Assorted Afflatuses

Television has taken a break, as it always does, this holiday season. So, unlike most weekends when I can plop down on the couch and enjoy my hot chocolate with a dash of entertaining television, I sat down this Saturday to watch the news. BBC World had switched from its typical self-produced content to a re-branded feed of the BBC's domestic 24-hour news station, BBC News 24. Not unexpectedly, they had never-ending coverage of Saddam Hussein's recent trip to the gallows in Iraq.

But amidst the analysis and looped video clips, one aspect of Mr. Hussein's execution struck me as imbecilic — at least on the part of the Iraqi government — and incongruous: the men who hanged Hussein looked like run-of-the-mill extremists. And, of course, the executioner's choice to shoot the video with a low-quality camcorder — again, like the extremists — further casts them in the same light. If Mr. Hussein's face were blurred, I never would've guessed that the video came from the Iraqi government.

This event will probably plunge Iraq further into chaos and violence, now that the government has essentially equated itself with the same people who try to destabilize it day and night. The government should have put Mr. Hussien in prison for life or developed some other, more humane punishment, to set it apart from the extremist groups and put itself on the moral high ground.

When evaluating the president's popularity, pollsters often ask voters how likable they consider the president. At the moment, W's approval rating remains at very low levels indeed. I cannot speak for the entire country, however, I know my unfavorable disposition towards Mr. Bush stems, in part, from the simple fact that I do not find him very personable. He seems insincere. Even when he steps up to the metaphorical plate and fields questions from reporters at press conferences, W sounds more like a broken pull-string toy than a living, breathing, likable human being.

I have never understood why the public responds well to Mr. Bush in a "town hall" setting. Whenever I have watched his performances in such an arena, the president has made a fairly overt effort to dodge undesirable questions. I remember, during the second presidential debate in 2004, Mr. Bush completely — and probably intentionally — misinterpreting one of the audience members' questions.

Mr. Bush also has an obnoxious habit of haphazardly tossing in his questioner's first name, when responding to his or her question. It sounds very disingenuous, especially when W simply appends the questioner's first name to the beginning of a memorized sound bite.

So, since the president has, in my view, failed to come across as personable in nearly every medium — print, television, radio, and even blog — he should start an informal "presidential podcast."

The crucial element, of course, is informal. If the presidential podcast becomes a rehashed presidential radio address, then it loses its purpose. He needs to seem frank and forthcoming, rather than on-message and obdurate, as he almost always does. Otherwise, he may as well call Condi and go for a bike ride.

I recently purchased a Blue Microphones "Snowball" microphone for recording this that and the other. As the box says, "Perfect for Podcasting," I figured I would try it out by posting the first of what may become many podcast episodes. This particular episode spans a whole minute and twenty-six seconds.

Please excuse the somewhat unpolished audio; I know next to nothing about recording and the like, so it sounds amateurish. With any luck, the production quality will improve if I decide to produce more of these programs. Though, I did manage to have a great deal of fun with the accompanying music.

Enjoy.

Episode 01.m4a (708 KB; MPEG-4 Audio)

Happy holidays!

And, in the spirit of the season, the word for this week relates to teddy bears.

I pulled the bear's specs from this eBay auction.

As I mentioned previously, I had some problems with the TypeKey comment-authenticaion service, which failed to post comments as the logged-in user, despite that user being logged in. It made no sense. At any rate, I have now (mostly) fixed the problem by completely rewriting the comment submission template on my individual archive page. I still have no idea what I broke before, however, that's quite immaterial: it works now.

But, unfortunately, if you preview a comment and try to post it as a TypeKey commenter, that will still fail to post into the system as an authenticated comment. I could fix that too, by rewriting (most) of that template, but as the clock says I am now working on Saturday instead of Friday, I think I need to stop.

Despite the assertions of some that British English is not superior, but merely "different" than American English, I cannot help but wonder if the British, in general, possess a stronger command of the English language. I point to a recent article, again from the BBC, reporting that Joanne Rowling has released the title of Harry Potter's seventh tome. The article quotes a thirteen-year-old, to, presumably, provide a Potter fan's perspective on the new book's title. In response, he says the seventh book's title, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, "Sounds interesting, but a bit sinister."

This thirteen year-old casually tossed out the word "sinister" to describe a book title. I cannot imagine a typical American thirteen year-old using the word "sinister" to describe anything. The American news networks all published the same Associated Press article, which contained no reaction from American Potter aficionados, so I couldn't find a similar American quote for comparison. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume that an American 13-year-old would say something to the effect of, "It's cool, but kinda scary." I would argue that the British teen, who happens to share a first name with the boy wizard, expressed himself far more effectively in just as many words.

American Teens 0, British Teens 1

A story on the BBC recently caught my attention, not because it revealed anything particularly alarming, but rather because it contained a strange analysis of statistics. The article, "One in 20 Latinos 'goes hungry,'" details the findings of a new report, released today by the National Council of La Raza. According to the article, the new report claims that one in every twenty Hispanics living in the United States regularly lacks food. The article goes on to comment that such a rate, "is substantially greater than that of non-Hispanic whites," citing a government statistic, which puts hunger rate of non-Hispanic whites at 5%.

That analysis makes absolutely no sense. If the National Council of La Raza claims that one in every twenty Hispanics is hungry, then it could be said that five in every hundred — or five percent of — Hispanics are, unfortunately, hungry. How remarkable: the same percentage of non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites are hungry, according to these two sources.

And this is why, my readers dear, statistics lie: dare not go near!

Working into the small hours of the morning, I managed to make the MultiBlog aggregation system work. Visitors to the new homepage will now see the beginnings of a multi-blog aggression system that pulls entries together from my two current blogs, and will also pull content from two more content areas I plan to launch relatively soon.

But while I did manage to put the content aggregation system in place, I broke comment authentication on the entire site. I really have no idea what I did. It's still possible to log-in, and the system clearly recognizes that the user has signed in using TypeKey. Nonetheless, when the same user tries to post a comment, it does not receive instant "Published" status on the administration page, nor does it show the user as authenticated.

The number of visitors to my blog has also grown considerably in December. Only two-thirds of the way through the month I have received nearly three times the number of visitors who came in November. Though, to my continued bemusement, I still only have about forty comments on my hundred or so entries, which makes absolutely no sense considering the number of visitors I have each month. But then, a small contingent of Dutch and Swiss visitors seem to visit the site every month. Perhaps the visitors just cannot write very well in English. But for the Swiss visitors, I do speak French.

Since rehabilitating Kibeland in August, I have wanted to create a dedicated "Home" page where I could pick and choose from amongst the various content on different blogs to display prominently. But, until today, I had no way to do so, save creating a very elaborate system of conditional templates and categories. Today I discovered a great plugin, called MultiBlog, which allows me to aggregate multiple blogs onto a single page.

This new system, however, is still not the most intuitive I have ever used, so some features of Kibeland may not work correctly until I have finished setting up the system. Please, pardon the mess.

The other day, I left a fountain pen laying on a table at school. When I realized that I had failed to properly stash my stylish stylo, I figured that whoever happened upon it would probably take it for his or her betterment. And, as I discovered the next day, I was right. But I could always go online and buy another one. Or so I thought.

Apparently, MUJI, the Japanese company who manufactured the purloined pen, stopped making my model months ago. I visited MUJI's website, at mujionline.com, only to discover that they did not so much as list the pen as "sold out." Then I visited the MoMA Design Store's online storefront, at momastore.com, which also lacked the writing instrument I wanted to replace. Even eBay — where it's usually possible to locate anything — didn't have it.

All of this left me in an uncomfortable siutation. Of course, many manufacturers still produce fountain pens, however, those companies also have a strange tendency to charge upwards of $100 per pen. And while those pens might dash more fluidly across the page or better resist nib corrosion, I would prefer not to risk losing a $100 pen. By contrast, my MUJI model cost just $16, and it wrote at least half as well as my high-priced Waterman Carène. The MUJI's slick anodized aluminum finish also complemented my computing ensemble quite nicely.

I may buy something from Lamy, but I doubt that, dollar for dollar, it will work as well as the MUJI pen I lost. Frankly, I cannot see why MUJI stopped making the pen. It was an exemplary pen for the money and it looked slick too.

This week's word also deals with a strange disorder of the human mind.

Nearly a month ago, Qatar-based Aljazeera launched its English-language news channel, after many years of planning. But much to my dismay Aljazeera's English channel is virtually impossible to receive or even watch in the United States. None of the major - or for that matter, minor - cable or satellite television companies in the United States have agreed to carry the new network, doubtlessly out of fear that Washington politicians will deprive them of their special treatment. The Internet too, is an Aljazeera-free zone, at least for Americans. Both RealNetworks and JumpTV stream Aljazeera to subscribers, just not those located in the United States.

I would like to have Aljazeera's English-lanugage channel available to me, either on my television or through broadband video. This afternoon, I watched a low-quality Real stream of Aljazeera. And, true to their word, they put many stories on-air that other news channels do not. For instance, I learned a great deal about the breakdown of Mexico's police force. Apparently, Mexico's law enforcement operation has allowed a few small pockets of crime to spread. Now, rampant crime has penetrated all but the most isolated parts of Mexico. I have yet to see a similar report on CNN, MSNBC, BBC World, France 24, or Fox News.

Aljazeera also airs a fantastic program, called the "Listening Post," which spent the first seven minutes of its Sunday program deriding Fox News' attacks aimed at NBC's decision to call the Iraq situation a civil war. The program's content really made me think.

But, sadly, I doubt that Americans will have easy access to Aljazeera, at least in the short term. Most of the public knows Aljazeera as only the radical network, which broadcasts Osama bin Laden's communiqués. And, as a number of media analysts have noted, so-called "influential people" comprise the bulk of Aljazeera English's viewers. In other words, Aljazeera does not have much appeal to the broader public.

I love esoteric words. And while one cannot often make use of words like uxorious or halitosis, I still enjoy knowing what those words mean. So, I have decided to begin a new feature, my "Word of the Week." Each week, I hope to find some esoteric word and post it here. I have no doubt that some words will be both more esoteric and more interesting than others, but I intend to do my level best to choose something unique each week.

For this week, the word is:

I have no qualms about free verse poetry. Without question, many remarkable poets have composed their works without a rhyme scheme or meter to speak of. Students, however, seem to possess a certain propensity for dislike when it comes to the composition of poems with a rhyme or meter. On Monday, a few brave souls in my English class shared the poems they had composed for our "I'm Tired" poetry assignment, inspired by the somewhat macabre history of Pete in Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

But much to my dismay, not one of the shared poems had any semblance of a rhyme scheme or meter. I would not have minded if only half or even three-quarters of the poems lacked structure, but it disappointed me to see that so few people had chosen to give themselves some sort of boundaries when composing their poems. I have no idea whether my confrères at school simply prefer unstructured poetry or if they dislike the extra effort often associated with structured poetry. Frankly, though, I suspect the latter.

I end with my poem, yet another tirade against the lamentable online social-networking portal, MySpace.

O Rupert, Why?

There is a place, right on the net,
Where children post 'til dawn,
It's ugly and obtrusive, yet,
They fawn and fawn and fawn,

"How can this be?" I say and say,
Along with every click,
Cannot it all just fade away?
It looks and reads like sick,

The letter "I" ought be in caps,
Bemused does not mean glad,
Who are all of these writing quacks?
They make me very sad,

A photo of a green baboon,
With fuchsia does not go,
Nor does that sad new emo tune,
Make for a nice hello,

I tire of these spaces, my,
So ghastly and so vile,
One day I hope to say goodbye,
And strand them on an isle.

Once again, I have found something blogworthy in my website statistics. My assumptions could be wildly wrong, but, as with everything, I like to think I'm correct. At any rate, when I checked my website statics today, I noticed that someone had come across my website by typing the following search string into Google:

"the important thing is not to stop questioning. curiosity has its own reason for existing. one cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity of life of the marvelous structure of reality. it is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day."

This quote, which I mentioned in Shakespeare, Einstein, and Princeton, comes directly from both the mind of Albert Einstein and the essay portion of the Princeton University Undergraduate Application. This lazy or conniving student made such a blatant attempt to steal the contents of someone's essay that I hope he or she does not gain admission to Princeton in the spring. In fact, I would go so far as to predict that Lazy Larry or Conniving Chloe will relieve at least one piece of very unwelcome mail in the spring, if he or she has such a deficit of integrity or creativity.