Henry Hey's 'Palin Song'
Before you dismiss Palin Song as a slam against the candidate, listen to it a few times to see how jazz musician Henry Hey stalks her speech with his piano.
The song takes me back to Mister Rogers neighborhood. (Via Michael Sippey.)
Going to Buckethead at Jacksonville's Freebird Live
Last night I took my 12-year-old son to see Buckethead at Freebird Live in Jacksonville Beach. In the past year all three of my sons have developed an appreciation for, and I hope I'm using the term properly here, people who can shred an axe. They acquired this taste by spending most of their waking hours and some REM sleep playing Guitar Hero.
To give you an idea of how out of place I was at this event, the last musician I saw perform live was Janet Jackson at the MGM Grand in Vegas back in 1994. Yes, I'm a part of the Rhythm Nation. When I mentioned that I had attended this concert to my son and his teen-aged friend and nephew on the drive up, they didn't know enough about her to be mortified.
For those not yet familiar with Buckethead, he's a former guitarist for Guns N' Roses who plays his own instrumental guitar songs, most of which are thundering heavy metal riffs played at such a ferocious pace they're perfect for masochistic pattern-recognition videogames. I first discovered this performer when his song Jordan was played around 1,000 times in my house as an unlockable bonus track on Guitar Hero II.
But you really don't know Buckethead until you've seen Buckethead. He played Wednesday wearing his usual attire -- a bucket on his head, expressionless Michael Myers mask, one-piece work dungarees and Converse All-Stars. Last night he wore a plain white sandpail instead of what we were expecting, a KFC bucket scrawled with the word "Funeral." Although I read somewhere that his outfit's a consequence of shyness, the presentation makes him look like someone who has killed and will kill again.
I'd never been to Freebird Live, a concert venue owned by Judy Van Zant-Jenness, the widow of Lynyrd Skynrd founder Ronnie Van Zant. The place holds around 700 people, who can either watch downstairs or from a balcony that overhangs the stage. We watched upstairs from a perch close enough to drop a cameraphone on Buckethead, because I know that if I ever enter a mosh pit I will fall and break a hip.
Apparently there's a protocol for moshing at Freebird that allows it at some performances but not others. Early in Buckethead's set, a guy in his early twenties began banging around, clearing out a widening circle between himself and a bunch of unhappy people who held up the universal hand gesture for "step off." When a bald guy finally showed up and reciprocated his desire to become human pinballs, they had just gotten started when giant security guards wrapped them up and dragged them off.
This was probably for the best. When only two people are moshing, they look like the preliminary rutting ritual of adolescent male elk. I would not be surprised to learn they're now dating.
Considering the location, I was shocked and disappointed that nobody yelled "Freebird".
I'm afraid of liking a band for fear it will ruin them for my kids, but Buckethead rocked. We didn't bail until after he played "Jordan" around midnight, and I can still hear the song in my tinnitis. The bass was so loud downstairs I was afraid it might alter the electrical impulses of my heart. I went to bed twitching like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
Credit: The photo from last night's concert was taken by Anders Lindquist and is used with permission.
Obama Rally Brings Thousands to Orlando
I made the two-hour trek to Orlando yesterday to attend my first Barack Obama campaign rally, an event that brought 40,000 to 60,000 people to a plaza outside Amway Arena. Arriving an hour before the event, I knew to avoid the streets around the arena and parked my car at the Citrus Bowl, where buses were available.
Most of Obama's speech was so familiar I could have delivered it myself, as someone who has seen every one of the 30-plus debates he has participated in during this long campaign. One of his new remarks was a response to Sarah Palin's recent comment where she objected to the McCain campaign's use of robocalls. Obama said, "You have to work really hard to violate Gov. Palin's standards on negative campaigning."
Hillary Clinton, making her first joint appearance with Obama since July, gave a sharp 15-minute speech that tied John McCain to President Bush's economic policies and touted the record of the last Democratic president on the economy. She coined a new slogan, "Jobs, baby, jobs!", that was chanted a few times by the crowd. For some reason, chanting is harder in person than it seems like it would be on television. I couldn't keep up with the speed of the crowd racing through "Yes we can!" and "O-BA-MA!", and I found myself wishing that Democrats had a few more well-practiced exhortations in our repertoire, like "U-S-A!"
Both Clinton and Obama focused almost entirely on economic concerns. "At this rate, the question isn't just, 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?'" Obama said. "It's 'are you better off than you were four weeks ago?'"
I needed too much personal space to get close to the stage, relying instead on a giant screen to follow the speeches. (You can find me in Flickr photographer Rob McCullough's crowd shot, where I'm an unshaven gray-haired smudge with a tree growing out of my head.) Throughout the event, black families, some with aging grandparents and young children, gently moved through attendees to get closer. Although the crowd was racially and generationally diverse, you couldn't miss the emotion of blacks who had come to see Obama's first event in the city. As an adopted Floridian who has learned the tragic history of race relations in the Sunshine State during my decade here, I had to marvel at the progress that brought some of the older Americans in attendance past central Florida's Rosewood massacre, Klan lynchings, poll taxes and the civil rights struggle to this amazing moment in time.
Despite the size of the crowd and the zeal of some attendees to get a better spot, I can't recall a large event I've attended where people were in a better mood. Even at the Citrus Bowl, where more than 2,000 people were still in line to get on buses 15 minutes before the 6 p.m. start of the event, I heard no complaints.
Stories from early voting sites across Florida and other states this week describe huge lines where people aren't leaving, no matter how long it takes. Looking at the bus line in Orlando and the faces of the crowdgoers who made it to the rally on time, I think there are millions of Americans who regard casting their vote this year as one of the biggest milestones of their lives. Turnout this year will be massive.
On the way back to the Citrus Bowl, as we drove through a dodgy neighborhood right on the outskirts of downtown, a car avoided an accident by swerving towards the bus and stopped a few feet from riders seated behind the driver. Even that near-miss didn't sour the mood.
Credit: The photo from the Obama rally was taken by Rob McCullough and is used with permission.
Hosting Unlimited Blogs with TypePad Premium
Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter and one of the pioneers of blogging, recently moved his self-hosted personal blog to TypePad:
I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.
It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here.
I made the same journey, installing several weblog publishing programs on my server before throwing in the towel because of frequent security and feature updates. I finally decided last year to buy a $299 yearly subscription to TypePad that gives me unlimited hosted blogs, each of which can be published at its own domain, use guest authors, and employ advanced templates.
I'm still publishing Workbench with software that I wrote, but all new sites that I create begin as TypePad blogs. I love being able to turn an idea into a web site in five minutes, particularly when I'm creating sites with other people. Now, when I pester somebody I know to begin a blog, I fire up TypePad and create one for them to show how easy it is.
So far, I've only run into one area where using TypePad was problematic. The service makes it easy to incorporate content from other sites on a blog using widgets, but I couldn't find a widget for adding Google AdSense or any other ads to a blog. I had to put the ad code in a TypeList and give the list an empty title containing nothing but space characters (" ").
This workaround is awkward, because you end up with a bunch of no-title TypeLists containing ad code for different blogs. Finding the code later, when changes need to be made, will be an enormous pain in the ass.
Six Apart has been extremely responsive to new developments in blogging, adding new features to TypePad as they become popular in other publishing tools. It was one of the first companies to adopt the recommendations of the RSS Profile, such as including an atom:link element to identify a feed's URL.
Michelle Malkin, Commercial Good
I just noticed today that Michelle Malkin is a registered trademark:
Word Mark: MICHELLE MALKIN
Goods and Services: IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Online journals, namely, blogs featuring commentaries, opinions and original reporting about news and current events. FIRST USE: 20040608. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20040608
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code: (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number: 78716788
Filing Date: September 20, 2005
Current Filing Basis: 1A
Original Filing Basis: 1A
Published for Opposition: September 19, 2006
Registration Number: 3180093
Registration Date: December 5, 2006
Owner: (REGISTRANT) MALKIN, MICHELLE INDIVIDUAL UNITED STATES C/O KENYON & KENYON 1500 K STREET, NW - SUITE 700 WASHINGTON D.C. 200051257
Assignment Recorded: ASSIGNMENT RECORDED
Attorney of Record: David Zibelli
Type of Mark: SERVICE MARK
Register: PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator: LIVE
I have the strongest urge to use Michelle Malkin inappropriately.
McCain's Attacks Missed Target in Third Debate
During Wednesday night's third and final presidential debate, the former fighter pilot John McCain proved that he doesn't know how to land an attack. Whether due to discomfort or ineptitude, McCain brought up ACORN and William Ayers in a way that had to be utterly baffling to people who don't follow politics closely.
Picking up a week-long Republican campaign against the voter-registration organization ACORN, McCain said this during the debate:
We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy. The same front outfit organization that your campaign gave $832,000 for "lighting and site selection." So all of these things need to be examined, of course.
That's the entirety of what McCain said about ACORN. Though it sounds bad, the attack is less credible because McCain skimps on details. ACORN, which wasn't even an issue a week ago, now threatens to destroy democracy's fabric -- we must elect McCain to be democracy's seamstress!
Because McCain was so short on specifics, Obama stepped in and explained the ACORN controversy to the debate's audience in a manner that's likely to retire the issue entirely. "ACORN is a community organization," Obama said. "Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved."
McCain's reference to "lighting and site selection" was so obscure that I only could find one reporter who tried to explain it in his debate story. Paul West of the Baltimore Sun wrote:
[Obama] did not respond to McCain's charge about $832,000 that Obama's campaign spent during the primaries for what it says were canvassing activities.
The Obama campaign originally had said the expense included "lighting and site selection," as McCain pointed out, then later filed an amended spending report.
The $832,000 was paid not to ACORN but to Citizen Services, a campaign services firm affiliated with ACORN, according to an August Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article. The firm, which collected signatures and managed past minimum-wage ballot campaigns in four states, was paid by the Obama campaign for work conducted during the primaries from February through May. The campaign amended its FEC filing to indicate the payment was for "get-out-the-vote" efforts.
Though the relationship is worth examination because that's a large campaign expenditure, no evidence has been uncovered to suggest anything improper occured. A Democratic politician hired a political firm affiliated with the largest voter registration organization on the left. I've read several right-wing bloggers who allege that Obama's campaign tried to hide an attempt to pay ACORN by hiring Citizen Services, but their affiliation has never been a secret. A 2006 ACORN publication described the firm as "ACORN's campaign services entity."
McCain did little better with details on Ayers, claiming that he's a "washed-up terrorist" who launched Obama's first run for political office in his living room and said in 2001 he wished he had "bombed more." McCain also said that together the two men "sent $230,000 to ACORN."
Republican partisans have believed for months that Ayers was a relationship so toxic that any attempt by Obama to explain it would just make him look worse. But as Obama explained accurately last night, Ayers was an education professor respected by Chicago's political establishment by the time he met him in the '90s. Republicans and Democrats alike served with him on boards and funded his educational initiatives.
Because McCain gave the shorthand version of the Ayers controversy, Obama filled in the details for him:
Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.
Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican-leaning newspaper.
Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House.
Ayers did some loathsome things 40 years ago and continues to hold obnoxious views about his actions, but he was never convicted of a crime -- prosecutorial misconduct hindered the effort. He used that opportunity to rehabilitate himself and carry on a distinguished career in education. Anyone who finds it unacceptable that he was welcomed into Chicago political circles should explain the post-crime treatment of G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, who continue to be heroes to the right.
If politics is about defining somebody before they define you, McCain's clumsy attacks on ACORN and Ayers just gave Obama the opportunity to address them in his most favorable light. Voters think those subjects are distractions from the economic mess. The days the McCain campaign spent on them have left him with a double-digit deficit in most polls and a 1-in-20 chance to win, according to the poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight.Com.
During the debate, all McCain got out of the attacks was the sour response of CNN's independent voters. Every time he mentioned Ayers or ACORN, their opinion plummeted faster than the Dow.
Update: Right-winger John Podhoretz and I are brothers by another mother: "the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain's shorthand with longhand -- with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them. ... It is not a rap on McCain to say he’s not good at it; he doesn't want to bother with the introduction. But in a setting like that, the introduction is what matters, far more than the attack."
CBS Orders Full Season of 'The Mentalist'
CBS has made a full-season order for The Mentalist, a procedural drama on Tuesday nights that stars Simon Baker as an eccentric fake psychic who uses his keen powers of observation to fight crime.
The show has averaged 16.1 million viewers and a 3.8 rating/9 share in adults age 18-49, ranking as the top program in the Tuesday 9 p.m. time slot.
Mentalist joins two other freshman series picked up for a full season, the CW's 90210 and Fox's Fringe.
I thought this show was a goner, ranking it fourth on the Television Death Pool. The first two episodes of the show were passably entertaining, but how many quirky and damaged detectives can television support? We've already got Monk (flaws: obsessive/compulsive disorder, grief, germophobia), Saving Grace (alcoholism, Oklahoma City bombing grief, childhood sex abuse), Life (wrongful imprisonment, bad haircut), The Closer (Southern accent) and Psych (slacker), another series that stars a fake psychic who uses his keen powers of observation to fight crime.
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