Frankie Manning, Inventor of Lindy Hop, Teacher of Cool

Frankie Manning, one of the originators of the dance known as Lindy Hop, or Jitterbug, or swing, or whatever you like to call it, died this morning, two months shy of his 95th birthday. And while one can't feel too sad at a good life that lasted a very long time, it is hard to imagine a world without Frankie Manning.

When Frankie taught Lindy Hop, he would pair everyone up and then tell the guys to look at the girls.

"Fellas," he would say genially, "do you see that lady before you? That lady is a princess. And what do you do when you see a princess? You bow."

This wasn't a lesson in manners, this was a lesson in leading the swingout. Frankie would take a step back as he bent at the waist, his right arm sweeping back, and look very much as though he were bowing as his partner stepped forward.

That was what was so cool about taking classes from Frankie. He didn't just teach the mechanics of dance, he taught the attitude. Frankie was all about attitude. Watch the video below. That's Frankie dancing with Dawn Hampton, another swing legend. Nothing they're doing is particularly difficult from a technical standpoint, but it takes decades to learn to be that cool. You can see they have the music deep in their bones.

Frankie was the only teacher I've ever had who really focused on attitude. One of my favorite Frankie moies begins with a traveling tuck turn, in which you lead the girl to turn while moving foward in a straight line, and all you have to do is stay even with her as she moves. There's really nothing to that, but when Frankie moved alongside the girl, he did it with this elfen charm, this light, twinkling step (Frankie always twinkled, when he spoke, when he danced, and of course when he smiled) to what was essentially just a 2 second stroll. And he emphasized that this was part of the step, that you needed to create that feeling; you couldn't just walk along as though it didn't mean anything.

I think about the way Frankie moved when I lead that step, but I don't have it yet. Hopefully I will by the time I turn 94. I wish I could take another lesson from him, and just see again exactly how he does it, but now, alas, I am on my own.

How to create customer dissatisfaction with ease

Sometime back I signed up for some sight called ilike.com, because they had a facebook app, and this was before I got sick of facebook apps.

I'm not quite sure what ILike.com is, but you tell it what music you like and it tells you something. It will tell you when bands you like are performing, but I don't go to concerts so I set my iLike email notification settings to never tell me about favorite bands performing.

So when I got an email notice from iLike that U2 was playing near me soon, I was annoyed. I went to the site and checked my settings, and sure enough, my settings were such that I should not have received that email.

Okay, so there's some flaw with their programming. That's no big deal, sites always have issues. I'll just contact someone on the site and let them know there's a problem and give them a chance to fix it, right?

Wrong, because there is no way to contact anyone on the site. There is no way to report any problem. I could not find a single, solitary email address for users. So then I thought, okay, I'll just close my account so the can't bother me any more. But guess what? I couldn't find any way to close my account.

So I added iLike into my spam filter. iLike is dead to me. A site that does not want to hear from its users should not, in my opinion, have any users.

Vista no more, and I don't miss it

A couple of weeks ago, my PC died. Not the PC itself, actually, just the operating system Windows Vista, which stopped booting up. After a lot of internet research and a lot of trying this and that, I gave up and wiped the hard disk for a fresh install.

I did not, however, install Vista again; I went back to XP. Because I have hated Vista since I "upgraded" to it. The terrible security system that wouldn't let you do the simplest things without asking you if you were sure, and wouldn't let you do some things at all (there were certain folders and files on my computer for the entire time I had Vista simply because it wouldn't let me delete them. The software incompatibility that included Microsoft's own products. The ass-backwards way they tried to improve Windows for gaming and made it worse instead. I had meant to write a whole blog entry about the ways in which Vista sucked, but never got around to it. It is shocking that Microsft would issue what is at best a poorly designed service pack as a new OS, although more understandable if you read this interesting description of how the Vista shut down interface was designed (read the comments too; some are from other Microsoft programmers).

I didn't instantly go back to XP simply because it seemed like too much work. And I thought I would miss the handful of new, minor but useful features of Vista. But I was wrong, I don't miss Vista. Forget those commercials in which Microsoft tried to convince the world that Vista was a good product with bad buzz; Vista had nothing that counterbalanced all its aggravations.

Sure, the folder search on the fly was handy, and the checkboxes that could be used to select files were rather clever. But that's about it. I liked the new start menu, but I discovered that the best thing about it, the ability to type in a program name to find it, can be more-or-less replicated in XP with a freeware program called Launchy that actually works better than Vista's version of the same idea.

Microsoft should never have released Vista, which is the most disastrous OS update since Windows ME. And once they realized it was a disaster, they should have spent time trying to fix its serious flaws with a series of service packs rather than devoting all their energy on their next OS. Microsoft has pissed a lot of people off and made as convincing a case as anyone can that there is no reason to upgrade, ever. XP works fine, there still seem to be drivers for everything and if we just all agree to stop buying new Microsoft OSes then we can all just keep using XP until some Linux programmer comes up with a satisfactory solution for playing games on PCs.

Is Microsoft Trying to Kill Windows

While Windows Vista, the poorly designed mess that makes hell of the life of anyone stupid enough to install it, has been seen as just another Microsoft screw up, I've begun to wonder if perhaps Microsoft is depressed and is trying to kill itself. Like people who do really dangerous things until they die, as opposed to people who just shoot themselves.

This has come to mind because for about the third time, Vista has decided it might be pirated software and is bothering me about it. Last time I had to phone up Microsoft and spend 10 minutes convincing a human this really was a genuine copy of Vista (sent to me by Microsoft's PR people). This time there's no one to call; I'm getting a pop up, and none of the solutions on Microsoft's website work.

With all the problems and disappointments of Vista, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to want the next version of Windows. Vista sucks so badly that Microsoft has pretty much shown that they have no idea how to design an operating system.

A bunch of smart people work for Microsoft though, so how could that be? I think instead the whole company has gotten depressed that Gates is gone and they've decided to just keep using Vista to fuck with people until no one will buy Microsoft products anymore. Then the company will die and I think we'll all be happier for it.

like putting lipstick on a chimpanzee

A few months ago, conservatives claimed Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was a sexist slap at Sarah Palin. Liberals and people of common sense rose up as one to say, justifiably, that the claim was absurd; just because you mention lipstick and a pig in mocking John McCain's claims of bringing change to Washington does not meaning you are attacking a woman.

Now those same liberals who decried McCain's attacks on the lipstick remark as transparent political posturing are up in arms over a cartoon in the New York Post in which a chimp is said to have authored the stimulus package. Notorious opportunist Al Sharpton claims that the cartoon is a racist attack on Obama, and the liberal media has fallen in lockstep behind him.

But no, it's not. It is no more racist than Obama's lipstick remark was sexist. The cartoon isn't funny, or clever, and The Post is a right wing piece of shit, but that doesn't make the cartoon racist.

People are looking for subtleties in a cartoon devoid of any. The cartoonist just took his cue from the recent shooting of a chimpanzee gone mad and clearly meant to suggest nothing more than that the stimulus bill was a mess.

The chimp is not made to look like Obama, even though some headlines are describing it as Obama portrayed as a chimp. On the other hand, there is an entire website devoted to comparing George W. Bush to primates, and a cartoonist for the British paper the Guardian frequently presented Bush as an ape.

I suspect you could find a wealth of political humor over the decades comparing presidents with monkeys; the monkey/chimp/ape is often used to reference a lack of intelligence. Are monkeys now verboten from political humor because someone has decided they are racist? I would say any cartoonist that drew Obama as a monkey would just be asking for trouble, but are we now in a place where no monkey can appear in any cartoon referencing the Democrats?

I am disgusted by the hypocrisy of people defending Obama's lipstick remark and then turning around and attacking the Post for something quite similar. If it's wrong for one side to play these opportunistic games, then it is just as wrong for the other side to do it.

Why I Won't Be Watching the New Season of Lost

Imagine you’re at this party and you start talking to this guy. He’s a really cool guy, and he starts telling you a story that is one of the most interesting you have ever heard. It’s a story you think can’t be topped, but then he segues into another, even better story, and you think, wow, this is the coolest guy ever.

Forty minutes later he’s still talking, and it’s all still pretty interesting, but it looks like the alcohol’s running out and there’s this really hot girl talking to a friend of yours and you’re thinking, is this guy ever going to run out of stories? And after another 10 minutes you decide no, he is never going to run out, or pause to take a breath, and you politely excuse yourself.

This is the best analogy I can come up with for why I’m not going to watch the new season of Lost.

If Lost had wrapped up its story at the end of season three it would have been a short but perfect series. But now, as season five is about to kick off, I just don’t care anymore.

It was obvious by the middle of season three that Lost was losing focus. It was still really good, it still had a lot of “wow” moments, but it felt like there was a little more filler, that the show had to go a little too weird to keep up the momentum, and that it was really time to wrap things up. I even thought of blogging an open letter to the producers asking them to make that season the last one, but never got around to it. It is unlikely they would have listened anyway.

I didn’t think the show had anywhere to go by season three’s end until that last “wow” moment in which we get a glimpse of post-island life. Perhaps, I thought, this new twist would kick start the show back into high gear.

It didn’t. Instead, Lost increasingly seemed like a show going in a thousand directions at once. Since season one I’ve been worried that the series could never wrap all its bizarre twists and turns into something that made sense. I thought it would end with nothing but loose ends. But as Lost kept explaining one thing in a convincing manner while introducing something else, I began to think maybe they would pull it off.

As season four progressed though, I came to the conclusion that such a thing was no longer possible. The show has increasingly relied on a sloppy mysticism and it is my belief that the producers have probably convinced themselves that the Island should remain in great part a mystery. I do not believe they plan to offer a satisfactory explanation to all these years of weirdness, and that because they’re not planning to explain, they feel free to throw in more and more "out there" plot turns.

I could be wrong, but it’s unlikely, because you could not at this point explain everything in a two-hour finale. They would have to start explaining things bit by bit from the first episode and do that all season, without introducing any new mysteries. And based on the last four years, I don’t think that will happen.

Season four once again had me thinking about writing that open letter, but once again, I didn’t. It would not have mattered; the producers had actually decided already that they were going to end the series ... in 2010.
I can't go through another two years of unanswered questions, weird pseudo-science, and characters who refuse to answer the simplest question in a straightforward manner (seriously, if I were on that island I would've tied Benjamin to a chair and beat him with a stick until he told me what that smoke monster was). If Lost were a book, I would be jumping ahead to the last page right now.

Will all our questions be answered in two years? I doubt it. I expect the show will end with many loose ends, the producers will decide to make a Lost movie they promise will explain everything, the movie will come out and simply add some more mysteries and everyone will feel like a sucker.

So I'm done. By the end of season four I had simply lost my enthusiasm for what was once my favorite dramatic series. I just don’t care what happens from now one, except to the extent that when the series is finally ended I will go to Wikipedia and find out how it all turned out.

Lost isn’t the only series at this party, and I’ve listened to enough of its stories. Now I’m going to go over and say hello to that hottie from Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

how my anger at Republicans got the better of me

Sometimes you know you should keep your mouth shut but don't. Well, I guess some of you know to keep your mouth shut and do, but I'm not one of those. It's something I'm reminded of every time this girl I know glares at me from across the room.

A bit before the election, a facebook friend posted a status report that if McCain won he would leave the country and hang out with his friends talking about how stupid Americans are. Another facebook friend replied to his comment that it was absurd to say people who voted for McCain were stupid. I knew she was voting for him, because her own facebook status had said something like, "I'm voting for McCain, and I'm not stupid or a liar." (I don't know what the liar thing is a reference to.)

Obviously there was no good reason to say anything, but between my paranoia that somehow the Republicans would manage to steal this election like they did the last two and my general fury at those who had kept Republicans in power, I added a comment of my own beneath her comment, which was something like, "Most of the people voting for McCain re-elected Bush, and if someone did that, and after what has happened in the last four years still believes the Republicans somehow deserve to continue to run this country, well, stupid isn't such a stretch." I did not add, even though I wanted to, that saying "I'm not stupid," does not mean you're not stupid. Paris Hilton says it all the time, and then manages to say something utterly moronic within the next two minutes.

She wrote me an angry note and took me off her friends list.

So why do it? Well, partly because I've always been bad at keeping my mouth shut. But mainly because of my rage at Republicans. I mentioned the re-election of Bush for a specific reason; because it is less defensible than a vote for McCain, and I wanted to offer her the opportunity to say, well, I wasn't dumb enough to vote for Bush again after the mess he made, but McCain will be different.

Her not saying that suggested the she probably did vote for Bush in 2004, and as far as I'm concerned, that is a vote for torture, preemptive war (a.k.a. invading foreign countries that have not attacked you) and redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. And I really have an issue with that.

Still, it was impolitic, and unkind, since I think she's a genuinely nice person, though misguided. Had she said after the election that she voted for McCain and the people who didn't were fools I would probably have simply ignored her.

Of course, had I been in her shoes I would simply have made my case. She could have argued that McCain would be different from Bush. Some would say the real problem with Bush was not his politics but his gross incompetence, and that McCain is smarter and more capable than G.W. Or you could simply say that the issues important to you are those McCain supports. While you can argue with their politics, you can't say people who voted for McCain because they were against gay marriage or abortion or because they desired a radical right wing court were stupid. In that case, obviously you would want McCain over Obama.

I would argue that adding a comment on facebook opened her up to replies, impolitic or not. If I added a comment to a right wing facebook status report I would not be surprised if I got some flack for it. That's the danger of chiming in.

This doesn't make me any less undiplomatic, of course, nor does it change the fact that someone who goes to almost every dance I go to hates me. Learning to let stuff sail by without comment is something I aspire to, but it's hard to change a lifetime habit.

Addendum: eventually I and the Republican had a dance class together, and since she seemed perfectly friendly there, the next time I saw her I asked her to dance and she said yes. So everything's as it was, except we're not facebook friends.