Alan Dale

Playing a Brit on Lost, and an American on Torchwood.  He must be very confused.

The Most Incredibly Awesome Video of All Time, Ever

Not normally an Onion fan (anymore), but they've won me over to their video with this:

Jasmine? Jacaranda?

I got back to L.A. (from LA) last night, and all of a sudden for some weird reason it's spring.  Sometimes my trips are like that.  Now, since I've been a kid people have been telling me I'm not the center of the universe.  But if I'm not, what possible explanation could there be for a change in the weather between when I leave and when I return somewhere?

In any case, there's a particular smell in my neighborhood (Los Feliz) at night in spring.  I love the smell, but every year I wonder whether it's the smell of jasmine or jacaranda.  I've heard different people ascribe the same smell to both flowers.  Maybe until I find out I'll start calling it "jasmaranda."  Though that sounds like a genie's name.

The other thing that I love about spring (and summer) evenings in Los Angeles is that, because it's warm at night, people leave their windows open.  Stepping outside into my back yard becomes the auditory equivalent of the scenes in Rear Window where Stewart is staring into the windows of all the people across from him, watching them go about their daily business.  Last night, as I was bundling laundry, I could hear five or six different conversations, all set to "Picture This" off of Blondie's Parallel Lines.

It's good to be home.

This.

[T]hanks to decades of deregulation, the theater doesn’t have a sprinkler system - and the town the theater is in doesn’t have a fire department.

And now we have to put together an emergency response.

Is from this.

Obama's speech

How could anyone not want this man to be our next President?

This is phenomenal

I have never loved McClatchy quite so much.

Term for the day

Moral hazard.

Read this for the depressing details.

By lending massive amounts to potentially insolvent institutions that it does not supervise or regulate and that may be insolvent the Fed is taking serious financial risks and seriously exacerbate moral hazard distortions. Here you have highly leveraged non bank financial institutions that made reckless investments and lending, had extremely poor risk management and altogether disregarded liquidity risks; some may be insolvent but now the Fed is providing them with a blank check for unlimited amounts. This is a most radical action and a signal of how severe the crisis of the banking system and non-bank shadow financial system is. This is the worst US financial crisis since the Great Depression and the Fed is treating it as if it was only a liquidity crisis. But this is not just a liquidity crisis; it is rather a credit and insolvency crisis.

Useless stat of the day

My Macbook Pro, running Leopard, has been running for 33 days, 13
hours and 40 minutes without a restart.

I have the sense that it was only about 5 years ago that I would have
to reboot my computer (hand-built XP desktop) every few days because
some misbehaving background task would get a little too close to the
operating system; of course, I was running professional compositing
software on it, but still, it really does feel like both XP and OS X
are far more stable operating environments these days than ever
before. (I have no experience running Vista.)

These days, pretty much the only reason I have to reboot is because
some software update requires it. (This is more true on the XP side
because I have to run virus and adware software in the background.)

Cudos, Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs (and presumably Mr. Torvalds)!

Maybe I've watched too much Terminator

For whatever reason, when I watch the following (thanks for tonight's nightmare, Gizmodo), all I can imagine is me, being chased by it:

Superdelegate porn!

Makes me hard just looking at it.

And another test.

This from my computer (the other was from the iPhone).

Does it do lists:

• Bullet point 1
• Bullet point 2

Or numbers:

1. Number 1
2. Number 2

Or red?

What about bold?  Or italic?  Or both?

Test post from my phone

Just seeing if this works.

Does this show up as paragraphs?

This?

--
John Portnoy
Sent from my mobile device. Please forgive any typos.

Exactly.

Exactly:

...[L]et's assume, for the sake of argument, that she actually believes that Barack Obama cannot "cross the commander-in-chief threshold." One of the most important jobs a President has is to defend the country. If she thinks that Barack Obama is not qualified to do that job, then she should not support him over anyone who can. Specifically, she should support McCain over Obama.

That's why I think some enterprising reporter should ask her whether she would support Barack Obama if he were nominated. If she would, then she should be asked why she would be willing to support someone she does not believe is qualified to be commander in chief.

Whatever her answer, it would tell us something we need to know: either that her doubts about Obama are so serious that she would not be willing to support the nominee of her own party, or that she would support someone she thinks is unfit to serve, or that she does not believe a word she said about Obama, and is willing to impugn a fellow Democrat's fitness to serve as President because her own interests matter more to her than her party's or the nation's.

Anger

For the first time in this Democratic primary, I'm actually angry at Clinton, and not just her campaign (Mark Penn) or her surrogates. Every time I see this:



It makes me angry. And not (just) because Clinton is mocking the aspirational in politics, which clearly exists and is an important component of getting people to follow you as a leader. It makes me angry because if Hillary becomes the nominee, she is going to have alienated a lot of young, eager, inspired voters who are currently Obama supporters.

And don't even get me started on this:



That's way over the line. As is the continued hinting that they may go to the convention and try to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations. The campaign may sleep at night thinking that they're signaling strength against the Republicans with this burn-the-place-down strategy, but what's the point in that if they've disenfranchised a large base of Democratic voters?

Maybe she still wins the presidency, maybe. But what of the down-ballot races? 2010 begins the redistricting process. Picking up state Democrats this cycle is crucial to making sure we can un-gerrymander Texas and several other states.

There's a lot that I agree with Clinton on, and clearly she's a strong candidate. But her early reliance on terrible campaign strategy has put her in a position where she believes (or is it Penn?) that she can win only by spouting the kinds of things normally reserved for campaign surrogates. And hearing that shit from her lips is nauseating me.

As of yesterday, I'm now actively hoping for Hillary to lose.

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles

The frustrating thing about this show is how, on the one hand, it does a great job tapping into the paranoia associated with the creep of seemingly autonomous technology in everyday life, but on the other tries to convince us that dual-core computer technology is super plus new, or that a virus can be written for a computer program, sight unseen.

Given how ubiquitous technology is these days, I would have expected more than a Terminator version of the flux capacitor.

What the...

What kind of person reads Gizmodo? Look at these results! How could anyone take a poll and vote for anything over "Robots You Can Have Sex With?"

What kind of world are we leaving for our children?

Now that HD-DVD has lost...

Let me be the first (?) to propose it's time the hyphen in Blue-ray (Blue-Ray?) go the way of the hyphen in email.

Fast Forward: April 26, 2008

Mike Huckabee was nominated today by the Constitution Party and has agreed to launch an aggressive third-party Presidential campaign. George Soros, chief campaign financier to Republican candidate John McCain, weeps.

Someone at Amazon.com has a sense of humor.

It's Tuesday!

February 5, 2008. You all know what that means.

HAPPY FUCK COLIN POWELL DAY.