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Monday, August 16, 2004

Calling tech support

Apropos of nothing:  I was driving around today thinking, “wow, the independent college radio station here (WKPS-FM, 90.7, ‘the Lion’wink is doing a Ray Charles special” for about five or six minutes before I realized that I was, in fact, listening to our Ray Charles Ultimate Hits compilation CD, which Janet had apparently left in the car.  I mean, what are the odds that someone’s going to play “At the Club” followed by “I Can’t Stop Loving You” followed by “You Don’t Know Me”?  Well, maybe some really lazy DJ.

But those last two songs are always almost-ruined for me by the excruciating, hyper-enunciated, early-1960s-4H-Club-in-sweater-vests backing vocals.  Modern sounds in country and western music, indeed-- they sound like Saturday Night Live’s 1977 parody, Ray Charles with the Young Caucasians.  Especially Eddy Arnold’s “You Don’t Know Me,” which would otherwise be one of the more heartbreaking songs rendered in English, and which the late Mr. Charles delivers with just flawless understatement.

So here’s my question.  Now that we have TiVo and iPod and wiki and the eighth generation of MIDI, can’t we simply go back over these classic recordings and remaster them ourselves?  Why should we be subjected, yea, unto the seventh generation, to the most soul-sucking backing vocals known to humankind?  Why can’t we just revisit the original studio digitally, so to speak, and gently turn a couple of the knobs down to zero?  I mean, the CD version of Mingus Ah Um contains two fine, fine sax solos by Booker Ervin and John Handy that were deleted from the vinyl version of “Boogie Stop Shuffle,” as well as a vastly expanded “Bird Calls,” and I’ve heard the same kind of thing on any number of CD rereleases, like the CD version of “Young Man Blues” on the Who’s Live at Leeds that restores about eight seconds of guitar that were excised from the vinyl for reasons known only to Pete Townshend.  If CDs can augment the original releases, can’t they do some judicious editing as well?

I’ll be willing to share patent rights with anyone who comes up with the technology.  For the Ray Charles “Nashville sound” backing-vocal extraction, I suggest the brand name “Wite Out.” (I don’t think it’s being used anymore.) Any takers?

Posted by Michael on 08/16 at 04:35 PM
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Friday, August 13, 2004

Family and friends night

I’ve been deluged with one letters asking how last night’s Summer League championship game went.  We won, 7-1, and I contributed a goal and an assist.  But that’s not why I’m bothering to blog about it.  I’m bothering to blog about it because for the first time since I started playing again four and a half years ago, a whole bunch of people came to see me playñ Janet, Jamie, Nick, and (a major surprise) four of Nick’s friends, Dan, Peter, and the blog-reading Arthur and Jane (the latter of whom made a “Berube for Vice Prez in 2020” shirt for the occasion).  Hello, blog-reading kids!  Thanks for showing up.  Now stop reading this blog and get back to the salt mine.

Really, it was very sweet of you all.  The only thing was that Nick also brought a sign reading, “BÈrubÈñ score a point?!  Paid for by Obama-BÈrubÈ 2020.” While it was good of Nick to suggest that an assist would be as meaningful as a goal (thus assuring my linemates that I wouldn’t be doing any puck-hogging/grandstanding on Nick’s behalf), the curious punctuation troubled my team, who consequently were not at all sure what I was being urged to do.  As for me, I wondered whether the sign wasn’t going to be a classic jinx: on my first shift, I hit the left post from 20 feet out, and the inside of the post, at that.  A big loud clang in a scoreless gameñ a horrible sound (unless you’re a goaltender).  Later in the period I came in on a one-on-one, froze the defenseman with a faked slapshot, beat him cleanly to his left, and then threw another fake at the goalie, tucking the puck under him as he did the splits across the crease . . . only to see him smother the puck on the goal line.  So I began to worry about this point-scoring ?! injunction and its material effects on the game.

Finally, picking up a loose puck in the corner toward the end of the second period, I did manage to slide a pass (while down on one knee for some reason) to my linemate Jim, who scored from the slot to make it 5-0.  Then in the third I put a shot over the goalie’s glove, off the crossbar and in to make it 7-1 . . . a truly meaningless goal that did nothing to advance the cause of peace, love, and understanding.  Even worse, it was the eighth goal of the game, which, as King Kaufman pointed out this past June, is a deadly goal that almost always leads to defeat:

The real hypothesis, courtesy of reader Scott Van Essen, was that the first goal was no more important than any other goal, that all goals are tremendously important in a sport where 3-2 is a high-scoring game.

Here are the records, updated through Game 7, for the entire playoffs, for the team that scored each goal in a game:

First goal: 70-19 (.787)
Second: 66-17 (.795)
Third: 60-18 (.769)
Fourth: 31-26 (.544)
Fifth: 29-13 (.690)
Sixth: 16-5 (.762)
Seventh: 8-6 (.571)
Eighth: 1-4 (.200)
Ninth: 3-0 (1.000)

So the lesson here is to try to avoid scoring that eighth goal, but if you can get to the ninth one, you’re home free.

Anyway, despite choking a couple of times and not really having any “jump” all game, and despite scoring that kiss-of-death eighth goal, I didn’t do too badly, and we won, and no one can take that away from us for ever and ever.  Thanks again to the family and friends for coming outñ and doubling our attendance figures for the night!

Back next week with more serious matters.

Posted by Michael on 08/13 at 12:53 PM
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Thursday, August 12, 2004

This is not a real post to the blog

It’s just a notice that new family pix and hockey pix are up on this site’s other pages.

If it were a real post to the blog, it would say, for instance, that I’m still working out what the hell to make of Kerry’s latest remarks on the decision to go to war in Iraq.  My initial impression is that they’re bad on the merits (I’m with the anonymous source who told the Times, “I wish he had simply said no president in his right mind would ask the Senate to go to war against a country that didn’t have weapons that pose an imminent threat,"), that they’re politically foolish because they’re fodder for Bush (who not only gets to play Kerry as a flip-flopper but gets to make fun of nuance in general, as a bonus), and yet that I don’t think of them as some kind of dealbreaking disappointment, because I never considered Kerry an anti-war candidate in the first place and (unlike some of my friends on the left) don’t even consider the farcical Senate war vote to be the single (or the only) important thing about a candidate’s record.  I don’t favor an immediate pullout of US forces from Iraq, either, because I trust Juan Cole completely on these matters, and if he says things like this and this, I believe him.

Also, if I had time to write a real post to the blog today, I’d mention the fact that Richard Yeselson of Washington, D.C. has recently referred me to this hard-hitting piece of advice from Kenneth Baer to the Kerry campaign, which, even though it contains no references to ice hockey, nevertheless manages to be an insightful piece of political criticism.  For instance:

if Bush should lose this November, there won’t be any honeymoon for Kerry. His first few months in office will look like the last years of the Clinton presidency: congressional inquiries, constant talk radio trash-talking, and book deals for anyone with a charge to make. Simply, Kerry can’t afford to let the SBVT charges go unanswered if he wants to govern effectively.

Quite true-- but then, I’m one of those people who believes that the right smelled blood in the water the day Clinton caved in on Lani Guinier in 1993 (more on that here if you’re interested), and that’s why I’m in favor of smacking down far-right wingnuts like Corsi, Hoffmann and O’Neill well before they’re given their own shows on MSNBC and Fox.

And apparently the Errol Morris/MoveOn.org Republicans-for-Kerry ads are all set to go.  Tell you what-- if you stop by their site, watch a couple of the ads, and give ‘em a couple of bucks, I’ll consider this a real post after all.

Posted by Michael on 08/12 at 08:53 AM
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Monday, August 09, 2004

Affleck:  dump and change.  Neely:  your line up.

Another four-goal game last night, kicked off by what has been my signal contribution to my Summer League team, the goal that gives us a two-goal lead (on a 2-on-1, with a perfect pass from my center, Pennsylvania State Trooper and serious hockey guy Craig Polen).  For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 16 goals and 9 assists in seven games (I missed the first three while I was on vacation).  The championship game is Thursday night, and we’re expecting to play in it, being 9-1 and all.

This is not a trivial or merely personal matter.  With each four-goal game I become that much more qualified to serve as an informal advisor to the Kerry campaign on matters related to hockey, like health care, taxation, NATO, education, disability law, Iraq, and keeping guys out of the crease.  And passing along a suggestion recently sent my way by fine writer and occasional Altercationist Charles Pierce, I think the Kerry campaign should tap former Boston Bruin great and Kerry buddy Cam Neely as the campaign’s official enforcer.  Click the link and check out those career stats-- more career goals than assists, a man after my own heart, and some serious penalty minutes, befitting a talented player who wasn’t above the task of defending himself. 

Now the question is: how to get Ben Affleck off the tour bus.  Seriously, Kerry’s most likely got the Gigli/Daredevil/Chasing Amy vote sewn up already, and that terrible “laff” line in the stump speech (about how Kerry’s got something in common with Affleck because Ben was one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People and Kerry reads People, ha ha ha), far from being ingratiating and casually self-deprecating, is actually so annoying that it leads 30 percent of swing voters to consider voting for the guy who says things like “tribal sovereignty means that your sovereign entity is sovereignly sovereign in a sovereign kind of way.” Trust me-- I’ve done independent research on this.  Affleck is a drag on the ticket.  With Neely you take Ohio.

Sit Affleck.  Play Neely.  It’s the right thing to do.

UPDATE:  Jim Rassmann steps up in defense of his teammate-- and Eric Alterman rightly benches McCain for the rest of the game.  (Registration required for the Rassmann op-ed.  And whaddya know, it ran in The Wall Street Journal.  How about that.)

Posted by Michael on 08/09 at 04:06 PM
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Alan Keyes is making sense

. . . as the Illinois Republican Party’s candidate for the Senate race against Barack Obama.  No, really:  finally the people of the great state of Illinois will have a devout believer and master logician fighting to represent them, not just some skinny kid with a funny name.  Take for example the question of the homosexual agenda and how to stop it.  Other conservatives may talk casually about men having sex with dogs and box turtles, but only Alan Keyes will perform the actual intellectual labor involved in proving that gay and lesbian Americans have the moral status of children:

Now, given that that’s the basic difference between the distinction between adults and children, and that it involves the ability to deal responsibly with the impulses of passion, let us say we accept the premise of the homosexual movement-- that premise being that we treat homosexuality and other sexual inclinations like race, and based on that treatment, we assume that individuals cannot govern their impulses and inclinations.

Well, if an individual who is thirty years old cannot govern their impulses and inclinations, somebody tell me what is the difference for that purpose between that individual and a child. There is none, because the basis for making that distinction has to do precisely with that ability, maturely and responsibly, to deal one’s impulses and inclinations.

So if we accept the premise that no matter how old you are when a sexual feeling comes over you, you are pulled into a whirlpool of inclination and condition that, like race, is ineluctable, that “must be the way it’s gonna be,” then for the purposes of that particular passion, in this case sexual passion, you’re a child. You’re a child at ten, you’re a child at twenty, you’re a child at thirty, you’re a child at seventy-- because if, in fact, you do not have that fundamental ability, in light of rational and moral and ethical standards, in light even of your own purposes, rationally, to respond to the impulses that you are subject to, then you are no better off than a child, and your consent and your inclination has no different quality that than of a child.

Now, the reason I make this point is so we’ll think through the implication of this agenda, because if we accept the agenda, you do understand then that the line between adulthood and childhood for sexual purposes is erased. Accept this premise, and you cannot sustain it.

Therefore, and furthermore ergo, Keyes, who has thought and thought hard for decades now about the implication of this agenda, has come to the conclusion that gays and lesbians are uniquely dangerous children-- the kind who threaten the innocence of our children:

What is the implication for this society, for the entire social contract or compact on which it rests, if the government takes steps that withdraw its support for the privileges without which the marriage-based heterosexual family cannot be sustained? At that point the government will have betrayed its compact with the people.

So, I think it obviously has to be thought through carefully-- not just in terms of its individual consequence, but, in terms of what happens when we have so defined our understanding of human sexual passion, purposes, and of human nature itself, that we take sexual behavior out of the realm of moral judgment and accountability and put it instead in a realm like race, where you are not responsible for what you do.

And I think that to do that will ultimately mean, what? The demise of all these institutions: the protection of our children’s innocence, the ground cut out from under it; the expectation of fidelity in marriage, the ground cut out from under it; the restriction of marriage, by the way, to marriage between one person and another person instead of between one person and several people.

But wait, candidate Keyes hasn’t even started to make sense yet.  A propos and quondam non propter hoc, homosexuals will destroy individualism and establish tyranny:

And of course, there are people, I guess, who don’t care about this. But I believe they are people who, therefore, do not understand the interconnections between our social institutions and their consequences. Destroy the heterosexual marriage-based family, destroy the notion of family as marriage between one person and another person, and you re-introduce in our society those things which have, throughout human history, been the premises of tyranny, not of freedom.

And if we then allow the social institutions of tyranny and despotism to prevail, what makes us think we will be able to sustain the individualism and the spirit of liberty without which self-government cannot survive?

He’s got a point there, you know-- once the social institutions of tyranny and despotism prevail, it’s really hard to sustain individualism and liberty.  So maybe all you Nathan Lane and Martina Navratilova fans should think carefully through the implications before you go around destroying the very foundations of freedom.

For the entire speech, “Against Civil Unions and the Homosexual Agenda,” delivered in April 2000 in Vermont, go here-- and then feel free to root around in the incomparable Alan Keyes archives and send some stuff to the Obama campaign just in case Illinois Democrats decide to take this clown seriously.  You know, the way the mass media do.

Posted by Michael on 08/09 at 08:06 AM
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Friday, August 06, 2004

Why I’m glad I’m not a Catholic anymore . . .

From the Vatican’s recent security-alert warning about “lethal” strains of feminism infecting our families:

Recent years have seen new approaches to women’s issues. A first tendency is to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.

A second tendency emerges in the wake of the first. In order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary. The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.

While the immediate roots of this second tendency are found in the context of reflection on women’s roles, its deeper motivation must be sought in the human attempt to be freed from one’s biological conditioning.  According to this perspective, human nature in itself does not possess characteristics in an absolute manner: all persons can and ought to constitute themselves as they like, since they are free from every predetermination linked to their essential constitution.

This perspective has many consequences. Above all it strengthens the idea that the liberation of women entails criticism of Sacred Scripture, which would be seen as handing on a patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture. Second, this tendency would consider as lacking in importance and relevance the fact that the Son of God assumed human nature in its male form.

OK, yes, it’s great that Cardinal Ratzinger has been reading Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and immersing himself in the classic (though now dated) Lacanian film-theory debates in m/f and Screen of 25 years ago, and I hope he makes it all the way to Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, by which point he’ll have to rethink that entire sex/gender thing.  But in the meantime, what if, just what if, we actually didn’t have to “liberate” ourselves from biology in order to have these here polymorphous sexualities?  What if it’s not a “new model” at all?  What if we’re just polymorphous?  Scary, huh, kids?

As Sedgwick once put it:

Has there ever been a gay Socrates?
Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare?
Has there ever been a gay Proust?

Does the Pope wear a dress?

Posted by Michael on 08/06 at 09:01 AM
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