn't be harmed,
I'd have been fine. But NOOOOOO, to stretch the metaphor to
accommodate Bush blaming the previous administration, Mr.
Smarty Pants had to make Bush a relief pitcher mopping up for the
previous administration. I am sooo bummed.
Judging pitchers and President Bush.
Here's how it works in baseball. Let's say you're a relief
pitcher who's been called in after the previous pitcher left with
bases loaded, two outs, and an error by another fielder. In this
inning, no matter how many more runs cross the plate, your ERA
(earned run average) will not be hurt, because, with two outs and
error, subsequent runs are not earned. But you do have to
worry about the game: all runs count towards victory and
defeat; if you are slow to react to the situation and let run
after run cross, you'll cost your team the game. It won't do to
blame your poor performance on the previous pitcher or on the
fielder who made the error: if you throw a tater across the plate
which gets launched over the center field fence, you gave up a
grand slam and endanger the victory. You cannot blame the
fielder's error for your pitch. (Good major leaguers don't, of
course.) President Bush's campaign, however, is launching a new series of ads
this week. What do we learn? Well, he inherited a recession from
Clinton, thanks to the dot.com bust; there was this attack of
terrorists that happened in the summer of 2001... And these are
the difficulties he faced in his term which should provide
context in judging his performance and the horrible deficit which
he's achieved. Now really, these events happened well over half a term
ago. He was inaugurated over three years ago, and September
11 was almost 30 months ago. What's he done since then? Well, to
return to the baseball scenario, this pitcher has given up grand
slam after grand slam, comfortable that his ERA would not be
hurt. He's asked us to forget about the miserable score in the
ball game. A more aggressive, feisty President wouldn't have dawdled in
his office, and would have been more decisive. For instance, the
Homeland Security department: this was suggested by Senators
Leahy and Specter; what was Bush's reaction? Resist; dig in his
heels; only cave in when public opinion demanded it, and even
then hang up its fruition while trying to change the civil
service/labor rules for the new department before approving
it. Another example? Osama Bin Laden. Remember him? Rather than
pursue the head of the serpent and bring him to justice, he and
his advisors came up with the Iraqi Circus, drawing key special
forces services away from Afghanistan and sending them to Iraq.
How do we know Iraq was a diversion? Well, those special forces
are now back in Afghanistan hunting for OBL. If that effort had
been adequately addressed while we were in Iraq, there wouldn't
really have been a need to re-deploy them in Afghanistan, now,
would there have been? As for the economy, Bush is now in a position where he has to
hope that the voters will take it as a matter of faith that his
tax breaks for wealthier Americans will improve the economy in
his 2nd term — because so far in his first term, new jobs
are not being created. If he hadn't dilly dallied while the
economy was in turmoil, if he had spent more time in his early
days finding concrete solutions and stimuli, and less time
talking about how bad the soup was that he'd been served by
Clinton, well, maybe he'd be somewhere by now. But runners are continuing to cross the plate. In the big
leagues, pitchers lose games, and they either knuckle down or
they get pulled. Just whose team is this guy pitching for?
And why doesn't he accept ownership? UPDATE: A correction is in order regarding what goes
against a relief pitcher's ERA. Runners who reach and score on a
reliever without errors occurring do go against that reliever's
ERA. My point remains, though: a responsible pitcher, whether or
not a reliever, accepts their own bad performance for what it is
and does not blame a fielder. A pitcher who stays in the game
with two outs and an error doesn't blame the fielder for runs
scored from batters who subsequently reach safely, which is
basically what Bush is doing.
Finally, we can see in our bedroom.
(Now, maybe seeing me in the bedroom is undesirable, I'll
admit...) Past readers will remember that I saw a link at Kausfiles (the
political blog run by Slate's Mickey Kaus) which read: So I clicked the first link, and read a page which
looked like it was on the Times' web site, until I got to
the following paragrapg: It wasn't until I read that paragraph that I realized the page
was not from the New York Times. I wonder if Mickey Kaus
understood it, too. To me, it's a stupid joke.
"Compromise" is not in the Republicans'
vocabulary. You may/not have heard, but a law which would
have limited the liability of gun manufacturers was shot down by its own
promoters today after Democrats tacked on two amendments
which wasn't to their liking. One of the amendments extended a
ban on assault rifles that dated from the Clinton years and had
been called desirable by President Bush; the other amendment
extended background checks from stores into the arena of gun
shows. Both of these amendments had been endorsed by several
police organizations. (See here,
here, here, and
here if you care.) This must have been too much for the
Republicans to stomach, so they scuttled their own bill. It never ceases to amaze me how little willingness to
compromise there is in Washington. We are talking here about law
makers who do not hold mandates, and, as members of the upper
chamber of the legislative branch, are supposed to look beyond
their own district and think of the nation as a whole, where
Republican-Democratic sentiments are still fairly evenly split.
The Republicans have clearly dug in their heels on this issue,
and shouldn't have. Why can't they compromise?
Complaints without reason. The Boston
Herald complains that John Kerry is missing too many votes
while he's on the campaign trail, and should return some of his
pay to the U.S. government. I find this harping: even when a
senator "misses" a vote, that doesn't mean the lack of a vote has
any impact on the outcome. First, not every vote is close, and
second, it's common practice to find another senator who would
vote differently and ask that senator to withhold their vote, so
that the yes-no difference is unchanged. So I personally don't
think this is a big deal, yet there are those who think it is,
Instapundit among them (through whose site I saw this link). But
he takes it a foolish step further, by thinking it
significant that Kerry would return to the senate today (a
big voter day for the Democratic primary) to cast a vote on gun
control. Obviously, the closeness of the vote has something to do
with it, and the vote went 52-47.
Practically every senator voted; it would have meant far more if
Kerry didn't vote on this, than the fact that he did. (The
world, needless to say, would be a better place if bloggers
— even popular ones like Instapundit — used
the brains which God gave them before they post.)
Is intolerance of children growing?
Via Steve
Danckert, we learn of another article on a trend that suggests
greater openness about not wanting kids (greater openness at
least, if not necessarily achieved). (As I write this, Steve's
link to the article is not spec'd correctly, so click my link,
not the one on his site.) Some of the points are startling, such
as a steady decrease in the proportion of households with
children: the census bureau, according to the article, expects
that by 2010 only a quarter of all US households will have
children. That's down from 50% in 1960. The census projection is intriguing, and I wonder whether or
not the aging of the population has been considered in it? That
is, how much of the trend might be due to shifting attitudes
within age groups, vs. an aging population? We've all heard the
impact which an aging population is going to have on Social
Security fund demands as the "baby boomers" reach age 65 —
those baby boomers represent a proverbial pig-in-the python for
the age distribution; as the population ages, would you
expect them to still be having children? I, for one, would
prefer to see the percent of households with children over time
with age of the head of household held constant. Someone I spoke
to at the Census Bureau said they don't break info out by age of
household head, so we can't do more than hypothesize about the
historical trend in households of child-rearing years.
Zell Miller, everybody's favorite nominal
Democratic senator, has decided that America was so
terrorized by Janet Jackson's breast in the Super Bowl halftime
show, that fines should be levied in the future based on viewership.
Interesting idea, but how about if we just refund the viewers'
money to them? That would help us understand the severity of the
affront. Let's figure out now... 90 million people paid
approximately 0 cents each to see the Super Bowl...
Update your virus data files now. Even
yesterday's files aren't fresh enough to catch the new one, Netsky-D. I got sent
one this morning, but knew better than to open it. Symantec has
additional details.
We let the Kid Unit stay up for the
Oscars — being a school night I'd have preferred not
— but we'd all just seen "The Return of the King" together
on Saturday, and the staying-up-late-mo was as strong as all
those dead people from inside the mountain. Do not get in the
way. This was the only part I could drag the other family members
to see in the theatre, to complete seeing the first two on DVD in
the previous two weeks. One of the nice aspects of seeing it
together in the theatre was that because we weren't in our own
neighborhood and headed to a restaurant afterwards, our enforced
proximity to each other meant that we talked about the movie
more. Lots of agreement and disagreement, of course. But it was
great to hash it all through together. One of our common
complaints was why certain parts took so long (the laughing scene
when Frodo wakes up; in fact, the entire ending...). So we were
surprised it took an editing award. A major disagreement between
the Kid Unit and me was over Eowyn: I saw a lot of depth to the
character, but the Kid Unit wrote her off as "too clingy." Odd,
since Arwen had earned the accolade of "mad girl power" after
part one, but not Eowyn after part three.
"The Return of the King," obviously,
was some kind of incredible juggernaut at last night's Oscars. I
thought it would do well, but I never thought it would take
everything it was nominated for. All the nominations seemed just
— I was never surprised that it garnered no acting
nominations, and even if you put a gun to my head I'd have
trouble singling out a performance deserving an acting
nomination. (I happened to really like what Miranda Otto did
as Eowyn across parts 2 and 3. I think her character showed the
greatest range of emotions and situations: daughterly devotion,
courage, anger, grief, courage and feistiness, intense fear, joy,
infatuation, hope... But unfortunately it was split across two
movies; it's also quite possible that she shined for me because
every other character seemed pretty limited.) Billy Crystal's joke after the movie had already won numerous
awards
(There is no one left in New Zealand to thank) was perfect
because it worked on three levels at once: the number of
awards, the number of people thanked, and the relatively smaller
population.
A sea of dishes... We had a couple
people in for dinner last night, and cooked up a storm. This
morning the kitchen shows the wreckage of several ships which
washed ashore. I was able to get a load into the dishwasher last
night before bed, but there are many mixing bowls, pots and pans,
wine glasses... A treat for this morning. We also took another
stab at poffertjes, and this
time we mixed in buckwheat flour along with the white flour, in
the 50/50 ratio recommended in most recipes. We didn't like the
effect at 50/50, and next time will try it at 25/75. As before,
though, we served them with fresh berries, which seems to be a
break from tradition. A nice one, I add. Otherwise, dinner was
veal patties (with prosciutto, and served in a cognac-cream
sauce), a salad, and pureed cauliflower.
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there was this great
picture of Marilyn Monroe which, well, pretty well summed up
"decolletage." I'm sure Johnson's Dictionary had a similar effect
in the 18th century with all its supporting quotations —
did Shakespeare ever use the word decolletage? (Actually, Johnson
was reluctant to use foreign words in his Dictionary, and so he
goes from "decollation" to "decomposite.")
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we had our bedroom renovated, and one of
the improvements was to get a new ceiling fan. The one we bought,
a Hunter 1912 Mission Style (shown at the top) was very
attractive, but the translucent shade just ate up too much light,
and you couldn't see the new colors on the walls without
constantly using lamps in the corner. The lamp itself will take
no more than 2 60 watt chandelier bulbs, and no halogens would
fit. We did everything we could to goose up the lumens and
avoid the hassle of uninstalling the fixture and shipping it back
to homedepot.com. But there was no choice, we needed a different
lamp, so we found this one from Casablanca, shown at the bottom.
A different design, of course, but it feels like the same era
(important in our apartment: the building was built somewhere
around 1900 and has a lot of wood detail that contribute to a
feeling of that era). It's also much brighter (hooray!) because
the bulbs are not shaded at the end of these globes. (The biggest
pain, surprisingly, has been getting the old fixture back into
its original box: I saved all the styrofoam, but because I didn't
install it myself it was a three hour puzzle figuring out what
was originally unassembled and getting all the pieces back in so
the box would close.)
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NYT columnists' corrections:
Well-done dopple. (Via Luskin). 3:42 P.M.
The Times does not welcome information about errors
that call for correction in columns written by Times' Op-Ed
columnists. Since The New York Times refuses to hold their
columnists to any standard of accuracy, The National Debate
has taken upon itself to offer this Supplemental Corrections Page
for New York Times readers. Messages may be e-mailed to
nytcolumnistcorrections@thenationaldebate.com.
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