Presidential Candidates had to endure years of speculative scrutiny, had to announce themselves as candidates, had to stomp around America subjecting themselves to ritual humiliations, had to debate their opponents a wearying number of times, and, generally, had to carve out their own positioning in our collective consciousnesses. Then, amidst a long trail of slow discoveries and endless back-and-forths, a Vice-Presidential candidate is picked like a lottery-winner, as if from out of the blue. For presidential candidates, we got to analyze their reasons for running; for vice-presidential candidates, we get to analyze their reasons for being chosen.

I think what many Obama supporters are feeling is that, sure, Obama might be--in some sense--"inexperienced". But he had to make himself, and he did so in an impressive and dramatic fashion. But Palin was made, and that's not fair. Don't people understand how audacious it was of Obama to ask for our votes? How freaking crazy it is that he did, and that we were persuaded? To have Republicans ask voters to accept a similarly "inexperienced" candidate on a ticket because someone else decided it was okay is an entirely different matter: it's insulting.

All this is just my attempt to parse the reactions to Palin along generally unacknowledged lines: that running for President and getting picked as VP candidate are two very different things.

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Hilzoy, blogger for the invaluable Obsidian Wings, writes by far the best take on this story of the many I've read.

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My love for this show almost certainly has to do with being a certain place at a certain time (Washington State, early nineties), but I think it shows well why specific humor is often the best. It is also of general interest, being the birth-place of the much-loved Bill Nye: The Science Guy.

As such, I present: the best free-access, unrepentantly locally focused comedy show of ALL TIME*. The best of Seattle’s Almost Live.

* One might ask oneself: how many free-access, unrepentantly locally focused comedy shows has Nate actually watched? The answer is: none of your business!

• The famous: “Mind Your Manners” with Billy Quan, “8 Ball of Fury” (More Billy Quan)
• Bill Nye as “Speedwalker”
• Politically Correct Seattle
• Veggie Kill: The Restaurant for Vegetarians Who Still Have a Little Animal In ‘Em
• Bill Nye in Cops: in Ballard
• Dave Grohl on Almost Live

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Almost two weeks ago, in a late-night workout at home with HB spotting, I reached a new max on the bench press of 325 pounds. I'd been making rapid strides on the bench recently, partially by working out much closer to my max and partially, I suspect, because of creatine supplements. I warmed up, but not a whole lot: I remember wanting to preserve as much energy as possible for hitting a new max. I'd set my new goal on the bench at 400 pounds. I did 325 and, honestly, it felt easy. I wanted to do more: 330, or 335? Hell, I said: you only live once. We put 335 on. I brought the weight down and stalled. As I tended to do, I shifted the bar a bit higher to get a burst of strength from the shoulders. I started to push up and felt a moment of triumph--I thought I had it. Suddenly, something snapped in my right pectoral. The weight crashed down on my right side. HB grabbed the bar and I slid out from under it and fell to the floor, cradling my right side.

Continue reading “Dealing with a Torn Pectoral Tendon” »

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His is one of the best things I've read on the subject. It is interesting to wonder whether the delusions of nobility are a necessary dialectical waypoint or just a frequent but incidental one. I had never really considered that they were anything but forgiveable error, but perhaps to face the truth you need to come at it from a position of some real, if ultimately hollow, strength.

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Hidden within a New Yorker article by Charles Van Doren was a surprising revelation about Twelfth Night:

Along with Vivienne Nearing and eight others, I later pleaded guilty to second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor, for lying to the grand jury about getting answers from producers. The six weeks between my confession and Christmas of that year, 1959, were mostly agony.

But a small gift from my father helped me through it. He had wrapped a square box in tissue paper, sealed with Scotch tape. The box contained a gyroscopic compass, the kind you can start spinning and put on the edge of a glass, where it will stay upright till the spinning stops. A card in the box read, “May this be for you the whirligig of time that brings in his revenges.” I knew the quotation. It’s from “Twelfth Night.” Feste, the mean-spirited clown, has been unmasked, but those are his last words, thrown over his shoulder. The play’s audience knows that somehow he will survive and live to taunt some other master. I didn’t ask my father what he had meant by it, because I knew he was saying that I, too, would survive and somehow find a way back. I just hugged him and said, “Thank you, Papa.”

If I were under any previous illusions about being a Feste expert for having played him as a Freshman at St. John's in Elise Berg's production, they would have to end now. I had never even considered the possibility that there was any kind of severing of Feste's relationship with Olivia, or that the bitterness he reveals toward Malvolio is much marked by anyone except perhaps Malvolio himself. Was this obvious to everyone but me? If not, does this interpretation strike you as convincing?

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It's been my intention for a while to split this blog in two. One blog, Halloween Tree, would be a professional one: devoted in a way this blog hasn't to writing about actual web design and development. The second would still be Monadology, but would have mention of my name excised and would become more explicitly personal in scope. This potential shift has been one reason for my diminished posts: I've been unsure, in the mean time, of what I want to write here.

I have, however, in the intervening period, changed jobs. I enjoyed two and a half very happy years at Matrix Group, but the right opportunity came up and I accepted a position with PBS Interactive working for the Kids department. I'm primarily responsible for Raising Readers, a grant-funded section of PBS Kids that teaches reading skills to younger audiences and provides resources for parents and teachers. There have been many, many great things about starting at PBS (getting much better at Illustrator, learning Flash, gaining the most comfortable office chair ever), but one of the perks I can share with you has been the introduction to some videos that you should definitely check out:

• Waldorf and Statler sing "It was a Very Good Year".
• A corollary: Homer Simpson's version
• Fred Rogers defends funding for children's programming. "In 1969 the US Senate had a hearing on funding the newly developed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The proposed endowment was $20 million, but President Nixon wanted it cut in half because of the spending going on in the Vietnam War. This is an video clip of the exchange between Mr. Rogers and Senator Pastore, head of the hearing. Senator Pastore starts out very abrasive and by the time Mr. Rogers is done talking, Senator Pastore’s inner child has heard Mr. Rogers and agreed with him."

This last video came up because a bunch of us were watching a Jimmy Kimmel video that bleeped words from PBS clips to make them seem inappropriate. We laughed, up 'til they did Mr. Rogers, at which point my coworkers said seriously, "Some things are sacred." I was impressed: I tend to trust people who take Mr. Rogers seriously. I still remember HB remarking on at least two occasions about how worthwhile it is to talk seriously to children in that way.

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Review written at Amanda's request:

X-Files: I Want to Believe, directed by Chris Carter. 3/5 monads. I can only give X-Files one more monad than I gave The Dark Knight, but the difference in emotional tenor between the two experiences could not be more pronounced. Part of this is that, at some level, I feel like judging them differently: the X-Files is television, even if seen on the silver screen. This second X-Files movie acts like it knows that, content to let its characters have particular moments within the contexts of broader lives and worlds that it has no burden to explore within this particular film. Frankly, this is one of the nicest things about the movie: it feels small and modest in scope, an approach that allows certain kinds of excellence that are otherwise impossible. It also just changed the way I sat: instead of clenching my arm-rest trying to survive the onslaught of action and themes, I got to sit back and look carefully at skies, rooms, and faces.

The story, if it had been an episode, wouldn't have been one of my favorites: I enjoy the fantastic more than I enjoy the crime-thrillers, and this one comes grislier than anything previously seen on the show. It asks traditional questions about belief in a particularly TV-ish (that is to say: generally unsophisticated) way. Carter has a troop of modern issues he feels like roping together into the story: stem-cell research, homosexual marriage, priestly pedophilia. Happily, he relies on some classics, too: the story heavily involves evil Russians.

Continue reading “X-Files: I Want to Believe” »

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The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan. 2/5 monads. In the many months since I've seen Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (which he also co-wrote with his brother), the details of the movie have been quick to fade, leaving only some of the central plot contrivances lingering in my memory. They are (and I will not name them for fear of spoiling surprises) so surprising and interesting that it's difficult to imagine a movie founded on them going awry. Yet the Nolans' script and Christopher Nolan's perplexingly inelegant visual storytelling coupled with his ability to wrest startlingly poor performances from good actors (Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson) pulled off the impossible, turning The Prestige into a muddled, maddening destruction of a great idea.

My friend Katherine made similar observations about Batman Begins, a movie that I found flawed but very likable. I agreed, at the time, with her criticisms, but appreciated the merits of the approach too much to be very bothered. Sadly, even if there are grounds for defending Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is an exercise in exaggerating all the faults Katherine described.

Continue reading “The Dark Knight” »

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I've been meaning to respond in depth to the food thread from April, and today won't be the day I do so. But, given the release of a study most have probably seen about the effectiveness of certain types of diets and a little calling out by one Joseph Method (can't link, his Twitter is protected), I will offer up this helpful interpretation of the news that a low-carbohydrate diet appears to be more effective than a low-fat diet when it comes to weight loss. Link.

One of the most amazing aspects of the study is that the low-carb diet was the only one that wasn’t calorie-restricted, yet it caused the most weight loss. People in the low-carb group naturally reduced their calorie intake over the course of the study, ending up with an intake similar to the AHA group.

The low-carb diet also came out on top in most of the markers of health they examined. It caused the largest drop in HbA1c, a measure of average blood glucose level. It caused the largest drop in C-reactive protein, a measure of inflammation (the Mediterranean diet also did well). And finally, it caused the biggest improvement in the triglyceride:HDL ratio. This ratio is the best blood lipid predictor of heart disease risk I’m aware of in modern Western populations. The lower, the better.

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