Again ... NEW blog

I've been checking my page counter, and it appears some of you don't quite know what it means to see a blog in which the only post of the last two months is "Check out my new blog."

So let me reiterate:

-- This blog? No longer updated.

-- New blog? Mostly Modern Music. That's http://mostlymodernmusic.blogspot.com.

Same overly verbose thoughts, slightly different topic, completely different blog.

The new blog

Mostly Modern Music

Happy Skeptic signing off. Enjoy the archive.

Hiatus ending soon, sort of

After a couple of weeks away, I figure there are two things I want to do with blogs. First, I want to keep in touch with my friends, and I WILL eventually drag their sorry butts into the blogosphere so we can all stay in touch without those "Hey, just thought I'd e-mail since I hadn't heard from you in a few months" e-mails. Second, I want to blog about music.

If I stay focused on music, maybe that'll help me resist the temptation to get sucked into the pointless sociopoliticamedia discussions that pass for intelligent discourse in the blogosphere. Sure, I may have pointless arguments about music, but that's OK. And I least I can debate aesthetics without feeling like I have one hand tied behind my back because I'm still employed as a journalist.

So this is probably my second-to-last post here. The last will be to tell you my music blog is up and running ... or that I've had another change of heart and will do something very different.

My personal blog will be back up and running shortly. Most of you know where it is. E-mail me if you don't. And start your own danged blogs ... I'm tired of preaching to a bunch of invisible strangers.

On hiatus

Or, for Friends fans: "We're on a break!"

I've decided to take a break from all this -- writing blogs (work use aside), reading blogs (work use and wife's blog aside), commenting on blogs, etc.

I wouldn't say I'm disillusioned with the whole shebang. I'd just say that, for the moment, I've gotten as much out of it as I'm going to get. On other blogs, I've found myself making the same points over and over. On my own blog, I'm writing for a very small audience.

And I don't need to do that. I need to work, I need to spend time with my family, I need to do yard work, I need to watch some soccer and I need to get my sorry butt back in shape. I'd also like to make a dent in the stack of books I've accumulated on my night stand. I might even refocus myself to get some free-lance projects going.

To do all this, I need to get out of the habit of flipping on the computer as soon as we put the little guy to bed each night. I'm not really doing anything constructive. I'd probably have a larger audience if I stood on my back deck and yelled, and I'm not that interested in attracting an audience of strangers unless I have a compelling topic.

I'd love to use blogging as a way to stay in touch with my friends. But for some reason, the only friends of mine who blog are the ones who live in Greensboro, NC, or Athens, Ga. That's not doing much to shake my notion that Greensboro is a strange exception to the rule that most bloggers are either techies (like my Athens friend) or a bit cranky.

If my friends start blogging, or if I have something compelling to write about, I'll come back to this soon. Otherwise, I'll probably take a break for the spring and summer and come back when the weather isn't inviting me to the yard, the playground or the bike trail.

When my dad remarried a couple of years after my mom passed away, he told me he'd had an epiphany -- being an old curmudgeon up on a hill was no way to live. He's right. That's not to say he can't be a curmudgeon on occasion or that I can't blog on occasion. But sometimes, you have to come down off the hill, walk around and live in the real world for a while. That's what I'll be doing.

You can still reach me, of course. Any comments left here will trigger an e-mail my direction. And I'm not giving up e-mail any more than I'm giving up the microwave, cable TV, central heating, my new iPod, my car, my lawn mower ...

More British envy

I love the Indigo Girls. I love the Dire Straits song Romeo and Juliet.

I do NOT love the Indigo Girls' cover version of Romeo and Juliet. It is the most unlistenable thing they've ever recorded.

Mark Knopfler gives the main character a quiet dignity in his suffering. Americans, we're told often and it's probably true, don't do "understated."

Forever envying the British

I've always envied the British. The idea of hopping a train to zip around a comparatively small country to see my favorite soccer team is just part of it. They've produced far more than their fair share of the world's finest academic work, music, comedy and drama. They have the BBC, a sober-minded, community-building outlet for all of those things and the world's best news organization. Besides, who could see Jamie Oliver zipping around the streets of London and not feel the slightest twinge of envy?

But today, I just envy them because they're able to keep their version of The Office on the air.

I made a point of waiting to see the U.S. version of the show before seeing the original BBC version. (It helped that we just got BBC America a few weeks ago.) In many respects, the BBC version is indeed better. The British do absurdity better than we do, and they have a knack for finding understated beauty in dreary situations. That comes from a colorful history in which their nation has made intellectual and societal progress through scores of maniacal monarchs and a couple of world wars whose toll we can barely contemplate. The Office is really a loving tribute to those who try to find some humor and a bit of solace in their daily drudgery.

Yes, so is Dilbert -- we Americans get it right from time to time. And the people making the U.S. version of The Office got it right, losing very little in translation and adapting it nicely to American topics. The boss' car is full of Filet-o-Fish wrappers, and a "friendly" basketball game ends up in a lot of macho posturing.

One criticism I read (I forget where) is that the character we know as Pam is too pretty in the U.S. version. Perhaps it's just that I've joined the thousands of men who've decided that Jenna Fischer is our new TV girlfriend, but I don't buy this. In today's America, we're trained to think beautiful women are the ones using various feats of engineering for better cleavage display at the newsstand. The Office offers a subtle satire of today's tongue-dragging American men. Steve Carell's obnoxious boss character buys into the Pamela Anderson standard of beauty and makes outrageous comments at Pam's expense, as if assuming she pines for the magazine cover. The fact that Pam is pretty by any reasonable standard makes Carell's cutting comments howlingly ridiculous.

Her appearance also makes it that much sadder than she remains with the Neanderthal guy even as she and Jim are so obviously smitthen with each other. And that storyline is done remarkably well in this show. A couple of episodes ago, she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder -- a brilliant bit of subtle acting by John Krasinski shows that this little bit of comfort made his day. In the season finale, Pam and Jim share a lot of laughs as Dwight makes an idiot of himself, and then Pam is visibly jealous as Jim gets a date with the handbag saleswoman whose visit stirs up the whole office. (A handbag saleswoaman stirred up the whole office? Hey, they do the drudgery very well.)

In the British version, the equivalents of Pam and Jim eventually ended up together. But because no one's watching The Office other than me and a couple of Anglophiles who aren't hung up on the notion that the British version is better, we probably won't get to see this happen.

And for that, I'm really mad at all of you. Well -- that, and the possible cancellation of Arrested Development.

And so this is why I envy the British. Yes, they only make 12 episodes of their best shows, but they properly revere them and make DVDs out of them.

Think I'll watch my Young Onces discs and go to sleep.

Housekeeping notes

1. Anonymous comments have been enabled. I will, of course, shut them down if things get ridiculous. Of course, all my friends are starting their own blogs at Blogger, so they'll have their own IDs, right?

2. Speaking of those who know me in real life -- if you still have my personal blog bookmarked (and you should), you'll find a link to my latest photos of home and baby there.

3. I've added a Hotmail account. It's the name of this blog (all one word) AT h0tma1l dott ... etc. Wow, I'm paranoid about spam.

4. Maybe I'm getting too cynical, but I just compared blog fundamentalism to the South Park Underpants Gnomes at Jay Rosen's blog. I should probably retire on that note. That's either the best I'll ever do or a sign that the Internet has warped my brain.

Star Wars reconsidered

As we all cross our fingers and hope that Episode III isn't as bad as Episodes I and II, one question pops into my head: Was this series ever that good?

The original movie was on TV the other day, and I was struck by how bad some of the dialogue seems on the 14th or 15th listen. And some of the situations are just preposterous. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief for a bit when you're dealing with leaps into hyperspace, giant space guns that can blow up a planet and a robot with a Woody Allen personality chip (alas, without the sense of humor).

There's also the problem I've always had with the blasters. On the rare occasion that a blaster shot hits its target, it's always fatal, no matter how much body armor the stormtroopers are wearing. (Honestly, if you're wearing something that does nothing to protect you but makes you run like Molly Shannon in that Seinfeld episode, wouldn't you think about tossing the stuff in the garbage and investing in lightweight uniforms?) But when that blaster hits Leia in Episode VI, it's like a bug bite. What?

So why do we watch this nonsense?

I think it's Vader. (Disclaimer alert: Point also made by a co-worker.)

The first time you saw Darth Vader, the question was "What the ...?!" When you saw Vader reveal that he's Luke's father, again: "What the ...?!" Even after he died and was redeemed: "What the ...?!"

I think one reason Episodes I and II have been so disappointing is that we're impatient to know the answer. It's been fun to learn about Obi-Wan and Yoda, but Episode I only gave the underlying question more emphasis. Now we want to know how this sweet little kid could end up as the guy who blew up Alderaan just to tick off Leia.

That makes the series an intriguing examination of evil. We sometimes see bad guys redeemed, and we sometimes see good guys turn bad. We never see bad guys redeemed and then go back to see them as innocents. It 's a valid moral lesson to think of tendencies of good and evil residing in the same person.

It's especially chilling for those of us with kids to see Anakin with his mother. Parents can give kids a loving environment, and it might not be enough. And when we see Vader topple the Emperor in Episode VI, we see the family tie again. (Relevant Oasis line I've always liked: "I ain't good-looking but I'm someone's child.")

Part of me wants to wimp out of seeing this movie. It's going to be a gut-wrencher. We know the Jedi will be slaughtered. We can already see Obi-Wan's horror. And as badly written as Amidala has been (thank you, everyone who has cast Natalie Portman in a non-Star Wars movie in the past decade), what will happen to her? Lucas says this might be too intense for kids. I wonder if it's too intense for me.

On the other hand, maybe we'll see Jar-Jar in the opening minutes, and I'll instantly care less about all these people.

This is MY kid??

"Do you want a cookie?"

"No" (reaches for last bit of tomato)

Self-esteem: Generation gap

First up, thanks to AG for passing along a link that gets more unbelievable the more I read it. Seems that a young person breaking into journalism saw a listing for an internship, saw that she met the basic criteria and decided to start perusing her New York housing options with her buddies, as if she'd just been cast in Friends. To her astonishment, this was NOT the response: "Oh, you have eight clips? Welcome to your new home! Would you like a corner office, or would you prefer the larger office with a personal assistant?"

I heard a recent interview with Monty Python/Rutles music master Neil Innes, who complimented John Cleese as the master of writing sketches that revealed a twisted reality one little bit at a time. This column is along those lines. We learn late in the sob story that she used a "creative" font style when she applied, and she's aghast that the intern coordinator doesn't recognize how her choice proved that she is the next great music journalist, a Cameron Crowe waiting to go on the road with Stillwater. Of course, she's already derided the intern coordinator because he only has a few bylines in the magazine, so surely he has plenty of time to respond to her every word.

(I've been there -- I often wish the people who think I do nothing other than write a weekly column could follow me through the drudgery of meetings and spreadsheets for a few hours.)

The response at Romanesko (no permalinks, but if you pick up the thread around my buddy Forrest Brown's comment at 4/22/2005 4:03:53 PM, you'll have some good reading) is a mix. Some, like Forrest, share their stories of humbling jobs after college. A few others think some career counseling is in order, and others ask what the heck the North Adams Transcript was thinking in publishing a piece that is going to haunt its author for years to come. The "sound of 1,000 bridges burning" is loud and clear.

But our heroine, Krystal Grow, has her defenders of sorts, those who ask us to remember how arrogant and foolish WE were in our youth.

And that brings me to the generational point. I'm now closer to 40 than 29, and I find myself asking if today's music is really that bad or if I'm just too old to get it. Same type of question applies here, except that I've been asking it since I was 26 or so, watching kids come out of school at the beginning of the dot-com boom and throwing fits that they weren't rich and famous after one year of paying dues. (Seriously -- even as things went bust in late 2001, a kid who had been out of school for about a year told me with a straight face that she didn't want to do something difficult because she had "paid her dues." Not the sort of thing you tell someone who graduated from an expensive school and was listening to verbal abuse from a high school cross-country coach at age 23.)

So do kids ALWAYS have this bizarre sense of entitlement? Or is it a specific problem in today's TV-in-every-bedroom, grade-inflation age?

In my day, college did an adequate job of beating our expectations out of us. When I landed a $400-a-week job as a copy editor on the night shift (work every weekend, but every other Friday off!), people looked at me like I'd won the lottery. During the boom, I worked with people who acted as if the local media were beneath them.

Sure, that was during a recession, so perhaps it's unfair. In later years, kids from my school did in fact jump straight from the student paper to Newsweek and places like that. But I think there's a case to be made for the overinflation of our precious ones' self-esteem these days.

Or maybe ours is too low. Consider these test results:


Which Family Guy character are you?

Things you learn while chasing your dog

1. Don't leave the gate unlatched.

2. When you discover the gate open and the dog gone, don't shut the gate. That means the dog can't run back to his starting point.

3. If a car slows down while you're running, give a quick look and listen. The driver probably saw your dogs.

4. When you get close enough to your speedy dog to dive for his collar, don't. You'll miss, you'll frighten him, and you'll scrape up your arm.

5. Dogs eventually want to return home. You can use this to your advantage by chasing your dog in that direction rather than chasing him away.

6. If two of you are rounding up the dogs, it makes sense for one of you to stay near the front door to welcome the elusive one home.

7. Once the dog arrives at the front door and is safely inside, the person at the front door should call to the other one so that he may stop sprinting, thereby preventing a heart attack or assorted post-illness wheezing on the part of the guy in his mid-30s who's been sprinting in panic for more than five minutes.

8. That night, your dog will curl up next to you as if none of this ever happened.

Good summary, surprising source

Karl Rove on the media: "I think it's less liberal than it is oppositional."

Most political strategists know this, of course, though it doesn't stop them from painting the media all shades of blue (or, sometimes, red) when it suits them. This fact of life also explains why one of my favorite blogs, Blog on the Run, is written by a journalist and a Republican who never lets his party affiliation keep him from his duty as an aggressive watchdog. (He and I also worked together back in the day, or the mid-90s.)

But what's surprising here is that Rove goes on to present a valid criticism: Many journalists (and I'll exclude Mr. Blog on the Run here) are a tad too aggressive: "Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat."

The reason I call this blog Happy Skeptic is that skepticism is much preferable to cynicism. That's a point that stuck with me when I read Spiral of Cynicism in grad school. I think the distinction they drew is that skeptics often encounter questionable things and decide to check them out, while cynics take the simpler road -- you're wrong, and you're going down, dude.

Of course, the flip side is that politicians need to respect journalists' rights to ask questions. Real questions.

Why I hate blogging, Part II

I'll start in my now-customary hypocritical manner by sending you to a blog I like very much, written by Rebecca Blood. She observes a hostile exchange and calms the waters with a well-reasoned response that asks whether blogging is "in danger of being marginalized before it gains a foothold with mainstream Web users."

The conversation starts with an e-mail from fire-breathing columnist Nick Coleman to PressThink blogger and respected academic Jay Rosen, last seen attempting to keep a straight face when interviewed about blogging by The Daily Show. Rosen posts Coleman's e-mail and asks readers to interpret it and comment.

The gist of Coleman's e-mail: "Hey, pointyhead ivory-tower guy. Thanks for ripping me when I stood up to right-wing blogging ****** (pick any word you like). Now that Powerline has been discredited and Republican stooges are still taking over journalism, where are you now? Huh, punk?"

(Re Powerline: He must be referring to the recent controversy over the Terri Schiavo memo, which is really too trivial to concern most people who aren't bloggers. If you missed the whole thing and want to know what happened, there's a good summary at Instapundit.)

Rosen has an unusual blogging style that purists may dislike, but I think it has some merit. He elevates good responses such as Rebecca Blood's into the main text of his post.

As usual, his comments attract their share of self-important political warriors, but there are a handful of good ones. I hope mine is in the latter category, though it's slightly meaner than my usual fare.

The upshot: Obnoxious as he was, Coleman has a point. People who spew red-vs.-blue invective at each other aren't enlightening America, they aren't providing a valuable service, and the general public will always have a good laugh in their direction.

Notice that I didn't say they have no impact. They do. Why? The same reason the vast wasteland of cable news has impact -- we journalists pay attention. And why do we pay attention? Because if P.T. Barnum said there's a sucker -- a quote that is disputed -- he surely had journalists in mind.

Why I hate blogging

OK, obviously, I don't hate blogging. I wouldn't waste my time with this if I did.

But there are a lot of things I hate about blogging, and "waste of time" is a common theme.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

Arguing for sake of arguing: I had a polite, well-reasoned exchange of views with a fellow blogger who seems genuinely nice. But someone else decided to jump into the conversation to challenge my assertion that Christians and Muslims could live together in semi-perfect harmony. And so I've been suckered into a theological argument that has led me to spend far too much time this evening reading a bunch of amateur historians trying to prove or disprove some ... I'm sorry, I'm not even going into the details. Basically, all these people are talking past each other, so trying to make sense of it all is a bit like taking a set of bagpipes to a Ramones concert.

I get suckered into these arguments from time to time because I have this perverse inner need to correct things that aren't true. It's the philosophy major and journalist in me.

Of course, taking any sort of middle ground in these chest-puffing rituals that pass for intellectual discussion on the Web means that someone will try to push you one way or the other.

It wasn't always that way. I remember offhand political discussion in the real world in the pre-Internet days, and I was pleasantly surprised at the underlying civility. (I say "surprised" because even back in the Stone Age, the media dealt in conflict.) But the Internet empowers people to say things they wouldn't say in the real world. They can always find enablers to back up any extreme point of view, and there's no compelling reason to get along with other people in a virtual space.

Enabled hostility: Expanding a bit on the last point -- through a series of links I won't describe to protect innocent intermediaries who may be reading, I came across LiveJournal's "childfree" community.

I understand people who choose not to have kids or are in a situation that would make kids less than feasible. I understand if such people occasionally need to vent about societal pressure to have kids, though that pressure seems to be diminishing daily. I've often quoted the Harvey Danger line "Been around the world and found that only stupid people were breeding."

I don't understand this community. I don't understand the insistence that anyone who would put herself through childbirth isn't in her right mind. I don't understand how people expect to be taken seriously with arguments about why dogs are preferable to kids. (If they were joking, it'd be one thing, but I don't think they are.)

To be fair, when I checked in today, it was more civil than it was when I first saw it. Then, it was full of terms like "crotch nuggets" ... well, they didn't say "crotch."

Our community believes it; therefore, it's true: Ever wander into an unfamiliar blog and find that the blogger and his/her commenters (usually his, because let's face it, men are meaner) have essentially created an alternate reality?

The myth of time: "Oh, blogging is so easy! You just go online, type in a couple of boxes and there you go! Before you know it, hundreds of people will be reading!"

You don't want to know how much time I spent writing and researching (should I link to a definition of this word?) this blog and how few people will read it.

So this has been a waste of time. And that's why I hate blogging.

Motley Crue reconsidered

When I see old Motley Crue videos on VH1 Classic, I can't help thinking of ...

DEATHTONGUE

And then I remember how much I miss Bloom County.

Arrested Development forever

Just saw the season finale of Arrested Development, and all I can say is that it better not be the series finale.

Most of the folks who've been telling you to watch AD take this approach: "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you an idiot?"

I'll take ... the same approach. Come on, folks -- have we lost our sense of humor? Would it help if they called it CSI: Arrested Development? Do we only watch crime shows and reality shows? Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Help! There's a chili pepper in my ...

So we were watching VH1 Mega Hits, and they played the Red Hot Chili Peppers video (Can't Stop) that starts with the camera passing through a long tunnel like the ones used on dog agility courses. Mrs. Skeptic said she liked watching that part. I said "it reminds me of my sigmoidoscopy," just as Anthony Kiedis appeared in the tunnel.

I added, "Well, except for a Red Hot Chili Pepper being there."

I can just picture my doctor -- "Ah, THERE's the problem. You have a Red Hot Chili Pepper in your colon."

One thing to add: When they say "slight pressure and cramping in your abdomen," what they really mean is that you will curse yourself for failing to take better care of your digestive system while you lie there feeling as if someone is trying to inflate you like you're supposed to be in the Macy's parade. In other words, it's not pleasant. Really. I'll eat any manner of fiber necessary to avoid doing that again.

(There -- now anyone who searches "Red Hot Chili Peppers" and "sigmoidoscopy" is bound to land here. That'll double my readership.)

Priorities

I ran a couple of errands tonight in Mrs. Skeptic's car. In the Home Depot parking lot, I was unsuccessful in my attempt to get through the obstacle course of shopping carts. The damage -- a few scuff marks on the front bumper. (In NASCAR, they call it "tradin' paint.")

When I came home, tired from Day 19 of the Persistent Springtime Viral Crud, I profusely apologized.

Mrs. Skeptic fussed with me. Not over the car. Over the "grape drink" I'd bought to keep my fluids up. It's 170 calories per 10-ounce jug.

The car? Not a problem.

I love this woman.

Gina and Steve Buscemi

(Kind of old news, but I'm catching up ...)

What happens when a Sesame Street actress takes a role on The Sopranos as the new bedpal of Steve Buscemi's character? A lot of back-and-forth over what she can or can't say or do.

Happy Skeptic Jr. has a bit of a crush on Gina, so this sort of thing would probably freak him out. OK ... Happy Skeptic has a bit of a crush on her, too, though it seemed a little skeezy when we were at the doctor's office and saw an old video from the days in which Gina was, well, a good bit younger.

(And today she has three kids? Wow.)

Uncle Sam wants Weird Al

Another nice item found at random (OK, I searched on my own name and a blog called Infinity Ranch popped up): Last summer, the Air Force put out an urgent call for an accordion player.

As a veteran of a wind ensemble, I can empathize with the comparison of polka music to boot camp.

Funny stuff you find at random

A lot of people are exploring random blogs in Blogger today, so I'm getting some random referrals. I randomly picked one to check out, and it happened to be simply brilliant.

Yes, I know I just said that lists of 10 aren't original any more, but when you suggest that interns are capable of changing into Voltron ...

Reminders for bloggers

The Happy Skeptic is skeptical of many things (but tries not to be cynical, which is different and far less contructive). One such thing -- blogs in general.

Obviously, I see some value in blogs. But I'm a little wary of the orthodoxy of many blog evangelists. In English: Life ain't always like these blog folks think.

So here are a few reminders for those who blog. Most should be common sense, but a few might be heresy to the blogosphere's big names:

1. Most Americans distrust both major parties.

2. People tend to get a little annoyed when you slap labels on their entire way of thinking. The reason: People are capable of independent thoughts.

3. Most people don't have 4-5 hours a day to blog or to read blogs. Don't assume someone's ignorant just because they didn't see one of the 100 or so posts at Instapundit yesterday. They may have families, dogs, hobbies or just the occasional urge to go outside.

4. A medium dominated by people with lots of free time and a touch of anger is not necessarily more democratic than a medium dominated by modestly paid professionals.

5. Journalists are people, too. Really, I know. I'm a journalist myself, and my doctor recommends the same medicine for me as she does for her other patients.

6. To spin doctors and pundits, the game between the two parties is more important than anyone's ideology. That's why the fact that James Carville and Mary Matalin are married is no more surprising than the sight of longtime Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens in a Yankees uniform. Only suckers let themselves be defined by a strict "left" or "right" ideology. We just happen to have a lot of suckers in the blogosphere (and, thanks to partisan redistricting and a bit of demagogy, we also have them in Congress).

7. Reporting takes work. Editing takes work. Thoughtful analysis takes work. Punditry does not. Even if you can write better political commentary than the columnist at your least favorite newspaper (which would mean you're putting some effort into it), you've only proven yourself capable of replacing one out of a couple hundred staffers (couple thousand for the big ones) at that paper. Even if your blog is better than the a newspaper's op-ed page, you're "replacing" two pages in the paper. The rest is a little more difficult.

8. Blogs are not the cure for being disenfranchised. I've been doing this a while now (some of the work I did as far back as 1997 would meet any conventional definition of "blog"), and I'm more disenfranchised today than ever. If you think the cure is "spend more time blogging," see No. 3.

9. Most problems with the media stem from the fact that they work too fast and are too caught up in the process of what they do (landing that interview, fixing that computer systems, surviving that Dilbert meeting) to think about the ramifications of the content. That's why it's helpful to point out the mistakes, but it's not helpful to assume a motive behind the mistakes.

10. There's more to life than politics. There's more to politics than the White House and Congress.

11. Schadenfreude is a poor hobby that was once reserved for cranky old curmudgeons. Or sportswriters.

12. If you're not David Letterman, a top-10 list is simply derivative.