“Life is not always chronological.”

Amen, brother.

If there’s anyone out there mystified by the sorrow and gratitude many people are experiencing in the wake of Senator Kennedy’s passing yesterday, this CNN story encapsulates pretty well how many of us saw him as a legislator and as a human being. No, he wasn’t perfect, but neither am I and neither are you. And like his brothers, he always sought “our better angels”.

Requiescat in pace.

Great weather, great people, great location, great food. It all makes for some pretty great pictures. Check them out in the album.

The Nat'l fireworks extravaganza, as seen from Bloomingdale.

John Feinstein wades into the pool this morning with “Whether or Not This Is Final Acta, Nats Need to Change Script“. Clever, huh?

Anyway.

The article’s a decent way to pass a couple of minutes, but there’s a comment from lawberns that sums up a lot of my frustration with the Nats:

Do the Nationals ever try to steal? Do they sacrifice, or hit-and-run? Do they even tag up on a long fly to get a runner into scoring position? When they fall behind, where’s the scratch-and-claw, the “let’s get a run any way we can” philosophy? There’s no fire; there’s no fun! I was at a (losing) game last weekend where our starter was getting hammered early — no infielder ever came over to him, patted him on the rear, encouraged him, relaxed him; they just let him hang himself. In fact, the fielders’ body language was awful; no one seemed to care and you felt that instead of a team the Nats have become an every man for himself club. I’m sorry, but that flows down from the head man. Acta may be “a class act,” but he appears unable or unwilling to inspire or motivate the Nats, and this team needs that most of all if they’re ever going to turn it around!

Bingo. Take risks. Play with flair. Give the fans something to talk about. You’re failing horribly right now. Stop playing conservatively and at least start failing in interesting ways.

Every once in a while, I get antsy about how I do the things I do and shake things up to see if something better rises to the surface. I just concluded one of those shake-up tests, changing my default browser from my beloved Firefox to Google’s new-ish browser Chrome. After a week of exclusive use, I’ve decided it’s not yet time to abandon Firefox (despite it beginning to show signs of bloat) because, quite simply, Chrome just isn’t ready for prime time.

The pros of Chrome: It is the fastest browser in the stable of six I have installed (along with Firefox, IE, Seamonkey, Safari and Opera). It renders pages snappily, and – as you might expect – handles Google’s products flawlessly. I’m a big consumer of Google’s gmail, calendar, reader and almost a dozen of their other services, so this is no small consideration. On most of the advanced web services I use aside from Google stuff, Chrome measures up pretty well. The reason I started considering a switch last week was yet another stream of errors with flash-based video in Firefox, a problem that until last week I hadn’t encountered since FF went to 3.0. With Flash-based sites and site elements (and indeed, most Adobe dynamic media I encountered), Chrome behaved well. Where it faltered was in places that were only expecting FF or IE. Zoho doesn’t work at all in Chrome. Some special features that I was checking out on Yahoo.jp didn’t work. Bing crashed its Chrome tab pretty consistently (although I blame Silverlight in that one as well). So not all of the web works just yet. But you can get to much more of it in Chrome than you can in Opera.

Another major plus in Chrome’s favor is the threading it uses. If there’s a fault in one of your tabs, it doesn’t bring your browsing to a screeching halt (most of the time). As I mentioned, Bing caused its tab to crash on, I believe, four of the five times I tried loading it, especially if I was trying to see older backgrounds. But the only adverse thing that happened was a notice from Chrome that the tab’s process had crashed and that the tab needed to be closed. However, everything else I was doing was completely unaffected. Chrome separates each tab into a discreet process, something you can see clearly by going into Windows’ Task Manager during a Chrome session. As more and more of our daily life is moved into web applications, the need for IE and FF to move to that sort of tab-threading will become more urgent. It is one of the major advances that Chrome brings to the table.

But, at the end of the day, I am a creature of habit. I like spending time getting things just-so, and then leaving it alone. Firefox won the day in that regard a long time ago with its browser extensions (an idea it shamelessly stole from Opera but implemented in a much better fashion). I forgot just how much I’ve customized the living hell out of Firefox until I moved over to Chrome and didn’t have so many of the little shortcuts and visual cues in my browser that I was used to. And this, ultimately is the dealbreaker for me. Here’s a checklist of items that I have in Firefox that I will require in Chrome (either as parallel extensions, or something within the browser itself that mirrors their functionality:

• ForecastFox – A line that appears either in the menubar or statusbar that is customizable but generally contains current weather conditions and forecasts. Saves me from going to Weather Underground every time I want to see a forecast or the temperature, and unavailable in Chrome.
• IE Tab: Instead of always going over to IE, especially if I am testing something, I’ll just click the little icon in the statusbar that changes the rendering engine from mozilla to IE’s. All of IE’s features and ties to Windows become available right within Firefox itself. Pretty handy, and unavailable in Chrome.
• Image Zoom: A very simple-yet-powerful tool that lets me blow up images on my screen just by right-clicking on an image and selecting a size. Useful when people post images that are smaller than my screen resolution allows to view comfortably. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that duplicates that behavior in Chrome.
• PDF Download: Another simple tool. It simply provides an option when I click on a PDF link of either viewing or saving the PDF. Sometimes I just want to look at it. Sometimes I’m saving it for posterity. In either case, I’m a fix-it-and-forget-about-it kind of guy, so having that option in the moment is of high value to me. Chrome just offers to save them. Bleh.
• Tab Mix Plus: While I didn’t experience much difficulty at all with Chrome’s tabs, there are a few behaviors I would alter if I could. Oh wait, I can. Just not in Chrome. Lack of options in how the tabs behave makes Chrome a non-starter.
• Xmarks: Formerly Foxmarks, the popularity of being able to back up your bookmark file and even sync your bookmarks across computers caused the developers to create Safari and IE extensions for their tool, which caused the thing to be renamed. Opera has its own bookmark backup tool that is not compatible. Chrome, however, has bubkes. Your bookmarks get horked in Chrome and man, you’re screwed. Having invested as much time as I have in maintaining my bookmarks, the thought of having to start from scratch is positively horrifying, so Xmarks becomes essential. No Xmarks for Chrome = No Chrome for checkypantz.

There are a few other minor annoyances I have with Chrome: non-standard titlebar, no easy way to determine if a site has an RSS feed (there’s an RSS indicator that lights up in Firefox’s Awesomebar), and a few other minor things. Perhaps the most annoying was the inability to use the search bar that’s in the left-hand sidebar in Wikipedia (and indeed, in all WikiMedia-powered sites). I couldn’t get the cursor into the box, instead having to click the search button with the search box empty, then entering my search terms in the box in the main body of the resulting page. That smells more like a bug than a shortcoming to me, and one I suspect will likely get fixed in short order.

On the whole, Chrome is a very good browser, and appears to be well on its way to becoming an excellent browser. Given time, it will replace Firefox as my default, unless the Mozilla project comes up with something truly revolutionary that leapfrogs Chrome. But for now, it’s still an also-installed for me.

Just startin’ off, you know, and then hopefully, you know, who knows, you know hopefully it will, whatever. Yes!

Hope you feel good. I think I’m enjoying myself, you know. But you never know. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Other times, when you got to do what you got to do but you want to. Do it. Other times you don’t want to, but you got to, because it’s what you got to do. Sometimes. Other times, you get to do what you want to, because you got to. Ohhh.

-Dave Matthews, 6/28/08

Submitted without comment.

In the fall of 1995, I took a class called Theory & Criticism. It was the capstone for my major in terms of complexity, thought and sheer volume of material digested.

The way the class worked, each of us selected a day and the readings for it and prepare to lead a conversation in the class, attempting to spur debate or moderate the conversation as it evolved. I selected the day that had two works set against one another: Aristotle’s Poetics and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

If you come from a theater program worth its salt, Poetics is a common point of reference. TO, as those familiar with it refer to it, is a little less common, and was far less known to the wider theater community in 1995 than it is now. English language journal sources were sparse, and the web as a source for anything other than scientific-based research was still in its embryonic stages. As such, most of what I learned about TO came from Boal himself via his writing, and only as theory. (There had been some effort to put his theories into practice in his home country of Brazil, and in Germany, but papers about those efforts had not been translated into English at that stage.)

Boal, and that first book of his, struck a deep, resonant chord in me. In a nutshell, Boal sought to create methodologies that destroyed the conventional way people thought of theater. There was to be no actor-audience separation. There was to be no set script, just an issue and a common community. There did not need to be any trappings of a formal theatergoing experience – seats, tickets, tech. Even the space could be “found” or otherwise un-theatrical. Boal wanted to strip all of that away because, as he saw it, we were all – you, me, the person next to you in traffic – engaged in the act of theatre on a constant basis. His whole point with Theatre of the Oppressed was to draw attention to the ways in which this was happening and, after a fashion, deconstruct the social fabric to get at the underlying problem or issue, whatever it may be.

I was absolutely riveted by his notions. Along with my copy of The Empty Space, Boal’s book was, and remains, one of the few books I would rescue from a burning building. Ever since I really started having my own thoughts about anything at all, I really questioned the necessity of artificial barriers in any context. I came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, when barriers were coming down, in a very real and tangible way, all over the world. Why not, I wondered, continue that effort into the conceptual and rhetoical barriers that continued to separate us? MJS introducing that book to Theory & Criticism solidified those ambient notions in my head.

Boal’s career went on from there, where he expounded and revised his thinking through the 90’s as he sought to affect change and help others do the same. A branch of therapy evolved, dramatherapy, that has steadily gained adherents over the past two decades. Boal himself went on to devise a form called the Legislative Theater and was elected as a councilman Rio de Janeiro based on the principles of it. TO clinics, workshops and performances have sprung up all over the world and remain as important, if geographically sparse, extensions of his own work.

Boal died yesterday after a long battle with leukemia. He’s left behind a complex and fascinating system of theater that combines elements of sociology, activism, improvisation and psychology, one that requires of its practitioners a mastery of a vast array of skills, from rhetoric and diplomacy to issues-based knowledge and the ability to synthesize a coherent plot out of the spaghetti strands of reality that do not appear to be related.

Descanse em paz, Boal.

So, today, Republic of Texas President Governor Rick Perry obliquely announced that Texas could secede from the union.

First: Wow. Everything’s bigger in Texas, even Teh Crazy.

Second: he clearly hasn’t thought this through. Texas secession = immediate brain drain in Houston, because Texas doesn’t get to keep NASA. Also, good luck in cleaning up Galveston the next time another Ike comes through. Also, good luck on building that border fence y’all are so fond of talking about.

Third: This is addressed specifically to my Republican friends who don’t live in Texas: You will never have another Republican president in your lifetimes. Let alone the fact that you’ll have to live down the albatross of being the party that rent the Union asunder, losing Texas puts an impossible strain on your Electoral College hopes. Texas represented 34 electoral votes in the 2004 and 2008 elections, 32 in the ‘92, ‘96 and ‘00, and 29 in the 80’s. Care to imagine what those elections might have looked like without Texas?

2004: In the real world, Bush won 286 to 252 (let’s imagine that the weirdo in MN actually voted for Kerry, not an Ewards / Edwards ticket). In the Forty-Nine United States (the Seven Squared), the 2004 election would have ended in an electoral lockup at 252. With two fewer Senators and 22 fewer Representatives, it’s not clear-cut that the Congress would have been leaning Republican, and thus unclear that a tie would have automatically gone for Someone Other Than Bush (since, being from Texas, might not have been eligible to run in the first place). Result: Unclear, but likely Kerry wins.

2000: Real world: Bush 271, Gore 266. Seven Squared outcome: Bush’s alt-hist replacement 239, Gore 266. Gore wins handily, and Katherine Harris never becomes a notable figure in history.

1996: Was alreadya Clinton cakewalk, but the margin for Dole gets that much more embarrassing: 379-127.

1992: Clinton’s first election is an easy victory over George H. W. Bush’s alt-history replacement (most likely: Howard Baker of Tennessee, who could match Bush’s chops in intel & defence, or, without TX as the southern anchor, a pick from the NE like Lowell Weicker.), 370-136.

1988: Bush was never Vice President (ineligible to run), so Reagan’s VP pick in ‘80 might have been someone like PA Senator Richard Schweiker, Reagan’s pick in ‘76, when he lost the nomination to Ford, or someone else. (Bob Dole, arguably the heart and soul of the party, at least in the Senate, was probably an unlikely candidate for the job, sharing the same mid-west roots and fiscal conservatism that Reagan possessed. He wouldn’t expand the ticket by a whole lot. Schweiker, Baker, Weicker, Dole – one of them go up against Dukakis in 1988. Aside from being one of the biggest snoozefests in the history of narcolepsy, it’s hard to extrapolate which alt-history VP-cum-candidate would have made the biggest impact, and who (if any of them) would have beaten Dukakis. In any event, the real world 1988 results were 426-111 for GHWB. It would have been much, much closer than that (397-111 at a minimum, minus GHWB’s stature on the world stage), and the biggest swing in electoral college history (as the Democrats mount an amazing comeback from the alt-hist 496-13 drubbing they took in 1984). But, hell, I’m feeling generous. Let’s say the Republicans still carry in ‘88.

So, ignoring for the moment that it wouldn’t have even been GWB running in 2000 and 2004, The Democrats win five consecutive Presidential elections, aren’t out of power nearly as long in Congress (because remember, you Republicans suffer a net loss ten or more seats in every session – not enough to overcome 1994, but it makes the D comeback easier), and we don’t have to listen to the insufferable Jerry Jones talk about how awesome his Cowboys are. Ever.

In short, a Texas secession virtually guarantees that Democrats win the White House for the foreseeable future. It behooves you, my Republican friends not in Texas, to beg and plead with Perry and his ilk (tea partiers, all) to tone down the crazy a bit. You are doing nothing good for your party, or the country.

(There’s another side of me that thinks, as a Democrat, and a cynic, let them go. Not worrying about Texas’ EVs, plus the benefit of everyone not liking a brown-skinned President moving to the same former State and out of the United States, seems like it might not be such a bad thing. Plus, I’m going to San Antonio in August for a conference. It’ll give me an excuse to renew my passport and collect some of that crazy foreign money you non-Americans use.)

PS: The DHS report that came out this week talking about the dangers of “right-wing extremists” was not talking about you, my Republican friends (yes, even you, Texas), unless you choose to affiliate yourself with Timothy McVeigh circa 14 years ago this week, or Richard Poplawski circa two weeks ago. Let’s put that canard to rest now, shall we?

If you grew up watching the Phils, as I did, you don’t need to ask “Who’s Harry Kalas?’ He was the voice that kept you interested in a team that otherwise sucked ass.

He got to call his championship Phils when they won last year and then, I guess, figured he’d seen enough. He died today in the press box down at Nationals Park before the game today. He was the last of the old guard of legendary broadcasters. New voices have taken over the press boxes across the league, and the Phils have a decent enough pool of announcers now, but it will not ever be like listening to Harry and Whitey.

I don’t know if this will get yanked from YT, but you should probably watch it sooner rather than later. It’s one of my favorite memories. I was at this game and taped it. It was a great game – a massive Jack Clark upper deck homer, 15 innings, Steve Jeltz closing the deal with an RBI triple, and a massive thunderstorm on the way home where we saw one of those large oil tanks along 95 get hit by a bolt of lightning and burst into flames.

Anyway. Enjoy.