Musical Memories

Walter's trip down memory lane with Hitchhiker's reminded me of the other thing that always triggers memories of our time in high school together - music.
For instance, whenever I hear Ultravox, I think of Walter.
I'm sure whenever Walter hears Big Country, he thinks of me and how I ruined that song for him (as well as his one of his favorite mix tapes - sorry Walt).
When I hear any song by the following bands today, here's who it makes me think of:

English Beat - Julia
Monsoon - Greg
New Order - Lark (and his purple car)
Heaven 17 - Lark (and his purple car)
Rush, Maynard Ferguson - songs I first heard at Russell's house
Any songs from Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's or St.Elmo's Fire - Walter (not because he owned the soundtracks - we saw the movies together)
Depeche Mode, OMD and whoever sang that "Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" song - Tom
Any hymn at a catholic church - Tom
U2's Joshua Tree Album - Lark and Russell's apartment they shared with Andy Hong (no idea why except that's when the record came out)

I would have listed some bands and songs that reminds me of Michele but there are so many it wouldn't have fit on the page and it wouldn't do her justice.

How about you guys?

DON'T PANIC

DON'T PANIC, originally uploaded by ealket.

Howdy from the small blue county called Travis. I just got back from seeing the movie National Treasure with my brother & nephew and had to send up a flair. The Hitch Hiker's books are still some of my all-time favorites. I reread Hitch Hiker's Guide... and Restaurant... a few years ago, and laughed at all the same spots I did back in high school, while pretending to listen to Mrs. Pollack, of course. Hopefully the movie will do it justice. Ya know, I've always thought that reading those books, and laughing, was far more a badge of nerdliness than knowing Mr. Sulu's first name (Hikaru for those of you keeping score) or deriving an equation to determine who, if anybody, was cooler than Joey Nelms.

__ Agree __Disagree (Check One)

Anyway, everybody make sure you've got a clean towel handy, because come May, you're gonna need it.

HAPPY TURKEY DAY!

Can Freedom and Religion Co-Exist?

Bill Maher was on Larry King Live tonight (Tuesday) and he gave an interesting answer to a question from a caller about spreading "freedom" around the world. He said there are some cultures and nations who don't want our kind of "freedom" to rule the day, and I believe he is right.
President Bush is fond of saying "Freedom is on the march" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but how many people in those countries want to be like the U.S.? Of course they like our wealth and resources and living standards, but on a cultural and social level, are they ready for some football (or Starbucks or Playboy or whatever)?
Saudi Arabia is a perfect example of an Islamic country that is becoming schizophrenic. On one hand, the Saudi royal family bathes in the fortunes that oil has brought to the country with fancy homes and fancy cars and a loosening of the previously strict standards of fundamental Islam (behind closed doors). Yet, members of the controlling Wahabi sect patrol the public streets and malls, making sure women stay covered up and nothing inappropriate collides with the modernization of their country. The majority of the 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and most reject American culture and what we would call "freedom". We may soon see the day where a Wahabi uprising topples the Saud royal family.
I don't see how we can import "freedom" into most of the countries in the Middle East, no matter how many bombs or troops that we throw at them.
Thoughts? Comments?
To avoid this turning into a semantic argument, let's assume that my definition of "freedom" is good ole American-style freedom - hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and strip clubs.

Basket-Brawl

Throw Down in Motown

I'm as big a sports fan as anyone on this blog I'm guessing, but even I think that this country's obsession with sports has gone too far.
Did anyone see that fight in the stands in Detroit last night? Fans attacking players, players punching their way through the crowds, cops threatening to mace the players if they didn't stop pummeling the fans.
What's with all the pent-up anger from the fans? Because your team is losing, you decide to take matters into your own hands and throw things at the players?
The word "fan" is derived from "fanaticism", but I think there is something else other than misplaced team pride coursing through all of this behavior, and I would be interested to hear some theories on what it is.
Fortunately, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on bad behavior from sports fans. Did you see the story about the Spanish soccer fans hurling a barrage of racial epithets at the black soccer players on the English team earlier this week? Nice.

The Future of TV and Radio

First, CBS stations across the country are fined because Janet Jackson's boob showed up on the national broadcast of the Super Bowl (for which local affiliates have no control of the content - they only broadcast the signal to their local viewers).
Then, several ABC stations refuse to air Saving Private Ryan on Veterans' Day because they're afraid of the repurcussions from the FCC.
Now, ABC and the NFL are under fire because of a white actress dropping a towell and jumping into the arms of a black player in the intro to Monday Night Football.
As a result of all of this new pressure on broadcast outlets, shock jock Howard Stern has decided to leave the public airwaves and go to satellite radio where he can do and say anything he wants without fear of being fined (he has already been fined more than 2 million dollars by the FCC).
He compares it to the growth of pay television on cable and satellite where the best programming now resides because of the limitation of broadcasting on public airwaves.
Right now, 4 major corporations own almost 80 percent of all the radio stations across the country which has greatly homogenized the music you hear on FM and AM stations.
Do you think enough people are willing to PAY for satellite radio to get uncensored talk and a greater variety of music than we currently get?

Evidence that Long-Distance Running is a Key Adaptation of the Anatomically Modern Human

Though controversial, this is certainly an interesting interpretation of the fossil record.

An old and wacky (but nevertheless interesting) theory is that some unique characteristics of the human body arose from an aquatic phase of the ancestral human past. The new idea about endurance running seems just about as interesting (but somewhat less wacky) to me.

Of course, whenever I bring up the idea of the evolution of the human body, there is the risk that someone who opposes the very idea will object loudly. In this forum, I imagine that only Michelle might object, but I am not certain of that. For my part, I should promote the official Catholic position, according to which there is no conflict between Christianity and the idea of the evolution of the human body, though there is definitely a conflict between Christianity and the idea of the evolution of the human person. The key to understanding the difference is to recognize that the human person is not merely a body.

Blast from the Past

Have you heard the new song about the Eighties?
It's aimed directly at our generation, but was written
and performed by a young band called Bowling for Soup.
It's called "1985" and here are some of the lyrics:

She’s seen all the classics
she knows every line
Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink
even Saint Elmo’s Fire
she rocked out to wham not a big Limp Biscuit fan
thought she’d get a hand on a member of Duran Duran
Where’s the mini-skirt made of snake skin
and who’s the other guy singing in Van Halen
when did reality become T.V.
what ever happened to sitcoms, game shows

(on the radio there was)
Springstein, Madonna way before Nirvana
there was U2 and Blondie and music still on MTV
her two kids in high school
they tell her that she’s uncool
but she's still preoccupied with 19 - 19 - 1985

It's actually kind of a catchy song.

If You Don't Like the Rules, Change 'Em

House Majority Leader Tom Delay is on the brink of being indicted on state political corruption charges in Texas. Under current House rules, any Majority Leader that is indicted on criminal charges must step down from his/her post until the criminal case is over.
Not so fast, law-abiding citizens.
Republicans in the House have decided to CHANGE the federal rules to allow the Majority Leader to keep his post despite the coming indictment.
Nice.
Too bad Clinton didn't think of changing the rules before he got impeached for getting blowjobs in the Oval Office.
But then, I guess campaign finance violations don't compare to getting extramarital nookie on government time.

Lark Does L.A.

Just wrapped up a fun weekend with Lark and Deline who came to Los Angeles to attend the MLS Cup Final between D.C. United and Kansas City Wizards.
We ate some good sushi, spent Saturday night at The Comedy Store, went to the game on Sunday and saw a great movie on Sunday night.
The game was very exciting with 4 goals scored in the first 30 minutes of the game, and a suspenseful conclusion as Kansas City tried in vain to tie the score in the final minutes of the game.
We went to see the movie, "Sideways", with Paul Giamatti directed by Alexander Payne, the director of "Election" and "About Schmidt". All three of us LOVED the movie and highly recommend it. Think of it as "Swingers" for 40-year-olds.

In Search of Greg Shaw

I just got off the phone with Walter who promised to post soon. A topic that comes up in seemingly every conversation with our cohort is do you know what's up with Greg Shaw? Use this post to record your last encounter...

National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL

The Onion | National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL

This post is really just a test of the "BlogThis!" plugin for the Firefox browser. The plugin is designed to work with Blogger (and so it works with Brahma Blogs). If I right-click on a link or an image, I can---now that I have installed the plugin---select "BlogThis" from the context menu. When I do that, a new window pops up with the HTML code for the hyperlink already typed into the text area. I just typed this paragraph below it. At the upper-right corner of the window is a drop-down box listing the blogs to which I subscribe. Because I subscribe only to Brahma Blogs, that's already selected by default.

Now, I'll push the "Publish" button, and see what happens.

Firefox

Everyone (especially everyone who runs MS Internet Explorer) should check out mozilla.org's new Firefox browser.

It has some nifty built-in features, but the coolest part is that you can easily pick from a large number of "extensions" to install into the browser. These allow you to customize it with just the functionality that you want.

And it's way more secure than MS IE.

And it runs on a wide range of operating systems. (Yes, it runs on MS Windows, but you can ditch MS Windows and still browse the Web with Firefox).

And it's free.

(Just an aside: Firefox is one of the browsers available on my home network, and OpenOffice is the office productivity suite that I provide for my family. I don't have Microsoft Windows installed, not on any of my home machines. I always warn my extended family never to buy any MS-Windows-based computer game for my kids, because they can't use it. :^)

NASA's Vision

So what do you all think NASA should be doing? Don't worry, I'm not in any kind of position to do anything about it... I'd just like your opinions.

In the 50's, the folks who would become NASA's leaders put out a vision of pinwheel space stations, shuttles between these and the earth and the moon, and nuclear rockets to the planets. They order they had in mind was 1) spaceplane 2) space station 3) lunar shuttle 4) lunar base 5) Mars shuttle 6) Mars base. As we know, Kennedy inverted this and put the moon first, but we've never gone back. Call this strategy "exploration."

In the mean time, we've found that we can do all sorts of science in space that is exciting to both the public and the science community. Everyone knows about Voyager, Viking, Hubble, and the Mars rovers, but there are many many more, such as Chandra (which made the X-ray image of the Galactic Core Tom posted), COBE and MAP, which studied the "echo" of the Big Bang. Call this strategy "science."

Currently, there is a new exploration vision for NASA that takes us back to the Moon, with a replacement for the Shuttle that we'd be able to send beyond Earth orbit. Eventually, the idea is that this model will get us to Mars, maybe even by the time our generation starts to retire. But to make this happen, we have to choose between putting more tax money into NASA's budget, or cut back on science (or at least the kinds of science that don't contribute more or less directly to exploration).

Of course, it's really much more complicated than I'm making it out to be, but to keep it simple, let's assume NASA's budget is fixed, and give a percentage for science vs. exploration.

(Don't worry about offending me; having worked on both sides of this issue, I really can see it both ways!)

The Galactic Core

The innermost 100 light years or so of the Galactic core in X-rays. Click on the image to see the explanation at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

From the orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory: your tax dollars at work.

That's just amazingly cool detail. Just for reference, the disk of our Galaxy appears to be about 100,000 light years across, and the Sun appears to be in the disk about 25,000 light years from the core, which is rather densely packed with stars and gas. So I think that the image is about a quarter of a degree across; that makes it about a quarter of the area of the full moon on the sky.

The core is, in visible light, shrouded from view. I suppose that this image is what Superman would see from earth if he looked at the Galactic core.

Media Coverage Just Before an Election

This morning on the way to work, I was listening to FAIR's Counterspin radio program. The interviewee, the reporter who broke the story on "Bush's bulge", was talking about the refusal of major newspapers to cover the story about a bulge that appeared on the back of Bush's jacket in each of the three debates. This is an interesting story in itself.

What really got my attention, though, is the implication---as I understood the reporter---that the media are generally shy of rocking the political boat with a big story just before a major election. Apparently, even one of the guys (and I don't remember his name) who broke the Watergate scandal, when he found out about the pictures of Bush's back-bulge, did not think that he could get the Washington Post, for which he works, to publish the story before the election. There were only a couple of weeks to go when this stuff was really boiling.

Although I'm interested in opinions about the bulge, I'm also interested in opinions more generally about the responsibility of the media when a controversial story seems to break right before a major election.

Holiday Plans

Where is everyone going to be for the holidays?
Let us know your plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and maybe a couple of us will be in the same place at the same time (like Russell and Tom or Walter and Julia possibly).
Kyung and I will be in Los Angeles for both holidays.
We are both working on Thanksgiving (the news doesn't take a holiday) and our moms are both coming to Los Angeles for Christmas.
Picture a Korean-born religious, very traditional mom (Kyung's) vs. a Southern, brassy, loud mom (mine) and you have the ingredients for a very scary Christmas or at least a good sitcom.
Where are y'all going to be?

US and THEM

Although I found this map at a humor site, I wonder if it reflects a sad truth about some subset of the American population.

Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics (and for Serious Christians in General)

In a comment under the "It's the Values, Stupid" thread, Russell mentioned that he saw a flyer and that he would post it if he could figure out how.

I'll wager that he saw the Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics (PDF file). There's also an HTML version, and even version for non-Catholic Christians.

The Voter's Guide originated at catholic.com, a Catholic apologetics organization. Karl Keating, a noted Catholic apologist, runs catholic.com, which is a good source for authentic Catholic teaching (books, and other paraphernalia).

Another good resource for anyone who is interested in knowing what the Church actually teaches is the Catholic Encyclopedia. Although the on-line version corresponds to the 1913 edition, it is still a good resource because the Church's doctrine---the subset of Church teaching that is promulgated infallibly---doesn't change. For example, see the article on evolution, in which one finds that the Church has at least as far back as Augustine in the fourth century advocated that the evolution of the human body is a serious possibility. Remember, this article was written before the Scopes "Monkey Trial"! Certainly, the Church does not demand (and never has) the teaching of creation "science" in the public schools. It was this very article (the Encyclopedia article on evolution), in fact, that about ten years ago started me down the path of taking the authority of Church teaching seriously.

Map on left is 2004 Electoral Red and Blue States, Map on right is Pre-Civil War Free vs. Slave States (Green vs. Red and Yellow) - Note the Similarities 

Screw You, We're from Texas

Texas is not only the home state of the Leader of the Free World, it is also the state which decides what kind of textbooks most U.S. students will be reading for the next generation. Why? Because Texas has so many school districts that their purchasing power influences the content of the textbook publishers who mass-produce their books and want the highest sales possible.
Today, the State Board of Education approved health textbooks for Texas high school and middle school students only after the publishers agreed to change the wording in their books to reflect marriage as being between a man and a woman.
A day earlier some board members had argued that health textbooks should not contain “asexual stealth phrases” such as “individuals who marry” instead of husbands and wives.
Members of the Texas state school board say the overwhelming rejection of gay marriage in 11 states on Tuesday justifies what they did Friday.
"I think they spoke on Election Day — even Oregon — they all have passed the Defense of Marriage Act," says school board member Terri Leo. "I think the country has spoken."

Let the Culture War begin.

It's the Values, Stupid

20 years ago at MacArthur High School, several of us were assigned an exercise in History class to split into teams and argue for and against the policies of Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. I know Tom and I were part of the Mondale team. I can't remember everyone else who participated, but I remember Lisa Carol was on the Reagan team.
Tom and I laid out strong arguments in favor of Mondale and the Democrats on everything from the economy to our country's intervention in Nicaragua. We felt like we had won every debate point going into the final argument by Lisa Carol.
Lisa never mentioned the names of Reagan or Mondale. She never mentioned either of the political parties. All she did was read a passage about what happens in a late-term abortion when an unborn fetus is scraped out of a uterus. While she was reading that passage, she held up a large photo of an unborn fetus that had been scraped out of a uterus.
Half the class was in tears. The other half was furious.
"What does this have to do with electing a President?" I thought to myself.
At the end of Lisa's presentation, our teacher (can't remember her name) declared the Reagan team a winner. I remember Tom and I and others being very angry about the teacher's decision.
20 years later, I still have not learned that valuable lesson in politics that Lisa Carol was trying to teach me in 1984.
This election was not about the economy, the environment, health care or the War in Iraq.
It was about abortion, gay marriages and God.
"Moral Values" was listed as the 2nd Most Important Issue for voters in exit polls and it was the Most Important Issue for women voters.
If that is how we are going to elect Presidents from now on, it will be interesting to see whether Democrats try to adjust by going even further to the right, or taking a stronger stand on the left to differentiate themselves.

... 

Election Day

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
--Benjamin Franklin

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
--George Jean Nathan

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
--Gore Vidal

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
--Napolean Bonaparte

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
--Otto Von Bismarck

The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.
--Will Rogers

Voters quickly forget what a man says.
--Richard M. Nixon

Vote early and vote often.
--Al Capone

Every motherfuckin' vote counts!
--Eminem

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
--Albert Einstein

Michele's kids... Luke and Thia 

Julia's daughter, Claire, as a Ladybug 

Caleb "Spider Man" Moore and friends 

Jessica Moore 6 month pumpkin