Today's Quote of the Day

CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Science Fiction Grand Master novelist, on the Iraq war/occupation. (Does Arthur realize Ted left Time Warner and CNN years ago?)

In Memoriam: Porter Wayne Wagoner, 1927-2007

With acknowledgment to filkertom for passing along the sad news: Country-music legend Porter Wagoner has died at the age of 80, from lung cancer. Yahoo! News has his obituary here.

Country music, for all that I have so ridiculed my own southern-hick family and roots, is in my DNA and I can't help but like at least some of it. (It's been pointed out that country music of today and Irish folk of yesteryear share common roots, and I can see it now.) I remember my daddy tuning in Mr. Wagoner's eponymous music show on TV Saturdays in my childhood, along with other country-music programs (it was still called "country & western" back then), and seeing Porter twanging his way through songs alongside the likes of Dolly Parton (his protegeé), Merle Haggard and Charley Pride. He was one of the last true showmen of that era in country music, right down to his sequined Western jackets and shirts, and always showed his audience a good time and peerless skill. Even his name was Western-sounding, fergossakes; made you think of wagon trains portaging their way over Western frontier rivers. (And it was even his real name, too!)

Is there a country artist, from today or decades past, whose music you like at all? Or a country song that still sticks in your mind? There are dozens in mine: Jerry Reed's hilarious story-songs like "She Got the Gold Mine (And I Got the Shaft)," "Lord, Mr. Ford" and "When You're Hot, You're Hot"; Loretta Lynn's "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man" (a duet with the late Conway Twitty), "You're Lookin' At Country," "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)," and of course her signature tune, "Coal Miner's Daughter"; and Porter's own hit "Green, Green Grass of Home" from 1965, just two years after my birth. More recently, Trace Adkins' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" has unaccountably lodged itself in my brain, and I defy you to listen to Alan Jackson's 9/11 anthem, "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning?)" or Lonestar's "I'm Already There" and not at least sniffle a little. And that's just the tip of the haystack.

As Rush Limbaugh likes to say, "Words mean things"

...but they don't always mean the same things to everybody. Witness TurnLeft.com's list of conservative terms and their meanings, which I got to remembering after reading this column by my local newspaper's resident right-wing columnist, Jim Wooten, decrying the state Supreme Court's decision to cut Genarlow Wilson some long-deserved slack as "judicial activism." (Bad enough I had to read it once, when shelleybear linked to it; then I got hit with it again in yesterday's dead-tree edition when I opened the op-ed section.) I'm sorry, but I don't believe any otherwise good kid should have to do 10 years' hard time for getting stupid with another teenager in a consensual situation where no one got hurt.

I could swear I posted about this sort of thing here awhile back, noting that a conservative's "judicial activist" is usually a liberal's "sage, courageous jurist"...and that the two designations precisely reverse when the judge in question rules in alignment with the conservative worldview. (A conservative will often use both to describe the exact same judge, based on two different decisions, one of which the conservative loves and another s/he loathes.)

PBS paints a lovely portrait of ol' Sparky

New York Daily News TV reviewer David Bianculli (whose work I greatly enjoyed reading each day when I lived there) reports here his impressions of a new American Masters episode devoted to the late Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, airing tonight on PBS. And wouldn't you know, our local station is airing it directly opposite Heroes... (My cable setup can't tape one show while watching another. Dammit.)

One of my fave heroes gets his big-screen debut at last

Reuters reports here that a major motion picture based on DC Comics' Green Lantern series has been greenlighted. A TV-series creator and an experienced comics writer will be handling the script, which will focus on the best-known holder of the GL name, Hal Jordan. (There have been no less than five—count 'em, five—Green Lanterns from Earth in the decades since the Lensmen-inspired GL Corps was created, and the even more decades since the original, magic-based Golden Age character's debut: in order, Alan Scott, Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart and most recently, Kyle Rayner.)

No word as yet on casting, but since this is the first big-budget movie ever made (to my knowledge, at least) featuring GL, who would you like to see play him? There's also the love of his life, aircraft heiress Carol Ferris (Hey, that rhymes. Hee, hee!); his long-suffering mechanic (and the only one outside the Justice League entrusted with the knowledge of Hal's dual identity, at least until recently), Thomas "Pieface" Kalmaku; and his greatest enemy, the red-skinned renegade ex-Lantern Sinestro. The floor is open for nominations. (I like Jennifer Connelly for Carol; still thinking about the rest.)

Junior has his Nixon moment

Then: missing 18.5 minutes from audio tapes. Now: missing e-mails.

"Tricky Dick" Nixon's own mouthpiece, John Dean, warned us years ago that Junior Bush was even more of a corrupt thug than Dean's old boss. (And who should know better?) Still need more proof?

Two columns on the health insurance crisis

Printed side-by-side in my local paper today: First, this op-ed from a conservative think-tanker who argues that patients, even ones bleeding or otherwise sick unto death, should have to choose between medical treatment and, oh, say, paying their rent and utility bills.

Then this one from Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) offering the most cogent rebuttal of that appalling load of bullshit I've yet seen.

Let me make my position on this as crystal-clear as I possibly can: No one in need of medical treatment, particularly in a genuine, immediate, urgent need (e.g., bleeding to death from an accident or vomiting blood and guts up), should EVER be expected to stop in mid-crisis and worry about which hospital, clinic or doctor is cheapest, rather than which is closest and best able to care for them—period. Paragraph. Yet this is exactly what assholes like Goodman and his ilk seem to think is necessary to drive costs down.

We could afford to provide every man. woman and child with decent health-care coverage today in this country, were it not for the misplaced priorities of our leaders and the rigid, self-interested ideologies of their cheering sections on the right. I don't think any more proof is needed that at least some conservatives are quite literally willing to see other people die rather than allow policy that will (or even might) cost the conservatives more in taxes.

Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a crutch in a rainstorm. And people wonder why I despise conservatives' views so much. (I do try really hard, honest I do, not to hate the conservatives themselves; some of them are actually otherwise quite decent people and include members of my own family. But their ideas and views are an entirely different matter...and when they spew just plain fucking evil bilge like this, they make it awful damned difficult—and my blood boil.)

Whine, whine, whine: Crybaby head of NBC Universal attacks Apple

Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, which has pulled its TV shows from Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store in a dispute over pricing, wails that, and I quote, "Apple has destroyed the music business...and if we don't take control on the video side, they'll do the same to video." (See article here.)

Um, Jeff? Actually....no. If anyone's killing the music business, it's most certainly not Apple; it's you and your minions at the record labels your firm owns, the other conglomerate-owned labels, and your lawsuit-happy buddies over at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). And the sooner you realize that and quit trying to blame someone else for your own short-sightedness, the sooner your industry can pull out of its current death spiral...assuming that's even possible, which I do not by any means consider a given.

Fanfic Sampler #9, Justice League: Green Lantern is framed for genocide

Part of my attempt at a novelization of the episode of Justice League where John Stewart (AKA Green Lantern 2814.2) is falsely accused, tried and convicted for a crime he did not commit: the destruction of an entire planet and its inhabitants.

( The Leaguers discuss a strange sighting by Superman... )

Leopard On My Mac mini: Day 1

Just installed OS X Leopard late last night, after scoring a copy for $10 off at the Fry's out in Gwinnett County. (No, I was bloody-be-damned NOT going to try downloading a 5-gigabyte OS from BitTorrent or some such, over my bargain-basement DSL line...and was too impatient to wait for Amazon or CompUSA to ship it.) So far, so-so...no major problems as yet, but would love to figure out how to change the menu bar's color back to white from that translucent screen...and how to disable the Spotlight menu, since the way I did it in Tiger doesn't work this time. Will keep y'all posted as the week progresses and I try various new features and usual operations. Stay tuned if you want to avoid any bugs I run into in your own installation.

The installation process itself was smooth enough, if time-consuming. (The initial time estimate the install program displayed was over 3 hours[!!], but actual elapsed time was somewhat less—call it 90 minutes from loading up the DVD to full normal operations.) Only malfunction so far was that the Last.fm client launched automatically on startup when I hadn't told it to, but an uninstall of the client with CleanApp took care of that. (Synium Software makes CleanApp, and I highly recommend it for getting rid of unwanted applications and all their little ancillary files secreted hither and yon in the Mac OS's Unix underpinnings; see product page here.)

Most of the installed software so far seems to work, and the new OS and Safari 3 installed by the Leopard disc even took care of the crashiness I was suffering with Safari under the old Tiger system. (On the demerit side, Safari 3 plays no nicer with LJ's rich-text editor than its predecessor did; so I still have a reason to keep Firefox around.) Now if Leopard will let my Mac talk to my color printer again the way the old OS did before I moved, I'll be a happy little coonass.

Just saw the PBS American Masters episode on Charles Schulz

...Oh, man. Wow. Just...freakin' WOW. I'm still crying. A flawed man, to be sure...but also a good man, genuinely good and decent in that way that his fellow Minnesotans like Garrison Keillor understand and embody just as well. Thank whatever God or gods there may be that we got to have him for as long as we did...and that we still have all those years of strips, and all those movies and TV shows, to remember him and the characters he created. Abso-damn-lutely worth missing an episode of Heroes (that will be repeated anyway) to see.

If you get the chance to watch it another night this week, and you're at all a fan of Charlie Brown and his friends, do NOT miss it or you will kick yourself to the end of your days. You can also read a modern cartoonist's thoughts about the show and Peanuts at the pbs.org blog here.