The Tiger installation went well on Mr. iBook. About halfway through the process I realized that I really should have backed up my files beforehand. And after I began Mail.app and none of my messages crossed over, I realized that I was stupid for not backing up my files. But, turns out Mail 2.0 does not like httpmail haxies. All good, all good.
Well, mostly good. What is going on with Mail itself? It's ugly and clunky. And what exactly does one do with Widgets? They are flashy and neat. However, most of them are duplicates: Stickies? iTunes? Couldn't the Dashboard work better as an integrated dock?
Methodists Reinstate Defrocked Minister: "An appeals panel of the United Methodist Church has reinstated a lesbian minister who was defrocked in December after revealing in a sermon to her Philadelphia congregation that she was living with her gay partner...
The court of appeals said in its decision yesterday that it would reinstate Ms. Stroud because the lower court had committed two legal errors. One was based on the conclusion that neither the church's top legislative assembly, the General Conference, nor the Eastern Pennsylvania region of the church had ever defined what it meant by 'practicing homosexual.'"
Crocodile's Breath: "In 1978, the Jam released a single called ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’. It opens with the sound of a Tube train pulling into a station. A child’s voice cries against the heavy roar and rattle and a guard shouts something and the music begins, chopped chords, an urgent, darting bass line and an ominous hissing of cymbals. In the song, Woking boy Paul Weller, lyricist and vocalist, captures something Wolmar doesn’t mention in either of his books on the subject. He brings to life how frightening Tube stations could be late at night in the 1970s, particularly for non-Londoners. The long, dirty, CCTV-less tunnels, smelling of urine, so much less busy than now, the sense of being in a beige-tiled maze, alone except for the dodgy-sounding geezers whose voices echoed not so distantly, but in which direction? You weren’t sure."
If I had to rate them, perhaps my favorite public transportation system. Sorry, NYC, those strange express trains knock you down in scores.
"Her Mission: Save the World Without Offending Anyone"
'The Interpreter': Her Mission: Save the World Without Offending Anyone: "Making the United Nations look good is easy compared to the movie's main imaginative ambition, which is to turn Nicole Kidman, apotheosis of all that is blond in Hollywood today, into the embodiment of African suffering. Silvia, Ms. Kidman's character, may have a European education, but her roots are in the troubled (and fictional) African nation of Matobo, where her parents were white farmers...
Dot is played by Catherine Keener, a wonderful, underused actress who, if there is any justice in Hollywood, will someday have her own chance to embody the sufferings of the African continent."
I realize that I am one of the only people in the world who actually watches Jack and Bobby and the show will probably not be back in the fall (television executives smoke crack). However, the guest cast for the finale is amazing. UNSPOILED DON'T CLICK. I haven't been this excited since Norman Mailer was on Gilmore Girls. (See also the teaching supplement to the show).
Audioscrobbler kindly recommended some under-appreciated artists for my listening pleasure. Beat-les. Huh. This lends itself perfectly to my new status as a music fan of a certain age.
Wizards of Oz: "For the music fan of a certain age, flicking through gig guides has recently become a source of profound discombobulation. Every page delivers a series of cataclysmic jolts from the past: the House of Love, Pop Will Eat Itself, the Wonderstuff, the Wedding Present, Suede, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, they're all back...
Whenever a band reforms, they are understandably subject to mistrustful inquiries about motives and consequences. Except, for some reason, the Go-Betweens, who reconvened in 2000 after 12 years apart without causing a solitary suspicious eyebrow to be raised. One ex-Go-Between who did not participate in the reunion, drummer Lindy Morrison, would claim this was because no one cared in the first place, except 'a fistful of wanky journalists and some students'...
On Boundary Rider, McLennan similarly delves back to the remote farmlands of his youth: a brave move, given they were the setting for his greatest song, 1983's remarkable meditation on childhood, Cattle and Cane. Boundary Rider may be its diametric opposite - it depicts a careworn, stoic ranch-hand, staring down middle age - but it's no less affecting."
Music fan of a certain age. My recent life as a curmudgeon finally has a name. Better than this one at least.
Gayist politicians are coming out all over the country. Well, twohave. But including New Jersey's McGreevey, that's three. And three, as everyone knows, is a trend. As usual, the trend started on the coast.
Woman breastfeeding tiger cubs in Myanmar: "A lactating woman in Myanmar has volunteered to breastfeed a pair of endangered Bengal tiger cubs recently born at a Yangon zoo and separated from their aggressive mother...
'I felt sorry for them so I decided to feed them before their teeth grow,' she told the newspaper."
Pope John Paul Appraised as Pope, Not Rock Star: "The panoramic television coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II has represented him as an athlete, an actor, an enemy of totalitarianism, a world traveler, a polyglot, a pacifist, a penitent and an ecumenist. He has also been described, almost compulsively, as a rock star."
Please, everyone, get this right. Especially if you've heard his cover of "Sympathy For The Devil". (Yes, the jokes just don't stop!)
Admire the stage instead: "All eyes are on one man's achievements as the world's television cameras dwell on the great spectacle being enacted in the Vatican. I'm talking, of course, about Michelangelo Buonarroti. It may officially be Pope John Paul II's week, but as a flatterer once told the sculptor, painter, architect and poet who conceived the dome of St Peter's, the world has many rulers, but only one Michelangelo...
There's not a stone in the Vatican that is not shaped, directly or indirectly, by Michelangelo. Even its fortifications, which you queue alongside to get into the papal museums, were built under his guidance. It is no exaggeration to say that everything we see in the TV images from Rome is the creation of one 16th-century mind.".
This book has been on my night stand since February. Now the ending is spoiled.
My initial reaction to seeing Alexis Bledel in Sin City was "wow, she's a teenage prostitute in lots of leather". Strangely, she still acts like Rory Gilmore and calls her mom on her cell phone. The rest of the film is visually stunning, but made me feel dirty. I went home and watched unthreatening cooking shows to recover. Ina's world is much more delicious than Frank Miller's.
