Category: Uncategorized

NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” talked to Arlo Guthrie on Monday about the copyright flap that has arisen over a campaign parody of his dad’s “This Land Is Your Land”:

Neil Conan: Your father was a political musician. What do you think he would have said about people using his music for political purposes?

Arlo: Well, you know, I really can’t speak for him. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago, I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries, if not one of the most directly inspired–I mean, I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it and we’ve all been laughing about it since then. I don’t think that was–I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.

Went up to Sonoma County yesterday to see our friend Pete compete in the Half Vineman triathlon. The event involves a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run; all events half the distance of the established Hawaii Ironman distances. Anyway, here he is at the finish, 5 hours, 36 minutues, 3.4 seconds after he started out. Pete rocks.

Bob Herbert has a decent column in the Times (registration required) that throws more than a bucket of cold water on the campaign-trail optimists:

There was no shortage of pretty words and promises at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last week. But there’s a big difference between the rigidly crafted reality at the heart of a political campaign and the reality of the rest of the world.

“Practical politics,” said Henry Adams, “consists in ignoring facts.”

The facts facing the United States as George W. Bush and John Kerry joust for the presidency are too grim to be honestly discussed on the stump. No one wants to tell cheering potential voters that the nation has sunk so deep into a hole that it will take decades to extricate it.

I think his basic thesis about how fundamental our problems are. The question he poses, without trying to provide an answer, is whether voters are up to hearing the truth.

There’s a great story on Wired News (and elsewhere in previous days) about a copyright lawsuit against the two brothers who produced the brilliant “This Land” campaign parody. The people who own the rights to Woody Guthrie’s songs, the Richmond Organization, have demanded “This Land” be removed from the Net because the brothers stole Guthrie’s music. The Wired News story ends with this note on Guthrie’s reported wishes regarding the song’s copyright:

“According to various Internet sources, including the website of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Santa Cruz, California, Guthrie allegedly wrote, ‘This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’ ”

Oddest moments (for me) in tonight’s sporadic convention viewing:

–Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, extolling remarkable Kansas citizens of the past, included John Brown, the abolitionist. I guess it was startling to hear the name of one of the most radical characters in U.S. history, and one generally held responsible for killing five pro-slavery farmers in Kansas, because the proceedings have such a carefully crafted moderation to them. But maybe I’m wrong and John Brown is on his way back as a hero of the New Democrats.

–PBS vs. MSNBC vs. Fox vs. C-SPAN:
PBS: Jim Lehrer looks like he’s sleepwalking through this thing. The New York Times’ David Brooks doesn’t seem to have much insight to add, and no one, Republican or Democrat, has done anything to deserve the torture of watching Mark Shields paw through the proceedings in search of meaning nuggets. We next switched to …
MSNBC: I thought I might be able to stomach Chris Matthews. I didn’t watch long enough to really find out, because of the jittery way he kept leaping from correspondent to correspondent after John Edwards’s speech. Next up was …
Fox: Tuned in while Brit Hume was holding court, and Kate insisted I refrain from switching so we could see what “the other side” is saying. It was surprisingly un-awful — in the context of how awful network news in general has become. Hume’s panel included Morton Kondracke, who termed Edwards’ speech 95 percent positive but took points off for his having uttered the “fiction” that there are two Americas with different levels of privilege; NPR’s Mara Liasson, whose startled looking (not to say bug-eyed) expression explains why she’s not on the tube more often, stuck to her guns in analyzing Edwards’ speech as effective; and the most damning thing conservative lion Bill Kristol could come up with was to say the speech was the most hawkish heard at a Democratic convention since John F. Kennedy was nominated in 1960. Hume’s most memorable contribution was a complaint about the volume of the Black-Eyed Peas performance after Edwards finished. Later on, Greta van Susteren took over and provided a frightening look at face-work gone bad. To recover from the Botox scare, we tuned to …
C-SPAN: Thank the deity, if any, for a channel that won’t get in the way of the Guam delegation’s long introduction (60 years since liberation from the Japanese, 100 years under U.S rule) to its vote.

Well, last week Kate told me a friend was begging off a social engagement — well, it was actually a planned reading aloud of “A Tale of Two Cities” — because she wanted to watch John Kerry’s speech at the Democratic convention instead. My response was, “No way I’m changing anything in my personal life to watch John Kerry talk.” Yeah, I’m still stuck on wondering what in the world he was thinking when he voted to give Bush the OK to pound Saddam. But I won’t wander down that trail now.

But tonight after picking me up at the airport, Kate wanted to get home quickly to watch Barack Obama’s speech to the convention. I didn’t bad mouth Obama. I’m curious about him as a native Illinoisan and also — just having seen “Fahrenheit 9/11” last night — really wondering if there is anyone out there who might appeal to “the better angels of our nature” (no, I don’t think it’s Michael Moore, though he did succeed in making an occasionally funny, often wrenching film).

So I heard Obama tonight, and right away I was thinking he should be on the ticket. He’s articulate. He speaks from experience. He talks convincingly about inclusion and unity, about looking out for each other and about the keys to helping the poor and disenfranchised succeed. Hope he makes it to the Senate in November (running virtually unopposed in Illinois, I suppose he will). We need a presence and a voice like that on the national scene.

Kate and I are no longer childless! Tom returned from Germany this afternoon. Spent the afternoon regaling us with stories and pictures and poring over his amazing German candy trove and explaining the finer points of German beer and beer glasses. Just before dinner, when the evening replay of the Tour came on, he hit the wall.

Great New York Times piece today on a guy who is golfing his way across Mongolia (“The total fairway distance is 2,322,000 yards. Par is 11,880 strokes”).

The golfer, Andre Tolme, is recording his round on a Web site, golfmongolia.com. From a Q and A on the site:

Is Golf Mongolia a work of art?

The definition of art is subjective but I have coined the term “adventure expressionism” which I believe describes my expedition quite well. Golfing across Mongolia is indeed an absurd idea but the concept resonates with people’s imaginations. Golf is known as an elitist sport and Mongolia is a poor country that, until 2003, did not have one golf course. It’s this juxtaposition that is itself an artistic concept.

Well, TechTV mostly requires past-tense verbs. But it becomes really official for most of the employees on Tuesday. That’s July 6, the end of our 60-day layoff-notice period when the people “selected for termination,” as the new owners put it, are officially ex-employees. More on that later, I hope. But I did happen to see a link to a nice, understated short essay by Mark Neuling, one of our photographers, about the closure; it’s worth checking out just for his nice stills of the staff.

What we have here is the packaging for a neoprene rectangle, 4 and 3/8ths inches wide, 10 and 3/4ths inches long, and 1/16th of an inch thick. How did this little patch of foam come into my life? I just bought a new iBook laptop, and the clerk at the Apple Store grabbed one and added it to the bundle of stuff I was getting. Not free, mind you. It cost $9.95. The reason she said I needed it was to prevent the keyboard from marking up the laptop screen. Fair enough — you don’t want your display scratched up.

But.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Apple to throw in a little scrap of free neoprene, maybe with the company logo, when you shell out your two or three grand or whatever it is for one of their machines? Answer, yes, it would be nice. And it wouldn’t hurt profit margins much. I mean, how much can this little patch of fabric cost to produce? My totally unresearched guess is between a nickel and a quarter. (Hell, now I’ll have to research it.)

But the thinking is, I’m sure, who’s going to squawk about 10 bucks when they’re spending $2,000? No one, probably, though if I’d thought faster, maybe I would have said keep your keyboard cover because a sheet of typing paper or something like that will work just as well.

Checking the maker’s site, by the way, I see they charge $6.95. Apple’s markup is $3, or about 42 percent.

Brother.