discussions of things i find interesting

Entertainment industry incentives and sacrifice bunts

2011-11-28T15:50:00.005-06:00

I've been reading a lot about state incentive programs for the entertainment industry and I've come to feel about them the way I feel about bunting (in the baseball sense).

These incentives take several forms (for instance tax breaks, transferable tax credits, and/or actual production grants). Most states have some form of them. In Texas, the state government will subsidize a certain percentage of a film or television show production's in-state spending or hiring. As this sort of industry incentive goes, we're relatively demure here; some states will actually subsidize spending and hiring in other states or issue refundable tax credits that exceed a production's total tax liability.

It's obviously hard to estimate what would happen in the absence of such incentives, but most states have at least anecdotal evidence to support the position that these incentives result in in-state hiring that may not have happened otherwise. Generally, this is the conclusion of an analysis sponsored by a business association or industry group. In spite of that, it seems fair to assume that, yes, if you bribe an industry well enough they will come to your state.*

(*Proponents of subsidies sound a lot like anti-tax partisans, arguing that a business will always go where it's tax liability is the smallest. This is clearly not the case, though. A whole bunch of states offer industry incentive packages that are much more generous than Texas', yet Texas still attracts a lot of film and television show productions. While productions may well be responsive to incentives, they're clearly not the exclusive factor in deciding where a production will locate.)

While the incentives may result in jobs and spending that otherwise would not have happened, states lose money on them. The entertainment industry tends to produce jobs that are short-term (they just last the length of the production) or that don't necessarily result in a net gain of employed people (like, a person who works as a private hairdresser getting a job as a film set hairdresser, essentially an employed person trading one job for another). In addition, the industry has a relatively low spending mulitplier. The overall economic activity resulting from a film or TV show production is probably less than the overall economic activity you'd get from putting that same amount of money into a different industry subsidy, another part of the state budget, or even a tax cut.

This is where this topic reminds me of baseball and of bunting. In his great book Moneyball (which is explicitly about baseball statistics but implicitly about public policy) Michael Lewis describes the school of thought that bunting is a terrible strategy, one not worth the cost. Basically, each bunt costs a team a limited resource (an out, of which you only get 27 per game) in order to advance a runner into scoring position. Statistically, though, the inning is probably going to ends before that runner scores, or a subsequent batter hits a triple or a home run (which would have scored the runner anyway).

Practically, though, can a baseball team never bunt? Can they really announce that their opponents will never have to play their infield in? That they can always position for a double-play ground ball instead of a single-play bunt?

Likewise, it might make sense for a state to give up a wasteful incentive program and still not be practical. Or, put another way, it's one of those situations where everyone is kind of right. Supporters of the policy can point to jobs the industry says are created by the incentive, opponents can point to the opportunity cost; apples, oranges. The question really isn't of efficiency; it's more a litmus test for government spending priorities.

2011-05-28T19:50:00.001-05:00

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A great book about a short-lived but far-reaching subculture of punk music and political activism. Given the subject matter, the highest praise I can give is to say that it's not only about the principles of the Riot Grrrl movement, but it practices them, too.

View all my reviews

Family planning in Texas drama summary

2011-04-28T11:16:00.010-05:00

In addition to the big fights everyone knew were coming this legislative session (over the budget, over redistricting), there have been numerous other smaller, but significant, battles. One of those has been over family planning.

Texas provides family planning services (which generally include cancer screenings, sexually transmitted disease tests, vasectomies for men and prescription contraception for women) through the Medicaid program and the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) and, both of whose services could be completely abolished or severely curtailed this session.

On the Medicaid family planning side, the state has the Women's Health Program. This program is a Medicaid waiver, meaning the state waives some Medicaid eligibility requirements in order to provide family planning services to clients who, if they were pregnant, would be on full Medicaid. In order to encourage the states to do this sort of thing, the federal government pays 90% of the costs of these services. In contrast, the federal government only pays for about 40% of regular Medicaid services for Texas, including pregnancy services (which average about $16,000 per pregnancy).

Quite a few states have these family planning waivers, and in all of them (Texas included) they've proven to save both the state and federal governments money. The Texas program needs to be renewed in state law this year, though, and that renewal has gotten hung up on whether the state would exclude Planned Parenthood from participating as a provider.

Planned Parenthoods only account for a small percentage of all Medicaid providers, but they see a large proportion of the Women's Health Program clients. Both federal and state laws prevent any clinic or affiliate that does abortions from receiving any tax money. In spite of this, activists and members who all know better have stoked a concern that the Women's Health Program is a stealth form of funding for "the abortion industry."

The Health and Human Services Commission, which runs Medicaid for the state, has estimated that letting the program expire will add about $88 million (in state money) to the cost of Medicaid over the next two years. In addition, the Legislative Budget Board estimated that expanding eligibility to include about 100,000 new adult women who don't qualify for the program, but would qualify for full Medicaid if they were pregnant, would save the state an extra $5 million over the next two years. These are women who, by the spirit of the law, should be in the program but, by the letter of it, are excluded.

Several members, both Democrats and Republicans, introduced or were joint authors on bills to at least renew the program. Several of these bills also included provisions to increase participation and/or expand program eligibility to further realize savings. None of these bills have been voted out of a committee in either chamber.

The Senate Health and Human Services Committee created a special subcommittee to draft a bill that would find the "common ground" between those who want to save the program, and those who express concern that it's secretly funding abortions. This week, that subcommittee voted to send a bill to the full committee that would extend the program (though make no other changes to it) but exclude all Planned Parenthood clinics from participating. The bill also has a provision that would cancel the Women's Health Program completely if Planned Parenthood (or anyone else, for that matter) sues the state over that exclusion. The committee is scheduled to vote on that bill next week.

House committees have considered a number of bills on the Women's Health Program, but so far haven't voted on any of them.

***

Family planning services via the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) are paid for by a small amount of state funds but mainly by one of three sources of federal funding, known as Title V, Title X, and Title XX.

Title X funds, which all come from the federal government, are strictly for family planning services. Money from Titles V and XX, though also mostly federal, can be used on a range of services; there's no requirement that any of it be spent on family planning.

When the budget bill was introduced in the House, the combined funding for family planning services through DSHS for the next two years was about $67 million (and approximately $99 if you include the Tittle X funds that they state doesn't have any discretion over). Before passing the bill out of the House, though, Republicans passed a series of amendments that transferred almost all Title V and Title XX money out of family planning services and into other programs and services. Total family planning spending was reduced about $62 million dollars.

So far, the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats are having much more trouble than in the House agreeing on a budget, has not made the same cuts. Presuming its budget preserves all or most of the introduced funding levels, the $62 million difference between the House and Senate budget bills will somehow have to be resolved by the Conference Committee.

If you assume that it costs about the same to provide family planning services to a client in the DSHS program as it does Medicaid (about $240 a client a year) then the $62 million cut from the House version of the bill would mean about 258,000 fewer low-income people in Texas would get family planning services.

If you analyze this the same way the state's Health and Human Services Commission evaluates the success of the Women's Health Program then, without those preventive services, the birth rate among those 258,000 people (presuming they're mostly women) would add approximately $120 million in state Medicaid costs over the new two to three years.*

*Presuming these pregnancies are all covered by the regular Medicaid program and not Emergency Medicaid, which pays for births in indigent, non-citizen populations. These costs might be slightly less on average, but this population may have a slightly higher birthrate.

Budget drama summary, part 2

2011-04-23T21:57:00.012-05:00

In the months preceding the comptroller's announcement of the Biennial Revenue Estimate (BRE), the Legislative Budget Board (LBB) works with state agencies to write a first draft of what will be the budget bill introduced in each chamber of the legislature. The agencies submit appropriations requests to the LBB, and the LBB in turn makes recommendations for each agency's funding level.

One of the first things to happen in each legislative session is committee assignments. Two of the most powerful are the Senate Finance Committee and the House Appropriations Committee. For this year's legislature, the chairs of these committees are Steve Ogden (R- Bryan) and Jim Pitts (R- Waxahachie), respectively. The initial draft of the budget gets introduced once these committees are set, and the two work simultaneously but independently to revise it. Revising the budget involves committee testimony from LBB staff, from state agency staff and from the general public.

In spite of rhetoric about the size of the state government, by almost any comparative measure Texas is a low tax, low service state. To the extent that we collect taxes at all, we only spend that revenue on the stuff we have to: public education and health care. This means that when it comes to closing a budget shortfall estimated to be about $27 billion, it's public education and health care that will have to pay for it. The Texas budget spends so little money, in fact, that you could cut all the non-health care, non-education General Revenue spending from the rest of the budget, and still not close the gap.

Given the political climate of the state most years, and the especially conservative cohort of freshmen elected to the House for this session, closing the budget gap via any means other than cuts was off the table immediately. There are other options, though, even aside from raising sales or property taxes (it's not even worth mentioning the possibility of an income tax).

For one, the state has the Economic Stabilization Fund (or Rainy Day Fund), basically the state's savings account that is fed primarily by revenue from natural gas and oil tax revenues. There was approximately $9.4 billion in the account at the beginning of the legislative session.
The state also has exemptions on sales and property taxes that could be repealed in order to help balance the budget. The comptroller's office estimates that the value of these exemptions for 2011 is about $38.2 billion.

As budget hearings began for both the Senate Finance and House Appropriations Committees began, cuts were pretty much the only strategy anyone would talk about. To their credit, both Sen. Ogden and Rep. Pitts made it clear to their committees (and their audiences) that everyone needed to understand the gravity of the cuts they were considering. Both held several days worth of public testimony on the effects of, for instance, reductions to funding for nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

The more conservative House passed a budget that has about 12.3% less spending in it than the current biennium's budget. It not only doesn't take any population growth into account, but it cuts spending on public education by about $7.8 billion and health and human services agencies by over $11 billion.

The Senate will vote on its committee's budget bill later this week. While the House is dominated by conservative and tea party-affiliated Republicans (part of an overall Republican majority that already neutralizes the Democrats), the Senate will need support from Democrats to pass its bill. As a result, the Senate's budget bill spends about $12 billion more than the House's, mostly in Medicaid reimbursements to nursing homes and public education.

The differences will be worked out in Conference Committee, and then each chamber will have to pass, without amending, that version of the bill. Either way, the budget will be cut in ways that people are going to notice: government workers and teachers will be laid off, nursing homes will close, there will be less money for roads, etc.

The House and Senate are each vowing to not budge towards the other. Pitts, with the more conservative chamber, says he doesn't expect a lot of support in the House for the Senate's budget. Ogden seems similarly dug in, declaring that the House's version of the budget would "wreck" public education.

Not clear right now how this gets resolved.

Budget drama summary, part 1

2011-04-20T17:56:00.005-05:00

I got to work this morning on the 41st-to-last day of the Eighty-second Texas legislative session, and right not all signs are that I won't be going home until after the 40th-to-last begins. A huge amount has to happen in the next six weeks, and possibly the most vital is passing a budget. At the moment, it also seems like one of the most difficult.

State governors and legislators like to compare their budget process to regular people's: they can't spend more than they take in (though, to be fair, state governments are allowed accounting tricks not afforded regular people; they're also allowed to be wrong in their budgeting and make up for it later, but never mind). Before each Texas legislative session, held for about 4 months every odd-numbered year, the comptroller releases the state's biennial revenue estimate (BRE), the official estimate of how much tax revenue the state will have over the next two years. This is how much money can be in the budget. T he comptroller estimated the state would have about $72.2 billion* for writing the 2012-13 budget.

*This doesn't include federal fund (such as Medicaid and block grant funding, nor some other sources of state revenue that are dedicated for specific purposes).

This budget has been controversial since before the legislative session began. Democrats began calling on the comptroller to give some indication of what the BRE would be back in the fall, while the governor was running for re-election on the supposed strength of the Texas economy.

Though the governor never mentioned it during his campaign, everyone has seen this year's budget problem coming. Part of the problem was obviously going to be the economy. The main sources of state revenues in Texas are the sales and property taxes, both of which bring in less money when the economy is hurt. The bigger problem, the more predictable one, was what's called the structural deficit.

The structural deficit was created in 2006, when the legislature cut property taxes and tried to make up the difference with a new business tax (called the franchise tax). The comptroller at the time warned the governor the latter wouldn't generate enough revenue to offset the former and urged him to veto it, but he didn't. The next, regular session was in 2007, when a revenue surplus made everything seem okay. The next session, 2009, had a budget shortfall but the state didn't have to deal with it, federal stimulus money closed the gap for us.

Back to present day, and the $72.2 billion BRE. There is no official estimate of the size of the budget shortfall. There are several ways to measure it, but the one that is most often cited (possibly because it either the biggest or the first one someone had ready) comes from the Center for Public Policy Priorities. They compared the BRE to the spending needed to hold maintain current service levels and put the shortfall at about $27 billion.

Going back to work now, more later.

Friday Night Lights, episode 1.7: "Homecoming"

2010-11-20T19:40:00.006-06:00

Even though Permian Panthers of the book have a handful of alumni who have gone on to fairly successful college and professional football careers, we have yet to hear of any such escapes from Dillon, Texas. In spite of the previous implication that the Panthers are a perennial contender for state, the first Panther alum we meet in the series faltered badly in college (both in football and in life) and never recovered, news that his hometown either doesn't know or refuses to acknowledge.*

*He's telling people in Dillon that he has a successful insurance agency in Dallas, though it doesn't seem like a lie one of Dillon's favorite sons could keep up for very long.

Lucas Mize was the star quaterback for the 2000 State Championship Team, and he's given a rousing introduction at a rally preceding the homecoming game. The town goes wild to see him again and the Panthers themselves are in awe, especially after he demonstrates at practice the next day that he still has a throwing arm.

The Panthers share the town's sad delusions, though. No matter how impressive Mize seems to them now, he admits to Coach Taylor that his college career, which was already fizzling, ended with a blown out knee in his sophomore year. Shortly thereafter, he lost his scholarship, dropped out of school and at some point had a kid he only rarely sees. His actual agenda in coming back to Dillon is to ask Eric for a job.

That Lucas flamed out is not a surprise to Tami, who repeats her criticism, first expressed in an Eyes Wide Open deleted scene, of how Dillon mythologizes its kids for their football talents, but fails to prepare them for life outside of football. She's further validated by his reaction to Coach telling him he doesn't have the budget for another assistant coach: bitterness and entitlement in lieu of humility and gratitude.

The cycle of entitlement continues, though, with Smash. After blithely dismissing a college scout's concerns about his strength and size, Smash chokes during the homecoming game so badly that he doesn't carry the ball at all in the second half. He's much more receptive to the scout's concerns after the game, but his solution isn't to hit the gym but to start injecting steroids. Doing the former, of course, would be a public admission of fallibility which, even if it is Coach Taylor's style, isn't what Dillon expects out of its stars.

Other thoughts:

More tension, last seen in a Who's Your Daddy? deleted scene, between Jason's parents, this time over whether he should make an appearance at the homecoming game. It's worth noting that Tim, with the good-hearted intentions, fulfills Herc's prophesy that showing up will mean Jason gets treated like a mascot.
At the rehab facility, Eric doesn't hesitate or flinch when Cory offers him a "stump" to shake when they're introduced.
I was wrong about Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War being the only references to real-world events, this episode has a 9/11 reference. (We learn that it indirectly ended Billy's career as a golfer and shortly afterward their father left town and Billy assumed responsibility for raising Tim.)
Tim Riggins sure sounds like a Canadian in his locker room speech

Trivia/Historic Moments

I think this is the first time Billy Riggins and Mindy Collette have a scene together. Mindy refers to her future husband as an "asshat."
Tami mentions having a sister in Plano, which is near Dallas.
Some confusing information about Dillon's location in Texas. Previous episodes have placed it in the west Texas panhandle, though (weirdly) in this one Lucas recalls that Eric used to drive __ miles from Macedonia, Texas to coach him. There are two Macedonias in Texas, one in central part of the state and one in the far east part. Obviously, neither is 22 miles from the panhandle.
Smash mentions that Dillon is in Carr County, though, which is consistent with a reference in the fourth season's finale. There is no Carr County, Texas. The Midland-Odessa area is in Ector County.
The Panther play, and defeat, the Larabee Lions in this episode.

Notable Texas Music (all replaced for the DVD):

Billy Joe Shaver, "Good Ol' USA"
Explosions in the Sky, "Remember me as a Time of Day"
Explosions in the Sky, "First Breath After Coma"

Deleted Scenes:

At the homecoming game rally, Buddy and Eric eat together while Buddy talks about how dangerous the Larabee quarterback is, and how a loss for the Panthers would put the playoffs out of reach; Mayor Rodell introduces more of the 2000 championship team, and Julie wonders "how can it be homecoming if they never leave?"
Tyra convinces Billy to call in sick so they can plan their anti-homecoming party
Smash at the diner, blowing off concerns about how tough the Larabee game will be and listening to some teammates speculate that some Larabee players must use steroids and discuss how to obtain some.
Matt trying to flirt with a resistant Julie

Federal spending and the Tea Party in Texas House districts

2010-11-05T23:21:00.008-05:00

I'm taking a short break from the Friday Night Lights project while I get through an especially hectic phase at my job. I'll be back at it soon. In the meantime, NPR's Planet Money just had an episode that, like Friday Night Lights and a lot of other great popular art, was about life, work, politics and survival in Texas.

Last Friday's Planet Money was about a cotton war between the United States and Brazil. The US spends about $3 billion a year subsidizing its cotton industry. This includes payments to farmers in Lubbock and Lynn County, Texas. The result is an overproduction of cotton that holds down prices worldwide. Brazil isn't happy about this since it, too, produces cotton and doesn't appreciate the US industry having this unfair advantage or the resulting price distortion. Brazil basically sued the United States through World Trade Organization, and the WTO agreed that the US cotton subsidy was against the rules each country participating in the WTO agreed to. The US appealed several times, and each time the WTO sided with Brazil.

The WTO doesn't have an enforcement mechanism; it can't actually make the US end the subsidy. What it could do, though, and what it did do, was authorize Brazil to tax American imports up to specific amount of money each year. Brazil chose to tax some high-end luxury items, hoping those American industries would then pressure the US government about the cotton subsidy, which is what happened. That motivated the US government to negotiate with Brazil. The US said that because the cotton subsidy is part of the Farm Bill, which isn't up for re-authorization until 2012, they could not legally end the subsidy until then. But, what they could do is subsidize Brazil's cotton industry. And that's where the story ends, with the United States government subsidizing not only its domestic cotton growers but Brazil's, too.

The facts of the story defy all sorts of logic, not to mention free market capitalist dogma, and its conclusion doesn't really solve any problem. If the US gets rid of the cotton subsidy in 2012, the domestic industry suffers if not dies, though the industries in other countries surely benefit. If the US continues the subsidy (a violation of both the spirit and letter of the free trade organization we opted into), it will also have to keep bribing Brazil to not exercise its right under the WTO to tax its imports from the US. There's something very practical and elegantly cynical about the bribery arrangement, it maintains the status quo indefinitely; nobody ever has to make the hard decision. It's also kind of a bargain, since the annual $147 million payments to Brazil are only about 5% of the $3 billion cotton subsidy.

This whole situation could offend plenty of political sensibilities. The Tea Party, though, has been so dogmatic* about government spending that it's hard to imagine how one of their candidates would resolve the conflict. Would they have the stomach to stand against the cotton subsidy, especially if it might mean a loss of jobs or federal money in their district? This is why I was surprised to learn that Tea Party Republicans now represent districts in Texas that benefit from the cotton subsidy.

*I know the Tea Party has developed as a decentralized, non-hierarchical movement incorporating a broad coalition, but the unifying theme of it has been the opposition to government spending.

Midterm elections usually result in losses for whichever party is in the White House. Nationally, the elections last week went the way everyone expected: the Republicans won the House and gained in the Senate. On the other hand, what happened in Texas was pretty remarkable. Texas has been reliably conservative for the last few years, but it became much more so last Tuesday. The Texas House went from being almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats (76-74) to being utterly dominated by Republicans (99-51).

The areas of Texas referred to in Planet Money's Cotton Wars story, Lubbock and Lynn County, are in the state's rural panhandle, an area covered by Texas House Districts 83, 84 and 85. Last week, all three districts elected Tea Party Republicans to the Texas House (Charles Perry, John Frullo, and Jim Landtroop, respectively). Granted, the Farm Bill and its subsidies are federal issues, not state ones, so while you can't quite call these guys hypocrites, you could maybe make a case for naive or Quixotic. I have to wonder if they appreciate how government spending protects a way of life in their districts, or if they even recognize an economic and public policy reality: that government dollars flow from affluent urban areas to rural ones. It's hard for me to imagine that part of the state really wants the alternative.

Friday Night Lights, episode 1.6: "El Accidente"

2010-08-26T02:56:00.005-05:00

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Git Er Done again. Not having seen it since it aired, it struck me this time as the first episode since the pilot where the show felt almost wholly confident about what it did well. El Accidente, though, finds the show indulging in a more schematic, self-contained story in which characters learn valuable lessons. There's nothing wrong with the execution, but it's not as thrilling as the show can be when it is doing more complicated things.

Coach Taylor finds himself negotiating two sets of other people’s lies. Buddy has told the district athletic commission that Voodoo Tatum had been a Dillon resident for 30 full days before he joined the team. The truth, that Tatum had been in town two weeks before starting against Arnett Mead, would result in Tatum being deemed ineligible and the game’s outcome reversed. Eric isn’t happy about being implicated in the lie, but he’s willing to sit quietly and let Buddy tell the commission (represented by one of Buddy’s old University of Texas teammates) whatever he has to protect the team and their victory. Eric is also willing to not ask too many questions when his star safety, Bobby Reyes, tells a series of lies to justify having assaulted one of Saracen’s nerdy friends.

The episode’s other storyline is much better. Riggins finally goes to visit Street in rehab and, after his old friend shames him for abandoning him for so long, takes him (along with Lyla) out for a joyride and evening spent on the lake. There’s a lot in these scenes that the show is great at: showing characters just being familiar with each other, caring about each other, making heartfelt declarations to each other, goofing off with each other, etc.

These scenes are also surprisingly graphic about detailing Jason’s new life. A few shots show the surgery scar running down his neck. There’s also a fleeting shot of the bag collecting his urine peeking out from under his sweat pant leg like a sock. He describes his day as consisting of lying in a bed, being poked and prodded, having catheters replaced, and teaching his body to “crap on cue.” He’s thrilled that he can still get an erection, but quickly deflated when he’s told that ejaculating can cause semen to backflow into his bladder, giving him a severe urinary tract infection. These sorts of details make the Reyes/Tatum storylines (“There’s what’s right for the team, and there’s what’s right”) seem a little trite.

Other thoughts on this episode

There are hints of the future version of Tim Riggins in this episode. He’s mischievous and funny in most of his scenes with Jason, and it suits the character and/or Taylor Kitsch much more than the dark and brooding version of Tim Riggins.
The only downside to the scenes between Jason, Tim and Lyla is Tim’s totally inappropriate obsession with Lyla. While she seems relatively practical and mature, and also regretful, about their affair, she's also clear that it needs to end and never be spoken of again. Tim seems to think they’re having some kind of romance. Lyla’s exasperation with him is totally understandable.
Her scene in the guidance counselor’s office with Tyra is the first time we learn anything biographical about Tami: that she was the pretty girl in school and was bad at math. Revealing little bits of her past like this is going to be a somewhat regular strategy for establishing rapport with someone in trouble (generally either Tyra or Julie).

Trivia/Historic Moments

Voodoo gets fed up with Eric’s new preference for Saracen at QB (even though, practicing on defense, Tatum knocks down his passes) and tells a local reporter about his illegal recruitment before leaving town. Buddy reports that his school in New Orleans has re-opened, though the next time we see him he’s playing for another Texas school.
Buddy played defense as a UT Longhorn
When Tami confronts Eric about how he’s going to handle the situation with Reyes he gets defensive and asks if he’s talking to his wife or the school guidance counselor, and exchange that gets repeated and extended in the episode “Black Eyes and Broken Hearts,” though Tami regularly serves as his guidance counselor, too.

Notable Music

Explosions in the Sky, "Inside it All Feels the Same" (As Jason, Lyla and Tim relax at the lake, Tami and Eric drink wine together at home) (Replaced for the DVD)

Friday Night Lights, episode 1.5: "Git Er Done"

2010-08-21T15:17:00.006-05:00

We learn a little about Dillon, Texas in this episode: it has oil fields that have been sitting idle for some time. We learn this from Connor, who's in town to oversee a feasibility study on behalf of an investment bank possibly interested in re-opening them and. He also strikes up a flirtation with Tyra. Tyra is so disdainful of the town, and of the people in it, that she gravitates toward the young, successful handsome guy from somewhere else.

Dillon has had a series of oil boom-and-busts that apparently ruined a good number of people in town, including Tyra's father (as far as I remember, this is all we ever learn of him). The oil rushes and the cycles of big wealth and big losses are the first clear parallels between Dillon and Odessa, and both the book and Tyra use drug metaphors to describe the town's behavior during the boom times. Connor never talks about what he learns from his geologists, but we can probably surmise something about Dillon's future by how he cuts his trip short and heads back to Los Angeles. Not to spoil anything, but nobody ever comes to re-open the oil fields.

In the rehab center, Herc takes Jason to see his possible future: quad rugby, a chance to be an athlete again.

Voodoo Tatum is also thinking about the future. In the only scene that ever elicits any sympathy for him, he tells Eric how unhappy he is in this new town, in this new school, with this new food, this new weather, and with how people keep going on about Texas; he wants to go home, to Louisiana, and getting noticed on the field and winning a scholarship to LSU is his best chance. He's got talent to go places while Eric, since losing Jason Street, is struggling to hang on to his job; the two of them, according to Voodoo, are a marriage of convenience, nothing more.

Still, though, Tatum makes no effort to work with Eric or even befriend his teammates. His talent alone wins him the start against Arnett Mead, and his touchdown wins him a reprieve from Eric for having called his own play. When he does it again, and the result is a touchdown interception, Eric jumps at his chance to pull him for Saracen.

The morning after Saracen leads the Panthers to a come-from-behind victory against their arch-rivals, Eric is beloved by Dillon. He's stopped in the street for handshakes, hugs, and well-wishes. The tension between him and Mac that's been hinted at (and is elaborated upon somewhat in a deleted scene) evaporates, Buddy seems warmed up to him, and his Saturday morning press conference, in contrast to the one following the South Milbank game, seems very friendly.

Even with the district officials in town to investigate Tatum's eligibility, Eric's place seems a little more secure in Dillon. Jason's discovery of quad rugby seems to have energized him, too; he gets up early to work out by himself. The same morning, Tyra is waking up in Connor's room and learning that he's going back to Los Angeles, and his ladyfriend, without her. Eric has earned the right to stay, but if Jason and Tyra ever want to get out, they'll have to earn that for themselves, too.

Some other thoughts

Lyla is a straight-A student but her college plans have always depended on where Jason ended up playing football and, to Tami's distress, they still do. Tami's suggestion to her, that she should have future plans that aren't contingent on following her boyfriend, is ultimately what Julie will do in the fourth season when she's invited to follow a boyfriend someplace.

Trivia

Herc was once a runner, and his injury is the same as Jason's: C7, T1. I looked this up on the internet, but couldn't figure out exactly what it means; I saw more references to nerves than vertebrae.
Herc's real name is Vincent Gossler (deleted scene, see below)
There are 16,000 people at the Dillon-Arnett Mead game.
The band playing over the opening scene, Heartless Bastards, is who Julie and Matt travel to Austin to see at a music festival in season 4.

Notable Music

Camera Obscure, "Let's Get Out of This Country" (as Tyra wakes up, the Taylors eat breakfast and Jason works alone on his rehab Saturday morning)
Explosions in the Sky, "Look Into the Air" (as the team visits Jason on the way to the Arnett Mead game) (Replaced on the DVD)
Explosions in the Sky, "With Tires Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept" (as the Panthers stage their comeback to win the game) (Replaced on the DVD)
Heartless Bastards, "All This Time" (as Lyla dresses and jogs over to Tim's)

Deleted scenes

A sequence in which: Smash brags on how he's going to win the game; Landry gets shot down by a girl he tries flirting with; Arnett Mead guys who beat up Matt in the last episode vandalize the diner; Eric and Tami go out to dinner and run into Mac and Buddy having a drink together; Riggins, Smash and Matt catch up with the Arnett Mead vandals and start a fight with them just as Eric and Tami are leaving dinner; Eric sees the fight and breaks it up.
Jason getting a sponge bath while Herc tells him stories of his sexual conquests; Jason's mom comes in, but in embarrassed to interrupt Jason's bath (though Jason doesn't seem bothered by it) and meets Herc.
The coaches watch Voodoo and Saracen practice, and note that while Saracen is stepping up, Voodoo spmething special. They also note, though, that the team seems to like Saracen more.

Friday Night Lights, episode 1.4: "Who's Your Daddy?"

2010-08-21T12:20:00.003-05:00

One of the themes spanning the Friday Night Lights multimedia empire is the crushing weight of tradition. There’s a lot of tradition in the book and film; cross-town rivalries and resentments, inter-family football traditions, and traditions handed down from one generation of football players to the next (these latter two are explicit in the film). Very rarely are these traditions presented with much sentimentality; they’re more often outright burdens. Coach Taylor’s disgusted reaction to seeing his locker room trashed and vandalized by longtime Panther rivals the Arnett Mead Tigers sums is a pretty good encapsulation of how any of the Friday Night Lights generally views its football-related traditions.

Tami learns the hard way that obligations to football tradition don’t stop with the players and coach. On short notice, she’s having to plan and host a party at their house for the players, their parents (though neither Smash’s mom nor Grandma Saracen appear to be there), the boosters and what seems like a huge number of other people. Though she is willing to look happy for Eric’s sake she also tells him its one of the parts of being a Panther coach’s wife that she hates.

Both Saracen and Jason Street have new competitors. Jason’s roommate in his rehab center, Herc, is loud and offensive, but his antagonism ultimately makes him a more effective rehab coach than Phil the physical therapist’s handholding. Saracen is bonding with his team and the coach (and, to Eric’s chagrin, Julie) but he’s self-destructing at practice. Meanwhile, Voodoo Tatum, who's been alienating everyone except Buddy Garrity, proves his prowess and confidence on the field.

It’s a bye week for Dillon, which means Coach has an extra week to make up his mind on which quarterback to start against Arnett Mead. He obviously dislikes Tatum (for the kid's arrogance and possibly because he feels guilty about how Voodoo was recruited) and wants to start Saracen, he likes him and the kid so desperately wants a father figure to impress, but Saracen is giving him no reason to buck the pressure from everyone else to start Voodoo.

Other thoughts

The relationship between Eric and Buddy is still pretty antagonistic at this point.
Matt, Tami and Jason try to be calm and reserved but are all pushed to emotional breaking points by the pressure on them this week
Tyra isn’t much more than a sketch of a character right now, but the scene where she visits Jason in rehab surprised me. She tells him how sorry she is that a good person like him had something so bad happen, something she repeats in the third season when she’s working on her college application essay.

Trivia and historic moments

The first overt reference to Grandma Saracen’s dementia; first mention of Julie’s friend Lois; and the first appearance of Reyes in an episode (he was introduced in a Wind Sprints deleted scene).
Last year, Voodoo won state in Louisiana, and broke five records.

Notable Music (Replaced on the DVD)

Explosions in the Sky, "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean"
Explosions in the Sky, "Look Into the Air"

Deleted Scenes on the DVD

Riggins working out with Voodoo, who refuses to spot him when he needs help. Smash comes over for the spot.
Smash and Riggins invite Saracen on their retaliation mission against Arnett Mead
Tyra and Tim have an awkward meeting in the hallway for the first time since breaking up
Tami going to bed while Eric watches game tapes
A doctor tells Matt his grandmother’s dementia will be sporadic and unpredictable: “You’re just going to have to keep an eye on her”
Eric meets with the Arnett Mead coach to talk about being a united front on the rivaliry and vandalism issues; the coach coach accuses Eric of having stolen Voodoo from his district
Jason's parents visit him in rehab in rehab and argue about what to tell him. They mention “there’s going to be a lawsuit” and ask if Coach Taylor ever ran him through tackling drills. When Jason protests his mom breaks down, sobbing that there's no other way to pay for everything.

Friday Night Lights, episode 1.3: "Wind Sprints"

2010-08-14T23:02:00.005-05:00

At the end of Eyes Wide Open, things were looking up for Matt Saracen. He’d forged a bond with Coach Taylor and, as the episode closed, took the field with renewed confidence. As Wind Sprints opens, harsh reality sets in. Saracen performs much better than expected, but the rest of the team struggles. The Panthers lose to the South Milbank Rattlers, and the town turns on them. For Saracen, this means his yard is vandalized and the Rally Girls suddenly ignore him.

The town is less pass-aggressive towards Eric. The boosters second-guess his strategy during the game. He and Julie are menaced by a burly ex-Panther at a hamburger restaurant. His team revolts against him in practice. His assistant coach, Mac McGill, seems to be spending a lot time with Buddy Garrity. Buddy is pressuring him to throw Saracen overboard a recruit (before someone else does) a talented quarterback, Ray “Voodoo” Tatum, recently relocated from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. On top of it all, Smash Williams takes his dissatisfaction public by giving his “off the record” opinion about Coach’s leadership during an on-camera interview.

If there’s a theme that ties this episode’s various plot threads together, its helplessness. Jason struggles against his broken spine and Lyla’s refusal to acknowledge the gravity of his injury. Matt has nobody to help him care for his grandmother. Riggins is so consumed with guilt that he’s ashamed to run into Jason’s mom, skips the pancake breakfast fundraiser benefiting his best friend, walks out on practice, and spends a lot of time drunk. By the end of the episode, we realize that Lyla’s relentless optimism is just a front for her own sense of helplessness.

For all the pressure he’s under, though, Eric is one of the few characters who can also do something about it.* He orders Mac to get the team together for a late night trip out to run sprints up a muddy hill in the rain. He orders Riggins to stop blaming himself for an accident he couldn't have prevented. At the next day’s practice his players seem disciplined, Saracen is hitting his receivers (the assistant coaches even seem to like him now), and Mac is deferential. Just as things are looking better Buddy walks on the field and introduces Voodoo Tatum as the team’s new quarterback, thus introducing a whole new set of problems.

Some other thoughts

(*)Strictly speaking, the affair Tim and Lyla start in this episode is also a way to cope with their stress and helplessness; it’s just one that will compound problems, not resolve them.
Unless I’m forgetting something, I think the reference to the Iraq War in the previous episode and the one to Hurricane Katrina in this one are the only overt references to the non-fiction world.

Trivia and historic moments

Tami learns that the previous school counselor killed herself. Mayor Rodell thinks it was pills, but can’t be sure. I believe this information never comes up again.
First references to Grandma Saracen having good and bad spells.

Notable Music

Explosions in the Sky, “The Only Moment We Were Alone” (Replaced on the DVD)
Explosions in the Sky, “Your Hand in Mine” (Replaced on the DVD)
Explosions in the Sky, “The Sky Above, The Field Below” (Replaced on the DVD)
Mogwai, “New Path to Helicon Part I”

Deleted Scene on DVD:

Tami lamenting that her Saturday mornings with Eric are no longer for “sleeping late and making love and reading the paper” before Eric goes to take pointed questions from the community about his strategy against South Millbank. He gets in trouble when he points out it was a non-conference game, as if that makes it “okay to lose.”

Addendum to Episode 1.2

2010-08-14T22:47:00.003-05:00

I forgot that the DVD has deleted scenes for some episodes.

Reverend at Smash's church telling him his team needs him to lead, not to dazzle.
Tami getting drunk (with someone) and angry about Jason Street only being valued by Dillon for having a good throwing arm
Local media interview Panther players and coaches, some of which is incorporated into the episode. Notable, though, for being the first time we meet Bobby Reyes (#42, Safety) and the only time we meet Jeroma Dolia (#01, Wide Receiver). We also learn that both Assistant Coach Mac McGill and Coach Taylor are Johnny Cash fans.
An extended version of the scene where the book club ladies tell Tami how Eric should use their sons on the team, which ends with Julie’s English teacher introducing herself and taking Tami away to get drunk (apparently leading in to the second deleted scene).

Friday Night Lights Season 1, episode 2: "Eyes Wide Open"

2010-08-07T20:53:00.006-05:00

In spite of a miraculous, last-second win in the season-opener against Westerby, Dillon, Texas is not embracing Matt Saracen as QB1. The boosters, led by Buddy Garrity, and Mayor Rodell are giving Coach Taylor unsolicited advice on strategy and brazenly telling him how little faith they have in Saracen. Even a customer at the Alamo Freeze, one wearing a Panther hat, lest we mistake him for someone who could be ignorant of who Saracen is, gives him a hard time while he tries memorizing plays while filling orders.

When I watched the first episode, I thought it wasn’t clear how familiar Street was with Saracen, the gaps in social standing and athletic ability between them being what they were. In this episode we learn that Street not only knows who Saracen is but he likes and rather envies him for his creativity.

Some other thoughts:

The expense of a new air conditioner prompts Tami to get a job as a guidance counselor at the high school. This is a pretty major thematic break with the book, where head coach is, by far, one of the school district’s best-compensated positions.

Matt’s reluctance to let Coach Taylor see inside his house echoes a character in the book who’s too self-conscious about his home to let even his girlfriend see it.

Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton had pretty great chemistry and timing in their scenes together very early in the show…

…but Taylor Kitsch (as Tim) and Minka Kelly (as Lyla) did not. I’m glad the characterization of Riggins as a brooding alcoholic, and possible racist, didn’t stick(*). Likewise, Lyla Garrity becomes a much more interesting character when she becomes disenchanted(**) with the Dillon football culture. Both of these characters and performances really come alive starting in the third season.

(*) I do appreciate that he will always be a drinker, though. The show’s nonchalance when it comes to teenagers acquiring and drinking alcohol (to say nothing of its matter-of-fact approach to teenagers having sex lives) is pretty remarkable, and must be due somewhat to the fact that almost nobody has been paying attention to this show.

(**) In some ways, Lyla’s arc is very similar to Becky’s in the fourth season, in that both stories are about a young woman learning in hard ways that their options in Dillon are limited. All the major teenage characters (including Julie, Tyra, Matt, even Jason) come to this realization at some point, but Lyla and Becky have in common that they start out as especially, sometimes annoyingly, callow (one's a cheer leader, the other a beauty pageant contestant) and end up much wiser and stronger.

Another character who gets better as they develop: Tyra.

This is the episode where we first meet Corinna, Smash’s mom. I've always liked that she works at Planned Parenthood. I worked at one for a few years, and in spite of the organization's political baggage, a lot of the front-line employees had more in common with Corinna than with political activists; just wage-earners raising kids on a small amount of money.

Trivia and historic moments

We find out, via a picture in Grandma Saracen's house, that Matt's dad is deployed to Iraq.
Eric and Buddy have known each other a long time (since Buddy was a junior salesman and Eric was a junior high coach).
I think this was the first episode with Rally Girls

Notable Music (all replaced on the DVD)

Explosions in the Sky, "Yasmin the Light"
Explosions in the Sky, "Your Hand in Mine"
Explosions in the Sky, "First Breath After Coma"
TV on the Radio, "Wolf Like Me"

Friday Night Lights, season 1, episode 1: "Pilot"

2010-07-19T22:41:00.010-05:00

Coincident to my re-reading and -viewing of Friday Night Lights I’ve been reading a book by Michael Chabon called Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of non-fiction essays about his thoughts and experiences as an adult man, husband, father and pop culture obsessive, and a few sentences made me think about Coach Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler) in the Friday Night Lights pilot episode.

In an essay called Faking It Chabon quotes a Rudyard Kipling poem (If) whose sentiment still informs at least somewhat an idea both boys and girls have of what it is to be a man: “To keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.” Chabon wonders if there really an operative difference between keeping one’s head and merely appearing to do so but concludes that the differences are probably moot: “There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind of aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed.”

These lines are apropos because it’s not clear for most of this first episode of Friday Night Lights which sort of man (Kipling or Chabon) Coach Taylor is. He’s a pretty stoic, Kipling-esque guy for a lot of this episode, mostly keeping any doubts or conflicts he has pretty close. This might be because he’s pragmatic enough to recognize that the community of Dillon, Texas will accept nothing less from him. He gets not-so-subtle assessments of his readiness and declarations of expectations from both the local radio sports show and in person. At a rally hosted by booster Buddy Garrity at his newest car dealership, townspeople mince no words: we want to win championships.

He might be playing it cool because he knows, as a coach who scouts opposing teams reminds him, that when expectations are this high he has nowhere to go but down. The Dillon Panthers open the first season of the show as favorites for State. The local paper’s headline rhetorically asks if this year’s team is the best ever and Sports Illustrated has named the Panthers the number one high school football team in Texas.

We also learn early in the episode that Taylor has been coaching senior quarterback Jason Street since he was a kid, and has been his quarterback coach throughout his freshman and junior varsity teams. Street is seemingly beloved by the entire town, adults and children alike, resolutely faithful to his girlfriend, unfailingly polite and possibly the best young quarterback ever scouted by Notre Dame. The only exception to the otherwise universal adoration of him is that the mayor, Lucy Rodell, thinks he’s too polite and prescribes early Black Sabbath to make him mean.

(Even Matt Saracen, sophomore, caretaker of his grandmother, and distant-second-string quarterback, and occasional holder for extra points, seems to respect the guy, though it’s not clear that football is as important to Saracen as it is to everyone else. He dutifully practices target throws in his front yard, but his best friend Landry suspects that his interest in football is more a “daddy love me thing” than anything else. The coaches don't take him very seriously, either; during a practice one sends him to dig something out of the trash.)

After it's established that Jason Street doesn't have an arrogant or unkind bone in his body, his neck is broken in a bad tackle during the first game of the season. This plot twist raises the emotional stakes of the show and signals unequivocally that this show is going to side with Chabon; that bad, difficult things are going to happen; and they will happen because difficult things, even failure, are constant. They're the normal. And that this show's measure of all its characters, but particularly its men, will not be their imperviousness to hardship, but their weathering of it. The closing minutes of the episode are set to a prayer of Coach Taylor's that may as well be the show's mission statement:

Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all at some point in our lives fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested.

**

Trivia/Historic Moments

The Westerby Mustangs are opponents in first episode
Street breaks his neck tackling a Westerby player named “Chandler”
Landry mentions wanting to start a Christian speed metal band
Jason Street 6’2", 190 lbs
On the field, Smash wears #20, Riggins is #33, Street #6 and Saracen #7
First use of "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."

Notable Music

Explosions in the Sky, "Remember Me As A Time Of Day" (used three times)
Explosions in the Sky, "From West Texas"
Explosions in the Sky, "Your Hand in Mine (with strings)"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Gold Lion"

Friday Night Lights, Chapter 1: Odessa

2010-07-18T23:14:00.004-05:00

Chapter one opens on a Monday morning in mid-August, 1988, as coaches and players arrive at the Permian High School field house for the first time that season. The bills of the coach’s hats are still stiff, the sweatbands still unstained. The field house smells of furniture polish: “the dust and dirt of the previous season were forever wiped away.”

Wiped away, but not forgotten or ignored. Coach Gary Gaines and his staff assemble the 55 boys that comprise the Panthers to remind them not just of their elite status in the school and community but their responsibility to the Panther legacy, though verbalizing both sentiments seems redundant. The field house’s Permian Wall of Fame immortalizes every Panther to have been name All State; a city council proclamation honoring a state championship team hangs on another wall; the county library’s history of Panther football is longer and more detailed than that of the city.

The town always has high expectations for its high school football, but is unusually excited about the 1988 team. A roster of experienced players was returning. Boosters regarded the team as the most talented in a decade and the Associated Press picked the team to win State.

The 1988 season at this point is as much a blank slate as Odessa itself was a hundred years before. Located 350 miles east of Dallas, the city was created by a group of speculators from Ohio. They sold the 14,000 mostly barren acres that would make up the city on pitches and promises that ranged from highly conditional to outright lies. At least 10 families of German Methodists from Pennsylvania did settle in Odessa, but they were soon clashing with the ranchers and cowboys who were already there. In 1900, the city had 381 residents. Ten years later there would be 1,178. By 1920 the population would be under 800 again.

There are a lot of references this chapter to the general unpleasantness of the geography around and the difficulty of life in Odessa. Directly quoting Bissinger:

“...gaping land that filled the heart with far more sorrow than… encouragement”
“virtually impossible to farm anything”
“physically wretched”
“lacked a fantastic amount”
“a place that cried out daily for alcohol”

He also describes regular droughts that made ranching also almost impossible; the land being so flat that there weren’t even trees tall enough to hang cattle rustlers and horse thieves (they were shot instead); and on top of this misery, a flu epidemic in 1919 that killed so many people so quickly that there weren’t enough healthy ones to dig graves

Odessa is situated in the Permian Basin, though, and in the mid 1920s oil was discovered in West Texas. The population boomed, and a who new set of miseries befell Odessa: wild overcrowding, lawlessness, prostitution, chronic diarrhea, bad water, and streets so thick with mud that oxen were required to transport drilling equipment through town, and an overwhelming rat infestation.

Bissinger describes the boom-and-bust cycles of the next decades as “a drug-induced euphoria followed by the lows of the bust and the realization that everything you made during the boom had had just been lost.” Odessa became a place where people flocked when there was money to be made, but a place they got the hell away from quickly once the money dried up. In 1987, Money magazine called it the 5^th worst place to live in the country. The next year, the year the book takes place, Psychology Today took into account its rates of alcoholism, crime, suicide and divorce and named Odessa the country’s 7^th most stressful city.

In the book's preface, Bissinger emphasized the universality of his story; this was not going to be a Texas story necessarily, but an American one. He returns to that theme near the end of the first chapter. Odessa may have invested its heart, soul and faith in high school football but it was just doing with the Permian Panthers what every other culturally or geographically isolated city does with something. As Gaines addresses his players in the opening hours of the 1988 pre-season he knows this won’t be his team for long, in a week he’ll be sharing it with the whole town. He also knows that a successful post-season run is the least of Odessa’s expectations. While a trip to the state championship will mean euphoria and joy, an unsuccessful regular season will bring anger and disappointment.

***

I’m not going to guess at intent on the part of the TV show’s writers and directors, but I am going to point out elements in the book that seem like the show maybe references or calls back to, even if it's obscure. For instance, the Permian Wall of Fame in the team’s field house has an analog in the show. In addition:

The local oil industry’s boom and bust history, and the out-of-towners who come to exploit the former part of the cycle, gets referenced in the first season.
The first chapter references a giant sand storm symbolic of the difficulty of life in Odessa, somewhat like the tornado that ravages Dillon in the second season and precedes conflicts between beloved characters.
A local historical figure in the book is a doctor named J.D. Cone, whose gets an alliterative descendant in third season quarterback phenomenon J.D. McCoy.
A discussion of the town’s very high rate of violent crime and murder can’t help but bring to mind a grisly murder in the second season.
The image of someone flying over Odessa in a plane at night.
The Permian Panthers are starting their season with expectations and pressure as great as those facing television’s Dillon Panthers.

Friday Night Lights: Preface

2010-06-30T23:00:00.003-05:00

The preface to H.G. Bissinger's book pretty short, and mostly background information. Bissinger was in his mid-thirties, married, raising two small twin boys, and working for the Philadelphia Inquirer when he set out to find a story of a high school sports team “keeping a town together.” It was an idea, he writes, that had been with him since he was thirteen.

He doesn’t detail the process that led him to settle on the city, but in July 2008 he quit his job and moved his family to Odessa, Texas. He describes his early impressions of Odessa and the surrounding area in pretty bleak terms:

“Severely depressed”
Feeling “powerless and insignificant” driving through West Texas plains
Rows of oil field equipment sitting unused
Grimy hotels without customers
Buildings belonging to banks
Closed down movie theatres
An abandoned JC Penny
Some restaurants, more pawnshops

Even the nicer, more apparently affluent parts of Odessa don’t seem that comfortable. The east part of the city has shiny malls and comfortable ranch houses, though many of them have FOR SALE signs. There is a south part of Odessa, too, populated mainly by minorities.

For now, I’m not going to seek any information that Bissinger doesn’t provide, but in the preface he does not mention how big a city Odessa is. He does emphasize, though, that on Friday nights during football season the Permian Panthers play to crowds that exceed 20,000 in a stadium that

…rises out of nowhere, two enormous flanks of concrete with a sunken field in between. Gazing into that stadium, looking up into those rows that can hold twenty thousand, you wonder what it must be like on a Friday night, when the lights are on and the heart and soul of the town pours out over that field, across the endless plains.

The preface closes with some disclaimers. This town is not just about football, and these kids are not just players. Bissinger is encountering Odessa during a bad time for the city, and he wonders what the people think about race, about education, about the economy, about the presidential election that will happen later in the year. And he wonders what it costs for the team to hold the town on its shoulders. Near the end of the preface, Bissinger quotes a man whose son had gone to Permian.

Athletics… ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people… Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It’s Camelot for them, but there’s even life after it.

This notion that football can be transcendent, but that life outside of and after it is harsh and difficult will be a major theme in the television series, too, keeping its portrayal of smaller-town, prayerful southerners from getting too romantic for too long.

The Friday Night Lights project

2010-06-25T20:09:00.004-05:00

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is a comprehensive review of Friday Night Lights. The story of a West Texas high school football team and surrounding community was originally a nonfiction book by HG Bissinger published in 1990. A film adaptation, co-written and directed by Peter Berg, followed in 2004. A television series, bearing little overt resemblance to either the book or the film, began airing in 2006.

Calling Friday Night Lights a franchise requires a fair amount of qualification. For spawning a film and a television series that's going on its fifth season, the book doesn't have much of a narrative. It follows the Permian Panthers through a football season, but most of it is devoted to describing the history and politics of its Midland-Odessa setting. The portrayal is not especially flattering, either. Apparently, threats of physical violence dissuaded Bissinger from making return trips to Odessa after the book was published.

I recall the film as being an object lesson in the dangers of faithful adaptation. It uses the narrative events, but it's the local anthropology that is the more memorable and defining aspect of the book. I remember the film also pulling some punches that the book does not, perhaps out of respect for its still-living, real-life characters. The television series solves both shortcomings. It fictionalizes the setting and characters and is also longer and more expansive, allowing the book's more subtle and/or damning themes to be more effectively translated.

It's also an improbable multimedia entertainment brand in that its themes more often have to do with failure and loss, rather than triumph. A premise of the book is that each year the high school football team carries all the hopes and dreams of a community that doesn't have much else going for it. The team's coaches and players are the local royalty when they're winning, but the consequences of loss can be brutal. For all the adoration the town has for team's players, all three versions of the story make life for ex-players seem pretty bleak.

In spite of the differences, there's still continuity between the three incarnations of Friday Night Lights, and part of this project will be to trace their common themes. I plan to cover the book, film and series, and hopefully finish in time for the show's fifth season (which may be airing in Direct TV later this year). Since the show is the longest, most time consuming piece, most of the project will be devoted to that. I'll post at least brief summaries and observations about each episode, and I do the same for each chapter of the book, rather than tackle it as a whole.

I'm going to rely mainly on the broadcast versions of the show. The first season, and to lesser extents the second and third, was scored with distinctive music licensed from a lot of bands, but primarily Explosions in the Sky (who also wrote original music for the film, and three-quarters of whom are from the region of Texas where Friday Night Lights takes place). For the DVD releases, though, a lot of this music was re-recorded (a Death Cab For Cutie song prominently used in the third season was also replaced for the DVD release), and the tone and effect of some scenes is somewhat altered as a result. I'll note especially significant uses of licensed music, and may also do some spot checks with the DVDs to see if it was retained.

Finishing Lost

2010-05-21T19:57:00.005-05:00

I don't think it's worth losing to much sleep or bandwidth over, but there's a churlish article in the New York Times by a guy named Mike Hale concerning this weekend's series finale of Lost. In summary, he doesn't like that people who watch the show might care more about the mythology than they do more important elements of show craft, that by late Sunday night people will judge the show based on what kinds of answers it gives to its myriad questions rather than on more objective achievements. Because I'd rather waste my time on the show's parlor game aspect that he disdains, I'll just make a few quick points.

Since “Lost” itself favors oracular pronouncements, here’s one more: The show had one good season, its first. It was very, very good — as good as anything on television at the time — but none of the seasons since have approached that level, and the current sixth season, rushed, muddled and dull, has been the weakest.

I sort of agree with this. The first season, overall, is still the show's strongest. The show's high-water mark, though, came five weeks into the fourth season with an episode called "The Constant." This is a seriously great hour of television, one that I bet is just as thrilling and moving for people totally unfamiliar with the Lost mythology and the sad saga of Desmond Hume & Penny Widmore as it is for the nerds. As for season 1 being "as good as anything on television at the time," I'll be a little condescending myself and point out that the third season of The Wire was airing at the same time, so Hale is obviously wrong.

In this sideways universe, making sense of the show became the responsibility, and even the privilege, of the viewers rather than the producers. The compromises and continuity lapses and narrative backing and filling that characterize all broadcast network series became fodder for a kind of populist biblical commentary, and the logical gymnastics performed to read authorial intention into every word and image and in-joke began to feel religious in nature. Every question about the show had to have one true answer, and discerning it — or asserting your version of it the loudest — wasn’t the stuff of water cooler chatter, it was blood sport. And this new proprietary “Lost” obsession grew symbiotically with things like mainstream entertainment blogs (and their comments sections) and Twitter, until now there is a vast body of shared commentary and speculation that often seems to overshadow the show itself. Why bother writing fan fiction when you can feel as if you had a hand in the real thing?

It seems a little like he blames Lost for the rise of the obsessive fan culture on the internet and for people being dickish in stating their interpretations as definitive. He also doesn't seem to like that some people might base their assessment of the show as a whole based on how it ends. If so, that's a little weird since all those tendencies predate this show and the internet.

There have always been viewers who value the closure more than anything else (for instance, people who are probably going to watch a movie once and thus don't want to know "how it ends"). On the other hand, obsessively arguing over popular art has been happening as long as two or more people have seen the same movies, watched the same shows, read the same books or listened to the same albums. Good, polite disagreement about the meaning of these things is one of the primary pleasures of consuming them in the first place.

It’s clear that the rise of “Lost” geekdom has encouraged fans, and critics who should know better, to celebrate the mythology — the least important element of the show, from a dramatic standpoint — while glossing over things like pacing, structure, camerawork and acting. (With a few exceptions, notably Terry O’Quinn, as Locke, and Henry Ian Cusick, as Desmond, the performances have been undistinguished since the first season, which may have as much to do with the conception of the characters as with the actors themselves.)

Yes, some members of Lost's ensemble cast have more range than others. The more galling parts of this paragraph, though, are the suggestions that (1) there's a right way to enjoy anything and (2) people who enjoy Lost can't also be critical of it.

I happen to agree that the latter half of the series (in which the characters bounce around in time, and the narrative centers on the philosophical battle between two immortal beings) is less engaging than the first (in which survivors of a plane crash piece together the history of the DHARMA Initiative's experiments with fertility and do battle with The Others).* Hale stops short, but it seems like he's suggesting that there are objective ways to appreciate things like acting, pacing, camerawork, etc.

(* Less engaging, but in spite of making the home stretch of the show all about relatively boring questions of good vs. evil and free will vs. fate, the producers have made the distinctions admirably knotty. For this reason, I don't expect, as some people I've talked to do, the show to end with Kate making a choice between Sawyer and Jack. More on the parlor games below.)

Entire books, scholarly journals, magazines and blogs have been dedicated to trying to figure out what's most (or least) important in criticism. What's the point of crisp pacing, a structured narrative, good camerawork and vivid acting if it's in service of something of something the viewer considers thematically dull (or even objectionable)? Moreover, by Hale's standard you have to throw out a lot of significant films. Does anyone argue that what makes Night of the Living Dead a great film is it's supple performances or accomplished cinematography? Moreover, how would Hale regard something directed by Robert Altman? I mean, with all the people talking at the same time you can barely follow a conversation in that guy's films!

Maybe I hang out with a different kind of person than Hale, but I haven't talked to anyone totally uncritical about Lost; everyone I know that watches the show can point to a performance, or a stretch of episodes, or a plot development they don't like. Being caught up in the mythology hardly precludes finding the dialogue ludicrous. Hence, a friend of mine with the biggest attachment to the show self-identifies as a "Lost apologist."

**
Lost has left so much dangling in its six years that no prediction can possibly cover everything the finale may or may not address. It seems reasonable (though unfortunate) to expect that we're not going to get much more about the DHARMA experiments, but that we will get a resolution to the Jacob vs. Man in Black conflict. The alternate reality will almost certainly interact somehow with the island reality. I rather hope we don't get a name for the Man in Black at this point.

I think Juliet will show up in the sideways reality (probably as Jack's ex-wife), for the first time since she was killed in the island timeline in the season's premiere, and repeat her dying line about getting coffee. I'm 85% sure that's coming. Also, I kind of think the island might cease to exist, but only enough to be 25% sure of it. I think there's a 5% chance that the Man in Black will actually turn out to be "good," and Jacob "bad." I also think there is a 100% chance that Jack, Kate and Sawyer will continue to work out with personal trainers, whether they are in LA or living for eternity as immortal beings on the island.

Another update on TV Shows

2010-05-08T18:36:00.010-05:00

Parks and Recreation
Parks and Recreation's six-episode first season was intermittently funny but too closely modeled on the American edition of The Office (from which it was an ostensible spin-off, though aside from having Rashida Jones in the cast the two are completely unrelated). Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope was manic and insecure in ways that recalled Steve Carell's Michael Scott; except that she's the deputy director of the parks department of a fictional Indiana town, there wasn't much that distinguished the two. Moreover, she pined for a city planner (played by Paul Schneider) she'd once slept with and this was a discouraging hint that they show might might follow her efforts to win him back. Maybe, maybe not. The last episode of that season turned the show away from being a workplace comedy into something much funnier and even more visionary.

In its second season the setting is the same, but Leslie is a vastly different character. No longer a delusional striver (though she still dreams of being the first female president or, failing that, Pawnee's first female parks department director) Leslie is an eager public servant whose enthusiasm for her job stems from a belief that government should do things for people. She's countered by her boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), current parks department director and avowed libertarian. Ron thinks the best possible government is one that does as little as possible, though he aspires to keep moving up in it. The two have a friendship and mutual respect that seems quaint in both a television comedy (in other hands this relationship might be more antagonistic, or one of the characters more buffoonish) and in contemporary political discourse.

Parks and Recreation is hardly a two person show, though. The regular cast is rounded out by Schneider, Jones, as well as Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari and Aubrey Plaza. Beyond the names in the opening credits, the show has a solid supporting cast that only gets a couple jokes each episode but generally nail them, anyway. Outside of the parks department office, the show has built up an impressive bench of recurring bit characters and local mythology, it's almost like they're working on a live-action version of Springfield.* In another season or two, they might be able to pull off a 22 Short Films About Pawnee episode.

The show also has the catchiest opening theme on television.

*Anyone who noticed that this phrase also appeared in Alan Sepinwall's review of the most recent episode might understandably suspect that I'd stolen the observation or wording. I promise, though, that I have a date-and-time stamped email proving that I came up with it independently.

24
Good Christ, I can't believe I used to defend this show. For its first 4 seasons, 24 was wildly inconsistent but capable of using its real time conceit to create genuine suspense and spikes of adrenaline (not to mention some heartbreaking sadness). It also managed a neat trick of simultaneously telling a story that, with each season taking place over a single day and with several years passing between seasons, used a here-and-now urgency to illustrate a longer-form character piece. The problem, though, is that this longer arc had a nice, perfectly appropriate conclusion at the close of the fourth season. By the time this eighth, final, season ends, the series will have gone on 100% too long.

24 has periodically showed signs of life since then, but those were fleeting and situational. None of it was as visceral, troubling and cathartic as the show's strongest moments in the early seasons. (My collected posts discussing 24 can be found here, and include what is in retrospect a surprisingly optimistic take on the early episodes of season 6, which would go on to be, by far, the series' nadir.)

The show came to life again for just a few minutes this season. At the end of episode 18, after years of being dry and mercilessly direct as Jack's unflagging ally, Chloe is elevated to the show's Counter Terrorism Unit director. For context, Chloe was introduced in the third season, back when the show still portrayed government counter-terrorism agents as bad-ass professionals with attendant emotional quirks rather than as emotional basket cases who somehow got a job protecting the homeland.

Anyway, As Chloe is taking charge of CTU, Jack is in custody but scheming to hijack a government helicopter and go on a revenge rampage (long story, not worth it). One of the nice touches here, is that Chloe does exactly what we expect not only that character to do, but what we'd expect a CTU director to do: she moves quickly and decisively to stop Jack. The closing moments of that episode, where Chloe's cold, matter-of-fact decisiveness goes up against Jack's angry impulsiveness, were not only the first time in years anyone from CTU actually takes him on but they were reminiscent of of 24's early glory in ridiculous, stark conflict.

Community
I saw an early episode of this show, set in a community college, and was not impressed. But I have gone back to it and though it seems likely that I would have found it funnier if I were familiar with the cast and show, it was still extremely likable. I was won over by the episode two weeks ago that concerned a campus-wide paintball contest that fondly spoofed a number of action films, but most frequently Die Hard (they even worked in a music cue). The next episode, a more conventional one, had a nice joke about The Wire. I am going to try this show over from the beginning.

There's a longer post about Treme coming.

Photos from a visit to the International Exotic Animal Sanctuary

2009-09-09T18:56:00.009-05:00

This sanctuary is in Boyd, TX, roughly 50 miles from Dallas. They have about 70 tigers, a few lions, bobcats and bears. It's pretty amazing. More on it later.

Two of three white tiger siblings who all live together. The whiteness apparently results from a combination of double-recessive genes.

Mad Men 3.1

2009-08-20T20:27:00.009-05:00

There are a lot of spoilers in the following.

I’ve seen Mad Men’s season premiere twice now. Brent used the word elegant to describe it, and after my second viewing that word seems about perfect. Last season’s first episode was more leisurely and mysterious; in retrospect, an apropos start to a season that had a long, slow burn before going pretty deep and dark in the last few episodes. If this episode is any indication, the third season is going to be more action-packed.

Back to the elegance, though. The episode opened and closed with Don Draper thinking about birth stories, Dick Whitman’s and Sally Draper’s. The opening flashbacks reverberated, both in the closing moments, when Don recalls for Sally the circumstances of her birth (which were very different than his own), and in a fleeting moment of a hotel hallway. In the latter scene, Don takes advantage of an elaborate lie (built on a flight attendant's misunderstanding of the name on his luggage) to admit to someone that its his (meaning, Dick Whitman’s) birthday. To me, he seemed just as alone here as he did in the episode's opening moments.

The long scenes with flirtatious flight attendants paid off, again, when the hotel’s fire alarm sounds and Don accidentally finds Sal making out with the hotel porter. It was a nice touch that the married man using a fake name to have an illicit affair and the engaged flight attendant each jump out onto the fire escape wearing only jackets; the gay men in the room below have to take the time to get completely dressed.

Contrast was a big theme elsewhere in this episode, between gay & straight; single & married; American & British; Pete Campbell & Ken Cosgrove; and, as usual, between the genders.

For the second season in a row, the premiere episode had Peggy Olsen scolding a secretary. This might be because Peggy is very serious but it also speaks to her different experience of the professional world. It’s hard to imagine any of the men’s secretaries being as lax and irresponsible as Lola seems to be working for Peggy; she’s earned her defensiveness.

On the other hand, there was John Hooker, who insists that he’s not a secretary, even though everyone (including his boss) regards him as one. It's another sign of the show's thoughtfulness; as Peggy struggles to be taken serious in a male culture, John struggles to be taken more seriously than his female counterparts.

I'm not sure what to make of Don's veiled advice to a terrified Sal ("Limit your exposure"). On the one hand, it seems like if anyone can appreciate the stress of a secret identity, it's Don Draper. On the other, I wonder if this admonition was for Sal's sake, or Don's (as in, "don't make me have to take a stand").

Also, Don continues to be a pretty terrible monogamist, even after his pledge at the end of last season. Even at her stage of pregnancy, Betty Draper is, by far, the less affectionate parent.

The show continues to have very funny, quotable dialogue, e.g.:

“I picked it for it sensuality.”
"I told them it was a stupid idea, but they don’t always get our inflection.
"Help yourself… not the Stoli."
"I’ve been married a long time. You get lots of chances."
"She’s taken to your tools like a little lesbian."

HB 2154

2009-05-11T12:43:00.003-05:00

House Bill 2154, having been voted out of the House Public Health Committee a few weeks ago, was on the floor of the Texas House Friday. The bill would increase funding for a program that pays down student loans for doctors in exchange for a term of service practicing in a federally designated health professional shortage area. The funding increase would come from a $25 surcharge on medical licenses, so the cost to taxpayers, and the rest of the state budget, would be zero.

According to the bill’s sponsor, Al Edwards (D- Houston) the bill “is going to help solve a lot of problems we have with general practitioners in rural areas. We have a shortage of general practitioners. It helps put doctors in your areas, members.”

The first thing that happens is that Edwards introduces an amendment. The amendment increases the surcharge cost to $35. This is because the fiscal note (an estimate of how much money the state would spend or save if the bill became law) for the original bill implied that the General Revenue fund would lose $10 of revenue on each medical license. The $10 increase is to offset that estimated loss and protect the bill from a point of order (a procedural move to kill a bill or an amendment before it comes to a vote).

The Chair hears no objections; the amendment is adopted.

Then there is some congregating at the dais, where a microphone picks up some laughter about someone trying to sub a 20-page bill for a 2-page bill.

Another amendment, this time by Veronica Gonzales (D- McAllen). This amendment would require recipients of loan repayment money to practice in a health professional shortage area. It also establishes maximum repayment amounts based on length of service. The former requirement is already built in to the program, making this one redundant. The latter authority, to increase payments to doctors, also already exists.

Nevertheless, Edwards initially opposed the amendment, believing that the legislation would cover the whole state, not merely the shortage areas. This is just a semantic slip up, though, because the overwhelming majority of the state is a shortage area. The map right below shows, in dark green, the counties that are designated primary care shortage areas. The light green counties have a partial designation.

Edwards withdraws his motion to table the amendment and the amendment is adopted.

Now Warren Chisum (R- Pampa) has an amendment. This amendment produced the laughter at the dais a few minutes before. Chisum had introduced HB 1876, which would have discontinued all the individual health-related loan repayment programs and replaced them with one big one, to be funded with a change in how smokeless tobacco is taxed. For whatever reason Chisum’s bill has not come up for a hearing (perhaps because he was an ally of the previous, divisive House Speaker Tom Craddick, though this is pure authorial speculation). Chisum’s amendment would strike the entire, 2-page bill and replace it with the almost 20 pages of HB 1876 text.

Charlie Geren (R- Fort Worth) calls a point of order, because the amendment is not germane to the original bill

The House Speaker sustains the point of order.

Chisum raises a parliamentary inquiry, asking the Speaker to clarify the mechanics of trying to appeal the ruling. (The scene briefly recalled the much tenser and ultimately explosive confrontation between Speaker Craddick and Jim Dunnam near the end of the previous legislative session.) Chisum explained later that this was just a move to distract from the filing of his next amendment.

Chisum’s next amendment just grafts the funding mechanism from HB 1876, the change in smokeless tobacco tax assessment, onto HB 2154.

Geren initially calls another point of order (“it has the same problems as the last one did”) but a minute later temporarily withdraws the objection.

Edwards asks to postpone a ruling on the point of order, and further consideration of the bill, until Monday.

Last night's episode of The Office was pretty good

2009-03-13T10:15:00.006-05:00

Back in it's second and third seasons, when The Office was underperforming, it was clever and heartbreaking in well-measured doses. Since it's become a bigger deal, the comedy has gotten broader. The tipping point, for me, was early in season four when Dwight killed Angela's ill cat. It was funny when the situation was ambiguous (was it a well-meaning accident? Was it a mercy-killing meant to prtect Angela's feelings?). It, and Dwight, ceased to be funny for me when we learned that Dwight had killed it by leaving it in the freezer.

The strength of this version of The Office, which it shares with its British source material, has been its familiarity; the degree to which we identify with the neuroses, longings and triumphs of uncelebrated people working in an uncelebrated field. At the beginning of the fourth season, aside from not finding animal torture very hilarious, I just didn't buy Dwight anymore; he had gone from off-beat eccentric to comedy-killing cartoonishness.

Last night's episode, "Golden Ticket," was one of the stronger entries lately. Michael, taking inspiration from Willy Wonka (though not Roald Dahl, an author he's never heard of), inserts five golden tickets into random boxes of paper, each ticket entitling the recipient to 10% off their orders for a year. The promotion becomes a disaster when Dunder-Mifflin's biggest client gets all five surprise discounts. Michael, in a panic, tries convincing Dwight to take the fall (and the pink slip) for him. Michael and Dwight then compete for the credit when their big customer, so happily surprised by the golden tickets, commits to several more, larger orders.

For me, the show has always been more effective when it's sad than when it's funny. For the last two seasons, I've preferred the more serious tone, perhaps because I have a hard time laughing at some of the broader stuff; in addition to killing a cat, Dwight also went through a phase where he thought the internet was alive and talking to him. I was also disappointed by what a monster Jan turned into, though it beget some great Steve Carell scenes and that entire, amazing dinner party episode in season 4.

This episode was very funny, though. I also appreciated it for both delving into Michael's insecurities (always, uh, golden) while for the first time in a long time, making me feel for Dwight. The scene where the office rallies around Dwight-the-marketing-hero was funny and also kind-of sweet.

I think my appreciation of the show, for the rest of its run, will be proportionate to the degree of humanity I see in Dwight. This episode may be an outlier that way, but last night I remembered what I used to find special about the show.

Some brief thoughts on the Watchmen movie

2009-03-07T12:22:00.009-06:00

It was pretty good.

It's very much like reading the book (but takes 10 fewer hours). I've not liked any of the other Zach Snyder films I've seen, but this one has grown on me over night.

It made me think of L.A. Confidential in that it is a very literal adaptation (except for the violence, which has been ramped up considerably), but also effectively streamlined; I didn't miss any of the stuff missing. While it's never boring, it did not move or involve me a whole lot; I might have liked it if they had taken more liberties for the sake of engaging the real world. Like, I don't necessarily consider The Dark Knight a rigorous allegory for the United State's War on Terror but I appreciate the allusions and undertones, or that it bears some passing resemblance to the world outside the theatre.

Snyder probably did not have a lot of latitude for infidelity, though. One of aspects of the book (and its cult) that annoys me is how seriously it's taken (nothing against Moore and Gibbons; I'm not convinced that the book aspires to be anything other than a clever, subversive satire of the superhero genre). For instance, aside from raising its profile I'm not sure how significant it was for the book to be included on the oft-cited Time Magazine's list of the best English language books of the the century. As much as I enjoy list-reading, does anyone rely seriously on Time Magazine for their literary criticism? At least nobody touts it's placement in Entertainment Weekly's list of the greatest novels of the last 25 years. Claiming canonization by Entertainment Weekly is a bridge too far.

I'll repeat since I'm about to sound harsh: I enjoyed the film and I really do think the novel was great. But so much of both is predicated on a straw-man argument that the world is grim and fucked-up that it's hard for me to see the profundity: Nixon has been elected to five terms, the government uses costumed adventurers as mercenaries and assassins, there are riots in the streets, roving gangs brutally beat old men to death, etc. Of course that version of the world is a hopeless, fucked up place. The New York Times' review of the movie summed it up well:

And Snyder's commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing...
This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.

I might add to this that the movie also has a lot of slow-motion and a lot of cliched period pop music. I mean, how impressive is it to get the rights to 99 Luftballons or All Along the Watch Tower, anyway?

As for the cast, Jackie Earle Haley is great. Everyone else is fine but not exactly distinguished. The CGI gore looks stupid.

Incentivize

2009-02-23T16:00:00.006-06:00

I own multiple print and electronic dictionaries, style guides and usage manuals because I am both self-conscious about my own language use and sometimes judgmental of other people’s. As with food, math, and house keeping, the linguistic and syntactic functional usually satisfies me. I am deeply thrilled and admiring, though, of people whose efforts in all these areas transcend the functional and become artful.

I also enjoy work in government and enjoy electronic communication, both areas given to bizarre shorthand and unpleasant neologisms, for example, congrats, proactive and the tendency to create verbs via the suffix –ize (e.g., utilize). I have been thinking a lot about the latter issue lately, specifically because I have been listening to committee hearings that rely on the word incentivize. It is an ugly word, for sure, but I feel myself softening on, even sort of defending, its use.

Unlike some other frustrating neologisms, I can't think of an existing word that expresses the same thing. For instance, congrats is a clear and (to my way of thinking) somewhat lazy way of congratulating someone (or, perhaps, an enthusiastic way of congratulating someone for an accomplishment or event you are only mildly impressed by); proactive in all contexts means the same as active; utilize just means use.

Incentivize, though, seems, different. Its entry in Garner’s Modern American Usage, 2nd Edition, reads, in full:

incentivize; incent, vb.

These neologisms -- dating from the mid-1970s -- have become vogue words, especially in American business jargon. E.g.:

o "And you know, we shouldn't incent [read 'provide incentives for'] all the wrong behaviors. Right now, what we're doing is incenting [read encouraging] young girls to leave home, to not marry the person they're . . . having a child with because they won't get the welfare check if they're married." Jack Thomas, "Ann Romney's Sweetheart Deal," Boston Globe, 20 Oct. 1994, at 61.

o "Today it is management -- usually incentivized by stock options and the like [read 'having stock options and other incentives'] -- that seeks to be recognized by
institutional shareholders." Benjamin Mark Cole, "New Economic Pressures
Force Banks to Cut Costs, Consolidate," L.A. Bus. J., 24 Mar. 1997, at 29.

"Incentivize," an "-ize" barbarism, is more than twice as common as "incent," a back-formation. There is no good incentive to use either one.

The phrase providing incentives for... is, I agree, ideal. This usage fidelity has drawbacks, though. For instance, in a discussion of education policy frequently repeating the phrase gets repetitive and cumbersome. It also obscures a policy’s intent, which is not really to offer or provide but to elicit a result by promise of reward.

A brief, unscientific survey of some colleagues indicates that induce (which seems like a reasonable synonym to me) connotes childbirth to people. Hayden (and Garner, above) suggested encourage, but in all my dictionaries encourage does something like inspire hope, courage or confidence; there is no suggestion of material compensation (an integral component in incentivizing) for the inspiration.

1/2/2009

2009-01-02T20:24:00.001-06:00

I'm working on new blog posts. I hope to have one up this weekend.

Thanks for continuing to stop by.

11/4/2008

2008-11-04T16:25:00.004-06:00

Tallies for all the races in Texas, presidential and statewide, will be updated every five minutes as returns come in this evening on the Secretary of State's website.

Barack Obama's 2004 Convention Speech

2008-10-28T21:38:00.005-05:00

The one thing I found really lacking in PBS's otherwise great documentary about the presidential election The Choice: 2008 (other than its totally generic title) was that it did not include much of Barack Obama's 2004 convention speech. It teased with bites of the speech, but never let loose with an extended clip. Whether this was for reasons of time, relevance, or to not bias anyone in the audience I cannot say, but it made me watch the speech again. Obama was still a mere senatorial candidate at the time but aside from a dearth of gray hair and perhaps being a little thinner, he had the poise and confidence that has defined his 2008 campaign. Seeing the speech live (on television) in 2004 was an electric experience. Seeing it now, as he's on the verge of the presidency is... well, I thought it was pretty awesome.

Here's the video, there's a transcript pasted below.

On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deepest gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.

My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas.

Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty, joined Patton's army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west, all the way to Hawaii, in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents.

My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential.

They're both passed away now. And yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.

And I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my two precious daughters.

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted -- or at least, most of the time.

This year, in this election, we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up, to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations.

And fellow Americans -- Democrats, Republicans, Independents -- I say to you tonight: we have more work to do. More work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. More to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back tears, wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on. More to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn't have the money to go to college.

Now don't get me wrong. The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead and they want to.

Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon.

Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach our kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.

People don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

In this election, we offer that choice. Our party has chosen a man to lead us who embodies the best this country has to offer. And that man is John Kerry.

John Kerry understands the ideals of community, faith, and service, because they've defined his life. From his heroic service in Vietnam to his years as prosecutor and lieutenant governor, through two decades in the United States Senate, he has devoted himself to this country. Again and again, we've seen him make tough choices when easier ones were available. His values and his record affirm what is best in us.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded. So instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas, he'll offer them to companies creating jobs here at home.

John Kerry believes in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves.

John Kerry believes in energy independence, so we aren't held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields.

John Kerry believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world, and he will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us.

And John Kerry believes that in a dangerous world, war must be an option sometimes, but it should never be the first option.

You know, a while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, 6-2 or 6-3, clear eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week.

And as I listened to him explain why he'd enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us?

I thought of the 900 men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one's full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists.

When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Now let me be clear. Let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.

John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure.

John Kerry believes in America. And he knows that it's not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we are all connected as one people.

If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child.

If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent.

If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief -- it is that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper -- that makes this country work.

It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America -- there is the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?

John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism here-the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it.

That's not what I'm talking [about]. I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope.

In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; a belief in things not seen; a belief that there are better days ahead.

I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.

I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.

I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs, and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us.

America, tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do, if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president. And John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president. And this country will reclaim its promise. And out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. Thank you.

Powell's doubts

2008-10-19T10:22:00.008-05:00

I saw this really awesome ad on DrudgeReport.com last night:

Here it is, close-up:

The ad is not a product of the McCain campaign, but of The National Republican Trust PAC. It depicts Barack Obama giving a driver's license to undocumented immigrants, specifically Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers on September 11, 2001. I'm not sure what the point here is, since Mohammad Atta was in the country legally (as a five-year resident of Germany his visa application was basically rubber-stamped).

The ad, though, illustrates the urgency of what Colin Powell said on Meet The Press this morning. I'm not necessarily talking about his endoresement of Obama, though my informal survey of internet news sites and the Twitter politics feed suggests the endorsement is all anyone heard. Powell actually had very complementary things to say about Obama and McCain. What seemed more significant to me is that he also epressed very serious reservations about the direction and tone of the Repubican Party.

Getting past that he's voting for Obama, I wondered how long this has been welling up in Powell. His endorsement, at the end of an uninterupted six minute monologue (see below), was not offhand or even issue-specific; a guy who has served as National Security Adviser to Ronald Reagan, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush's Secretary of State, went on television and said he sees no place for himelf, or anyone with moderate views, in the Republican Party. He talked more how narow and frustrating he found the party orthodoxy than he did about Obama.

This sense that the party has backed itself into a far-right corner has been around more this election than in past ones. There's footage in PBS's great Frontline documentary The Choice: 2008 of McCain being heckled and booed when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2008. It's also a theme Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter, has also been voicing and the reason Christopher Buckley severed his relationship with The National Review, the magazine his father founded. The Economist explicitly called for McCain to stop pandering to that wing of the party and subsequently has said nothing remotely nice about his choosing a running mate simply to please it.

The whole episode (sorry, it has commercials) of Meet The Press is worth watching, but here's the operative 6 minutes:

I hope republicans concerned for the future of their party listened very carefully to him.

By the way, if you want to read some scary stuff, go find the website for The National Republican Trust PAC. I'm not linking to it.

100,000 people rallying for Obama

2008-10-18T14:12:00.003-05:00

This was today, Saturday, in St. Louis.

DFW

2008-09-15T21:20:00.003-05:00

There are valedictions for the late David Foster Wallace all over the internet, from the New York Times to Ain't It Cool News to fan sites and message boards. Three days later, I am still rattled by his suicide.

I have never finished Infinite Jest, though now it's a priority. I know his collections of nonfiction pieces well. Re-reading portions of them this weekend, I saw nothing in them that suggested a hopeless or defeated person (in spite of the weekend's compelling evidence).

The man had an apparently voracious curiosity. He could write about pornography, tennis, politics, movies, dictionaries, seemingly anything. He won a MacArthur Fellowship, a "genius grant." He personified it. He was a genius. He seemed authoritatively smart, but generous.

His sentences and paragraphs could, put mildly, run long. Reading him, too, you were bound to encounter words you'd never seen before. I never found his vocabulary ostentatious, though, because after looking them up they were always exactly the right words.

He was a writer who made me feel total, unmitigated joy while reading. He made the English language do things I'd never imagined while simultaneously making me believe we shared a voice. Like I said, he seemed like a generous man.

As you'd expect for someone whose writing could be so ecstatically fun to read, he could tell jokes, too. Any professional comedian would envy his ability to make people laugh. His essays are loaded with the kinds of sentences and passages that beg to be read aloud. Among my favorites is (from the introduction to an essay called Up Simba, from Consider the Lobster, about John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign):

...the magazine suddenly turned around and called again and said the article was a Go again but that now they wanted me to fly out to NH and start that very night, which (because I happen to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems who require special care, and it always takes me several days to recruit, interview, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter) was out of the question.

and (from his description of waiting around to board a cruise ship, from the essay and collection called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again):

I've decided the perfect description of the orange of the hangar's chairs is waiting-room orange. Several driven-looking corporate guys are talking into cellular phones while their wives look stoic. Close to a dozen confirmed sightings of J. Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy. The acoustics in here have the nightmarishly echoey quality of some of the Beatles' more conceptual stuff. At the Snack Bar, a plain old candy bar is $1.50, and soda-pop's even more... Several Pier personnel with clipboards are running around w/o any discernible agenda. The crowd has a smattering of college-age kids, all with complex haircuts and already wearing poolside things. A little kid right near me is wearing the exact same kind of hat I am, which I might as well admit right now is a full-color Spiderman cap.

Obviously things were bad for him. So bad that he didn't think it was important to see how the election turned out or what the new Terminator movie would be like, though he did see the end of the US Open. He was one of the few people outside my friends and family who made me think I am lucky to be alive at the same time as this person.

Here are two of his writings available for free, one about Terminator 2 and one about his love of watching Roger Federer play tennis.

People should leave Sarah Palin's pregnant child out of this

2008-09-01T19:09:00.012-05:00

I thought Barack Obama made a great choice when he named Joe Biden as his running mate, but John McCain really made things exciting when he named Sarah Palin as his.

Palin's vice presidential potential has inspired all sorts of incredulity and scorn. Three of my friends have described the decision as either pandering (to women) and/or desperate and one hyperbolically called it evidence that "John McCain hates America."

I'm not so sure it was such a desperate, pandering move. In a lot of ways, she seems like his best possible choice given the conundrums he faced. He needed someone to mollify the lunatic evangelicals who basically hold that party hostage but have never cottoned to him (and vice versa). He also needed someone who wouldn't dilute his reputation (legitimate or not) for being a "maverick." She meets both those standards in ways that Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty did not.

I really do not see the pandering angle. (Update: Actually, I do, though it seems more like a pander to the far-right wing of the party rather than to women. Disgruntled Republicans have actually been better at criticizing this move than Democrats.)

McCain's best options for running mates in this context were women (particularly Carly Fiorina and Kay Bailey Hutchison). Palin will certainly be trouble if she says a few stupid things while campaigning, but if she doesn't fuck up she could be real trouble for Obama and Biden (especially if they underestimate her the way their proxies have been).

I wonder if McCain had picked Mike Huckabee if people would have called that desperate or pandering. It would be pandering, though, just as Obama's choice of Biden, whatever his considerable talents and strengths, was, at some level, pandering. Sometimes it's hard to see where strategic ends and pandering begins.

An alternative question here is would anyone have called Barack Obama desperate and pandering if he had selected Hillary Clinton or Kathleen Sebelius as his running mates. If you're going to deride McCain for doing so, there's no reason not to.

A third question might be: if McCain's selection of Palin is actually an attempt to pander, and there is nothing at all strategic or substantive about her contributions to the ticket, is that necessarily so bad? Strike that question, actually; that would be bad. But, really, how likely is it that McCain picked someone he genuinely thought brought nothing but a uterus to the ticket?

Would it be so bad, though, if he considered her gender as being among her other vice presidential attributes? Half of the country is female, after all, and 100% of the executive branch has been male. Statistically we're overdue for a female president or vice-president; maybe someone really ought to pander in that way to that demographic.

But McCain is apparently pandering and desperate because his woman running mate has only been governor for just a little less time than Barack Obama has been a senator. I don't mean to make light of the experience argument, but as much as I like Barack Obama (and I like him a lot) this is not a comparison the democrats should be inviting. For one, he hasn't been a senator that long and he has no executive branch experience. Being Alaska's governor may not be such a big deal but there's a very fair argument to make that it's better preparation for being president than being a first-term senator. (Anyone who watched the Sunday morning political talk shows this weekend saw that the republicans already have rhetorical strategies for turning any questions about her qualifications for the job into questions about Obama's.)

The other reason to give up the experience line of attack is that, historically, nobody seems to really give a fuck. The evangelicals McCain will need to win in November already love Palin. Obama's status as a relative novice, too, didn't deter the almost 20 million primary voters who supported him. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all came to the presidency after relatively short gubernatorial careers (Neither Kennedy nor Eisenhower had a huge amount of political experience, either). Plus, Bush was a one-and-a-half term governor of Texas, which has one of the weakest executive offices in the country. Surely we can all agree that lowered the bar way below Sarah Palin's qualifications.

Today the democrats got another chance to alienate the electorate when Palin announced that her 17 yr. old daughter was pregnant. This followed a couple days where left wing of the internet really showed its classiness by speculating that Palin had faked her most recent pregnancy. Fortunately, and probably out of fear for being confused for one of his lunatic supporters, Barack Obama reiterated tday, in no uncertain terms, that he does not want Palin's, or anyone else's, family or kids used as campaign material. He also reminded us that his own mother gave birth to him when she was just a little older than Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter (and, for what it's worth, both he and Bill Clinton have half-siblings on their maternal sides).

The smug tone of the pregnancy stories really bothers me mainly because Obama really ought to win. George Bush is hugely unpopular; McCain's campaign has in many ways been a disaster; the democrats finally have a ticket that speaks passionately about revitalizing American manufacturing; that convincingly invokes Jesus Christ; that for once is on the winning side of a huge financial disparity.

This ticket's supporters on the internet, though, want to make jokes about pregnant teenagers and abstinance-only education, as if multigenerational households are an expendable demographic. I disagree with Sarah Palin on pretty much everything having to do with sexuality and reproductive education policy, but that has nothing to do with her daughter. For all we know, she has a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves under her bed and got pregnant after a long and extensive teenage sexual history. You know what you call a teenager who gets pregnant, or contracts a sexually transmitted disease, accidentally? Unfortunate, but common.

Top Films of Fiscal Year 2008

2008-08-24T14:32:00.008-05:00

In state government, we don't measure things on the usual calendar. The operative measure of time is in fiscal years (days, weeks and months are grouped conventionally). September begins Fiscal Year 2009, which promises to be memorable. There will be a new president and the Texas legislature will convene for its biannual insanity. Not only that, but the Minnesota Twins are one of the two AL Central teams in contention for the post-season and Michael Mann will take another (no doubt laughable) stab at getting a mass audience to go see one of his trademark brooding crime dramas. Still, at least cinematically, Fiscal Year 2008 had a lot to recommend.

Eastern Promises

In retrospect it makes perfect sense that David Cronenberg would eventually make a movie about tattoos; the surprise is that nobody is fucking them. Nonetheless, David Cronenberg's second consecutive crime-drama-about-identity-starring-Viggo-Mortensen is the best film of his substantial career. It may not be his usual creepily erotic science fiction, but he hasn't totally abandoned his fascination with bodily trauma. In one of the best, most harrowing fight scenes ever staged for film he evokes both the fragility and resilience of a human body. The whole cast nails it.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is ostensibly about a woman having an illegal abortion. The pregnant woman, though, is not the film's main focus (nor is she even its most sympathetic character). This movie reminded me of the equally great The Lives of Others. Both films take place in socialist republics around 15 years ago. What impresses me most about them is that rather than being matter-of-factly bleak they depict people living and surviving under crushing regimes. As dramas they are absolutely gripping but they are also extremely affecting as documents of life without some of the very basic freedoms and privileges enjoyed by most people of this country. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has a long segment that takes place at a birthday party, and the dialogue and setting of that scene alone reveals a lot about how these people experience their lives, their country and their era. Do not be put off by the movie's stately pace; it is monumentally good.

Persepolis

I haven't read Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in Iran but the animated film is thoroughly, thrillingly cinematic. It twists the standard adolescent-coming-of-age formula by giving our heroine a loving, supportive home. There is plenty of drama everywhere else. The film opens with the Shah still in power and proceeds through his overthrow, the Iran-Iraq War and the rise of the Islamic tyranny that still controls the country (even as its citizens embrace Western culture). Persepolis is just as intimate in its details of life under an oppressive regime as The Lives of Others or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, though Marjane's political maturation (and perhaps the animation) gives this film a vibrancy and joy those other great films rather lack. This is easily the best animated film I've seen in years (and really the only I've found truly worthwhile).

No Country for Old Men

The Coen Brothers' first adaptation is darker and more cynical than the rest of their oeuvre, but it's a gratifying and full return to form after a few off efforts. Javier Bardem is indeed great, but Josh Brolin is at least as good as Llewelyn Moss, who spends the movie staving off fate after making some bad decisions. Meanwhile, a sheriff and his deputy (Tommy Lee Jones and Deadwood's Garret Dillahunt) are more like a Greek Chorus than the heroes convention demands. Jones considers the carnage these two have wrought he wonders to a mentor if the world is getting worse. His response? Nope, it's always been this bad. Arizona and Los Angeles may bring out the Coens' humanistic side, but in Texas you're still on your own.

Generation Kill

A scant few months after closing up The Wire, David Simon, Ed Burns and Nina Noble returned with this brilliant companion piece. Like The Wire, it immediately drops you into a meticulously detailed verisimilitude and fluid narrative. The show's seven episodes follow a battalion of Reconnaissance Marines on the leading edge of the US invasion of Iraq. The later years of sectarian and insurgency violence have come to overshadow those first few months which, in spite of the military triumph, were also marked by supply shortages and gratuitous civilian casualties. On the former, the Marines of the 2nd Platoon offer a wry running commentary on Donald Rumsfeld's war strategy and reformation of the armed forces. Also like the Wire, Generation Kill is massively irreverent of authority (the officers are almost exclusively incompetent or hungry for promotion) and its blistering anger is complemented by a strafing wit.

There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's nightmare phantasmagoria overwhelms. Watching it again I was struck by how many of the scenes and sequences that comprise its 2 and a half hours were indelible the first time through. This guy's worst film is still really fucking good, and with this he's topped himself.

The Dark Knight

The latest Batman movie manages to balance the conventions of the superhero narrative with a densely detailed crime drama in a way that David Simon might appreciate (that is, if he believed in entertainment). These two opposed forces allow Christopher Nolan plenty of chances to ruminate on his usual themes of justice, revenge and vigilantism. Indeed, the climax of the film involves Batman battling the police and the pointed absence of a giant explosion. This might be as close as anyone gets to my Platonic Ideal of comic book adaptations.

The Bank Job

Like Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men, Jason Statham's Bank Job hood is just smart enough to get into a huge amount of trouble and maybe not clever enough to get out of it. This British heist thriller is part fact and part urban legend and, like James Ellroy's American Tabloid, creates a sinister, convincing blend of the two. It's nice to see a movie about a robbery that's plausible, not to mention one with a real sense of danger (surely nobody went to see Ocean's Eleven expecting that Matt Damon or Don Cheadle could be subject to some enhanced interrogation with a blow torch). Surprising, too, that following the criminals, intelligence agents, mobsters and political figures never gets too dense with exposition; director Roger Donaldson has no trouble keeping all the balls in the air. When he brings it all to a head he does so with a quiet, humble confidence. I thought it was a blast.

Pineapple Express

With its carefully considered shagginess, and in being a loving take on a throwaway genre by an ambitious and talented filmmaker, the only thing Pineapple Express really reminds me of is Punch-Drunk Love. Notwithstanding his cameo in Knocked Up, this is also the first thing since Freaks & Geeks that deserves James Franco's talent.

Manny Farber has died

2008-08-18T22:06:00.004-05:00

I still have not read much by Manny Farber, but I have read plenty by critics and writers who revered him (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rob Nelson, Stuart Klawans, others). Ray Pride wrote this nice obituary that has been referenced in several places.

There are a few good Farber quotations in the piece (including a provocative dig at Hitchcock), but this one is the one that makes me want to start reading him tonight:

One of the joys of moviegoing... is worrying over the fact that what is referred to as Hawks might be [screenwriter] Jules Furthman... and that, when people talk about Bogart’s ‘peculiarly American’ brand of scarred, sophisticated cynicism they are really talking about what Ida Lupino, Ward Bond, or even Stepin Fetchit provided in unmistakable scene-stealing moments.

Amazon.com is all out of copies of Negative Space, by the way.

Vices

2008-08-10T17:51:00.004-05:00

If you go to this website and give the Obama campaign your email address and/or cell phone number they will send you an email/text message as soon as there's an official vice presidential candidate. They do not actually say that this is how they are announcing it, so this is very likely redundant if you also check the news sites regularly (you can probably expect whatever contact mode you give them to return more fund raising appeals to you than genuine inside information, but I am a sucker so I did it anyway).

Incidentally, does anyone have a preference or prediction for either vice presidential pick?

For a while I thought Joe Biden stood a good chance, but he has not been out in front for the campaign the way you might expect him to be if they were testing him out. Tim Kaine, on the other hand, has been on Charlie Rose, Meet the Press and Face the Nation over the last couple weeks. Each time he has not only been an unshakable Obama advocate but he's also been repeating him own personal and professional narrative. For a while, there was a rumor out there that the web address ObamaBayh08.com re-routed to the Obama Campaign's site. That was true for a while, but now the Obama-Bayh address routes to something unrelated.

Karl Rove was on Face the Nation this morning, discussing the race. He said to expect Obama to pick someone for their political value (Kaine, Bayh) rather than for their skills or policy expertise. The implication, that McCain would not do something so base as to let politics inform his running mate selection, was not-at-all subtle. Still, though, the speculative McCain candidates do not tend to be people who could deliver battleground state electoral votes (unless you think Tim Pawlenty and Minnesota count in those categories, and it's hard to imagine what else Pawlenty would bring to the ticket except an advantage in Minnesota).

For a few weeks Carly Fiorina seemed like she might be a leading candidate. That speculation has died down since her comments about insurance plans covering prescription contraception caused some embarrassment for McCain. Obviously, someone who has the sorts of sympathies for affordable and reliable contraception that Fiorina seems to have is not going to help McCain win over the social conservatives (not that he makes any decisions based on politics, of course). That's too bad for him, though, because when she's been on the TV shows speaking for McCain she's been graceful, witty and tough. She ran rhetorical circles around Senator Claire McCaskill on Meet the Press a few weeks ago.

Group Blog Writing Experiment

2008-08-02T21:38:00.001-05:00

Ryan had this idea of a themed writing project; a bunch of people with blogs would all write on the same day about an experience we associate with a place. I owe Ryan and the other participants in this an apology. I am several days past the agreed-upon deadline.

The other contributions to this series are on these people's blogs: Beth, Jody, Emily, Mandy, Meredith, Ruth, Ryan, Stacy, and Tom.

My blog writings have certainly been personal, but rarely is it about me directly. Almost exclusively, I write about myself via TV shows or movies or something else. Since it is a mode of writing I do not have a lot of experience with, and since I also like the idea of understanding myself better, I wanted to try this experiment. I even made a list of some things that inimitably happened in some place. After doing this, and still taking a few extra days, I ended up with something very much of its place but in which I am an observer, not a participant.

Perkins on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines, Iowa: The couple sitting opposite each other in the booth on the other end of the smoking section was late middle-aged. He was somewhat burly looking and she was matronly. They were dressed up, too, apparently for some sort of country-western event. It seemed like they had put a lot of effort and time into their appearances that night; they did not look at all like Perkins was where they were supposed to be. It was late at night, though. They had a bouquet of flowers lying on the table.

They were crying. They were not weeping furtively or anything like that, nor was their crying anything that seemed celebratory or joyous. It was serious, remorseful crying. After a while, the guy moved over to sit next to the women and put his arm around her. They both continued to cry.

Obviously I have no idea what the back-story to this scene might contain but the incongruity of the setting and their dress, and their totally unself-conscious and naked expression, made me assume that it must be real bad. This whole scene lasted somewhere around an hour. I am pretty sure they were still there when I left, but I have no clear memory of leaving. I am equally sure they were there when I arrived, too, but I do not remember that, either. This scene has no prologue or post-script, but when I think about the four years I lived in Des Moines, Iowa, it is easily one of my most indelible memories.

That scene has also become my yardstick for measuring grief. All things considered, my life to this point has been pretty charmed. When I think of the times when I have been terribly sad or mourning, I do not think any of them measure up to this. I could not have sat in Perkins, dressed that well and distinctively, and shut the rest of my surroundings out. These people existed inside whatever it was that bound them to each other while inside the restaurant; it would not surprise me if they never noticed me.

I do not mean to define myself in opposition to these people; I do not think of them as other. Indeed, my streak cannot go on indefinitely. What scares me about this scene, and maybe what makes it so vivid over eleven years on, is that there’s every reason that, at some point, I will know exactly how they came to be there.

Generation Kill, part 2

2008-07-21T21:47:00.006-05:00

I forgot to mention two aspects of last week’s episode that I loved. First, the 1st Marine Recon Battalion being introduced to their embedded Rolling Stone reporter. The marines crack jokes about the liberal media; they’re much more impressed with the writer, though, when they learn he also used to write for Hustler.

The second great sequence closed the show, and on an ominous note. The marines run into retreating Republican Guard soldiers. Deciding that handing the surrenders would slow down their advance towards the front lines, the decision is made to “unsurrender” them. The men are sent back to where they came from, to be killed, tortured, or, best case scenario (for them), to eventually fight the Americans. The war’s first big mistake came the war even started.

This second episode, “Cradle of Civilization,” is much easier to follow, the characters easier to tell apart. It also has The Wire’s dark humor and institutional pessimism (not to mention a hilarious, profane discussion of the men's most hated patriotic country music songs). This week’s episode also opens with exactly the sort of vision of modern American war-making that you’d expect from David Simon, Ed Burns, et al: the opening campaign not as a firefight or triumphant rolling out, but as a traffic jam of tanks and personnel carriers.

For the rest of the episode the marines bitch about their incompetence of their officers (why are they crossing an exposed bridge in daylight? Because doing it the night before would be “not retarded enough”) and wait for the fighting to start. Sergeant Major Sixta is this show’s Rawls or Burrell figure. He interrupts the marines while they’re celebrating surviving an ambush to remind them they’ll need to shave to be in accordance with grooming standards.

When the waiting ends, the violence is sudden and scary. The gunfights on The Wire were generally brief and kind of awkward. The ones in Generation Kill are interminable, like the longest minutes of these guys’ lives.

Again, though, there are portents of what is to come. When the marines happen across an enemy encampment, one of them pisses in enemy soldiers’ supply of rice (“denying the enemy”). Another observes the threadbare blankets and campfire remnants and observes, “these are some fucking hard men.”

Generation Kill Glossary

2008-07-19T20:18:00.004-05:00

I don't remember where I found this, but it looks like a compilation of the glossary from HBO's website. Generation Kill , episode 2 airs Sunday; I'll have a post about it shortly thereafter.

GENERATION KILL
MILITARY TERMINOLOGY AND SLANG USED IN THE MINISERIES

.50 Caliber: the standard heavy, vehicle-mounted machine gun used by U.S. forces since World War Two; aka “Fifty cal,” “the Fifty,” “M-2” and “Ma Deuce.”

5.56 Machine Gun Rounds: the diameter of bullets in millimeters used by US forces in all rifles and light machine guns; aka “NATO rounds.” Distinguished from Iraq’s Soviet standard military, which uses 7.62mm rounds in their weapons.

507 Maintenance: U.S. Army unit that took a wrong turn into Nasariyah and was ambushed. Note: This is best known as the unit to which Jessica Lynch belonged, though the platoon will not learn of Lynch by name, or her status as the most famous U.S. prisoner of war, until Part 3.

Alpha Company: Bravo’s sister company in First Recon Battalion, commanded by the highly popular and respected Captain Patterson, the polar opposite of Bravo’s commander “Encino Man.”

America’s Shock Troops: a catchphrase invoking Donald Rumsfeld’s plans of a lean, stripped-down invasion force modeled after German forces of WWII. This is a deliberate reference to the German Shock Troops, the SS, used to spearhead blitzkriegs across France and Poland. Ferrando takes pride in knowing his battalion will be the premiere shock-troop unit of the entire Marine Corps.

Amtrac: a loud, ungainly amphibious vehicle used to transport Marines on the ground in Iraq; also used as a mobile fighting platform.

A-O (Area of Operations): an A-O can be as large as all of Iraq or as small as the area around a Marines encampment.

Ass: Marine slang for any weapon system or unit that packs a lot of fire power. “We’re rolling with a lot of ass today” means “We will be accompanied by tanks or attack helicopters today.”

Assassin: radio call sign for First Recon’s Alpha Company. “Assassin Actual” is Alpha’s Company Commander, Captain Patterson.

Assault Through: primary Marine tactic when encountering a close ambush, linked to the mantra drilled into every Marine since day one of boot camp when every Marine must repeat, “I am a Marine, and every Marine is a rifleman and a rifleman’s duty is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire...” This is, in a nutshell, the doctrine of the entire U.S. Marine Corps.

AT4 Rocket: the ubiquitous anti-tank rocket carried by Marine ground forces. Fired from a self-contained plastic tube about a meter long and weighing just a few kilos, it can destroy a heavy tank. During the Iraq invasion most AT4s are fired into Iraqi homes to clear out potential enemy forces.

Atropine injector: atropine is a chemical that counteracts certain nerve agents. Atropine injectors are issued to troops who expect to be preparing or receiving chemical attacks, and in this instance, Iraqis.

Attriting: to wear down; verb version of “attrition,” peculiar to the military.

B.R.C. (Basic Reconnaissance Course): the school a Marine must attend and graduate from to become a Recon Marine; the most sought-after training course in the Corps. Only about one percent of all Marines qualify to enter B.R.C. and half of those who enter fail to complete it.

Battalion Commander: Lt. Colonel Stephen Ferrando, commander of the 370-man strong First Recon Battalion, call sign “Godfather.”

Beanies: black-knitted watch caps typically worn by sailors. A powerful status symbol; only Recon Marines are allowed to wear them within the First Division.

Belt-fed: excited; refers to linked rounds fed through a machine gun. Can also be used an intensifier, as in, “That guy is a belt-fed son of a bitch,” i.e., a real son of a bitch.

Blouse his boots: to tuck pants-legs into the tops of one’s boots and keep them in place by wrapping a metal spring around the fabric just below the boot-top; part of Ferrando’s hated Grooming Standard. Not only are the springs used in the boot blousing uncomfortable, blousing one’s boot ensures that all the ambient sand will pour directly into the wearer’s boot.

Blue Force Tracking Antenna: an antenna for the Blue Force Tracker, a new computerized mapping system that – when it occasionally works properly – identifies the locations of all “blue,” or friendly, forces and the locations of all known “red,” or enemy. forces. Locations of such forces across the entire Middle East are updated every 30 seconds. Sgt. Colbert possesses one of only a handful Blue Force Trackers in the entire battalion.

Boonie Cap: a standard issue floppy field hat, like a camouflaged version of the hat worn by Gilligan on “Gilligan’s Island”; aka soft cover.

Bound past: “bounding” is a specific form of maneuver favored by the Marine Corps, employed by two-man fire teams or the entire division.

Buck Fever: too quick to identify threats; a hunting term that comes from the expression to “put buck’s horns on a doe,” i.e., seeing a valid target when there is none.

Butterfly Trigger: a safety trigger that requires two thumbs to actuate.

C.G. (Commanding General): always means General Mattis, Commanding General of the First Marine Division, when these Marines use the phrase.

C.O. (Commanding Officer): usually applied to the Battalion Commander (Maj. or Lt. Col.), or less frequently the Company Commander (Capt.), but never to a Platoon Commander (Lieut.).

C.O.I., freqs covered, freqs plain: Encryption lingo necessary to operate radios.

“Captain America”: derisive nickname for Capt. Dave McGraw, commander of Bravo’s Third Platoon, sister platoon to the heroes in Second Platoon. Note: Although Captain America is a rank above Lt. Fick, as commanders of respective sister platoons they are peers with one another.

Cas-evac: casualty evacuation; similar to the older phrase med-evac. Cas-evac technically means an evacuation in a combat zone of a patient who has not yet been stabilized, but it’s become the cool way to say any form of medical evacuation.

“Casey Kasem”: a mocking nickname applied to Gunnery Sgt. Ray Griego, Encino Man’s aide de camp, based on the smarmy host of the Top 40 radio show and the voice of Shaggy in the original “Scooby Doo!” cartoon series.

Charms: brand name of a hard candy provided to U.S. troops in the meal rations, but seldom consumed due to the belief that they produce bad luck.

Cleared hot: given permission to fire your weapon by a superior.

Cobra Gunship: armored helicopter used only by U.S. Marines, unique because Cobras work in extremely close proximity to Marine ground forces.

Col. Joe Dowdy: Commander of Regimental Combat Team One, popular among his troops for his reputation of caring about their welfare. Later relieved of his command by General Mattis for not being aggressive enough and risking his troops to achieve battlefield goals.

Command Vehicle: Lt. Fick’s Humvee, configured like a pick-up truck with a canvas covering.

Completely outside of what First Recon does: this battalion is trained to swim or parachute behind enemy lines, not to drive into attacks in Humvees. Their motto is “Swift Silent Deadly.”

Condition One: a verb that means to put one’s weapon on red con one; rack a round into your chamber.

Contact: a visual or physical encounter with enemy forces, said when you either see them or they start shooting at you.

Cyclone: fierce swirls of dust common to Iraq, which dance across landscape and in some cases will collide with a person, tent or vehicle. They range in height from a few meters to several hundred meters; aka dust devils.

D.C.U. (Desert Camouflage Uniform): any field garment with desert camouflage.

DASC and DASC-A: Direct Air Support Communications headquarters, with one based on the ground and one based in an AWACs plane.

Deck: keeping with their nautical tradition, anything Marines stand on is the deck, be it on a ship, the desert or the floor of a tent.

Delta Company: a company of reservist Recon Marines expected to be attached to First Recon Battalion. Delta will prove to be a bunch of under-trained, overzealous, poorly equipped cops-on-leave and office guys who know nothing about war.

Deuce Gear: a web of straps and hooks worn as an outer garment, to which one affixes extra gear such as ammo packs and canteens; aka Load Bearing Vest or L.B.V.

Devil Dog: a Marine.

Dip: smokeless tobacco used by American fighting forces; a dip is a quantity of tobacco placed between one’s lips and gums. To dip is the habit of consuming smokeless tobacco.

Donkey Dicks: venerable Marine Corps term for a variety of phallic-shaped implements from engine hoses, to gas can funnels, to cleaning brushes for large mortar tubes.

“Echo Four Lima”: refers to Corporal Lilley, whose pay-grade is “E-4” and whose last name begins with “L.” In radio code phonetics, he becomes “Echo Four Lima.” Sergeant Colbert, whose pay grade is “E-5,” would become “Echo Five Charlie” over the radio.

“Encino Man”: Captain Craig Schwetje, Commander of Bravo Company, Lt. Fick’s immediate superior officer; the nickname is a reference to the dim-witted Neanderthal hero of the film “Encino Man.” This Encino Man is a former football star, none too bright, with an ape-like face: he is also referred to in phonetic alphabet code, in which “Encino Man” is changed to “Echo Mike.”

Enlisted Tent: area where privates through sergeants sleep. The senior non-commissioned officers such as Staff Sergeants, Gunnery Sergeants, Master Sergeants and the Sergeant Major are technically of the enlisted ranks, and occupy an elite position somewhere between sergeants and officers.

Ephedra: over-the-counter diet pills, now banned by Marines as a speed-like stimulant.

E-tool: a collapsible shovel carried by all Marines; short for “Excavation-tool.”

F.O.: Forward Observer; anyone spotting targets for Iraqi or insurgent forces.

Fedayeen: a Baathist paramilitary unit trained in guerrilla tactics and established by Saddam Hussein’s son in the 1990s to infiltrate and terrorize the Shia populace, but in the current conflict, arrayed against the American invasion, they are also referred to generically as “insurgents.”

Fiddies: fifties, i.e., .50 cal. machine guns; former ghetto car repo man Espera uses the gangsta counting system in which “fiddie” equals 50, a “buck” or a “hundo” equals a hundred, a “deuce” equals either two or two-hundred, a “grand” equals a thousand, etc.

Flak jacket: a heavy yet flexible shrapnel-resistant vest.

Foot-mobile: a person on foot.

Forty Mike-Mike: 40 millimeter; refers to either an individual 40mm self-propelled grenade round or the weapon that launches them, such as the M-19.

Foshizzle…Hajizzle: a goof on Snoop Dogg’s hip-hop lingo to mean “for sure” and “Haji.”

Free-balling: not wearing underpants.

Fucking Sixta: Sgt. Maj. John Sixta, Sergeant Major for this battalion; aka “The Fucking Retard,” “Mister Potato Head,” “The Coward of Khafji.” His role and actions both dictate that he is despised by enlisted men.

Get some: to “get some” means to do any thing really cool like run a fast mile or kill someone: originally celebrated by Van Halen as a term that meant to get some pussy. Marines apply it to getting pussy, combat action or even coming up with a witty retort to a put-down; often used as an exclamation or cheer. Latino Marines use the Spanish “Chingaso” and whites have adopted it, so “Get some!” and “Chingaso!” are interchangeable.

Godfather: call sign of Lt. Col. Ferrando, as well as his battalion. Ferrando earned the call sign because his vocal chords were removed after a bout with cancer, causing him to speak like Marlon Brando in the noted film. Note: Godfather often speaks of himself in the third person: instead of saying, “I think…,” he will say, “Godfather thinks…”

Grape Beverage Base: grape juice powder; the name printed on the packaging in the military rations. Used by Marines rather than the more familiar civilian term.

The Grooming Standard: not to be confused with Marine Corps standard grooming regulations, the Grooming Standard is Battalion Commander Ferrando’s much more exacting dress and grooming code for those who serve under him.

G-Shock Wristwatch: the popular xtreme sports watch, as essential to Marine fashion as Oakley sunglasses.

H & S Company: the Headquarters and Supply company. More than half the 370 men in the battalion belong to H & S, responsible for supporting the “line companies” or combat units, made up of Alpha, Bravo and Charlie Companies.

Habudabi: a nickname for Arabs.

Haji: an Iraqi or Arab or Muslim of any ethnicity, from the Arabic “Haji,” which is the honorific term for anyone who has made the trip to Mecca, the Haj. Most Americans who use the term Haji are probably not referring to that pilgrimage, but to the once-popular children’s cartoon show “Johnny Quest,” in which the white boy hero’s turban-wearing sidekick was named Haji. Not necessarily a pejorative term, Haji may be used as an adjective to describe anything Middle Eastern, e.g., Iraq’s customary flat bread is referred to as “Haji bread” or “Haji tortillas.”

Hardball: paved road, as opposed to unpaved.

Herringbone: to halt a convoy of vehicles at a 45-degree angle to the axis of a highway, much like the pattern of fishbones. Herringbone can be used as a noun or verb.

Hitman Two: “Hitman” is the radio call sign for Bravo Company and “Two” refers to second platoon, one of three platoons in the company. “Hitman” can refer to the actual company commander of Bravo or the company itself. All units have call-signs, rather like official nicknames, which are used in radio communications. For example, General Mattis, commander of all Marine ground forces in Iraq, is “Chaos.”

Hitman Two One Actual: Bravo Company’s Second Platoon Team One Leader, Sergeant Colbert. While “Hitman Two One” refers to the entire team, “Actual” means the actual commander. “Hitman Two” refers to all of Bravo Second Platoon, but “Hitman Two Actual” is the platoon commander, Lt. Fick. In addition, “The Actual,” or commander, is also referred to as “The Zero.”

I glassed it: “I viewed the object through binoculars or a rifle scope.”

I got your six: “I’ve got your back”; from the clock point in which the hour of six is at the bottom of the dial, if you were oriented toward the 12 hour. “On your three” would indicate something or someone on your immediate right. “On your four” would indicate something or something on your right and slightly behind you.

I.A. (Immediate Action): whatever you train to do when the shit hits the fan.

Javelin Team: two Marines who carry and operate a powerful anti-tank missile called a “Javelin.”

K-bar: a knife carried by Marines.

Kevlar: a helmet; while civilians know Kevlar as the brand-name of a bullet resistant material, Marines refer to their Kevlar helmets simply as Kevlars. Note: Even though flak jackets are also made of Kevlar, they are never referred to as such.

Kill Zone, Kill Box: the area where the enemy hopes to direct, channel and trap you in order to kill you, or where you hope to do the same to him.

L.A.V.’s (Light Armored Vehicle): used only by the Marine Corps; amphibious, eight-wheeled machines that look like upside-down bathtubs painted black.

L.O.D. (Line of Departure): the border between Kuwait and Iraq.

Leatherman: the all-in-one pliers, screwdriver and knife tool carried by Marines.

The L.T.: nickname for a Lieutenant. Note: A specific lieutenant or other commanding officer is often also referred to as “The Sir.”

M.R.E.: Meal Ready to Eat; standard military fare, food manufactured a decade ago and served as a complete, self-heating meal in a plastic bag.

M.S.R. Eight: Main Supply Route Eight; any paved road is typically referred to as an “M.S.R.”

M.S.R. Tampa: Main Supply Route Tampa. Not only are roads designated M.S.R.s, but American military planners have also given them names that will be easier for U.S. troops to pronounce than Arabic ones.

M-19: a heavy, vehicle-mounted machine gun that fires armor-penetrating grenades instead of bullets; AKA MK-19, Mark-19, and Forty Mike-Mike.

M-249 SAW: hand-held or bipod-mountable machine gun common to U.S. forces. “SAW” stands for Squad Automatic Weapon and fires at a rate of 750 rounds per minute. Notoriously easy to discharge by accident, hence Marine folklore: “The SAW’s got a mind of its own, it wants to kill a motherfucker.”

M-4: rifle carried by most recon Marines; similar to the standard U.S.-military M-16, but with a shortened barrel and collapsible stock. Note: Officers and POGs carry M-16s. (2-3)

M-40: standard, bolt action Marine sniper rifle.

Mathilda: Northern Kuwait camp where these Marines stayed, with about 5,000 others, in the weeks before the invasion.

MOPP: a nuclear, biological chemical protection suit; stands for Mission Oriented Protective Posture. Can be an adjective, as in “we were MOPPED-up,” or “wearing our MOPP suits.”

Moto: from motivational, anything that expresses the highly-motivated spirit of Marines. Shouting “Get Some!” is a moto thing to do. Moto films are the small movies and slide shows Marines make documenting the crazy things they see in this war.

Mud: the white supremacist term for a non-white individual.

N.J.P. (Non-Judicial Punishment): next to a court martial, the most severe form of punishment to which a Marine can be subjected. It usually involves a loss of rank and pay grade.

Navy Hospitalman, Doc Bryan: the medic, though medics in the Marine Corps are technically part of the Navy’s hospital corps and are never referred to as “medics” but as Corpsmen.

Negligent Discharge: accidental firing of a weapon; aka N.D.

Nine-lines: a procedure for directing air strikes on ground targets.

No salute zone: forward areas where officers are not to be acknowledged with salutes, in order to conceal rank from potential enemy observers.

O Dark Hundred: until darkness falls. Note: “O dark 30” typically means half an hour before dawn, or any ridiculously early hour of the morning.

Oakley sunglasses: surfer sunglasses worn by just about all Marines in Iraq. Iraqis believe Oakleys give Marines X-ray powers to see through women’s clothing and are a constant source of tension.

One M.E.F. (First Marine Expeditionary Force): the overall Marine invasion force in the Middle East, which comprises the First Division (ground troops) under command of Gen. Mattis, the Air Wing and a logistics battalion. The entire One M.E.F. is under the command of General James Conway.

Oscar Mike: “On the Move” from the phonetic alphabet.

Overwatch: a position that offers protective fire for a given area.

“Paint me”: to paint something is to shine one’s gunsight laser designator on a target in preparation for shooting it.

PAS-13 Thermal: a night vision device, about the size of an old video camera, that can see heat signatures. Note: A single device is usually referred to in the plural, e.g. ,“Pass me the thermals” refers to one device.

Pec-fours, Pec-thirteens: night and infrared vision scopes.

POG (Person Other than Grunt): a pejorative term for anyone who is in the rear echelon and therefore not in a recon or infantry unit. This is one of the most insulting terms in the Marine Corps, almost the equivalent of the “N” word. Note: POG is pronounced with a long “o.”

Police: to clean up or correct, as in “Police your tent,” or clean it up. (1-16)

Psy-Ops: Psychological-Operations units, which in Iraq relied on leaflets, radio and loudspeaker broadcasts to encourage enemy forces to surrender.

Pyro and Smoke protocol: codes involving use of smoke grenades and flares.

R.C.T. (Regimental Combat Team): a super-regiment of about 7,000 Marines; the First Division consisted of three RCTs – RCT 1, RCT 5 and RCT 7 – plus First Recon, which operated on its own.

R.C.T. One (Regimental Combat Team One): a motorized, armored infantry regiment of about 7,000 Marines.

R.O.E. (The Rules of Engagement): the all important, ever-changing and always ambiguous rules governing when a Marine may fire his weapon.

R.T.O. (Radio Transceiver Operator): radioman, the most important guy on the team and usually the calmest and smartest next to the team leader. (1-23)

Rack: nautical for sleeping area.

Ranger Graves: sleeping holes dug by marines to protect from shrapnel and gunshots.

Raptor: radio call-sign for First Recon’s Charlie company.

Recon Mission: a reconnaissance mission performed specifically by Recon Marines who are the Marine Corps special forces; there are only a few hundred Recon Marines in the entire Corps.

Red-Con One: a loaded weapon with a round in its chamber, but with the safety on.

Revetment: crude fortifications made from earth or concrete or sandbags.

Ripped Fuel: brand name of a popular over-the-counter stimulant, banned by the military but widely used.

RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade): anti-tank rocket first developed by the Germans as the “panzerfaust,” then adopted by Soviets and as common to Iraqi forces and insurgents as Skittles candies are to Marines. Not very accurate, but devastating when fired in mass by five- or ten-man RPG teams. RPGs were famously used to bring down U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters in Somalia.

S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure): S.O.P. is sometimes informally used as a synonym for common sense.

Saffwon Hill: a low hill on the Iraq side of the border with Kuwait, believed to be the locale of a dug-in Iraqi division.

Sapi plates: 12-inch square ceramic plates worn in front and back of one’s flak vest, rated to stop the enemy’s preferred 7.62 round.

Schwack: to kill; origin believed to be a popular video game.

Screwby: either “That sucks,” or “That’s really cool,” from Cpl. Stafford’s personal hip-hop lexicon.

Senior NCOs: anyone from staff-sergeant to Sergeant Major. Corporals and Sergeants are also NCOs, but they are never referred to junior NCOs, simply as NCOs. (1-18)

Sergeant Major: the highest possible rank a non-commissioned officer can earn in the Marine Corps; invariably a ball-buster who speaks in a semi-illiterate southern sounding accent no matter where he is from. This battalion has just one Sergeant Major.

Shamal: hellacious wind and dust storms endemic to Iraq.

Sit-Rep: situation report:; often used as a more confusing way to say “situation.”

Skittles: chewy fruit-flavored children’s candy, which is a dietary staple in U.S. military.

Slackman: team machine gunner, armed with a SAW.

Snatch: a specific Marine term for abducting an enemy combatant in order to gather intelligence.

Soft Cover: same as a boonie cap. Note: the word “hat” does not exist in the Marine Corps; anything you place on your head is a cover.

Sparrow: a small reaction force held in reserve while another unit attacks; an “eagle” is a large reaction force.

Spread load his excitement: to calm down; from the tradition of foot patrols spreading a heavy load equally among all troops.

T-55: Soviet-era tank ubiquitous in Iraq; older and much less feared than the newer, but less-common T-72 Soviet tanks also in Iraq.

TAD-two, TAD-three: Tactical Air Direct radio bands for communicating directly with pilots in attack aircraft.

Task Force Tarawa: a four thousand-strong Marine unit outside of the First Division Command Structure. This American unit was initially put under the command of the British at Basra, then moved north to Nasariyah.

Team Leader: the sergeant in command of each combat team. Fick’s platoon is divided into three teams, but spread across four Humvees (not counting Fick’s command vehicle, the fifth Humvee). Since Fick’s platoon is a special forces unit trained in coastal raids, they have no experience with Humvees. Technically each team has a specialty, with team one being the dive (or SCUBA) team, team two being the boat team and team three the para-jump team. But here, ironically, they are all in a desert.

The Three: the battalion’s intelligence unit.

T-rats: T-rations; pre-manufactured military food heated and served in mess halls of forward units.

Triple-A: Anti-Aircraft Artillery; towed or self-propelled guns designed to shoot down aircraft but often used by Iraqis against American forces on the ground.

Two o’clock: direction of enemy forces. Orientation of the lead vehicle puts 12 o’clock at the center of the hood and six o’clock at the rear.

Two-Oh-Three: an M-203 grenade launcher, which is a single shot self-propelled weapon mounted beneath the barrel of a standard Marine rifle. The M-203 fires the same 40mm round as the M-19.

Unfucking: a verb peculiar to the Marine Corps meaning to get out of a fucked-up situation.

U-two: a reference to venerable U2 spy planes.

Victors: vehicles. The military uses the phonetic alphabet as a shorthand code: the phonetic alphabet replaces letters with words, i.e., Alpha, Bravo Charlie, Delta, Echo. These phonetic word for each letter of the alphabet can be used to replace any word starting with the corresponding letter. Hence, vehicle becomes “victor,” terrorist becomes “tango” and white trash becomes “whiskey tango,” as in, “He grew up in a whiskey tango trailer park in the Ozarks.”

Whiskey Tango: white trash, from the phonetic alphabet version.

Zil truck: Russian-made truck popular in Iraq.

###

Generation Kill, part 1

2008-07-13T22:01:00.003-05:00

After HBO's other recent 7-part miniseries, John Adams, concluded my dad and I discussed the that show's depiction of day-to-day life during and around the time of the American revolution. Specifically, how grim are the prospects for life that a parent would choose to inoculate themselves and their children from smallpox in a terribly gruesome, and dangerous, manner? There aren't many segments of 21st Century North American life that have to make decisions based on which one is slightly less likely to kill you. The conclusion that it took a different, stronger, breed of person to survive that life was hard to avoid.

The notion that each subsequent generation gets to have an easier, less brutal existence than its predecessor's is intrinsic to the American identity and experience. The thesis of Evan Wright's book, Generation Kill, and the HBO miniseries adaptation of it, is that the generation that has been most insulated by the successes and excesses of the United States now has its own war.

The first episode opens before the war proper has begun. A group of Marines runs a training exercise in Kuwait; marvels at the detritus left over from the last Gulf War; speculates that Saddam Hussein may still capitulate to United Nations weapons inspectors; and worries about rumors that Jennifer Lopez has been killed. When the ask after the latter concern they're reassured that, "The battalion commander offered no sit-rep as to J. Lo's status."

The miniseries was written and produced by a team that includes Wire geniuses David Simon, Ed Burns and Nina Noble. The first episode shares The Wire's sardonic humor, its skepticism of policies passed down the chain of command, and its allegiance to the the front-line perspective.

Another early theme of the show, a variation on another theme the The Wire played with, is that these Marines are fighting a war with technology and supplies substantially less advanced than they're used to living with in peacetime (and without basic supplies that they cannot, but embedded journalists can, buy in bulk). "Back home they're driving around in Mercedes Bens SUVs picking up their poodles at the dog cappuccino stand, and here we are invading a country with ghetto hoopties."

As with the first Wire episode, there's a lot of detail and a lot of characters to keep track of (though so far Generation Kill isn't quite as nimble in distinguishing between them). The guy who played Ziggy Sobotka in the Wire's second season has a big part and I'm pretty sure I saw Officer Colicchio around in a few scenes, too.

Some thoughts on the John Adams miniseries

2008-06-11T13:33:00.004-05:00

There are some mild spoilers forthcoming.

Tarring and feathering is a much more gruesome act of violence than I'd ever considered. Not the feathering, so much; it's dumping boiling tar on naked human flesh that upsets me (if you want to read something harrowing check out the Wikipedia entry for tarring and feathering, and if you think you have the stomach you might also read about pitchcapping). The tarring and feathering is the most graphic example (though not by much) of John Adams' emphasis on the corporeal brutality of life around the time of the American revolution.

For a lavishly mounted period drama the series (for the most part) doesn't skimp on these details. Medicine often seems as terrifying as sickness. Smallpox inoculations, blood lettings, amputations and a mastectomy are all depicted with horrific frankness. The show also notes the constant discomfort George Washington felt as a result of tooth problems. He was apparently in awful pain when he sat for the portrait reproduced on the one-dollar bill.

In an early scene John Adams teaches young John Quincy Adams about manure, about how it should feel and how it should smell. When the son declares his desire to be a farmer, his father tells him it shall be law school for him first. The juxtaposition in this scene, between harsh physicality and enlightenment, is a theme not just of the show but of the country's long narrative, as well.

A few details are spared. Though the show periodically makes slavery an issue it elides the associated violence or degradation. This isn't so much a problem, to me. Surely we have something close-enough to national consensus on slavery nowadays that we don't really need to exploit that white-on-black violence by graphically staging it, right? (Which is not to say the lives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner couldn't also be mined for a spectacular miniseries.)

There's also not much sex in the show, but perhaps Abigail and John weren't so ahead of their times as to leave much of a record of that aspect of their relationship.

Tagged for Songs

2008-06-09T22:26:00.006-05:00

I've been instructed by Hayden Childs to meet the terms of this meme:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

I'm starting this late on Monday so I'm going to produce a shorter list tonight and think about it more over the next day or so. To paraphrase David Brent, I'll give you five now and two more if you need them.

1. "Constructive Summer"
The lead off song from The Hold Steady's forthcoming Stay Positive album is a total fucking blast. Even though it's another of the band's songs about friendship and drinking, it strikes me as fairly unique their catalog in that it looks forward rather than backwards. "Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger... We are our only saviors / We're going to build something this summer." A perfect party anthem for the summer before a big, important election.

2. "Paper Planes"
The story, as I understand it, is that M.I.A. wanted to come record a new album in the United States. She couldn't get an entry visa, though, and ended up traveling around the world playing shows, recording and becoming a big star. The song makes reference to those visa troubles but, like the rest of the album, Kala, its politics are a little fuzzy. No matter, though. It's one of the few songs that actually makes me want to dance. It samples my favorite Clash song and is catchy as all get out

3. "Fast Train"
Solomon Burke's version of Van Morrison's song was used over the montage that closed season three of The Wire. It was playing on KUT one night while I was driving around and hit me hard. It's my favorite kind of sadness: elegiac but not depressing.

4. "Let's Call It Love"
I don't think I've ever felt a band break-up as keenly as I felt Sleater-Kinney's. I've read that it was something that had been building since at least All Hands On The Bad One, but it felt harsh and sudden to me; almost all of my post-college life (which is to say, my best years) have prominently featured their music. I love all their albums, but I still listen to The Woods more than of the others. This song is a behemoth: just over 11 minutes and heavy and sexy as anything. It reminds me that I'd go anywhere in the world to see them play again.

5. "Triadic Memories"
Morton Feldman's 90+ minute piano composition is, as performed by Marilyn Nonken, very spare, slow and also a little unsettling. It's beautiful.

As for tagging seven people, that's tough because my posting has become so irregular that I'm not sure there are seven people checking this blog anymore. I'm pretty sure there are Ryan and Mark, also maybe Kat, Karen, Mandy and Stacy. Monrovia, if you're out there reading this, surely you have a list of seven.

Some statistics from The Economist's "Pocket World In Figures, 2008 Edition"

2008-06-08T11:41:00.002-05:00

The Largest Lakes in the World

Caspian Sea (Central Asia; 371,000 sq km)
Superior (Canada/US; 82,000 sq km)
Victoria (E. Africa; 69,000)
Huron (Canada/US; 60,000)
Michigan (US; 58,000)

Largest Populations (as of 2005, in millions)

China (1,315.8)
India (1,103.4)
United States (298.2)
Indonesia (222.8)
Brazil (186.4)
Pakistan (157.9)
Russia (143.2)
Bangladesh (141.8)
Nigeria (131.5)
Japan (128.1)

Largest Populations (in 2025, in millions)

India (1,447.5)
China (1,445.8)
United States (354.9)
Indonesia (271.2)
Brazil (228.8)

Women Who Use Modern Methods of Contraception
Highest %

China 83.3
United Kingdom 81.0
Hong Kong 79.7
Switzerland 77.5
Netherlands 75.6
Finland 75.4
Belgium 74.3
Canada 73.3
Australia 72.2
Cuba 72.1

Lowest %

Chad 2.1
Afghanistan 3.6
Guinea-Bissau 3.6
Sierra Leone 3.9
Guinea 4.2
Niger 4.3
Rwanda 4.3

Highest Life Expectancy
(in years, for 2005-2010)

Andorra 83.5
Japan 82.6
Hong Kong 82.2
Iceland 81.8
Switzerland 81.7

[The United States places #41, at 78.2 years]

Highest Health Spending
(As % of GDP)

United States 15.4
West Bank and Gaza 13.0
Malawi 12.9
Lebanon 11.6
Switzerland 11.5
Germany 10.6
France 10.5
Austria 10.3
Serbia 10.1
Iceland 9.9

With my cousin and her boss

2008-05-18T15:30:00.001-05:00

Alligators

2008-05-07T21:40:00.002-05:00

If you like nature-themed specials, then I encourage you to watch a new DVD set called David Attenborough: Wildlife Specials. It is available to purchase, but Netflix has it, too. The first episode I watched was about crocodiles, which, as I think I've told most people, are the animals on this planet (other than humans) that scare me those most. Some Crocodile trivia from this episode:

They have spread all around the tropical parts of world (Alligators and Caimans are subspecies of the Crocodile);
They are the most dangerous freshwater predator on the planet;
Since they can tolerate salt water they have ventured hundreds of miles out to ocean looking for new islands. This makes them a threat to any living thing anywhere there's water (several are found in Austin's Town/Ladybird Lake each year);
They have a protective membrane (like swimming goggles) that closes over their eyes when they are underwater;
They have perfect poise and submarine-like control when underwater. Here are pictures of one descending underwater without any visible movement of its body:

Alligators, which are what we have in North America, are astonishingly powerful swimmers; humans stand no chance of out swimming them. They are also, though, very fast on land. I have done some research, and there are two schools of thought for escaping on foot from an alligator. The most popular notion is that, since alligators are capable of bursts of speed but allegedly not so agile when running, you can put distance between you and the alligator by running in a zigzag pattern.

Several other websites I consulted dispute the wisdom of this strategy, though. Alligators can run up to 20 mph, but only for 30 or so feet. After that they get tired and slow down considerably. As long as you have a 10 or 15-foot head start you should be able to escape by running in a straight line.

Alligators attack by surprise, though. They launch themselves from the shallow water or vegetation they have been using as camouflage. For Christ's sake never feed an adult alligator and if you ever encounter baby ones get the fuck out there as quickly as possible. The mother is nearby and will respond fiercely if she hears distress calls from the youngsters.

If an alligator actually gets its mouth around you, your best bet is to fight it off. In spite of the tough-looking skin alligators are very sensitive to touch. You will not be able to force its jaws open, but if you bash it on the snout or in the eyes it may relent.

It is critical, though, that the alligator not start rolling or spinning. Alligators can't move their jaws from side-to-side; they tear meat by holding it in their jaws and rolling over repeatedly. The best way to prevent the alligator from doing this is to somehow immobilize its tail. If some part of your body is in its mouth, though, you obviously will not be able to do this yourself.

The reassuring news is that in spite of how well some movies (see below) play on rational people's fears, alligators probably do not live in our sewers.

What to do about the gas tax?

2008-05-03T23:59:00.008-05:00

Several weeks ago John McCain floated the idea of suspending the federal gasoline tax for the summer. Hillary Clinton seconded the plan more recently and added to it the idea of a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Barack Obama objected to lifting the gas tax, but favored the windfall tax.

McCain and Clinton each make good point. Neither has proposed that this is a solution to long-term problems, but rather a short-term benefit to consumers. The 18.4 cents per gallon that gasoline consumers pay in federal taxes will probably not drop the price of gas below $3.00 a gallon, but if people and families are planning to take any driving vacations this summer (or even if they just want to get back and forth to work) they will likely notice it.

Barack Obama countered that most gasoline consumers would only save about $30 over the course of the summer (as far as I know, he hasn't shared his methodology for getting to this estimate). He's also made the back-up argument, in case people think an extra $30 isn't so bad, that reducing the federal tax might cause the the price of gasoline to rise to the point that the tax reduction would be offset, anyway. (As far as I know, he has not ventured a theory about whether imposing a windfall tax on oil companies might also raise the price of gas).

What I think is interesting about this debate is that both positions on the gas tax are pretty reasonable. Gasoline taxes (as part of a tax on diesel and liquefied petroleum gas) are levied at both the state and federal levels. This map shows the combined gasoline tax rates, as of January 2008, for the 50 states.

Texas is on the low end of the spectrum. The 18.4-cent federal tax is combined here with a 20-cent state gasoline tax (if you wonder why the phrase "fiscal crisis" gets used so often in relation to Texas, consider that this nationally very low tax rate is one of our largest sources of state revenue).

The majority of the revenue collected from these taxes, at both the state and federal levels, goes to pay for highway construction and maintenance. The costs of steel and concrete have risen considerably in the last several years (by some estimates by as much as 300%). Neither the federal nor the Texas state gas taxes have been raised in some time. This means that the purchasing power of each of these taxes has fallen dramatically.

The state tax was raised to 20 cents per gallon in 1991; the federal tax has been at its current rate since 1993. The state gasoline tax in Texas is now worth 13 cents in adjusted dollars; even less than it was worth in 1991. The federal gas tax is worth about 12 cents per gallon in adjusted dollars. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics website has a handy and fun inflation calculator.)

What this means, is that the gas tax is pretty useless at its present rate. McCain and Clinton have a strong leg to stand on here: why should we keep collecting a tax that's so far out of proportion to the costs of what it pays for? It's a small drop in the bucket of highway costs. If consumers will notice the extra money they save, whether it's $30 or $130, then maybe it is actually more effective as a repealed tax than as a collected one.

Obama also has a good point here, though. Even though the taxes don't come anywhere near covering the costs of highway construction and maintenance, should we really make the situation worse by not collecting it during the busiest driving season of the year?

If the gas tax is going to stay (whether at the federal or state level) then it only makes sense to not only raise it, but index it, as well, so it continues to rise with some indicator of inflation. The problem, of course, is that concrete and steel costs rise so sharply each year that indexing the gas tax to them would make gas very, very expensive very, very quickly.

Indexing it to something that rises more predictably, like the overall consumer price index, still only adds a couple tenths of a cent each year for the next few years. The gas tax is not going to be able to cover infrastructure costs anymore. (State Representative Mike Krusee also made a compelling argument in favor of abolishing the tax altogether last week at the Texas Transportation Forum).

If there isn't the political or popular will to raise the gasoline tax right now, then why not get rid of it? Why collect a futile tax?

Transportation Trivia

2008-04-26T00:01:00.005-05:00

I got to spent a day and a half last week at the 3rd Annual Texas Transportation Forum, organized by, mainly, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Not only were the vegetarian meal options surprisingly creative and delicious (the last policy conference I was at the vegetarian dishes seemed rather like afterthoughts), the discussions and panels were surprisingly compelling. TxDOT ended the last legislative session having tested the lege's patience for building more toll roads, though privately managed toll roads remain their primary strategy for funding transportation projects (projects meaning more roads).

Some of the interesting and/or troubling things I learned about the state of transportation in our fair state:

Texas has he largest highway system in the nation, though also one of the largest (in terms of both population and geography) metropolitan areas without a major highway, the Rio Grande Valley.
Texas's population is growing fast. In the next two decades it's likely to be awarded two more congressional seats, while New York is likely to lose some due to declining population.
Neither the state nor federal Motor Fuels Taxes, historically the primary funding mechanism for highway repair and construction, have been raised in over 15 years. The costs of highway construction labor and materials have raced way ahead of inflation, while the Motor Fuels Taxes have fallen way behind.

Texans pay $.20 per gallon to the state in tax, but since that tax has not been raised since 1991 it's basically worth about $.13 per gallon (in adjusted dollars) now. Many people at this conference agreed that any "toolbox" for transportation funding needs to include a newer gas tax...

...Except for Rep. Mike Krusee (R- Round Rock) who, in spite of having authored a bill last session that would have raised and then indexed the gas tax (so that it automatically keeps pace with some economic indicator) now feels the gas tax is unfair. Every one who buys gasoline is paying it, but the tax goes towards state highway construction and maintenance. So, his logic is, people who live in the city and may use the highways less, are subsidizing the lifestyles of people who choose to live further out and then spend more time sitting in highway traffic during rush hours.

Lots of states are having problems paying for their existing and new highway infrastructure, and this status quo will not give rise to a robust transportation system. Thus, 29 states have entered into public-private partnerships to help pay for highway projects (toll roads, mainly, but also multi-modal systems).
Public transit systems, since they are necessarily an open infrastructure and first responders in a crisis, are attractive terrorist targets (as in London and Tokyo). The challenge is how to balance safety with efficiency.

There are over 10 billion passenger trips on public transit each year; that's almost 17 times the number of domestic air travel trips. Penn Station in NYC handles the volume in one morning what O'Hare Airport in Chicago does in 2.5 days.

42,000 people die on roadways annually. In urban areas alone these deaths have costs associated with them that exceed $164 billion.
There is fancy, futuristic technology being developed to reduce these deaths, their attendant costs, and also be easier on the environment.

These include intelligent cars that can sense when the driver is sleepy; nterpret it's 360 degree surroundings (as in, be able to distinguish between a paper bag in the street and a small child in the street and react accordingly); driverless vehicles for both transporting small numbers of people in enclosed environments and also large numbers in a public transit system.

Pynchon

2008-04-20T19:57:00.003-05:00

A Gravity's Rainbow Wiki can be found here.

More later.

The War on Terror's worst kept secret

2008-04-01T12:40:00.003-05:00

We torture people. Innocent ones.

A better plan for the democrats

2008-03-26T12:32:00.003-05:00

Forget what I said yesterday (see below) about what the democratic presidential candidates need to do about selecting a nominee. If, as seems likely, there isn't going to be a nominee going into the convention then this, I think, is the best possible alternative. In fact, I prefer it to either of the two campaigning candidates.

All Senators Clinton and Obama need to settle on, then, is who's going to be Al Gore's vice president.

The general contet of the political discussions I've had lately with friends and family

2008-03-25T18:57:00.005-05:00

Thanks to the gap between big state primaries and the resolution to the republican nomination process the 2008 presidential campaign has ground to a standstill. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to campaign, but this part of the season feels much more like a Rumsfeldian slog than a campaign in that the race remains so close that there’s almost no mathematical way for either candidate to clinch the nomination without using superdelegates. Even in that case, though, things aren’t at all clear. Obama can point to the 6 percent lead in pledged delegates he has and make a case for a popular mandate. Clinton can point to her success in a greater number of states that are actually likely to vote democrat in making her case. Both of these are perfectly reasonable arguments, but neither is convincing enough to invalidate the other. This is a disaster.

Each candidate can also find some national poll to support them, as well; polls that show a relative strength of one over the other in a contest with McCain, or that show a preference of one voting bloc over another. This also isn’t convincing since the presidential election is neither going to be held soon enough for those poll results to matter nor is it going to be a single national election.

Moreover, the longer this goes on the weaker both candidates look. When Clinton gets backed into a corner she reveals herself to be a dirty fighter. Negative campaigning is much more effective than people give it credit for, but it makes everyone feel gross, too. Both candidates have been tripped up trying to strike a balance on NAFTA (they both somewhat arrogantly assume neither Canada or Mexico would have any points they want renegotiated, too) but her longer public life has hurt her more on the consistency front.

Obama, meanwhile, is losing his angelic shine. His speech following the blow-up of his pastor’s ridiculous comments was extremely thoughtful and daringly mature (given the political and media climate when it comes to discussions of race and racism), but his characterization of his relationship with the reverend (“an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with”) wasn’t his strongest moment last week (unless he considers eccentric old uncle a synonym for dangerous bigot). He’s also admitted that his relationship with Tony Rezko was much closer than he’s previously let on. Neither of these things have much to do with his potential presidency (except to the extent he has made his self-vaunted judgment an issue) but it has started to reveal him to be exactly what he has insisted he’s not: a totally orthodox, conventional politician. In this sense, he has farther to fall than she does.

In sum, neither candidate can demonstrate an ability to heal both the domestic and international rifts that are hurting the country. Unless they acknowledge their respective strengths and weaknesses and end this mess it is McCain’s presidency to lose. They need to get together and either form a ticket or one of them needs to make a very, very sweet promise to the other. I know this is easier said than done, but it can’t possible be as hard as their more intransigent supporters would maintain.

While all this is going on, John McCain is sitting around Arizona, raising goodwill and looking like the above-the-fray candidate. He made a show of scolding campaign workers who have tried smearing either of his rivals. He has also been canny at pointing out that he’s actually done a lot of the things both the democrats claim they can do (i.e., work in a non-partisan way with the rival party, attract independent votes, protect the United States in wartime, etc).

In spite of these advantages he’s still a long way from the presidency. When the economy goes bad the party in the White House is punished (even though the president cannot really do much to control economic cycles). A lot of the republicans I’ve spoken to (from the ranks of my family and classmates) do not trust him, and the nature of their mistrust has a common theme: they’re concerned with what they see as his big government tendencies. One of my friends jokingly said that once the republican nomination was down to McCain and Mike Huckabee she tuned out because at that point all the candidates were basically socialists. This critique is as absurd as the corresponding left wing one that portrays him as a water-carrier for George W. Bush and the GOP, but it speaks to a real threat: this could be the election where the right wing base stays home or goes for a third party.

"Let's go home."

2008-03-17T19:25:00.001-05:00

In its five seasons on HBO, The Wire managed to (mostly) balance the demands of an hugely entertaining TV show (clever plotting, expertly executed plot twists and cliffhangers, genuinely funny jokes, attractive people having sex, etc) with the rigor of a Brookings Institute report on a major city's fraying social fabric. The show rarely relied on broad characterizations or glib answers to complex questions. It was also, for me, the ideal program to become obsessed with in public policy school. Few shows have found the drama in (or even bothered dramatizing) the excruciating decisions that public workers (whether police, politicians, or teachers) have to make in allocating finite resources to infinite problems.

The fifth season proved that the people who make The Wire (creator David Simon, as well as Ed Burns and an A-team of writers, directors and actors) were fallible. The fifth season premiere was the first time the show's sprawling cast and diverse settings felt crowded. Moreover, two of the season's main storylines disappointed.

I remember reading David Simon discuss (though I do not remember where) the themes for the then-upcoming last season. He said in one interview that some of the characters in the police department would have to secretly take matters into their own hands to get things done. He was referring to how Jimmy McNulty would fabricate a lurid story about a serial killer to pressure city hall and the police hierarchy to provide the financial and material resources for Lester Freamon to find a way to put drug kingpin and mass murderer Marlo Stanfield in handcuffs.

I didn't have the totally adverse reaction to this plot's outlandishness that others did; I actually appreciated it to the extent that it satirized lesser crime dramas that rely on sensational crimes and romanticized police detection. Landsman's jerk-off-motion reaction the first time McNulty brings his his "evidence" of a serial killer was hysterical.

My problem with this story was its redundancy. Season three's Hamsterdam experiment, where Major Bunny Colvin creates free zones in the deadest parts of the city where drug laws are not enforced, covered the same thematic ground. It was also much more challenging. The free zones may well have reduced the violent crime rate and allowed for better community policing, but the human cost was staggering. This season, we were never really asked to condemn what McNulty does. We're shown one cop taking financial advantage of the money the "red ball" brings to the department, but even the characters angry about McNulty's subterfuge tacitly acknowledge that it gets real police work done.

After the show so effectively and thoughtfully expanded its universe to show how dock workers facing re-development and being made obsolete, the city's political structure, and the failing public schools were all entwined in the drug economy, it seemed like the show could top itself with it's fifth season examination of the local media. The end of the fourth season even hints that there's fertile ground there.

Fans of the show all knew that David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, bore a serious grudge against the paper's management. Anyone who feared that his resentment and anger might get the better of his storytelling were right to be concerned. After acknowledging the effect of declining revenues and remote ownership on the local newsroom, the bulk of this storyline was take up with a young reporter's fabrications.

I visited my grandmother in Cleveland during this season's run. Her local paper (The Plain Dealer) devoted its front page to local stories and politics, all with Cleveland-based bylines. Compare this with, say, the Austin American-Statesman, whose front page on any given day is almost exclusively stories picked up from the New York Times and wire services, and you buy The Wire's theory that local journalism is dying, and that this is as genuine a social problem as the drug trade being better financed than the police or the public schools that teach to statewide tests.

Since the end of the show, Simon has defended that storyline (in Salon or The Onion, or maybe both) as being about what stories don't get told by local media. I think he's being a little disingenuous; that's a great theme, but exploring certainly didn't require the young fabulist. If McNulty's storyline felt like the deck was stacked in that character's favor, in this one it's stacked decidedly against the paper: the newspaper's managing editor gets much less sympathy from the show than killers like Chris Partlow and Stringer Bell.

Even with these problems, though, The Wire was still miles ahead of any other show. To wit:

That montage of Baltimore at the one hour mark of the series finale. As my friend Hayden said: "Just beautiful, a love letter to a messed-up American city."
Clay Davis trying to rally support from anyone who will listen to him after he's indicted, and his pandering, cynical performance on the witness stand. And after all that, and with a awesomely sleazy smile on his face, he declares that Carcetti's enemies are "Playing that race card. Shameful shit."
Michael and Dukie and Bug spending the day at Six Flags.
Bubbles's climactic speech at his N.A. meeting.
Carcetti's first speech on the homeless-killer.
Proposition Joe trying to teach Marlo the civilized art of money laundering.
Proposition Joe's death scene, and the creepy look on Marlo's face.
Kima's Goodnight Moon scene with her son.
The look on McNulty's face as he hears the FBI's profile of his serial killer: "They're in the ballpark."
Beadie's lecture to McNulty on who will come to his wake when he dies: "...that's all the best of us get."
The same scene, when McNulty confesses to her: "You start to tell the story, you think you're the hero, and then when you get done talking..."
Nerece Campbell running damage control on Burrell and Davis as each contemplate going down fighting.
Herc giving Carver a phone number for Marlo, in doing so paying a debt to each them.
Pearlman sparring with Levy.
All of Bunk's reaction shots.
Michael and Snoop each plotting to ambush the other.

As grim as things looked like they would get, the last episode was surprisingly humanistic. This shouldn't have been a surprise, though; as cynical as the show has always been about institutions, it's always been pretty hopeful for individuals (a delicate balance that has saved it from the misanthropy of The Sopranos); it's always celebrated those who, to paraphrase Bunk Moreland, give a fuck when it ain't their turn to give a fuck.

In the end, McNulty and Freamon are more-or-less off the hook for their crimes, and get second chances at being happy civilians. Prezbo has gotten the hang of public school teaching, and his kids respect him. Greggs has no interest in reconciling with her ex-girlfriend, but wants to be a parent to their son. Bubbles has made some peace with Sharrod's death, and has been invited into his long-suffering sister's family. Poot and Cutty seem to have gotten out of "the game" permanently. Michael proves to be the heir to Omar. Dukie is lost to homelessness and addiction. Carcetti is governor, though at a cost to his soul. Daniels and Pearlman realized that the longer they stay with the police and district attorney, respectively, the more likely they were to have to bend or compromise ethics. When we last see them, they've walked away, consciences intact, and seem much happier.

The Travis County DA Race

2008-03-03T22:30:00.001-06:00

If anyone who hasn't voted is looking for a recommendation for how to vote in the Travis County District Attorney race, Rick Reed seems like a good choice. He was apparently a big behind-the-scenes part of bringing down Tom DeLay, and he promises to zealously pursue elderly person abuse and sexual predators. He is also the only candidate who has vowed to never seek the death penalty during his tenure. I think that by itself makes him a good choice for the most visible and powerful DA position in Texas.

Texans Love Voting

2008-02-29T19:37:00.005-06:00

The Texas Secretary of State's website keeps track of the numbers of voters each day of the early voting period. Voter turnout this year is high. Really high. See the figures below, created by me from data on the secretary of state's website.

One difference between the two years, though, is that by this point in 2004 the major parties had their official or de facto nominees. Another difference between 2004 and 2008? So far in 2008 democrats are outvoting republicans at an overall rate almost three-to-one. Democrats are even outvoting republicans in generally republican counties like Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Tarrant, and Williamson (though it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the democratic race is closer and more dramatic than the republican).

The biggest turnout in Texas for a presidential election was 1988, when 2.7 million people voted. Secretary of State Phil King is predicting that in 2008 3.3 million Texans will vote.

My cat playing with a cigar filled with catnip

2008-02-27T17:34:00.001-06:00

Retort to Ryan

2008-02-25T17:40:00.002-06:00

Ryan and I played Scrabble and argued about voting Friday night. We started out debating the merits of Barack Obama (whose rhetoric Ryan thinks is inspiring and I think is cliché ridden) and whether one should feel obligated to vote for a candidate they do not like. I said that even though I think Barack Obama is (in the words of Jimmy McNulty) an empty suit I’ll vote for him if he’s the Democratic Party’s nominee because he’s the Democratic nominee. Ryan said that sort of voting is mindless, sycophantic voting (also, Ryan was drunk and I was stoned on a cocktail of Maxalt and Vicodin taken earlier for a migraine).

I woke up Sunday feeling like I needed to clarify my point. The reason I’m going to vote for the democrat regardless of who the party nominates is that I have a core set of beliefs about the role of the government in people’s lives that transcends the individual candidate, my cherry-picked objections to them, and, moreover, is not shared by the Republican Party. By way of illustration I’ll note that 143 million pounds of beef was recalled last week by a California meatpacking firm.

This was a voluntary recall. All meat recalls are voluntary. The US Department of Agriculture has lacked the authority to enforce food safety standards and policies since the Reagan and first Bush presidencies. (Some news stories have incorrectly indicated that the USDA issued the recall.)

In addition to generally cutting public health spending, Ronald Reagan had two secretaries of agriculture, one was in the hog rendering business and the other was a former president of the American Meat Packers Association. He appointed a vice president of the National Cattleman’s Association to run the USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Service. There's nothing about these backgrounds that necessary means the people would be bad choices, but from a public health standpoint they were bad choices.

These appointees reduced the presence of federal inspectors in American slaughterhouses, leaving the job of regulating adherence to food safety standards to the individual meat packing companies. The meat packing industry got to keep regulating itself even after some companies were caught falsifying safety records and injury logs. The USDA’s role in recalling meat after this point has been to issue press releases (often written by the meat packing company issuing the recall).

Bill Clinton tried reinstating the USDA’s authority to demand recalls and fine negligent mean packers, but congressional republicans blocked legislation to that effect in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999.

Had a videotape of obviously sick and decrepit animals being abused and forklifted to slaughter not been smuggled out of the slaughterhouse in California nobody would have been the wiser. This may very well be one of those anecdotes with viscerally unpleasant details but no outright dangerous implications. The effect of republican small government policies, though, has been that there's no safety net here, not even against companies who have demonstrated their negligence. This is a scenario where I think the democrats have the right idea.

So, even though I like John McCain more than Barack Obama (for instance, McCain is clearly funnier) I’ll vote for Obama because he represents something closer to my view of how the government ought to work. If you can't be bothered to vote for a candidate who's nearly synonymous policy-wise to the one you prefer, then you're really only supporting them for their celebrity. That’s my argument for sucking it up and voting for the candidate you dislike when they’re from the party that you do.

Websites collecting signatures and/or encouraging silly postal campaigns to Friday Night Lights

2008-02-20T23:06:00.004-06:00

1)

2)

http://www.petitiononline.com/savefnl/petition.html

Friday Night Lights / Texas history trivia

2008-02-15T18:25:00.004-06:00

What was the name of the horse Sam Houston rode at the Battle of San Jacinto?*

Saracen.

According to Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, page 4.

Friday Night Lights season 2 recap

2008-02-09T15:29:00.001-06:00

Friday Night Lights ended its second season, and perhaps its entire run, last night. After a starting the season with episodes that portended both more of what was great about the first season and the half-baked, melodramatic digressions that were to come, the fifteenth episode was, mostly, an understated triumph. (Peter Berg's goofy cameo didn't feel at home with anything else, but it did look like he and the Taylor family actors were having fun.)

The season never hit a consistent stride. It opened with the Taylor family fractured. Eric spending the week in Austin as TMU's quarterback coach; Julie and Tami living uneasily together in Dillon. Julie resented her father's absence, and the attention her mother paid the new baby. As with last season, some of this season's truest-feeling, and best, scenes were played between Tami and Julie.

Julie was also restless in her relationship with Matt, too, but their break-up never really pays off in any way. Briefly, Matt is the center point in a love triangle between Carlotta, his grandmother's Guatemalan nurse and the blond cheerleader who knows so much about cars. Matt's affair with Carlotta had its moments (for one it explored Matt's attraction to care-givers and parental figures), but Carlotta's presence and departure were both totally inexplicable.

Grandma Saracen's care needs frequently overwhelmed Matt in the first season, and it seemed uncharacteristic for the show that Carlotta mysteriously came to their aid. Matt seems as surprised to meet her as we are, which is odd given that he's been the only one in charge of his grandmother. It's never explained, for instance, how she's being paid. Does Medicare pay for around-the-clock, live-in nurses in Dillon? It seemed likely (or at least plausible) that the Buddy Garrity and the booster club were sponsoring her, but we never did figure it out. It also seems like the question of a replacement might come up after she suddenly moves back to Guatemala. I'm going to leave the quincinera scene in the past.

More briefly, some of this season's other misbegotten and aborted storylines:

Lyla Garrity's transformation into a megachurch-going Christian. Lyla seems happy now, sure, but it seems like we're leaving her pretty much right where we found her in the opening of the series (having traded cheerleading football for cheerleading for Jesus). She was much more interesting at the close of the first season, when we saw her setting out on what seemed like would be a lonely new identity as someone who was rejected by, and the rejected, the Dillon football culture. She seemed much too humble, and much too cognizant of what she didn't like about Dillon, to become the harshly judgmental fundamentalist she was for most of the second season.
Similarly, Jason Street seemed to be seeking some new way to exist as a former Dillon Panther. His decision to leave his coaching job seemed like a prologue to leaving Dillon. Alas, as the second season closed he, too, was embracing, in an out-of-character way, the divine: insisting that the pregnancy resulting from his one-night stand was a miracle. Anyway, shouldn't he just a year after being paralyzed still be in some sort of physical therapy?
Coach Taylor's return to Dillon, following the booster club's ouster of Coach McGregor, was promising but never went anywhere. Eric having to serve as athletic director to the school in order to draw his old salary seemed like a clever return to the Bissinger book's examination of the high school football cult and culture in Dillon, but the conflicts it seemed likely to create were pretty much left out of the show.
Smash's secret relationship with a rich white girl. Friday Night Lights has been pretty nimble and thoughtful (relative to prime time, network standards) when it came to race and class, but the whole business with Smash beating up the obnoxious white kid in the movie theatre made everyone I know cringe. I will presume, for the sake of the show I once loved, that had the writers not gone on strike this would have been smoothed out and better-handled.
The murder. This was handled much better than could have been expected (or, was hardly the biggest problem the series created for itself), though it obviously belongs in another, crappier show. Still: How is it that Coach Taylor gets a call from the police when Smash gets in a fight, but is totally out of the loop when Landry confesses to murder?
Almost everything involving Tim Riggins. This season spent a lot of time on Riggins. Like Lyla and Jason, he was also seeking something, though he never figured out what. His pursuit of Lyla was tiresome and repetitive, redeemed only by how she's portrayed as not-at-all conflicted about not wanting him. He also spent some time living with, and then stealing from, "one of the biggest drug dealers in Dillon." This was the only development dumber than his falling out with Coach Taylor after Coach thinks he's caught Tim and Julie making out. The Riggins-Taylor family storyline was especially disappointing since it's the sort of thing this show can do beautifully. Speaking of which...
The show has always been best when Coach Taylor is acting as surrogate father for the players with absent fathers (Saracen, Riggins, Smash) and for the one he's always been close to (Street). His relationship with Saracen has been special, though, because Saracen actually longs for a father figure (and because Eric seems to have mixed feelings about his own father). It seemed a waste to me that Eric and Matt were only on screen together a handful of times, and almost not at all for the mid section of the series.

For everything that went wrong this season, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton heroically kept the show anchored. One of my favorite scenes of the year happened in the last episode, when Eric takes Smash to visit Whitmore. We've always known Jason was Eric's ticket to Dillon, but last night we learned that he's been watching Smash for a long time, too. The sense I got here was not just that Eric was taking an interest in advising a young man who needs (without realizing it) a father, but that he felt like he owed Smash. For the first time, too, Smash seemed to recognize (and finally be grateful for) the depth of Eric's commitment to him and the team.

Likewise, the last episode's scene between Eric and Street showed how good the show could be. Jason is asking for advice on convincing his one-night-stand to not have an abortion, and Coach Taylor, radiating humanistic wisdom, refuses to indulge him, though he does recognize Jason's pain.

I don't have any magic words for you and it's not for me to convince her, its for you to find those words yourself. I can tell this is going to be one of the most serious conversations probably you'll ever have in your life. I can tell you that your children and the mother of your children are the two most important things in life.... I can't give you any answers. You've got to make the answers.

Incidentally: I liked that this show actually used the word abortion (several times, even) and never once in a derogatory way. Street only wants this girl to continue the pregnancy out of a previously unmentioned concern that he might never be able to have kids. There was otherwise no judgment that I picked up on.

Whether Eric's overtime work on his players' off-field lives is compensation after realizing in the previous episode how much Saracen had counted on him, and the degree to which he failed the boy, we won't learn unless we get a proper conclusion to the season. If this does prove to me the last episode of the year (to say nothing of the series) we were at least treated to some scenes of vintage quality, and we'll be leaving everyone facing in the right direction.

Other highlights, from the last episode and the whole season:

We were treated to one last scene of Landry and Matt's affectionate bickering, and a glimpse of Landry's family having survived the earlier crisis intact.
Coast Taylor, refusing to "drop the hammer," allowing his opponent a score during a post-season blow out.
Unlike Lyla and Jason, who sought refuge from the Dillon of their past, Tyra embraced the aspects of her town she'd always kept at a distance, and it seemed to suit her. After prevaricating on whether she loves Landry or not we see them unabashedly holding hands at school, and her enthusiastically cheering during the game. She's also found a place on the volleyball team and a surrogate family of her own in the Taylors.
The relationship between Buddy Garrity and Santiago never developed in a very satisfying way, but the game sequence, set to ...Trail of Dead's Source Tags and Codes where Santiago takes his place on the Panther team was pretty awesome.
The premier episode's use of Wilco's Muzzle of Bees.
The suggestion that Coaches Taylor and McGregor would face off at some point was exciting.
The weird, fleeting sense that, while in Mexico, Jason, Tim and Lyla might have a three-way.
Tami's scenes with her sister, in whom she gets a glimpse of how different her life could be, and the resentment and love inherent in their relationship.

The space shuttle launched today

2008-02-07T20:50:00.000-06:00

I'm obsessed with watching the space shuttle launches and landings on the internet. The landings are pretty much what you expect: a ground level view of the space shuttle coming in, though seen through cameras powerful enough to give a pretty good picture of it miles out. The launches show you things at heights, speeds and distances humans never see.

After the Columbia shuttle was ruined by chunks of foam coming off the external fuel tank, NASA started watching the tanks more carefully. One of the things they do now is photograph it from the shuttle as the two separate high in the atmosphere. They also have webcams on the shuttle and tank. From those cameras, you see the view from the shuttle when the rocket boosters separate and when the tank falls away. Both occur in such thin air that it looks like slow motion. It's traveling so fast, and is so far away, at that point that it also happens with a graceful coldness. It is practically Kubrickian.

Today's launch is still available to watch on NASA's website. It cuts off after the rocket boosters are ejected.

Cable TV and the Campaigns

2007-12-15T14:18:00.000-06:00

I have cable television now, with a DVR. It's nice. I have some high-definition channels, too. This week both Lost and Friday Night Lights disappointed me in astonishing clarity. On the other hand, I've liked watching Charlie Rose and The Daily Show regularly. PBS and Jon Stewart might be the only civilized news outlets on cable. What I've learned from seeing the 24-hour news channels is that cable is an utter waste of time and money. The internet does shallow and insulting just as well, but without the extra cost and volume.

Cable has been good, though, for being able to see the presidential candidates debate. I know they've been debating for almost a year now, but once the primaries got close the debates started to seem important.

Here are my endorsements:

The democrats should nominate Hillary Clinton
The republicans should nominate John McCain.

I disagree with some fundamental tenets of the Republican Party, and so am almost always going to vote for the democrat, but I think a McCain-Clinton race offers a can't-lose scenario for the country.

Both of these candidates have incurred the anger of the more dogmatic parts of their parties for their cross-party alliances and positions. I like this because I don't want another you're-with-us-or-against-us president. Clinton the senator is more accomplished and strategic about working Washington than she was as first lady (a fact she does not shy away from, though no candidate is going to be so candid as to admit they are much better at this than they once were). McCain would bring a moral and ethical authority to the executive branch we haven't had in a while; he's not going to parse a distinction between torture and enhanced interrogation.

Both are also good at being professional senators. Admitting, or being, that is anathema for presidential candidates, but I think it's a good thing. I like Barack Obama, too, but I'm wary of his amorphous rhetoric of change. Like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, he's running as an outsider. The message being that only someone not inculcated by Washington can be an effective president, or that not being a Washington insider gives you an uncorrupted moral clarity.

This is a presidential campaign cliché. It was the theme of Jimmy Carter's campaign, and Ronald Reagan's, and Bill Clinton's, and George W. Bush's. After the last eight years of dishonesty and/or disaster, what's wrong with wanting the next president to know what they're doing?

Anecdote

2007-11-27T23:11:00.001-06:00

Apropos of a discussion on Mark's blog about what sorts of perniciousness would follow from a universal (or, close to) health care plan, and in response to any notion that government sponsored health care is somehow more likely to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship, I offer this quote from my Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBSTX) Explanation Of Benefits. The bold is in the original, the italics are mine:

Medically Necessary (Medical Necessity) - Services and supplies are considered medically necessary if they:

• Are essential to and consistent with the diagnosis or treatment of a specific illness or injury;
• Meet generally accepted standards of medical practice in the U.S.;
• Are not primarily for the convenience of the patient, physician, or hospital;
• Represent the most cost-efficient treatment of the condition that is safe and effective; and
• Are not experimental or investigational.

The recommendation of a physician or other health care provider does not automatically make a given service or supply medically necessary.

BCBSTX will determine whether a service or supply is medically necessary, considering views of the medical community, guidelines and practices of Medicare and Medicaid, and peer review literature.

High Definition Moon Footage

2007-11-10T22:34:00.001-06:00

The footage of the moon at this website was taken by a Japanese satellite with a high-definition camera. I think it's pretty hypnotic. I hope it is one day available on DVD without any added sound (or perhaps with the option of Brian Eno's instrumental album Apollo playing over it).

An Undated Photo Perhaps Showing A Ghost Sitting In A Hospital Room

2007-11-10T22:32:00.000-06:00

I found this on the Coast To Coast AM website.

The Revised Netflix Survey

2007-10-20T12:08:00.000-05:00

I have 28 Netflix Friends, over half of whom have rated at least 500 movies. Only eight have rated less than 250 movies; six have rated over a thousand (though nobody has rated over 1500 as of October 2007).

< 250 ratings: 8
251 - 500: 5
501-750: 5
751-1000: 5
> 1000: 6

Geographically, they are primarily in Texas.

Texas: 20
Washington, D.C.: 3
California: 1
Illinois: 1
Minnesota: 1
Oregon: 1
Washington: 1

Movies were deemed eligible for the survey if they were rated by at least 10 people. I found 72 movies (or television shows) with this attribute.

The distribution by decade of release (number / percent of total):

2001 – present: 34 / 47%
1991 – 2000: 14 / 19%
1981 – 1990: 6 / 8%
1971 – 1980: 12 / 17%
1961 – 1970: 3 / 4%
1951 – 1960: 2 / 3%
1941 – 1950: 1 / 1%

The best rating a movie can receive on Netflix is 5 stars. There are, then, two measures of the collective affection or regard for a movie: the cumulative number of stars awarded and the average rating.

All but four of the movies in the survey had cumulative ratings of over 50. Three movies were rated above 100. In the following distribution, the cumulative score and number of raters follow the name of the movie.

Cumulative scores between 101 and 110
The Royal Tenenbaums (105) [25]
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (104) [25]
Amelie (103) [24]

91 – 100
Rushmore (99) [23]
Little Miss Sunshine (96) [25]
Lost In Translation (96) [23]
Pulp Fiction (95) [23]

81 – 90
Election (81) [20]
Garden State (81) [24]
Y Tu Mama Tambien (81) [20]
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (82) [21]
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (82) [17]
Punch-Drunk Love (83) [20]
The Shining (84) [19]
Raising Arizona (85) [19]
The Big Lebowski (89) [21]

71 – 80
Magnolia (80) [20]
The Office (UK) Season 1 (78) [17]
The Godfather, Part 2 (78) [16]
The Godfather (77) [16]
Raiders of the Lost Ark (77) [17]
The Departed (76) [19]
Fargo (76) [17]
Reservoir Dogs (75) [19]
Sideways (75) [21]
Dr. Strangelove (73) [16]
Batman Begins (72) [18]
American Beauty (72) [23]
Kill Bill, Volume 1 (71) [18]

61 – 70
Arrested Development, Season 1 (70) [15]
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (70) [15]
Taxi Driver (70) [18]
Capote (68) [17]
The Empire Strikes Back (68) [14]
The Office (UK), Season 2 (68) [15]
The 40-Year Old Virgin (67) [19]
Annie Hall (67) [16]
Bottle Rocket (67) [15]
Citizen Kane (67) [16]
The Graduate (67) [16]
Kill Bill, Volume 2 (67) [18]
Star Wars (67) [14]
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Extended (66) [15]
Children of Men (65) [18]
The Squid and the Whale (65) [16]
The Office (US), Season 2 (63) [13]
The Incredibles (62) [15]
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended (62) [13]
Memento (62) [17]
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (61) [14]
Rear Window (61) [14]

51 – 60
Goodfellas (60) [13]
Chinatown (59) [13]
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Extended (59) [13]
North by Northwest (59) [14]
The Office (US), Season 1 (59) [14]
The Science of Sleep (59) [14]
The Shawshank Redemption (57) [13]
2001: A Space Odyssey (56) [13]
Apocalypse Now (56) [13]
The Silence of the Lambs (56) [13]
Alien (55) [13]
Freaks and Geeks (55) [12]
Blade Runner: The Theatrical Version (54) [12]
Full Metal Jacket (54) [13]
The Office Special (53) [12]
Pan’s Labyrinth (52) [12]
Jaws (51) [13]

40 -50
Borat (50) [13]
Aliens (49) [11]
Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut (47) [11]
The Exorcist (44) [11]

In terms of average rating, a different set of movies emerges as the best regarded. No movie had an average rating of 5, which would have indicated it as universally beloved by its viewers, but five had average ratings above 4.8. Only two movies in the survey had average ratings below 3.5.

Average ratings between 4.51 and 5.00
The Godfather Part 2 (4.88)
The Empire Strikes Back (4.86)
The Office (US), Season 2 (4.85)
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (4.82)
The Godfather (4.81)
Star Wars (4.79)
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended (4.77)
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (4.67)
Arrested Development, Season 1 (4.67)
Goodfellas (4.62)
The Office (UK), Season 1 (4.59)
Freaks and Geeks (4.58)
Dr. Strangelove (4.56)
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Extended (4.54)
Chinatown (4.54)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (4.53)
The Office (UK), Season 2 (4.53)

4.01 – 4.5
Blade Runner: The Theatrical Version (4.50)
Raising Arizona (4.47)
Fargo (4.47)
Bottle Rocket (4.47)
Aliens (4.45)
The Shining (4.42)
The Office Special (4.42)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Extended (4.40)
The Shawshank Redemption (4.38)
Rear Window (4.36)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (4.36)
Pan’s Labyrinth (4.33)
The Silence of the Lambs (4.31)
Apocalypse Now (4.31)
2001: A Space Odyssey (4.31)
Rushmore (4.30)
Amelie (4.29)
Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut (4.27)
The Big Lebowski (4.24)
Alien (4.23)
The Science of Sleep (4.21)
The Office (US), Season 1 (4.21)
North By Northwest (4.21)
The Royal Tenenbaums (4.20)
The Graduate (4.19)
Citizen Kane (4.19)
Annie Hall (4.19)
Lost In Translation (4.17)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (4.16)
Punch-Drunk Love (4.15)
Full Metal Jacket (4.15)
The Incredibles (4.13)
The Squid and the Whale (4.06)
Election (4.05)
Y Tu Mama Tambien (4.05)

3.51 – 4.00
Magolia (4.00)
The Exorcist (4.00)
The Depated (4.00)
Capote (4.00)
Batman Begins (4.00)
Reservoir Dogs (3.95)
Kill Bill, Volume 1 (3.94)
Jaws (3.92)
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (3.90)
Taxi Driver (3.89)
Borat (3.85)
Little Miss Sunshine (3.84)
Kill Bill, Volume 2 (3.72)
Memento (3.65)
Children of Men (3.61)
Sideways (3.57)
The 40-Year Old Virgin (3.53)

3.01 – 3.50
Garden State (3.38)
American Beauty (3.13)

My Favorite Movie of Summer 2007

2007-10-17T00:12:00.001-05:00

To better understand why Live Free Or Die Hard was the summer's best, most gratifying movie it helps to understand the terms by which its predecessor, Die Hard With A Vengeance, the third in the series, was such a disappointment.

...With A Vengeance was fundamentally different than the two previous Die Hard films in several ways, though the obvious ones are not the most significant. Obviously: Die Hard 3 is set outside a confined space and a partner/buddy character is also given a more significant role. These elements certainly contribute to it not feeling like a Die Hard movie, but they are not the reason it sucks.

The latest film is set in an even more expansive milieu (stretching over several cities) but its individual action scenes all take place in very specific, and generally enclosed, settings. This is important because it contributes to the sense that what makes a Die Hard movie is not the sense of enclosure per se, but rather John McClane's sense of lone-ness. He acts not not because of any moral imperative, but because he's the only one who can. (There was really nothing at stake for him in With A Vengeance, and thus no real answer to the question why doesn't he just go home?)

The newest film also pairs him with a partner who drives plot as much as provides comic relief. Justin Long is actually quite good in this role (not that I doubted his latent ability, but I did doubt the conception of the character). John McClane has allies both of the first two films, too. In the third, though, he's frequently, comedically antagonistic towards those helpers. He and Samuel L. Jackson's character forge a friendship of sorts, but they still yell t each other a lot and argue about racial politics. Hearing John McClane express opinions (let alone quasi-conservative ones, or ones that make him sound like a complete asshole) is jarring in Vengeance because in the previous films he's been too preoccupied with having to survive in the here-and-now to complain about relatively abstract notions. A similar kind of thing happens in Live Free, when he argues with Justin Long over musical tastes. Fortunately, this is only a momentary lapse in judgment.

The other thing the new film improves on is McClane's relationship with authority figures, and here there's actually a minor improvement on the first Die Hard. In parts 1 and 3 authority figures are depicted as incompetent boobs (Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson in the first, and the two FBI agents in the third). McClane's relationship with an FBI director in the 4th film is much more plausible: the two actually want to help each other.

The biggest improvements over the third entry are in terms of tone and the action sequences themselves. Tonally part 3 was almost as much comedy and action film, and these elements do not support each other the way movie studios seem to think they do; laughter and fear-for-your-life tend to be mutually exclusive expressions. Live Free Or Die Hard does have it's lighter moments, but the overall tone is one of tension and fear. In one scene McClane implores his hacker sidekick to imagine the consequences of the terrorist plot in terms of people sitting alone in their homes. It recalls one of Die Hard 2's nicer, but also more sinister, touches: showing the interior of an airplane, with its passengers tired and happy to be on approach for landing, just before terrorists force it to crash. In Die Hard 3, the repercussions of terrorist acts are fodder for jokes amongst the police as well as citizen bystanders.

This more serious tone is also evident in McClane's relationship with his divorce and his kids. His estrangement from his family, when its mentioned, is played for laughs in the third film. This movie takes more seriously the idea that McClane is a middle-aged man whose marriage has not worked out; he doesn't find it funny that he's alone. This film's Nobody-wants-to-be-that-guy speech may not be as effective as the original's She's-already-heard-me-say-I-Love-you-a-thousand-times scene, but it suggests that the filmmakers understand what made the first film so effective.

I referenced them already, but the action sequences in this film are also pretty great. This movie felt to me like its makers wanted to thrill their audience the old-fashioned way: with gleefully kinetic action and diabolically clever stunt work. It's in this department that ...With A Vengeance (not to mention most other action movies these days) really looks uninspired and lazy by comparison.

There's also a powerful sentimental value for me, as several of you know and maybe also share, in seeing a Die Hard movie capitalize on the first's legacy, it's almost a redemption of sorts. The anticipation for this movie (chronicled at this link) isn't over, yet, either; the unrated DVD comes out next month.

The Science of Progress

2007-10-10T11:56:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite LBJ School professors has an op-ed in the paper today (it's pasted below, as well). His piece is about some concerns he has with the notion of university faculty having to bring money into their schools or departments by conducting narrowly defined research for commercial purposes. His feeling is that researchers shouldn't be licensed out like the university logo or sports mascot; that there is both intellectual and financial value to scientific research for the sake of research. Incidentally, he also wears a bow tie very well and his class was a lot of fun.

The science of progress

Kenneth Ashworth, LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR

Planet Earth can support more than 6 billion people presently only because of science and technology. How many people could Texas support back when our technology consisted of the windmill, the moldboard plow, barbed wire and the six-shooter?

So said two of Texas's most original thinkers: Norman Hackerman, a chemist, and Walter Prescott Webb, a historian and author.

However, these two ideas are being misused by legislators and governors all across the nation.

Too often, policy makers are impatient for the rewards that are the product of scientific research. What they want is new businesses, new manufacturing, new venture capital opportunities and more jobs. And — eureka — they think they have found the solution to stimulating state economies.

Many elected policy makers would require universities to support themselves increasingly by contracting out their faculty members to corporations and government agencies. They would insist that state support for research be spent on technology transfer but denied to basic science. They would put their bets — our tax dollars — on directed research, research on specifically identified problems rather than on what they see as arcane research faculty members want to pursue. They would create ways to reward faculty members who work on applied science and translate scientific knowledge into technological uses. And they might insist that, within our universities, faculty promotions, tenure, and salaries be dependent on doing only science that can lead to stimulating the economy and helping the business community. Big bucks to reward patents, copyrights and start-up businesses but not a dime for idle research to satisfy some professor's curiosity.

What's wrong with this picture?

As Hackerman used to say, science is the flywheel of man's accumulated knowledge about nature.

Every once in a while, the flywheel throws off something that is picked up by engineers and technologists and applied for the benefit of mankind.

But to keep that flywheel spinning and throwing off useful information, new scientific knowledge has to be constantly added to it. And we don't increase the spin or source of knowledge by exclusively trying to pull on the applied technology end.

"You don't use a ballet dancer to pull a plow" is how Hackerman used to put it. You don't waste a highly trained research scientist to work as an engineer, a technologist or an applied scientist.

For instance, the discovery of vitamins and their manufacture have helped mankind enormously. Yet the discovery of vitamins came initially out of basic science research done by a man who wondered how butterflies produce and maintain their brilliant colors. Out of pure curiosity, he spent years to discover and describe the chemical and metabolic process that ended up on the flywheel of scientific knowledge.

UT vitamin researcher Roger Williams made his breakthrough by opening the secrets of chemical metabolism in animals and humans. The flywheel threw off a piece of abstruse knowledge that has enhanced the lives of millions.

Hackerman used to say that there is only one absolute certainty about investing in scientific research: When we put money into basic science, there have always been substantial rewards for mankind.

We simply don't know when we make the investment in what ways it will benefit us and in what form it will come to fruitful application. But we cannot just skip scientific research to reap only the benefits of technology.

The one mistake we must avoid is to mess with Texas by prescribing misguided rewards and punishments for the kind of research that faculties choose to do of their own volition.

Ashworth, a former Texas commissioner of higher education, co-authored 'Conversations on the Uses of Science and Technology.'

2007-10-08T19:19:00.000-05:00

I don't know what these following numbers really mean or represent, but the season premiere of Friday Night Lights came in 2nd place for its time slot in the Nielson Ratings. The first place show was on CBS, and it scored a 5.4/10. Friday Night Lights's score was 4.2/7. This, apparently, is pretty consistent with how it performed last season, when it was on Wednesday nights; I don't know if that is considered good. I also cannot judge the strength of it's second place finish relative to first, but the third place show was 3.4/6. It looks like FNL, then, was closer to the third place spot than the first.

My Favorite People Of Network TV

2007-09-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

Season 2 of Friday Night Lights begins one week from tonight.

diymmogame@yahoo.com

2007-09-24T19:21:00.000-05:00

Sometime while I was living in Des Moines, Iowa (1993-1997) someone in St. Louis, Missouri used my name and social security number to get a cell phone. This person then ran up a several-hundred dollar bill that they never paid. I found out while living in Austin (sometime between 1999 and 2000). By then, a collection agency had been looking for me, and they were not at all sympathetic to my innocence claims.

One person at the agency finally suggested I back my story up with a police case number. I spoke to a St. Louis police detective who was helpful but not surprised by my story. The phrase identity theft was not part of the popular vernacular, but he predicted that this sort of crime would be a big deal within 10 years. When I called the collection agency back with my case number they promptly and politely informed me that I was off the hook.

***

I get fake email from PayPal all the time, and I dutifully forward it to spoof@paypal.com. They then send me back a note confirming that I received a fraudulent message, and reminded me of how to discern a genuine PayPal communique from a phony one. That's how I knew there was real trouble earlier today when the PayPal message confirming my payment to a stranger of several hundred dollars greeted me by name.

Somehow this person got into my PayPal account and sent themselves a large payment. I filed an online unauthorized transaction report with PayPal, and also called them. They told me they would investigate and that whoever did this probably did not get my whole credit card number, just the last four digits. I also called my credit card company, and they were extremely nice. They said to let PayPal handle it for now ("it is their job"), and if the payment actually "hit" my card then they would take care of it for me.

A couple hours later PayPal wrote to say the situation was resolved and the "seller" was issuing me a refund. The email also contained this transmission from the thief:

Message From Seller:
shit

The email address of the person who tried stealing my money is: diymmogame@yahoo.com.

If anyone knows of any clever, mean-spirited (but legal) retribution I'd be honored if you carried it out on my behalf.

New Cronenberg

2007-09-23T16:14:00.001-05:00

I love David Cronenberg's films generally, but even though I liked A History of Violence pretty well I haven't been really excited by either of his films since eXistenZ (one of the only movies, incidentally, for which I will indulge the ridiculous use of capitalizations and/or punctuation and/or abbreviation).

Eastern Promises, though it's another crime drama with few obvious references to Cronenberg's signature themes of the sexualiation and violence of technology upon the body, seems to me like one of his very best. It's hard to describe the movie in terms of plot or story, because in some ways not a whole lot happens. Most of it seems like a cautionary tale for midwives. The lesson being that if a 14-year old Ukrainian immigrant dies in childbirth and leaves behind a diary detailing her life as a forced prostitute it is best to be careful who you tell, and in particular not the Russian mobsters her diary leads you to.

For most of the movie, though, this is incidental and Viggo Mortenson's relationship to the crime family as their driver is the center of what's going on. By the very end, though, you realize that Naomi Watts's midwife has done something much more significant than it first seemed.

Last night Kurt mentioned a Fresh Air interview of a few weeks ago in which Cronenberg was talking to Terri Gros about making blood look just right in his movies. He (Cronenberg) said human blood actually changes color the longer it's outside the body (as it spends more time exposed to oxygen). On the one hand, it's very morbid that the man has researched this.

On the other, though, it makes me love him more. That kind of curiosity, that attention to detail and precision, is indicative to me of how unusually thoughtful a filmmaker he is. (This means he is also, apparently, the kind of guy who sees people get their throats slit in other movies and thinks, that could really be much more graphically realistic.) There were a lot of moments during Eastern Promises (some violent, some not) that reminded me of Kurt's story. It's a nice feeling when one of your favorite filmmakers puts you in a state of awe.

Friday Night Lights

2007-09-20T19:30:00.001-05:00

The second season premiere of Friday Night Lights is available on this Yahoo site, commercial free.

Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama

2007-09-16T01:22:00.000-05:00

National Public Radio, with the cooperation of George Lucas, adapted Star Wars into a 13-part, 6 and a half hour radio drama in 1981. I remember driving around with my dad and him turning it on in the car for us to listen to. I also have memories of listening to radio editions of either The Empire Strikes Back or Return Of The Jedi, but in no case do I remember the content of the shows. I'm concerned that I might have been underwhelmed at the time. If I was for whatever reason then it's too bad, because they're actually pretty awesome.

George Lucas sold the rights to make the series (for $1), and gave away the rights to use the film's music and sound effects, to the local NPR station based out of the University of Southern California. Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels and Ben Burtt also all reprise their roles (as Luke, C-3PO and Sound Designer, respectively).

This must count as one of the best donations NPR has ever received (though I can't find any information on whether or how it was also lucrative). I'm surprised you don't hear about CD sets being given away to the higher donors during the pledge drives; it seems like that would be more appealing than a coffee mug or shirt. But maybe there are rights issues with the CDs, or maybe coffee mugs really are a better inducement than a 20-year old radio serial based on movies that are (understandably) almost exclusively associated with visual pleasure and stimulation. (I can also imagine that, at the time, such rank commercialization was not part of a nonprofit entity's fundraising strategy, and now NPR doesn't control them, or something like that.)

At any rate, radio's lack of visual capacity is not a problem. The writers have ingeniously decided not to re-tell the events of the movie (at least not so far, I'm a few episodes in to Star Wars), but rather to fill in some expositional blanks; it's all context and character development (which Lucas apparently thought up for, but didn't use in, the movie). The radio serial is a nice, even fun, complement to the films (and, according to the Star Wars Wiki, considered part of the canon).

The first episode is particularly good. This episode depicts Luke's life on Tatooine. We get a sense of the day-to-day, season-to-season responsibilities of not only tending a moisture farm, but also of life under the Empire. Luke and a friend fear being drafted to fight the rebellion, but are cautious in how and when they express sympathy for the rebels. There's also an affecting scene where Luke and Aunt Beru argue with Uncle Owen over Luke's desire to buy new robots to help around the farm. Another nice moment has Luke watching through binoculars, in wonderment and terror, what appears to be a star destroyer attacking a smaller ship in the upper atmosphere. In showing Luke as a just a kid, specifically a teenager seeking something to get him away from home, and also in the drag racing theme, this episode recalls George Lucas's American Graffiti as much as the Star Wars movies.

The second episode tells the backstory to Princess Leia's search for Obi Wan Kenobi. It also describes how she came to possess the Death Star blueprints, and presages the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star.

The Empire and Jedi radio dramas were made later (1983) and much later (1996), and are also much shorter (5 hours, 3 hours). Jedi was also the only not not produced by NPR, though it was broadcast on it. The North Village Branch library has those on, CD, too.

Some Housekeeping

2007-09-05T16:24:00.000-05:00

Since I am now 33, and basically unemployed, and also a little tense about that unemployment situation, I have decided to take on a casual research project (in addition to my full-time job research project).

This year I will research and write about the noteworthy accomplishments of other 33-year old people, particularly those whose accomplishments as 33-year olds have some sort of personal meaning or sentimental value for me. So far, my list consists of Bruce Willis (who starred in Die Hard when he was 33) and David Foster Wallace (who wrote his famous essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" at the age of 33). I also know some people in their mid-60s who live in Minnesota and had kids at this age, but that might make me too self conscious to write about. If anyone can suggest other topics in this category, please do so.

Also, it's come to my attention that my methodology in carrying out The Netflix Survey was flawed. This has resulted in conclusions that are slightly skewed. Within a couple weeks, I will undertake a more comprehensive review of the tastes of my Netflix Friends (using the first edition of the survey as a guide).

If anyone reading this is a Netflix Friend of mine and has updates for their ratings of any relevant movies or TV shows, it would bolster the survey's accuracy if you made your updates in the next week or so.

Thank you.

Surgically Precise Amnesia

2007-09-05T16:00:00.000-05:00

According to a New York Times story a new book about George W. Bush and the Iraq War characterizes the president as being against the notion of disbanding the Iraqi army and intelligence services after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer.

The president (via this book) ascribes responsibility for that decision exclusively to L. Paul Bremer, the then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer, in the same Times article, says the president knew of and supported the disbandment policies.

Incidentally, in the weeks preceding Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, Bush had referred to himself as "the decider." It's possible, though, that he only meant that he's the decider in regards to personnel decisions, not policy ones.

At any rate, here's how Thomas Ricks describes the decision to disband the Iraqi military in his book Fiasco (this comes from page 163 of the book's paperback edition):

[It] threw out of work more than a half a million people and alienated many more dependent on those lost incomes. Just as important, in a country riven by sectarian and ethnic fault lines- Sunni versus Shiite versus Kurd- and possessing few unifying institutions, [the order] had done away with two of the most important ones. Moreover, the moves undercut the fragile remnants of the police structure.

In abolishing the military and intelligence services, then, the United States not only lost allies and labor for the rebuilding effort, they antagonized over 500,000 people with military and weapon-handling experience. They basically gave the insurgency 500,000 competent warriors.

According to the president, though, this is not what was supposed to happen. His policy, all along he says, was to keep the Iraqi military in tact. So how did he react when he heard that Bremer effectively overruled and reversed his (the president's) policy?

“Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Two Commercials Directed By Wong Kar-Wai & Starring Clive Owen

2007-09-03T12:59:00.000-05:00

For BMW (the longer and more narrative of the two, which also features Forest Whitaker).

For Lancome (it's only 19 seconds long).