BYE BYE BLOGGER, I'VE GOT A NEW GIRLFRIEND

Google-owned Blogger has decided to stop supporting users who use FTP to store their Blogger sites on their own domains. Apparently, at only 0.5% of the total user base (that's 225,000 blogs using the 2006 figure of 4.5 million Blogger sites), we don't rate anymore. Thanks, Google. Wordpress is happy to host me and to give me all kinds of FTP control over The Clog. So, to my hundreds of millions of followers, find the new and improved and wickedly cooler Clog over here.

WELL SAID, MY BROTHA

On why the term "African American" is silly twaddle.

REALITY 1, HOPE AND CHANGE 0

It's astonishing to watch Barack Obama's presidency flame out so loudly and so quickly. With his contemptible health-care reform evaporating like a glass of water in the desert, all eyes are on what he's done in the last year, and what he plans to do in this critical mid-term election year.

It's been all about the surprises. Chicago will host the Olympics because no one can resist Obama's charm. Not. Obama in Copenhagen plus a bunch of glue-sniffing consensus scientists will take nature by the throat and make her do their bidding. Not. Obama and Nancy Pelosi will ram expensive, mandatory, socialist health coverage down Americans' throats. Nope. Obama will throw mind-boggling amounts of money he doesn't have at the recession, causing a measurable drop in unemployment and a China-style recovery. Nope. Guantanamo is closed. Um, no. Escalations in Afghanistan and increasing tension with Pakistan. Check.

By my count, he's broken approximately 6 campaign promises, 4 of them central to his getting elected. The carcass of health-care reform isn't even cold, and he's out selling more federal power, more regulation, more economic engineering in the form of controlling those bastardly banks. Naughty naughty banks! Papa Obama doesn't approve.

At this point, who cares?

Although it irks my vestigial liberal organ, the Supreme Court today rightly struck down a century of bad precedent related to political free speech. I would rather corporations have no more say in the political process than they already do, but that is my problem, not theirs. The Constitution allows for all forms of free speech except those that can be construed as fraudulent and felonious (screaming "fire!" in a crowded theater, for instance, or threatening to assassinate a president). This will change the way the mid-term elections shake out. Why? Because the only entities -- other than the electorate itself -- powerful enough to combat bad government are those with equally vast resources to combat it. (I am opposed to unfettered corporate lobbying power, but not to what corporations do to voice their opinions about who should be elected. There is a difference.) Politicians are a weak species, so no matter how you look at it, the sway is in.

To think that this clown (Obama) had the gall to demand a Second Bill of Rights (the right to health care, the right to a job, and other specious shit a socialist would spew) when he wipes his butt with the ideas enshrined in the original Bill of Rights is preposterous. Who does he think he is?

I loathed Bush, but he was an enemy I could define; laughing at him soothed the pain. Obama is something else entirely...he's so unqualified and unconvincing it hurts to watch him in action.

FUCKING AROUND AS A PLOT DEVICE

I'm watching an incredibly irritating movie. One of those movies you can watch while folding laundry -- five loads of it. It's called Gone and the entire plot so far hinges on whether one character reveals to the girlfriend of another character that the boyfriend had a one-night stand before meeting his girlfriend on holiday in Australia. That's the plot. No, really.

It's billed as a thriller because we're supposed to be thrilled that young people -- already predisposed to sleeping around -- magically have the moral queasiness of conservatives three times their age. It's a disgusting display of moral immaturity, and it's been infecting Hollywood movies for as long as I can remember. It's never been stronger than in the Naughts, however, and I wonder when we'll get back our sense of sex as fun, void of guilt, the sort of thing normal people do with each other that doesn't turn into wafer-thin fodder for silly little thrillers.

If you were a 25-year-old straight guy and you arrived in a new country, went out to a club, got drunk, and slept with a really pretty girl, tell me -- please -- how you could squeeze 90 minutes of drama out of the possibility that your girlfriend might find out that you had a good root? Why is that entertainment? What is so insecure and petty-minded about the filmmakers that they thought this would "thrill?"

It's this sort of normative, traditional, conservative bullshit that keeps a useless movie like Gone from simply evaporating before the end of the first reel.

A character just said -- no kidding -- "I don't think I know who you are, anymore." Enough. I'd rather watch Fatal Attraction, a movie that knows how to milk drama from the otherwise completely boring conceit of infidelity.

THE BACKGROUND MOVIE

Are you one of those people who can't stand the sound of silence? If you're by yourself, do you play a radio or stream audio/video all the time? Or do you love the sound of absolute silence?

I'm somewhere in between. I love the sound of absolute silence, but when surrounded by it (can an absence surround you?), I tend to pay attention only to it.

Let's take baseball. Best background white noise mankind ever created. These days, I watch about 500 hours of baseball during the spring and summer. Baseball is great background activity when you're working, although I am much more efficient when I just stream music or play it off my Zune.

When I'm writing, music, again, is the best medicine, but there's something about the background movie that makes it perfect for felling silence while you're working on mundane tasks like email, cooking, or non-creative documents.

The beauty of the background movie is that I can write a post like this while watching one. There is no competition between that part of my brain that needs to focus on forming or typing thoughts and that part that can listen to unimportant dialog, looking up only every minute or so to see what some dramatic swell in the music means. I'm watching some dumb movie called June 9. It has teenagers running around in the woods acting like assholes and any minute, some of them are going to start dying horrible deaths. The perfect movie for getting productive things done.

So, what makes a great background movie? First, it has to be inconsequential, one of those movies many people wasted parts of their lives producing. It has to be of interest to me, meaning it has some subject-matter appeal. Often that means people get killed or are in some regular state of terror or are being eaten, blown up, or stepped on by monstrous giants. It also has to have no cerebral, artistic, or innovative aspirations. Although that last sentence describes 97% of all movies made, I can't just background-watch any old piece of trash. If a trashy, cheap, shabbily made movie has any brains, any originality, it instantly becomes a foreground movie and I just pay attention to it.

[Hold on, someone's getting killed.]

OK, that took a few seconds, but I'm back to finish my post. See how easy it is?

THE ADVENTURES OF DARWIN & DR. WATSON

When you've tried your literary hand at comic-book scripts, screenplays, verse, prose poems, short stories, novellas, and novels, what do you turn to next?

For many years, I've marveled at the genre of children's fiction. I grew up on Curious George, Hardy Boys, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie. Something about children's fiction -- whether it's ultra young like Dick and Jane or more modern and mature like Harry Potter -- still enchants me, even though I'm a middle-aged man with no kids.

Many people I know are parents of young kids, from newborn to 5 or 6. That's gotten me thinking about what I would write if I wanted to entertain older young'uns, whom I'll define as the 7-to-10 crowd. Those were critical reading years for me, a cross section of Superman comics and books like Red Planet, by Robert Heinlein.

But before I made the leap to Heinlein, John Christopher, Verne, and Wells, there were the books with lots of pictures and big words. Where the Wild Things Are is emblematic of that experience, although there were no doubt dozens of less memorable but equally fascinating fictions of the time. Many of them I can't recall, other than their impressions: the large eyes and fantastic creatures, the sense of suspense and joy with each new page of discovery.

So, I come in my life to a place where I can write The Adventures of Darwin & Dr. Watson.  The premise is simple.  Take Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, make him a Beagle called Darwin, outfit him with a scrappy little brother named Dr. Watson, and moor them in a world shared with two 9-year-olds.  What about Lastrade?  And Moriarty?  The Hounds of the Baskervilles?  I'll get to all that soon enough.

I'm so looking forward to this.  The first story -- or case -- is called The Beagle Knows.  I'm putting out a call to illustrators who will collaborate with me.  By jove.

DEAR BARBARA BOXER, YOU IGNORANT SLUT

From Barbara to my junk-mail folder:

I am pleased to let you know about Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent announcement of a new rule to protect airline passengers’ rights. The new rule includes much of the Boxer-Snowe legislation, the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, which addresses limits on tarmac delays.

I first introduced the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights with Senator Olympia Snowe in 2007, following several incidents at airports where passengers were forced to remain on airplanes for as long as 11 hours. The Boxer-Snowe Airline Passengers Bill of Rights (S.213) is currently pending before the full Senate as part of the FAA Reauthorization bill.

Specifically, the Department of Transportation’s new rule limiting tarmac delays includes three central components of the Boxer-Snowe Airline Passenger Bill of Rights:

* Airlines must give passengers the option to deplane after they have been stuck on the tarmac for three hours.
* Airlines must provide food, water, access to medical treatment and working restrooms while passengers are trapped on the tarmac.
* Airlines must provide passengers with delay information on their websites as well as information on how to make formal complaints.

This is a victory for passengers who have been mistreated, and I thank Secretary LaHood for acting to protect passengers’ rights. This shows that the Department of Transportation understands that no passenger should ever be held captive for hours on an airplane without food, water or sufficient restrooms.

As good as this new rule is, it doesn’t give passengers permanent protection because it could be overturned by a future administration. That is why I will keep working to see that the Boxer-Snowe Airline Passenger Bill of Rights becomes law.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

My response to Barbara on her web site:

What I'm interested in is you spending less of your time on ridiculous airline rights and more on getting out of the airline business all together. I'm interested in you spending less time fussing over "rules" and "laws" that don't really mean anything (or which put bandages on much larger problems) and allowing the Fed-whipped airlines the ability to recover from decades of regulatory subservience. It is a tedious perennial lie that airlines are free to engage in business without overwhelming Federal regulation. That lie is evident every time I look at the taxes/regulatory fees I pay when buying a plane ticket.

Your newsletter about the Boxer-Snow intervention is smoke and mirrors. You think we're stupid enough to think that these fool bills protect us, when all they do is enshrine the problem at the heart of a massively powerful federal government: the way to solve problems is with more regulations.

Quick question: who had a larger role in informing your proposed legislation, lawyers and lobbyists or your voters? You are beholden to only one of those groups, but I suspect you paid more attention to the other.

EMPTY WEB

Here, I wrote about my little friend, the spider. After many weeks of watching his peculiar and delightful life, I discovered that he was gone. The only trace that he had ever been there is the wreckage of his web.

What happened to him? Was he eaten? Did he skedaddle after a moth massacred his web? I'll never know, but there is a haunting loveliness to the broken geometry of his carefully constructed home. The heart of the web, that place where he would pluck the filaments to further ensnare flies, is gone. The long filaments that anchored the web's heart in mid-air are all that remain, runners that begin to thicken with dust.

I thought of clearing these scarcely noticeable remains, but something in me says wait. Perhaps he is in hiding after a middle-of-the-night attack that failed. Maybe little spider will return, rebuild. Or perhaps time will turn over those last strands to other creatures, bugs or birds adapted to recycling abandoned spider webs.