Specter apparently was meeting with a party activist group prior to the open town hall, which explains the loud minority of passionate single-payer types in the crowd, up front-right. He apparently told them that the rest of us wouldn't be representative of the rest of America. Which he knows by telepathy, I guess. The polls don't bear out this belief, far as I can tell.

So, I went to the town hall with Senator Weathervane.

There was a big, fancy bus for one of the anti-reform groups, driving past the line of folks waiting outside the conference center. Way to buy into the Democrats' complaints about bussed-in ringers, you knuckleheads!

I'm not going to relate everything the old so-and-so said, because most of it was nonsense and the rest was boring. He kept going on about selling cantaloupes with his father in Wichita. And Bonus Marchers! At one point he kevetched about his WWI-era vet father never getting his $500 bonus. A bunch of us in the back asked, more or less simultaneously, if he'd retire if we gave him his father's $500.

Specter doesn't really sound like he's from Pennsylvania - it isn't an eastern accent, it isn't yunzer or hillbilly or anything like that. It isn't even recognizably immigrant like a couple of the questioners, one of which was somebody from coal mining country who him hell over cap-and-trade, and had an accent I couldn't place - sounded sort of like Welsh crossed with a Germanic dialect. But the way Specter talks... it's like the Senate has evolved its own microdialect, full of orotund wide vowels and pseudo-Southern gothic pretensions.

I had never realized just how big of a socialist tool Specter was. I guess I've never listened to more than five minutes of him, and never about this sort of thing. He was usually nattering on about Judiciary Committee stuff, now that I think about it. His biggest beef with the current health care bill is the lack of a single-payer system. I don't understand him - he goes on about balanced budgets, and line-item vetoes, and preserving jobs - and then turns around and demands gold-plated government health care, and cap-and-trade monstrosities, and the budget-busting stimulus act. He never talks about raising taxes, except that's the only way to square this circle of his.

He was *bragging* about his time on the Veteran's Affairs committee, and how wonderful the VA was as a model for public health care. Some sheep-like member of the single-payer herd in the front right of the room bleated something about the VA, civil service, and prison health care systems as marvelous examples of how to do public-option health care properly. I couldn't help myself - I yelled something along the lines of "prison health care for everyone!"

In short, Specter isn't really persuadable on the subject. He's home, and happy, and stubborn. As far as he's concerned, a woman's right to choose ends at the womb - government can't tell you to not have an abortion, but he wants 'em to hector patients about smoking, diet, and all the rest of the heavy hand of preventative care.

So, I'm in the new place, and cleaning out the old apartment. Good thing the landlady's getting rid of the carpets, because they're a mess in places. A bad, leaky roof will do that to you. Also, turns out there was a huge, nasty mold spot behind the apartment's refrigerator. Any suggestions on how to clean that up? Luckily it's not naked paint - some sort of plasticy-fabric-substance, like a rubberized weave. Also, what's best for cleaning out an under-used refrigerator with mildew issues? Vinegar?

So, another $2 billion for the Bonfire of the Ford Explorers. Girolamo Savonarola is alive and well, and he's pretending to be a deep ecology Watermelon.

I guess one could say that President Obama cares less about the poor than a used-car salesman does.

Now, I don't think that's exactly fair - Cash for Clunkers is as much or more of a Congressional horror as it is a creature of the Administration. But the White House has made the decision to defer to Congress & enthusiastically supports, prepares, and serves for supper the monstrosities that careless blind giant vomits out upon the national kitchen table. Obama's minions are fully committed to this destruction of wealth, to this assault upon the resources of the industrious poor. It is a welfare program which transfers government funds to those who can *almost* afford new cars, while wasting marginal & distressed assets which would otherwise populate the purchasable stock for those with the time and skills to maintain creaky old vehicles who also are without the funds to buy new cars, even with a 4.5k helping hand by the government.

Frex - a guy here at work bought a new F150, a bigger truck, with a handshake deal with a third party who was going to buy his six-year-old extended-bed Ranger. That third party's planned financing fell through, and for a while this guy had two trucks (and two truck payments!) on his hands. The third party eventually re-negotiated a less generous financing plan, but my co-worker was stuck with the additional cost of carrying that payment for an extra month. Cash for Clunkers encourages people like my co-worker to buy, oh, I don't know, some hypothetical hybrid truck with miracle gas mileage, and destroy the Ranger. The struggling third-party buyer, who could barely wrangle financing for a six-year-old Ranger, would then be utterly SOL.

Update: This guy has a clever, if nasty, idea, but I rather think that if the Cash for Clunkers thing runs out, and many people follow his particular scam, that the resale value of CfC vehicles will be artificially depressed by the drug of his fellow scammers' assets on the market. Using assets to launder money tends to reduce the price of the asset in question in a manner roughly related to the convenience and difficulties of cleaning and the easiness of the unearned profit. In short, the transaction costs will consume some of the 4.5k, the final end-user will claim her share of the 4.5k, and a certain portion of the windfall will simply be a dead loss lost to the friction of the scam.

This is somewhat related to how my exploit of the first-time home buyer credit of this season will not be fully captured in value by yours truly, because I expect the asset I just bought was partially inflated by the prospect of the credit in the market. When December rolls around & the tax credit window closes, I expect that inflation will drain out of the market as well, thus reducing the apparent value of my asset. A certain part of that inflation was not real, but rather a temporary artificial fluctuation in response to the government incentive. The seller captured that portion of the value, insofar as I was willing to pay the premium. Now, it wasn't the full 8,000, because qualified first-time buyers are not the whole of the buying public - they aren't even a majority, although they might be a slight plurality. In weighing the advantages and disadvantages of this, I had to take into account the natural and direct governmental components in future inflationary trends, which *won't* disappear in December with the expiration of the first-time buyer tax credit.

Also, 8,000 is 8,000. I was willing to pay what I paid to get the house then. It was the reasonable cost of the asset, and if I can recapture some portion of that after the fact, great! But I don't expect to cash in on my place like a short-time investment. For one thing, I've committed to living in it for the medium-to-long term. I was living in the same rented apartment for nine years. I don't have happy feet.

Why does this chaos sound like a sheet metal postmodern reenactment of FDR's old herd slaughters? With the wrecking yards refusing to take economically ruined scrap cars, are they going to end up burying the 'clunkers' in mass graves in already half-regulated-to-death landfills?

Unintended Consequences, thy name is 'Efficiency by Diktat'!

I've made some progress this weekend - did some painting, got most of it done, although it looks like I will need to re-do the edging in the living room. I'm not so good with the paint brush, I'm afraid. I'm going to go ahead and schedule a steam-cleaning company for the first floor's carpets, to see if we can kill that cat-smell. Then, hopefully, start seriously moving this weekend coming up.

Well, I'm a homeowner.

Now's the time for me to bumble about & run into sharp-edged things in the dark, I suppose. My shampooing attempt on the downstairs carpet seems to have come up short on the "must and cat-smell" front. I've had someone recommend getting a steam-cleaning outfit in to take care of it. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on spackling & wallpainting this weekend. Am I going to get any dry weather?

Poll question: I need to change my voter registration to reflect my new address - I *think* I'm moving into a new ward. Should I change parties while I'm at it? I've been tactically Democratic since February 2003, but I get more conservative and culturally Republican by the week. Should I re-register *tactically* or *culturally*?

'Endless Eight' finally gets to Hitler. This is easily the least political use I've seen of the Downfall clip.

h/t

A guy here at work is getting married. I observed that he had just bought a house & wondered why they had waited until now. Apparently there's a serious income gap in the mortgage terms available to couples and singles, and we tend to fall into it here at work. They're holding the wedding after the grace period allowed by the terms of his mortgage financing. I had wondered about that one-year ban on cohabitating in my mortgage application.

But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.

I threw out most of my MSiA toys on Sunday, after pulling down a toy-model of the Albion from Gundam 0083 off of the top of a shelf & discovering that it had turned *brown*. The MSiA toys were mostly cast from a foul, cheap sort of rubbery plastic, especially the stuff made for the North American market. It wilts, changes color, and generally doesn't hold up well. I saved a couple of the sturdier pieces which shouldn't look like crap on a shelf, and tossed the rest of the box into the trash. In retrospect that particular hobby was a waste of money, although disassembling them and putting them back together gave me something to do with my hands while talking on the phone to particularly annoying HighQ customers back in the day.

So, I found a friend with a burn-barrel and we destroyed my excess personal papers, which had accumulated to the point where I wasn't willing to haul it with to me to a new domicile. An overflowing paper-case whose overflow filled three plastic disposable shopping bag, it took about an hour or so to incinerate the lot. Mostly ten years' worth of phone & electic bills & banking statements, but there was an awful lot of health insurance rubbish, and a fair amount of old Otakon paperwork - floor plans, hotel proposals, decorators' proposals, that sort of thing. My old passport - used once, expired eight years ago. Into the fire, all of it. Well, except a few things which just didn't need to go up in flames. That all will go into the trash - no personal information or old confidential Otakorp stuff.

I should mostly be ready to move by Thursday, which is the closing. After that, I may need to take a day or so to figure out what I should take care of before moving anything in - I have a toilet to fix, a ceiling-crack to do something with - spackle? I dunno - and assess the paint in the family/TV room on the first floor - should I give it a new coat of paint before moving anything into it?

Oh, man. Kyoto Animation's apparently collectively decided to become the otaku Andy Warhol. The same damn episode, re-animated, re-recorded and slightly modified - not just four times, not six, but - what, eight is the current guess?

Lunatics.

And now I'm embarrassed, because someone else has already had this epiphany.

You don't get much more badass than this. Girl Genius just keeps getting better & better.

Dresden Codak may operate at a higher artistic level, but it's also a once-a-month sort of operation, and is almost openly hostile to linear narrative. The Foglios crank out three color pages a week like atomic clockwork, with an exceptional narrative flow. Order of the Stick has a similar fidelity to strong, well-written narrative, but Burlew's art style is just less demanding than the Foglios', and he's not nearly as reliable, albeit not bad by online standards; also, the fake-RPG story and subcreation is clever but doesn't even pretend to originality.

Perhaps the closest competitor to Girl Genius is Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary, which has long since outgrown its original crap art & comic-sociopathy humor for a polished style & intricate space-opera plotting. But in the end, Schlock Mercenary is a *strip*, while Girl Genius is a graphic-novel serial. The Foglios are operating under a different and more demanding set of artistic constraints than Tayler. Also? Schlock Mercenary is a comedy which pulled a Cerebus, while Girl Genius has always been a serious story with a wide streak of comedic relief-style humor.

Man, I love Dresden Codak. Even though I only get about one joke in three, googling the references usually causes a follow-on snicker.

I was down visiting in Pittsburgh last weekend. I spent the weekend pestering my great-aunt - who's terribly shaky on her pins & keeps wobbling around without her cane saying that she's fine so long as she can balance herself on the walls or furniture in her house - to always carry her cane around & to be more careful of falls.

Karma took notice of this, and as I was packing up my stuff and walking out of her guest room with arms full of a bulky overnight bag, my toe caught on a stool she keeps in her hallway. I took a full-on face-fault header into the floor, right in front of her. Luckily I didn't bring her down with me, so no harm no foul, but boy was that embarrassing. Much to her credit, she didn't burst out laughing like I would have if I were in her shoes.

Hopefully I've used up all the bad-fall luck in that house for the next couple weeks.

Watching (and reading) a lot of Ranma 1/2 th' last week or so. The TV series ends fairly strongly, in an episodic, unfinished fashion, but that unfinished character suits an episodic series - a heck of a lot better than the way they (didn't) end Inuyasha, a shounen quest show if I ever saw one. I'm taking the OAVs slowly, as it's now high summer & walking season. Better to be out and about than cooped up inside with a TV & DVD player.

But I really liked Nodoka as a character, more than I thought I would from the descriptions I'd heard over the years. She's quite sweet & even-tempered, not at all the sort of fool who you'd expect would marry someone as monstrous and worthless as Genma Saotome. Only a walking catastrophe like Genma could take someone like that & turn her into an aspiring familicide. By the end of the TV series, I had come to hate Genma Saotome with the fire of a burning sun. The heck with harmless old Happosai, with his lechery, petty larceny and fire-bombs - Genma is the true villain of the story.

Everything wretched, or wrong, or mis-aligned in the world of the Tendo household was wrecked upon it by the will of Genma Saotome. That first trip to the Cursed Springs? Genma. Ranma's serial fiancees? Genma, again and again and again. Ranma's pugnacity, inarticulateness, and incapacity to effectively display emotion? Genma's insistence on raising him without a mother. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Soun & Genma's original apprenticeship to Happosai was somehow Genma's fault.

OK, OK, it's hard to blame the evils of the Kunou family on Genma. But I'm working on it. He *did* once affiance Ranma to Kodachi, so there's that...

Well, it looks like I'll be a homeowner come August. I was holding off until the inspections on account of last month's failed attempt, what with the foundations and the carpenter ants and the maintenance and the HEY LADY!

Ahem.

This one went much more smoothly. It's a split-level condominium in a modest little six-unit in the borough, on Crawford Lane at the top of the hill in the southwest ward. They're putting in a new roof on the units, and it sounds like they'll be working on that while I'll be moving in. There's some minor stuff to fix, but every place has its quirks. I'll be in the market for furniture, though. I don't have nearly enough stuff for a place this size, and a lot of what I do have ought to go right into the trash. You accumulate a lot of rubbish furniture unworthy of a decent home, renting as long as I have.

But hey, you know, I'm going to successfully shift from creditor to debtor status. With the dollar about to go over the falls, I figure it's the proper posture. Even if they surprise me & stave off the hyperinflation to come, I'll still have a decent place to hang my figurative hat.

Oh, crap. It's Cruise weekend. I guess I better leave my car up here at work.

It's going to be damned loud. If I'm lucky, it'll rain constantly... That'll keep the street noise down.

I see that they're talking about banning smoking in Tallyrand Park. In a *park*. In the *open*. Schmucks.

You can buy cheap washers and dryers from amazon.com, but the shipping charges will eat you alive. $192 each!

How did Mark Levin get such a big radio following? He's got a voice made for print.

Daemones Diogenissimus

Restless I was born
And searching even in the womb
Quickly my path worn
And back and forth and back and forth
Like a shuttlecock across the loom
To find that thing they call
“Understanding” or “knowledge” or “God”
But most often truth.

Diogenes they called me
And damned the light of my lamp
And avoided my footsteps
As I hove into view.

I was searching
For my first honest man
And after a time
For any honest man
Or woman, or god, or book,
Or mythical beast,
And still, the most mythical
Of them all
The honest man
Far more rare than
Two-headed amphibians
Or chimerical monstrous
Combinative horrors
Is that rare beast,
Whom I have yet to find
The honest man.

He was not among the Italian cult
Whoring their intellect in the
Geometric Temple.
He was not arguing
In the Athenian mob
He was not to be found
With the wise men
Masons and fishwives.
He was not driving slaves
Or helots or peasants
Nor a brother of the Spartan lords.
No, he was not found in any of those places.

But artists? Truth and wisdom,
If you exist,
I tell to you and the
Unhearing troubled heavens
If you exist to be troubled,
Troubled you are by the
Omnipresent
Odoriferous
Abominations of the artist.

Everywhere I went, I found them.
Daubing the fields in false and frivolous colors,
I found the painters plying their trade.
Flattering the rich and powerful,
I found the poets planning their praise
I found them again, called
Demogogues and sophists and tribunes
Bragging of their telling
Of truth to power,
Meaning that truth that is a means
And a way to power.
Again I found them, with instruments
Flattering women
And the love of women
And the love of the love of women
Or boys, or sheep, or whatever
Desires
Best paid for the lacquer on their lutes
And the fat on their bones.
Singing! Oh, the singing,
Lie upon lie upon lie
Flattering half-falsehoods at best
Utter tripe in the main
And such an unplumbed
Obstructed
Main it was
Stinking to the much-abused
Much-maligned
Much-polluted heavens,
Rising along with the sacrifice-fires
Of the hypocrite priests
And the alchemist-cheats
And the vaporous oracles
With their vaguities so much worse
Than pure simple musical lies.

All the hours and days of my life
I walked by the light
Of my flickering lamp
And not one glimpse
Did I gain of my prey,
And not one word
Did I hear which led
Me anywhere but through
The same sodding muck
Of human delusion
Derision
And lying despair.

Thus did I come
To my dishonored grave
And within the tomb
They laid my
False foul flesh
For not even in myself
Did I find the honesty
Or understanding of truth.

From that putrid space
Burst what I have become
Restless still
And deathless with hunger.
The lamp burns
Now without oil to fuel
And through the darkened hours
I stalk my honest man.

Well should they fear
The liars and cheats
The light of my lamp
That splits the stillness of the night.

Even in darkness
With no-one to hear
Not one of the artists
Will tell me the truth
And those who knowing
The lies they sell
Those I destroy
For the sound of their demolition
For the sake of rage and despair.

Some trying to save
Their lying souls
Will offer long-winded stories
And beautiful songs
And marvels and wonders
And glorious prose
And some I will grant license
And some I will spare
In experimental hope that
Terror and awe
Might forge from artistry,
Fear and trembling
Some semblance of truth
Or a guide-post
But each essay and trial
Dare disappoint my hope
That subject I shall leave hanging
Strung up by the rope
I had lent him before.

Mitch Hagmaier
6/5/2005
(Heavily edited & revised, 6/17/09)

I've just been in a mood recently. The weather's been dreary, or I've been under the weather, or both in conspiracy with each other have been at me at once, and the sum and total of current existence is the monocloud, looming, over a landscape of overpriced, ill-kept real-estate. In the financial news, the sucker's rally is in full roar, and summer's long static roar looks to be even longer and even louder than is its usual wont. It's very likely that I'll miss the interest rate sweet spot, as nothing's reaching out & grabbing me after last month's pricy mis-fire.

I can't help but think that on a purely utilitarian basis that I don't belong in an owned house, by myself. Houses are for families, not for unmotivated solitary men. I had thought about getting a cheap house in Phillipsburg, but the long miserable commute and the uninspiring nature of that hill-town just made all of my ambition curl up and die a shameful, slovenly death in a roadside ditch halfway down the Allegheny Front.

While I was walking a suburb of that town, I encountered an honest-to-God "Here, Hold My Beer" moment, in which a pair of hicks in black wife-beaters had clearly gotten tired of chopping down a thick tree by the side of an attached garage, having taken chips out of each side of the trunk without seriously cutting into the heartwood. They had wrapped a narrow little cable around the trunk about eight feet up from the roots, and attached it to a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and one of the wife-beaters was revving the Jeep, trying to pull the tree down by main force. They were probably lucky that the cable gave way before the root system, because I figured about even odds that it would have pulled down the garage wall along with the trunk if they had succeeded. Meanwhile, the narrow little cable snapped at a join, and went whipping about. I had kept my distance expecting this to happen, and luckily, none of the other onlookers got caught in the rebound. But geez, that really didn't strike me as the sort of neighborhood I needed to be a part of.

I've been watching My Otome, which is a fun example of what's known by the TV Tropes people as a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, of the superhero subspecies. It's a SF fantasy set on a world where nations' militaries are supplemented or replaced by nanotechnologically overpowered female knight-servants known as "Otome". Think OMAC: One Maiden Army Corps.

I'm also watching Flag, which is a Real Robot super-realistic Twenty-Minutes-Into-The-Future show about a combat photographer embedded with an elite UN strike force involved in a central Asian civil war. It's stylistically exciting, done in a hard-edged "found footage" documentary style, with absolutely no compromises with narrative - every second of story is pieced together from video by the narrator character, and the protagonist is mostly heard, not seen.

It's a strange juxtaposition, My Otome and Flag, because it's so much easier to accept My Otome on its own terms. Suspension of disbelief is far, far easier when you're presented with magical nanotechnological works of wonder - it makes every other conceit of unreality and whimsy go down that much more easier, like a mouthful of milk prior to gobbling a plate full of dry cookies. Flag on the other hand, with its hypocritical officers prating on about roadmaps for peace and its M1 tanks getting ambushed in tight urban kill-zones and its photo-realism, doesn't get an ounce of consideration from yours truly. When the elite UN strike force (btw - bwa hahaha!) feels the need to perform aerial reconnaissance by piling into a Little Bird with a side-mounted "Predator drone" & *flying* into a canyon, all I could do was scream in horror and disbelief. A) Predators are much, much bigger than that silly little contraption B) the whole point of using UAVs is to *not* put your scouts in physical proximity to danger C) why were they flying *in* the canyon?

I think I'm going to call it the "Military Realism Uncanny Valley". The closer your fiction gets to actual contemporary realism, the more sensitive the viewer/reader gets to inaccuracies. Putting giant robots or magical girls into "realistic" war fiction is the narrative equivalent of robots with expressive skin-like surfaces & facial mimicry - it ceases to be "cute" and instead sets off all of our ingrained BS detectors. We cease to be amused by the rough similarities and instead are repelled by the subtle failures. The difference between watching a charming performance and feeling like you're being deceived?

OK, crap like this is why I told somebody during the campaign that Joe Biden was "smart by Senate standards". Which is to say, slow on his best day, and a complete and utter moron the rest of the time.

That being said, underneath the Naval Observatory doesn't seem particularly secure if you're afraid of a suitcase nuke going off in the District, I don't care how hardened the bunker is. Shouldn't it be somewhere more distant, like Cheyenne Mountain or that place they built in the Catoctins for Congress back during the cold war?

No Sale

So, there wasn't a pony after all.

I just bought a somewhat expensive education in things that can go wrong with buying an old house, and what to look for in 'bargain' houses.

1) It may seem like it'll be easier to deal with an owner directly, rather than going through a real estate agent. You'd be wrong. The agents bring with them a certain structure and discipline to the process which protects both sides of the transaction, even if they're mostly acting in the interests of the seller. In 'for sale by owner' transactions, you're playing without a net. I was lucky enough to have a co-worker who used to work in real estate law, who helped me along the way, and whose aid in preparation and drafting got me out of my trouble with most of my skin intact. Others might not be so lucky.

2) Houses are fiendishly complicated machines, and you really can't look them over in a single viewing. Every time I set foot in my aborted would-be purchase, I saw different things. Most of the time what I saw was unwelcome, which is why I waved off in the end.

3) Older houses are archaeological sites. They change with every new project their various owners performed, and few contractors have a proper respect for their predecessors' necessary structural elements. The house in question was build in the early fifties partially on an older house's fieldstone foundation; this was the start of the problem, most likely. Later contractors put a set of stairs into the basement, without proper support. Closets were built into rooms. The second floor bathroom's bathtub was moved back four-five feet from its original location, taking space from what used to be a walk-in closet. The house was expanded to the rear, twice. A roofed front porch was put in, without fully sealing the holes knocked in the brickwork.

4) The foundation is the spinal column of a house. If there's something wrong with that, the house is crippled. The house in question had at least four attempts to shore up the original failed foundation design over the course of fifty-some years. My sin in this transaction was in not noticing this initially. It was a complicated basement, and I should have thought through why it was that complicated.

5) Drainage is important. Even if you aren't in a flood area, if your gutters are ill-placed and you have bad slopes around your foundation, you've bought yourself a long-term heartache.

6) If it seems cheap for the square footage, there's probably a reason. If you can't see it, look harder.

7) A thorough housing inspection is the buyer's best insurance. Don't ask them to cut corners. Mine saved me years of misery.

8) Dryers need to be vented *outdoors*. Venting into your basement is a bad idea - it just introduces moisture directly into the foundation.

9) Closing costs are always more expensive than you think when you start house-shopping. Keep that money in reserve.

10) A draconian mortgage officer is also your friend. If they're tight with their money, they'll force you to be careful about your purchase. Also, they make for a dandy enforcer on your transaction. "They won't give me a mortgage because of this that and the other thing" is a great conversation-ender, or negotiation tool, if you've still got the sand for the purchase.

11) If you're not happy with the house as the closing starts to approach - get out. You're going to be living there, don't walk in the door hating it.

12) Be careful about tripping yourself up with the terms of your contract & deadlines. Give yourself enough time between the inspections & your mortgage application commitment date.

13) If you're not handy, why the hell would you buy yourself a fixer-upper? Old houses are almost always project houses; don't get yourself into more than you can handle.

So, I've got my deposit back, and I'm feeling free as a bird. I wish the owner the best of luck in dealing with his foundation fixes. He was very good about giving me my deposit back & terminating the contract. He's got a heck of a job on his hands, and I'm just glad it isn't in mine any more.

Wheee!

So, another history day judging in the can. I don't know why, but this year's left me a lot more tired than usual. The best senior paper in my section was thrown out because the author failed to make his interview - really disappointing, really. Got into a number of arguments about Noam Chomsky.

That kid who interviewed me at the Palin rally last October turned out to be one of Bruce Teeple's daughters. Apparently I made it into some sort of documentary she was working on, and he recognized me.

Oh, and my Otakon messenger bag died. I need a new man-purse!

Ugh. The Heavy Weather Bruce Sterling is back. This is why I read more and more non-fiction and comic books: SF writers as a class are turning into psychotic infants. See also: John Scalzi & Charles Stross.

On the plus side.. Vega wasn't a trilogy? The good thing about post-Singularity novels? No contemporary politics to let the author inflict his crazy on you. And I'm starting to think they're all crazy...

Had a bunch of fun at the Monroes' trap shoot last weekend. The Monroes and Craig Rusch brought out their spring-load clay trap throwers to a target range in the gamelands northwest of Allentown, and about twenty of use went out & had a ball on the shotgun range. I put a bunch of shells through that old pump-action shotgun I bought off a co-worker last fall, and shot pretty well. It's still got that double-load problem with the magazine clip, but all that means is that it basically is limited to a single shell in the magazine, which works for the only thing I'm going to do with the weapon, which is trap-shooting.

Jon Acheson brought his semi-automatic Kalashnikov shotgun with the clip-feed magazine. He does well enough with it, but I saw it jam a couple times with other shooters trying it out, when they used el-cheapo Winchester shells. Shotgun shells just aren't made to be clip-fed, the mechanism likes to chew on the plastic. I've decided to avoid the Winchester brand anyways, on general principles. I tried Jon's gun out, but I just can't get used to semi-automatic on a shotgun - it throws off my rhythm to not have to rack the next shell into the chamber.

The Monroes invited us all over to their place afterwards for gaming & munchies. I was feeling pretty under the weather by then, and I just hope that I didn't give anybody my cold. Most everybody was pretty sunburned by then - most of us had forgone sunscreen, which was probably a mistake.

Ha ha ha ha!

I love stories like this: great white anthropologist - or at least, a science writer *posing* as such - goes off into the hinterlands, and brings back a racy story of primitives waging reprisal wars over blood-feuds. They've been doing this crap for a century or more, safely wrapped in their assumptions of civilized New York & distant, ignorant New Guinean hillbillies, never shall the twain meet.

Except this is 2009, and somebody in Papua New Guinea apparently has DSL, and read the article. Now two "tribesmen" are suing that hack Jared Diamond for defamation.

This is one of those stories "too good to fact-check". Which is exactly how Diamond got himself into this mess. Ha!

h/t Instapundit, the one-man newspaper.

I've been reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations this last week. I'd only read the usual assigned excerpts - on division of labor in pins manufacture, of course - back in school. Aside from the strange archaic usages - he uses the term "police" in a fashion utterly alien to modern usage, for instance, almost synonymous with "statute", really - it's quite engaging.

I find that it helps to read period works of analysis like this in an aggressive, argumentative mind-set. Even Smith can argue fallacies, and the free-market commonplaces of economic theory did not spring full-grown from this book, after all. With some effort, you can follow his developing argument against mercantilism, but if you don't pay attention, it can disappear under modern economic assumptions. He's much more hostile to entrepreneurs and labour-centric than his reputation would lead one to assume. You can see why intellectuals & academics as a class would *hate* Smith - he's quite uncompromising in judging them as a class as "unproductive", along with lawyers, courtiers, the military and the clerical order. He's also quite conservative on banking matters, endorsing maximum rates of interest to suppress speculative investment & opposing paper currency likely to gain circulation among consumers, judging paper to be a pure replacement for specie & not at all a supplement.

This passage has never been more apt:

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

One thing I was thinking about at the rally, was "you poor suckers haven't seen anything yet." This isn't going to be a bad year for taxes. The bill hasn't come due yet - the President and his merry band have been partying and scheduling for further parties on our credit, not our cash. For almost half of the country, the federal government doesn't tax us at all except for the entitlement payroll taxes. For now, they're concentrating on the capitalized classes.

Obviously, as Lady Thatcher once said, you eventually run out of other people's money. They can only float so much debt with foreign investment money until they'll have to start funding all of that debt. That means taxing the hell out of the rich. The rich will respond to incentives as the rich do, and will do their best to no long meet the official definition of "rich", which to coffer-minded taxmen, looks like taxable income streams. Y'all will recognize that particular situation under its suddenly-fashionable alias, Depression. Also, the taxmen will discover that there ain't enough rich to fund the new debt now that "the rich" has become a moving target. They're gonna have to re-define "rich" to include enough targets to make the game worth the hunt. Ten Years After had it wrong - it's "tax the rich, feed the poor, till we're all 'rich' e'er more".

The Great Re-Definition is coming. When it does, some people will want to know what happened, and how "we're" going to get out of this trap. The rest of us will already know what happened.

You eventually run out of other people's money.

So I stopped by the Tea Party on Frazier Street yesterday & dropped my local tax return in the mail while I was there. Signed the petition, although I have to admit that I only read the blasted thing *after* signing. Good thing it wasn't anything sketchy, right? Your basic petition of grievances, remarkably well-put-together for something that mentioned the recent outrageous DHS "study" classifying fervent opposition politics & federalist opinions as markers of "domestic terrorism". With something like that, it had to have been composed on the fly the weekend before the event.

There was maybe two hundred people there when I was by. I didn't pay much attention to the speakers; somebody asked me if I wanted to hold a sign, and I told him I hadn't made it, it wasn't *my* sign. I'm not much for signs, anyways. I'm not really sure what good these things do, either. We're stuck with the current administration for the next three and three-quarters years, and the current congress for the next two years. There just isn't that much leverage in Centre County. About all we could do is make the leftist university twits in State College who voted for the current disaster miserable, and there isn't much point in that. Stupid goes right to the bone, it's not as if they make a cream for it.

Oh, well.

Can anyone explain to this dim liberal-arts major why credit default swaps aren't simply institutional, marketized, commodified moral hazard?

Say I'm pondering doing something madly risky, bordering on daft: like, for instance, radically expanding my trucking fleet in the face of a possible oil shock. I hedge against the chance of fuel costs wrecking my expansion by buying fancy financial instruments which promise to cover my losses in the event of a cost bump. My competitors, not wanting to get edged out, all do the same thing, resulting in a short-term profitable event for the financial industry as we all dump significant change into their hands. But we're all betting on a certainty, and the oil costs hit all of us at once, and we all cash in our swaps. Not only have we distorted the market in oil and shipping by producing an excess of road traffic & trucking and a shortage of fuel, we've also smashed up the bottom lines of the various firms which let us buy insurance on a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's even possible that the hedging helped *produce* the oil shock by distorting the market in the first place!

The only difference between this credit-default-swap business and a legislature interfering in the market by subsidizing fuel prices is that the newfangled method removes government entirely from the business of moral hazard: haven't they privatized hazard? Instead of buying a congressman to get a chance at cheap gas, I've bought a financial instrument from Wall Street! Either way, I'm socializing risk, and privatizing profit. I'm buying the opportunity to make *somebody else* catch the flack for my consequences, right?

Thought for the day:

Truth is only stranger than fiction because narrative is inherently familiar. Narrative is a creature of fiction. Actual strangeness is essentially alienated. Understanding comes with interpretation - re-writing experiences into a coherency which can only approximate the actual, in the creation of a personal narrative, the incorporation of the alien into your fiction, your version of reality. In this sense, the familiar is antonymic to the strange, as fiction is to truth.

Ugh. I just looked up the M3 money supply curve. That quantitative easing thing was bigger than I thought. Today, I feel punished for saving.

Hyperinflation, here we come!

An email, sent to my district's representative in the House:

Mr. Thompson, I did some campaigning for you during the election last fall, so believe me that I don't relish the need for this message. But I am deeply disappointed to find that you had a part in the recent passage of a bill of attainder against employees of the TARP beneficiaries. While no-one can be enthusiastic about the rights and privileges of overeducated, overpaid, arrogant finance professionals, especially ones employed by organizations enjoying the inappropriate benefits of government funds, that can't lead us into illicit, immoral, or uncivilized responses to provocation.

The recent bill is, in my layman's opinion, unconstitutional. Congress's constitutional warrant explicitly excludes the ability to pass bills of attainder, which I define as a class of legislation designed to confiscate the property of individuals as a punitive response to political actions. A bill designed to reclaim monies legitimately paid under legal contract via punitive taxation meets this definition by my lights, and I believe that I am not being irrational or excitable in making this characterization.

Furthermore, although post-facto taxation is not itself (so far as I know) unconstitutional, it is is immoral and unethical. The fashion in which this bill combines attainder and post-facto legislation with the expressed intent of an assault upon private contracts only makes the act the more inexcusable.

In a time of Democratic legislative dominance, the party of the opposition has an even greater obligation to defend both the spirit and the letter of the law. Such doors, once opened in the heat of the moment, cannot be so easily closed!

The constitution and the culture of the law which it under-pins must be our bulwark in times of crisis and emergency. Kindly stop knocking holes in our foundation!

And this one is literally about wealth destruction - a theoretical solution to the below-zero interest rate in which the Treasury announces the de-tenderization [sp?] of a randomly statistical sampling of currency in circulation at a set period, to discourage cash holdings in a time of sub-zero return on investment.

...who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by

- William Blake, America, a Prophesy

Just got some spam for St. Patrick's Day gifts. This is a holiday for giving presents now?

I thought it was a day for aspiring alcoholics to pretend to be Irish, wear green, and drink themselves cross-eyed.

Watchmen. In short? It's very much a Zach Snyder movie, despite what I'd heard beforehand. It's got interludes of brilliance, and is interesting even in its failures. I especially liked how they shifted Veidt's trendy lefty do-gooder conceits from the slightly artificial nuclear freeze one-worldism of Moore's now-archaic script to a contemporary 'watermelon' environmental extremism which expresses itself in what looked like the deliberate assassination of Lee Iaccoca. (This new trendy leftism will look as archaic and foolish in twenty years as Moore's original script does now, mark my words.) They even papered over the cartoonish bigotry of the New Frontiersman editor in the coda, who was gassing on about minorities in the comic book & was whinging about 'hippie communes' in the filmed version.

But I didn't much like the ending, which inverted the purpose of the big evil plot, and tore out the heart of the ending. The *point* of the comic book's resolution was a renunciation of superheroism in favor of Veidt's one-world progressive futurism. The filmed ending was a reversion to type, with the definite suggestion that the New Soviet Couple are cheerfully polishing new toys & new latex duds in the basement, getting ready to go out every night 'at 3 AM to do something stupid'. While I don't particularly *like* Moore's politics and ideas, it was his story.

The movie was too long for a theatre experience, and too short to invest the audience in the climactic disaster, which was reduced to a CGI annihilation of streetside ciphers, most of which they hadn't had time to introduce to us in an already-overstuffed narrative.

I liked 300 better.

So, I continue to be pure poison for automobile companies. First, I killed Daewoo by buying my first new car, a 2000 Lanos, from those poor suckers. Then, I went and bought a Chevy Aveo-5 from GM in December 2007. Result? Dead company walking. I zombify car manufacturers with my cursed cheques.

I was out profiting from the anime industry's agonies this weekend. Best Buy has mostly given up on selling anime DVDs, and they're liquidating their anime sections in most of their stores, starting the first of March. I went over to the Patton Twp Best Buy & grabbed a pile of stuff I wouldn't normally bother with if it weren't at least 60% off MRSP. As usual, it turns out that at least some of the stuff I hadn't bothered with up to now was pretty dang nifty.

Case in point: Negima!?. I avoided the manga originally, because it seemed like anything other than original. A Ken Akamatsu harem comedy with a prepubescent harem lead and thirty-some utterly interchangable girls? It seemed like there'd be better "girlswarm" stories out there, so I passed. The word on the first anime adaptation of Negima, sold as Negima! in North America, was even worse - that the character designs were literally interchangeable, the story tedious, and the fanservice bizarrely nonexistent - for a harem comedy!

Apparently the Japanese license-holders noticed that the first try by Xebec was a dud, but decided that the Akamatsu brand was worth a second go with another studio, and they opted for Shaft. You hear a lot of trash-talking about Shaft, but they've got a creative team somewhere in the bowels of that operation which is just boiling over with hyperactive style. The closest thing I've seen to the new version, sold confusingly as Negima!? in North America, was the fansubs of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei (aka "Goodbye, Mr. Despair"). It's got the same hyper stylism, although Negima!? tends more towards turbocharged 60s New Wave splitscreening than Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei's skeezy Japanese noir. It's also got the eruption of chalkboard message non sequiturs, which I always thought was the factor which would have made SZS unlicenseable, due to its rapid-fire pace and potential for frying subtitling crews; although Negima!?'s chalkboard non sequiturs are much less rapid-fire than SZS's, it still broke the subtitler a couple times in the first couple episodes.

But anyway, Shaft's Negima!?: excellent. Also, fun! The only real problem is that there are far, far too many characters, and I found I couldn't remember the names of more than a half-dozen or so. It's literally a girl-swarm, a mob of characters, introduced in a swirl which leaves you the impression that there are people out there, but far too many to take in at once. The gag in the opening credits is that the girls are all labelled by roster number - and only roster number, their little seat numbers cryptically floating along behind them in a surreal sepia-tone landscape constructed of stacked school-desks.

Quote of the day:

I suppose once you get locked into a serious sword collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

I guess there's just something about anime cons which invite Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas references.

So, Herr Deutsches Finanzspam has prompted me to dig up my Haloscan account password and edit out his mindless comment spammery, something I haven't bothered with no matter how pissed off I've been on political occasions. Congrats, D-F! You've figured out how to fruitlessly spam a journal with a readership in the low dozens, all of them in a language other than German!

Bah! Europeans!

Some manga turn into a chore, or a slog, after a dozen volumes or so. Bleach, in particular, lost headway about volume nine or so, and degenerated into a flashy recitation of incomprehensible half-translated archaic-Japanese called attacks which was tolerable only because the layout and style is so slick and breezy that the story is over before you can really get up a head of "I don't care about these people", thus leaving *just* enough good-will to not take the next three volumes off the pre-order list.

Other manga go through phases of the moon, in turn bland, self-plagiarizing and repetitive, and light, airy & delightful. The Wallflower is my exemplar of this elliptical class of comic. Some of the mid-teen volumes were flat and undistinguished, but the latest, volume 18, has suddenly blown the doors off the morgue, leaving a set of wildly-swinging chrome hinges rattlingly metallically upon the door-frame. Suddenly Takenaga-the-dark-haired-bishounen is an actual *person* instead of a hair-colored cipher; the goth-loli tertiary characters return and prove that a "rule of four" works even better in comedy than hoary old "rule of three" gags, and Sunako returns to her proper central place in the chaos. The Wallflower is suddenly, giddily *fun* again. Wonderful!

Now, one can only wish that Skip Beat can pull off the same trick. Because I'm getting tired of the narrow rut that particular comedy manga has gotten locked into.

Meanwhile, on the anime front, I'm enjoying the early episodes of Shakugan no Shana. The first dozen or so episodes are gorgeous, beautifully animated, and dark, dark, dark. The show lives in an existential abyss, with an undead protagonist who's literally a thing (mono), a walking magical shell designed to keep the universe from imploding around the sudden absence after a monster ate the original person (hito) - devoured his "existence". Now he's watching his romantic interest fight said monsters. Said romantic interest is herself an emotionally undeveloped cipher who doesn't really think of herself as a person, having been Raised-by-Wolves to the point where she doesn't really have a name - just a sword and a mission. He names her after her sword. This is a strange foundation for what eventually turns into a tsundere love comedy, but there you are. It doesn't live up to the early episodes, from what I remember of the fansubs, and rumor has it that the second, unlicensed season is a trainwreck. Oh, well. The beginning is a gem, and the ending credits absolutely rock.

Kessler Syndrome warning, part three. Although it sounds like this wasn't so much the *result* of incipient Kessler, as it is yet another contribution towards the eventual onset of Kessler Syndrome, namely, a chaos of untrackable self-propagating debris fields which makes the maintenance of any sort of useful orbital infrastructure impracticable.

It's a shame the Planetes anime was so annoying, because Kessler Syndrome was the core high-concept behind the story - the protagonists worked in a "debris section" which was dedicated to staving off KS by cleaning up debris fields before they start to cause chain-collisions in the first place. Manga was ok, but incomplete.

When I saw this 1/10 Gundam model, a small voice in the back of my head whispered "lawn jockey".

Although I'm not sure that the plastic or vinyl it's made of would be weather-resistant. Hell of a thing, to waste 3.3k on a five-foot-plus novelty lawn-jockey and then let it rot to pieces in the front yard.

Viz's Otomen is as inconsequential as everybody's been saying. The schtick is that the protagonist is a boy with a 'feminine heart' - likes cute things, has the skill-set and hobbies of a yamato nadeshiko, reads shoujo manga, etc etc sexist blah; his father abandoned his family to work in a tranny bar, so the protagonist has been emotionally crippled by his damaged mother & is fixated on being 'manly', largely through being stoic & mastering every martial art out there. It's bloody 'orrible. The author has absolutely nothing of interest to say, and everything done in the comic has been done better in School Rumble, Ouran, Gatcha Gacha or a hundred other high-school romantic comedies. The protagonist is a walking ready-made pansy-hardass cliche, his love interest is a tomboy cipher, and the loki character - a teenaged male mangaka writing award-winning shoujo manga under a feminine pseudonym - is an undermotivated, impossible contrivance who comes off less realistic than if he had been a talking dog or a magical girl's mascot. It's not worth another volume, series dropped.

Oshinbo, on the other hand, was a joybomb surprise. I bought the first volume mostly out of cultural obligation - it seems like it would be a weaboo check-point rather than anything particularly exciting in and of its own merit. Boy, was that wrong. I'm about the polar opposite of a 'foodie', one of those gastronomic obsessives who constantly go on about their cooking habits. I eat out of cans & a microwave. Still, Oshinbo makes a rollicking good time out of that exact sort of niggling technical obsession with food, food preparation, and presentation.

It's a series about cultural status anxiety, and how that false consciousness which comes with status anxiety wars with the actual authentic practice and experience of a practical art like cooking. The details of the art in question is a matter of execution & technique rather than essence, which is the constant struggle between wanting to do something, and wanting to show off how you do it. The stories picked out for the American edition of Oshinbo - the ongoing comic in Japan has been on-going for decades, and the publisher decided to just print highlights instead of pretending to print the whole massive series - are focused on what the writer calls 'washoku' - a sort of denationalized Japanese cultural/culinary spirit. The two antagonists of the story - the punk Yamaoka and his curmudgeon father Kaihara - are respectively a journalist and an artist-artisan who compete in a series of face-offs over the composition of an "ultimate menu" of the Platonic ideal of the Japanese culinary art.

It's *fun*, kind of silly, and very, very open-hearted. It might just have been the editorial choices made in publishing an American edition, but half the stories in the first volume are about Western weaboo types showing up snotty or arrogant or mistaken Japanese about this or that aspect of the true art, about foreigners being more open to washoku, being more willing to learn.

Oshinbo's art is very simple, but tasteful. The emphasis is on the food, and on things rather than people, who by and large are relatively simple cartoons existing to express attitudes, comedy, and passions in an efficient manner. I found myself regretting somewhat the choice to present high-lights, but I can see why they thought they couldn't get away with publishing 102 volumes of food-snob comics in the current market.

You know, unnamed webcomic artist, when you beg for money on your front page, and then I find that you've let most of your back-log go out of print, I suffer a sudden lack of desire to pay for your free ice cream, no matter how much I believe in the freeware concept.

The Long Tail helps those that help themselves, Mr. Unnamed Webcomic Artist. Maybe I ought to go help Howard Taylor, who *doesn't* waste my time with unfunny, labored, interminable Harry Potter parodies. And more to the point, is capable of keeping his overpriced comics in stock on Amazon.

On second thought, no. I've been seriously overconsuming on pop crap recently, and it sounds like I have to take my car into the shop again, for the second time in three months.

Read through Kyle Baker's Nat Turner last night. For those who have never heard of Baker, go read Why I Hate Saturn and The Cowboy Wally Show, they're two of the best books to come out of the Eighties indie comics scene. He's mellowed a lot since the cynical misanthropies of those two classics, but he's still an interesting and fearless artist. He went through a rather Chuck Jonesish phase in the late Nineties (You Are Here and King David are highlights, if seriously different in tone from each other.), and later kind of went avuncular, writing "life with the family" Dave-Berryish autobiographical stuff like the Bakers. So, I knew that a Nat Turner comic from Baker would be *interesting*, if nothing else.

It's certainly that. The book is more in the style of his Eighties indie stuff, all painterly sepia-tone browns and tans, more in the style of an illustrated chapbook than your standard gutters-and-word-balloons comic. The text is a series of excerpts or highlights of the pamphlet "Confessions of Nat Turner", published right after his execution & written in a typically turgid pre-Victorian style. Baker's native style was perhaps an unfortunate fit with the Nineteenth-century pomposity of the text, as the two tend to emphasize each others' tendencies into faults, inflating Baker's visual wit into buffoonery and the text's attempts at dignity into pretension and bombast.

But Baker doesn't try to sugarcoat anything, or make allowances, or excuses, any more than the original "Confessions" did. It's all there, in bloody, violent, merciless browns and tans. The second half left me wondering why anyone would find Turner an inspiration for anything other than regret and horror. The first half, on the other hand, almost elevated the subject into a religious figure. The text and the imagery lead me to compare Turner with his contemporary prophet, Joseph Smith, who was going through much of the same plow-side revelation at about the same time. The parallels are striking, if probably not intended by the author. Religious radicalism was in the air in the 1820s and 1830s, there's no doubt about that. He sort of steals a base by starting the book with the capture, enslavement, and middle passage of Nat Turner's grandmother, since it isn't covered, properly speaking, by the text, but it's some of the most compelling imagery of the book, and worth the diversion from the subject matter. It probably would have been more appropriate to a book on the Amstad mutiny, though.

What I kind of lost the track of in the course of reading was how the first half led somehow into the second half, how Turner's religious revelation turned suddenly into an exterminationist rebellion. Because that was, indeed, what the prophet Turner delivered - a determined slaughter of every white within axe-reach, from infant to invalid. Baker papers it over with some wordless montages of broken families, but there isn't enough middle here to satisfy my questions. This is the point where Baker's choice to rely on text and images rather than traditional comic-book stylings causes a narrative break-down. Who's that losing his children? Is it Turner? Was Turner married? Or was that a flash-back? Too many visual cues from traditional comic visual syntax are missing in the style Baker is using, when he needs to play these sorts of narrative tricks it causes confusion in the reader, or at least, this reader.

And when I said earlier that Baker doesn't paper over the bloodshed, he certainly doesn't. It occupies a good third of the book, and it's horrible. He doesn't shy from making the insurrectionaries look like monsters, and shows un-named whites suppressing the armed slaves in a fairly heroic light, which you wouldn't expect in a modern adaptation aimed at the guilt-industry crowd. He even throws in the old stand-by of post-bellum nostalgia, the faithful house-slave desperately trying to save his family, comically shucking-and-jiving for the bloodthirsty band while the whites run for it.

In the end, it's kind of chaotic, and mournful, and strange. Certainly haunts you afterwards, I'll say that much for it.

Oh, BTW, my formerly-moonbat neighbors have finally taken down their Obama drapes. As an act of reciprocity, I vow to no longer call them "moonbats", "personality cultists", or "fascists".

I felt 35% less oppressed this weekend. Life's looking up!

AAUGH!

*This* is why federal pig-slopping "stimulus" spending is INSANELY inefficient. What does a school district with sharply declining enrollment, recently constructed buildings, and a preposterous *FOURTEEN* unoccupied school buildings need? Eighty-some million federal dollars for yet more unnecessary and un-needed construction!

Maybe Milwaukee will import some career arsonists from Detroit so that they can collect the insurance on their new buildings, because I can't fathom any other benefit to this particular scheme other than keeping Wisconsin construction employees fully employed. Why not just go whole-hog and just start burying bundles of hundred-dollar bills for people to dig up again?

I ordered the first disc of Nerima Daikon Brothers to fill out an order the other month, having not heard much of anything about it - or at least, not much of anything which stuck. It was stuck in among a hundred other C-list titles that ADV dumped into the market like a freighter full of cattle in shark-infested waters - apparently on the theory that if you throw enough of 'em in there, the sharks will eventually get too full to eat at least *some* of your beeves.

Uh, anyways - Nerima Daikon Brothers. It's a Nabeshin late-night anime, and not one of his hack-work directing-for-some-studio-spark make-work shows, like the Wallflower or Tenchi Muyou GXP. Remember Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi? Yeah, that level of hyper bad taste. Except as a musical. A really sketchy, slapdash, cynical musical about the dreams of a suburban radish farmer, his host-club loser of a brother, and their gold-digging over-the-hill-former-idol cousin from Okayama. All of them dressed in a loose Nabeshin-eque approximation of the traditional attire of "Hassidic diamond merchants".

The show goes like this: introductory half-assed musical number in their daikon radish field. One or more members of the 'band' gets scammed by the bottom-feeding predator-of-the-week, via one or more short, hyper musical numbers; this is usually punctuated by a song-and-dance number from the loan-shark kanban musume dancers & their portable-shrine ATM of Doom. The Brothers escape, go to a back-alley pawnshop, to rent a preposterous weapon or device to defeat the villains (and rob them of all their ill-gotten gains), which they inveigle via song from "Oyaji", a shadowy figure with the traditional Nabeshin afro voiced by the director himself. One more violent song-and-dance routine later, justice is served, and Oyaji's pet "pandaikon" shows up with all the other victims-of-the-week, who walk off with all the Brothers' stolen wealth, leaving them destitute in their radish field to song-fight with their annoyed neighbors who probably thought that living next to a daikon field in sleepy Nerima would have been *quieter* than some more urban ward, right?

The songs aren't particularly brilliant - Sondheim isn't exactly quaking in his boots - but it's all delivered with a cock-eyed sloppy enthusiasm which makes it impossible to hate. The subject matter is pretty damned sketchy - the first episode is basically an extended homosexual casting-couch gag - which probably explains why it didn't get more notice back when it first came out. But it isn't all making-fun-of-teh-gheys, and the rest of the first disc mocks Korean pachinko parlours, predatory hospital operators, and mobbed-up cops. I was a little disappointed the Korean pachinko episode stayed within the relatively safe confines of "boy, the Koreans love their kimchee and cosmetic surgery, don't they?" and "housewives love them some Korean prettyboy actors", when I, personally, would have gone with the obvious North Korean commie-gangster line. But hey, it's still pretty funny, if kind of bigoted.

And damn, are there a lot of extras on the first disc. I started watching the disc, and just kept going and going until hey! Time to go to work! I'm definitely going to have to get the rest of the season the next time I make a TRSI order; we'll see what the next sale is coming up this Thursday.

Heck of a thaw on Sunday. Walked to the grocery store in a t-shirt, after turning back to leave my winter jacket at my apartment. Saw a woman up on High Street dumping salt on her sidewalk, and told her to wait until dark, because it was just going to get washed into the street-gutters without affecting the inevitable night-time ice-slicks that this sort of mid-winter thaws leave all over every down-hill flat surface.

Listened to the Super Bowl on the radio. Living without cable has a certain old-timey charm occasionally. You really do live in a different world when you interact with the polity via radio and print. Even if the print is online blogs instead of the daily paper...

God, what a pompous ass. Textbook projection. Wanna bet Ron has a heavily foxed, falling-apart copy of Catcher in the Rye somewhere near his bed-post? Probably hidden behind a bookstore-fresh, never-read copy of Franny and Zooey.

Not that I'm much of a Billy Joel fan. "We Didn't Start The Fire" is galactically bad, and most of his stuff is kind of eh. Rosenbaum's right about "Allentown" being crap, but not because of any sort of imagined contempt. The song is phony, artifical and worse, schmaltz. It's a college-student's idea of what life's like, and what it used to be like, in a dying factory town. It's an act of imagination by a not-particularly-imaginative hack. But Joel was occasionally a skilled hack on other occasions - I liked "River of Dreams" and some of his blue-eyed soul stuff - so I'm inclined to give him an existential pass.

Just don't make me listen to "We Didn't Start The Fire" or "Allentown" again.

Ha!

Jim Geraghty, live-blogging the RNC officers' elections:

Another reporter notes that the RNC has to be out of the ballroom by 5 p.m. because a wedding is slated to use the room starting at 5:30. Besides the RNC Chair, the RNC has to elect several other positions, including co-chair, secretary, and treasurer.

Every con-runner's been in that position. It's just a hell of a lot more... prosaic and small-time than anything you'd associate with the guys running one of the two national political parties.

Well, crap. I don't follow too many TokyoPop titles anymore, but I've already had two or three orphaned manga from them - Suppli and Platinum Garden - and two titles from their light novel line which is now one with the ages. It's better than Viz seizing up & falling over, but it's never good when the former-leader in an industry segment starts zombifying before our eyes like this.

Embarrassing confession time: not only do I regularly confuse Arthur Miller with Norman Mailer, but I also have been conflating Norah Vincent with Sarah Vowell. Oops. Well, at least I managed to *not* give my sister the cross-dressing lesbian journalist's latest socially subversive performance-art piece for Christmas. Lucky for me, it didn't come out in time. Which reminds me, I need to get around to finding my own copy of the Wordy Shipmates to read.

In my defense, they're both semi-comedic writers with last names starting with "V" who've written for Salon, which is probably where I got the idea that they were the same person. Yes, I used to read Salon.

I told you I used to be a very bad Republican.

h/t Glenn Reynolds.

Did you know that Wil Eisner's last comic book was a collaboration with Umberto Eco about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery? Ordered, but geez, that puts some really rank crap into my "Recommendations" listings on Amazon.

When did Momotato Daioh turn into a Unarian math? A few years ago? At any rate, January 1st is Apert for Momotato.

I'm getting kind of wroth with Del Rey & their slipping standards. Yozakura Quartet is an OK-if-not-great urban-fantasy comic, but the translation is just full of holes. They'll translate all the silly crap in interstitials about tertiary characters' favorite musicians and and comedians, but when the protagonist obstentiously writes something portentous in the heroine's mayoral log as the introduction to a big, showy Power Walk, then hey, the readers don't need to know just what the heck he was writing, right? It was just left in the original kanji & kana.

The translator did similar things in previous volumes, where we were just given the original, untranslated Japanese bulonium terms for various invented fantasy elements of the plot, without any explanation of what the hell the characters were talking about for chapters at a time. Now, admittedly, the original terms used were probably gibberish in Japanese as well, but it looks like they were a lot less obscure in the original than in the version delivered to the American audience. And I still say there's too much gassing on about obscure Japanese pop culture references in the endnotes, and not enough explanation of the made-up fantastic elements. It's a serious lack of prioritization of translation, if you ask me.

Wheee! Cartoon binge! Dennou Coil, Red Garden, and various favorite episodes from the Dini/Timm Superman late-Nineties series. I never got around to watching the fansubs of the last few episodes of Red Garden, so it's nice to know how that series ended. Very "Twilight of the Gods", really. The two-part OVA "Dead Girls" was pretty unexpected. I'm not sure what it was I was expecting - some sort of flashback or re-telling of the main story, maybe? But the delivered show was peculiar in a way which I can't really describe without massively spoiling the TV series. Dead Girls was an awful lot like Batman Beyond, actually. Cut maybe with Anne Rice.

But Dennou Coil. I'm kind of on the fence about how to rave about that show. It's like the demon spawn of My Neighbor Totoro and Serial Experiments Lain, half cheery Miyazaki-NHK children's extravaganza, half gloomy haunted cyberpunkish psychological mystery. On the one hand, bright spritely Ghibliesque crowd-pleasing spectaculars, and on the other hand, complicated emo wangst, tormented little kids in peril, and urban legends about dead girls. I'm not sure if the mainstream would eat it up, or be completely confused and repelled. It's utterly brilliant, but there was perhaps about a half-episode's too much of the wangst and emotional gnashing-of-teeth in the conclusion. It *needs* to be released in North America, but I'm not sure if it'd be successful. It bears strong structural and thematic resemblance to Fantastic Children, and that pretty much dropped into the marketplace & sank without a ripple.

Up late last night listening to the commentary on Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell and John Carpenter have known each other too long to be doing commentaries together. They spent five entire minutes bragging past each other about their respective teenagers instead of talking about the film. It was like a ringside seat at someone's family reunion. What the hell ever happened to Dennis Dun, anyways? Nothing but TV bit parts since Prince of Darkness.

Finally got around to watching the Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz OAVs, and they're complete and total hogwash. Pretty, but horribly, horribly stupid. A meaningless re-tread of the same rattle-brained set of themes as the TV series, which at least had the virtue of simplicity and single-mindedness. None of the characters' motivations in the OAVs made any sense, and stuff seemed to happen just because they had finished storyboards available to animate from. One can't help but figure that randomly shuffling the storyboards wouldn't have materially affected the story.

I'd forgotten just how disgusting some episodes of Requiem from the Darkness could get. I watched the fansubs, back when it was still being called "Hundred Ghost Stories", and bought the Geneon DVDs on the cheap last year. It isn't a show that you can marathon in a single sitting, so I've been watching an episode here and there. Last night, I sat down to eat some cheddar sausages and watch a single episode, and got murder, necrophilia, gas-bloated corpses, and maggots with my dinner. You know it's an ugly show for dinnertime viewing when the least repulsive episode on a disc is about child dismemberment. Lucky I have a strong stomach...

So I was thinking about the other day's Dark Knight drivel, and worrying that I might be wandering into "Grand Inquisitor" territory. Do you think Bruce Wayne's ending position in that movie could be described as Grand Inquisitor lite? It is a deliberate reliance on falsehood and self-scapegoating on the part of an elite to save the souls of the general run of humanity, in short, an argument that salvation must forever travel with a bodyguard of lies.

But then, the Grand Inquisitor is more about freedom and agency than the problem of evil. Different cultures, different politics, different fixations, I suppose. Subjugation for us isn't the issue it was to the Russian intellectual, after all. If Batman in all his incarnations is about anything, thematically, it's about civic lawlessness, urban disorder, the problem of evil in the city.

There is no real hunger in Gotham, as there is in Doestoyevsky's Russia, or the Grand Inquisitor's Seville, and thus all that about bread goes over our heads, whereas in Doestoyevsky, it was intended to go right through the literal gut. "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" For those who have seen what virtues the well-fed, fat, lawless poor are capable of, this is an ironic demand. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." Oh, how ironic this one is, when the fools of Hollywood pledge their literal servitude to a new king on the day of his crowning.

But really, truly, the cup of "Mystery" and its self-regarding moral pride is a temptation. It's hard to not get caught up with Ivan in his enthusiasm for his creation's towering egotism.

I don't know why, but it feels colder this morning than it did last week, when we had the real Arctic cold round these parts. Maybe because I had the heat turned up further to compensate last week? But I'm sitting at my desk here at work, and my toes are still half-frozen a half-hour after coming into the office. It's not as if I'm the one setting the thermostat here in the the office.

So, I got the news last night that Neal, my former roommate from the days at Quest Labs, has shipped out for the Sandbox. He & the rest of the 56th Stryker Brigade should be passing through Kuwait into the theatre in the next week or so. Good luck to the Bloody Bucket, and here's hoping the elections go quietly and safely.

Stay safe if you can, and kick ass if you have to.

Jessica's requested meme, from One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg, by Eric Wittenberg et al:

Imagine a long column of cavalry winding its way up the mountain side, on a road dug out of the mountain side, which sloped at an angle of thirty degrees just wide enough for four horses to march abreast - on one side a deep abyss and on the other an impassable barrier, in the shape of a steep embankment; the hour ten o'clock at night, a drizzling rain falling, the sky overcast, and so dark as literally not to be able to see one's own hand if placed within a foot of the organs of vision; the whole command, both men and animals, worn out with fatigue and loss of sleep...

It is, itself, a quote from a New York Times correspondent's description of Custer's brigade riding towards what would be a successful ambush of a retreating Confederate wagon train in Monterrey Pass over South Mountain after Gettysburg.

Fabius Maximus tried to illustrate the real-world application of the Dark Knight aphorism about men who 'just want to watch the world burn', and went seriously into the ditches by citing one Baju Bajrangi, a Hindu nationalist-fascist, terrorist and murderer. As Bill Quick points out, Bajrangi isn't a *textbook* pure-nihilist, in that he's clearly reacting to an initial atrocity with reciprocal atrocities. But I'm not satisfied with Quick's answer. It's incomplete, at least partially because the moral tableau established by that movie is incompletely described by Fabius Maximus. Let me explain.

The Dark Knight's action isn't just about a nihilist-terrorist and his hero-opposite. Rather, the movie presents us with The Joker, our man who 'wants to see the world burn', and two would-be heroes, established man-within-the-system District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the masked vigilante, Bruce Wayne/Batman. The Joker's goal isn't physical destruction for its own sake, but rather moral destruction. The world he wants to burn isn't tangible, physical, or ephiphomenal, but rather existential. He wants to burn down moral constructs, what he sees as social fictions. He's looking to find the flaw in the shining lie which is Harvey Dent, Pugnacious Hero-Reformer of the Corrupt City, and smash him utterly.

I can't remember where I picked this up, but somewhere out there is an archaic definition of "monster" as "in fiction, a person warped such that his or her personality presents a moral or ethical lesson." The Joker is convinced of the essential, irredeemable wickedness of man, and is looking for a person to make into his monster, a public soul to carve into the most shocking and monstrous of moral lessons. The middle of the Dark Knight, in which he places Dent into an impossible situation & shatters him into the disfigured, monstrous Two-Face, is The Joker's lit brand flung into the prepared bon-fire which is Gotham. Two-Face is the world set on fire, the atrocious response to atrocity.

In so far as the monster Two-Face is Harvey Dent in flames, he is the world on fire. He's an example of moral corruption and madness, whose very existence spreads the fire as sparks on rooftops in a crowded tinder-dry city. It's only when that fire-brand is extinguished and its very existence buried as in an unmarked grave by Wayne that The Joker's plot is defeated. In order to preserve the Heroic Dent, Wayne co-opts Two-Face's crimes & obscures The Joker's monster by subsuming him in Wayne's own moral lesson, a monster called the Batman.

There's a rich lode of metaphors in this narrative, and the Man Who Wants To See The World Burn is probably the most trivial of these. There are men like this throughout the academy, and all over Hollywood. Every third hip-hop, rock, and punk musician is probably somewhat inclined towards this point of view. Cheap nihilism is more common than not in the absence of proper moral instruction, and that particular duty has been neglected for the last hundred years and more. Socialized sociopathy is the end-result of the refusal to offer proper moral instruction on the part of our teachers and parents. The prisons are full of them, and if the streets are not even fuller, it's only because The Joker's belief that mankind is universally, essentially and irredeemably corrupt is at least as wrong as the belief that man is born free & everywhere lives in chains. Perhaps this is somewhat occluded by the relative rarity of socialized sociopaths with The Joker's corrupted-Calvinist view-point, as the more popular mind-sets are Rousseauian, in either the anarchic or totalizing trends.

But enough of that. We've had five generations of perfected brand-burning, fire-bombing, and pre-meditated arson. Men like Harvey Dent are even more common than the cheap nihilists, and Fabius Maximus's Bajrangi sounds like a Two-Face to me - not a man who wants to see the world burn, but rather the world itself on fire. He is the atrocious response to atrocity. Jokers are answerable on their own terms, as arsonists to be stripped of their matches, but what do you do with a man on fire? Extinguishing them seems often to be the simplest answer.

So, I ended up helping a friend move out on Saturday. Quite by accident - called as I walked past their place on the way to the grocery store, found out that was the day they were packing up her stuff in a U-Haul. So, I stuck around and helped them pack a U-Haul on what had been promised to be The Coldest Day Of The Year. We warmed up fast, but boy, U-Haul ramps are fun with slush-slicked bootheels. We couldn't get into the self-storage locker at first, and had to take a trenching tool to the ice-pack to free it from the deathly Icy Grip of Winter. We made much fun of her Saarinen-esque stackable chairlike torture devices.

They dropped me off at the grocery store on the way out of town. You don't often see a 24-foot U-Haul making a u-turn in the Weis Market parking lot. Least not around these parts.

Anime licensing wish-list:

1)Bamboo Blade. Hey, Funimation! You bothered to issue cease-and-desists for Enoki Films, why not follow up on that ukase with an actual license? It's a damned good sports anime, relatively light-hearted with a serious, ethical core which places moral development over competitive advantage.

2)Zipang re-release. I bought the first volume of the Geneon singles release cheap at TRSI, and got around to watching it yesterday. It seems like the sixth volume is unavailable, and Funimation/Geneon hasn't talked about doing a re-release in half-season or full-season sets. Admittedly, a time-travel war anime about a JSDF AEGIS destroyer flung back into WWII from the Japanese point of view isn't exactly the best fit for American audiences, but the first four episodes weren't nearly as jingoistic or morally myopic as they could have been, given the typical Japanese blind spots on the Pacific War.

3)Kodocha 2nd season set. This is more of a complaint about the new Funimation release, which is peppered with mysterious Japanese audio drop-outs. At first I thought it was more legal-issue fall-out from the SMAP hissyfit which ate the original Kodocha opening animation & those intermittent appearances by the band in the anime proper, but said audio drop-outs appear periodically in situations where there oughtn't be any sort of musical background. What's up with that?

Since I have nothing of importance to say, I thought I should start nattering on about unimportant crap again, if only to reassure any folks who might be wondering that no, I have not yet made my way for the Grey Havens...

I've been buying a *lot* of manga. It's much, much cheaper in bulk at TRSI, and I went on a serious binge late last fall. As a result, I've got dozens of volumes sitting on my to-read stack on my 'breakfast table'.

One of the pleasant surprises has been CMX's Dorothea, by one-named mangaka Cuvie. CMX is one of those publishers which is a total crapshoot: they seem to just pick licenses out of a hat, so that there's no real guarantee one way or the other. Dorothea is one of the pleasant "hits" - a historical Joan-of-Arcish sword-and-politics comic from their high-end "Mature" imprint. The heroine is an albino swordmaiden-type from a vaguely pagan pocket of the late-fifteenth-century Germanies who goes off to be a mercenary with a Landesknecht company to "see the world with her own eyes", in hopes of preserving her homeland.

The political details and realism is relatively high, and impressively well-thought-out, at least for manga. There's an acknowledgment of both sides of most arguments, and while our heroine's intentions are manga-pure, she still lives in a real, consequential world. She's virtuously opposed to mercenary looting, and yet her intervention is ferociously rebuffed by the protected with the furious observation that she had just personally slaughtered the protector of the household being looted.

I say "relatively" because the details are kind of wonky - German Waldensians were supposedly pacifistic and certainly aren't famous for being witch-burners, and Nauders & Ems are on opposite sides of the Germanies from each other - but hey, you make allowances for mangaka, especially when they start in on abtruse subjects like 15th-century German religious politics. And it's clearly supposed to be some sort of alternate-history...

Important post on the limits of centralized command in COIN, namely, the perils of "Major Hundred Miles". But I've recently heard a training story about an artillery officer which suggest that there can be reason to ride pretty close on any particular officer's tendency to think with his nifty new smart shell toy.

Um, yikes. I certainly hope this idea of a diffused nano-balloon-mirror weather machine is as thermodynamically impractical as it sounds, because otherwise, civilization is pretty thoroughly screwed. That would be the mother of all hydraulic tyrannies, "the devil's excrement" crossed with a truly ubiquitous Sword-of-Damocles scenario.

H/T Dr. Reynolds.

So, what did I find upon returning from Florida for a week with the folks? More than a ton of ice mounded up in front of the steps leading up to my front door. Apparently the new guy they had clearing the lots at the funeral home got confused about where he was supposed to put the snow-pile and decided to sock me in. Took hours & a proper set of heavy iron ice-chipping tools to clear a path to my door. Ah, global warming, how I love your paradoxical nonsensicality! See how you bewitch dimwitted neighbors into inconveniencing me?

I'm sure it's Al Gore's fault, somehow. He's called down the gods of anthropogenic ecological malice to curse my existence for doubting his prophecy, like Elisha's disrespecting by a mob of boys was avenged by the Almighty via a pair of bears, sent to devour his small and impertinent mockers.

This article on a paper claiming that reforestation resulting from depopulation of the New World after the post-Columbian pandemics was a trigger for the Little Ice Age was interesting, if fantastical. IIRC, they still can't agree on something as simple as whether the early voyagers brought back syphilis in the late 15th Century. Building an anthropogenic cause for the Little Ice Age on this sort of rickety foundation seems so amazingly Rube Goldbergish as to be practically impossible to prove. It's the very essence of "Just So" explication.

I thought I had written something about Charlie Stross in the past, but a quick google-check doesn't reveal anything. I find him a very frustrating, hit-or-miss sort of writer. His politics are typical muddle-headed hedonist-leftist twaddle - he's the sort of reflexive-instinctive 'libertarian' whose ideals could only exist in the comforting bosom of Mother Government. But he occasionally has a bright spark of lively plot and prose - most especially in the cubicle satire/spy novel/Lovecraftian pastiche The Atrocity Archives and the first volume of his Zelazny-Princes in Amber pastiche, the Family Trade. Come to think of it, the books of his which I've tolerated or liked have, by and large, been piggyback science-fictional rides upon the fantasy giants of the past. He's better known for his singularity-themed novels, but I took a strong disliking to the single example of that particular flavor of Stross, so pfft on that.

Anyways, I finally got around to reading the fourth volume of his "Merchant Princes" series, the Merchants' War, after skipping the hardback edition on the strength, or lack thereof, of the third volume, the Clan Corporate, which left me irritated and and a little bored with Stross's increasingly inept and sympathetic protagonist. The fourth volume picks up some steam by broadening the viewpoint of the narrative wildly, with less than a fifth of the book told from heroine Miriam/Helge's dull, pointless point of view. There's lots of action in the fourth book, almost all of it occurring where Miriam ain't, which makes this installment a great improvement over the third book. So, yay on that front.

Sadly, Stross's ability to maintain an American 'voice' seems like it's slipping badly with the Merchants' War. While I've been known to indulge heavily in anglicianisms like extraneous 'u's in words like 'colour', I do accept that there are distinctions between the standard American 'voice' and the British 'voice', and the Scottish Stross doesn't do too well in this volume, repeatedly having American characters pick up 'torches' or talk about being 'in hospital' and so forth. Since there's only one viewpoint character who could conceivably be pictured as "British", with every other major or secondary character either being Americans or native speakers of a teutonicized alternative-world feudal language, this kept yanking me out of the story and into an unwanted textual-analysis mode which I don't generally relish.

Also, the story doesn't so much end on a cliff-hanger as just *thwapt!* slaps up against the back cover, as if the last thirty pages just weren't bound with the rest of the manuscript. And what in previous books was a laudable refusal to inject his repulsive personal political views into an otherwise-contemporary hot-button narrative has broken down with this volume, as he wastes fifteen or twenty pages on a pointless, off-message, graceless insinuation that someone in the Reagan administration had apparently intended to blow up Boston in a fake-terrorist attack in the late Eighties, and he later has a sinister sock-puppet government spook spout stupid Truther claims about bin Laden having been a rogue agent of the American government, and salivating about the prospect of a terrorist nuke going off, again, in Boston. Bah.

Anyways, the series as a whole isn't a total waste of time, but the aspects which most attracted in the early volumes have faded or been left to the wayside, and the books are largely carrying themselves on the strength of plot, action, intrigue, and good old pulpy forward momentum. YMMV.

Sen. Casey's office auto-emailer replied to that message about the Detroit bailout proposals. With some wallpaper about FDIC and TARP, didn't even mention GM or Detroit. Guess the auto-reply emailer classified me as a financial/banking crank instead of someone pissed at the American carmakers.

This comment is the most reassuring thing I've heard out of Washington since the election. Cabinet-level nominations are fairly small ball in my eyes - the tone and attitude of an administration is set a) in the Oval Office and b) in the sub-Cabinet nominations and appointments.

One of the things that scared me the most about Obama was his Carter-like earnestness and apparent lack of spontaneous humor. He seemed to have no goofiness to him. That gag about Richardson's beard sounds spontaneous and unscripted - either Obama's speechwriters are really, really good at scripting ad libs, or he actually made a Joke. A real one, the sort of stupid, doofus gag I'd expect from Bush the Younger in the days before the office ground him down into a grey stolid paste.