Author: brian

Austin City Limits are go!

Sunscreen applied, 24oz Bud Light in souveneir cozy underway… Time
to get our rock on.

Smells like heaven! I love Austin right now…

things done or left to do this week:

— watch the poll numbers reverse course as mccain lies circles around himself, and all the things he’s stood for the last 25 years (massive deregulation, corporate interests) prove to be direct causes for the current economic disaster. congrats, fiscal conservatives, you had your big chance and you blew it big time!
— prepare for vacation, which pretty much involves daydreaming about barbeque for every meal.
— pick up some new cds (i’m thinking okkervil river for sure, probably the ra ra riot album) for the plane ride.
— finish one book so i can write a combo book/movie review of choke and bring a fresh one on the trip.
— revel in the huge USC football victory vs ohio state, be sad there is no game this weekend.
— try to fight the overwhelming urge to buy rock band 2, out now, until at least after vacation. (have you seen the set list? it’s gonna be so sweeeeeet).
— mourn the probable loss of my work computer to a crash taking out all the files i’ve accumulated in the past 6 years, save for the assortment of ones stored on servers or hopefully in coworker’s files. funny, i was just thinking of doing a back-up last week, and should have probably followed up on that intuition.

looks like i’m even deeper into the cult of apple now. no regrets. at least not yet.

not that it’s news or anything, but this is one slick piece of technology. we’ll see in a week or two of field-testing if it’s super handy, just a flashy phone, or causes me to start acting like a douchebag.

i am totally addicted the the white house race right now. so much that, as much as it pained me to do so, i’ve watched all the prime time republican speeches out of fairness, just to see what they had to say.

i have to say, wednesday’s palin speech rubbed me entirely the wrong way with all its vitriol and hard-right pandering, but at least it went smoothly and seemed to be a hit with the people in the convention hall. but last night’s mccain speech was a little embarrassing to watch.

the first thing i caught was the sad sign someone held up reading ‘THE MAVRICK’, which was too bad for that person but pretty hilarious to see on national television. i mean, anyone can make a spelling mistake, but come on, it’s only one word, and this is not the time to be sloppy, republican guy.

then there was that big sprawling green lawn on the video screen behind mccain for a large part of the beginning of his speech. i tried to guess its significance but had no idea what it was until this morning. apparently, it was supposed to be walter reed medical center for US veterans. which i guess makes sense since mccain is so proud of his military service (despite the fact that he didn’t show up to vote on the new GI bill for current service members).

but again, a little mistake was hilariously appropriate. apparently the image was the wrong one, and is actually of walter reed middle school in north hollywood, california. oops! this one’s a little less forgivable to me. someone within the campaign had to prepare those images. and if the people working for him are that careless, and no one that knows any better is overseeing details like this, do we really trust his appointees to make good decisions down the line? it’s not just embarrassing but it shows some pretty weak control of your team.

and of course, my preoccupation extends to hopping on the internet to read all about the reactions, as well as religious watching of the daily show coverage. this clip sums up so perfectly the spin machine of the conservative talking heads, everyone voting should take a moment to consider it before listening to these people ever again.

one road trip: gangbuster success. we left friday morning last, and once in san francisco managed to drink beers almost nonstop during waking hours through sunday night. we did step out briefly on friday for burgers and to go to a bar for a while, but saturday and sunday we let the party come to us. football game and and hanging out all day saturday, bbq and beer pong all day sunday. all the buddies just having a good time. it was uneventful and at the same time, amazing. more weekends like that, i say.

other road trip: cancelled! or at least delayed. yes, after months of trying to wrangle our friends into the RV trip to austin, we had enough people realize they couldn’t afford it or get the time off, that now the rest of us that were still committed had to finally call it off. it was within reason when we had six or seven people splitting the bill (and the driving duties), but once we got down to four or five, it just didn’t make sense any more. so no grand canyon for me this month. don’t worry, we’ll just be flying to austin to hang out and eat bbq and go to the festival.

but don’t worry: the dream will live on! perhaps a shorter, less pricey, less time-intensive RV party bus just to vegas and the grand canyon to come in the spring? don’t count us out yet, it’s still a great idea in the making. we’ll see if we can get more brave souls to join up next year.

roooad triiiiip!

heading up to SF this weekend for labor day with ol’ roomie mike. six dudes from LA, ted down from seattle and dom in from chicago, all crashing at mike’s place. should be mad shenanigans happening all weekend. not to mention the first USC football game of the season. oh man, good stuff ahead.

preparations are also underway for the epic september road trip to austin; hopefully we don’t get any more people dropping out and have to downgrade from RV to car for budget reasons. that would kind of defeat the whole purpose. if anyone out there wants in, there’s still time! rush into your boss’s office right now and say you need the week of the 22nd off work so you can go on a rock and roll road trip. or just come for the journey and skip the music festival, i don’t care. i just want that RV to be packed full of fun for the week leading up to austin. vegas! grand canyon! albuquerque? who knows!?

oh and a fun new piece over at under culture if you haven’t been in a while. i like the ones where i get to complain a bit more; it’s easier to write in jokes when you’re angry than when you’re trying to praise something.

i cringe every time i see a campaign ad full of platitudes that amount to ‘i want to make the country more better than my opponent, who is wrong about everything’. even the debates are recycled quips engineered to sound the best when quoted.

i was talking to justin at lunch the other day that in the future, there should be a ban on any politician or political interest group buying media of any kind. it doesn’t inform, only obscure the debate with accusations and obfuscations. it’s kind of disgusting. ideally they would only be able to give detailed interviews, release full-fledged position papers with all the ins and outs of their opposing policies, and it would be the job of the news media to analyze, talk to experts, and present a fair picture of the differences.

so thank god for the occasional truly in-depth piece we get this election cycle, without having to wait for that ideal future, like this one from the NY times:

how obama reconciles dueling views on the economy

it’s really long but should be the kind of thing required reading for intelligent voting purposes. it goes into history, nuances, influences, opinions from academics, and detailed comparisons from neutral parties. its analytical instead of praising or damning, relying on, imagine that, facts and figures instead of passionate pleas. here’s the bit that really got me excited, because in all my following of the campaign, even i had not had a position explained this plainly to me yet anywhere else:

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

…

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

It’s hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it’s also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled.

imagine that, spelling out details for people to judge on their own merits? it’s crazy, but it just might work.

i’d love to see another piece that focuses more on mccain, and then similar reporting specific to things like health care, foreign policy, national security, and on and on. maybe we can get people to vote for the best ideas this time around instead of the best drinking buddy.

i watch the daily show every single day it’s on. i never miss an episode. so on weeks like this, where they have the week off, there’s a little hole in my day. i miss the blunt disbelief at the ridiculousness of current events from smart, funny people.

i think my new substitute may be keith olbermann though. it’s not as jokey, but dammit if this guy isn’t a straight shooter with fire in his belly. watch him take on mccain’s speech to a veterans’ convention and all the double-talk and pettiness he’s been dealing lately.

ntz ntz ntz… listening to a soulwax remixes compilation at the moment courtesy of james, and looking forward to going out to do some dancing tonight at PYT. it’s a beat-thumping sort of friday.

this week so far, some reading and writing and whatnot. stayed home tuesday to bring the car in for a brake job and got to hang with jessica all day fresh back from her work trip. her friend joy, who we stayed with in tokyo, was in town that night so we got some roscoe’s, which i haven’t been to in years i think, and went to see pineapple express. good movie, maybe not as classic as superbad or 40 year old virgin, but still a good time.

the one thing i have not been doing is watching the olympics. i did catch a tivo’d viewing of the opening ceremony, which was super impressive. although am i the only one who saw their massive display of coordinated movements at least a little bit as a ‘fear us, we are a well-oiled, massive machine that cannot be stopped’ type of demonstration? or that thought their image of a globe with chinese people running all over every part of it was maybe their vision of the future?

the competitions themselves though i have basically no interest in. it’d be good to know our basketball stars are the biggest stars in the world for a reason, and not just marketing, but otherwise, i’ve always felt exactly how chuck klosterman describes feeling in this article:

I do not hate the Olympics; I just don’t like them at all. For as long as I can remember, the Olympics have been completely and utterly unmoving. This is ironic, inasmuch as we’re all about to spend the next VII weeks being reminded of how emotive and heart-wrenching and dramatic these games are going to be. This is not something I need to hear, particularly since the only thing the Olympics ever do is reinforce my dislike for a particular kind of American: people who like the home team simply because the home team is, in fact, the home team.

so yes, i am impressed that one dude can break a ton of records and earn a bunch of gold medals in the process. that’s pushing the bounds of human achievement — assuming he qualifies as human and not part dolphin or something. but do i want to watch men perform pommel horse routines? not especially. especially if they’re going to lose to an ascendant china intent on world domination… come on guys, keep them at bay!