WTF Is Up With Children's Television Programming?

It's a damn good thing that cartoons are designed for children because man, the innocence of youth is a beautiful thing.  Kids can just enjoy them.  Adults have to endure them and what I've quickly discovered is that a lot of children's television programming is just plain eye-gougingly awful.  Thankfully, The Cigarillo seems to be hip to a variety of channels and I've made damn sure to stay far, far, far away from that satanic purple dinosaur Barney but there are still a few offenders that we really need to talk about, the first of which is Dora The Explorer.

Dear God.  Don't get me wrong:  I get the whole repetition thing-  there's at least some method to the madness and anarchy that is Dora.  I also like the bi-lingual stuff- might as well start them early, right?  No problems whatsoever.  But Dear. God.  First of all, she yells a lot.  I know you're going to the Big Tree already, dammit.  You don't have to yell it at me three times in a row.  I think I've literally had nightmares where I get stuck in a car with a GPS system that's constantly nattering at me:  'WHERE ARE WE GOING?  (clap clap clap)  'CANDY MOUNTAIN'.  Second of all, The Map.  The best part of this piece of awesomeness from Funny Or Die is when she slams The Map's head into the table.*  The Map's voice is so nasal and so irritating and all it does is repeat over and over again 'I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map...'  No shit, Sherlock.  Remind me again what you are?  Finally there's that god-awful song at the end of each and every episode.   'We did it, we did it, we did it, yeaaah!'  I KNOW YOU DID IT.  I JUST SPENT THIRTY MINUTES OF MY LIFE WATCHING YOU SAVE THE PURPLE FLOWER FROM THE GRUMPY OLD TROLL!

Dora has also bred two distant cousins:  Go Diego Go is one that The Cigarillo hasn't really tuned into yet but somehow involves saving and yelling a lot about animals which can actually be amusing to my juvenile brain sometimes.  (The episode where Diego is singing about how awesome beavers are-  'Everybody scream!  BEAVERS!' -that actually tickled my funny bone.)  NiHao Kai-Lan really excited me for a little bit- I mean, a bilingual cartoon that helps you kid learn Chinese?  Sign me up!  But then I watched an episode...  the animals all have twee, annoying names like Rintu or Toli or Ho-Ho and in a contrast with Dora- who actually goes exploring- Kai-Lan just kind of hangs out and tries to get along with people- which usually involves telling Rintu not to be such a douchebag to Toli and/or Ho-Ho while the Grandpa just hangs out in the background and teaches the occasional life lesson.  (I'm increasingly convinced that NiHao Kai-Lan is actually from the world of Firefly, where everybody sounds reliably American but can speak Chinese as well.)

Then there's Bubble Guppies.  Let me be clear about how desperately awful this show is-  whenever I see an episode come on, I change the channel or risk trying to spend a half-hour not trying to stab myself in the ears and/or eyes.  The theme song curls up in the cerebellum like those freaky space slugs from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan only you don't get to die writhing in agony like Paul Winfield did, oh no, it just haunts you for days.   Plus it just doesn't make sense.  Are they underwater?  Are they weird fish mutants from the future?  Why are there farms and supermarkets if they're underwater?  Spongebob Squarepants at least recognizes and works with the environment around it- Bubble Guppies just throws it all out the window and says, yeah, they're fish people that just fly around in a world that looks exactly like ours and never once do they eat lunch.  (They sing about with Mr. Gruper, their teacher, but I don't think I've ever seen them actually eat.)

It's not all bad though...  Yo Gabba Gabba is surprisingly tolerable (I secretly covet DJ Lance's orange hat) and Nickolodeon's version of Peter Rabbit is pretty good- despite Peter Rabbit being kind of a dick sometimes and Benjamin Bunny having severe social anxiety issues.    The first time I ever saw The Backyardigans, I literally said out loud:  'Why is a moose in a pink pastel jump suit dancing the merengue?' So that's not too bad.   And I am so, so thankful that The Cigarillo digs Thomas the Tank Engine.   Granted, Netflix doesn't have any episodes narrated by George Carlin, Ringo Starr or Alec Baldwin and there's a truly frightening amount of rich, detailed history about the entirely fictional Island of Sodor out there but I'll take hours of Thomas and Friends over a lot of other stuff that's out there.

Moral of the story/pro-tip:  variety is the spice of life!   Television will be varied and limited, I think because I don't want The Cigarillo locking into the television too much and I certainly don't want him getting too attached to certain shows to the point where we have to drop everything at watch it- because knowing my luck, he'll like some truly unbearable shows.  Kids these days though...  I don't get it.  I remember cartoons being a lot cooler, back when I was younger.

*Additional awesomeness can be found here, here and here.

This Week In Vexillology #43

Last week, we were in Europe looking at Romania- this week, we're heading down to Southeast Asia to the country where change is slowly and carefully tip-toeing forward with increasing velocity.    Home of the Iron Butterfly and that Patricia Arquette movie from the 90s that I never got to see- yes, this week, it's Burma!

Officially, it's the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, I guess and more importantly, as of 2010 this flag is brand spanking new, realtively speaking.  Adopted on October 21st, 2010 the new flag of Burma is a fusion of the flag of the State of Burma, flown during the Japanese Occupation and the Union of Burma which last from 1948-1974.  Basically, they took the horizontal tricolor from the State of Burma and the five pointed star from the flag of the Union of Burma and combined them.  The yellow in the flag symbolizes solidarity, the green represents peace, tranquility and lush greenery and the red represents courage and detemination.   The white star in the center of the flag represents the unity of the country.

Prior to the adoption of a new constitution and this new flag, the flag looked like this:

This is the flag of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma declared in 1974 by General Ne Win.  The old flag of the Union of Burma looked quite similar to this and this flag shouldn't be confused in any way, shape or form with the flag of Taiwan.  It looks similar, I'll grant you, but it's a totally different flag.   While the Union of Burma flag had a series of stars in the canton (one large one surrounded by four smaller ones) this flag replaced it with a socialist-style emblem. 

On the emblem itself:  the 14 stars represent the unity and equality between the member states of the Union while the cog-wheel represents industry and the rice stands for agriculture.  The white color represents purity.   The blue in the canton represents peace, while the red on the flag symbolizes courage.    The overall design of this flag originated during the Resistance to Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

So there you have it kids, out with the old and in with the new in Myanmar- or Burma.  Remember- until next time keep your flags flying- FREAK or otherwise.

The Bat-astrophe!

The news dropped last night that Ben Affleck was going to be suiting up and taking on the role of Batman in the upcoming sequel to Man of Steel and the interwebs promptly imploded and everybody lost their damn minds.   I'll be totally honest:  I wasn't expecting Affleck.  I'm not 100% sold but the more I think about this, the less I hate this idea. 

The biggest strike against Ben seems to be his role in 2005's Daredevil.  To be totally honest, I don't remember being a huge fan of that movie but I don't remember it being completely awful either.   And the genre of the comic book movie has evolved hugely in terms of quality- in writing, casting and directing- and let's be clear:  not a single frame of this movie has actually been shot yet.  There's no script.    The director, Zack Snyder managed to make Watchmen, a graphic novel that most considered to be unadaptable into a pretty good movie.   Christopher Goyer is, I guess, writing the script and he has screen credits on all the Dark Knight movies-  people need to take a breath.  This is not going to be anywhere near as bad as Batman and Robin.  (The benchmark for just how bad movies in the Batman franchise can be.  If somehow, this movie manages to be worse than Batman and Robin, I will be genuinely impressed.)

Yet, people are losing their damn minds over this:  a new petition on Change.org is demanding that Affleck be fired and some fools actually attempted to petition The White House to make it illegal for Affleck to star as Batman.  (Per HuffPost, it was taken down due to violatation of the White House petition systems terms of use.)  Really?   A petition?  Petitioning The White House?   Come on now.

This might be awesome.  (Screenrant.com seems to agree and has some cogent, coherent reasons as to why.)  And if it is awesome, Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and company are going to be laughing- all the way to the bank.  My concern now is just how they're going to infuse 'The Dark Knight Returns' into this movie.  If you're going own any comic in graphic novel form, it should TDKR and Watchmen as well-  it's ready made for it's own movie adaptation and one hopes that Snyder will use that source material judiciously and with care.   But he pulled off Watchmen so I'm not too worried.

In the meantime, everyone needs to calm down.

Numb3rs: Some Thoughts

Listen, I love Fringe and I'm going to go back and finish it up as soon as I'm done writing this but after about season three and a half, it got a little boring.   So I wanted to mix it up and Numb3rs had just been sitting there, staring out at me every time I logged on to my Netflix for what seemed like years now.   One of my sisters (let's call her The Geographer) had been a major fan of the show back when it was on television-  it was like appointment television for her so I figured, why not?  So I started watching it and six seasons later, I've come up with ten thoughts about the mathematically themed series:

1.  I'm not usually one for procedural television.  It doesn't lend well to repeat viewing and the cookie cutter, paint by numbers plotting doesn't lend itself to the greatest writing on television.  Character development is frustratingly vague or, in the case of Numb3rs, occurs off camera- that said, the Numb3rs spin on the procedural formula was unique enough to hold my attention and interesting enough to carry six seasons of a television show.  So nice job there.

2.  Speaking of which, the Numb3rs spin.   I've always said that most of what I learned in high school math classes was completely useless and the whole 'you're going to use trigonometry all the time in real life' line that math teachers insisted on trying to sell you on smelled a little like bullshit to me.  Numb3rs challenges that assumption with super-genius math professor Charlie (David Krummholtz) using math to help his super-cop FBI agent older brother Don (Rob Morrow) solve crimes.   The math he uses to do it is all real- a nice bit of scientific or in this case mathematic accuracy.

3.  Rob Morrow squints.   A lot.

4.  One of the more irritating 'we're going to leave character development to your imagination' aspects of this show is the romance between Charlie (Krummholtz) and Amita (Navi Rawat.)  It just kind of happened all of a sudden and the lack of context was extremely frustrating but by the end of the series when they get married, you kind of felt the chemistry between the two of them had moved from forced to genuine.

5.  Larry, oh Larry.  Peter MacNicol was the perfect actor for this role.   Though having him act more quirky than usual for a good chunk of a season until he reveals apropos of nothing that he's going into space.   And then another 'apropos of nothing' announcement that he's going into the desert to find himself.   Which he does.   Very weird- I would have liked to see more of him.

6. One of my favorite story arcs:  the season 3 finale/season 4 premier which revealed that Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) was a double agent (and then triple agent) working for the Chinese.  It was a beautifully unexpected twist that shock and surprise! enabled the character to grow and evolve a bit.

7.  One of my favorite characters:  Agent Megan Reeves (Diane Farr) for some reason and I don't exactly know why she left the show but I was heartbroken when she did.  She had a background in profiling, some Daddy issues (her father had wanted a boy and was disappointed when she was a girl) and ended up in a remarkably believable relationship with Charlie's sidekick friend and odd duck Larry of all people- all of which were conveyed to the audience in some excellent moments of vulnerability over the course of her tenure.

8.  Judd Hirsch.  Still remember him from Independence Day and he hasn't lost a step as Père Epps.

9.  How come nobody else got a girlfriend/boyfriend/significant other?  Colby (Dylan Bruno), David (Alimi Ballard), Liz (Aya Sumika) and Nikki (Sophina Brown) all got short shrift in the romance department over the course of the series.  To be fair, I guess Liz did date Don for awhile but that went nowhere.

10. It was a crying shame that fugitive hunting FBI Agent Joel Edgerton (Lou Diamond Phillips) didn't get more screen time- or join the show altogether.  His episodes were always standouts whenever he was on.  Ditto for Mildred Finch, Charlie's boss played by Kathy Najimy.   Josh Gad and Fisher Stevens also showed up more than once on the show but neither really clicked the way that the first two did.

Bookshot #65: India After Gandhi: A History Of The World's Largest Democracy

There are history books that are interesting yet interminable and then there are history books that capture you with the eloquence of the author's passion and writing and the sheer volume of material that is both compelling and captivating.  Happily, Ramachandra Guha's well paced and fantastic book chronicling the nearly seven decades of the history of post-independence India falls into the latter category and although it's a doorstop of a book, it's a glorious, glorious doorstop that I was honestly sad to finish.

Picking up right at the moment of independence in 1947, Guha wastes no time plunging the reader into the chaos and sectarian disaster that was Partition as Pakistan (along with East Pakistan- which eventually became Bangladesh) was shorn from India and massive population exchanges and sectarian riots that followed.   The steady hand of the remarkable first Prime Minister of India Jawaharal Nehru, who's firm commitment to a secular India above all else made a lasting mark on the country that despite the rise of Hindu sectarianism in the 80s and 90s still holds remarkably true today proved to be an inspired stroke of good luck for the early years of India.   Under his leadership (though many, many others played a role) India wrote it's Constitution (probably the most significant Constitution written since the American one), started the process of integrating the Princely States left behind by the British and delayed pressures for states along linguistic lines and Hindi as the national language for at least a decade (which proved to be a significant factor in embedding English as a lingua franca of the government and business class- a unifying factor that cannot be overlooked today.)

But where the book really knocked me down was Chapter 7.  Entitled 'The Biggest Gamble In History' it tells the story of India's first elections in 1952 and the achievement alone is staggering:

176 million eligible voters, some 85% of which could not read or write.
224,000 polling booths were constructed
2 million steel ballot boxes were constructed- requiring 8,200 tons of steels.
16,500 clerks were appointed on six month contracts to collate and type up electoral rolls
380,000 reams of paper were used printing the rolls
56,000 presiding election officers were chosen to supervise
They were aided by 280,000 staff members and 224,000 policemen to stop violence and intimidation.
Total area were the elections were taking place: more than 1 million square miles over a variety of different terrain

And you know what?  They pulled it off.   The elections were considered free and fair and provided a huge jump start to the process of consolidating Indian democracy- and decades later, it's still going strong.

With history books, it's not just what I already know that's fascinating, it's learning stuff I don't know as well.  I have a biography of Indira Gandhi kicking around here some place so many of the features of her rise to power and subsequent rule- however controversial I already knew about but reading about it from Guha's broader perspective really provides a lot of context.   While Nehru proved to be a major unifying figure during the early years of Indian democracy, when Indira came to power, her centralizing tendencies had effects on India that are still being seen today-  even Guha at the end of the book says India is more a populist democracy than a constitutional one- and the rise of regional parties as the national image and efficacy of the Congress Party has declined over the decades has forced India into coalition governments more often than not which may seem slightly more stable to some but also have provided new challenges and difficulties that have yet to be overcome.

I knew plenty about the conflict in Kashmir but I knew less about the conflicts in the Northeast with Assamese and Naga separatists and the conflict with the Mizo and the other tribal peoples in the south of the country.   I also learned where the term Naxalite comes from.  (I heard it first from this song thanks the excellent soundtrack from Brokedown Palace.)  Guha also does an excellent of job of explaining and then tracking the rise of Hindu sectarianism and fundamentalism in the 80s and 90s (mainly centered around the conflict over Ayodhya).

Overall:  If you want to learn anything about India, read this book.   I was left with little doubt that India was a remarkable, vibrant country that I now desperately want to see for myself and any history book that gives me this much knowledge to pack into my brain and doesn't bore me to death doing so gets an enthusiastic **** out of **** from me.

Albums2010 #64: Trans-Continental Hustle

Well, for starters, I owe an old friend- let's call him The Barrel Roller an apology for taking this long to discover the charms and general face-melting awesomeness that is Gogol Bordello.  Described in Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge) as 'gypsy punk' my first reaction after I listened to this album was:  'where have these people been all my life?'  Then, thanks to the magic of Spotify, I listened to this album again.  And again.  And I probably will do so again at some point in the very near future.

Trans-Continental Hustle marks the major label debut of Gogol Bordello and it's a damn good one-  produced by Rick Rubin (who helped give Johnny Cash something of a late career renaissance with his series of American Recordings) the album is heavily influenced by the sounds and music of Brazil, which lead singer Eugene Hutz has called home since 2008. 

The album opens with 'Pala Tute' which grabbed my attention immediately with it's heavy gypsy flavors (guitars and accordians) and Eastern European flair- but the Brazillian influences become obvious with the next song, 'My Companjera' and especially on probably my favorite track of the album, the Marley-esque 'Raise The Knowledge.'   (Though songs like 'Uma Menina, Uma Cigana' and 'In The Meantime In The Pernambuco' should make the Brazillian connection obvious.)  'Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)' brings a more traditional punk vibe into the mix for a pleasant change of pace. 

It's really hard to put into words exactly how awesome I found this.  Gogol Bordello, with this album, have taken genres of music from across the world that I dig but don't really listen to all that much and blended them together to make an entirely unique sound that's fascinating and a lot of fun to listen too.  Will I be listening to more albums from Gogol Bordello?  Bet your ass I will.  

Overall:  A masterful blend of music from across the world that turns into something unique and truly awesome to listen too.  I can't remember the last time I enjoyed listening to an album this much and they should be appointment listening for anyone out there wanting to try something new.   Listen to these guys:  you won't regret it.  **** out of ****

No Easy Answers On Egypt

The turmoil in Egypt shows no signs of ceasing, although yesterday the Muslim Brotherhood did call off a planned protest in the capitol of Cairo and nothing so far- at least publically that the West has been able to come up with seems to have had any meaningful effect on the ground.   There are no easy answers, apparently, whether due to the fecklessness and impotence of this Administration's foreign policy or due to events spiralling beyond the control and even the predictions of even the most seasoned of regional experts with every passing day the problem becomes more complex and not less and harder not easier- and ordinary Egyptians are caught in the crossfire.

I'll be honest:  I've been queasy about the coup ever since it happened.  (Unlike the United States Government, I'm willing to just go ahead and say it:  it was a coup.  Maybe a popular coup, but a coup nontheless.)  My queasiness stems from the fact that despite the fact that a large section of Egyptian society disagreed with the man, President Morsy was elected in a democratic election.  If the dude you pick screws up, you can't really just take to the streets and demand he resign for fucking things up.   Democracy is about the process more than anything else, I think-  the process matters more and popular revolts to overthrow Presidents that you don't happen to like set an ugly precedent that practically invites military intervention.   Morsy wasn't going to be blackmailed by the protestors, the protestors weren't budging and an unacceptable stalemate ensued which again, invited military intervention which is exactly what Egypt got.

Despite all of that...  there were a lot of people on the streets.  When the Beeb of all sources says that this might be the largest political protest in human history.  Not Egyptian history.  Not Middle Eastern history- but human history- that means that there's a metric fuckton of people on the streets who wanted President Morsy to step down.  The process of democracy may matter most if that's what you want to grow in your country but there's got to be a tipping point- when that many people want you gone, then I think we could call that a valid expression of the popular will and you should either see what they want and then do it or step down as they demand.

Once the military took power, a collision like this was probably inevitable.  Tragic yet inevitable.

So what do I think?  In a perfect world, our government would be on the side of the aspirations of the Egyptian people and act accordingly by cancelling the billion dollar package in military aid that we give Egypt on an annual basis.  However, the reality of the situation is nowhere near as perfect as I'd want it to be.   A basic rule of international relations is that nations don't have permanent friends, only permanent interests.  The United States doesn't stand for truth, justice and the American way- we probably never have, so what should we do?  I think cancelling our military exercises we had scheduled was a good first step- and continuance of our aid package should be contigent upon the military moving towards an inclusive, democratic transition to civilian government.   Problem is, I doubt the military thinks we're going to actually go all in and cancel the aid package and that's down to lack of leadership more than anything else.  We're just not getting taken seriously over there anymore- and who can blame them?  We waffled while Egypt slowly went to hell in a handbasket. 

It's hard to see any good outcomes ahead- but you can always hope.  The Egyptian people have made their desire for change obvious to all sides- just what kind of change, however is something that they have yet to figure out.  (The Quiet Man noted something interesting:  Egypt had elections and then wrote a new Constitution-  maybe they got that backwards?)

UPDATES:   Turns out Hosni Mubarak might be going free...  so any resemblance that the past couple of years have had to an actual revolution have turned out to be just a coincidence I guess.   One of the more intelligent, thoughtful commentators on the interwebs, Walter Russell Mead also has some thoughts, that are, as always, worth reading.

They Got The Land!

This almost slipped through my radar while the Missus, the Cigarillo and I were on a mini-vacay to Des Moines last week, but the Iowa City School Board authorized three more land purchases- two for new elementary schools and one for the third high school.

And judging by the description of where the new schools are going to be, the School Board has made smart choices in positioning schools exactly where you'd expect development to flow.  The third high school and a new elementary school are going to be located more or less north of Coralville but east of North Liberty.  (More specifically, if you want to get all Google Maps about it, the new high school at the NE corner of Dubuque and North Liberty Road and the new elementary somewhere off North Liberty Road.)  This makes sense-  North Liberty is growing like a weed and Coralville right along with it.  The new schools are going to spur development east and north of their respective towns.

The other two elementary schools are more interesting.  I sort of blinked a little when the school board finalized a land purchase for 15 acres just north of Pleasant Valley Golf Course on Sycamore Street but the more I thought about it, the more that made sense too.  There more development emerging in that area as well--  especially with the new Terry Trueblood Recreation Area opening up out there.  The only thing I question is the relative proximity of the new school to Grant Wood.  Much debate has been had over the attempts by the district to achieve a socio-economic balance in all their schools- you would hope that with new development and a new school, the neighborhoods around Grant Wood might see some benefits from that but it all depends on how they draw the boundaries I suppose.

The other elementary is also interesting:  a site along American Legion Road.   I would not have called that at all-  I was thinking they'd go more northwards, like maybe out by the new St. Patrick's Church but again, the more I think about it, the more that makes sense too.   If anything continues to surprise me (still) after moving back to Iowa City from Minnesota, it's how fast the city has expanded to the east of Scott Boulevard.  (A random fact that makes me feel old:  I remember when Scott Boulevard was the end of town.  Period.  Like nothing but corn and soybeans until you hit West Branch.)  If memory serves me, somewhere on the City of Iowa City website, you'll find plans for the Towncrest redevelopment, some of which also includes the City's plans for development south of American Legion out to Taft Avenue.  (There are a freaskish amount of bike trails already in those neighborhoods as well.  Think I turned what's usually about a 4 mile ride into a 7 mile one last week with a little judicious exploration.)

All in all, I feel like they've made good moves.  I still think hard questions need to be asked about the necessity (or lack thereof) of closing Hoover Elementary but if the School Board Elections (September 10th, people!  Remember to vote!) bring in some new faces to the board, those questions could be answered to the satisfaction of most of the community, I think.

Double Scoop of Lies

So everything that the government has said so far about the NSA Scandals has turned out to be wrong or just plain flat out lies?  Listen, I took a somewhat blasé approach to this initially.  The oodles of outrage seemed a little naive to me- I mean, were we really all the surprised?  Of course the government's been spying on us this entire time.  But with more and more revelations (this time from The Washington Post that broke last Thursday) my positions has moved from 'somewhat blasé' towards 'are you fucking kidding me?'

Let's consider:  WaPo had two big scoops on the NSA- but the one that really raised my eyebrows was the interview with the head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where he essentially admitted that they have to rely on the government agencies to tell them if they've broken the law.  I mean, I didn't exactly have a ton of faith in the FISA Courts to begin with- in their three decades or so of existence I don't think they've told the government 'no' once- which seems less like oversight and more like the government is the kid who wants to bum $20 off their Dad who's busy watching an NFL game, so they sneak downstairs and they're all like 'Daaaaaaad, can I have $20' and the Dad goes, 'I don't know, ask you mother.'  Or 'Sure, whatever.'   It's the equivalent of the police expecting criminals to call them to report crimes and it essentially seems that the supposed oversight of our intelligence programs is little more than farcical at best.

The other big scoop:  that the NSA has been giving Congress, the law and our privacy the old double bird for years now-  an internal audit of the NSA obtained by the WaPo reveals that they broke privacy rules thousands of times a year.   Not hundreds.  Not a couple of times a year.  THOUSANDS of times.  I'd be willing to say 'well, they go through a lot of data and maybe they just done fucked up somewhere' if it was closer to hundreds of times a year- but thousands?  Come on now.  That's the NSA just saying 'meh, fuck everybody, we're going to do what we want.'  (And please, please:  don't cue the Jack Nicholson 'You want me on that wall, You need me on that wall' bullshit from A Few Good Men. We are a nation of laws, people- if we can't rely on the government to follow it's own laws, then what kind of country are we going to end up being?)  There was an instance in 2008 (a Presidential election year, by the way) when a programming error started tagging calls from the 202 area code instead of country code 20.  So instead of Egypt, the NSA placed Washington D.C. under surveillance.  In 2012 alone, they logged 2,776 instances of unauthorized, illegal surveillance...  if your computer programs screw up that much, it's time to upgrade from Windows 95, people.

I'm honestly not sure what kind of oversight the NSA is under but it needs an upgrade, badly.  The FISA Courts need some serious teeth or they just need to be abolished, since apparently they don't do that much other than rubber-stamping whatever the government wants and more importantly, people have got to ignore the bullshit and demand some answers.  (EFF website is here, how to contact your Congresspeople and Senators, here and here.)

(Interesting postscript:  I don't know if this was random chance or a remarkably intelligent attempt to get the media to look at a bright shiny object that not related to this NSA business but the CIA has acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time- and placed it on a map!)

UPDATED:  Well this is just wrong:  Glenn Greenwald's partner was detained by the UK police for over nine hours under the Terrorism Act.   So, just so we're clear:  Greenwald writes pieces exposing the shocking level of surveillance by the NSA that's quite possibly (yeah, let's go ahead and call it what it is:  illegal) and his partner gets detained, under the Terrorism Act?  So does this now mean that journalists = terrorists?   Whistleblowers = terrorists?  2016 is just around the corner and I'm hoping like hell people (and this incudes the media.  Any journalist that asks 'boxers or briefs?' at any televised debate should be dragged from his or her podium and tarred and feathered right then and there.  We need real live journalists not stenographers reporting puff pieces for the elites) start asking candidates hard, hard questions about where they stand:  with the new security state or with the Constitution?  (UK Wise: if the LibDems have any backbone left whatsoever, they'd withdraw from the Coalition and trigger new elections, but I doubt they will.  Which means the ball on the other side of the pond is square in the hands of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party.   Enough is enough already.)

This Week In Vexillology #42

Last week we dipped our toes in the Pacific and learned something new about the Republic of Palau- this week, we're headed back to Europe and I'm dipping into my personal collection again so get ready to party like you're in Transylvania, kids because this week, it's Romania*:

Adopted on December 27th, 1989 for national and civil usage, the flag of Romania dates back to it's independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1859.   The flag was created by combining the colors of Wallachia and Moldavia, the Ottoman Provinces that made up Romania.  The blue in the flag, therefore, represents Moldavia, the yellow represents Wallachia and red was a color that was featured in the flags of both provinces and is the color of Romanian unity.

In 1867, the Royal Arms were set in the yellow stripe- and were modified many times over the years until the Communist regime took power in 1948 and replaced the arms with a Communist emblem- so it looked like this:

When the revolution against Ceaucescu's** regime began in December 1989 at Timisoara, the emblem was ripped out of the flag, leaving flags that looked like this:

These flags were called 'the flag with the hole' and after Ceaucescu was overthrown, nothing was placed in the yellow stripe of the tricolor, leaving it in it's current configuration.  In 1992, the old coat of arms was restored by the new Parliament:

The eagle is gripping an Orthodox Christian cross in it's beak- with the sceptre it's holding is the sceptre of St. Michael the Brave of Wallachia while the sword recalled St. Stephen the Great of Moldavia and the shield displays the arms of some of Romania's provinces.

So put your hands together kids and give it up for Romania!  And remember, until next time keep your flags flying- FREAK or otherwise.

*Random bonus fact:  Romanian is a Romance language!   Coolest outlier ever, geographically speaking.

**If you don't know who this guy is, start here with the basics of Wikipedia.  Not at all a nice man- which probably explains how quickly the Romanians got rid of him in 1989.

The Practical Guide To Entertaining The Cigarillo #2

Lucas Elementary
(a.k.a. The Dikembe Mutombo School For Kids Who Don't Read Good)*

Pros:  The playground on the south side of the school is just a short fence hop away from the warm, comforting embrace of the cheap beer on tap at the American Legion Post on Muscatine Avenue.  So if you're really desperate one parent can watch the kids and the other one can go have a beer and then switch off.   Of course the south side playground also had a spicy patina of cigarette smoke, cheap beer, vomit and regret- which adds a certain character to the place, I think.

Cons:  Lucas was a major disappointment.  This is not a toddler friendly playground-  first of all, the swings and one of the playground sets on the south side seem to be designed for the freakishly tall future NBA stars that apparently attend Lucas.  Which is fine- I mean, LeBron James had to go to Elementary School somewhere, didn't he?  However, when you've got a toddler like The Cigarillo who, although he's too young to know who Daredevil: The Man Without Fear is, hasn't really gotten the hang of things like gravity and steep drops from terrifying heights it's sort of a liability.

Not want to give up on Lucas just yet (after all, it could be The Cigarillo's Elementary School unless we move somewhere else) we took a stroll around to the east side playground and it turns out that was a major disappointment too.   Freakishly high, the east side playground had rules (rules vich must be obeyed!  Or zere will be consequences!) and had the look of a playground designed by some fitness freak that's trying to make recess into gym class and fool the children into health- it could have also been possibly designed by a psychotic German drill sergeant from a Monty Python sketch.  It has that whole 'we think death defying pratfalls are HILARIOUS' feel to it.

Verdict: Lame at Lucas.   We either need to put The Cigarillo on growth hormones (which we're not going to do, obviously) or move to a good school with a decent playground because Lucas is underwhelming.

*I just imagine a half dozen six-seven foot elementary school kids blocking shots, scaling the monkey bars and shoving kids aside who get in their way and wagging their little fingers and saying things like 'No, no, no, not in my house,' in their little Cookie Monster voices.   The image never fails to make me smile. 


Hoover Elementary
(SAVE HOOVER!  http://savehoover.blogspot.com)

Pros:  Decent to good playground that isn't freakishly tall or designed by a gym teacher.   The big kid stuff features a pair of strangely phallic slides split in two (immediately in my head, I labelled it 'The Splitter' because, well, I'm 12 years old.)  The small kid stuff is a decent size and has a slide for The Cigarillo and the weird netting thing he seemed to enjoy a lot.  Not a lot of heart attack potential for the Missus here-  I tend to follow The Cigarillo when he's on the big kid set just to make sure he doesn't take a left turn to see if he can fly/jump off of something and it works out pretty well.  The small kid set has a bouncy bridge which makes a lot of noise.  He likes that a lot.

Cons:  There's not a lot of shade and they've installed a weird fence thing on the back side of the school that seems a little 'Big Brothery' to me.  (After all, there's no corresponding fence on the other side of the school, so it's no like you're securing the playground at all.  Interesting sidenote:  there's also a gigantic temporary classroom where there didn't used to be one.  Why do they want to close this school again?)

Verdict:  I'll admit, not the most impressive playground we've seen so far but it is entertaining enough.   And it's moderately toddler friendly.  As a bonus, it's also just around the corner from The Cigar Parentals so if the playground alone can't cut it, there's more entertainment close by.

Hype of The Hyperloop

Well, billionaire visionary Elon Musk unveiled his latest and greatest design this past Monday- for the 'fifth mode' of transportation, a system that would be known as a 'Hyperloop.'  Basically, it's like a gigantic pneumatic tube that would shoot people between Los Angeles and San Francisco so fast it could cut travel time down to as little as thirty minutes.   Futuristic flight of fancy, you say?  Not at all.  Per Musk, all this technology current exists and as a nice bonus, this could be built at a fraction of the estimated cost of the high speed rail link that's currently being built between the two cities.

There was some concern that this could be unworkable- as even higher speeds are possible if this is done underground.  (And how does that work?  You gotta dig, you gotta get land to dig on- just makes the whole idea seem even more expensive) but Musk seems to have worked around that saying that this could be built above ground and run alongside the I-5 between SF and LA.

This is kind of exciting to me...  it's new, different, could be be built- since we've got all the technology invented already and most importantly of all, it's really, really fast.   Don't get me wrong:  I'd love nothing more than a beautiful network of high speed trains all over the country but it's just not feasible.  Too many tracks aren't graded to handle genuinely high speed rail- too many routes have to be shared with freight rail service.  The problems are too many to count.  Hyperloop represents an investment that could be well worth making for the transportation infrastructure of this country.  (The fact that it's estimated price tag comes in at a fraction of what's estimated for the California High Speed Rail project should really make people sit up and take notice.)

In other words, all the right boxes get checked off with this idea:  it can be done right now with existing technology, it's cheaper than building a high speed rail line by a significant margin and it'd would be an incredible fast, efficient way of getting between point A and point B.

Do I think it's got a chance in hell of getting built?  I doubt it.  Too many vested interests are behind rail projects now and unless Governor Brown drops the high speed rail line like a bad habit and doubles down on this, I think this will get filed away under 'perfectly plausible and money saving ideas' and forgotten about.  Though if I'm a California GOPer, I'd be raising holy hell over pissing away so much money on high speed rail when you could build this for less and have it go a hell of a lot faster.

It'd be awesome if people did get their shit together and build it though.  Just a thought...

Butter Is Murder?

 

They got old Bessie and they got her good!  Members of Iowans for Animal Liberation broke into the State Fair sometime Sunday night, broke into where the famed Butter Cow was being stored, doused her in red paint and scrawled their charming note on the glass for everyone to read.  Statewide media has been all over this as you would imagine-  though the Butter Cow has been safely restored and everything cleaned up already.

 

Apparently, the vandals/eco-terrorists/liberationists- whatever the hell you want to call them, hid in the building until after it closed and then broke into where the Butter Cow was housed to do the deed... (at least that's what the DM Register is saying) unfortunately, it seems to have amounted to no more than a publicity stunt.  People across the state probably took axes to trees and ate red meat slathered in butter when they heard the news (I, sadly, did not-  though I will undoubtedly partake of some beef when we get to the State Fair this week.)

 

It's not clear whether Iowans for Animal Liberation has any connection the Animal Liberation Front- which is sort of what makes this story fascinating to me.  One of my undergrad classes that stuck with me was one on the politics of terrorism and we did discuss eco-terrorist groups like the ALF, but here's the catch:  they're sort of 'open source' if that's the right term.   You go to a website, find a list of suggested acts of vandalism/destruction and if you do it, they'll claim credit on your behalf to publicize it.   It's a stark contrast to the decentralizing franchising type of evolution that's going on with groups like Al-Qaeda and it's a model that (at least to me) would seem to be harder to get a grip on.  I mean, how do you catch these people?  It's not like they're organized in a typical cell structure you can infiltrate and break down as you go.

The whole thing kind of annoys me though.  It's not like everybody in the state is a huge fan of massive, corporate agribusiness.  Quite the opposite in fact.  The local food movement is big, farmer's markets seem to get bigger every years- and there's more organic, sustainable meat out there for purchase by consumers than ever before.  It's not a perfect world, I'll grant you- but there are a growing number of consumers out there who are about what they eat and where it comes from.  Is it large enough to TKO the big food industry?  Not right now- but if you plant enough seeds, something's gonna grow, right?*

The whole 'meat is murder' crowd is just not something I can get behind, I'm sorry.  I like steak.  Humans are built to be omnivores not herbavores.  I'm not going to disagree with anyone's lifestyle choices (except maybe vegans--  how can they give up cheese?  Seriously.   I tried no carb once on the South Beach Diet and I was irritable, moody and ready to seriously consider shanking a hobo for a crust of bread by the end of the first two weeks.  I gotta have bread- but if I had too, I could probably live without it.  After a lengthy de-tox of course- but no cheese?  I don't want to live in a world without cheese.  To me there is no greater culintary pleasure in this world than a freshly baked loaf of bread and a gigantic slice of Stilton to smear on it.)

Either way, seems like an epic fail.  Nobody saw the damage and Old Bessie was back to normal before the Fair opened on Monday morning.

*I'm not a huge fan of factory farms but neither am I possessed of the deep pockets necessary to buy all organic, free-range, grass fed meat.  I would love nothing more than to live in a world where the organic, free-range, grass fed, sustainable meat was cheaper than the regular stuff but I don't.  It ain't cheap to put your money where your mouth is and politically, I prefer pragmatism over fiscal foolishness just to 'eat the right meat.'

Whiskey of The Month #11: Yukon Jack Jacapple

We're heading north of the border once again, this time to explore an interesting corner of the world of whiskey infusions...  that's right, we're sampling some apple spice whiskey.   Described as 'blended whiskey with spice, apple and other natural flavors', Yukon Jack's Jacapple whiskey is eminently drinkable though I do think it'd be better in the winter than in the summer.  There's something pleasantly warming about it that brings to mind shitty winter weather and hot apple cider more than a refreshing way to cool down on a hot summer afternoon.

Color:  Dark honey, shades of lighter colored amber

Body:  The spice is predominant and the apple forms a nice undertone to it.  Spice wise, I'd say mainly cinnamon with just a touch of nutmeg in there.

Palate:  It's heavier than you might think-  it's not syrupy but it doesn't sit lightly on the tongue either.  There's sweetness there but the flavors of the whiskey burst onto the tongue and are far more evident here than in the body of the whiskey.

Finish: Just about perfect.  There's hardly any burn going down and while I'm not entirely sure where one's cockles are, the phrase 'it warms the cockles of your heart' springs to mind.  The warming sensation spreads gradually and pleasantly from your gut on out.

Overall: LIke Tennessee Honey, you could sit down with a handle of this and drink way, way too much of it in a hurry.   I've tasted honey infusions and cherry infusions but this is my first apple infusion and it's an excellent addition to the infusions I've tasted so far.   I can heartily recommend this- though I stand by my original thought:  wait until fall.  When hot apple cider weather hits, snag a bottle of this stuff and go to town.  You won't regret it.

This Week In Vexillology #41

Last week, we were in Malaysia but this week we're going to wacky wild and totally random and jump into the Pacific Ocean feet first and check out the flag of Beluu er a Belau- or as it's more commonly known, the Republic of Palau!

I'm going to admit something kind of shocking, kids.  I know absolutely nothing about Palau.  I mean, I know where it is (the Pacific Ocean, near my all-time favorite, rage inducing Hangman clue The Federated States of Micronesia) but that's about it.  Right off the bat, I was surprised- the population of Palau is estimated at about 20K or so which means that it's a country with roughly the same population as Coralville, IA.   That boggled my mind a bit.

The capital is Ngerulmud, located in Melekeok State while it's largest city is Koror (which accounts for 70% of the country's population with 14K people living there.  Ngerulmud in contrast has a population that I can't really find and has only been the capitol since 2006.)  The country was under the control of the United States from 1945 to 1981 as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands that the US administered jointly with the United Nations.   Palau, along with the Marshall Islands voted against joining the Federated States of Micronesia in 1979, opting for independence in 1981 and signed a Compact of Free Association with the United States in 1994.

The flag was adopted January 1st, 1981 for national and civil usage.  Blue represents the freedom of self-rule while the golden disc represents the full moon (it's slightly off set making it similar to the flag of Bangladesh and dissimilar to the flag of Japan) which is considered by Palauans to be the optimum time for all human activity.*  (Mainly harvesting and celebrations- and the moon is seen as symbol of peace, love and tranquility.)

Like GI Joe said kids- now you know and knowing is half the battle!  So put your hands together and give it up for the Republic of Palau!  And remember, until next time keep your flags flying- FREAK or otherwise!

*As a Dispatcher, I can confirm that the Palauans are on to something with this full moon business.  Shit gets nuts leading up to and especially on the full moon.   The Missus confirms a similar thing happens in hospitals.  It's nice to know that some people out there actually look forward to and have fun on full moons.

'Shut Up And Play The Hits' --A Review

I have no idea how to start this review, so I'll just be honest about that up front.  I loved this band and I loved this movie and when this movie was released in theaters for one night only on July 18th, 2012 and I didn't manage to get to a theater to see it, I was majorly bummed out.  So you can imagine how excited I was to stumble across this on Netflix of all places!

Shut Up And Play The Hits chronicles the forty eight hour period before and after LCD Soundsystem's final show at Madison Square Garden on April 2nd, 2011.  Interwoven into the footage you see and hear excerpts of front man James Murphy's extended interview with Chuck Klosterman about the genesis of the band and what prompted them to disband and walk away right when they seemed to be on the verge of getting ridiculously, seriously big.   That alone makes this movie worth watching to me and Klosterman is quick to ask Murphy:  why walk away?  That's not a very rock n'roll ending and it's somewhat unique in the history of popular music.  Bands implode, rock stars die in various tragic accidents or self-destruct in excess or bands just keep going- some of them beyond the point of all reason and logic sometimes.   Rarely do you see a band just drop the mic and walk away and that's kind of fascinating to me.

But that's LCD Soundsystem, to me.  Fascinating.  Their music defies definition.   Is it techno?  Is it punk?  Is it rock n'roll?  It seems to be a little bit of everything all rolled into one and the underlying philosophy of the band (if there is one) seems to be that they wanted to make music people could dance and have a good time with and if that was the goal, well then they hit the nail right on the head.  (Yes, I hopped on Spotify as I was watching this to make a comprehensive playlist with all the LCD Soundsystem I could get my hands on- and I'm listening to it while I write this review.)

The entire movie is infected with this sense of joyful melancholy that reminded me a lot of my last day of high school.   I took my time on my last day in high school- I walked around a little bit, I took in the sights, the sounds and then, finally, I went home.  It was an ending but it's was an ellipsis and not a period, you know?  You were moving on and it was an ending but it wasn't the ending.  That seems to be big amongst the motivations for calling it quits.   Murphy talks about how fast it's gone and how old he's getting and that he wants to do other things with his life- and that seems like a valid point to me.   You only get one life, after all-  and it's understandable that people wouldn't want to build their life and define their life around one thing, even if it's something as awesome as making music.

The concert itself is glorious to behold.  The footage is amazing, the crowd is going nuts and some friends show up to help out too.  A couple of members of Arcade Fire drop by to add some backing vocals to 'North American Scum' (the film's title comes from when Arcade Fire lead singer Wim Butler tells Murphy to 'Shut up and play the hits!')  Per Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge) I guess that Aziz Ansari and Donald Glover can be spotted somewhere in the crowd as well?  I didn't notice them- I was way too busy enjoying the music.

Overall:  Oh to have been in Madison Square Garden that night!  Since I missed that particular date with rock n'roll destiny, I had to settle for this movie and I am 100% fine with that.  Beautiful, melancholy, spare, fun with some truly great music to listen too this movie is a beautiful swan song for a band that left us too soon.  **** out of ****  (If you've never heard of LCD Soundsystem, get on Netflix and remedy that stat.  And then get on Spotify and educate thyself.  You won't regret it.)

We're #1!

This has been old news for a few days now, but the Princeton Review has released it's Party School rankings for the 2013-2014 school year and the Mountaineers of West Virginia have been dethroned as the top party school in the land by none other than our very own University of Iowa.  The local press has been having a field day with this (Jimmy Kimmel weighed in with this- which managed to be decently funny and not make any stupid jokes about farms and/or the Midwest) and of course, with 21-only back on the ballot in November, the ranking has injected itself into that particular debate as well.

Hmmm... so just how big of a deal is it?  I think it depends on your point of view.  Some anti-21 folks are doing cartwheels:  despite all the efforts of the University administration and the City Big-Wigs, we still party and party hard.   All these attempts to control binge drinking and grind the college experience into dust under the iron bootheel of the Metamucil chugging Old Fogies that are our town elites have come to naught, so let's axe the 21-only ordinance and be down with it anyway.  And oh, by the way- pass me a beer.

The pro-21 folks are dismissing this as meaningless fluff, which it more or less is.  I think people see 'Princeton' next to the word 'Review' and automatically assume that this is a rigorously academically designed thing.  With peer review, multiple metrics to analyze and control groups or something to boot.   It's not:  essentially, they send out a shit-load of surveys and analyze the responses they get.  So whichever student body has the highest response rate could, conceivably skew the results whichever way they want.  This isn't exactly the kind of stuff you find in The Chronicle for Higher Education.

What do I think?  Well, I have to admit, I'm sort of proud and sort of puzzled all at the same time.  Back in the day, this school could thrown down with the parties.  Hardcore.  I remember the pig's head being thrown on the field at Kinnick.  I remember the old Lot 6- before they built the ramp on top of it to try and control the mayhem you found there.  I've heard stories of dorm wars so bad that they had to bring a front loader in to clear glass on the street.  Things are nowhere near as bad as they used to be- in fact, you could argue that things are pretty damn vanilla compared to years past.

So the fact that we achieved this ranking is sort of a win for everybody- unless you assume that the basic notion of wanting to change the drinking culture on campus was to make sure we don't get these kind of rankings to begin with.   But to me, it's a win all around.  21-only works.  It didn't destroy the college experience.  People still party.  People still have fun.  This is Iowa, baby.  You can get a fantastic education AND still have a good time.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit back, relax and crack open a cold one and toast the one thing that matters most to me in this whole debate:  job security.

#WriterProblems: Chapter 4

Kids,

I'm about done with revising Chapter 4.   It's the first Chapter I've gotten to that needed some major renovations and while I was glad of the opportunity to make it better, it's now turned around and presented me with a whole new set of problems.  

You see, I seemed to have a surplus of meetings in my last draft and part of my revision process includes making sure my characters have something to do other than sit around and make momentous decisions that propel my plot forward.  Meetings, even dramatic ones have their places but they're somewhat passive to me.   Unless you're dealing with something like the final courtroom scene of A Few Good Men ("Did you or did you not order the Code Red?" "YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!") they tend to make things a trifle boring after awhile.  The primary goal of these revisions is to cutback on the number of extraneous characters and make sure that the important ones have enough important things to do.

This was an excellent point of feedback that rocked my back on my heels a little bit until I sat down, thought about it and realized that it was absolutely correct.  Sometimes, the story and the scope of what I have these characters doing in my head doesn't translate all that well to the page which doesn't do you, the hopefully soon to be satisfied readers all that much good- unless I get all Talosian about it and start pulsing my forehead veins at you to make sure we're all on the same wavelength. 

BUT:  back to Chapter 4.  So, my biggest thing with Chapter 4 was taking out the meeting.  It served its purpose in my original draft but it jumped the gun on a dramatic moment that I had planned and in doing so, removed all juice from said moment.  The whole scene fell kind of flat and took up tons of space to really and truly not propel my plot along all that much and for an added bonus, it muddled it up some more.   So I scrapped the whole damn thing...

What I ended up with instead was a chapter that jumped around a bit.  I'm okay with that part-  these are all characters that you've met before and this Chapter helps you, the reader, get to know them a little bit better but instead of watching them sit in the meeting, I show them reacting to what happens in it.   What's making me queasy is now that I've taken out the meeting I'm wondering if I need to put it back in again which I really, really, really don't want to do.  (It wasn't my best writing and it really didn't help propel things along all that much.)  What I'm left with flows better than my original draft of Chapter 4- it moves quicker (or at least it feels like it does to me) and it propels our characters and plot along without getting bogged down in unnecessary amounts of detail and minutia.  (Another failing I'll cop to as a writer.)

I don't know.  I'm going to have to ponder this some more.  One of the cardinal rules of writing is 'show, don't tell' and in this Chapter there's a meeting that I'm not showing you.  But another piece of advice I've heard (from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut when he gave a lecture on campus back in the day) was 'start as close to the end as possible.'  What it seems like I'm facing then, is a clash of these two rules.

I don't know.  I have one more piece of Chapter 4 to get set up (ironically, it's a scene from Chapter 7, I think, which in the original draft, I told the reader about but didn't show them- in this draft, I'm bumping it up to show the reader so I can do more interesting, exciting things in Chapter 7.) Maybe when that's in place, I'll have a better idea of just where I stand on Chapter 4. 

In the meantime:  onwards!  I want to be over the halfway mark of these revisions and looking towards the finish line (if not completely done) by the end of the month!  The sooner I figure all of this out, the sooner you all get to read it.

UPDATED, 8/7/13:  Yeaaaaaaaaaah, I thought about it.  Read what I had.  Shortened up the meeting and put right back in there, so this entire post sort of made itself moot by the morning after I had written it.  On the upside though, Chapter 4 is done and locked in.  So there's that.

BOOM! Random Sports Post!

Brace yourselves, kids, because today, there's a trio of things worth contemplating in the world of sports and rather than subject you to three, meandering blog posts about each topic, I thought I'd just boil them down into one big happy clump.  So:

1.  The Phoenix Coyotes are staying in Phoenix.   For the life of me, I still have yet to wrap my head around the idea of Phoenix having a hockey team.  (Apparently, they're going to rebrand as the Arizona Coyotes after next season to try and broaden the appeal to the whole state.) But there's a catch:  IceArizona (whom I guess is taking over ownership) has an out after five years if they incur losses of more than $50 million dollars.   If that happens (and I'm guessing it will) then possible destinations include Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Markham (which is, I guess, a 'burb of Toronto) and Quebec City.  (At least that's according to the article I linked too, so go figure.)  If I was going to guess, I'd say Quebec City or Seattle would be a likely destination for the Coyotes if it comes down to a move- I bet there are still some Nordiques fans up there that would love to get a team- any team back. 

2. The MLS wants to add four new teams by 2020.  I'm excited yet cautious about this...  they damn near screwed the pooch about a decade ago and the league saw a round of contraction and financial troubles as a result.  Since then, they've wisely taken a 'slow but steady' approach to expansion and (more pleasingly there's also been a move to more soccer specific venues which I think will be a ton of help going forward.  Nothing drained the excitement out of the room more than seeing an MLS team play in a gigantic, half-empty NFL stadium.)  My picks for the four new teams:  well, New York City FC is already happening...  after that, I'd say Orlando City, something in the Carolinas and after that, maybe Minneapolis, since part of their new stadium deal involves the option to bring in an MLS team.  There's been a lot of chatter about David Beckham and a possible team in Miami but there's already plenty of competition down there, franchise wise.  And the Carolinas seem to have a good tradition of the game on the collegiate level so I think a team could do well there as well.

3.  A-Rod gets a 211 game suspension.  I'm not passionate about baseball.  I'll admit that right out of the gate- some people take this game seriously.  Some people keep stats religiously and take all the talk about the national pastime to heart and I'm 100% fine with that.  In general, I'm not down with the use of performance enhancing drugs in any sport and that includes baseball.  Where I get queasy is with this:  after the strike in 1994, everybody tacitly asked no questions about performance enhancing drugs while Sosa and McGuire did their thing and got people pumped up about baseball again.   Then, when Barry Bonds came along and did his thing sudden it was a problem.   To me, it smells a little funny when you look the other way for a good decade or so and then start get tough and cracking down and smacking players around with suspensions.  It feels inconsistent to me.  But how do you get beyond the Steroids Era when so many people are now questioning the integrity of the game?   That's the tougher question.  There should have been a cleaner break with the Steroids Era, to me- an acknowledgement and then a clear statement of what was going to be done going forward to move ahead.  And I'm unclear why a bunch of other players get 50 game suspensions and A-Rod gets a 211 game suspension...  enlighten me, baseball fans.  Help me understand:  how does Bud Selig still have a job?

Doctor Who?

 

Yes, the wait is over and the world of nerd/geek/pop culture is abuzz today with the news that Scottish actor Peter Capaldi will be the 12th Doctor on Doctor Who.  And you know what?  Reading the reaction around the interwebs, people don't seem to be that pissed off about it.   Some people I think were still hoping that they'd throw dow with a curveball and use a non-white or even a female actor in the role but one constant buzz about the latest casting has been that they wanted to go older.   And Peter Capaldi fits the bill.

 

Some are hoping that this will shift Doctor Who back to a more hardcore, less whimsical tone (though I admit this brief reaction could also be complete satire)  as all the world knows, Doctor Who is a children's show, technically speaking though it's hard to see how you can maintain that when your fanbase is most definately not children.   While I agree that there have been some rather twee and whimsical moments of late, it's not completely lost the plot.   But an occasional burst of PG-13ishness couldn't hurt, I don't think.

 

The Beeb and The Guardian have further reactions here but I think that this is an intriguing choice for Doctor Who--  I'll admit I've absented myself from all things Whovian for awhile now but I'm feeling the old familiar itch to maybe get back into and go on a Netflix binge.  Problem is that there are so many shows that I need to watch, start watching or finish watching.  (I'm currently working my way through Numb3rs right now.)  But these announcements always give me the old itch to get the DVDs out again and watch some David Tennant episodes.  Maybe I'll do that...

 

(Just tangentially:  I'm not opposed to non-white actors of either gender taking on this role.  It'd be refreshing to see- with this role and with James Bond.  But I can also understand why they picked who they picked--  they went suuuuuuuuuuper young with Matt Smith- he was younger than even me and I think that was seen as a somewhat risky move, which has paid off quite nicely as it turns out but I think they wanted- and I'm just engaged in pure guesswork here- a return to a more familiar Doctor Who.  Older, maybe slightly prickly when provoked with an odd personality to boot.  This seems like a return to that.  But I guess we'll see for sure.)

 

Random Postscript:  Apparently Peter Capaldi played a W.H.O Doctor in World War Z.  Not sure if that's an internet untruth or not but if it's for real it's a weirdass coincidence.   Must be fate.



This Week In Vexillology #40

We were in Ecuador last week but this week we're headed to the other side of the world to Southeast Asia-  so I bet you can't say Negeri Sembilan three times fast, kids because this week we've got Malaysia:

Adopted on September 16th, 1963 for national and civil usage, the Malaysia won it's independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, forming the Federation of Malaysia was formed- which at the time did include Singapore.  If this flag looks sort of kind of familiar to people, well there's a reason for that- the flag was based on the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America though it's not without irony that we have to note that the Malaysians added a dollop of Islamic symbolism on top of that.   (It's actually got it's own name as well!  It's known as Jalur Gemilang- the Stripes of Glory!)

The blue in the canton represents the unity of the Malaysian people.   The crescent and the star represent Islam while the 14 red and white stripes represent the fourteen states of the Federation (including the state of Negeri Sembilan, if you were curious as to what that referred too.)  When the three new states of Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah joined the Federation the flag was amended to the fourteen stripes it contains today.  But when Singapore left* the flag remained unaltered:  the 14th stripe now represents the Federal District of Kuala Lumpur.

The yellow in the flag is the traditional color of the rules of the Malay states- while red and white are traditional colors in Southeast Asia.  The 14 points of the star (the Federal Star or Bintang Persekutuan) represents the unity amongst the states of the Federation.  (Oh and if you're going for trivia fact, the national motto is 'Unity is Strength.'

So put your hands together and give it up for Malaysia (not conicidentally one of the settings for one of my favorite movies- Entrapment.  I can still remember going to see that in the theaters.)  And until next time, remember to keep your flags flying- FREAK or otherwise!

*Curious thing...  my reference guide says that Singapore seceded.  Wikipedia's page on Singapore says that they were expelled from the Malaysian Federation by a vote of 126-0 and Wikipedia's page on Malaysia just says that 'they left.'  (Strokes chin thoughtfully...)  Hmmmmm.....

A Brewing Boycott of the Sochi Olympics

There's a growing furor over the Sochi Olympics, given Russia's recent crackdown on gays and lesbians in that country.  To be clear, this isn't your average, run of the mill, shitty workplace/housing/marriage discrimination type of crackdown either- no, this is some seriously scary fascist shit:

Fierstein makes his reason plain in the opening sentence, writing, 'Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, has declared war on homosexuals.'  There is ample evidence that this is far from hyperbole.  Putin and Russi's legislators seem set on criminalizing every aspect of gay life throughout the country.  The Russian Duma (their Parliament) recently voted 436-0 in favor of banning 'propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations.'  This law is so broad that is threatens prison time for anyone who acknowledges the mere existence of LGBT people in any public forum such as the Internet, a classroom or even a street corner.  Putin also signed a law banning the adoption of Russian children not only by gay couples, but by any single people or unmarried couples who reside in a country where marriage equality is on the books.  And he still wasn't done.  The man our previous president lovingly nicknamed 'Pootie Poot' (wish I was kidding) also approved legislation that hands out two week jail sentences for any tourist suspected of being gay.

All of which is drawing increasing criticism (and rightfully so) from the LGBT Community Worldwide.  Stoli Vodka has had to do some frantic PR to explain to everyone that no, they don't hate the gays and yes, they're from Luxembourg and have nothing at all to do with Russia if they can help it.  Bars worldwide are dumping Russian vodka at a frantic rate and there's a growing debate:  should countries boycott the Sochi Olympics to protest this shittiness?

USOC has already made it clear that they're not down for a boycott- but I can definately see the arguments in favor and against a boycott.  Russia has sunk a shitload of money into Sochi-  the overruns and corruption are growing and to be honest it smells more like a prestige project for Putin's ego* than anything else- if people stayed away, that's a lot of money he pissed down the drain.  (The fact that's just around the corner from Abkhazia, Georgia and oh, Chechnya might also give people pause.  It may be a picturesque little town on the Black Sea (that apparently doesn't even get that much snow, weirdly enough) but it's not in the friendliest of neighborhoods, you know?

So there's that.  But there's also the argument that if you don't go, then no one gets to hear about the issue at all.  (A fact that the Grantland article points out courtesy of John Carlos, one of the athletes that held their fists up in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games.  If they hadn't gone, nobody would have known and nobody would have saw.)  Put it this way:  dare Putin to put his money where his mouth is.  If these new laws could jail tourists suspected of being gay for up to two weeks, I'd say go.**  Let him start locking up athletes from other countries.  Then you'll see some serious shit fly.

What would I, personally do?  I honestly don't know.  Two weeks in a Russian prison isn't something I'd wish on anyone but holy shit, does the international community need to raise some holy hell over this.   What's next, Russia?  Pink triangles and concentration camps?  Wait:  I do know what I'd do.  I'd totally go.  And if they were going to arrest gay athletes they could arrest me too...  two weeks in a Russian prison, I'm pretty sure I could some bad ass fucking tattoos.  If I don't get shanked on the first night, that is.

*:  Apparently there's a Facebook group encouraging people to send Putin a dildo.  I'm not sure why, but I like it.  Flood the Kremlin with rubber penises! 
**: Sounds like figure skater Johnny Weir is going.   Good for him.