G.I. Joe Sigma 6: Introducing kids to zero-defect managment practices?
Flippin’ sweet!
Last week, I was over at my dad’s, going through old photographs. There were some great ones of Dad as a child, as well as a gorgeous pic of his parents’ wedding (naturally, before he was a child), and other shots of him with his brothers, as kids and adults.
But did Amy want to see any of that stuff? NO! She was much more interested in the photo below, from when I was 18 years old and bore a mind-blowing resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite (not as good as this guy’s resemblance, but still):
Sigh. She plans on sending it to all of her friends who haven’t met me yet, to show them what a catch her future husband is.
Update: Shut up! I turned out to be all decent-looking and stuff! See? Even if I did have bad facial hair. . .
Peace in our time!
Yay! Osama Bin Laden’s offering a truce! If we give up more of the world’s oil regions to nuclear-ambitious apocalypse-obsessed mullahs, we’ll have peace! It couldn’t be more easy!
(I was really hoping he’d go with the “I just saved a bundle on my car insurance” line, but that’s what he gets for not using Jewish comedy writers)
Wire Hitch
Chris Hitchens is mighty bothered by the discovery that he was the subject of one of those warrantless wiretaps conducted by the NSA. It’s not just the intrusion privacy that seems to anger him, but the waste of resources:
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration’s own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Read the whole thing. While you’re at it, you oughtta check out The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s books about the NSA, in case you ever thought any phone conversation you had might have been private.
Leapfrog
I started reading Edward Jay Epstein‘s book The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood a few days ago. I’ve enjoyed his articles on Slate for a while now, and the book’s also pretty enjoyable. It breaks down the finances of how Hollywood works, and how the studios ultimately became tools in larger media empires. I find this stuff fascinating, but you all know I’m weird.
One issue that interests me is the fate of News Corp. See, Rupert Murdoch had the idea that satellite TV would be a distribution system that rivalled cable. As far as TV goes, he’s been proved right. While DirecTV can’t do on-demand too well, it’s got a great signal, and it has unique content that people are willing to pay for (in my case, the NFL HD package). Satellite’s been growing rapidly in the last few years.
Unfortunately, I’m also paying my cable company for internet service. I had some bad service from Verizon DSL a few years ago, and have done okay with my local cable company for that part of the package.
The thing is, the cable companies can (and do) provide TV, internet and voice services. The phone companies are trying to get to that point too, by laying down “last-mile” fiber-optic lines. Satellite, however, is pretty much a one-way technology; users receive signals and can send back short dribbles of info, but there’s no way to provide realistic internet and voice service via DirecTV.
Which gets me back to the question of what News Corp. exactly plans to do. And that gets me to BusinessWeek this morning, which asks Can Murdoch Win on the Web?
One theory in the article is that News Corp. will attempt to brand DirecTV’s internet service using WiMax wireless technology. Other wireless technologies are mentioned in the article, and that struck me as a pretty amazing way of getting around the Gordian knot.
In this case, the knot consists of all those cables and landlines that would need to be brought to every consumer’s home: fiber-optic, digital co-ax, etc. By going with a wireless system, News Corp. could avoid much of the massive capital cost associated with all of that “last-mile” work.
If a wireless solution offers comparable speed and access to cable and fiber, News Corp could be in a position to undercut its phone and cable competitors, which have to pay off those capital costs.
Like I said, “I find this stuff fascinating, but you all know I’m weird.”
Rhetorical Engine
I would’ve run this yesterday, but the guy who wrote it didn’t get back to me about it until today. So, here’s a post-MLK Day rhetorical analysis by John Castro (John went completely nuts a few years ago when some internet company tried using the speech in a commercial about how well they distributed broadband):
Friends,
I was listening to MLKs “I have a dream” speech today. Something struck me about it.
There are a few phrases he uses in concentrated bursts — I’m sure there’s a rhetorical term associated with it, but I’m too lazy to look it up (a cup of coffee, on me, for anyone who knows the name of this rhetorical device). Here’s one example:
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Of course, “I have a dream” itself is the most famous example.
If you take these phrases out, and line them up, they make a kind of poem that is the spine of the whole speech:
One hundred years later
Now is the time
We cannot be satisfied
I have a dream
With this faith
Let freedom ring
Free at last
Now, rhetorically, when he’s speaking, he does something interesting with these phrases. These phrases are the first half of a sentence, for instance:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
But the interesting thing about this is that gradually, over the course of a paragraph, he starts taking the natural pauses that you would take at the end of a sentence in the middle of the sentence, between the introductory phrase and the end.
So he actually reads the passage like this:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” [pause]
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream [pause]
that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream [pause]
that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
The effect is a wonderful reversal, where an innocuous phrase that kicks off a paragraph (“I have a dream”) becomes the final rhetorical focus of the whole passage. This transformation elevates what are really very simple, very plain phrases — and by that I mean no disrespect – into flourishes of great rhetorical power. These transformations — punctuating the speech with increasing frequency — elevate the text that follows each of them to a new level of intensity. They provide not just the spine and structure of the speech, but the rhetorical engine of the speech as well — constantly shifting it into higher gears. Until the famous climax of the last repeated phrase — “Free at last” — is followed, as we all know, by nothing less than the fanfare of the last forty years.
It’s a remarkable piece of work. Just some thoughts I wanted to share with you all – happy MLK day!
PS – Are you like me? Do you geek out about, and bore your people with stuff like this? If so, I’m sorry. But check out “Lincoln at Gettysburg“. Really cool book that will meet your fix.
Glad I moved to Mac
Microsoft: Not evil, just half-assed.
Lit Scrit
Official VM buddy Tina B. sends a neat article about the sheer messed-up-edness of contemporary academic writing about literature. Here’s a piece:
The problem is not just that literary scholarship has become disconnected from life. Something else more suspicious has happened to professional criticism in America over the past 30 years, and that is its love affair with reducing literature to ideas, to the author’s or reader’s intention or ideology  not at all the same thing as art. As a result, literary critics are devoted to saving the world, not to saving literature for the world, and to internecine battles that make little sense outside academe.
High and Low
My brother got me a couple of birthday presents via Amazon: The Young Ones – Every Stoopid Episode & The Broken Estate : Essays on Literature and Belief, by James Wood.
This makes me feel even guiltier about not sending out his (and his family’s) Chanukkah presents yet. No way around it; I’m a heel.
On the plus side, Amy & I got our wedding invites out this week, and the RSVPs have started trickling in. Today’s wedding-related missions: she goes for a fitting/alteration session on the dress, and then we get sized up for our rings, back at the Little King.
Whole world, hands, etc.
It was a nice birthday present to find that Google Earth is now available for the Mac. It was pretty funny to zoom in on the ark-shaped house next door to mine.