Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

It’s been about 24 hours since we installed the new version of the Wordpress blogging software on our main Irregular Times page, and at first, everything was working great. Right now, however, I’ve got steam coming out of my ears trying to work with the software.

There are out-of-memory errors popping up everywhere, making administration of the site, and sometimes even just viewing it, a difficult task. It just took us 30 minutes to get up a simple article, as the new WordPress 2.5 software kept stripping out tags, reassigning categories, giving the name of the wrong author, and even making the title of the article blank.

WordPress 2.5 looks to be full of errors that dramatically cripple the operation of a previously healthy blog.

Avoid this update, bloggers, until WordPress comes out with a fix.

Me Ooma! Ooma car crash in ditch go fire! Ooma sit repair shop watch talky talky.

Ooma stop talky soft computer man! Ooma change channel go Spike TV. Ooma watch World’s Most Amazing Videos.

Ooma like man smash rocks. Spike TV man smash rocks. Spike TV man drive snowmobiles on water in winter. Spike TV man go zoom! Spike TV man burn fuel go fast. Spike TV man punch wimpy man eye pop on floor.

Ooma go home Spike TV eat mastodon blood pudding.

I’ve just finished reading the first 100 pages of The Golden Compass. No spoilers in this review of those pages - you should discover the book for yourself.

I will tell you, however, that if you’re letting some ratty old email church lady email keep you from reading the book, you’re missing one hell of a treat. It’s a great read, with lots of action, really interesting characters, great settings, and rich language.

I have not seen one single “militant atheist” line in the book so far. I am seeing a lot of undercurrents of struggles against social class hierarchies and sexism, as well as xenophobia, however.

If the film is half as good as the book, you’ll really be missing out if you decide to stay home and sing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” instead.

That’s your choice to live in an impoverished literary world, all centered around one jealous book, letting other people tell you what to think, I guess.

I’m not trying to tell you what to think. I’m just suggesting that you let the Fox News commentaries take a back seat in your mind for a minute, and read the first hundred pages of the book to see what it’s all about yourself.

Get ready, folks! The Golden Compass is almost here!

The movie, which looks to be an absolutely stunning fantasy, will be released on December 7, 2007 - just a couple of weeks. Of course, I’m just judging that opinion on the trailer and secondary items I’ve read. I have not yet been able to get my hands on the book - stuck in the house with Thanksgiving guests and all that.

So, I’d like to hear from people who have read the book, The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. In the United Kingdom, it’s entitled Northern Lights.

What did you think of the book, and what do you think we can expect of the film?

Dattaswami’s latest bout of religious diarrhea gives me pause, since his is a cut-and-paste job, one that bullies space away from other writers without even being especially thoughtful. It says a lot that Dattaswami has chosen to demonstrate such negative character traits in the name of the true religion for which he claims to hold swami status.

There’s a contrast between what Dattaswami has done and what others have done using the diary system. Rather than cede the stage to this fakir’s song and dance, I thought I’d take the opportunity today to express appreciation to some diaries and diarists whose efforts I really appreciate. Perhaps I haven’t taken enough time to express that appreciation before now; now is the perfect time to do so.

The first diarist I’d like to single out for appreciation is Red Dave, whose ongoing Iraq Body Count series is a daily effort to keep count of what many people would like to forget — the toll of dead and injured in Iraq. Thanks, Red Dave, for ringing a reminder out loudly and persistently. His latest post, the Iraq Body count for October 25, 2007, is here.

The TV show The Sopranos is over, and media critics are having a festival of whining about how cheated they are out of a meaningful ending to the series.

I don’t get it. How could there be a meaningful ending to a TV series that had no meaning in the first place?

I can understand if you watched The Sopranos for one season, if you had nothing better to do, but after that first season, what was the point?

Ooh, the main character was a mobster… like in hundreds of other TV shows and movies. Ooh, he does bad things… like thousands of other TV and movie characters.

Okay, the mobster saw a therapist. That had enough interest to carry a single one-hour show - kind of like Analyze This, but without the jokes.

What was left after that? Mob goons battling for control of turf. Miscellaneous, not very remarkable personal issues.

I saw a few of the shows, sure - enough to see that there wasn’t really that much there. The only people who would keep on watching The Sopranos after the first season are the kind of people who get addicted to television, and are just desperate for something to watch because they don’t have anything to do.

The Sopranos is over. Yawn. Turn off the televison now, okay?

Flipping around through the world associated with Irregular Times, I found a new corner today - Progressive Bumper Sticker. It’s a web site that is what it sounds like, but is more than what you might think.

It’s not just a catalog of progressive bumper stickers. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to be quite that yet - not enough entries.

Besides, the bumper stickers are from all over the web - different systems like Zazzle and CafePress, and different stores within those systems.

The idea of the web site is interesting to me. They don’t just put in a link to a progressive bumper sticker. They discuss the concepts behind the bumper sticker design.

It’s kind of like reading the cards of text on the wall next to the paintings in an art museum, except there seems to be a lot more relevance to these ideas, as they overtly political, and overtly progressive… or, well, liberal, as I would describe it.

It’s not a big sweeping site purporting to unite the masses behind a new movement of enlightenment and liberty and super genius charismatic leadership, though Progressive Bumper Sticker does good in its own way. It’s just a web site that looks at an unexplored niche, and tells what it sees. Simple.

Vroom, vroom.

I know it’s hopelessly out of my age and gender group, but I just don’t care. I loved watching the CBC’s production of Anne of Green Gables last night. That’s Anne with an “e.” How comforting to know that in these trying times, with a little bit of pluck and a fair number of freckles we can find that bosom friend. I found it to be the perfect childish retreat for a world that is increasingly intolerant of innocence.

Are there any other closet Anne of Green Gables fans out there? Or am I alone in my admiration of the corny and sweet?

“We almost got killed back there!”
“No, honey. it was just a close call.”

This may change tomorrow, but right now Twister is my favorite bad movie. It’s full of doozies like this, either messed up by the writing or messed up by the delivery: “He’s not in it for the science. He’s in it for the money!”

What’s your favorite bad movie, and why?

Lately I’ve taken to reading turn of the century literature (Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, etc.) and I’m quite proud of myself, to be frankly honest. The kids of stories such as those that I just listed above are often hard to read for most people, such as my father, because of how the dialect and sentence structure has changed in the last one hundred years or so. Myself, I can read them and enjoy them.

But one common thing I’ve noticed in almost all of the stories is that, if these stories can be taken as an indicator of how people were back then, I’m honestly surprised that the human race survived from all the damn fainting that’s in them. Currently, I’m reading Dracula and thus far I have counted a minimum of around seven people fainting or coming close to it. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I had read, a woman (Watson’s future wife) fainted after hearing that Holmes and Watson were shot at.

In these stories people faint over things which, in this day and age, would merit a pair of wide eyes. And the cure-all for a faint or near faint? BRANDY! I wonder, did it ever occur that people might have been fainting because they were loaded up on the brandy as a cure for nearly fainting? Like I said, I’m surprised the human race survived all the fainting. I’m pretty sure more than a few people must’ve cracked their heads open after hearing about that really bad hangnail Mary got that evening.

One of the problems I have with the novel Dracula isn’t so much the fainting, but more how Bram Stoker, when referring to a child, would use either the words “child” or “it” rather than “the boy,” “the girl,” “he,” or “she.” Is that how kids were viewed to Mr. Stoker? As an “It”?

Other than that, these are good books, which I shall have to return to. I just wanted to do a mini-rant.

~ Damen

I was looking around on the Apple Quicktime video site today, and came across an album entitled, My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

Albums these days tend to have titles that boil down to babble. Lyrics too. It’s as if the musicians know that the songs need a human voice, but don’t really have much to say, just a bunch of chords and notes that sound cool together, so they create the equivalent of lorem ipsum.

The sad thing is that the music itself from My Brightest Diamond wasn’t really that interested. It just kind of wandered around, never getting any place.

Yet, here’s how the musician described the meaning of the album: “Reconciling all the complex emotions found in each of us.” Reconciling ALL the complex emotions found in each of us?!? Nothing could do that, except if the sun exploded and ended all life on Earth. This phrase represents the ultimate in pretense.

It reminded me of a review of Bob Dylan’s new album that I heard a few days ago on NPR. The reviewer seemed to think that the album was a work of genius, with wonderful music combined with poetic lyrics. I was interested. Then, they played a song from the album. The music was boring and unoriginal, and the lyrics were superficial, without much meaning.

If the music hadn’t been produced by Bob Dylan, nobody would bother to give it a second look. There’s too much in the music industry these days of the worshipping of legends, babbling praise without consideration for the real value of what’s being said.

A few days ago, someone came on here and left a diary consisting of nothing more than a piece of hokey poetry sent around as a chain email. The message was one designed to elicit unconditional support for soldiers sent over to other countries to fight and kill people.

It bothered me to think that, for many Americans, the preferred method of dealing with foreigners seems to be to invade their countries and kill them. American xenophobia isn’t expressed just in terms of war, but also in terms of this year’s push to make English the only official language of the United States - as if there is something inherently menacing in a foreign language.

I thought back to a song that I heard a long time ago, performed back in 1991 by Raffi to a crowd of children. Remember 1991, when people had hope for the world, and there was the promise of the Peace Dividend to deliver us from the Republicans’ debts?

Well, this song was pretty simple, consisting of the simple declaration of the names of children from different countries. The point was simple too - human beings from different cultures and countries have the fundamental things in common, and we ought to try to understand each other instead of being afraid of our mutual foreign identities. It’s a simple message that has, sadly, largely been lost.

I’d like to hear a lot more of this song. Here are the lyrics:

Janet lives in England
Pierre lives in France
Bonnie lives in Canada
Ahmed lives in Egypt
Moshe lives in Israel
Bruce lives in Australia

Ching lives in China
Olga lives in Russia
Ingrid lives in Germany
Gita lives in India
Pablo lives in Spain
Jose lives in Columbia.

And each one is much like another
A child of a mother and a father
A very special son or daughter
A lot like me and you.

Koji lives in Japan
Nina lives in Chile
Farida lives in Pakistan
Zocha lives in Poland
Manuel lives in Brazil
Maria lives in Italy.

Kofi lives in Ghana
Rahim lives in Iran
Rosa lives in Paraguay
Najee lives in Kenya
Dimitri lives in Greece
Sue lives in America.

And each one is much like another
A child of a mother and a father
A very special son or daughter
A lot like me and you.

I was walking through the video store in my town today, when I wandered into the video game section, something I don’t usually do, as I don’t have a video game player and don’t have time to play games even if I had one. Yet, my eye was caught by the box for a particular game: The DaVinci Code video game.

I don’t get it. How can the DaVinci Code be a video game? How do you play? Race around Paris, looking at landmarks and competing against other players to see who can come up with the most elaborate, and yet implausible, interpretations for their characteristics?

The Arc de Triomphe… I know it… The ARC stands for Association Revolutionaire Crucifixe, which was a French secret society that worked in the shadows of perfume factories for centuries to disguise the fact that John the Baptist was really the Buddha’s great great grandson.

Fifty points!

Yesterday morning, J. Clifford offered up a bit of a comparison of MySpace with TagWorld - and TagWorld came out on top.

It looks as if J. Clifford is trying to set up a political space for progressives on TagWorld, a way for grassroots people to get together and get organized in a funky space. One of his ideas is to start a page there where people can view progressive-themed videos.

That’s an awesome idea, I think, and I really like one of the videos that he put up over there. It’s one of a song called War All the Time by the group Thursday. Thursday’s sound kind of reminds me of a New Jersey version of The Cure. Well, kinda. The lyrics to the song go like this:

Standing on the edge of the palisades cliffs

In the shadow of the skyline very far away

A lightning rod that couldn’t pull the storm from me

I was 5 years old my best friends older brother died

He fell from these cliffs

The river washed him away the current pulled him downstream

And our lives float in the headlines, so we parked these cars

Parent’s garage

Listen to the lullaby

Of Carbon Monoxide

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

The sun doesn’t rise

We replaced it with an h-bomb explosion

A painted jail cell of blood in the sky like Three Mile Island

Nightmares on TV they used to sing us to sleep

They burn on and on like an oil field

Or a memory of what it felt like

To burn on and on and not just fade away

All those nights in the basement the kids are still screaming

On and on and on and on

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

And we’re blowing in the wind

We don’t know where to land

So we kiss like little kids

We used to be very tall buildings

We’ve been falling for so long

Now your eyes follow the sign on the edge of town

They offer a welcome when you are leaving

War all of the time

In the shadow of the New York skyline

We grew up too fast falling apart

Like the ashes of American flags

The pieces fall it’s like a last day parade

And the fires in our streets start to rage,

so wave, to the people that long to wave back,

from the fabric of a flag that sang “love all of the time”

War all the time