"Desert Caution: Once 'Stormin' Norman,' Gen. Schwarzkopf Is Skeptical About U.S. Action in Iraq"

[via Daypop Top 40]

Get ready for the big show tonight with the "State of the Union drinking game"

[via Daypop Top 40]

Yesterday, when she got back to her hotel room in New Orleans, Terri watched the original version of Bedazzled, which features Dudley Moore and Eleanor Bron. Earlier that day, back home in Cambridge, I had watched Doctor Zhivago, which features Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie. I suppose that's only amusing if you're familiar with the Yo La Tengo song, Tom Courtenay. Terri claims that she thought of the line from the song when she saw Eleanor Bron, too, but she still associates her more with the Beatles' movie Help! (which is of course also the reason that she appears in the YLT song). I can say no more.

Speaking of "No Child Left Behind"... if anyone wants to read more about it, let me know. The new edition of one of the book's I'm working on, American Education by Joel Spring, offers an informative critique of the policy. Just because legislation focuses on education reform, that doesn't make it good. There are a lot of different kinds of reforms, and these are not necessarily good ones. Whether or not this kind of policy even "worked" in Texas is debatable at best.

Rant rant.

We have been doing a lot of work on the site, and new stuff is coming really soon, I swear!

We hung out with Chek today. He's in town because his friend was in Boston for a science fiction convention, and he decided to come along for the ride/mini-vacation. It was good to see him and catch up. We now have a good reason to go to upstate New York more!

We are working on improvements to the web site, and just ordered food from Bombay Club.

Go Howard Dean.

Dean criticized the president's education plan, called the ''no child left behind" act, by calling it the ''no school board left standing" act.

I have a new Aubrey Beardsley calendar here at work and it's helping to satisfy my ongoing need for art in my life. I am surrounded by art postcards and things here in my cube. Occasionally refreshing them is very good for me.

On the reading front, I haven't yet finished Think... or Death on the Installment Plan (though it seems like I was getting the idea with the Celine...), but have gone ahead and started A Wild Sheep Chase, the Murakami book I got for Christmas. His books are reliably decent, and I'm enjoying it. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is still the best, hands down, with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World coming in a respectable second.

It snowed again a little bit here today... a nice surprise after constantly hearing that we're going to get snow and then not getting any. Today they said we'd be lucky if we got flurries, and we ended up with a new coating to an inch on the ground.

I am working on our honeymoon scrapbook and I think it's coming out nicely. It's hard to get napkins and relatively flimsy things like that to stay snugly in the photo corners, but I just can't bring myself to destroy our precious artifacts with glue or tape.

We made soup last night using our new cookbook (a Christmas present from Ezra's family). It came out all right, but I think we should have used more beans. We may add a can or two to the leftovers and see how that goes. It's got lots of garlic in it--5 cloves all together. I think my fingers still smell a bit like garlic!

We're in the middle of watching Cradle Will Rock. We saw the first 1/2 last night and will watch the rest tonight. I've been wondering about this movie for a long time, given its impressive cast and 1930's setting. Much as I suspected, it seems like it's mostly panorama and not much plot. But, much as I expected, the cast is impressive (as billed), and it's visually fun (for me). It's a bit reckless, which can be both good and bad. I sort of admire that, but it doesn't necessarily make it good. We're having a little bit of a festival with Bill Murray these days, and he's one of the fun parts of the movie. Suddenly it seems like he's cropping up in a heap of good movies (well, we're discovering them--they were already there).

Reading The Godfather. It's kind of pulp but I can't put it down. Schmaltzy and no great style, but the story really hits some buttons emotionally, and physically. In the chapter where Michael kills of Solozzo, I felt an adrenaline rush.

In the New Year's spirit of taking stock of where we were and where we are going, here's Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think," which predicts, among other things, the PC and hypertext. 

I find its optimism is a bit giddy, even though I am generally a technophile. I wonder how many of today's "visionaries" will be as correct in 50 years. I certainly can think of none of their visions which I actually think I want to see come about in 50 years. I can think of none who have such a humanistic outlook; everyone these days is hung up on different ways to fundamentally alter what humanity is, that I can think of no one who even tries to prescribe what a good life might be.

Maybe I'm fishing for a counterexample.

Orgnet. Interesting.

I am eating a little lunch and in a bit I will go out for a walk. The Salvation Army bell is ringing outside. They have lots of different volunteers out ringing the bell, so it's not the same person outside my window everyday. They wear a red apron, but no Santa suit, or even a Santa hat. Maybe they think it saves them money to not wear the Santa suits. Maybe they think that it makes their cause more secular (but this is the SALVATION ARMY, for heaven's sake). I did see one woman last year wearing a Santa hat, and I made sure to drop some change in her bucket.

I went out for a couple of drinks with the ladies (Cheri, Rita, Katherine) last night. It's always so good and cathartic to chat with them. And I know that I am not the only one with a crazy schedule since it seems like we only really get together once every couple of months! It's the same with many of our friends, but there has been much travel and running around going on lately. I am so ready for everything to calm down a bit. Some quiet-ish time at home with the cats appeals to me.

What else is news? Kimby's cat Callie has diabetes. She is boarding at the vet while Kim and Glenn are on their honeymoon. I have been designated as the go-to person should anything happen while they are away. Right before the wedding Kim spoke with the vet and it sounded like Callie was improving. I haven't heard anything from them, and I'm thinking that no news is good news. She's a sweet little kitty. Hope she's not too traumatized.

I started reading David Lodge's Thinks... the other day. Bought it at the airport on the way back from the wedding. It's really not bad. It flows nicely, and while it's not a terribly demanding read (which is good right now), there's still some interesting stuff in there to think about. I'm also in the middle of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan (started it in Portland) and a variety of other books!

Well, I think it's about time for that walk!

Happy wedding day to Kim & Glenn! I'm killing some time before I have to go to my assigned duties, so I thought I'd lug the laptop to somewhere where I could get internet access, so, even though Terri is going to kill me for setting foot inside one, I'm at a Starbucks, leeching from one of their new wireless internet access points. It's a bit rainy outside, so even though the Manassass battlefield is only an exit away, I'd rather be at Starbucks. I've always felt that there are enough civil war buffs in the country that it's well covered. I'd rather remember things just as they're about to be forgotten.

Last night Terri spent the night in Alexandria with Kim, so I was on my own at the hotel this morning. There are three or four different kids' teams staying in the hotel: field hockey, soccer, track. The continental breakfast room was packed with them this morning. I ran in to Al and Debbie, then Suzi and Anita. I ran to CVS to see if they had any umbrellas better than the one I already have, and when I got back Sue and Nate were down, just about on their way to the hair salon in Alexandria, and they were talking to Kay and Larry. I talked to them for a while, and then went back down and talked to Helen and Harold, who were sitting with "Johnny O." (a.k.a. Watson) and Maria.

I probably should actually head out and see if I can get cell phone reception and try to get in touch with Terri.

I have to admit that I'm completely addicted to being on the Internet, and was starting to feel weird after being disconnected for the past few days. I also have to point out that I would be utterly addicted to C-Span Radio if we had it in Boston. Til next time...

I think Edie likes The Pogues.

Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't, but the site's down right now for repairs.

If you don't care about the painful details, skip the rest of this paragraph. I bought a new router, because Microcenter had wireless routers on sale for $60 after rebate, and then I could use the wireless card for my Forrester laptop at home to have a connection to the Internet anywhere in the apartment. But something about its port forwarding is different than my old router's, so for some reason, I couldn't get Apache configured to actually answer requests right. So I decided to just reformat the hard drive on this machine, and start from scratch. I set a lot of things up on that machine before I really knew what I was doing, so I had been meaning to do this for a while.

Anyway, it'll be back up by the time you read this, since you won't read this until it's back up.

I have time for these home IT projects since Terri's away in D.C. at a conference. She's staying with Kim, so they'll also be doing some wedding-oriented stuff like Kim's bachelorette party.

We flew to Pittsburgh last weekend for Nora's wedding. It was all a whirlwind, but it was nice. I got to meet many famous people from Terri's youth, like the other Gallers and Nora's friends Nico and Leslie. We also made an effort to drop in and see Greg and Dawn since Dawn is with child and we're excited for her. We stayed at the farm, and even though I swore to myself that I'd do no manual labor, I got some nice scratches on my face while helping Mom & Dad clear some thorn bushes near the back property line.

Terri and I went on a record-buying rampage through Cambridge's many fine used vinyl shops this evening. We picked up albums by Robyn Hitchcock, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Scriabin, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby, Jack Teagarden, and Lester Young.

While I eat some Cocoa Blasts and write this, Terri is now typing things on Matt Shaw's typewriter, which is still sitting on our dining room table from when we were working on the flipbook project for Sarah & Michael.

I'm looking forward to the long weekend. It's Columbus Day, which is still celebrated in Boston.

The site improvements are coming along. I found some really nifty software to make photo galleries, whilch should make it way less time consuming to make our little photo albums. The photo albums it makes are nicer and easier to navigate, too. One of these days, all two of you who come to this site will come back to find it utterly transformed.

I'm reading many things simultaneously; The Decameron, one of Terri's college textbooks about Buddhism, and some stuff I bought in Portland (starting with some essays by Octavio Paz).

I spent some time at the Apple store at the Cambridgeside Galleria last night. I would love a schnazzy new G4. But I'm trying to be realistic, and ask myself what I would do with that that I can't do with my current computer. There's really very little. iCal and iPhoto are the best parts of it. But it's not like I'm so busy that I really need iCal, and it's not like we even have a digital camera that we'd even need iPhoto. Anyway, I'm trying to stick to my guns. I care more about software than hardware; I care more about what people actually do with software than the software itself. Which is what led me to find the schnazzy photo gallery software and inspire me to actually do work on the website.

So now it's October and the weather is still stinking hot--I hate it. Where's the Fall I love?? My hopes for snow for the holidays are looking rather dim. Maine, Canada, Minnesota, and Alaska are all looking good right about now.

I hope to maybe do some work on the website... possibly tonight... and anyway, soon. I swear, new stuff is coming!

We spent last weekend in Portland, Oregon for Sarah Braun and Michael Hamilton's wedding. It was stinking hot out there one day, too, but pretty nice. I like the houses there, and the landscape is pretty. This weekend we are headed to State College. I have a haircut scheduled and I am SO ready for a new 'do.

Well, back to work. Need to do a few more things before I get to leave.

Think FALL HARDER.

We're back!

I hope to do some more work on the site soon, so stay tuned and hopefully all the new stuff will be posted before too long.

Think FALL.

It's that time of year again! Terri (and even I) watched PSU clobber Nebraska last night; it's a nice change from the past couple of seasons.

In more important news, we capped off the end of the Anniversary Week™ festivities this evening by taking the top of our wedding cake out of the freezer. It still tastes pretty good, which was a pleasant surprise.

Hooray! I got Blogger working again. The Terri & Ezra Show website never quite recovered from the change from MediaOne to AT&T Broadband. It broke a lot of the images on the site, and AT&T has goofy restrictions on its FTP site that make it impossible for Blogger to log in. I was going to write my own weblogging software, but it just didn't seem quite worth the effort.

Anyhow, it comes as part of a renewed effort to get the Terri & Ezra Show back up again in honor of our first anniversary. Woo hoo!