First, my blogging performance. Work is taking nearly every waking moment, and will continue to do so through Monday. It stinks.
Second: Glenn Beck, as noted by Mike Boyer via Cyrus. I happened to catch Beck’s exchange with representative-elect Keith Ellison while I was at the gym the other day, and it was pretty disgusting. As quoted by Boyer, here’s how Beck started off the interview with Ellison, who is our country’s first Muslim congressman:

OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I’ve been to mosques. I really don’t believe that Islam is a religion of evil…. With that being said, you are a Democrat … what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

If my memory’s right, Boyer’s ellipses are a little unfair. Beck prefaced his comments by pointing out that Ellison favors a “cut and run” strategy in Iraq. So this ridiculousness was at least in part motivated by Ellison daring to have opinions about foreign policy that differ from those of a learned cable news anchor — it wasn’t entirely about Ellison’s religion. Still, there’s no denying that Beck was saying to a democratically-elected representative: the burden of proof is upon you to prove that you’re not a traitor. Go! It was kind of astounding.

Well, I’ve been trying. My attempts to find new music usually come in fits and starts — Pitchfork’s best new music section is generally pretty reliable, but sometimes they spend months and months in genres that I’m not interested in (or my RSS subscription to the section breaks which l, uh, just discovered it had). When that happens it’s time to hit up the music blogs and take some shots in the dark.

I did that, and I grabbed the new Decemberists, too. Unfortunately, the results were kind of disappointing. It could be that I just need to give these albums a few more listens. Or my unfavorable impression may have been due to my fancy-pants earphones being in the shop for service yet again (yes, I’m a snob), leaving me to listen through muddy $10 wraparounds that I bought at CVS out of desperation. Whatever the reason, the following failed to adequately whelm me:

Pony Up! – Make Love To The Judges With Your Eyes

Inspired by this cliptip post, I gave this band a try. They’ve got the songs but not the production. The album sounds like a well-made demo tape — there’s a lot of potential, but the execution is uninspired. All they really need is a pro in the studio, forcing them to play through each composition like it’s going to be the last pop song before the world ends. I’ll check in next album (or maybe next tour).

The Decemberists – The Crane Wife

Colin Meloy’s epic ornithophiliac triptych gets off to a rockin’ start. But it drags, it’s pretentiously out-of-order (and that’s in addition to the Decemberists’ normal baseline of pretension), and what’s up with combining parts one and two into a single track? Do the Decemberists really think they’re going to single-handedly turn the tide against the ipodification of their industry? Cause, uh, they won’t, regardless of how many Japanese birdfucking myths they reference. And given that, I’d prefer that they stop screwing up my meticulous playlist management.

Cold War Kids – Robbers and Cowards

To my ears these guys sort of sound like the Arctic Monkeys, except tired. Given that I’m not a big Arctic Monkeys fan, that’s enough to consign them to my ipod harddrive reclamation efforts. Also, I’m bothered by the fact that the first thing I ever read about this band was in the context of complaints that they were getting too much blog-buzz. Same thing with this meme. I think internet fads now occur at such a speed that they can only be observed as they destructively collide with boredom, sending particles of ennui and ascii skittering across a bubble chamber BoingBoing.

So that’s the current, sad state of my attempts at musical exploration. I can legitimately recommend the Annuals album, though (as Caralyn noted here). And hey, you haven’t worked all the way through this list yet, have you?

ALSO MUSICALLY RELATED!: Is that Rhett Miller singing the latest Chili’s commercial? A: Yes, yes it is.

John Hodgman and his dizzying psychedelic forest have come and gone, but the F.W. Thomas Performances continue on: tonight’s the sixth installment. I won’t be able to make it — I’m headed to Charlottesville for my mom’s birthday — but you should go. Unless you’re a member of my immediate family, of course, in which case: see you tonight.

Last weekend Sommer came up to Philadelphia to hang out with Emily and myself (okay, mostly Emily). That weekend remains undocumented, although I do have a blockbuster post about brains in jars planned (it was a good weekend).

This weekend it was Kriston and Kate’s turn, and we had a grand ol’ time, with lots drinking, eating, a competitive pie-off, and a visit to the Pabstiest Place On Earth (with special guests The Oldest Jazz Band Ever). It was great.

The weekend also featured the completion of a Philadelphian obligation that I had somehow, until now, escaped: cheesesteaks. Kate was attending the Mütter Museum with a friend, but on Saturday Emily, Kriston and I wended our way through the Italian market and on to the center of cheesesteak culture in Philadelphia (and therefore the universe).

Pat’s and Geno’s Steaks sit across the street from one another, and are by far the most famous purveyors of gristle and cheese in the city. Native Philadelphians don’t seem to like to admit loyalty to either — doing so would betray a lack of nuance, revealing the speaker as an unserious person who hadn’t considered the science and philosophy of cheesesteaks in a careful and dispassionate way. Needless to say, this quest for knowledge is deeply personal — tourists are not invited — so instead of giving you a straight answer they’ll generally just pick a family member’s name at random and pretend that it’s an actual steak-purveyor (“Yeah, those places are okay, but you’ve really got to have a steak from Uncle Joe’s”).

But Pat’s and Geno’s were the obvious entry points for cheesesteak philistines like ourselves. Besides, they were nearby. So that’s where we headed.

More »

I somehow missed it on Monday, but this week’s Late Night Shots roundup is just as good as I would’ve expected. Callow, mean and dumb: these are the worst people on earth that aren’t eligible for trial at the Hague.
I’m a little worried, though — Rusty’s resolve seems to be faltering. Be strong, comrade! And realize that these people were probably expecting you, and almost certainly said nasty things about you after you left. The devil will be pleasing in his appearance (the picture to the right notwithstanding).
Anyway, I’m sure that the LNS crowd has a full Wonkette crisis response initiated. I’ve no doubt that they’re superficially peeved, but secretly deeply, deeply satisfied. First: people paying attention! The board’s denizens must be glamorous and interesting after all. Second: the obvious response is to hatch secret conspiracies. This incursion by the outside world represents a chance to set up new, more exclusive inner circles, in a flurry of private-messaging between the idiot children of the American aristocracy. It’s an opportunity to purge the undesirables from the LNS boards — and you’ve gotta love a good purge. Let a thousand electronic Skull and Bones bloom!

Atrios notes that Tradesports completely failed to predict the outcome in the senate. In some ways, it’s unfair to use control of the senate to criticize the idea of non-financial futures markets. In this case, we’re talking about a very small range of possible outcomes and a situation that was genuinely hard to predict. All Tradesports said was that the Republicans were 70% likely to retain control. That probability has to collapse into reality at some point, and 30% is nothing to sneeze at. It just didn’t work out this time.
But I’m glad to crow about this failure, because I’ve been seeing more and more references to Tradesports on sites I read, and they’re almost always unilluminating — or they’re at least frustrating, since I have no idea who and how many participate in these markets. Apologies to my journalist friends — I realize that graphs from online futures markets are one of the greatest labor-saving devices to hit your profession since the invention of Lexis Nexis or Larry Sabato. But they’re still sort of boring-slash-infuriating.
As far as I can see, all that these markets get you is an honest effort on the part of their participants. Homerism and marketing within such systems become dramatically more expensive than such practices are elsewhere, which discourages dishonest behavior. That could certainly be useful when it comes to predicting sports outcomes or box office grosses or any number of other endeavors where prognosticators could have a motivation to deceive or insufficient motivation to carefully evaluate the problem.
But when it comes to things like terrorism or hurricanes, the futures market idea seems incoherent to me — unless you believe in its particular brand of magic (many open source enthusiasts are guilty of this, I should note, but they’re no less wrong to do so). Experts in these rarified fields are presumably already doing their best to make objective predictions based upon all the data they can find: there are career-related mechanisms in place to encourage them to do so. Adding more voices and weighting them by cash on hand seems unlikely to be as useful as listening to and evaluating the justifications behind each voice’s prediction.
Basically, I don’t see how you can divorce the qualifications of the contributor from the valuation placed upon his or her opinion. A desire to make money may be enough to qualify someone to predict how the Wizards are going to do, but I don’t really see how it could help me figure out when a hurricane is going to make landfall.
Admittedly, political outcomes seem more suited to the idea… but not in this case! So yeah: get bent, futures markets. Arguments make for more interesting reading than market graphs ever will.

Which, okay, great. I would’ve liked to leave open the possibility of making my wallpaper a screencap of him being led out of the pentagon in handcuffs, but I’ll settle for simply getting someone competent in there.
But Spencer: please, PLEASE be wrong about this. I am slightly worried that Spencer’s gone into some sort of clairvoyant fugue state, though.
UPDATE: Phew! Looks like it’ll be Robert Gates instead. My expert analysis: he’s not currently a U.S. senator. Good!

Well, things are winding down. The candidates have gone to bed, nobody’s releasing new election results, and all that’s really left is for someone to unplug the Chris Matthewsbot and drape him with his protective dust cover. I’m pretty optimistic about my home state’s chances of banishing George Allen and his pathetically small lizardbrain to the wilds of the Commonwealth (or California — it’s time to reconnect with your roots, George). But the senate is just barely, tantalizingly, within reach. I won’t jinx it. I’m not optimistic. But I’m hopeful.
I’m just catching up with all of the election-watching now, I’m afraid. I went to go see Broken Social Scene with Catherine, so most of my election updates came via text message and anxious web browsing on my sidekick (good job on mobile accessibility, CNN.com!).
The band was pretty good, overall. When they resisted the temptation to succumb to jam-band awfulness, they were great: “Ibi Dreams Of Pavement” and a countrified version of “Major Label Debut” were both genuinely fantastic. “It’s All Gonna Break” was pretty good too, although trying to make a song that’s so sprawlingly enormous and of-the-moment even bigger and more spontaneous rendered it just a little silly. Still, I love horn-induced catharsis.
On the other hand, the untitled, minutes-long batch of noodling before IAGB — when a guitarist stubbornly tried to create feedback that didn’t want to come and a bass player tried out his new guitar to no one’s amusement but his own — that shit was simply infuriating. I was walking out when they stopped and started playing “It’s All Gonna Break” — that made me turn around. But I was genuinely disgusted: $33 should buy you something better than a jam session. I’ve sat through a Disco Biscuits show before (it’s a long story), and by god I’m not going to do it again. I wasn’t disappointed with the show, but I didn’t stick around for an encore.
UPDATE: I almost forgot! Also on stage was DC’s own Brendan Canty, fulfilling the terms of his plea agreement (namely, that he participate in every musical project, anywhere, forever). Woooo DC!

I’m about to head off to vote, but before I do, one additional thought on the election — and this one has almost nothing to do with helicopters.
This robocalling business? It’s going to get much, much worse. Frankly, I’m a little bit surprised that the NRCC is so obviously to blame for these sleazy tactics. The technology necessary to make automated calls is now within the grasp of any hobbyist:

1. Download Asterisk (it’s free). Installation is pretty simple by opensource standards, but if it’s still too daunting, there are liveCDs available.
2. Set up an outbound account with a cheap bulk-termination provider — this is what lets you turn internet traffic from your installation of Asterisk into actual phone calls on the public switched telephone network. Minimum buy-in for these services is usually around $15. Credit can be purchased with a VISA giftcard or, in many cases, with PayPal. I haven’t tried buying this sort of thing anonymously, but, having gone through the process legitimately several times, I don’t see what would stop you. Outbound calls cost around 1.3 cents/minute and turnaround on new accounts is usually instantaneous.
3. Get some phone numbers to call. I’m sure there are databases you can buy, but you could also just randomly generate numbers with the right area code.
4. Record a disenfranchising message. Maybe you warn that back taxes or delinquent parking tickets will be collected at the polling place. Or maybe you direct voters to a new, nonexistent polling place. It’s not hard — it just takes a little bit of imagination and a computer with a microphone.
5. Write a dial plan that dials a number and plays your message. Write a script to autolaunch this dialplan over and over, working through your list of numbers. This takes a little bit of know-how, but is well within the reach of anyone who can get an A or a B in CS101. It’d take 20 lines of code, tops.
6. Run your nefarious scheme. Using a purloined wifi connection might be tricky — you generally have to open up ports on the router to let the VoIP traffic go through properly. But if you drive around looking for access points named “linksys” you’ll probably be able to find a few with the default administrative password unchanged. Go in, open up the ports and you’re all set — you can run your robodialer from a laptop plugged into your car’s cigarette lighter.

It’s all pretty easy. And it’s only going to get easier over the next two years.
Now, consumer bandwidth isn’t up to NRCC levels of malfeasance. But you should at least be able to make a few dozen phone calls simultaneously over a broadband connection. And since these calls don’t have to be very long, you could easily chew through thousands of voters over the course of the time window when your tactic is likely to be both effective and immune to press coverage. Get a few wackos doing this and you might actually be able to affect turnout. For municipal elections it would probably be very easy to have an effect without getting caught.
So am I worried about this? Maybe a little. But there’s no going back, and the big boys are already misbehaving — I don’t particularly mind if the process gets democratized. I suspect that it’ll soon become common wisdom that you ought to ignore your phone during the week before an election. Sure, it’d be nice to see the FCC take action. But they’re awfully busy with indecency complaints, broadcast flags and bungled cableCARD/HDTV transitions. I’m afraid we’re going to have to muddle through this ourselves.

Wow. The past seven days have been pretty hectic — so much so that I’m a little shocked to see that it’s been a week since I posted something here. Weird. Even more troubling, I haven’t even been able to play with my new toy (I’m referring to the microcontroller).
Well, hopefully it’ll calm down a bit. Election day is a good, decisive marking point. My subconscious thinks so, anyway: I’ve been having election dreams.
It’s pretty unusual for me. I don’t dream very often — not in a way that’s coherent enough to remember, at least. But these were vivid and occurred in quicker succession than I’m used to.
The first one involved the deaths of both Charles‘ mom and Sommer. Although tragic, details remain fuzzy about the fate of the former. But I can say with confidence that Sommer died in a horrific rocket attack (delivered via helicopter) on a George Allen rally. What was she doing there? I’ll leave it to Sommer to explain herself.
The second dream was a bit weirder. I was in an airport departure lounge, getting ready to be shipped off to Iraq with a number of friends, Starship-Troopers-style. Only we weren’t going to fight enormous insectoid aliens, or even Iraqis. Instead we were being sent as media grunts, drafted against our will to report fluff pieces with a pro-America spin. More specifically, we were all divvied up to produce television segments on the different member nations in the so-called Coalition of the Willing. I got Eritrea, which is not actually a part of the aforementioned coalition. I was understandably worried about finding an angle for my reports.
Both dreams were weirdly affecting. I woke up from the first one despairing, genuinely unsure of whether the narrative’s victims were alive or not. I woke up from the second one furious (although this was admittedly more because of some frustrating in-dream boarding pass problems I’d had with security than because I was being forced to sugarcoat a monstrously immoral war — that part was dandy).
Now, I’m no expert at dream interpretation. It’s possible that my subconscious is actually more preocuppied with helicopters and TV news than with the election. But having any sort of political backdrop to my unwaking escapades is pretty weird, particularly given their rarity.
So, for what little it’s worth: I suspect we’ll only get four seats in the senate. Because the universe is unjust, and it seems likely to me that at least one race will be swung by a last-minute helicopter attack.