Why I'm voting for Obama

As much as the smart policy decisions, as much as the opportunity to make history, as much as the reshaping of America's image abroad, this small quote from Obama's speech claiming the Democratic Presidential nomination embodies why I think it is important that he be the person to represent The United States to the world:

What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Pork and Beans

I have to say, I was really ambivalent towards Weezer's upcoming "Red" album and its lead single, "Pork and Beans." That is until I saw the video for this said lead single. It's a very loving homage to oft-mocked internet celebreties and, upon a closer listen, a pretty darn good song on its own merits. I was disappointed with most all of Weezer's previous cd, Make Believe, and the horrible selection of singles from the songs available. But now I am actually looking forward to the "Red" album's release in June.

Crashing Waves

20080520 Crashing Waves, originally uploaded by BuddyCole.

More vacation fotos. This one was taken on one of several beachside strolls. The sand and the surf were both absolutely beatiful the whole time we were there.

Pelican's Roost

20080519 Pelican's Roost, originally uploaded by BuddyCole.

More vacation fotos. This one is for my soon-to-be sister-in-law Meghan who likes pelicans.

20080518 Crab

20080518 Crab, originally uploaded by BuddyCole.

I'm back from vacation. The beach was beautiful. All of the family made a genuine attempt to get along. It's the most politics-free week I've ever had. I shudder to think what misconceptions my family may have about me now, however. I challenged no statement or comment put forth by anyone during the entire week. And I fear, in some cases, that silence might imply consent when the truth was I just didn't want to start an argument. More on that later...

I had a great day. (A post in four parts)

Here’s why: A post in four parts.

1. I got to see Iron Man. Awesome summer-time comic book hero movie. And as pitch perfect Morton Downey Jr. is cast as billionaire, alcoholic, sexist, fascist Tony Stark, my favorite part is Gwyneth Paltrow. Sure, her character Pepper Pott’s constant pining for her boss is a little tired. But in the end, she saves his ass. Twice, technically. Plus, there’s loads of gadget geek stuff for me to, um, admire, and a great subplot/running joke involving S.H.I.E.L.D. that, in the (very, very) end makes me really anticipate (rather than merely expect) the eventual sequel (already booked into theaters for May 2008. Also, I’m not a man given to military fantasies. But I definitely could be if Terrence Howard continues to wear them.


2. I got T Bone Burnett’s new cd, Tooth Of Crime, a project based up on Sam Shepard’s play of the same name, and made with his collaboration, as well as that of Burnett’s ex, Sam Phillips (with whom he duets on “Dope Island” and turns over vocals completely to on "Blind Man”, and the late Roy Orbison. It is a truly great record. Dark and mysterious, this record has allegedly been in gestation for roughly 20 years. And a few shades, especially Burnett’s speak/sing vocal delivery in the opening track, “Anything I Say Can And Will Be Used Against You,” is highly reminiscent of his mid 80’s output, especially The Talking Animals. But it’s suffused though the voodoo swamp twang Burnett deployed so effectively on his previous full-length, 2006’s The True False Identity, and coupled with the industrial ambience he’s been juxtaposing with musical anachronisms almost as long as this record has been in production. What is not an anachronism, however, is the cd’s devastating critique of the politicization of fear, the commercialization of religion, and those who use such tactics to amass power. Nowhere else is this seduction into slavery so artfully rendered as in “Kill Zone” where in Burnett sweetly croons in a sweeping Roy Orbison penned melody:
   

   For I will steal your dreams while you are sleeping
   and sell them for dust and cheap lust.
   And I’ll slit your hope while you are weeping
   and wipe the blade clean with morphine.
   Be my queen.

   It is chilling, seductive, and strangely entertaining without an ounce of pandering to its audience. Look for Tooth Of Crime to be on many year-end “Best-Record-You-Haven’t-Heard” lists.
   
   
3. In a speech before the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, W. compared Obama to a Nazi appeaser (as opposed to W.’s grandfather Prescott Bush who [a] was a Nazi sympathizer, [b] a Nazi war profiteer, and [c] even allegedly plotted to roust FDR in a coup) because Obama would prefer to talk all diplomatic like to nations with recognized governments with whom the US has adversarial relations (Iran, for instance) instead of, say, invading them for made-up reasons. Or it could have been W. was talking about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, two of W’s cabinet members who have, um, advocated the same thing as Obama.Now, US politicians have a long-standing tradition by which politics ends at the nation’s border. When the Republican President or the Democratic Speaker of The House goes overseas, they are just American. That means no petty sniping over differences about domestic policy or campaigning for or against any one candidate. Unite. Don’t divide. Well, W. pretty much pissed all over that tradition. Joe Biden rightly calls “Bullshit.”
   
   Secondly, W. loses the argument by invocation of Godwin’s Law.
   
   Thirdly, and why this adds to my good day (other than just giving me a reason to rail against W.), the bipartisan swell of support behind Obama (excepting for John McCain and Joe Lieberman who only support W. and each other) helps cement him as the Democratic nominee in the fall. And it brings into the discussion the clear contrast between Obama’s foreign policy and the W./McCain policy, not too mention the broad bipartisan support for for Obama’s foreign policy and the international embarrassment for W.’s.
   
   


4. The California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples should have the same standing before the law as opposite-sex couples. Gays and lesbians in the State of California are now entitled to the same rights and privileges and obligations of marriage as heterosexuals. I sometimes think that we obsess over marriage rights to our own peril. Not for the feared political backlash (the worst of which I think we suffered four years ago and have since rebounded from), but for the kids for whom identifying as gay or lesbian means getting kicked out of their home, or beat up (or shot) at school, or ostracized from their faith community, or a million other ways that these kids face discrimination each day. But in the long run, the former helps the latter.
   
   Marriage and family is now something gay kids can realistically aspire to. That is an enormous cultural shift in less than a generation. Secondly, as marriage rights for gays and lesbians progress across the country, the panic will hopefully subside as more and more normal, happy gay neighbors reside next to families and parents realize that their gay children won’t necessarily grow up to be unhappy degenerates. My money and my work and my advocacy will be aimed more towards gay youth and the organizations that exist to support them (The Point Foundation, The True Colors Residence), but I’ll celebrate this victory and every one like it that helps to make a future for them.

Here’s to tomorrow!

P.S. #5 (Bonus!) My dear friend Adrian called me out and told me to come see a new band he'd found in Conway, Sleep Today. They were not bad, shoegazery pop. But the headlining band failed to show so 5/6 of Sleep Today took to the stage again as Ginsu Wives, a disco/punk hybrid of !!! and Scissor Sistors with a heaping helping of screamo and WTF? Very Enjoyable. I may have to find a way to spin them into my next mix cd.

Offered without further comment

An advertisement for the Mexican newspaper Milenio.

Clinton loses another superdelegate.

After airing this virtual endorsement:



and this one:



Saturday Night Live essentially unendorsed (Sullivan says destroyed) Senator Clinton by acknowledging what she's doing to the Democrats' chances of winning the general election in the Fall:



If this is an accurate picture of the movement among actual superdelegates, it's not going to be a pretty convention, especially for the senator from New York.

P.S. Sorry Micah.

You take your beauty where you can find it.

You take your beauty where you can find it., originally uploaded by BuddyCole.

Over The Rhine play Little Rock

Although I've seen Over the Rhine something like 10 times since 1991, their concert at the Revolution Room was the first time they played in my own home town (walking distance from my home, no less). They drew a good crowd for a Monday night and for a relatively unfamiliar band. From what I could judge most of the audience was familiar with the band's records if not their live performances. Almost as many were brought by friends to get a proper indoctrination. In either case, they were timid listeners. Most chose to sit on the ground some distance from the stage and most of the standers stood off slightly to the side so as not to block the sitters' view. That made for some uncomforably empty real estate directly in front of the stage, though the audience's boisterous reaction to each song seemingly crossed the distance. There were also some hipster douchebags talking loudly in the back by the bar (to whom Karin issued the warning: "you talkers out there, be warned. Our listeners don't take kindly... and they carry knives").

The band had a great night. They were in friendly territory, but they had a lot of new faces and a lot to prove too. I hadn't seen them play since the Ohio Tour in '03 and had nearly forgotten how soulful, even sensual their music becomes live. The jazzy, playful nature of The Trumpet Child became slower and more sultry on stage and built a real connection with the audience. The evening also brought highlights from Over The Rhine's past records Drunkard's Prayer, Ohio, and Good Dog Bad Dog (but, sadly, nothing from Films For Radio).



The set list, for those still reading:

To the bartender at Revolution Room last night...

... This is how you make a "Scarlet O'Hara":

2 parts Southern Comfort
1 part cranberry juice
1 part roses lime
a splash of club soda

See, that's not that hard, now is it?

You have got to be kidding me!

That's what I say everytime my upstairs neighbor turns on her vacuum cleaner. Which is like five times a day. Sometimes as early as 7 a.m. It's not even 11 a.m. yet and I've already heard her run it three times this morning. I keep wondering, does her dog shed that much or is she just OCD?

UPDATE: In the 1 hour and 15 minutes since I made this post, she has run the vacuum four more times. Four. More. Times. In 75 minutes. I would also like to point out that her apartment, like mine, is on the low side of 600 square feet, less than half of which is carpeted.

A Radiant Decay

I'm still working with the graffiti, but as you can see, I'm starting to find some new subjects as well.

I am a feminist

This quiz confirms it!

You Are 90% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

Translating Pearl Jam

Why is this so funny? Maybe because after 16 years of loving this song, even I don't have a clue what the frickin' lyrics are.

Tidbits

American Idol is now down to the four performers I actually like. I'm rooting for Melinda to win although Blake is the performer who's cd I'd be most likely to buy.

I finally found a new apartment to move into as my current building is going condo next month. My new home is a little bit a lot smaller, but it's a little bit cheaper, it has a washer and dryer, and, best of all, it's only five blocks from work.

This video could very well be the cure for the Mario Madness gripping you, me, and millions of other hapless Wii and Gamecube players.


Mario: Game Over - Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

Is it just me, or is Mario freakin' hot?

Going vegan for a month

Anyone who has sat down to a meal with me since July 2004 is likely aware that I’m a vegetarian. That means I don’t eat meat. I do, however, still consume dairy products, eggs, honey, wool, or any other animal product that doesn’t kill the animal to produce said product. In my head, I’ve flirted with the idea of trying a vegan diet for a time, partly to see if I can make better ethical choices about what I eat, and partly because the 10 pounds I lost when I began my vegetarian diet have slowly crept back onto my ass.

Justin Droms, a carnivore, contributed an entertaining article to the current issue GOOD Magazine chronicling his one-month vegan experiment. In 30 days, his weight and cholesterol improved. But his blood pressure and sugar got worse (because of his increased intake of salty and high-carb foods).

Still, I figure I’m halfway there already. The hard part would be figuring out all the ways I still eat animal products and then coming up with alternatives to them. These are a few animal by-products that I enjoy a on a regular basis that giving them up will test my willpower:

o Yogurt in my cereal each morning.
o Half and half in my coffee.
o Eggs in my favorite Pei Wei Pad Thai, hardboiled with a salad, scrambled.
o Honey in those terrific Starbucks hot chai tea lattes. (My vegan friend Paul says he eats honey on occasion because only happy bees make honey. So, he doesn’t feel like he’s oppressing them by partaking of it.)
o Cheese on pizza, on salads, on sandwiches, on vegetables, as a dip for chips, as an hors d’oeuvre, on other kinds of cheese, etc. Cheese is one of those high-fat foods along with peanut butter (and to a lesser extent avocado and hummus) that I will eat until I am too fat to move. I wonder how much of my goal I could accomplish simply by resisting the cheese?

This is, of course, only the first part of the process. Next, I suppose I should come up with a list of vegan equivalences or other changes to my diet (do I have to have yogurt with breakfast everyday, for instance?) to replace the ova and lacto I’m currently consuming. Then I suppose at the end of the month I need to have some kind of “results show” where I catalog any health benefits or detriments I have observed in the preceding 30 days.

Droms shares from the pamphlet “Why Vegan” by Vegan Outreach a few of the more compelling reasons to hold to a vegan lifestyle. My favorites are:
o The American Dietetic Association reports that, on average, vegetarians have lower body weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, and rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, prostate cancer, and colon cancer.
and
o Having enough compassion and discipline to choose the vegan lifestyle permits you to smugly refer to nonvegans as “murderers” while they eat.

Comments? Suggestions? Ridicule?

(photos published by GOOD Magazine)

My favorite Onion article ever!

No other article, either serious or humorous, has ever summarized my relationship to my family as well as this item from The Onion circa 2003. Read it and share in the flood of conflicting emotions:

95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family

The Frowny Face of Doom

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I went to sync up my iPod last night to add the new Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane reissue and got an error message from iTunes that the device might be corrupt. All attempts to restart/reset/restore the iPod failed.

This was actually my second iPod. I got my first in July 2004. It served me well for two years till I had it replaced literally two days before the extended warranty expired for "battery issues." I got the replacement not long after that and it worked well for nine months. Which is kind of a ripoff, if you ask me.

Now I'm kind of stuck. I know the iPhone is coming in June... and a new generation iPod is probably right behind it. So it doesn't make any sense to buy a new iPod now since it will be outmoded in three our four months. But what to do until then? Carry cds around again?

UPDATE: It's an Easter Miracle. I was trying to show my co-worker and fellow iPod owner Pam what the "You're Screwed" Sad iPod Face looked like when, instead of frowning at me, the unit actually booted up. Attempts to play it, however, were fruitless as it appears to no longer have any music on it. Capacity = 37.1 GB. Available = 544 MB. Songs = 0. And the lock button indicator seems to turn on and off for no apparent reason. Maybe I'm less screwed than I was before. But it's still looking like I'm in the market for a new iPod.

UPDATED UPDATE: I tried to sync the iPod to iTunes again over lunch. Got the prompt to try and restore it again which iTunes couldn't do. Also still couldn't restart or restore the device. And now it makes this "whir-click" noise repeatedly until it cycles through its unsuccesful attempt to boot up. Fortunately, AppleInsider is reporting analysis today from Citigroup claiming new iPods are on the way. Unfortunately, they won't arrive until probably August or September. Has anybody upgraded to a new iPod and have an old unit just lying around I could borrow in the meantime?

Super Sweet

For the first time in ages, my minimum monthly credit card payment is less than it was last month. The new job with the higher pay is beginning to show dividends. And, after this next payment, my balance will be less than half of my total line of credit.

Of course, this would be better news if I hadn't run up $500 on my Best Buy account to get a Wii and a new external hard drive (one of those items, however, was an absolute neccesity. I'll leave it to you to decide which it was).