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An Anvil to a Drowning Man

Posted January 31, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I imagine there are quicker ways to make a fool of yourself than to make comments about a fellow Democratic senator that sound racially-tinged, on the very day that you officially announce you’re pursuing the presidency. For example, you could do all of that, and then be scheduled to go on The Daily Show later that day.

In other words, you could be Joe Biden.

I really oughta go upstairs and set the DVR.

In other campaign news, the blogosphere rumor mill is buzzing that Wesley Clark will announce his run later this week. A couple of months ago, this news would have gotten me very enthused. Now, I think I’m more inclined to wait and see if he can really get his campaign moving before I jump fully on board. (And yes, I know, if everyone takes that attitude, failure is guaranteed. I’m willing to take a little risk on being a free rider for now.)

Filed in So Now What?
        

Get Plato a Script Doctor

Posted January 30, 2007 By Dave Thomer

If there is one philosophical device I am absolutely sick to death of, it’s the dialogue. Apparently some writers figure that no one wants to read a boring treatise about some kind of abstract theory. So instead, they write a boring play in which multiple characters debate the abstract theory through stilted dialogue. Maybe it’s the fiction-reader in me, but I read these things and I just want to scream “exposition dump!” Characters don’t sound natural, they have to contort themselves to drop names and establish theories, and usually there’s clearly one character who’s destined to be right. (In Plato, it was Socrates.)

I remember in college our professor had us watch a movie called Mindwalk, in which Sam Waterston plays a senator who’s just dropped his campaign for the presidency and so his poet friend takes him to a beach in France, and while touring a castle they meet some French woman who decides to start talking to them bout how the Cartesian worldview has affected Western society for hundreds of years. On the one hand, the characters had their own existential crises they were trying to get through. On the other, they had to recount hundreds of years of Western philosophy while they traipsed around the beach. By the end of it I was begging for a lecture.

I am reminded of all this by one of my education textbooks, which is full of dialogues. And boy oh boy are they stilted. And full of stereotypes – the author has apparently decided to be “edgy” by occasionally having one character call another a racist or a conservative idiot or what-have-you. At least there’s no clear voice-of-the-author character.

In the end, I think I’d rather read or see a work of fiction, with fleshed-out characters delivering compelling dialogue, that illustrates a philosophical conflict rather than make the philosophical debate the centerpiece of the story. It’s not like anyone’s breaking down my door to start a philosophy reality show – these conversations are interesting to participate in, but not much of a spectator sport.

Filed in Philosophy
        

Gotta Be a Better Way

Posted January 29, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Given the complaining I did the other day, I figure I ought to share this link to a story that ran in today’s Inquirer, in the Health and Science section. It’s a feature piece, where you’d expect some more in-depth reporting, and for the most part the story delivers – it tells the story of a woman who’s been taking care of her paralyzed husband since he had a stroke 11 years ago, and whose own health is getting steadily worse – she’s in a wheelchair herself.

On the one hand, the story is a human interest story. On the other hand, it raises questions about our insurance and safety-net programs, our reliance on family and friends to care for the sick, and the support we provide – or don’t – to those caregivers. Those questions don’t get much exploration, but then I don’t take that as the main purpose of the piece. Still, the wonk in me wonders how we could do better.

On the third hand, I found myself wondering about the guy, and what he’s doing to try and make his wife’s burden a little easier. The story says she’s resisted putting him in a facility, even for a few days so that she could get a break, but it doesn’t mention whether he’s urged her to take a break or not. I guess, even from the human interest side, that’s one side of the dynamic I would have liked to see more about. It gets me thinking about the question of how much of a burden we can realistically ask our loved ones to take on on our behalf, and at the same time it gets me thinking that it’s important to know our own limits and ask for help every once in a while.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Endurance Cooking

Posted January 28, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Every so often I remind myself I need to keep better track of those little expenditures that add up and explain why my bank balance isn’t where I wanted it to be at the end of the month. By far one of my biggest financial sins is paying for fast food or snack food while I’m away from home. I bought a 2-liter bottle of Coke at the grocery store today for $1.25. At the checkout counter, the store was selling chilled 20-oz bottles of Coke for somewhere around $1.25-$1.50. I could have bought 24 bottles of Snapple iced tea for $13 – or a single cold bottle for 2-3 times as much as a single bottle from the case. A little thinking ahead can save a lot of money.

Actual meals are even worse. If I don’t eat, that’s obviously bad. But once I leave the house, my options are school cafeterias and fast food courts. Most of the time I don’t even enjoy the food I get from these places, but because I didn’t bother to pack anything, they’re my only option. (A caveat – there’s a food court at Temple where I can get either a really good cheesesteak or a really good chicken kebab sandwich. Treating myself to one of these places every once in a while is actually one of my favorite things about being back at Temple.) I was stuck at 30th Street Station a few weeks ago, and in trying to eat something but eat cheap, I grabbed a couple of tacos from Taco Bell. Not only did I not enjoy that meal very much, but a few days later the e. coli story hit. Great timing, eh?

So part of my resolve to eat better and spend more wisely is to cook in bulk on the weekends. I made two batches of tomato sauce, some fried chicken for the fridge, and shredded beef for tacos. (That last dish owes much to Rick Bayless’s cookbooks, and is really in an entirely different universe from the unfortunate Taco Bell incident.) I think it’s a good habit to get into, but the next trick is going to be making sure I save enough of the food to last through the week.

Filed in Life in Practice
        

And Now My Head A Splode

Posted January 27, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I just went to the R.E.M. home page and discovered that earlier this week, Mike Mills joined dada on stage and sang “Dizz Knee Land” with them. Apparently he also helped re-enact the “I just flipped off President George” line.

On the one hand I’m sorry I missed it, but on the other hand, I do think that if I had been at a dada show and Mike Mills showed up, they’d be picking up little bits of Dave from the floor.

Between this and the Crowded House reunion, I’m working on the assumption that 2007 is gonna be one fine musical year. Don’t let me down, guys.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Here Comes California

Posted January 26, 2007 By Dave Thomer

It looks almost certain that California is going to move its presidential primary to early February. And if California does it, other states are going to do it. We could be heading pretty close to a national primary this time around.

The one thing that I think is unequivocally bad about this is that it’s going to make candidates even more reliant on fundraising, and that always makes me nervous.

But I do like the idea of a large number of voters having a chance to evaluate the wide field of candidates. As long as I can remember, by the time Pennsylvania’s primary has rolled around, I might as well have voted for myself for the nomination for all the good it would do. Candidates will probably still pick the areas that they think they have the best shot in, but at least those areas will have a chance to make themselves heard.

I’m not sure I’ve really bought the idea that the retail campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire really makes a huge difference. Seems to me like a lot of those voters wait until the end of the campaign to start paying attention anyway – witness the big shifts that occurred in 2004 on the Democratic side and 2000 on the Republican side.

And there’s something to be said for the idea that, look, each party is picking a candidate who is going to have to run a national campaign. Why not have the nomination process actually test that capacity?

Filed in Public Policy
        

Another Victim of the Backlog

Posted January 25, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Earlier in the week, Pattie and I deleted several unwatched episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from our DVR. Once I stopped watching, I realized I had absolutely no desire to catch up. And I’m trying to figure out how this happened, given how promising everything seemed at the start.

One of the fundamental problems, and I may have written about this before, is that Sorkin is just not a very good plotter. He doesn’t seem to be interested in thinking through the consequences of anything that happens in his stories. The result is just an accumulation of things that don’t ring true, and because they don’t ring true, you don’t really care how they turn out. One of the more famous examples of this is probably Sorkin’s claim that he decided to give President Bartlet MS because he was working on a story where Bartlet needed to be sick in bed for a period, and so he figured, hey, why not give him MS. I’ve ranted about the problems of The American President ad infinitum. I think the best example of this, though, comes from Rob Reiner’s commentary on A Few Good Men. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s a point at the end where Tom Cruise is cross-examining Jack Nicholson, and catches a very basic contradiction in Nicholson’s story. Reiner says that Sorkin hadn’t included this in the script – Reiner noticed the contradiction, and thought it would be something that Cruise should bring up. That’s the kind of not-seeing-how-things-fit-together that I think gets Sorkin into trouble.

I think this habit bothered me more on West Wing than it did on Sports Night because the stakes were lower on Sports Night, and the stories focused on the character intereactions a lot more. I thought Studio 60 would be the same, but instead Sorkin’s tried to use the show to discuss Big Issues, and it’s fallen flat. Plus the one major character arc that he was exploring while I was still watching the show was the romance between Matthew Perry’s and Sarah Paulson’s characters, and going back to Sports Night and the bizarre “dating plan,” it’s pretty clear to me that Sorkin has difficulties writing romances that I find believable or engaging.

Maybe I’ll check the show out again in a few weeks, but it’s definitely off my must-see radar. I guess that’s an easy way to clear the backlog.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Recycled Newspaper

Posted January 24, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I got the renewal notice for my Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I don’t think I’m going to do it.

After the most recent round of layoffs at the Inquirer, it occurred to me to check how much of the paper’s content was being generated by the paper itself. In the front page “A” section, where the national/international news go, there are usually two or three stories by Inquirer staff writers on page 1. Inside, there might be one or two Inquirer-written sidebars. Everything else comes from the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or another news service. I don’t need the Inquirer for that – I can read it on the Web, or just buy my own copy of the Post from a newsstand. (I’d check into home delivery if I didn’t think Pattie would kill me.)

On the philly.com Web site, a lot of Inquirer and Daily News writers have blogs, chats and Q-and-A forums. And that’s great, but you know, analysis and opinion isn’t really the niche newspapers are suited to fill. I can get analysis and opinion from any number of blogs and web sites. Honest to god reporting, though, that takes resources and skill. It’s what I wanted to support by buying the Inquirer. But if they’re not going to give me any, why should I bother?

I opened up today’s edition of the Inquier, and there was no local analysis of the State of the Union speech. Nothing from Pennsylvania’s newly elected senator or the new representatives from the Philadelphia area. No discussion of how Pennsylvania’s new health care proposals might intersect with what Bush wants to do. Zip. What was there was recycles from the more-extensive coverage provided by the Post, the Times, or other outlets.

I don’t need to kill more trees to bring an out of date news aggregator to my doorstep once a day. And I don’t need to keep paying money for something I don’t want and that doesn’t give me what I’m paying for.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Getting Off Track

Posted January 23, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Another education class tonight, and I’m trying to process everything that we discussed. It’s weird – the economic disparities underlying education in this country, and the way those play into racial/ethnic distinctions, seems like an undercurrent of the class, and something that’s very much on the mind of the professor. But it’s not being brought to the fore in a systematic way, so that people can understand it and use it to analyze other issues.

We spent a lot of time talking about the notion of tracking in public schools tonight, for example. And as someone who took a lot of honors classes in school, I know I felt a little defensive about the idea that my own education didn’t live up to the democratic ideals I have now. And then right at the end of the discussion, someone else mentioned that so far neither we nor the textbook had discussed the contrast between public schools and expensive private schools in terms of creating separate expectations for students. Which was a really good point, but one that kind of implied that the entire discussion so far had been kind of missing a key piece, you know?

Look, I’m all for making students construct knowledge for themselves. But I still kinda think that a little more structure would be helping us do so more efficiently.

Filed in Philosophy
        

Thinking and Writing, Writing and Thinking

Posted January 22, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Thus far in the day I’ve been having trouble figuring out what to blog about today. I finally finished that reflection paper, but I’m not really sure how worthwhile that would be as a blog post. And I’ve kinda used up a lot of the pop culture thoughts I’ve had over the weekend. (“A Friend of Pat Robertson” is still a damned good song, and anyone who’s ever e-mailed me about Jake Johannsen routines may want to check out YouTube fast. I’m just sayin’.)

I think the biggest reason for the writer’s block on serious subjects is that the thing I’m thinking about is something I’m really not ready to start writing about – the 2008 presidential primaries. No candidate has really excited me enough to start working for him. And that last pronoun is deliberate. I really can not see myself supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary. (If she wins the nomination, obviously, it’s a whole new ball game.) But you know, there’s been a Bush or a Clinton in every presidential campaign since 1988, 1980 if you count vice-presidential nominations. And I know the Bush clan is responsible for most of those, but I don’t want to usher one political dynasty off the stage by bringing a new one in. If Senator Clinton were leaps and bounds above the other candidates, maybe I’d get over this concern. But at the moment I’m hard-pressed to think of anything she’s done or said that gets me particularly enthused. (And as always, if other people connect with her, more power to them and to her, and if there are more of them than there are of me, we’ll find out at the polling booth.)

Hmm. Maybe I did have something to say there after all. But at any rate, I’m just not ready to really jump into 2008, which is sucking up a lot of energy even here in Philadelphia, where we’ve got a mayoral primary coming up in just four months. And I still gotta pick a candidate there. So I may stay clear of the presidential derby for a while.

That said, Keith Olbermann’s poke at Fox and their Barack-Obama-went-to-a-Muslin-school story on tonight’s Countdown was well worth watching.

Filed in So Now What?
        
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