No mo' Nomah

The Red Sox just traded Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs, in exchange for the Expo's Cabrera and a first-baseman from the Twins, who they happen to be in the midst of a series with right now. This should be an interesting game, huh?

Although, in the irony department, it occurs to me that Nomar has just been traded to the only team that's possibly more cursed than the Red Sox. Lucky him. [Hey, I suppose that at least it gives me an extra incentive to root for an "End-of-the-World Series" between the Sox and Cubs, now.]

Communing with my inner tenor

Part of the problem with being a baritenor is that it makes classification difficult--and can lead to some odd situations. For example, in the group I'm singing with right now, I'm principally singing tenor II. In one passage, though, I join the basses for a few bars before going back to the tenor line, and then swinging the other way and helping out the sopranos for a few bars. [Yes, that's right, sopranos. Apparently the B-flat above middle C is too low for them to sing effectively--even though they're the largest section in the chorus, by far.]

Lately, though, I've been studying with a teacher who's been helping me to find the tenor range that I always suspected was there but could never quite get into. It's been a lot of work, but it's paying off in some ways I hadn't quite expected. In particular, notes that I used to think were "high" in the sense of requiring adjustments (think E flats and E's above middle C) no longer feel quite so enormous. On the other hand, it now feels like an astronomical leap between an F sharp and a G. So it's slow, but steady progress. Where this leads to, we'll see. Maybe I'll have to shed the "bari" part of the description. [Just kidding--I'd hate to have to relocate my blog just because my part designation changed.]

Only WASP media allowed?

If this Arizona Daily Star report is to be believed, the Bush campaign is engaging in racial profiling--of the media covering the Vice President's visit to that state. Couple that with the required endorsements apparently needed to secure tickets for an event in New Mexico, and it is becoming ever more clear that BushCo. can't deal with people that don't kowtow to its every whim.

This isn't campaigning, it's propaganda, pure and simple.

Convention conflation

I have to admit that, like the rest of America, I largely tuned out of the Democratic National Convention. I only really watched Thursday night's events--from the introduction of Kerry's daughters onwards.

I'll admit to laughing at, and being quite disturbed by, Alexandra's anecdote about the hamster ("the hamster was never quite right after that. . . ."), but not so much as the cornball "John Kerry, reporting for duty," with salute. Even if it is a dig at the current squatter of the White House, it was still rather lame.

The first few minutes of the speech were also rather stiff: it's kind of clear that Kerry isn't going to be the first guy you invite to a party. But, at this point in time, I don't think America needs, or for that matter wants, such a person in charge of the country. I agreed with most of his major points, and felt he did a brilliant job in connecting his own plans, beliefs, and values to those of his great predecessors--Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. I also believe he did a good job in turning a lot of his supposed "negatives" into assets: "Saying `mission accomplished' certainly does not make it so" was brilliant.

Obviously, I think the line that sent most of the crowd into overdrive--and will be a difficult matter for BushCo. to deal with was the line about the Saudi royal family. Media focus groups reacting to that speech apparently reacted with utter joy and glee, on both sides of the ideological divide. [Allegedly, 98% of Democrats, and 88% of Republicans agreed with that sentiment.] But the reason I think that this line is so well-received is that it expresses a fundamental truth about our society today: we need better solutions to our long-term energy strategy than just cheap sources of oil. We fundamentally need to reform the way we use and conserve energy, and it's not a solution that's going to be solved with secret meetings with energy suppliers. [That riff was also one of the glories of the speech.]

But on the whole, a lot of people apparently like that speech. Newsweek claims that Kerry/Edwards now holds an eight-point lead in a two-way race, while a recent MSNBC poll claims an eleven-point bounce between polls taken on Thursday and Friday. If these results are anywhere near true, we're almost guaranteed to see BushCo. really get desperate on their tour this month.

Bush's main problem I see right now is that he's been painted into a corner in the last few months. He can't even really claim to be cutting taxes for the middle class, thanks to his shenanigans earlier this week, scuttling a tax cut because too many Democrats wanted to support it. All in all, after nearly four years, Bush has a one-line resume to run on, and, thanks to his speech, Kerry can claim that Bush is being hateful if he tries to go negative.

Frustration

It seems that my desire to get some work done today in splitting my third paper of the summer into my third and fourth papers of the summer is going to be thwarted, at least for the time being, by MIT Facilities, which is taking its oh-so-sweet time in restoring the power to the circuit my office happens to run on.

I wish this were the first time something like this was happening, but, alas, it is not. A couple of years ago, before my exodus to the fourth floor of my building, this was actually a fairly frequent occurrence in my office--a whole bunch of new, power-hungry lab and computer equipment was installed on the same circuit, and the old circuit-breaker just couldn't handle the extra load. So, for about a month, it was fairly common for the power to go out at least once or twice a day, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. For a computational person like myself, this is a major inconvenience, especially since my work needs to be done on computers.

On the other hand, for now, it means you get to put up with a bunch of posts from yours truly.

Where's the good news?

If everything is so rosy and wonderful--if Bush really has all the "good news" to spread that he claims he does, why do tomorrow's headlines include:

"Oil prices jump to 21-year highs"
"Whistle-blowing said to be factor in FBI firing"
"IRS says income has fallen for second consecutive year"
"Record budget deficit of $420 billion to be announced"

Wait--let me guess. This is the good news!

What the?

OK. Now I'm really starting to get confused. Somebody tried to find my site searching for "Ke." That's it. A two-letter search that really couldn't possibly find anything suitably specific--and it didn't, judging by the three-million-plus hits it found. More amusing still is that my site isn't anywhere near the top of the list, yet someone still found and visited my site.

Either that, or somebody's invented a really stupid web spider that's searching through various two-letter combinations.

Ya think?

A true anecdote.

A choir conductor is going to be late to rehearsal, and gets in touch with several members of the chorus by phone to let them know about the delay. This is duly reported to the assistant conductor, and things proceed swimmingly.

Then, when she arrives, the conductor wonders why she was unable to reach the aforementioned cell phones--during the rehearsal.

I'll let y'all figure out why this was so amusing to me when I heard about it.

Shoot me now.

I actually used the phrase "analyze analytically" in a draft of my paper.

Too much editing, not enough caffeine in my system.

Failure on a grand scale

I believe that Ted Kennedy expressed the sentiments of many of us last night:

The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush.

That, I believe, is the fundamental problem of this administration. We no longer believe that it can do anything other than pursue the same wrong-headed policies it has before, and are frightened about the havoc it could wreak, given a second four-year term.

Fundamentally, the last four years have been about squandered opportunities. Three years ago, we had the support of (essentially) every nation on the planet, all of whom were willing to support us in a war on terrorism. [What exactlyis a "war on terror," anyways?] Instead, we threw away an international consensus to settle what seems, to me, to be a personal grudge.

More recently, the House was considering a bill which would have extended tax breaks to middle-class families (where it is needed most, and can do the most good). Bush had the bill killed. Why? Because too many Democrats would have voted for it, making it a non-starter as an election issue.

It's exactly this sort of short-sighted vision that is the cause of so many of our problems right now. A leader is someone who does what he knows is right, even though he knows he will suffer the consequences for doing so. A tyrant is someone who does what he thinks will keep him in power, regardless of the consequences of his actions.l

No points for guessing which camp our "Dear Leader" falls into.

Huzzah.

I just constructed my first C++ templated class. I feel special now.

Can I get a medal--or a cookie?

Methinks . . .

. . . that I would be much more likely to attend Yale Club of Boston events if they weren't either $75 per ticket (during the summer, and events I want to go to) or conflicting with either my schedule or my religious beliefs (e.g., pub crawls and wine tastings).

What is wrong with you people?

Don't get me wrong, I love my blog-visiting public. But seriously folks, I go away for a week, and you start looking for:

• "photo of Steve Schmidt": Who the hell is Steve Schmidt?


• "Tenors Undercover": Why would any tenor go incognito, ever?


• "D--- t--- in Massachusetts": Now this one just disturbs me, because it combines two other memes that get to this site--the aforementioned tanks and a certain type of dancing that may include the word "break" in its name. [Will you please learn to use quotation marks in your searches, please?]
  

and, my personal favorite:

• "jo": You really need to be more specific in your search terms here, folks. There's only about 8 million web sites that mention the name "jo." And don't even tell me if there's some other meaning being implied here.

Random incidents

I'm not sure which of the following incidents from this past weekend was the most surreal:

• Having someone pass by me in the street and ask: "Whassup dog? You wanna buy some trees?" [And this is a twentyish white guy doing the asking here.]


• Passing by an old MIT classmate--who I've never seen when he's anything less than stone-cold sober--looking, for lack of a better description, glazed and confused.


• Being the only passenger waiting for a Red Line T--at around 9.30 pm.

Trek to DC

It's time for my annual trip to DC, as my last "official" CSGF Fellows' Conference. [I can attend future years as an alumnus of the program--although I don't know how expenses are handled in that particular case.]

Anyways, it also means this will be the few days of the year where I don't feel like an freakish giant the whole time. There are, in a group of 60, quite a number of people--probably on the order of a dozen or so--who are substantially taller than me (and I'm between 6'3" and 6'4").

If it weren't for the fact that we're all tech nerds, it'd probably make a terrifying pick-up basketball team.

Periodic updates are possible, if I get the chance. If not, it will have to wait for my return on Friday.

Simple pleasures

Just for the sheer visual entertainment value of it, someone should write an orchestral piece with parts for several tubas, and then have lots of muted and unmuted sections, just so we can see the absurd ballet that would be tuba mutes being passed back and forth and being used.

That is all.

Dueling echo chambers

This has been something that I've been meaning to post about for a while now.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been doing a fair amount of digging through the political blogosphere lately. What I've found shouldn't be too surprising, but, then again, it's how things really and truly are right now.

For the most part, one can divide the American political blogosphere into two camps: the "left/Democratic" and "right/Republican" camps. There are obviously others, but for the most part, they all dwarf in comparison to these two. This, by itself, is obviously not a problem per se. What creates the problem is the relative interactions between the two, and the feedback loop each side is currently generating.

It should be obvious to anyone paying attention to the blogosphere that "discussions"--on both sides--are, when restricted to a single side, "pile-ons" against the opposing candidate or "lovefests" for their own. Although we're not quite at the level of "Bush eats babies" or "Kerry is a devil-worshiper," we're admittedly not that far away. Compounding matters is that most discussions that "include" both parties are only because "trolls" come in from one side or the other and raise havoc.

Again, I suppose I'm being unduly harsh to both sides--there are a few havens where free discourse reigns. Unfortunately, these are few and far between. On the other hand, reports of people being banned on various websites simply for being insufficiently or incorrectly partisan outnumber these oases of rational discussion.

Is there a solution to this problem? Is there any way to prevent the coming decades from being increasingly polarized ones in our society? Can we find people who are acceptable to our entire society, our will we have to live with half the country hating the guts of whoever is leading our country?

It's a depressing thought, but that's what I've been finding lately.

Talk about superposition

So, apparently, last Friday night was really and truly impressive. If all sources are to believed, I should have been simultaneously at Opening Night at Tanglewood, participating as a supernumerary voice for a choral workshop for high school students, and singing Beethoven's Ninth with the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.

Somehow, this seems like a gross violation of the quantum superposition principle--not to mention the fact that I don't think I can simultaneously sing two notes at once.

It led a few people to remark "he must be really busy." I am--but not with any of that stuff!

[Now this would definitely qualify as an example of omnipresence.]

Big surprise

"SPOILER ALERT"

So, it turns out there really isn't a Buried Secret in the Sci-Fi Channel's new documentary.

This really shouldn't come as much of a shock to anyone who's been paying any attention to the Sci-Fi Channel. After all, if the documentary pissed off Shymalan, as the advertisements suggest, why would teaser trailers for The Village be shown during pretty much every single commercial break during the premiere of Stargate Atlantis?

[Note on SA: Pretty good, although Joe Flanigan is trying too hard to impersonate Richard Dean Anderson--for the moment. Best line: "No," when Dr. Jackson tries to weasel his way into the embarkation room to go through the gate--twice.]

Student-teacher or teacher-student?

The National Labor Relations Board has decided that graduate TA's at private universities do not have the right to unionize. This is basically tantamount to telling GESO (the fledgling union wannabe at my alma mater) and its cohort to "Go cheney themselves."

Now I have to admit that this is one argument where I can see both sides fairly easily, as I have been both a research assistant and a teaching assistant. However, the principal difference between me and the typical teaching assistant seeking unionization privileges is that I work in the sciences and engineering, and the typical teaching assistant is in the humanities.

The consequences of this are large. Many humanities graduate students rely on TA positions for the bulk of their funding throughout their graduate careers, while most science graduate students TA for a very limited term--usually not more than one year. Consequently, the right to unionize would have a much larger impact on humanities students.

The main question to be decided, though, is: "Are teaching assistants students or employees?" I think that's a difficult question to answer with a simple "yes" or "no." Science students, who are usually supported by research grants, generally TA as part of a funding deal for the first year, or as part of their program requirements. Most people falling into this category probably shouldn't be considered as employees, then--at least not for their teaching duties. [More on this point below, however.] For graduate students in the humanities, when teaching becomes their primary duty--more than research or any other activity--then they have a case that they are employees.

Where conflict starts to arise is that research students in the sciences should have as much right to unionize as the students who are teaching assistants. Both of them are the bedrock on which many private research universities depend to fill their teaching and research needs. If one restricts attention to teaching assistants, then one does research assistants a disservice. That was one of the problems with GESO--they generally made it clear that RA's were not fully welcome in the organization. This caused a great schism in support--the science students, as a result of this rejection, later turned the tables on GESO by rejecting their internal poll for unionization last year.

The other problem I have against the unionization efforts is the tactics employed by the union organizers. They attempt to treat the situation as if they are already a union, and use rather boorish and obnoxious strategies to convince people that they should have the right to unionize. [This is about a smart a strategy as waking undergraduates up at 7.30 am and hoping that they'll petition the university to settle with the unions.]

All in all, though, I guess my position has to be that if any unionization is to take place--an idea I'm not entirely sold on in any case--it has to encompass both teaching assistants and research assistants. Otherwise, it's creating an even more unequal system than the one already in existence.

Sentences with no real meaning

"Please allow approximately 6-14 weeks for delivery."

Huh? Six to fourteen weeks? That's not a window, that's basically any amount of time they want. Especially with "approximately" appended out front: with an eight-week range, this could mean anywhere from 2 weeks until four months.

Utter nonsense.

The magnetic field is collapsing!

Well, not really.

But it does appear that the Earth's magnetic field is about to collapse--temporarily--while it undergoes a reversal sometime within the next few thousand years.

So, compasses are going to be kind of difficult to use, and without the magnetic field to protect satellites, global positioning systems are also going to be a bit of a challenge. It'll sort of resemble The Core, except the acting won't be so bad, and without the special effects budget and the liquid magma.

And you thought negotiating rush-hour traffic in Boston was tough before. . . .

Again, not so good

Security woes at Los Alamos National Lab appear to be continuing, as they are currently halting all classified research while looking for data which has mysteriously vanished.

It's an understatement to say that this is a problem--particularly since LANL is one of the nuclear weapon research labs.

It also gives me pause for reasons more personal as well. . . .

Wrong on so many levels

Recent spam subject: "Intestinal cleansing for superior health."

I don't really want to dwell deeper on what this e-mail is advocating.

It boggles the mind

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is currently shooting himself in the foot by criticizing the Bush administration, but at the same time lambasting Kerry as unpresidential.

Isn't this a case of burning your bridges prematurely? I mean, he'll be screwed if Bush wins because he's criticizing the modus operandi (surely a no-no if there ever was one in this administration), and screwed if Kerry wins because (how can Kerry respect him after all the jabs?).

So much for hoping for an ambassadorship or Cabinet post, I guess.

Twice Nothing is not necessarily nothing

Interestingly enough, it looks like that both Central Park and the Boston Common will be home to productions of the Bard's Much Ado about Nothing this summer. I'm not sure how both companies putting on the productions happened to land on the same (relatively) obscure comedy at the same time, but it's a welcome selection, nonetheless.

Getting priorities straight

It's nice to know that Senate Republicans have felt that it was more important to create a politically divisive and ineffectual vote on the marriage amendment than to worry about, oh, say, passing a budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

They're starting to get as bad as the ineffectual turkeys who run New York's legislature--and that's saying something.

DC neighborhoods?

So, as a random question, if someone wants to live in the DC area and work at the NIH, what are the right neighborhoods in the metro DC area to look at? Is there any compelling reason to live in Virginia (low rents, etc.) or significantly north of the Bethesda area?

Random thanks

For what it's worth, I just learned that neither W. nor Kerry lived in Trumbull College while they were attending Yale. [W. probably followed his dad into Davenport, and Kerry lived in JE.] As a member of Trumbull, I can at least feel that my college doesn't have the ignominy of having one of the most lackluster presidents of recent decades as one of its graduates.

Hello? Anybody out there?

Signs it's a slow week--even the spammers are leaving me alone.

Haven't we already "been there, done that?"

It seems absolutely ludicrous to me that we would even consider postponing the election in the case of a terrorist attack--particularly if we announce such plans in advance.

This seems like a redux of the "transfer"--we announce the changes, adn then as a result, create a moving target which needs to be changed. This is just wrong--not to mention completely avoiding the precedents of wars past, where we managed to carry out elections, even under the spectres of two World Wars.

One man's f is another man's mp

I know that my voice is sort of on the large side--particularly for someone at my age. However, the true extent of how large it is kind of hit home last week, when I was being thrown around to different parts to try and equalize the balance in the choir. Mind you, this is a large chorus: there are about a dozen people on a part, even when singing an eight-part divisi.

[Allegedly, what I've read suggests that men's voices don't reach full capacity until sometime in the mid- to late thirties. I'm kind of worried about what that means for my own pipes. Am I going to have to scale down my voice just to fit in?]

Not so good . . .

It looks like I need some more work in watching good films. Unfortunately, it doesn't help much that I'm part of a group that specializes in watching the dregs of the cinematic canon.

IMDB's Top 100 Best Movies of All Time generate this HTML for your own page at ObeytheFist.com
Rank Movie Didn't See It/ Started It/ Finished It/ Hated It! 1 Godfather, The (1972) Finished It 2 Shawshank Redemption, The (1994) Finished It 3 Godfather: Part II, The (1974) 4 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The (2003) Finished It 5 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002) Finished It 6 Casablanca (1942) 7 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001) Finished It 8 Schindler's List (1993) 9 Shichinin no samurai (1954) Started It 10 Star Wars (1977) Finished It 11 Citizen Kane (1941) 12 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Started It 13 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Finished It 14 Rear Window (1954) 15 Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Finished It 16 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Finished It 17 Memento (2000) 18 Usual Suspects, The (1995) Finished It 19 Pulp Fiction (1994) Finished It 20 North by Northwest (1959) Finished It 21 12 Angry Men (1957) 22 Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le (2001) Finished It 23 Psycho (1960) Started It 24 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 25 Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966) 26 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) Finished It 27 It's a Wonderful Life (1946) Finished It 28 Goodfellas (1990) Finished It 29 American Beauty (1999) Finished It 30 Vertigo (1958) 31 Sunset Blvd. (1950) 32 Matrix, The (1999) Finished It 33 Apocalypse Now (1979) 34 Pianist, The (2002) 35 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 36 C'era una volta il West (1968) 37 Some Like It Hot (1959) 38 Third Man, The (1949) 39 Taxi Driver (1976) 40 Paths of Glory (1957) 41 Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) 42 Fight Club (1999) Finished It 43 Boot, Das (1981) 44 Double Indemnity (1944) 45 L.A. Confidential (1997) Finished It 46 Chinatown (1974) 47 Singin' in the Rain (1952) 48 Maltese Falcon, The (1941) 49 M (1931) 50 Requiem for a Dream (2000) Finished It 51 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957) 52 All About Eve (1950) 53 Se7en (1995) Finished It 54 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Finished It 55 Saving Private Ryan (1998) 56 Cidade de Deus (2002) 57 Raging Bull (1980) 58 Rashômon (1950) 59 Wizard of Oz, The (1939) Finished It 60 Sting, The (1973) 61 Alien (1979) Finished It 62 American History X (1998) Finished It 63 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) 64 Léon (1994) 65 Vita è bella, La (1997) Hated It! 66 Touch of Evil (1958) 67 Manchurian Candidate, The (1962) 68 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Finished It 69 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (1948) 70 Great Escape, The (1963) 71 Wo hu cang long (2000) 72 Reservoir Dogs (1992) Finished It 73 Clockwork Orange, A (1971) Started It 74 Amadeus (1984) Finished It 75 Modern Times (1936) 76 Ran (1985) 77 Annie Hall (1977) 78 Jaws (1975) Finished It 79 On the Waterfront (1954) 80 Braveheart (1995) Started It 81 High Noon (1952) 82 Apartment, The (1960) 83 Fargo (1996) 84 Sixth Sense, The (1999) Hated It! 85 Aliens (1986) Finished It 86 Shining, The (1980) Finished It 87 Strangers on a Train (1951) 88 Blade Runner (1982) 89 Metropolis (1927) 90 Duck Soup (1933) 91 Finding Nemo (2003) Finished It 92 Donnie Darko (2001) 93 General, The (1927) 94 City Lights (1931) 95 Princess Bride, The (1987) Finished It 96 Toy Story 2 (1999) Finished It 97 Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) Finished It 98 Great Dictator, The (1940) 99 Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957) 100 Lola rennt (1998)
Which movies have you seen?

A victory for anti-yuppies (well, not quite) everywhere

I just noticed this, so I don't know how long it happened, but it appears that the Abercrombie and Fitch store in Hahvahd Squeyah has shut its doors. It seems that the über-yuppie look is not quite popular in the Boston area--there's no record of its downtown Boston store being open, either. [On the other hand, its Galleria store appears to still be open.]

Job offer?

So, it looks like a formal job offer will be in hand shortly. However, I do know that approval was given to make the formal job offer, which is a significant plus.

On the other hand, I got the hint that such an offer was coming not from the request to give my prospective boss a call, but for the request for a middle name. After all, you don't need middle names to tell people they're not getting a job, right?

More later.

Omnibus random rants and ravings

It's been a while since I did my (now-no-longer-)weekly collection of miscellaneous thoughts.

So, without further ado, a new compendium, departmentalized for your convenience:

• From the "I Hate Waiting" Department. Waiting for bureaucracy to finish turning is painful enough. Waiting for three different bureaucracies to operate at their own respective speeds, and then coordinating those to end up with a job I like as a post-doc seems interminable.
  
  
• From the "Life Imitating Government" Department. It looks like my declaration of victory against the manuscripts I've been writing lately was premature. I know have yet another manuscript to write, this one due by the end of the month. Yes, that makes three manuscripts in three months. Now, while I appreciate that this will amount to another publication credit in my fledgling CV, it's still not something I wanted to worry about this month. I was hoping to spend July furthering research, not rewriting my thesis. But hey, a paper is a paper.
  
  
• From the "No, I'm bi-sectional" Department. One of the problems that comes with having a voice that doesn't quite fit in clearly as either a tenor or a bass is that sometimes you end up having to do double duty. That's the situation I'm currently facing--I'm supposed to sing tenor, unless the basses are the dominant line, in which case I'm supposed to reinforce their ranks. In other words, this means that my voice will be front and center in the musical balance, much like the last time I sang with this particular group.
  
  
• From the "Meteorological No-No" Department, Part I. There's nothing quite like being woken up at 5 a.m. by a nice, brisk, loud thunderstorm. It makes the day so much more refreshing and exciting.
  
  
• From the "Meteorological No-No" Department, Part II. Either thunder and lightning, or sunshine. Not both.
  
  
• From the "Heads in the Clouds" Department. You'd think that in an affluent state like Connecticut, pretty much everyone would know that our governor has just been replaced, and who the new governor is. Surprisingly, though, more than a third of Connecticut residents couldn't name who our new governor would be. [Her name is Jodi Rell, in case you were wondering.]
  
  
• From the "Laugh So You Don't Cry" Department. I finally got around to seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 earlier this week. Well-put together, even if it wasn't quite everything I was hoping for. I have to admit that I was holding on to my jaw, so that it wouldn't drop to the floor every five minutes when one bombshell after another was dropped. The most damaging testimony in fact came from the military personnel themselves. If anybody sees the behavior of the recruiters, and the anger of our military, and still thinks Bush is a strong, compassionate leader, they must be smoking something.
  
  
• From the "Movie Math" Department. We really need a better means for determining what a good movie is. The fact is, a screen is not a screen is not a screen. Some screens have capacities in the range of 100-300; others can be twice that, or more. What we really need is a "gross per seat, per showing" average. After all, at three and a half hours, you simply can't show "Return of the King" as often as you can "Shrek 2" or that Mel Gibson film from earlier this year.
  
  
• From the "Paging the Kerry Campaign" Department. I think that Bush's quip about "the haves and the have-mores" and "Some call you the elite. I call you my base" (which appears front and center in "F9/11") would make great excerpts for a political attack ad.
  
  
• From the "I Hate Spam" Department. I could honestly do without the "weightloss available" spams that seem to be the latest rage. Especially as it seems to mutate every few days, not so fast that our local spam filters can't keep up, but fast enough that it's downright obnoxious. Besides, if I have about 13,900 e-mails last year, and 12,000 e-mails so far this year, it tells me that spam is getting just a wee bit out of hand.
  
  
• From "They were looking for what?" Department. Our latest entrants into the world of strange searches leading to my blog are:
  
  • Stave of Jingle Bells
    
  • correct spelling coinkydink
    
  • chemical engineering divorce statistics
    
  • durian Tampa
    
  
  The last one is the only one that truly scares the living daylights out of me. The first one just puzzles me; the others just engender "huh?"
  

And this was the week that (almost) was.