Outside, the snow is falling and I just finished calling my folks, "Yoo-hoo." After a hearty Bob Evans breakfast, we'll drive an hour south to chop down our Christmas tree. As my father explained at a party last night, the last pre-cut tree he bought was in 1974, a season spent hearing the dulcet chime of needles falling to the floor by the dozen. The Ubaldis have taken their tree directly from the ground ever since. Dad prefers Douglas Fir; I love the smell and sharpness of Blue Spruce. Either way, our find will be beautiful and uBlog photographs will follow. Enjoy the day!
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, to which I have donated in the past, sent me an e-mail reminder that Hanukkah begins at sundown. Says the honorable Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein:
Hanukkah is a joyous holiday, marking the triumph of good over evil, of the God-fearing over the godless. It is a time of fun, food, games — and of retelling the story of our victory because of God's steadfast love for the Jewish people.
I remember the story well, having been told it twenty-one years ago in a public kindergarten. For that, I'm grateful.
From a Gentile: Happy Hanukkah!
Bill Federer's American Minute from yesterday:
His death went unnoticed, as he died the same day John F. Kennedy was shot, but his works are some of the most widely read in English literature. Originally an agnostic, he served in World War I and became a professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He credited his Catholic friend and fellow writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, as being instrumental in bringing him to faith in Christ. Among his most notable books are: The Screwtape Letters; Miracles; The Problem of Pain; Abolition of Man; and The Chronicles of Narnia, which include The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe.His name was C.S. Lewis, born [yesterday], November 29, 1898. Over 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and continue to sell at a rate of a million copies a year, even forty years after his death.
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote:
The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body.
A towering figure among modern philosophers, some of Lewis' sharpest advice can be found here. Take notes.
After a delicious sushi dinner last night with Albany-based buddy Ed, he and I were joined by our shared old-time pal OX to trade stories at my place until near midnight. I'm running errands this morning — craving more sushi. Rice Krispies will have to suffice.
My folks and I are jetting to Maryland to meet my sister and her husband; we'll celebrate Thanksgiving in Williamsburg with retirement-relocated family. We return Friday. Keep an eye on the uBlog; I'll be around.
Everybody's favorite Dubliners are back and ready to spin with their new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Kenneth Tanner, reviewing U2's latest, moonlights on National Review.
A question that members of every band should ask themselves is, "how and why did U2 stay together?" Yes, in the beginning, it was all the four had — except for maybe Larry Mullen, Jr., who has always struck me as tickled pink to have made millions playing his beloved drums but would be just as happy working for an honest nickel with a motorcycle in the garage. After the 1983 War album, the band's third, the point when bassist Adam Clayton claims their debt to Island Records was finally paid in full, one might assume debt to one another was as well. But four years and two albums later, U2 released its largest-selling and most popular record, The Joshua Tree. They toured and toured. Four more years and two more albums beyond that, the record hailed by the music industry as U2's successful reinvention — Achtung Baby — hit stores and the Zoo TV tour crossed the globe for another two years. That only leaves us in the mid-1990s.
Was it the simple association of perpetual success, not comradery, that kept the four on stage, in the studio and a part of each other's lives? Ask two English contemporaries whose careers have run nearly parallel to their Irish counterparts': Robert Smith of the Cure and Alan Wilder, formerly of Depeche Mode. Since 1979's Three Imaginary Boys, songman Smith has remained the single fixture of his music, whatever the moniker. Everyone else comes and goes. Wilder joined Mode in 1982 to tour for its second album, A Broken Frame, and left in 1995, after the band's self-destructive Devotional tour; tired of too much work of too little interest for too little credit. U2 has never been much of a counterculture or protest band, instead the respectful, if starry-eyed utopist, conscience of rock and roll. But they shied away from normal life and wages early on and never returned, so it's a little ironic and a lot more comforting to see four men aging in a beloved career that never left its first office.
If mothers want to show their boys rock stars who never descended to the base of the occupation; who came, played with the best and left as themselves, U2 is the first and last example.
So, how's the music? I loved their download-only single released this fall, "Vertigo": for those in the know, it had the lyrical freshness of Boy, the energy of October and the muscle of 1995 single "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." It rocked. Skipping through the disc and glancing at the liner notes, I hear interesting hooks and melodies; creative production by four-time producer Steve Lillywhite. I'm looking forward to a thorough introduction and a long acquaintance thereafter. Bono's up to his adolescent wish-making for goodwill to men to come with much less effort and difficulty than is possible in the real world, but we can grant him some artistic and idealistic license: nobody else in rock and roll is wishing. U2's the only act of its kind.
A five-minute stop at James Lileks' "Bleat" wins you a bit of history and a wry anecdote from an inimitable author. Just yesterday he took comic offense at the cartoon likes of Bugs Bunny and King Leonardo being considered peers, concluding, "nothing says kid-fun like a theme song scored for six barroom harmonizers and one oboe."
Less barroom beverages, more practice. And it's too long. Just for that, I feel obligated to remind the world how unique arrangements for three-minute ditties can be done right. Two summers ago my father and I converted a stock of fifty-year-old 78-RPM records, one of them being a double-sided single of ragtime maven Crazy Otto. "12th Street Rag," apparently a tried-and-true ragtime standby, stole my heart; I keep a copy on my rig and occasionally give it a listen to introduce a little emergency levity to my day. If you took a piano's honky-tonk conversion to a level of necromancy, you'd have Crazy Otto's instrument. His hammers sound like they're ball peens. As pianist friend Jonn said to me after I played the rag to him for the first time, "What was that?" But we played it again and again.
Hell is a more lively place and earth a safer one, as Yasser Arafat is dead. May his curse — the celebrity and elitist legitimacy of terrorism and genocide — die with him.
With its chosen presidential candidate having soundly lost one week ago, we may have expected a bit of chastening on the part of the leftward mainstream media.
Not quite so, at least not for the moment. Fox News' website headlines for the current allied offensive in Fallujah reads the following way:
The theme is consistent with reports, which Wretchard drew together into a cogent statement last night, that the Iranian-Syrian-Ba'athist-terrorist combine was not prepared for the ferocity and precision of this assault; nor could they possibly ever have been. MSNBC, however, seems to be reporting from a different — if familiar — perspective:
Granted, as Chester points out this morning, light resistance could be the sign of weakness or deception on the part of the enemy. Either way, that discovery hasn't yet been made; moreover, the story observing "unexpectedly light resistance" is from the Associated Press, which means MSNBC could easily have included it in their coverage.
There's a rule of thumb here. When confronted with a friend who while unaffiliated politically is a registered voter, who may have appeared a bit glum about Republicans, the president, the economy, the war on terror or the state of the world in general, get to the heart of things: ask him where he gets his news.
'FIERCE FIGHTING' AND 'LIGHTER THAN EXPECTED': Not to diminish the challenges and mortal dangers the Allies face, the reports of "fierce fighting" — using precisely that phrase — apparently come solely from accounts from "witnesses" within the city, as evidenced by three separate reports from the New York Times, Australian news, and United Press International (UPI's story including a typical note of terrorist propagandizing of "heavy casualties" when those reported by Central Command are extremely light). That could mean sources are the few noncombatants who are believed to have remained in Fallujah because they are supportive of, related to, or in fear of and therefore verbally concurrent with, the terrorists.
The disparity between reports directly from our soldiers and embeds, and unverifiably independent accounts from people walking about in a combat zone fits well with the Allies' decision to reclaim Fallujah's main hospital first, the Pentagon eager to prevent terrorists from "forcing the doctors there to release propaganda and false information." The enemy may be woefully outmatched but can claim a strong ability to twist perception. It seems ever clearer that the only way for authoritarians to win is to convince the West, through doubt, to defeat itself.
THE REASON FOR THIS TOPIC: Al Jazeera is spreading disinformation for the benefit of our enemies. Stay sharp.
A conversation this evening:
(Phone rings.)MIKE: (Picks up phone.) City Morgue: "You Stab 'Em, We Slab 'Em."
BUSH-CHENEY '04 PHONE BANKER: (Silence on other end.)
MIKE: Hello?
BC04: Is there a Michael Ubaldi there?
MIKE: Ah...yes. Yes.
BC04: Can President Bush count on your support at the polls this Tuesday?
MIKE: Yes he can.
BC04: Do you know where your voting place is?
MIKE: I do. Once I find my way out of this drawer (Thought about actually saying last bit, didn't; probably better off.).
It's Halloween Night with a few hours to kill (forgive the pun), I'm confident about Tuesday, ready to vote and inordinately restless. Noodling about with six strings helps distract. (Here's a silly little excerpt-medley on my cherry-red Gibson 335 knockoff. The first is a song I was convinced I couldn't stand, Kinks or Weird Al. The second should be familiar though just not the same without a Fender Stratocaster [Or the Edge. — ed. But I have hair!] The third should be familiar to a couple dozen Concord fans and the Concord boys themselves.)
One of the more disturbing phenomena in this presidential election is the near-unanimous preference for the Democratic presidential nominee among dictators, terrorists and strongmen in between. Steven Den Beste puts it into black and white.
AND ANOTHER: 50,000 words.
MAKING TROUBLE: Adam Brodsky.
