Recounts Bring Us Closer Together

In the Washington gubernatorial race, Christine Gregoire has passed Dino Rossi in the hand recount for a 10-vote lead, which will probably grow when 700 votes that were improperly disqualified by one county are examined.

Whether Gregoire wins or Rossi overturns the count in court, the winner's going to have little legitimacy with half of the electorate. As this race and the Bush/Gore debacle demonstrate, this country can't handle photo-finish elections, because no one believes the recount process won't be gamed by one or both parties. (I'm gaming the process by describing Gregoire as the presumptive winner.)

Around 2.8 million people voted in Washington, so the next governor will sweep into office on a mandate that amounts to 1/300th of a percent.

This is no way to run a shining city upon a hill.

If we can't settle maddeningly close races with dueling pistols, there should be a threshold, such as 1/10th of one percent, that triggers a new 30-day registration period followed by a new vote. This would give the electorate a second chance to make up its collective mind and put an end to some recount lawsuits and grandstanding, because both sides would fear the second batch of voters.

Politics · 2004/12/23 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Legendary science fiction author Ursula Le Guin is doing everything she can to dissuade fans of her books from watching the Legend of Earthsea mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel.

She's most offended by the decision to change the races of her characters, making most of them white:

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

Publishing · 2004/12/22 · 1 COMMENT · Link

I Want to Be a Better Neuron

Looking at Technorati this morning, I realized that none of the entries on my hand-coded weblogs are showing up there, presumably because I haven't been sending update pings to weblog notification services like Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, and Ping-o-Matic.

For a weblog to be a properly firing neuron in the information-gathering nervous system that Jon Udell describes on InfoWorld, tools like Technorati must learn in real time what's being linked, and by whom.

To fix this, I'm writing a PHP class library to ping notification services over XML-RPC, using Edd Dumbill's XML-RPC for PHP library.

The code works successfully for Weblogs.Com and Ping-o-Matic, but I haven't had any luck calling Blo.gs over XML-RPC.

According to the documentation, I should be able to call the site's XML-RPC server at http://ping.blo.gs/, port 80, with the method weblogupdates.ping and parameters "Ekzemplo" (weblog title), "http://www.ekzemplo.com" (weblog link).

I can't get this to work with my own PHP code or the Dumpleton XML-RPC debugger, so I'm hunting for examples of working code that connects to the Blo.gs XML-RPC server.

Php · Wordzilla · Xml-rpc · 2004/12/22 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Jack Newfield, a muck-raking journalist and author whose expose, The Shame of Boxing, was one of the best investigative sports pieces in years, has died of cancer at age 66.

Newfield, who loved boxing writing so much he celebrated A.J. Liebling's 100th birth anniversary in October, had this take on the sweet science:

At its infrequent best, boxing can be the art of hitting and not getting hit -- a ballet with blood, geometry with guile. At its frequent worst, it is fakery, burlesque, cruelty, injustice, exploitation and death.

Sports · 2004/12/21 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Look, Ma, I'm on TeeVee

On a recent episode of CSI: NY, one of the bit characters looked so familiar that I couldn't think about anything else until I figured out who it was.

When I realized who I had seen, I was so haunted by the experience that I wrote an article about him for TeeVee.

If you're unfamiliar with the site, you've missed eight years of funny, snarky writing by a group of television obsessives that includes Jason Snell and Greg Knauss. How this site never made them rich, even during the years in which the stock market threw millions at lightweights like TheGlobe founders, is a mystery to me. At the very least, they should be thousandaires.

2004/12/20 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

All Aboard the Polar Express

I saw Polar Express this afternoon, and like Roger Ebert was completely floored by how good it was:

The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year.

I haven't been as certain a film would become a Christmas classic since Ralphie shot his eye out with the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model in A Christmas Story.

Kids always talk during children's movies, but I can't recall one in which every single child in the theater talked out loud to the screen, urging the characters in suspensful moments.

At one point near the end, I glanced back at the projector. Four or five children were standing up in the row behind me, inches from my face, and their hands were clasped to the seats as they watched in absolute awe.

2004/12/18 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Great feature in the New York Times this morning about Slab City, a lawless, rentless, taxless community of 3,000 who bring their RVs and trailers to an abandoned military base in the Mojave Desert:

Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea.

The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years.

A site has been created to work on Slab City's trash problem:

Some residents of Slab City talk bad about this website, and our growing group of trash haters. Take a good look at the photo on the right, and keep in mind that the same people who stuff trash into any empty bus, are the same ones who are against our efforts to clean up the area.

2004/12/17 · Comment · Link

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