This Land is Their Land

Who says you can't sum up the complexities of a political campaign in a
three-minutes song? They've done it at jibjab.com.

Bush the child king?

I was discussing Fahrenheit 411 with my ex-wife Jessica. I found her take
on George W. interesting. Not because she thinks he's a moron - everyone
with any sense calls George a moron - but because she's not just using it to
mean a dim bulb, and she's not just using it in the pejorative sense; she
means more like he's borderline retarded. And what makes that interesting
is that Jessica has always had an amazing talent for reading people. When
she saw Susan Smith crying about her children she immediately thought she's
actually killed them. She says she saw it in her eyes.

What she sees in George's eyes is someone confused by the world of adults.
She says he's like an Egyptian child king who is called the country's ruler
but is actually simply the puppet of his advisers. In Fahrenheit when he
was telling reporters he was getting lots of work done on vacation she said
he was like a young, boasting child. She's convinced if he were tested it
would turn out he had some sort of learning disability, which could explain
why he's always so tongue-tied. She says she could almost feel sorry for
him, lost and confused and powerless, if he wasn't also such a
conscienceless prick (you know he hasn't lost a night of sleep over all the
dead from his war).

Ronnie was senile, George is retarded. Republicans really don't care who
leads the country, as long as they lead it down the drain.

Another way to find music

I've been gettings MP3s through a free program called iRate. It downloads songs mainly, I think, from iuma.com, a site where musicians can upload their songs for free (my songs are here), as well as whatever other sites the author discovers. As you listen to songs you rate them, and the program looks for people with similar tast and gives you the songs those people like (along with the occassional completely arbitrary song to catch those genres you might like but haven't rated yet).

The program is originally seeded with what I think is just stuff the guy who wrote the app likes, so until I'd given enough of those negative ratings I was getting a lot of dance and trance music. After a couple of days of rating songs I started getting an interesting mix of bluegrass, jazz, classical and alternative rock, and I'm getting more and more good comedy songs. In a way, it paints a little picture of one's musical tastes. It's coming up with some really cool songs; if not for iRate I probably never would have heard Ruth Wallis's song Boobs. Nor would I have heard Man Bites God's terrific The Annoying Song.

iRate isn't totally user friendly. To install it you need to download a java thing if you don't have it already (instructions on the site). That's not bad, but after it installs, it doesn't create any sort of shortcut to run the program. Basically, you run the install program and it installs it. When you want to run it a second time you need to just run the install program again, and only then will it say, hey, you've used this twice, would you like a shortcut created for it? But this is typical of a lot of the open source software you find at sourceforge, which houses iRate. Once you've got the shortcut it's pretty easy to manage.

They like me, they really like me

Well, someone does, anyway. A PR person sent me a link to this reporter's
blog, in which he describes me as "the best game writer in the industry right now."
I'm always excited just to discover there are people who read my column
regularly, so this was extra special.

Bush's puzzling inability to think of common words

It's something we've all seen countless times. Bush is speaking to the press and he pauses for a very long in the middle of a sentence before he finally comes up with some pedestrian word anyone else would have popped out instantly. For example, the Daily Show had a clip of him mispronouncing Abu Ghraib (a habit with Bush) in which he said something like, "someone brought up the Abu Gharaf ................. situation ...." And I began to wonder why it took him perhaps 10 seconds to come up with the word situation. He could just be incapable of putting words together, or Dick Cheney could be telling him what to say through a small earphone, but I think Bush is just running through a series of his honest responses before finding one that will be
palatable to the American public. I think he wants to say, "someone brought up the Abu Gharaf bullshit again, and I just thought, Jesus Christ, you strip a couple of fucking towel heads naked and everyone gets on your ass." But he can't very well say that, so he says "someone brought up the Abu Gharaf" and then pauses as he runs through the words bullshit, crap, nonsense, annoyance and then situation pops into his head and he goes with that.

So everytime you see Bush pause to come up with a simple word, just think, what really horrible sentence does he really want to insert there?

The mysteries of obscenities

Was watching an Avril Lavigne video for her current hit, which I think is
called "did you think" and is telling off a guy for thinking he was going to
sleep with her. Like most of Avril songs it's a wonderfully calculated
ditty, managing to do something Britney Spears never could; make virginity a
source of justified fury. But the weird thing is a coupling that goes
something like, "did you really think you would get into my pants/Now I'm
going to have to kick your ass." The weird thing is, "into my pants" was
bleeped out but ass wasn't. Apparently ass is no longer an obscene word,
which doesn't really surprise me, since it's been moving that direction for
some time. But pants is an obscene word now, and that just came right out
of the blue.

Might as well try this out

Heard that blogger now lets you create posts by email, so I thought I'd try
it. Will the ease of this make me more likely to keep up my blog? Probably
not. I am full of opinions but I always have other things to do. They are
not all important things - watching television is one of the main ones - but
I find it hard to sit down and write when there's no reason, no deadline, no
money involved, etc. I admire all the determined bloggers who create a huge
wealth of material, but I shall probably never join their ranks. Time will
tell.

What I did

I was leaning towards Dean for the MoveOn primary but chose Kucinich in the end, mainly because of my friend Cheryl, who was lobbying for Kucinich, not so much because she thinks he can win the nomination but because she feels if he can increase his presence in the process then it will push the whole debate to the left. She included a message from a group called democrats.com that swayed me:

An interesting exchange occurred at Sunday's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Candidates' Forum, in answer to a question about the "Digital Divide" that separates minorities and the poor from middle class whites in computer access. Congressman Dennis Kucinich received warm applause when he declared: "As long as we're spending so much money for the Pentagon, and so little money for education, we're going to have all kinds of divides in this country. The only way we're really going to close the divide in this country is to start cutting the Pentagon budget and put that money into education."

Howard Dean spoke next and commented: "I don't agree with Dennis about cutting the Pentagon budget when we're in the middle of a difficulty with terror attacks."

That's a stark contrast on one of the biggest questions facing Democrats. Dean describes himself as a fiscal conservative adamant about balanced budgets. But if the soaring Pentagon budget is untouchable, are we being candid with voters about delivering them an enhanced domestic agenda that Democrats can be proud of?


Perhaps Dean just thinks that in these fearful times, saying you want to cut the Pentagon budget is a dangerous position, but of course the Pentagon isn't going to save us from terrorists, and Cheryl suggests he should educate people rather than pander to them.

Tomorrow MoveOn will tell us how the vote went.

Meanderings on who to run against the president select

MoveOn, a progressive organization devoted to battling the evil currently personified by GW Bush, has decided to let all its members vote on what candidate MoveOn should support. Each Democratic candidate was asked for a statement and was sent a few questions to answer. I haven't read the statements but I looked at the questions. Lieberman obviously doesn't take MoveOn seriously, since he just basically send the url to his website and didn't answer the questions. But no one at MoveOn is any more interested in a Republicrat (or is that a Demoplican?) like Lieberman than he is in us.

The most instructive question is the one on Truth, in which the candidates are basically asked if they're willing to call Bush a liar. Most of the candidates tip toe around this one, saying, I want to know the truth, I'm determined to learn what the president knew and if any information is withheld, but three, Carol Mosely Braun, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, are pretty open about their mistrust of GWB. They are easily the most appealing candidates.

Truthfully, they all say sort of similar things - war is bad, environment is good, poor people shouldn't starve to death - all those things that differentiate the two parties, but some express those ideas more strongly than others. John Edwards says a number of good things, really, but there's something slippery about many of his answers. Gephardt says some good things but I have a generally unfavorable concept of him as a middle-of the road political insider. Kerry seems pretty good, and likes to throw in a lot of facts and talk about specific plans, which I like. Sharpton tosses off short, rather vague answers that suggest he was sitting in the bathtub while his secretary took down answers he came up with off the top of his head while thinking of something else.

So now the question is, who do I vote for? I like Braun, but I think she'd be as surprised as any of us if a black woman became the president of the US in this decade. My theory is she's running just so Sharpton isn't the only African-American representive. My favorite is certainly Kucinich. He's as liberal as they come, and while all the candidates more or less talk the talk, Kucinich walks the walk like crazy. Other candidates say, we shouldn't have had a war with Iraq, but Kucinich is the only one saying, I voted against the war. At the same time, Kucinich has long shot written all over him. The Daily Show had clips of some of the candidates asking about where the weapons of mass destruction are, and Jon Stewart said you could tell how viable a candidate was by how vociferous he was on the matter, with Kucinich's shouted outrage pegging his as the longshot. It's an interesting point, and really, the most liberal candidate never wins. Often the least liberal wins, which is why Lieberman worries me.

Dean is interesting though. He seems as liberal as Kucinich, but simply doesn't have the same proof as Kucinich that he will put his money where his mouth is. But he's very good at phrasing things in such a way as to make Bush sound dangerous - he likes referring to him as a radical, and I think that's the right approach. So I think he might be the liberal who has some chance of winning.

But I wish MoveOn's sites had little videoclips of the candidates, because I can't tell from their words who is charismatic and who will put people off. We need a Clinton, not a Gore, not in terms of policy but just in terms of likability. I'm leaning towards Dean, but don't know if Dean has charm. The picture of Edwards on MoveOn's sites is the best, with him looking rugged and handsome, and Kerry has a Herman Munster look that could be a problem, but who's going to be good in a debate?

At any rate, a rabid dog would make a better president than GW, and right now I think everyone acceptable except Lieberman and Sharpton (I'm not going to even bother explaining why Sharpton is a bad idea).

The obligatory introduction

Welcome to Opinionade! I review videogames for the New York Times for a living, and I love spouting off my opinions on videogames, but I have opinions on so many other things and I feel I need an outlet to spout off about everything. So now I have joined the world of bloggers and when I have an opinion I will post it here. Will anyone actually read this? No idea, but I can pretend that it is being read by many, many people.