Exit Helms

I just heard that Jesse Helms has died at age 86. Throughout his whole career in the Senate he fought against civil rights, AIDS research, women's rights, foreign aid programs, government support of art and culture, and anything that represented tolerance and equality.

It's a mean-spirited thing for me to do, but I swore fifteen years ago that I would toast that self-righteous jerk the day I learned he passed on to the netherworld. And so this morning I raised a glass of the cheapest whiskey in the cabinet.

I hope that Senator Helms is resting in the peace, grace and equanimity that he worked so hard to deny to others.

Hostage rescue in Colombia

It's great news that the Colombian military was able to free those 15 hostages from a FARC hideout in the Amazon. The operation went off without any violence or injuries to either side, which is obviously the best case result anyone could ask for.

But I just heard today that the way the Colombian special forces were able to get the rebels to let them close to the hostages was by posing as aid workers that were supposedly bringing food and medicine.

I think that's a really bad and irresponsible idea, because it now casts suspicion on anyone who from now on will claim to belong to an international NGO, and it directly threatens the lives of aid workers around the world. What rebel group is going risk negotiating with the real aid orgs now?

It used to be a favorite tactic of CIA agents to pose as journalists in the field, until the CIA was forced to stop doing it in the 1970s because they were getting too many real journalists killed. I wish the Colombian military had behaved with the same restraint.

I'm glad the 15 Colombian hostages are free, but I have a bad feeling that this operation is going to end up killing a lot more than 15 people in the long run.

Bush Tours America to Survey Damage Caused by His Disastrous Presidency

OK, this is cheap and gratuitous but I had to do it...

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Seven months left and counting...

Sound of thunder

Dreamt I was walking through a huge library built like a cathedral. Old books and parchments stacked in narrow aisles on all sides. I could hear the voices of some girls speaking softly from somewhere nearby, but I couldn't make out what they were saying.

I wandered through a section of medeival illuminated books filled with religious iconography and bound in stamped leather. Then through a tack and sail-themed section filled with rolled up nautical charts and schematic drawings of sailing ships and old pre-Dreadnought armored cruisers from a hundred twenty years ago.

Then I entered a section of globes and atlases - rolled up parchments bound with ribbon or leather. I chose one dark, heavy parchment and unrolled it, revealing an incomplete, hand-painted map of the world that could have come from Drake's time. Only the western coastlines of North and South America were sketched in, and in the wide blank space of the Pacific, the words "Terra Incognita," and a large coiled sea dragon.

Another table-sized chart with ragged edges showed a number of small circles widely spaced from each other and connected by faint lines, the way Victor airways connect distant VORTAC beacons on an aviation chart. Ringing each circle were a series of dots, each circle with a different number of dots of varying size. Next to some of the circles was a hand-printed word, but the parchment was very old and the words were smudged. I was able to read only two of them - the words Deneb and Centauri.

I woke up to the sound of thunder.

Going Nowhere

Bad luck with events lately. I wanted to see Jeremy Scahill speak in Seattle on Thursday, but was too ill and exhausted after work to leave the house. Then I wanted to see Scott McClellan give a speech to promote his new book. The speech sold out (I didn't know we needed tickets). Tonight I'd planned to go see David Sedaris roll through town on his book tour - and that was sold out.

So now I'm sitting at home watching bad Roger Moore James Bond movies and hoping the Three Imaginary Girls tribute to Liz Phair doesn't sell out tomorrow before I get to it.

A lot of stuff cooking in Seattle but I guess you have to plan ahead...

Delta Safety Video

Hey this is totally unrelated to anything, but has anyone seen the new flight safety video Delta Airlines is using?

Holy fox... when that flight attendant says "Smoking is not allowed..." she just makes me wanna start smoking again. I guess that's irony.

Tim Russert

I was getting on the plane in Boston and did my usual email download to my phone, so I could do a disaster check offline while I was sitting on the plane. It almost knocked me off my feet when I saw an alert from the Washington Post that Tim Russert had just collapsed and died in the middle of taping a broadcast.

The years I was living in Denmark, Tim's voice from the Meet the Press podcast was one of the things that kept me in touch with what was happening in the States. Meet the Press was consistently more professional and insightful than any of the other interview programs, and was one of the few pieces of media that has always been on my weekly 'must hear' list.

Beyond that, I could just tell that Tim was a great guy, and when he was hard on his guests (which was always), he did it out of a love of politics and a sense of duty to the country.

His was a great mind and I'll miss him.

Stimulus

I got my economic stimulus check from the US Government this week... Two dollars! Two big beans!! You wonder why they bothered spending the resources to send it.

When the government came up with this plan of distributing tax rebate checks back to people as a way of encouraging consumer spending, economists had been worried that people were just going to save the money or pay off debt, rather than spend the checks.

Not me. I'm gonna go buy a cup of coffee.

Obama Claims Nomination

Congratulations to Obama for winning enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination. There's a lot more to say about the political situation, but for right now let me just sit here amazed and happy that America has progressed to this moment. It does feel like a new beginning. For the first time in a long while, I'm proud to be American.

Discovery launch

I had the TV on in the background, waiting for the Rules & Bylaws Committee to reconvene, when C-SPAN broke to the shuttle Discovery Launch at Cape Kennedy. I've been so busy lately I hadn't even realized there was going to be a shuttle launch today.

Perfect launch, and Discovery is on her way to the International Space Station. Those launches are always so nervewracking, given the history of the shuttle program. I always hold my breath till the moment the solid rocket boosters finally separate.

Godspeed, Discovery.

Hunt and Peck

Hopefully today's meeting of the Democratic party's Rules & Bylaws Committee will decide how many delegates from Florida and Michigan will be seated at the Convention. If Clinton doesn't get a very favorable ruling, it could effectively end her primary campaign.

Whichever way the decision falls, the most important result is that the committee process looks credible, so that both the Clinton and Obama camps can respect the ultimate decision and move on. If the thing is perceived as a circus, it could damage the legitimacy of the whole primary, which would hurt the nominee in the general election.

Well, I just spent most of the morning watching the first half of the committee meeting on C-SPAN, and it pretty much looks like a circus. Lots of shouting, cheering, booing makes for good television, but it doesn't really establish the process as sober and deliberate, much less legitimate.

Oh well, we've had two screwy presidential elections in a row, why not go for three?

80s moment of the week

I just got back from a boy's night out - we saw that Iron Man movie. Not bad if you want to lose a couple of hours and forget that you have to wake up and go to work in the morning. But the real fun was that we got there early and had a little time to kill. So Salim and I ducked into the video arcade attached to the theatre. I mentioned offhandedly how cool it would be if they still had the great old video games from the 80s lying around, like Galaxian and Galaga. And sure enough when I turned the corner they had a retro 80s console with Pac Man, Galaga and some other games on it.

Galaga used to be my game when I was a kid. I used to spend hours pumping quarters into those old machines honing my mad skillz. So I powered that thing up and blew past round thirty - scored more than 260,000 points. That would have been a very respectable game 25 years ago when I still had the reaction times of a 10-year-old. All the old reflexes came back, like muscle memory, and from some deep recess of my age-addled brain I could still anticipate the attack patterns that the bad guys used on each round. I couldn't believe it was happening - it felt as if the hand of the Divine was upon me.

I only wish I'd been surrounded by a pack of teenagers so I could show the little jerks what *old school* moves look like.

Palm Harbor Vice

Ha ha, this is funny - "Palm Harbor Vice" was a very low-budget comedy spoof of Miami Vice some friends of mine filmed fifteen years ago when we lived in Florida.

I played a counternarcotics detective from New York (ha ha) - you can see a couple of shots of me in this trailer - I'm the too-skinny kid wearing all black. Thanks for the memories Sara!

Ladytron

I've been devoted to Ladytron since they first appeared on the scene. They're one of the clearest and most talented voices of that post-rock, 80's electro-atavist sound that came out of the late 90s.

The 604 album was one of those albums that hit you at the perfect time, place and headspace (in my case, 1999 and San Francisco). For me it instantly became one of those "soundtrack of your life" albums that you have running in your head when you're doing other things. Every time I'm walking through some strange airport I've never seen before, I still feel like I have that track Playgirl running in the background, like film music.

Foreign coins in a telephone box...
A question mark on a calendar...
An empty seat on the Alpha Line...
A sorting code and account number...

Light and Magic was a deeper convolution of their clean early electro sound. And the aggressive yet still clinical, almost "Soviet" Witching Hour was an unexpected evolution that also became one of my favorite albums ever. They just kept getting better and better.

But it was killing me because I was always in the wrong city to see Ladytron live - when I was living in Copenhagen they missed the city on their European tours, and I'd always be on an assignment somewhere when they were playing someplace close like Berlin. When I was in the Netherlands for a class reunion in 2005 I missed their Amsterdam show by a week (I had to get back to work right after the reunion - grrr...). Finally, fed up, I booked a flight to New York to catch them when they played there - and it turned out the NYC date listed on their website was wrong! (And my ticket was nonrefundable - Not that I was complaining about a week in NYC, mind you).

So last night I finally caught Ladytron live after chasing them around the planet for almost ten years. I was ecstatic when they rocked the house with older tracks like Soft Power, Discotrax, and especially when they closed with Destroy Everything You Touch.

I'm listening to the new album Velocifero now, and it's... good. It's still the Ladytron sound but it doesn't have the energy or ingenuity of Witching Hour. Sure, I'll give it three and a half or four stars, all the while admitting that after the genius of their last three albums I've been spoiled rotten.

New York

Cec and I went back to New York for my cousin Aja's wedding. It was great to see the NYC branch of the family again - I'm out in space most of the time and need to be reminded where I come from. And we got a few days to enjoy the city, for which I'm always grateful.

Here are some pics.

Sometimes I just can't figure out why I'm not living in New York. I've never had time to make detailed plans before arriving - but there's so much cooking in NYC it's never been a problem to just stumble into some crazy fun. Last year we randomly ended up at the launch event for Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater book and ended up meeting Scahill and Amy Goodman (Goodman was one of the people who inspired me to become a journalist in the first place).

This time around, besides going to the wedding, we ended up front row at an off-Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which I'd never seen on stage before. And we missed out on a lecture about the history of Japanese lacquer because it filled up before we could reserve a couple of seats. That's what I love about New York - only in NYC would one even stumble into something so diverse (and obscure) as a class on ancient Japanese lacquer techniques. And only in New York would there be enough people interested in it to have the class sell out!

And there were the usual impressionistic touches that make New York special - the way people dress, the energy of the place, the food... listening to 1970's Brian Eno looking out into the midtown haze... picking up my jacket from a Japanese restaurant's coatcheck and hearing Boards of Canada's "Aquarius" in the hallways, of all things...

I wish I was loaded. I'd move to Manhattan in a second. But these days I guess you'd have to be very loaded indeed to live there. With the crashing dollar, New York is awash in foreign capital. So the housing prices that used to be merely obscene have shot up to, like, interplanetary levels. But I still love the city anyway.

New York

Heading off to New York for a few days - going to catch my cousin Aja's wedding in Queens and bum around Manhattan for a couple of days before & after. I've been insanely busy trying to close off work to the point that it was possible to get away, and now I realize I haven't really mentally prepared for the trip.

Not that New York needs a lot of prep work - the city's always on enough of a slow boil that you're bound to stumble into something weird and interesting if you keep your eyes open. I keep telling myself I'm going to move back there someday. But I don't want to do that right away - I have an intuition that if I go back, I won't ever leave again, and there are other places I want to see first.

2am wakeup call... Must start packing.

Reformists win Serbian election

"For European Serbia," the country's pro-Western, pro-European Union governing coalition just won yesterday's parliamentary election in a surprise upset, defeating the nationalist Serbian Radical Party.

Here's some inside context from Zorana, our hard-partying Serbia correspondent:

Yes it is super - but, they have tough negotiations ahead to form a government. They may have to form government with socialists (old Milosveic party), so it will be interesting to see what happens. But it is a great victory for Democtratic Party and Tadic and it seems the voters realized EU is the only way to go for Serbia, and that nationalists are losing the grip with voters. I am optimistic, but lets see how the government negotiations develop...

Noc Noc

Had a good conversation with Hannah yesterday, who's a director at CARE, the big NGO. She said I can knock off all the doom & gloom about the food crisis - and she should know.

There is a crisis in food prices right now but she said that was almost entirely because of energy costs being passed through the economy, and there's an acute supply shortage because of the biofuels policy. It's not, as I had feared, a leading indicator of a capacity crisis compared to world population & world consumption. We still have a little ways to go yet before we run into a global capacity shortage. So fair enough, I'll drop the Cassandra act for now.

Then she told me that she, Maggie & Jeannette from the Chicago scene were going to run out to a local industrial club and goth out for the night.

Grr... So I was moved to wander out in the night to Noc Noc, a local industrial place here in Seattle that I found out about at the Thrill Kill show. It was fun - typical goth club in that everyone knew each other - but people were friendly and the music was good, and I danced my tail off for four hours. A charitable use of a Saturday night.

Spent today in mellow-mode, catching up on mail, cooking & prepping for work tomorrow. Life is good.