• When the poll worker reached to hand me my ballot, at first I thought it must be one of those instructional posters…I was not prepared for how enormously large it was!  It felt like Voting for Dummies or something; as we were getting coffee later, Eric and I joked that all we needed were big crayons to grip in our whole fists to complete the kindergarten feel.

  But, mightn’t it be a good idea to either make the ballots smaller or the voting booths larger? And maybe tie down the pens? I’m just sayin’…

• At least the pens gave me an opportunity that I’d for too long passed up:  the write-in candidate.  However, I used it mostly as a protest, writing in NONE for all of the judgeships and other races (why the hell do I need to vote for board members on the Water Reclamation District anyway???) where the candidates were unopposed.
• For the first time in my voting career, I essentially passed on a top-line race, Illinois Governor in this case.  (Well, technically I voted for NONE, but really that was just to prevent the scanner from kicking out my ballot as having an undervote.)  My thoughts were
  • I just can’t in good conscience be an enabler and vote for Blagojevich. At worst, his administration is slimy and headed for a couple years in federal courts. At best, he’s a Democratic hack and populist grandstander who never made the proper transition from the demagoguery of the U.S. House to the more nuanced role of chief executive. At least his questionable competence and distracting controversies haven’t run the state government into the ground.
  • I just can’t bring myself to vote for Topinka either. Sure, she’s done a good job as Treasurer and would arguably make a more competent executive. Yet, she’d bring back to positions of influence people and a party who’ve been a disaster for this country for the last several years. Besides, as governor she’d be severely hamstrung by the Democratic grip on the General Assembly and other constitutional officers.
  • Green Party candidate Rich Whitney, or write-in Constitution Party candidate Randy Stufflebeam? I briefly wavered in my opposition to minor-party candidates, but got over it. Even if a sudden shift in the body politic swept one into office, then what? With no political allies anywhere in Springfield outside his own office, either one would find himself even more marginalized than would Topinka. How does four years of railing against the system, even from the governor’s chair, help out Illinois? At best a vote for Whitney might bring the Greens over 10% and shake up the next round of elections a bit, but I think I should vote for the candidate and not the second- or third-order effects of his candidacy.
  
  So, in the end, NONE was my choice for governor: I really didn’t care whether the governor’s chair was empty or not, I don’t think it will make a whole lot of difference.
• Well, it looks like the Dems can flex some muscle in the U.S. House for the next two years. Congressional oversight again? It will be interesting to watch over the first couple months of 2007. The Dems would be justified in turning the tables and ramming a couple things through as a bit of payback, but they would be wise to limit such tactics to a couple bills that would enact amendments they tried to attach to things during the past few months–items that may still have support among moderates. After that, they should recognize the even split of the country and try to restore a spirit of bipartisan statesmanship that has been sorely lacking over the last dozen years.

At least until things start ramping up for the February 2007 municipal elections, alas…

But this has got to top them all. Gapers Block says it best:

ThisBe Madness, Yet There is Method In’t
Dov Weinstein performs the Bard’s most famous play at breakneck speed with the help of a hundred plastic ninjas, a robot, and other assorted dime-store figurines. Weinstein’s ingenious staging is hilarious, if not exactly enlightening. Catch Tiny Ninja Hamlet through October 18th at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

C’mon. Hamlet. With tiny ninjas!  And a robot!   Okay, maybe it’s not Hamlet backwards in 60 seconds, but I still gotta see this troupe sometime.

(And maybe another Greek tragedy with sock puppets too.)

Anyway, as the Dusty Death March finally stood a day away from resolution there was yet another flurry of activity with Andy MacPhail’s announcement of his resignation, resulting in an hour of press questions for MacPhail, iterim prez John McDonnough, and Tribune Co. chariman Dennis Fitzsimmons. As I listened to the talk it dawned on me that the great Corporate Cubs Canard–the suits see fans in the seats win or lose, so they don’t care about winning since it might cost more money–was about to dominate the local sports news for a few days, especially since the management reins were being handed, at least temporarily, to the team’s (successful) VP of marketing.

A quick look at the papers this morning of course proved me right. Yet it just exasperates me, the argument is just so fricking ridiculous, especially when spewed from the mouths and keyboards of people who claim to understand both the business and on-field aspects of the sport.

Okay, I will concede that Tribune Co. isn’t going to feel a particular urgency to single out one of its assets for special attention, especially when it seems to be generating steady revenue year-in and year-out. Perhaps the general corporate short-term attitude has also crept into the Cubs’ front-office mentality and is preventing them from properly constructing longer-term plans to rebuild the whole organization. But in the 25 seasons of Tribune ownership the team has won three divisions, one wild-card berth, and twice been within a couple innings of the World Series. That’s a vast improvement over the previous 35 seasons under the stewardship of the Wrigley family, which makes it hard to argue that the ‘corprate mentality’ has hurt the team on the field.

Yet what I find utterly ridiculous about the notion that Tribune management is deliberately constructing mediocre-to-bad teams, and emphasizing Wrigley’s party atmosphere, over on-field success is the notion that a successful team is inherently less profitable than a bad one. Certainly, success leads to higher player salaries…but it also generates more interest, resulting in more prime-time playoff appearances (read: higher advertizing revenues) and the ability to bump up next season’s ticket prices. Yes, Connie Mack said that a team that gets off to a fast start, generates lots of interest, and then ultimately finishes fourth is nicely profitable because the money is taken in but management can hold the line on player salaries–but the key element is still some measure of success.

Moreover, did anyone pay attention to the buzz around Wrigleyville in the fall of 2003? The ringing of cash registers at souvenir stands well into November? The throngs of ticket-seekers on a cold February morning in 2004? Do people really think that cold, corporate calculation in Tribune Tower feels that the revenue potential of putting the Cubs–the long-standing doormats of the National League–into a sustained run of prime-time battles deep into the World Series would be lower than that of just running the world’s largest beer garden?

If those corporate suits were so smart and calculating as the armchair owners seem to think they are, here’s a more likely scenario for maximizing the profit potential. They would build up the team to the point where it would consistently take all three playoff series to the limit, thus maximizing the profit of each by playing all possible games whose net reciepts don’t need to be shared with the players. They would make the team just good enough to reach the 7th game but perhaps not good enough to win it, thus keeping everyone (players and fans alike) hungry while justifying both ticket-price increases and some dampening of players’ raises. They’d keep this up for several seasons, culminating in a World Series victory–after which the team would quickly be sold: the team’s valuation would be at a lofty premium, and Bill Veeck knew long ago that you don’t make money by operating a baseball team but rather by selling it.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there is a TribCo beancounter with a cost-benefit spreadsheet showing that the risks involved with such a scenario are too high compared with the current steady revenue stream. But, as in most human endeavors, it is probably incorrect to attribute the lack of success to calculated malice when it can just as easily be explained by incompetence and bad luck. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a goat’s curse probably has a lot more power, and longer life, than any corporate business model.

The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

SEFORA

Bill of Rights for Scientists and Engineers

Who knows whether this will go anywhere, seeing as government officials and members of th public are already inclined to ignore the advice of the National Academy of Sciences—supposedly composed of our nation’s best scientists–from time to time on important issues.  But it’s nice to see a useful agenda laid out so clearly.

I found it interesting that our neighborhood seemed like such an urban oasis at the end of each day; it was something that went beyond the usual relief of finishing a workday. Liz sometimes laments that we seem so far away–no doubt, this neighborhood lacks the buzz of Lakeview. Yet, as quiet, residential, and lacking in the cultural amentities (read: lots of nearby bars, restaurants, and shops) as our street is, to me it feels distinct from the ’suburbs’ for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. It’s something more than just the green light poles and our determination to not be suburbanites. As I gazed out the living-room window today in that half-relaxation, half-procrastination reverie that so often pervades a Sunday afternoon, I saw a clue that solved the puzzle at least somewhat.

A mature horse chestnut tree.

Now it’s not only cliche but somewhat unfair to disparage the suburbs for the saplings and adolescent trees that demark new and recent developments, as that distinction will fade with time. Yet the maples and horse chestnuts that line our street mostly have two-foot-wide trunks and are taller than the two-story bungalows, which indicates that the area has had time for the natural comings and goings of the residents to establish a dynamic. These trees are set in front lawns that seamlessly merge from one to the next, forming a common space that neighbors mow without regard to property lines and the local kids use as one big play area. These trees line a street that is less dense with cars than our old area of two- and three-flats yet still requires careful navigation since it predates the dominance of the car culture. These trees stand in front of houses that are generally similar in appearance due to their era of construction yet are all subtly different in their brickwork and dormers and such. These trees are wayposts for walks to restaurants and shops that are fewer in number and farther away than we had in Lakeview yet still exist as unique institutions.

Contrast this with what I witnessed on this week’s suburuban jaunts. The suburbs are filled with similar-looking houses on lots designed to exude a sense of ‘my property’ (and still will be when the trees mature), placed on streets designed to maximize convenience for vehicles. Each morning many denizens of the suburbs climb into their cars, drive down industrial-sized roads and highways lined with strip malls and chain restaurants that repeat every few miles to reach gleaming–yet jarringly quiet–commercial parks that look almost identical to the ones by the next interchange. Almost everything about all of that just screams out separation and commoditization: people giving over their lives to mass-produced houses and offices and meals and culture, spending great amounts of time isolated within cars and fences. Almost everything has been built to the purpose of minimizing costs and maximizing repeatability.

Our new neighborhood shares with the suburbs a focus on the residential life, no doubt; we’re still learning the dynamics, and perhaps the extra effort required to take advantage of the North Side/Downtown culture will lead us to spend more and more time inside our property lines. Yet this area exudes a sense of distinctive place that is still sorely lacking in much of the sprawl that lies beyond the city limits; the eight miles that separate Norwood Park from Lakeview seems to hold more variation and personality than the 22 miles of bad road from here to Downers Grove. A quick look at the tree in our front yard is a reminder that no developer can simply create that urban personality from scratch, and being part of it may be worth the cost of fewer square feet or a bit more on the mortgage payment.

Yet, I wish the IAU had done a little more of this behind closed doors, announcing the final decision rather than the dramatic, back-and-forth of ‘yes, we think it is’ followed by ‘nah, never mind, it isn’t’ just a few days later. Granted, this is how science works: discussion, debate, and often decisions based on less than clear-cut criteria. However, many in the public expect that scientists have definitive answers–indeed, that a clear definition of planet had never been established was news enough to many people! This expectation is perhaps unjustified, but I’m mildly fearful that this recent squabble may muddy the waters and give further ammunition to those anti-scientific groups who already are showing a distressing amount of influence.

Hopefully it will all blow over. Besides, many will continue to look for Pluto, Ceres, and other dots in the sky no matter how the IAU decides to classify them.

Reading list

We certainly got our money’s worth. Cubs-Cards is always a festive experience, and this one had not only plenty of action–nine runs on 18 hits means a goodly amount of activity yet not quite a boring slugfest of sloppy pitching–but an extra inning to boot. Big Z was a bit shaky for the first two innings, but got out of major jams to turn in a very impressive seven innings. Too bad the bullpen couldn’t hang on to a one-run lead…twice. Yet, that did set up perhaps the most spectacular combination of play and situation that I’ve ever personally witnessed: Juan Pierre going back on a Pujols drive, checking the wall, checking the ball and backtracking further, checking the wall again, and finally leaping into the ivy with exquisite precision to snag the ball just under the basket–turning a game-breaking, bases-loaded double into a long, loud third out. The stunned buzz of ‘did I really just see that?’ was palpable; too bad the play came for a Cubs team that has been reduced to merely the role of spoiler. At least that play plus Nevin’s game-winning single an inning later kept Z’s outing from being in vain.

However, my mood quickly turned to annoyance (not difficult at 7am on a Thursday) when, instead of a useful weather report, I was switched to a press conference from Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzalez. Okay, fine, raising the alert level, instituting tigher policies, and telling the public the reasons why was perfectly fine…but then it degenerated into an irritating spew of self-serving puffery and fearmongering. It’s one thing to specify what actions various agencies are taking to address the situation, but it’s unnecessary to repeatedly mention that it’s the Bush administration acting to keep us safe. Giving credit to the investigators who discovered and foiled the plot is good, and while the nature of the plot certainly warranted American involvement it seems a bit presumptive for DHS to take much credit for British agents rounding up British nationals on Britsh soil to disrupt a activity to be instigated from a British airport. Finally, given the nightly news and events stretching back the last, I dunno, 25 years or so, it is really unnecessary for department heads to lecture us on how there are Islamic radicals out there who dislike us and want to cause us ruin; that was pretty well-established on Sept. 10, 2001–9/11 didn’t Change Everything in that regard, it’s not news.

Yet the nadir of my mood happened just a few moments later, for in the time it took to turn of the radio and walk downstairs, my mind wheeled to two thoughts in rapid succession: how much will the Republicans try to turn this into a rallying point for their election drive? can Democrats effectively parry with ‘why are we still dallying in an Iraq misadventure when the real threats to our national security are elsewhere’? Yeah, I’m a cynic, but the ease with which my thoughts moved in that direction almost made me feel the need to go back up and take a shower again. Sad, it took all of 25 minutes on a dreary weekday morning to show what a nasty, screwed up state our public affairs are in.

(Of course, it didn’t take long for the first question to be answered. Or the second.)

Reading list
Notable quotes

I suppose the reporter and editors thought it might be a nice cautionary tale to remind people that the internet really is a public place where people who you’d rather not have your information can readily find it. That’s fine…but this one quickly degenerates into a mess of ‘wha?’

First off: did the incident really rate signficant police involvement?

Second: isn’t taking the kid’s phone pushing the limits a bit?

Third:  was this such a dastardly crime that it required extensive police work to hunt down and nab this fugitive from justice?  I suppose that’s a good sign that the campus is a nice safe place, but I wonder if the extra $195 in fines was really worth the use of time and resources.

Finally, what a doozy:

Gartner, a U. of I. junior studying crop sciences, admits he lied but said he was shocked to learn that he was booked by Facebook.”I had no idea that old people were wise to Facebook. I thought they referred to it as a doohickey that kids play with,” he said. “I got bone-crushed.”

Truly, the next great criminal mastermind.   ‘Doohickey’?  ‘Bone-crushed’?  Way to make the old alma mater, a true bastion of higher learning, seem like a haven for hicks!  Further, when I was in college–which was still my late teens–as much as I may have felt there was a cultural/generational gap from the powers that be, I don’t recall ever thinking of University officials or police officers as ‘old people’; moreover, I certainly don’t think I ever thought they were somehow incapable of understanding something like the world wide web (which was vastly more unknown to the wider public at the time!).

Ugh!  Someone please tell me I’m objectively entitled to gripe about such things and not simply getting old…

Anyway, for all the intrigue, there’s one broader element that I haven’t seen anyone pick up yet. Several places have pointed out this little item

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.” (Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack)

He believes man and dinosaurs inhabited the earth together and has offered a $250,000 reward to anyone who can offer him satisfactory proof of evolution.

In both these examples, the obvious bit of astonishment is the ability of such people to look at the available information and claim that ’science’ is unable to provide anything to ‘back up’ its claims. If you don’t like the consequences of a theory and want to hold out to see if your pet theory can be vindicated later, fine, but I can’t begin to comprehend what sort of twisted understanding of science and evidence is required to look at what’s currently available and simply dismiss it as completely basis.

Yet an even sadder aspect occurred to me. The two people described here have proven to be relatively successful and productive, so in general they would seem to have a basic grasp of how to analyze the world. So it would seem that perhaps it’s not that they can’t understand the more usual meanings of science and evidence, it’s that they are refusing to believe what’s currently available; I highly doubt there is any evidence from theory or the fossil record that would provide any sort of ’satisfactory proof’ that it’s not just a bedtime story. (Maybe an elixr that extends the human lifespan into the millions of years, combined with a time machine??) That would seem to me highly hypocritical, as they’re trying to used some debased form of the other side’s argument while simultaneously refusing to honestly enter the debate. Their arguments stem from a rock-solid faith that they have The Answer, so why is it so difficult to openly admit to us (and themselves) that they see absolutely no point in bothering to debate any further or brook any deviation from their ideas? Perhaps they’re afraid to look arrogant or backwards, but shouldn’t such issues of perception be irrelevent given the absolute correctness of their positions?

Reading list
Notable quotes

Well, at long last I’ve started to whittle down that TODO list that seemed to grow ever longer after moving into the house.   More importantly, I think I’ve managed to piece together a method for taming the even longer list of links that I’ve bookmarked in various ways in the hope of making some pithy commentary.  Trying to pull something to write about from a huge list (300+ by the time I got around to it over the weekend) of potential ideas was daunting enough, made even worse by the challenge of easily pulling all that HTML together.  I have hope that things should be easier, both for quick swipes at the world’s goings-on and for broader musings…at least for a while.  Maybe putting it in words and slapping it on the internets will make it true.

Those readers who just tune in to see what news and thoughts cross my consciousness can stop reading now.  Techie stuff below.

No, really.  You’ve been warned.

Actually, my solution is fairly straightforward (and perhaps almost obvious) for a good chunk of blogistan.  To wit:

1. Use Flock to a) tag pages, b) save newsfeed articles, and c) save Web Snippets
2. Cron up a perl script to pull the last day’s bookmarked feeds from del.icio.us and append them to an open, unpublished entry in Flock’s blog directory
3. Review entries, decide upon amazing commentary
4. Post!
5. Wrangle too-long lists of links by tagging them appropriately in del.icio.us and simply appending a link to that tag in the post
6. Shove off too-long lists of intriguing quotes into WordPress pages, again linked back to the main post

It took me a while to figure out the best way to handle (2) and (3) because they seem to fall into a gaping holes in the technology.  That the del.icio.us API has a crappy way to pull down a list of links by date range & filter, while having a modicum of control over the formatting, was understandable when it was just one guy–but c’mon, they’ve been part of the Yahoo! behemoth for months now, I think they can spare a couple days of developer time to fix that.  Moreover, the blogging protocols still seem to have trouble with the concept that someone might want to post something from a remote tool but not actually release said post to the world without a little more time to review and edit.  Fix those two little gaps, and the blogging toolkit is much more to the liking of people like me who prefer to not only age my words but filter out some of the more mundane links that end up in my bookmarks (truly, many of them really are only going to be interesting to me).

Of course, this is all theoretical since I have yet to actually post anything according to this finely crafted formula.  But at least I have a documented plan…

Always sad to see a great player traded, especially one who genuinely seemed to like the team and fans, but such is pro sports.  It’s not like the Cubs are going anywhere this year, and unlike the fiasco during his first exit in 1992 this time his leaving would appear to be helping the team for the future.

I noted while watching the game on Saturday that the fans gave him two ovations, one for a perfectly executed sacrifice bunt in the sixth and then a larger one (prompting the cap tip) as he walked off the mound as Baker relieved him one batter into the seventh.  They paid homage to not only his skills and execution in that game, but also that they were seeing a Hall-of-Famer leave the field in Cubbie pinstripes for what was quite possibly the final time.

Hence, the Wrigley crowd exhibited an understanding of 1) how the game is supposed to be played, 2) its history and a particular player’s place therein, and 3) the business realities of the sport.  Not bad for a bunch of yuppies who know nothing of baseball and just go to that ballpark for the beer and sunshine, no?

Somewhat ironically, when we decided to stop by Julius Meinl on our way back from Steppenwolf on Saturday, I couldn’t bring myself to park in the 383 zone, even though Liz pointed out that we still had the sticker and enforcement of expired stickers never begins before July 15.  Still, it felt better to go find a spot (relatively easily, as it turns out) over in the LV2 zone:  I benefitted from the 383 restrictions for five years, so I understand how important it is to keep the ‘unentitled’ vehicles out of the way.

Add that to the fact we bought city stickers even though we have a garage, and some might find me daft.  But $75 per car per year isn’t much; call me silly, but I like having Streets & San have enough funds to provide municipal services.  We deliberately stayed in the city, so I think a little civic duty to keep it running and orderly is proper.

But can we reset the sticker rollover date to something like October 1?  Scraping those things off in the heat of summer is just no fun!

Blogged with Flock

Like The Pain and the Itch, The Unmentionables is a squirm-in-your-seat examination of people’s views of themselves, and particularly their views of themselves, when faced with life in the real world. While the performances were again good–Amy Morton is memorable as the loquacious, well-meaning, but forever sidetracked Nancy, a part Liz pointed out must have been fun to play–this show was mildly disappointing as its narrative wasn’t particularly tight. Providing less of a plot and more of a situation certainly allowed the freedom to explore a fairly broad theme–do our motivations and principles really drive our actions, or are the former more often created to rationalize the latter?–but it also resulted in a bit more drift and opportuntity for events that seemed to me, if not non sequiturs, at least a bit gratuitous. ‘The Doctor’ is the perhaps the most intriguing character, for he seems to be the only one to accept, in a Zen/Taoist sort of way, that life is messy and the best one can do is help where possible but not fret when changing the world–especially by tomorrow–is beyond one’s capabilities.

Interestingly, our seeing of this show came a week after viewing The Constant Gardener and a day before watching Brokeback Mountain, so I think we’ve pretty much covered the themes of not only western attempts to Do Good in Africa but also wrestling with conflicts between one’s desires/conscience and the pragmatic realities of living in a society that may not value them. Maybe our next movie should be something lighter, more escapist…

Blogged with Flock

• The UK is certainly trusting of their vistors: the immigration form requires only name, nationality, passport info, and local address–a far cry from the more paranoid forms presented by the US and Australia. And the ‘nothing to declare’ lane off the baggage claim area didn’t even have any personnel making cursory checks of arriving passengers!
• I came all this way to see a billboard for the Dixie Chicks? At least the next one was of a stern-looking cricketer.
• Yards and miles on the roadsigns, square feet on the ‘Office space for rent’ signs. I guess the U.S. isn’t quite so backward as I thought.
• Even after midnight, with no traffic, the narrow and windy streets made it obvious why some measure was needed to reduce congestion. Good thing they don’t get Chicago-style winter snowstorms here, they’d never be able to get the snowplows through!
• The similarities between the old parts of Sydney and central London are striking. If it were just the layout and street names it would be one thing, but even the road signage and transportation logos are nearly identical!
• Streets that continually change direction slightly are one thing, and the lack of a standard numbering grid is another, but by far the most perplexing thing about navigating the City is that the name of a street seems to change every block or two. The Pulaski-Crawford discontintuities are trivial in comparison!
• The Sun is noticeably lower in the sky at midday, but at least the Moon wasn’t upside down. Odd to be in bright twilight at 9:45pm.
• In response to a track problem, a sign in Liverpool St. Station indicates that railroad engineers are said to be ‘in attendance’. Wouldn’t it be better if they were fixing it instead?
• Certainly, city planning was a concept far in the future when most of the streets of central London attained their present configurations, but the seemingly haphazard arrangement of streets and architectural styles is truly jarring for a Chicago native.

Finally…pictures are here.