Close My Eyes, She's Somehow Closer Now

This upcoming weekend, I plan on writing what feels like my 90th post regarding the upcoming election. I hope to cover two items: [1] I plan on endorsing a presidential candidate (guess who?) and [2] I’m going to engage in a little armchair prognostication, discussing what the world will be like if Kerry is elected, and vice versa.

But for today, more light-hearted fare:

On a run last night, I was lucky enough to hear Ed Ward’s review of Brian Wilson’s 37-years-in-the-making album, SMiLE. (The review’s audio link is the bottom one on the linked HTML page)

Ed’s review is wonderful, and I’m happy that Wilson has finally completed this work. After the review, KQED played a great big chunk of Good Vibrations, the central track of SMiLE (of course, Good Vibrations was released in 1966, shortly after it was recorded; however, it was released as a single, not as a track in a larger album).

Running to Good Vibrations (iTunes link) felt, well… good. This song profoundly influenced rock music, challenging McCartney and Lennon to produce Sgt. Pepper and the White Album.

But a seminal place in rock history wasn’t why Good Vibrations soothed me. Good Vibrations does something else for me, something important. It manages to incorporate conflict, contradiction, and confusion into a central theme while retaining a hang-in-there inspirational quality.

For so many people, these days feel shifting and dangerous, important and decisive. Good Vibrations reminds me that uncertainty isn’t necessarily negative. Uncertainty can be neutral, even positive. When Wilson penned this song, the times – they were a-changin’. Same as now.

Triumph in a John Stewart mood

If you liked a fired-up John Stewart on Crossfire last week, you'll love Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog in the spinroom after the third presidential debate.

(Patience on the movie download. It takes a looooooong time.)

Plausible Deniability is the New Black

Look good as you move humanity ever closer to Ragnarok. They are Banana Republicans.

The New, New Scarcity: Personal Wikipedia Entries

The web creates amusing scarcities of language.

During the e-heyday, the race to lease a short, business-worthy domain name resulted in companies with names that seemed like (a) random adjective/noun combinations or (b) little more than short strings of Latin characters. Bluedog. Beenz. For Pete's sake, someone even bothered to lease AllTheGoodNamesWereTaken.com

Around the same time, a perceived scarcity of email handles appeared. Suddenly, we weren't just bobby@hotmail.com or sally@yahoo.com, we were fastkid457@yahoo.com or sally33@yahoo.com. With the semi-launch of Gmail this year, Yetties had another land-grab on their hands. Will you be justin@gmail.com, or the lesser justin12@gmail.com?

I know that this background information is old news, but here's the real deal: From a cultural zeitgeist perspective, Wikipedia 2004 is Google 1999. Wikipedia grows more popular and more useful everyday. With the growth of Wikipedia, a new type of online scarcity will appear.

You can learn a lot about famous people on Wikipedia, Grover Cleveland, for example.

You can also learn about Donald Hoffman, but he's not famous. Don plays trombone in Sinister Dexter, a band in which we are both members.

I defined Donald Hoffman about 30 minutes ago. I got dibs. Normal people are going to start getting Wikipedia entries, and you may wake up to find out that your name is defined as someone else.

Other Donald Hoffmans could appear on the scene, but Wikipedia already has a definition for Donald Hoffman. They'll have to be Donald L. Hoffman or Donnie Hoffman... that is, unless I define those, too.

Sure, people could change the definition of these words to resemble the life story of a different Donald Hoffman, but (a) that would take a lot of damn gall and (b) I think the primacy of my posting on the topic would tip the revert-war balance my way in the eyes of the Wikipedia masters.

Even people with unique or multi-cultural names, like, say, Garth Patil are not safe from other Garth Patils preempting the moniker's definition. Generally speaking, however, the degree to which your name resembles the names of other internet users will correlate closely to the time it takes for its definition to get swooped up.

Go get defined.

Jon Stewart Hacks Crossfire

This weekend, set aside 10 minutes and read the transcript from today's Crossfire program. You don't need to really start reading until the guest for the evening, Jon Stewart, joins the program.

Stewart's appearance was supposed to be simply a book talk, a tour stop to pitch The Daily Show's new book. Instead, Stewart took the opportunity to browbeat the Crossfire hosts and critic the negative role that partisan media plays in today's political climate.

It takes a lot of gall to say the things that Stewart said, and a world of smarts to say them at the breakneck pace that they came out. Way to go, Jon.

Watching Bush Supporters Turn On One Of Their Own

To the extent that words like Conservative or Liberal retain any meaning in American society, Andrew Sullivan has long been one of the most well-known Conservative bloggers (on par with InstaPundit).

Andrew Sullivan also happens to be gay. He took no offense at Kerry's comment during the final Presidential debate -- the somewhat strange shout-out to Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter. You know, the one that made Mrs. Cheney go insane.

How are Sullivan's readers greeting his candor on the topic? With anger, apparently.

He doesn't have commenting on his blog, so you'll have to speculate on what people are emailing him.

His defensiveness since the final debate speaks volumes about the attacks he must be enduring from the Far Right.

Google Desktop Search

If you're a Windows user who uses Microsoft Office programs, consider trying out Google's new Desktop Search. As you'd expect from the name, it searches through all the text in your local files, displaying results in a Googlish way.

Holy cow. I've been playing with it for about an hour, and it appears to be way more useful than the standard document search that comes with Windows.

Here's what the Slashdot crowd is saying about it.

Icelandic Birds Do It, Vietnamese Bees Do It...

Cole Porter may have known that all kinds of creatures fall in love, but he never conducted a comprehensive survey on global attitudes about sex.

Each year, condom manufacturer Durex surveys people the world over, asking a wide range of questions about bedroom behavior. This year they made 350,000 people blush with questions ranging from sexual concerns to who should teach sex education to who has the most sex (Yes, it's the French).

A host of fascinating statistics emerge from the survey, most of which are far too ribald for a family blog.

One stat that (sadly) caught my eye: More than one in 10 Indians (11%) surveyed had not heard of the common STDs mentioned in the "sexual concerns" portion of the survey. That's almost three times the global average (4%).

An Intersection Too Far

I think I may have a double standard when it comes to fuzz-busting car technology.

Unlike the Canadian police, I don't automatically think that the people who buy radar detectors are wanton law breakers.

American society has a touch-and-go relationship with speed limits. Whether it's on a 25 miles-per-hour residential avenue or the 65 miles-per-hour freeway, many otherwise law-abiding citizens find themselves speeding. Although the section of the populace that buys radar detectors may more aggressively speed, I still consider their sale appropriate.

On the other hand, I consider people who buy PhotoBlocker to be wanton law breakers.

People who decide to run red lights are in a completely different category than casual or accidental speeders. You don't buy this product unless you're planning on running red lights. I'm surprised that marketing something like this is legal.

Here's to Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential philosophers of our time, died on Friday at 74.

Highlighting the messianic and religious tones of professional philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (a book that rarely left my side during my undergraduate and masters degrees in Religious Studies) refuses to grant a personal entry for any philosopher who is still living. I guess now it's time for Jacques' entry, and for his intellectual history to join a history of ideas that he profoundly influenced.

My favorite philosopher, Richard Rorty, once said, "Of all the philosophers of our time (Derrida) has been the most effective at doing what Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking the crust of convention, questioning assumptions never before doubted, raising issues never before discussed."

Here's to you, Jacques.