First Draft

Weekend Question Thread

Why did you start blogging/commenting?

A.

That sound you heard around 8:30 last night

Was the collective squee of America's lesbians. Had it not already been such an over-the-top news day, I swear "WADERS" would have been a trending topic on Twitter.  

Full segment

Everything I need to know, I learned from Boogie Nights

(A.K.A: W.W.D.D.D?)

Sometimes the world doesn’t make a lot of sense.

My last university tenured someone and gave her a distinguished chair position after only about half the time usually required for tenure because she was the last person left with half a brain. Had it given those out to the people who actually did leave, the school would have been better off and wouldn’t be stuck filling three more positions.

A raving psychotic is likely to not only get his way in my current job but destroy our department as well.

My best friend got a jump on her mid-life crisis by doing something she always wanted to do, while my mid-life crisis is stalled because a) I hate tattoos and b) it needs to be fed with a classic Mustang I can’t afford. Meanwhile, the Missus just spent $89 on yarn for three pairs of socks while I’m stockpiling Diet Coke because I found a 5 12 packs for $10 coupon.

The long and thoughtful post I’ve been working on this week on the idiocy that was WaPo and the subsequent fall out has been trumped by Ms. A’s brilliance, thus making it pointless to post my version.

And while it seems like you couldn't name anything any other former VP has ever done in life, Dick Cheney is still creating problems.

So you might ask, “Doc, where can we turn when the world is so bat-shit crazy?”

My answer: “Boogie Nights, of course.”

Never has there been a film that more clearly defines what to do and what not to do in tense times. No other film has been as clearly inspiring or filled with fortune-cookie wisdom as P.T. Anderson’s magnum opus. The Missus and I ended up seeing this on one of our earliest dates, although that was inadvertent, given that I thought it was a story about 1970s disco movements. Of all the great moments, the best was in the theater during the scene in which we finally saw “it” exposed. The guy in front of me scoffed at the mammothity that was Dirk Diggler, saying something to the effect of “I’m close to that big” to which his girlfriend broke out in uncontrollable laughter.

Still, below is a list of all the things you can learn if you watch carefully:

You Don't Even Have a Name

What a bunch of whiny, entitled bitchery. Outing somebody because he said you were wrong? Automatic fail.

Honestly. I try to tell the newspaper kids I talk to about this kind of stuff all the time: someone criticizes you, why get into a two-week shitfight over where your critic went to school, who he "really" is, whether he's taken as many classes as you, etc etc? It just makes you look like a petty asshole. Why not instead focus on the substance of the criticism: Does this person, even if he goes by iLikeBigJugs553, have a point about some fact or interpretation of fact that I have published?

If so, either incorporate that into your next bit of work, correct the current post, or just resolve not to be such a dumbass in the future. If not, then ignore it because nobody cares. I mean, I know we bag on the Freepi a lot around here but during that week when they all called me an ugly whore, would it have benefitted me in any way to post sexy photos of myself and then demand they do the same so we could see who truly lived up to standards of physical beauty? So much easier to point, mock, and move on.

You hear this constantly from mainstream media pundits sniping back at bloggers, too: Oh yeah, well who are YOU, Mr. Imginary Internet Person, to point out the sky is not purple as I quoted Newt Gingrich saying it is but is in fact blue? You don't have a paycheck! I mean, so why? The sky is either blue or it isn't. I do not understand the impulse to prolong one's embarrassment at making a mistake by wanking about the credentials of the person who pointed it out. Except for that, of course, it makes the argument about something other than how you screwed up.

Take what's useful about the criticism you get and use it, even if it comes from some anonymous asshole on the Internet. Shove the rest.

A.

Weekend Question Thread: First Draft Talent Show

If we held the show tonight, what would your talent be? What would you do to amaze and inspire the assembled masses dozens?

I'd probably read something, if I could find something I'd written recently without any profanity. Wait.

A.

The Imperfect Masterpiece Revisited

(Ed. Note: Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of Harvey Haddix's "Imperfect Masterpiece." When I started this, I asked Athenae how long is too long. Her answer: "No such thing as too long on the Interwebs. If people don't want to read that's what the scroll button is for." Well, we're going to test that theory...  I spent my whole career writing 8-inch stories on deadline. I always wanted to try something longer and I've loved this story for my whole life, so pardon the self-indulgence and if you get through it all, let me know what you think. Thanks. -Doc)

The first thing that struck me about the man was how ordinary he looked.

During his playing days, he was listed as 6-foot-2, 190 pounds. From his position at the folded out card table in the middle of a dimly lit rec center venue, he looked like he’d shrunk a bit.  His hair had grown wispy and gray while his midsection had expanded a good deal. He had a bit of a hunch to him as he scrawled his name across varying pieces of memorabilia.

When my turn at the table had come amid the sparse gathering of Milwaukee Braves fans and semi-interested interlopers, I had a million questions.

What was it like that night?

Did you think the game would ever end?

What were you thinking when Adcock finally ended it?

The answers I got were less than satisfactory. The man had pretty much gone deaf as he ambled into his 70s. The fellow next to him, a handler if you will, also explained the man had been slightly handicapped by a late night out on the town with some fellow baseball alums.

Rather than conduct a pointless interrogation, I instead asked him to personalize the autograph he was about to sign.

“What?” he asked.

I repeated the request. He shook his head like a dog trying to remove water from its ears. The handler hollered my name into the man’s good ear and then spelled it.

The man dutifully wrote it down, added “The best” and his name.

I shouted a request to shake his hand and get a picture with him. He happily obliged.

As his rough paw took a hold of mine, a smile I didn’t know I had in me consumed my face. I was touching the hand of Lew Burdette, the human instrument that had faced perfection the likes of which no one had ever seen and defeated it.

Fifty years ago this week, baseball fans witnessed something that had never happened before or since: a game in which a pitcher retired 36 batters in a row and had yet to complete the game. On a cool May night in Milwaukee, Burdette and Pittsburgh’s Harvey Haddix faced off for 77 incredible outs.

Haddix had been perfect.

Burdette had been better.

Trying REALLY Hard to Withhold Judgment

Mr. A sent this to me with a question: Why is it that people need to make Sherlock Holmes into the 19th Century's Batman? Granted, Holmes had his disguises and his moments of derring-do but this looks like the Wild Wild West:



I want this to be good because I've been starved of Sherlock Holmes on screen since forever, and because I love Robert Downey Jr. and think he's not the worst actor they could have chosen. I've seen some actors who are physically unlike Holmes absolutely kill the part, like Frank Langella in the William Gillette adaption and this red-headed kid I saw years ago in a play, who managed to get me past his looks with his acting. I'm willing to be charmed and seduced by it.

And I'm not a total canon snob, I've read and enjoyed some pretty horrible pastiches ranging from Holmes investigating the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to time-travel absurdity and the Phantom of the Opera to Holmes being Jack the Ripper himself. But I may have to draw the line at campy sex hijinks with Irene Adler and the maid. Just ... no.

A.

This is the Future, Y'all

I'm not finding myself with a lot of sympathy for Meghan McCain's discovery that a lot of weaselly creeps who have made money off being assholes in public fora turn out to be ... weaselly, creepy assholes, but I have to admit this is a good line:

It’s really scary when the guy who houses his inmates in tents in the summer and whose most visible public-relations success involves pink underwear, boxers, and handcuffs tells you to tone it down.

Unfortunately she then goes on to deplore the reporting of what she Twitters, which ... EVERYBODY CAN SEE THE INTERNET. For fifteen years this has been true. If you're creeped out by people reposting your shit, then lock your updates or don't Twitter at all.

A.

Cold As The Star That Bears You

Caprica thread:

Q: There's a lot of really blatant racism in Caprica -- something you got a hint of in BSG but never really saw head-on.

A: Yeah, having a common enemy does a really good job of bringing people together. We always knew that there were tensions between the residents of the various Colonies before the Cylons came along, and now we get to explore that some more. We know from real life that it seems impossible to achieve peace on one planet. Twelve planets... it seems too Utopian to think that they wouldn't have conflicts. And I've always been intrigued by the fact that racism in the BSG universe is entirely cultural -- not based on ethnicity -- and that it exists in a world with little prejudice based on gender or orientation. Separating cultural conflict from conflict along all those other axes... it makes it starker.

Q: Ron Moore explained when he was writing the BSG finale that he had to remind himself, 'It's the characters, stupid!' -- that the storytelling always came back to the character interactions. Is that your motto for this show as well?

A: I always said that BSG was such a joy to write because you could put any two characters in a scene together and their pasts would instantly charge their interaction. On Caprica, you get the same effect, right out of the pilot. You learn more about monotheists and The Soldiers of the One, more about this crime syndicate that Joseph Adama is wrapped up in, more about Graystone Industries and their new Cylon invention. And you'll learn more about the conflicts between the colonies and the culture of Caprica. But, it always comes back to getting to know these characters.

A.

For the one or two of you that haven't seen this

The moment the reality show's audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she'd reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn't had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why?

... 

The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person.

Susan is a reminder that it's time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It's people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect. Susan has been forgiven her looks and been given respect because of her talent. She should always have received it because of the calibre of her character.

Collette Douglas Home

h/t ayse

Now It's Lonely Round These Fields: Final Galactica Thread

Jacob:

The sound startles a pigeon awake, on the floor of his apartment; it begins to walk and he blunders toward it, begging it to leave. He grabs a broom as it soars into the rafters, terrified. A bird in the house means death is coming; his brother has something he wants. He'll be dead soon. And Lee will feel so much guiltier about it than he knows, because this morning her face is a bird, fluttering against the glass.

He swings wildly and knocks something else off a table; he begins to curse the bird. She's caught, against the sky; she fights something she can't see because she is afraid. She fights because she doesn't know how to do anything else. Lee Adama loves Kara Thrace.

So say we frakking all.

Last one ever, guys. Boom boom boom.

No, really, seriously

Link to video from yesterday's special Battlestar Galactica panel at the United Nations. The video's two hours long, in RealVideo format, no embedded portions up anywhere that I can find yet. According to the UN Public Information Departmen, the discussion explored:

some of the themes that are of importance to both the United Nations and the critically acclaimed television show: human rights; terrorism; children and armed conflict; and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faiths. The panel will be moderated by Academy Award-winning actress and producer Whoopi Goldberg. Oscar-nominated actress Mary McDonnell, Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Edward James Olmos, and Battlestar Galactica creators and executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick will participate in the panel.

Imagine greater....in case Caprica doesn't pan out

As Battlestar Galactica comes to its climactic finale, many fans are desperate to soften the gaping black hole of emptiness looming afterwards. Some seek solace in looking ahead, rather, looking behind to the upcoming prequel, Caprica.

But what if Caprica is a dud? Worse, what if no matter how good it is, it will never see the light of day due to the whole SyFy transition concept hitting a huge wall of FAIL? What then will we do?

Allow me to offer a humble suggestion below. Sure, it's a tad low-brow... no, I doubt the UN will host a discussion about it, but we have to have hope, don't we? We have to move toward the light...

Days of octos past

I got nothing to add to this, except, "Wow."   Also, "wow."

via P. Z. Myers, newly-discovered 95 million-year-old cephalopod fossils that are amazing. Look at the preservation of the dimensions and details of the soft tissues, tentacle, suckers, and even the leaked ink.

UN Panel Discussion on BSG

Via Virgo's twittering, the UN has decided to become awesome:

Over the course of its four seasons, "Battlestar Galactica" has been lauded for its nuanced portrayal of war, faith and morality. Since it debuted six years ago, the Sci Fi drama about a rag-tag space fleet has offered challenging fictional depictions of problems afflicting our planet in the here and now.

And now a discussion of how those very issues have been handled on the show will take place at the United Nations.

On March 17, there will be a "Battlestar" retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as "human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith," according to Sci Fi.

The "Battlestar" contingent on the panel will consist of executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, as well as stars Mary McDonnell (who plays president Laura Roslin on the show) and Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama).

And commenters for the win:

Likely lectures and lecturers

A new method of population control, by Caprica-Six

Humane and environmental disposal of unlawful enemy combatants, by Laura Roslin

Genocide as a rational response to personal identity issues, by John Cavill

A modest proposal for reforming the UN, by Tom Zarek

I've always thought Zarek and John Bolton would get along well.

A.

On The Wing: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

Because as much as this episode is about the concept of home -- Laura's off-tone speech rapidly making subtext into text as clumsily as possible -- it's also about finishing the equation Sartre and Milton started: not "hell is other people," not "myself am hell," but something much better. Home is other people. Home is letting go of the place you only thought you were standing; the place you thought was home. And it takes the heaven of everybody else to get you there. (The shepherd Bodhisattva vows not to enter paradise until everybody else does first; the trick is that you then obviously have to go about making sure that happens. I submit to you that's precisely what we're doing and we don't even know it -- this is also my explanation for Gaius Baltar's amazing ability to duck enlightenment, if not redemption -- but imagine a whole world like that. It would be like Canada, but with God. How awesome.)

Lee leads Kara, Kara leads Sam. He thinks he's talking about Six, but it's Caprica that leads Gaius. And then Gaius leads Kara, too. Laura leads Bill, Bill leads Saul. Hera is Boomer's angel. Daughter Eight is Saul's, and Ellen too, toward something we can't yet see. All of them looking -- and helping each other to look -- for strength, and for wisdom, and that measure of acceptance that moves you into the next thing, the next shape, the next home. Pilgrims of mortality, they'll say at the funeral, and voyagers traversing the stars, in search of grace, unity, life, love: No man is islanded.

Bridges

Week before last I flew to Chicago for a few days to celebrate a friend's 50th birthday. She's someone I've known for 23 years, though we don't see each other that often. Now this particular person does happen to be one of those people that you can just pick right up with, no matter how long it's been since you last saw them, but the internet has played a significant role in our keeping close. In fact, years ago, for reasons best left back there, we stopped speaking for a few years but became close again via email.

That was after her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she reached out. They had just moved across the country, she was in a town she didn't know, she had a toddler, and her husband was going to die. She needed people to talk to and I reached back — because who wouldn't under those circumstances — but also grateful that it gave me a way to make a real amends for what had broken us apart. I long ago deleted the emails we exchanged during those months. I remember feeling they really weren't mine to keep. The particulars weren't what remained important anyway, it was the bond.

Anyway, on this same Chicago trip, I  finally got to meet the esteemed blogmistress of this very establishment. Over a great meal, she and Mister A and I talked about the whole online/real world collision thing briefly, but the conversation pretty quickly turned back to other stuff, movies, television, gossip, family,  the kind of things friends talk about over dinner

For a bunch of reasons, I don't really get it when people question the value of online friendships, not to mention what they can offer that's above and beyond meatspace acquaintance. The topic's been hashed and re-hashed, online and off, so don't worry, I won't attempt a treatise on it here. But it's been on my mind a lot lately, the way that people can come together. I never can figure out if it's the internet or if it's the distance it bridges. You know, the old-fashioned logistics, the miles away-ness, that encourages intimacy.

Back before I was born (needless to say, well before the digital age) my mother began a correspondence that lasted for years, with someone she would never meet. My mother collected rare shells and via a classified ad in the back of some shell collector hobbyist magazine, she came to contact a Mrs. Rook, first name Winifred, who lived in Australia. On one of the very edges of Australia in fact, in a cottage she shared with her husband, Mr. Rook, keeper of the Bustard Head Light.

I've still got the packet of wispy airmail envelopes. There's not that many of them, but then again, it's only one half of the conversation these two women had. Who knows what happened to the other half? I don't remember how or why it came to an end, but my mom talked about that relationship for the rest of her life. She was kind of an odd soul, and she didn't have a lot of friends, and none that shared her fascination with shells. So there was the great novelty of sharing this enthusiasm with someone she'd never met, coupled with how exciting it was to receive treasures from the Great Barrier Reef, tiny fragile things not much thicker than those blue and red envelopes. Shells that had survived intact, not just the postal journey but the week(s) long overland trek it took for them to get to the post from the Rook's isolated compound. If it was during the rainy season, the mail was picked up by a bush pilot but only if there was something else important enough for him to actually land the plane, so there was often a long wait, after which my mother might get two or three blue letters, and a package! As for the mail and the shells she sent back, they were more often than not airdropped along with the lighthouse provisions. I think this was probably when my mother developed her trademark form of extreme package bondage, the fine art of which greatly amused my college room-mates years later as they watched me hack through layers and layers of criss-crossed strapping tape and brown paper.

When they heard about her friend in Australia, people always said it was too bad that my mother and she never got a chance to actually meet each other. My mom would nod or say yeah it was, but I'm not so sure she would have traded those blue letters for that chance.

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Nothing Matters When You're Free: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

And when he's played the last note, Dreilide holds up one finger like a gun, for his daughter to blow the smoke away; Kara remembers, beautifully, and smiles at him. He touches her face as she recognizes him. She thanks him for visiting, calm again, with a smile and a laugh like a fresh wind. The cruelest thing about free will is knowing you've got your whole life ahead of you, and no trajectory but what you decide.

Not the Arrow of Athena, not the leader of the search, not the harbinger of the apocalypse: just a girl. To exist. That is an incredible amount of pressure. Kara's smart enough to live through it, but I don't know that Boomer is. She hasn't been so far. In order to be the man or woman you choose to be, you have to know the moves and be brave enough to make them.

Spoilers inside.

Housekeeping Notes

Because of the amazing amounts of really vile spam we've been getting in trackbacks, I've disabled them. Nobody was using them anyway. If there's really a thing where you used them and I didn't notice I can put them back, but seriously, it was pretty nasty spam.

For the same reason, after a couple of weeks all posts' comments will close automatically. I realize this might put a damper on commenting to older posts, but for the most part after a few days most people are done talking anyway.

Anything else about this place's operation bugging you these days? I'm going to be digging into Typepad pretty hardcore this weekend so drop a comment if something's wonky.

(I know the search function sucks. Suggest a less-sucky one if you have one.)

A.

Sailed Out Against The Sky: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

The first Article of Faith is and always should be very simple: this is not all that we are. The Final Five and the Cylon race are Galactica too: falling apart, rehabilitating, stronger and stranger, not fitting together anymore. Cobbled together from shoestring and half-remembered directives and fears. This scene is really sad, in a way: Ellen and Saul join a random Six and Eight, along with Galen and Tory, around Sam's bedside. The Final Five, together for the first time. And the daughters breathe in, joyful, waiting for the single event that will tie up all their loose ends and tell them what they're doing here, mend their rended hearts and recreate the Cylon world they remember, or something better. And nothing happens.

She'll Wait and Hope and Pray: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

"Someone contaminated the amniotic fluid in which we were maturing all the Daniel copies. And then corrupted the genetic formula. I knew it was John. Envious, sadistic." Cavil totally changes the subject to how he's a total sadsack and blah blah: "If I'm so irredeemable, if I'm such a mistake, if I'm so broken, then whose fault is that?" It's your fault, you stupid motherfucker. Even Kara Frakking Thrace has figured this out, and you're like this computer genius robot thing? "It's my maker's fault. And that's not God, that's you! This is on you!" All I hear is wah, wah, wah. ( Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould Me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?)

If this show's about the cycle of vengeance, if this show's about who you become when the world ends, if this show's about now what, well, now what? How do you decide when to stop blaming what made you for who you are? And if you don't like who you are, is it ever a better use of your time being angry at what made you, instead of just spending your crazy-ridiculous-short time on this planet fixing yourself up?

I ask an honest question here because I'm not sure, because I'm torn a lot of the time between this very everyone-would-say-normal need to put everything out on the table and make sure everybody knows the score, my own desire that the people I hate be miserable, concern that the people I hate could be out making other people do insane things for shitty reasons, and an enduring need to get work done.

And don't we talk all day long about the reason the present assholes get away with it is because the ones immediately prior never answered for their crimes? And doesn't Cavil have a point here? But is having a point, the point? I'm not being cute, I'm asking: where does justice end and vengeance begin? Is the former ever not the latter? Do I have to go back to The Winslow Boy to make this make sense? ("Easy to do justice. Hard to do right.") I don't understand this all of a sudden and it's weird, because I'm Catholic, this is mother's milk to us. This show keeps screwing with my head.

There actually is a show, by the way, with spoilers inside and a hot space chick with tattoos and an old man with a gravelly voice. C'mon:

Not all Texans suck. And here's a reason why:

As a people, we have an innate, near-Borgesian, affinity for the surreal.

Which may, or may not, be entirely subconscious. 

I'm in the middle of the audiobook of Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, which is partly a total squicky trainwreck and partly genius gutbusting funny.

And that makes this, below, even trippier and more inspiringly godawful tacky than it already is.

Debbie Reynolds, b. El Paso, in the first American Scopitone video. Made, not so incidentally, by her own Harmon-ee Productions company.

I love you, Mickey Hart

 

(Ed. Note: Due to a technical snafu, my second post of the day got eaten by the digital dog. Athenae was nice enough to let me post a "re-do" version with some updates tonight. I'll be back at the regular slot on Friday. Thanks for your indulgence. -Doc)

On this Valentine’s Day, what did it take for you to really come to grips with how much you love the one you’re with? Was it flowers, candy or a nice dinner? Was it a touching card that hit the sweet spot of human emotion? Or was it you and your partner simultaneously sneering at the “Hallmark holiday” that you don’t need to use to justify your love to anyone?

For me, it’s all about Billy, Jane and the love of Mickey Hart.

If you’ve never seen the movie, “For Love of the Game” this is going to need some explanation. If you’ve seen it, you probably wouldn’t mind the refresher course.

Kevin Costner is Billy Chapel, a 40-year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who is closing out his Hall-of-Fame career with an 8-11 season and a bit of lousy news. He’s finally come to the point in life where he realizes the game is leaving him behind, not just because of his age but also because of its values. (He thinks kids buy baseball cards for the gum, that his friend Davis Birch should have stayed with the Tigers instead of taking the huge free-agent money to go to the Yankees and that clubs should be owned by nice old men instead of corporate conglomerates. Yeah, he’s a bit behind the times…)

He is headed to pitch in New York, where his on-again, off-again girlfriend of five years, Jane, lives and he is hoping to start the next chapter of his life with her. Instead, she tells him she’s moving to Europe and that she always knew he didn’t need her.

“You and the ball and the diamond, you’re perfect… You can win or lose the game all by yourself,” she tells him before heading off to the airport and sending him off to his final start at Yankee Stadium.

For the first six innings, she’s right. He’s pissed, he’s reliving their life together via flashbacks (big tool in this movie, almost to a fault) and he’s firing smoke. He’s got eight strikeouts and everything caught behind him has been pretty routine. He doesn’t need anyone. 

In the seventh, an old arm injury flares up. Jane, her flight delayed at JFK, has been trying to avoid the game all day, but she catches this part of the game in the airport bar. She knows he’s not going to win now because he’s hurt and he’s stubborn and he won’t tell anyone (parallels anyone?) so she heads to the gate, where her flight is finally boarding.

Chapel makes it out of the inning somehow and retakes the mound in the eighth with a one-run lead (courtesy of catcher Gus Sinski, played brilliantly by John C. Reilly). It’s at this point Chapel looks back at the scoreboard and realizes he’s been throwing a perfect game. He asks Sinski if anyone’s been on base and the two finally have “the talk:”  Yes, Billy, you’re throwing a perfect game and now that you realize it, you’ve got to work even harder not to blow it. Billy staggers off the mound dejectedly, telling Gus, “I don’t know if I have anything left.” Gus props him up with the great “We don’t stink right now” speech, which has to be among the most inspirational things ever put to film. “Just throw whatever you’ve got, whatever’s left. The boys are all here for you. We’ll back you up. We’ll be there.”

Of course, the first batter is Davis Birch and suddenly, Billy can’t find the plate. He throws three god-awful pitches and he’s one pitch away from a walk that would kill the perfect game.  Birch is also a huge hitting threat, so he can’t just groove one either. Billy rares back, finds inspiration in a flashback (this time he flashes back to dad playing with him in the front yard as a kid: “Billy, you can do it. Just calm down. Throw the ball to the glove. Just play catch.”)  and throws a frozen rope across the inside corner. (Several cuts of Jane at the airport heading to the gate are interspersed here.)

So he’s 3-1 to Birch and still in serious trouble. Announcer Vin Scully notes, “Well they put the handcuffs on him 3-0, but he’s such an aggressive hitter, you know they’re going to green light him 3-1.” (Side note: has there ever been a better play-by-play guy that Vin Scully? He can make something epic without screaming like an idiot. Half the play-by-play guys in baseball make a routine fly to center sound like the Invasion of Normandy. Scully’s always metered and yet engaged.) 

Sure enough, Billy leaves too much of a fastball out over the plate and Birch hammers it to deep right field. It’s gone without a doubt, the music is this sad, slow piano and strings combo and to make matters worse, you’ve got Mickey Hart back there in right. The only thing Hart was ever known for was his “Canseco Catch” at Fenway where the ball hit him in the head and went over the wall. He was the guy Gus said “just could never catch a break.”

Hart is racing back, looking over each shoulder frantically, showing no sense that he’ll ever get there. Scully’s voice is covering the action “…to the track … at the wall…” And then you see it. Hart goes up, his glove just above the wall, and the ball smacks just into the webbing. He crashes to the ground holding the ball aloft. Scully: “… and LEAPS UP AND ONE-HANDS IT!”

Billy reacts with metered joy (hey, it’s Costner, he’s not going to go all “I just won the ‘Price is Right’ showcase on anyone), while Gus is screaming “YEAH! YEAH!” Birch stops half way around first and just stares at Mickey Hart with a “Jesus, if you could have played that way when I was here, I might not have left” look on his face. The Detroit manager, played by J.K. Simmons (another great casting move) is clapping and screaming from the dugout, “I love you Mickey Hart.”

Meanwhile at the airport, Jane’s practically to the gate when she hears the Yankee fans reacting to the catch with varying levels of groans and “how the hell did that happen” mutterings. She pauses and looks back at the TV, as Scully’s gleefully chattering: “He took a home run away from Davis Birch and the perfect-o is still alive!” Meanwhile, the lady at the gate is saying, “Ma’am, are you coming? I’m sorry, you’ll have to board now…” Jane freezes for a second, and then starts walking toward the TV as the ticket lady keeps calling after her, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” She reaches the group of people watching the game, drops her bag and calls back to the ticket lady:

“Give my seat to somebody else.”

The first time I watched this movie was about 10 years ago when it first came out on DVD. At the time, I didn’t have a DVD player and the movie folks were staggering DVD and VHS releases, trying to drive more buyers toward the DVD market. I was at Target, shopping with the future Missus during a weekend visit while we were dating. She had come down to visit me (we were living several states away and were very much like Billy and Jane: on-again, off-again and in that “OK how does this work” area). Buy it, she told me, you can watch it on your computer. I hemmed and hawed but she kept poking me. It’s your birthday, she said. I’m down here, and we’ll watch it together.

So we did and I bawled like a schoolgirl with a skinned knee when Mickey Hart made that catch. I still do. Two days later, I had to take the future Missus back to the train station so she could take a 9-hour trip back home.  I got her set up, we said our goodbyes and yet I couldn’t watch her leave. I put her on the train and got into the car and just sat there completely broken in half.  I waited until the train started to move. I waited until the last car had pulled out of sight. I waited for ten minutes after that. I didn’t want to leave.

I wanted to know if she’d given her seat to somebody else. She hadn’t.

I must have watched that scene 1,000 times in the next week and each time I thought of her. I had no idea what would happen next, but every time I saw that movie, it brought back that emotion and that feeling of curling up with her in a plastic office chair while watching that movie on a Blueberry iMac. I knew I needed that for the rest of my life.

She eventually moved down and when I decided to propose, I took her back to that same train station. After she said yes and put the ring on, we drove back to our local bar so she could have a drink and stop hyperventilating. After that, we went home and I watched that movie again. It’s been a symbol for me of how close you have to come to losing something before you really know you want it badly enough to do anything for it.

I return to the film from time to time when life is hard or I want to go back to that moment in time where I locked in on love. I popped it in early this morning after a beautiful Valentine’s Day celebration. It helped me remember that we’re in this together, no matter what the circumstances or how hard things get. It reminded me of the little things like buying that movie in Target or how she eats the breakfast I’ll make for her, even though I’m the world's lousiest cook. It always helps me remember that no matter how close to perfection I try to get, that nothing is ever perfect without her.

I also smile and know that she’s a special woman who doesn’t mind sharing my love with Mickey Hart.

You Must Raise Our Child With Dignity: Galactica Thread

Mrowr.

Jacob:

Adama's last act was to invite the 268s into a glorious future he hadn't written yet, and now he's been cockblocked from sketching out the rest of the story, from building the new Will to Meaning for everybody, to get everybody out alive like any good Adama tries to do. Can Adama be the Lie he used to be? Can he rally the tatters? If he dies, can Laura build a world around his memory? If he lives, can he talk the people into remembering there's a future? He spends this episode like the cat in the box, neither living nor dead, and we're right back at depression, the way you get out of it alive: can you commit yourself to that half-future long enough, on faith, to find your way out of the maze? Can you forget Christmas and Easter, the way Cally and Dee forgot to do, and have faith in the end of the story? Stop waiting and move forward into light.

Spoilers within.

We Had Dreams and Songs to Sing: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

One man's "there are no good guys" is another man's "then it follows that there are no bad guys," and I try to stay on the right side of that line, but this deck seems really stacked. It's all people who either A) don't matter or B) are so disgusting they don't matter, which means that anybody who throws in alongside them ceases to matter as well. Which is not how this should go down, because I want to root for everybody. Or, maybe in this case, for nobody. It's hard to see where the insurrectionists are coming from when this is the company they keep. I guess somebody that's not me could similarly say that it's hard to see where the loyalists are coming from when most of them are Cylons and all of them are suddenly pro-Cylon, which tracks because the Fleet is ignorant enough to think that "Cylons" are still the problem. But I've actually been watching the show for four years, and it's nothing like that simple. I just wish it were less simple to come down on this side, and I'm afraid one Racetrack -- whom I've always found boring -- and a few worried looks from Felix aren't going to cut it. This is a dumb plan, being carried out for dumb reasons, by the dumbest trash in the Fleet. How is that attractive?

This is the problem, though. You do something assholish, even if you're a good guy who by and large has a reasonable point, and you end up attracting these assholes because you need them to do stuff for you. You need bodies for your revolution so you take who you can get. And who you can get is usually who's irrational and pissed off, because you're in a hurry and they'll go along with your crazy fast and not ask too many annoying questions, like "now what?" and "should we, like, have a plan before we go all berserker on the place?" It's not that the revolution is bad because it's being propagated by sucky people, it's that the very nature of the revolution ensures a place for these rapists and dickheads because when all you've got is 10,000 hammers you need 10,000 nails. Flatheaded, thick ones, easy to bang into place. Thus, every rapist and dumbass on the planet ends up siding with you and if you feel sort of sticky afterward, well, look. You made up the recruiting brochure. This is what you asked for.

In any case, spoilers within.

Don't let the wintry mix win

Way to go @marlaerwin!

Fox To Host 'When Talkers Write'

SouthernBeale posted this up in Jude's PJM post. Jesus Christ, Greta:

I see that many of you want me to keep GretaWire …and maybe I will…I will think about it. There are reasons to keep it, reasons to close it down and move on.  To keep it going  I need to figure out how to make it more fun, do things differently.  I was worried it was just getting old (it has been up and running for years)……and I also see lots of nasty comments here. I really don’t feel like blogging with the haters.   I realize there are always a few jerks - haters - but because I am committed to the First Amendment I did not want to censor GretaWire (within some reason.)  I sort of hoped that the sickos would get bored and go away.  I know many of you want a registration system but that creates some headaches…. I might have to take GretaWire to another service to get that feature.   I really don’t know much about registration (in fact I know nothing about it.) So let me think about all this including your comments…Fox has talked to me about making GretaWire into a website instead of a blog but that is fun only if I can devote the time I need to make it really fun.

Sigh. Where to start? Giant blocks of bolded, italicized text might be contributing to Greta's lack of fun, perhaps. Also, people are HATERS. And, well, yeah, the Internet's full of assholes, just like the world. Blogging is HARD, especially when your blog consists of reposts of other Murdoch content, pictures of your studio, open threads, and weird animated .gifs from 1997. Look, I get that not everybody's schtick is writing upwards of 1,000 words a day on some topic, not including the curse words, but if what you do is primarily a graphic-enabled Twitter feed, maybe not so much with the bitching about how hard it is, mmkay?

But I think this is my favorite sentence:

I realize there are always a few jerks - haters - but because I am committed to the First Amendment I did not want to censor GretaWire (within some reason.)

Because, thanks, Greta. Thanks awfully for continuing to spread the mistaken impression that if you ban a dickweed said dickweed's Constitutional rights are being violated. Once and for all, the Internet is not America, you are not guaranteed the right to be a violent jackass in anybody's forum but your own, and if you are a First Amendment absolutist with regard to your site, the "within some reason" qualifier is a dodge.

Not to mention which, again, QUIT BITCHING. You can't volunteer for crucifixion for the Internet's sins and then bitch because the nails are too big and the wood is scratchy.

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On Blogging and Money

Scout e-mailed this over during discussion of the ongoing Pajamas Media meltdown:

I’m not complaining; I’ve had a good run on PJM. They were very accommodating to me when I needed to either stop being a PJM “exclusive” or stop being a blogger altogether, and I have very much enjoyed writing features for them - some of which I’ve been pretty proud of (and I hope have enhanced, rather than dulled PJM’s reputation) - and I suspect I will still submit a piece to PJM, now and again, particularly on issues of religion - which is one area the gang does not have covered, and where I do think I had something to offer.

It is a little of a bummer, though. I’d finally reached a point where I was breaking $1,000 a quarter in earnings. Yes, it’s a pittance and laughable, but frankly, it was the difference between staying alive as a (mostly) full-time blogger posting daily, or having to find other work and post just a few times a week. I’ll have to re-think the blog a bit, now, and figure out how to either make up for the lost revenue or substantially cut my blogging time, in order to work at something else.

Emphasis in the original. But $1,000 a quarter seems to me to be a great deal more than a pittance. Maybe this is just me trolling the Craigslist writing boards recently looking for ... I dunno, inspiration, but some of the offers for writing THERE make me laugh out loud. Or the people that want you to blog for them "for the recognition," but the site's one I've never heard of, or the company's a startup, or the company is freaking huge and they're just being cheap, in other words, the recognition doesn't seem like that big of a prize. Or they pay you based on traffic. For a new blog. Which it will take you a year of constant work to bring up to even a minimal amount of readership. GAH.

Pajamas Media sounded like a pretty sweet deal, compared to what else is out there in the wilderness. What happened to them sounds like a classic case of expectations being set too high. I remember their launch, when they were going to overtake the whole entire press establishment and do their own journalism and whatnot, and it sounded GREAT on paper, but you can't do that in three years just by ... blogging. You have to be prepared to sink some serious cash into newsgathering and then just wait, for people to get good, for people to learn, for readers to come, for the new model to catch on, and of course there was the little problem of hiring complete and total assclowns with no connection to reality to provide your content at a time when the national conversation was about to shift dramatically from Bush to Who's Next. 

And I think there is a sense out there, STILL, that the Internet = instant money. Maybe people aren't as wildly profligate with the venture capital as they were in the late 1990s but you see this in every story about newspaper readership and the web, this utter astonishment that you have to scramble and scrape and work for the dollars here just as you do elsewhere. There is no magic to it, you have to sell it here just like you have to sell everywhere else. I think people believe that the Internet is supposed to be different, and easy, and that has nothing to do with the facts on the ground and everything to do with believing one's own hype.

(FYI, the Liberal BlogAds network, on its very best quarter for First Draft, brings in wildly less than $1,000. More like $150, $200 on the best month we ever had, and then for months there's nada, and you can't predict or control it. There may be massive money out there for what we do, and I'm dedicating a certain amount of time lately trying to get us noticed more so maybe some of that money can come our way, but for right now, reader support is our main support. It allows us to do things like travel to events to report on them, replace busted equipment like a camera or a keyboard, and generally deal with what needs dealing with, but this is a labor of love and passion, not a job. We're so appreciative of what you give us during our annual fundraisers because it means you like spending time here, you value what you get, and that means the world. I'd never describe that as a pittance.)

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A Prison Ship Lies Waiting: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

But also: sucky Earth was the ultimate sign that there's no good fix for anything, ever, just all of us trying our best to get somewhere better. If True Blood taught me anything, that's it: the second you find the answer, it stops being the answer, and if you don't figure that out and keep moving, you are going to screw yourself over really bad. The only hope that really kills you is the last one, so you'd better come up with something else fast. There comes a point where you realize that finding joy in spite of (not instead of) being naked and broken is the absolute best you can hope for.

Imagine, if you will

What things were like before Athenae grew up and killed journalism.

Against the Famine and the Crown: Galactica Thread

Jacob:

What would you keep in your locker? The dogtags of the men you've loved and lost, certainly, and photographs of your dead relatives; records of achievements, sentimental notes from friends and lovers. All the things too precious to take with you but too important to store elsewhere. All the things you need to look at every single day in order to remain yourself. Anastasia keeps this picture hanging in her locker, and has for years: this little girl, innocent and full of hope. This is her heart, locked somewhere the world will never find it. This is how we stay clean.

Spoilers inside now.

Low Lie the Fields: Galactica Thread

Here's the thing about stories, good ones, ones that mean something. They're supposed to shake you up, knock something loose, change you inside, so that even if you knit yourself back together you can still trace the seam with your fingertips, you can still see the place where the change happened. I'm trying to find a way to describe the ache in my chest because it's not sorrow and it's not joy.

Jacob:

You fight for something, like Jacob for Rachel; you work to earn it, you flay yourself, open up your veins and your skin and your selfishness and your cruelty and the greatest shames inside you, to earn a sense of worthiness. You work to earn your just reward. And when you get it, it is broken. They burned off the things that kept them blind and they walked one painful, bloody step from the Altar of the Colonies, on which they were sacrificed, to the Temple of Aurora, and when they got there it was broken.

Friday Night Galactica Vid

Obligatory because-I'm-12 comment: I've heard of yelling some strange things during sex, but this is ridiculous.

ONE WEEK PEOPLE ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT OH MY GOD.

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Let Us Hope

2009 is like this.

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LURK MOAR

Dick. Diiiiiiiiiick.

Usually what I object to with jackholes like this is the "hey, I meant it as a joke, gosh, you're just so humorless" dodge they pull when called out on their jackholery. This guy makes it an art form, and yeah, he may be well within his rights, but to cloak your desire to be a chewy little frat fuck for the rest of your life in canting about free speech and how man, the terms of service say you shouldn't be abusive, and words can hurt, kids, so play nice, is really above and beyond.

Anybody with even a passing familiarity with alt.shitheads back in the bad old days of the Internet, much less a passing familiarity with the Internet now, much less a passing familiarity with humans, could not credibly say that anything BUT this would be happening.

I mean, really. Since people could carve slashes and arrows into stone they were putting up anonymous shit about each other. The only thing the Internet did was make such postings global. This is basic human nature stuff here. We're pricks, a lot of the time. We say crap online and we whisper behind people's backs and since the beginning of time this has been true. So you can't start something like this and then be all OMG BEN FRANKLIN INTENDED FOR ME TO DO THIS WHEN HE INVENTED ELECTRICITY I NEVER THOUGHT PEOPLE WOULD BE SO MEEEEEEEN!!1!

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Friday Night Galactica Vid (And Thread)

Flory sends this along:

"Battlestar Galactica" always finds ways to challenge the audience's beliefs—it is no more an ode to pacifism than "24" is to "bring 'em on" warmongering. In the pilot, humanity is nearly eradicated by the Cylons, a race of robots that revolt against their human creators. The only survivors are stationed on a spacecraft called Battlestar Galactica; they're spared because the ship's commander, William Adama (Edward James Olmos), had refused to relax any wartime restrictions. Adama is a hard-liner, willing to sacrifice personal freedoms in order to provide safety from an abstract threat. And he was right: the moment the human race let its guard down, the Cylons attacked. As the show unfolds, though, the survivors must constantly reflect on the price of keeping their enemies at bay, and whether it's worth paying. The show's futuristic setting—hushed and grimy, not the metallic cool of stereotypical sci-fi—helps ground the writers' ruminations in a nail-biting drama series. "Battlestar Galactica" achieves the ultimate in sci-fi: it presents a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy.

Which gets it wrong on a lot of levels, I think: Galactica looks a LOT like our world. Shit doesn't work right, the vagaries of bureaucratic crap dictate a lot of lucky escapes, people talk on phones that look like the phones in our houses, I mean the whole appeal of the show, hot space chicks aside, is that we could be these people in 15 years (granted, it would mean increasing NASA funding like a kazillion percent), not 1,500.

And the Cylon threat, as it was, wasn't abstract. Shit blew up in their actual faces, in the faces of everybody on all twenty-five sides of the argument, so it's the wrong construction, concrete-abstract, "real" world vs. academia, it's the cheap dispute: I have the right to my opinion and you're a sheltered moron STFU. The conflict between personal freedom and personal safety was never a hypothetical in Crazy Space World any more than it was here, and to say it was is to fall into the same post-9/11 traps Galactica skewers so effectively, about civil liberties being for pussies who live in the city, who've never known fear. That you can know fear and still say hey, maybe not so much with the genocide, that's the show's grand statement. Abstract threat. Come the hell on.

Moreover, even in the most painfully earnest of the "issue" episodes where Lee fucks whores to improve them and Helo cures religious fanatics with only the power of his pecs, the people were still people, not cardboard cutouts of The Military and The ACLU giving each other paper cuts. This show has always brought it back, from the very very beginning, to the personal, to reminding us that pontificating on the idea of "who we are" is a dodge for figuring out "who I am." If you don't know who you are, we don't stand a chance.

Plus I'm just kind of fucking annoyed at the mention of Galactica in the same pixel-space as the wingnutsphere's Islamofacist spank bank, 24.

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There Is A Hole In The World

Well, this certainly could explain the preponderance of all 31 flavors of batshit to which we've been subjected this week.

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Friday Night Galactica Vid

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Band Queers Represent!

"Band Queers."

That's what they called us. And to be totally fair, some of us were, even if we didn't realize at the time. However, in my high school,if you played an instrument other than a guitar and were in the band, you were a Band Queer, regardless of your orientation.

I've said before that I learned the meaning of irony in high school marching band. You see, there's something about marching, the act of declarative, deliberate, ritualized walking, that is revelatory. Those who haven't ever marched in any capacity, be it military, musical, or in protest, just don't get it. The other kids in high school certainly didn't, that's for sure.

But we did. All the weeks of sweaty August nights, practicing on that muddy, bumpy field behind the band hall, slathered with Off to protect against the clouds of mosquitoes that feasted on us, trying and failing, and trying again till suddenly it all clicked: the intricacies of the music embedded in our brains, the mathematical complexity of the formations understood and mastered, turns and counter marches exquisitely snapped off, and a hundred and eight awkward geek adolescents moved as one proud accomplished entity.

We knew how good we were and we knew that the others would never get it and we knew that didn't matter. We had a job to do, a show to put on, and a school to represent, whether they liked us or not. We were Band Queers. We kicked ass.

All of that, and of course so much more, was why I was in tears when I saw this news day before yesterday:

We are extremely pleased to announce that the Lesbian and Gay Band Association will be included as a marching contingent in the Inaugural Parade. This is the first time that an LGBT group will be represented in a Presidential Inaugural Parade, truly our chance to make history.

Friday Night Galactica Vid

The end of this show is going to wreck me, I just know it.

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Transparent and Connected. Can We Handle It?

Something very interesting happened over on the Obama transition team's Change.gov site a week ago.  It was the day before Thanksgiving, so it didn't make as big of a splash as it might otherwise have.  An invitation was issued to Join the Discussion and tell the Obama team "What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?"  Transition team members Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson opened the discussion with a video request for feedback.

"Today we're trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues -- with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top."

Making use of a system created by Intense Debate, the threaded discussion grew into 3,701 comments. Six days later, comments were closed, followed by an video response yesterday from Aaronson and HHS Secretary nominee Daschle.

I know I've done my share of Obama cheerleading but that's not what motivates me to find this chain of events pretty damned impressive. First, it'a a helluva change from what we're used to.  As noted on techPresident.com

Ordinarily, you wouldn't get too excited about reading those words on a website. But when they are on the official blog of the President-elect, things are a little different. In fact, this is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public "you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider," this is huge.

Second, I think it's fair to say that it signals that Obama and Co. want the electorate to believe they are serious about those campaign promises regarding enabling citizen access to the process of government via technology. 

I'm optimistic but still a bit cynical, or at the very least cautious. I am fascinated at the prospect of an actual meaningful exchange, but I use the word "signal" deliberately.   We obviously aren't yet able to take full measure of the true extent of the interactivity, from both sides. The Daschle response video was short and shallow,  mostly intended to get the point across that "We're listening!"

The signal's been received, noted, and appreciated, but now what? What happens to that input? Having a forum makes a difference to the citizens but will it make a difference to the policy makers?  How do we know and what will we see as proof of follow-through? There's a good argument made here that a more wiki-like approach would greatly enhance the conversation. It's also likely that some system of revision control/notice will have to be put in place to demonstrate transparency. 

Change.gov took another encouraging step on 12/1 by switching the site's content over to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which in effect, says that the content on the site is free to the American public to take and use as they want.  Imagine that...

We can assume that other issues will be opened to a forum on Change.gov. I think we can also count on the White House website morphing into something much more Change.gov-like after the transition of power.  Ideally, if promises are kept, this will bring information access, interactivity, and greater transparency into the daily business of governance. And what about us? Will we respond accordingly and participate?

Friday Night Galactica Vid

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'There Ought To Be Congressional Medals For People Like That'

You know how sometimes at Thanksgiving you go around the table and you say what you're thankful for? Well, thank you.

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Friday Night Galactica Vid

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Intelligent. Not so grown up

Hey, David Frum!

Bite me.

 

 

And I guess when you say that you want the discourse to be more grown up and more intelligent, I agree with you on intelligent. I don't necessarily agree with you on grown up. I think there's room for all sorts of different kinds of discourse including satire, including teasing, including humor. There's a lot of different ways to talk about stuff and Americans absorb things in a lot of different ways.

Friday Night Galactica Vid

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Friday Night Galactica Vid

Yoo hoo, Floooooorryyy! Your boyfriend has a new job!

As Metaquotes puts it:

IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, THE PEOPLE ARE REPRESENTED BY THREE SEPERATE YET EQUALLY IMPORTANT GROUPS: THE POLICE, WHO INVESTIGATE CRIME, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEYS, WHO PROSECUTE THE OFFENDERS, AND MATT DEVLIN, WHO SEDUCES CRIMINALS UNTIL THEY CONFESS TO EVERYTHING THEY MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE DONE. THESE ARE THEIR STORIES.

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Friday Night Galactica Vid

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Interwebs

Not actually the root of all evil:

In what was described as the first detailed survey of its kind, released last weekend, researchers reported that family life has not been weakened, as many had feared, by new technology. Rather, families have compensated for the stress and hurry of modern life with cell phone calls, e-mail and text messages and other new forms of communication.

"There had been some fears that the Internet had been taking people away from each other," said Barry Wellman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto and one of the authors of the report, published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "We found just the opposite."

In the poll, 60 percent of adults said that the new technologies did not affect the closeness of their family, while 25 percent said cell phones and online communication made their families closer and 11 percent said that the technology had a negative effect.

It's easy to deplore anything new as the easy way out, to lean back against the wall of the hipster bar and cock your hat and talk longingly of the days when things were real, man, when it was about the music, and whatnot. I think everybody who writes went through that phase where only a typewriter would do, because it made the teen angst poetry you were pounding out seem like elevated expressions of the darkness within us all, instead of just self-indulgent crap anybody and everybody scrawled in journals.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody else; I love my No. 9 Oliver typewriter that looks like something out of a steampunk fantasy and weighs as much as an anchor like I love my own left breast, but without e-mail and especailly Facebook, I'd have lost touch with half the people I know long ago. I save almost all of my e-mail like people used to save their letters; I don't feel the words have any less value because I read them on a screen instead of on paper. And I'll fight you to the death over whether print is dead (it isn't, except in cases where it's being murdered; more on that later this week) but that doesn't mean I don't occasionally turn on the wireless to get news through the airwaves. It's not the tools. It's the use to which you put them.

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Friday Night Galactica Vid

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