unwiredben

Our debate watching skills and eagerness to be brief pundits earned Annelies and me a brief moment on a German internet news site, zoomer.de.  We're the first of many Pacific Standard bar patrons to be interviewed.  You can't really hear my voice, so I hope the translation is correct.  Yes, I wish I actually looked at the camera when I talked; it looks like I'm rolling my eyes the entire time when I really was looking at the face of the interviewer.  Annelies did much better with that.

Here's a link to the automatically translated version of the page courtesy of Google, although they don't seem to grab the comments so I can't tell what people are saying about us.

By the way, the bar we were at is called Pacific Standard.  They're about ten blocks down 4th Avenue from our apartment, and so far I find them to be pretty cool.  They've got team pub quizes on Sunday nights, and it looks like we're going to try to make a team with friends up here for their new season.  Any suggestions for team names?  When we went and played one night as a duo, we were SWxNE (Southwest by Northeast), but I don't think that moniker is long for the world.

People keep comparing Barak Obama with John F. Kennedy. Does that mean he a telepathic sex-expert robot? See the (not quite safe-for-work) video History Lesson #1 on SuperDeluxe.com and decide for yourself.

Short version: mostly closely matched with John Edwards, and Barak Obama. Matched least with Ron Paul and Fred Thompson (big surprise!). I edited it to remove candidates that have already withdrawn from the race (Tancredo, Dodd, and Biden).

91% John Edwards
91% Barack Obama
86% Hillary Clinton
85% Mike Gravel
83% Dennis Kucinich
78% Bill Richardson
43% Rudy Giuliani
29% John McCain
23% Mike Huckabee
22% Mitt Romney
19% Ron Paul
13% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I just did a writeup of the neighborhood meeting with state rep Mark Strama over at the Lone Star Democracy Builders website.  As always, I was quite impressed.  By the way, 9 days until the election.  Be sure to vote, wherever you happen to be.  If you're here in Austin, early voting has started and you can even do it on Sunday afternoon while you're running errands.

I just made a post over at Lone Star Democracy Builders with four videos that I shot this evening at the Keep Austin Blue meetup.  They are of speeches by several candidates in this November's election, including John Courage, Valinda Bolton, Lloyd Doggett, and gubernatorial contender Chris Bell.  I got over to Mother Egan's about 4:15PM and camped out inside with my laptop for a while before finding a good seat on the patio.  It was a hot afternoon, made even hotter by the crowd that gathered.  There were also several news cameras out covering Bell's remarks.  Bell came through much better on this visit than when I first saw him back in Summer 2005; a year of campaigning has done him well.  While he still trails far behind current governor Perry, the dynamics of the race seem to be helping him in these last few weeks, with him getting back a lot of Democratic support that had gone to Kinky Friedman.  I think ultimately the race will depend on how well Perry can get out his base and how Strayhorn's campaign manages the fight.  Paul Burka seems to think there's a chance Strayhorn might withdraw and endorse Bell, but I wouldn't count on that happening.

I just learned that the last REAL governor of Texas, Ann Richards, died today after a brief fight with throat cancer.  I'm really sad to hear of her passing.  I got to meet the former governor twice.  The last time was at a SXSW screening a couple of years ago, where she was attending as a friend of the filmmaker.  I got to shake her hand and tell her about the first time we met.

It was 1995.  I was still at Georgia Tech finishing my senior year, and I was flying through Texas on an interview trip.  I'd just spend a couple of days in Dallas with Texas Instruments, and I was waiting in DFW to board a plane to visit Austin for the first time.  I looked around the boarding lounge and I recognized Ms. Richards sitting, waiting for the same flight.  I walked over to her and said hello and introduced myself.  I told her that I enjoyed the commercial for Doritos that she did with Mario Cuomo.  She asked me what I was doing in Texas, and I told her that I was interviewing with TI in Dallas and Motorola in Austin, and she told me that I had to go to Austin, it's the prettiest and best part of the state.  Obviously, I took her advice.

I'm sad to see her go.  The last thing I saw her do was appear in the Alamo Drafthouse's promo earlier this year where the penalty for talking in the movie was having Ann Richards "take your ass out".  I loved that she had a great sense of humor about her, and I hope for her sake, we're able to make Texas a bit more blue this election season.

The news today about the arrests involving a plot to blow up US-bound airliners leaving from the UK has me a bit rattled.  It was just two weeks ago that I was on one of those flights, heading from Heathrow airport to Chicago.  The security at Heathrow wasn't too alarming; there were long lines to get through the screening area in terminal 3, but the process felt less intrusive than the scans I routinely get here in Austin.  I did get additional screening when I was at the gate to board the plane, but it only took about a minute.  I boarded the plane with two bottles of water and a backpack full of electronics and personal affects.  Based on the short-term "critical alert" rules, I wouldn't even have been allowed to take a book on with me for the flight back to the US, and all the stuff I bought in the duty-free area would have had to be checked somehow.  I really empathize with all the travellers who are caught in the middle of all of this.

Personally, I'm conflicted.  I'm very glad that they detected the plot, and I understand the need to have restrictions in the immediate aftermath.  However, I hope these don't stick around too long.  The new intra-US flight restrictions mean that I'm going to have to check my main bag on my next California trip which adds about a half hour to my travel time each way.  However, I think these restrictions can't hold long-term.  I would hope that the public disclosure of details of their plot would mean that we'll rely on passengers to be more aware of what's happening on the plane and feel that they can act to stop things that seem wrong.  I really like David Brin's writings on this subject, particularly this article for The Futurist.  Rather than trusting a faceless security authority with our safety, we need to take personal responsibility to notice when things are odd and to take action.  I really wonder that if this plot hadn't been detected, how many of the detonations would actually have been successful?  How many of the schemes would have been detected at the airports, and how many would have been thwarted in-air by passengers and flight attendants who notices suspicious behavior and did something about it.

While I've complained about jingoistic magnetic ribbons in the past, I finally found a ribbon that I can fully support.  As seen in downtown Austin on Saturday night on the back of a 4Runner-type vehicle....

About three weeks ago, I signed up to spend Saturday afternoon working as an election clerk.  The polling location was at the school across the street from my townhouse, and I'd be working with other people I'd met at the local Democratic Party precinct caucus.  It was a lot of fun; I got to say hello to lots of people and verify their voter registrations, and I contributed to a smoothly running election.  Today, I got my payroll check in the mail from Travis County for $49.50 for my efforts.  I've decided to spend it all in one place; I'm using the money to fund a membership in Common Cause, a non-partisan group that works to advocate campaign reform and open, ethical government.  I'll give money to campaigns again later this summer, but for now, I want to help a group that works to help the entire democratic system.

By the way, Travis County was "lucky" enough to have a monthly election somewhere in each of the first five months of the year: the special election for district 48 and its runoff, the primary and its runoff, and then the city/county elections.  No runoffs there, so most of us are safe until November.

I just got done watching the political nerd's version of the Oscars, the annual White House Press Correspondents' Dinner. This year's dinner was a combination of funny and awkward moments. One of the big things they covered is the renovation of the press area, and they showed a droll video tour of crowded news agency rooms with most of the press people poking light fun at themselves. There was also a montage of presidential funny moments that C-SPAN provided, including a slightly too long LBJ story with a great ending. The president's speech was funny, although most of the laughs were delivered by the Bush lookalike that represented his "inner thoughts". The jokes here tended to at the "Jay Leno"-level of political awareness -- if you know that Bush has trouble speaking at times and that Cheney shot a man, you could appreciate these.

The awkward moments were in Stephen Colbert's monologue, which borrowed heavily from material he's already used on his TV show. Colbert's brand of sarcastic irony seemed to fall flat with the press audience, and the material he did on how the gut is the ultimate determinant of the truth just didn't work outside of the cable show context. I did like it when Colbert flubbed a joke about Bush's approval rating and restarted it mid-punchline, doing an apparent ad-lib about the glass being 2/3rd empty. Colbert repeatedly asked for Bush's agreement, but the cut-aways to the President seemed to show a man who was trying very hard not to show disapproval. Colbert was much better later in his speech, and a joke about Washington D.C. being "the chocolate city with the white marshmallow center" gave me a belly laugh. I also appreciated the pretaped segment where Colbert tries out to be the new White House press secretary and succumbs to the wrath of Helen Thomas.

C-SPAN's showing a repeat later tonight, and it's likely there will be another airing soon. I also expect to see parts of it popping up on Google Video and YouTube within hours. It's worth checking out.

Update: Here's Colbert's speech on YouTube in three delicious parts, and here's a transcript for those of you who like your comedy all old-fashionly wordified.

Google Video of the Day just highlighted the short film "One Weekend a Month", and it's well worth watching. I saw this back in January at the Lunafest screening at the Alamo Drafthouse and it was one of my favorites. It's also got Austin native Renee O'Connor (from Xena) playing the lead role.

Earlier this evening, I went to my first Dionysium event, their April 2006 meeting at the Alamo Drafthouse South. The name is pronounced "die-oh-knee-see-um". This is a project of Salvage Vanguard Theater among others to do a monthly salon with presentations, debate, and theater. I went into the program with high hopes and left with some interesting experiences but also a little disappointment.

What went well? The opening piece was a screening of a short film, part of the East Austin Stories project. It was about Honduran teens who took political asylum in the US to escape their violent gang life in their home country, and it highlighted a program here in Austin that provides support for these kids. The RTF program at UT has been doing this project as part of their introductory documentary filmmaking classes for several semesters, and they will soon be turning these pieces into a video podcast.

I also really enjoyed Wayne Alan Brenner's telling of a personal story titled "Coming & Going" that he'd written for the 2000 Austin Chronicle "sex" issue. Wayne's a brave, brave man and a really funny storyteller, even though the content is probably more "Austin weird" than "highbrow salon".

What didn't work? The debate was the centerpiece of the evening, but I didn't think either debater provided an effective argument. The topic was "Resolved: That American military power can be neither effective nor justified in bringing about democracy in other societies." In the affirmative was Pat Youngblood of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, while taking the contrary view was Alan Blake, CEO of Yorktown Technologies. Pat argued that the US had a poor track record with military intervention, with many of our efforts pushing our own country's interest over the democratization of the rest of the world. However, he gave a lot of ground on the morality of military action to preserve human rights in the abstract, and he failed to show that it would be unjust and ineffective for the US to act if it really had the goal of bringing democracy to a troubled region. However, Alan's argument relied on an appeal to the Declaration of Independence and a recital of Japan and Germany as example of the US being effective in setting up democratic systems. When questioned, he usually dodged the meat of the question by saying we're dealing with abstractions. At the end of the speeches and audience interrogatory, a vote was held, and the resolution passed by a small margin, but I don't think the format adequately explored the deep issues involved in this question.

There also was a performance by the core group of Violet Crown Radio Players, doing the last act of their recent Molly McCoy aviatrix saga. The timing for this was a bit off; they'd done a much better job when I saw their show at the Hideout earlier this month. Better was the closing commercial, a pitch for the MoneyGo Vulcanizer, a rubber coating sprayer that can be used on furniture, pets, and children.

The evening was closed by everyone singing the Philosopher Drinking song from Monty Python. That was fun, and I did appreciate the musical interludes played on the organ by the talented Graham Reynolds. I think I'd attend again in the future, but I'll probably not make a big effort to get tickets unless the topic and speakers looked to be really interesting.

These two questions were the topics of the two PopTech! 2005 sessions that I heard earlier tonight.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's talk was about how prediction is so inaccurate, and that we do a very poor job in thinking about the future in two main areas: first, we overestimate how confident we should be about our predictions, and second, we tend to underestimate the effects of the unknowable and rare. It was a fascinating look at the limits of what we can say about our own future.

The second talk was the one that followed Taleb's at PopTech, a lecture by Robert Trivers about the role of deception in nature and psychology. He starts with simple arguments about how evolution fosters species to deceive each other, then how deception plays a role in communities of a single species, and finally how humanity has integrated it into our communities and cultures. Combined with this is a strong argument about the role deception played in the US's dealings with Iraq, leading up to the current war and occupation. This talk was chilling, but not entirely hopeless.

Both are recommended listening.

This evening, I walked across Brigadoon Lane to the elementary school and joined a dozen other Democrats in the Precinct 259 convention held after the primary election. It was fun; the precinct chair has been doing the job for over a decade and seems to have the drill down, but also is very personable and friendly. We started at 7:15 and immediately recessed until 7:45 to allow more time for people to join us. I volunteered to be the recording secretary for the meeting, so I got to fill in the boilerplate meeting minutes. This precinct had a lot of Democratic voters in the last gubernatorial election, so we get to send 24 delegates to the Travis County meeting on March 25th. That meant anyone there who wanted to go was elected to the team, and that was most of the room.

We also got to vote on a variety of proposed resolutions. My group was pretty liberal, so we voted in most of the proposed language. We skipped consideration of the two abortion-related issues; one had language that felt anti-choice, and the other didn't have enough common ground for the group. We also added a 13th resolution urging the Democratic Party to start impeachment hearings on a certain president and vice-president :)

Oh, I won a donkey. A stuffed plush donkey, to be exact. It was a door prize, and the other attendees moved to award me the toy to thank me for taking the minutes, and I couldn't really refuse. I'll have to find a use for it in my future political activities.

Literally, OMG. I saw this earlier today on X-Play, my favorite video game review/juvenile humor/political commentary show. Seriously, they did a whole episode devoted to balls that had a long Howard Zinn ("A People's History of the United States") reference in the middle of a review of Pac-Man World 3.

Here's the link to today's disturbing video:
X-Play presents "The Passion of the Christ 2: Judgement Day".

I'm about to head to sleep. So far, my first trip of the year has gone well. The 9:15 AM flight on Monday wasn't completely packed, so I had an empty seat next to me on the exit row. However, the couple sitting behind me also had two small kids, one who liked to kick the back of the seats, the other who liked to scream as we were landing.

On this trip, Hertz gave me a brand new red Toyota Matrix as my rental car. I really like this vehicle -- lots of room and nice styling. I'm not going to replace my Saturn anytime soon, but if I was in the market, I'd consider this, especially if there was a hybrid version.

Work has gone well; I was there late last night getting some bugs fixed, but I left today about 6:30 and had dinner with former Austinites Alex and Kathryn out at Frankie, Johnnie, and Luigi's, a cool Italian restaurant in Mountain View. I'm back at my hotel room now, and I'm pretty exhausted.

One final note: I'm very glad to see the strong support that Donna Howard got in today's HD48 special election. She almost hit 50%, and I think she's positioned very strong to win the runoff election, something that will put her in a strong position for the primary and general election. I heard her talk at Democracy for Texas, and I think she'll be a strong representative for west Travis County.

Sometimes, it just takes some angry flower re-contextualization to get at an issue in a fresh way. Take that, you yeti partisans!

I've been paying a bit of attention to carbon emissions this year, in part thanks to postings like this one from lizardprincess. The evidence of human-caused global warming is becoming overwhelming, and I'm afraid that I contribute to a bit of that activity through my air travel.

This morning, I was looking over the web to figure out how many tons of CO2 my flights (and the rest of my life) produce. I can't do a lot to reduce the amount of flying I do with my current job, but at least I can help pay for clean energy production that would offset those emissions by reducing emissions from other sources.

My first problem is actually doing the calculation. I used three different sites and get very different answers about how many tons of CO2 emissions would need to be offset. Native Energy has two different calculators on their site. On the "Offset your Travel" calculator, my airplane trips are producing about 10.2 tons. However, if you go to their Safe Climate calculator, it estimates that my travel emits about 31 tons a year. I expect some differences, but an order of three difference in the estimates seems suspect. Fortunately, the other calculators I saw seemed to agree with the 10 ton figure. I was helped by most of my flights being long-haul Austin-to-San Jose trips, rather than shorter trips like hops to Dallas or Houston.

Now that I have an idea of the carbon emissions from my travel, the next step is to figure out how to offset those emissions. Earlier this year, I bought a TerraPass sticker for my Saturn to offset its emissions. NativeEnergy sells memberships at levels to offset a certain number of tons, and their pricing is around $12/ton offset. Carbonfund.org, the provider chosen by Working Assets, is pricing their offsets around $10/ton. They both seem to be good programs, and it looks like it would be between $100-$140 for me to offset the emissions for my air travel. That seems like a reasonable price to pay, especially compared with the direct cost of all those trips.

You just can't get away from advertising. It seems like companies want to invade every inch of our lives with their commercial messages. Today, I saw the latest battlefield in this war for our attention.

I'd stopped at the Howard Lane Home Depot to get a replacement garbage disposal to replace the one that had burnt out a few months ago. When getting out of my car, I looked down and saw the Maytag logo. All of the stripes in this section of the parking lot had been covered by plastic strips hawking dryers and credit cards.

I wanted to get angry, but I just looked at it and felt depressed. I'm sure some ad creative noticed that people always look down after leaving their cars to see how well they parked, and they could grab that little bit of attention for a moment.

I've got one idea, but it requires too much cooperation to work. If you parked badly, you'd cover up one of those stripes with your car. Then, if everyone parked badly, they all would be covered and they wouldn't work. I don't think that idea's going to catch on, but the next time I see those, I might just find another parking lot, preferably in front of another store.