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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 7, 2008
As the once-invincible, still-insufferable Patriots attempt to come to grips with their 17-14 Super Bowl loss to the Giants, the death of their dream to go undefeated, and the possible end of their dynasty, almost every other person in America is reveling in what they consider the perfect ending to New England’s season.
Well put!
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 5, 2008
It may look like gobbledegook, but the most streetwise of teenagers would have no trouble translating and responding to it in kind.A new language is being developed by cell phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.
Key words are replaced by the first alternative that comes up on a mobile phone using predictive text — changing “cool” into “book,” “awake” into “cycle,” “beer” into “adds,” “pub” into “sub” and “barmaid” into “carnage.”
The new code of youth, I guess.
Posted in Americana, Nuvo-Techno | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 3, 2008
People are screaming on my block in New Jersey, just a few miles from Giants Stadium. Screaming.
I was driving home from Acme with some orange juice and, okay, I checked my BlackBerry one more time to see if the Giants could do the impossible… and they had.
And they did.
And if you don’t see the human interest story — the plain-vanilla, gets-no-respect coach… the overshadowed younger-brother quarterback… the team of no-names picked for a .500 season and perhaps one playoff round right up through the late fall — then you have no heart.
Posted in Americana, Heart and spirit | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 30, 2008
To me Rudy Giuliani was about salvation from the New York that David Dinkins allowed to happen — the New York typified by the pogrom in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, and which drove my family out of the City.
How ironic, then, on the day that sees the sun rise on the end of his campaign for President, that Jews — politically unpopular, or at least awkward — in Crown Heights are once again “in season,” and New York’s nominally Jewish mayor and the rest of the liberal establishment once again could not care less. As David Kelsey says,
If Jews were being attacked by skinheads or Muslims in Brookyln, you would be hearing a lot more about it. But strangely, when it comes to black on Chassidic violence, the J-blogosphere is suddenly quiet outside of Crown Heights/Chabad community members. No hippies….no Zionists…no hipsters.
It doesn’t help that, religiously and ideologically, the particular hasidim in Crown Heights have made themselves largely loathsome to many. But it hardly matters. Nor is it surprising, for the same Upper West Side Jews who do not care now are the ones who overwhelmingly in shockingly high numbers voted to keep Dinkins in office after Crown Heights, rather than vote for law and order as personified by the “fascist” Giuliani. They are the heirs of the don’t-make-waves Jews who sat silently in this country during the Holocaust. This is no Holocaust, but it is shameful nonetheless.
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works, Oppression, Past is prologue | 10 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 21, 2008
This is one of the first posts on this blog, and remains one of the most-likely to get hit by a search engine. It hasn’t seen the front page in three years, though, so I thought this would be a good day to re-post it:
The online Globe and Mail has an important item on how documentary filmmakers and others are being slammed by the IP equity grab, called “How Copyright Could be Killing Culture”. Okay, maybe “killing culture” is a little over the top. I suppose if more rigorous enforcement of copyright would throw a speed bump in front of the likes of Michael Moore, our modern Leni Reifenstahl, that would put a little chill in the air — but is that killing “culture”?
The point of the article, flagged by Tech Law Advisor, is nonetheless well taken. On the road yesterday morning, I listened to the entirety of the “I Have a Dream” speech on the Imus show (and, indeed, wondered about permissions — or does Imus need them?). The speech is breathtakingly beautiful, compassionate, stirring, patriotic; it is a truly appeal to America’s better self. (What a contrast to the self-parodic tropes of King’s imitators.)
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1999 that the speech was not “generally published” for purposes of waiver of copyright, and that the King estate had the right to enforce its copyright in the speech. It is interesting to learn that King himself filed the copyright for the speech (albeit a month after he gave it — one of the issues in play in the case). According to the Globe and Mail article, however, for the makers of the King documentary Eyes on the Prize to renew their copyright clearances, they would need between a quarter and a half a million dollars. Evidently they won’t or can’t do it, so untold numbers of schoolchildren (who, please God, are prevented from listening to Imus’s show) won’t be exposed to the documentary, the speech, or this compelling version of the MLK story.
(Read the rest of this post here.)
Posted in Americana, Gelt, Heart and spirit | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 21, 2008
A big, jumbled-up antique store can make for some very odd juxtapositions.
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Suburbia | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 20, 2008
Can you opt out of negritude? Alan Wolfe in Slate:
Although he was accused of being one, [Randall] Kennedy defends the idea of labeling a person who betrays a cause, or, for that matter, a race, as a sellout. Sometimes it is necessary for a group, in the interests of cohesion, to defend itself in a less than pleasant way, even to the point of coercion. One reason the much-praised Montgomery bus boycott was successful was because those African-Americans tempted to break it were threatened with physical harassment. Compared to that, William Hannibal Thomas made truly harmful comments about his own race and was met not with violence, but with calls for ostracism, two reasons that Kennedy concludes it was justified to call him a sellout.
Kennedy, however, also believes that “choice is always an element of racial citizenship.” Just as one’s citizenship in black America can be revoked by the group, one must also have the right to resign from the group. There is always, as a result, a fine line to walk between group solidarity and individual integrity.
Choice about racial or ethnic “membership”? It is certainly appealing, the idea of being able to choose who you “really are,” and very American. In college I decided that it wasn’t going to work for me. (It’s actually rather pathetic to see watch Eastern European Jews pretend to be Ivy League WASPs, though one of them, Ralph Lifshitz, made a fortune selling the idea.) It frequently doesn’t work out too well at all – just ask the late an unlamented Bobby Fischer, or Michael Jackson.
Posted in Americana, Sisyphus | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 17, 2008
Afraid to talk, write or advertise about the SUPER BOWL?
Posted in Americana, Gelt, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 16, 2008
Glenn Reynolds writes, in reference to a predicted threat to the technological leadership of the US:
The big problem is that the American workplace doesn’t make technical jobs attractive enough. The pay is okay, but less than that of other professionals, like lawyers. And the working conditions for engineers and scientists are generally quite poor — too much Dilbert, not enough Skunk Works. They act as if there’s a positive conspiracy to take all the fun out of it, according several of my friends who work in the area.
Well, I have had this discussion with Instapundit before. I just don’t understand how a market-oriented guy can utter formulations like this. “The American workplace” isn’t some guy with a green eyeshade. Unless Glenn wants to see a Japan, Inc.-type “investing in winners” and pay-scale-setting government policy instituted here, which I certainly know he doesn’t, what is the point of this?
It would seem there is some structural reason that technology workers are compensated at the level they are here, considering all factors (e.g., the cost of living), if indeed it’s the case that they are undercompensated.
Bashing lawyers, again, is not the answer, because not only we can never make technology jobs competitive with the best professional jobs, but we can never make the gap here look anything like the gap in the developing world, i.e., among our putative competitors. They are not, in the long run, going to be one of possibly two or three global centers for international finance nor the sort of commerce that makes business enterprises find it worth paying attorneys $400 – $1000 an hour to protect their interests.
In short, let’s stop comparing apples and oranges. Envy is not a basis for policy-making! Like you, Glenn, I sometimes wish I were fresh out of a good law school (as we both once were, if not quite the same law school) and contemplating those starting salaries and bonuses, just for a little while. But those times, for both of us, are rare; life is basically good as a human being, isn’t it? Even human beings with science degrees would agree.
UPDATE: One Instapundit writes in to suggest a secular reason for the problem: Legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Well, you can indeed blame the lawyers for that one.
Posted in Americana, Gelt, Stragety | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on January 14, 2008
I don’t think I’d want to eat a food item that resembled me. Further, I don’t think I’d want to watch a room full of people eating bits of food that resembled bits of me.
A fortiori, the likes of me.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
