...to The Weekly Standard. Ladies and gents, be so kind as to import your wit and levity from page to screen and save us - I beg you, save us - from your impenetrably dull television commercials. They're so clunky, so Super 8 that I'm left agape when neither a "$19.95" nor a "But that's not all!" graphic appear on the screen.
Prove to the world that conservatives can resonate when verve is the game. Please?
So as it would appear, my web host does not support Berkeley database operations nearly as well as it does MySQL; both of which are options for Movable Type but the former of which caused some kind nasty cascade failure of the entire blog installation yesterday evening. Luckily, I submarined an export out of the system right before it got "all monkeyed out," as they say in the...well, as I say. And, I'm rather proud to boast, this computer layman reinstalled Movable Type with the MySQL database option in record time!
That said, let's keep our fingers crossed and our prayers centered on non-corrupted Movable Type installations, eh?
Fear not, Luddites; man has been toying with animals and lesser nature since the day he began consciously planting seeds. Anglo-Saxon cattle were, in fact, leaner than their meticulously-bred ancestors from the Roman occupation of Brittania. We know what we're doing. So no worries. Mooo!
When I was a child, my mother was convinced I'd become a meteorologist. It could have been the wide-eyed, long stares at clouds; or Volume "T" in our collection of The World Book Encyclopedia naturally falling open to its "Tornado" entry; or else every other school library book being a picture-stuffed weather tome; or my ponderous lecturing to her on the authoritative meteorological depths any bright 9-year-old might possibly manage; or perhaps constant monitoring of The Weather Channel out of one corner of my eye during the thunderstorm tumult of the summer months.
In the wake of my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, the Weatherman Theory can be safely put to rest (as can my father's prediction, as he always figured on my becoming a computer programmer). As with many interests - astronomy, natural history, psychology and sociology - my intuitive grasp of meteorology, its theories and its occasional application in life was enough to satisfy me and essentially precluded any serious study. My dislike of linear processes shouldn't be overlooked, either; I score in the top 1-3% in mathemeatical concepts but drop to the top 20% in computation (so many steps, so few correct answers!) High school, miraculously, managed only to sour chemistry and physics. The rest of science belongs to me as a source of reasonable, sometimes whimsical, amateur assertions that I playfully set to circumstances. I snatch bits of data, I hypothesize, I reconcile the prediction with an outcome; I move to the next situation.
The slow emasculation of Ohio summers over the past ten years or so has caught my attention. Growing up, turbulence would kick up thunderstorms with a moderate frequency; perhaps fifteen to twenty stormy days in the twelve weeks leading June to August. Certainly, the looking glass of youth is distorted and wont to expand notable events - but after learning about El Nino, my impressions were confirmed. Never a doomsday cheerleader, I am confident that this ocean temperature disruption is a common occurrence and is so prominent in science simply because of growing knowledge and awareness of subtle phenomena, aided by the increasing sensitivity of instruments. But I do not dispute its effects: Northern Ohio summers have been mild and benign since the mid-Nineties, often with less than five days of unstable weather patterns moving through the area. Puzzling, I'm sure, to scientists; troublesome for farmers; and certainly disappointing for me, who has always looked to the horizon on hot, sticky days, searching for approaching thunderheads with the same anticipation Spaniards hold for running through the streets with bulls.
Year after year, summer wouldn't quite be summer. No rain, no thunder! And then, six months later, winter wouldn't quite be winter; snow I enjoy as much as storms and to experience more than one 50-degree Brown Christmas was grounds for petitioning God for a weather refund. Well, I couldn't say I hadn't been warned:
The NOAA spotted old El Nino working his voodoo again and predicted a mild winter. In fact, this shaded map could have worked just as easily for most of the winters before it - the winter of 1995-1996 is the only year that bucked the trend.
Well, the only year until this one.
Call this simplistic, facile, amateurish: I've found a more or less direct correlation between mild, calm summers and tepid winters, connected by abrupt transition seasons consisting of cold-until-May springs and short-sleeves-until-November autumns. I can't recall 1995-1996 but for the extremely white Christmas it offered. This year, however, I paid quite a bit of attention.
Spring was smooth; ever so smooth. I'd call it picture perfect, with temperatures steadily rising a fraction of a degree every day. It was rainy, yes, but it wasn't downright weird. Summer was closer to what I remember years ago; this year we experienced at least ten thundershowers or storms. I did see a return to the El Nino symptom - our stifling drought brought on by a turn to ineffably polite weather, so the atmospheric deviation came to pass at least partially. Autumn, however, was just as uncannily effortless as spring. Who cares if the leaves are behind schedule when the temperature is just right? My markers are frost outside at a reasonable point in time (mid-October, I believe); kids requiring coats for Halloween (my folks always needed to be creative lest they mar the costume) and snowflakes before Thanksgiving.
Snowflakes in fact stuck before Thanksgiving and thus ushered in what Clevelanders are understanding as one the colder, snowier winters on record.
NOAA is baffled. I contend our summer was more normal, so our winter is closer to the mark. Besides, I'm a sucker for snow and thunderstorms; for whatever reason the clouds do what they do, they've given me what I like best.
What with yesterday's discovery on Asymmetrical Information that some chick not only believes in unabashed abortion on demand, is confident that an unexpected child's presence would have better been served by his absence, and is unquestioning in the concept of human life being worth no more than that of other creatures. Her defense, of course, was of the "just because you believe you're right doesn't mean you are" dodge variety. Bats in belfrey.
I've had just about enough of relativists. So, in no uncertain terms, has Hanson.
Andrew Sullivan popped a link to this colorful mockery of Bush with a less-than-impressed, cocked-eyebrow of a description: "the state of the opposition: this guy thinks he's being real clever."
It is quite clever and mostly harmless; I find it funny because of that and the fact that Bush's parody caricature is exactly that - a parody caricature, enjoyable by its disconnection from reality. And that, though not at all interested in jest, embraces the chattering class misperception of George Bush. It's no surprise that intellectuals would dominate journalism and the various opinion-making engines - nor is it out of the ordinary for them to impune someone who not only represents anathema to their causes but is decidedly not an intellectual.
I have the benefit (or the curse, it depends on the day) of being capable of intellectual thought: I'm articulate, I absorb facts easily and I revel in successfully grasping or constructing concepts. There are those I know who are not as adept at connecting events and situations to draw unifying conclusions. On occasion, it has been my mistake to discount them as predictable, small-talking dimwits who can easily be outmaneuvered - simply by virtue of their less complex language and assertions based upon simple observations.
Understanding that intelligence manifests itself in many manners is the best way to avoid being utterly outflanked by those who speak plainly, almost unimpressively and routinely confuse words or lose their place in a train of thought while articulating. When confronted with people who are simply not talented with the construction of linguistic expression, myself and many others are wont to dismiss them as the dim-witted or conceptually benign.
Truths, I contend, are entropic in that their pursuit begins with the simple observation of a phenomenon, continues through civilized generations with a burgeoning examination, and then are desired to be concentrated into an exclusive, absolute cynosure of meaning. Or, to employ a tautological cynosure, truth. Human nature dictates that we expand the phenomenon's definition and breadth of meaning for the sake of stretching its analytical surface; the more knowledge we compile for the entity, so goes the intent, the more we understand its nature. At some point in time or study, undefined to the mind of man, it is again human nature than will lose sight of the epicenter - the "gist" - and become mired in semantics and minutiae; it becomes germaine to sift through the manner in which Truth is being pursued. What deepens human understanding and what simply obfuscates? Entropy cuts the meaningless or distracting away and what is left is Truth. My corollary is that man cannot successfully arrive at any nucleus until the end of time and the return of the Almighty, dovetailing with a much more consequential entropy.
A man like Bush - clever, but unrefined - might simply say, "if it is what it is, then it is." He'd be right, delivering more focus than my explanation and he'd save paper.
His unassuming posture is an advantage, especially against the arrogant. We have seen him run circles around his opponents. Assuming they never learn - they never focus in on an approximated truth about the simplicity of common sense - Bush will continue to win. Flummoxed, the best the elites will be able to return is laughworthy derision and, as is unfortunately more often the case, unfunny barbs.
"Even with disk-doubling and sophisticated data-compression technologies, sooner or later we all simply run out of real estate. Fortunately, hard drive tehcnology has made enormous progress in the last three years. Ceramic platters, multiple heads, smarter caching systems, and a host of other technologies have made hard drives smaller, more durable, and fast than ever. In today's market, a 500MB drive is a simple, low-cost upgrade, and you can take your pick of fast 1GB drives for less than $1,000."
- PC Computing, April 1994, but eight years before the market could offer an 80GB drive for $100. [And it's gotten even better since early 2003!]
Who'da thunk James Lileks loves Star Trek? And the new movie?
Remember the hue and cry from the perenially bad-tempered charging Jar-Jar Binks as a denegrating stereotype? Remember when Chris Rock (I believe) thrust it back in their faces, saying, "yeah, Jar-Jar sure is offensive...to gay lizards!"
Hallucinatory journalists and intellectual elites are attempting to draw some incredibly strained analogies out of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers. Jonah Goldberg pounds them with an equal mixture of humor and logic.
Yeah, archives are still spotty. Time is not cooperating with the idea of renovating that uBlog appendage, so we'll need to wait a bit.
