I moved away from Massachusetts a little over three years ago. When I left, Eastern Massachusetts, by which I mean from Worcester in though I can remember a time when I felt like Worcester was deep in the contintental wastes of America, was a land of complaint and sorrow. The Patriots had never won a Superbowl and Red Sox had last won a world series in 1918. Perhaps, you were aware of this latter fact. Since then, things have changed.
They’re never going to let me come back.
You know that Hunter S. Thompson article I mentioned yesterday? In there he says that Bush is worse than Nixon.
That’s sort of like Ahab saying that Moby Dick wasn’t really that much of a whale.
Here it is, my secret life’s ambition that I share with no one, by which I mean anyone who’ll listen to me, I want to able to write like Hunter S. Thompson. See RollingStone.com: Politics – Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004 Tell the truth, even the ugly parts, especially the ugly parts. He may not be as on as he was back when he was writing about Nixon, but he’s certainly a lot more on than he’s been since before Clinton was president. with the single exception of his euology for Nixon. Which, for whatever reason, does not seem to be freely available on the web.
And its not the profanity or the ad hominem that I’m talking, it’s the honesty.
John Stewart pulled it off last week on his cross-fire appearance. (The link probably won’t work, but then you’ve probably see it already.)
And by “truth”, I mean speaking sentences intended to convey accurate information. Now, what accurate information means turns out to be what I spend my time trying to write about, which is a lot duller than pointing out that the rot in this administration is so bad that calling them liars doesn’t work, you have to be capable of acknowledging the truth in order to lie.
It also makes me part of the problem.
Since I’m bloggin Salon today anyway, I should note that what Ken Burns says in this article,
Salon.com Life | Curses!, is correct. It’s in the waking moment that I’m aware of being a Red Sox. And it was almost Christmas last year before that particular moment of the day stopped being rather unpleasant for me.
Nobody has ever accussed me of having too subtle or sophisticated a sense of humor. If I’m the only one laughing, people tend to describe the moment as “stupid”. Needless to say, I enjoy “South Park” andI enjoyed reading Heather Havrilesky’s interview with Trey Parker or Matt Stone, if for no other reason, the their great parting line: And it’s no big deal. If you don’t want to vote, you don’t have to. Fuck that vote or die shit. I hate that.
Reading that I was immediately struck by the guitar lick for a speed metal song entitle “vote or die”. Its a good thing I have absolutely no idea how to play the guitar or to otherwise express said guitar lick, so the dar thing is going to have to stay locked in my head forever. There’s no need for you to ever listen to it.
Emacs, AucTex, MikTeX, Aspell.
I got all the odd GNU stuff that I use working well on my new windows system in less than 2 days not the weeks that its taken me on previous installations. I can’t say that it Microsoft was responsible for this feat either. Did you know that they finally got rid of the autoexec.bat? It sure took them long enough. The funny thing is that they didn’t fix sysedit so that it would stop trying to open this now non-existent file. I had a moment of panic until Geoff clued me in. Not only couldn’t I set the HOME variable, but it sure looked like I had deleted a formerly important file.
Why am I posting this? Well, I’m pretty sure that no one’s reading this blog, so it makes a fine spot to pat myself on the back for this little achievement. It’s the sort of thing that seems pretty trivial to anyone who can understand it and arcane to everyone else.
Take a look at New York CiTay’s – Run-DMC: “It’s Tricky” and pay special attention to the second chorus. Where the English phrase “It’s tricky” repeats many times, the German translation uses
“Es ist knifflig (Was ist es, DMC?)
Es ist kompliziert
Es ist schwierig “, translating “tricky” three different ways.
The German translation adds nuance to the song, or at least semantic variety.
I find that odd.
