Caught the Black Keys last night

FOUR people's worth of really good noise poured out of those two guys.

splatter

For every prole that ever indignantly asserted, "I coulda done that in five minutes!," now you can give it a shot.

added Charlie Rose to the TiVo season pass

Can't sleep tonight. Got up to grab a quick snack and watch a few minutes of TV which quickly turned into 25. On PBS, Charlie Rose was interviewing retired General Jack Keane about the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. It was refreshing to hear a journalist carefully parsing out his questions while respectfully acknowledging the complexity of the situation and the experience of the person in front of him, and enthralling to listen to the very measured but very knowledgeable and direct answers Keane gave him.

I've dropped out of knowing day to day what is going on in Iraq, but according to Keane, the end of this month will bring provincial elections that will shape the gov't much more fairly than the first go 'round due to increased Sunni enfranchisement. He's of the opinion that an Arab Muslim democracy allied with the U.S. is not just a goal, but almost an inevitability. I hope he's right.

He also talked a bit about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and India. An interesting point that he made about the dismal situation in Pakistan was Musharraf's easing of pressure on the Taliban once the U.S. asked for help in Afghanistan from NATO. Our inability to dedicate the number of troops to stabilize the country and subsequent request for assistance made us look weak to Musharraf, leading him to hedge his bets and try to appear less an American toady to the Islamists. Another point he made was that the U.S. has been and will need to continue trying to convince India to throttle back a little on the Pakistanis, especially in Kashmir so that the Pakistanis can retrain their freed-up troops for counter-insurgency work so that they can address the growing internal dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. The fulcrums and balances are incredibly complex and bely the politics and shallow media reporting skimming over the top of them.

January 20th, 2009

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer..."

great idea

Check this post out on Pruned. It's about really driving home the experiences of others, making them present in our daily lives.

BTW, their symbol's NFLX

If they don't have your next DVD available at the closest shipping center, Netflix will now mail you the next locally-available movie in your queue while you 'wait' for the first movie in your queue to find its way to you. So they're basically tacking on a movie you want to see for free, without counting against your account for that month, just because it might take an extra day for your first movie to get to you.

Part of me rankles at this type of thinking as they're just movies, and it's just a day or so. Anyone who'd actually get upset about this needs to readjust their priorities.

That said, I also recognize the remarkable level of service they embrace by doing this; they're saying that their customers should not expect just solid service at a good price, but truly exceptional service from people who actually look for ways to solve a problem before anyone reasonable even thinks they have one.

At this rate

we're going to lose everyone cool. RIP Andrew Wyeth and Ricardo Montalban.

they've seriously GOT to be kidding

This has got to be the coolest, most daunting, most elemental thing I've ever seen a person do.


wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

I'd guess the rest of their job isn't quite this cool.

A benefit...

...of working in a federal building is that sometimes I leave work and find myself in the middle of a demonstration. Today I just happened to have my camera. Israel supporters to the left of me, Palestine supporters to the right.

I completely support both sides' right to demonstrate and in a way am glad they were, but the whole thing smacked to me of the underlying dilemma: both sides are good and pissed off with real grievances, yet the only things between them today were indignance and noise and police with guns directing traffic. No discussion, no attempt whatsoever to figure out the problem. Maybe if just a few more people get killed, a solution will magically appear.

UPDATE: Because I didn't know enough about why those yahoos were scrapping their cease-fire agreement, I looked it up. Turns out the Israelis in this case really do have a leg to stand on this time. Hamas members died when Israel collapsed some tunnels being dug into their territory, and the rocket attack retribution started in November. Good article, worth a read.