Weekend America had an interesting interview with a composer named Peter Fish, who is apparently the go-to guy for TV news themes.

Fish described how the different networks’ news themes express their personality (if you will). For example, CBS is very traditional with lots of strings; FOX’s theme, on the other hand, is full of musical anxiety and conflict (I’m paraphrasing freely here). At the interviewer’s request, Fish demonstrated how he might go about composing a theme for economic meltdown stories (minor keys and a bit of dissonance, if I understood him correctly, not being a musician). It was fascinating and made me newly aware of how even a very short musical piece can express mood and set up expectations.

Did you know that this sign has a name?

It is called an obelus.

Confusingly, “obelus” is also another name for the dagger footnote symbol.

For some reason, this reminds me of how disappointed I was when I discovered that there was no cool name for the at sign.

… Ur doin it rite:

My paternal uncle lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma for most of his life. He was handsome (in later years he sported a gorgeous head of white hair), roguish, and generous. He dropped in to visit his aging mother every day. He wore beautiful turquoise belt buckles. He was an occasional bootlegger, and I’d bet anything he packed heat on a regular basis.

I only saw him on my infrequent trips to Tulsa, but he always took time to connect with me, however briefly. One of the ways he did this was by catching my eye (often across a packed and noisy room) and slipping me an elegant, understated wink. I thought of him when I read the following passage in Robertson Davies’ The Cunning Man:

It was a sophisticated wink, not one of your grimacing winks that contorts the whole of one side of the face. It was the slightest descent of the upper lid of the left eye, but it spoke eloquently of gentlemanly derision.

Compare:

According to Howie Klein at DownWithTyranny!:

This morning I woke up and heard partisan gladiators for the Republican Party, Inc — Pat Buchanan, Rudy Giuliani and Joe Scarborough — talking about how Sarah Palin had passed a test and proven she had what it takes to be president. She proved no such thing. She proved she could do a reasonable impression of an ill-tempered mynah bird and the only thing that was proven is that Pat Buchanan, Rudy Giuliani and Joe Scarborough would rather see our country continue down the road to ruin than see Barack Obama as president.

The whole Infotainment/reality show mentality has trivialized American democracy. Why not elect George W. Bush? Why not elect a trained mynah bird?

Khitan General: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!
Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Our elementary school chess club met for the first time this morning before school.  It was a bit chaotic, as first meetings usually are, but a good-sized group of kids and the high-school-age coach did well.

This year we have several boys from the 5th grade football team, and one boy’s dad stayed to watch.  I didn’t get a chance to chat with him, but after the meeting was over I happened to overhear him ask his son, “Did you beat him?”  This threw me a bit:  first, that it mattered at all (these were “for fun” matches, not even recorded), and second that the question wasn’t “Did you win?” or “Who won?” but “Did you beat him?”  That competitive thing must run deep.

T-shirt spotted at the super-discount bag-your-own grocery this week:  “I’m not rude, you’re too sensitive.”  OK then!

Recently I was remembering a summer job I had at a burger pub many moons ago. The owner’s son was assistant manager, and he avidly enjoyed every nepotistic privilege this afforded him.

One time when he was cooking, he brought me back an order tag on which I’d indicated a customer’s wish for “no onions” by writing “No O.” Owner’s son pointed his finger at this notation, and pompously lectured, “When somebody doesn’t want onions, you only need to write ‘N/O.’ This is a waste of an O.”

The place went belly-up some time later, probably from wasting too many Os.

Kathleen Parker ed. (Via atrios.)

Is it bad form to jump up and down and screech, “WE TOLD YOU SO!”?

We told you so.

I keep hearing the debate over the bailout through a half-remembered bit in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” As I recall the plot, the country had gone into the tank as a result of the Eevil Libruls ™. The Hero was listening to a recovery plan being espoused by the chief Eevil Librul, and the Librul couldn’t supply any details, only vapid generalities like “This plan will help children,” and the Hero kept manfully barking, “Don’t tell me what this plan will do, tell me what it is!”

Wouldn’t Rand be surprised to discover that in real life, the perps are her beloved Free Market Capitalists (hereafter to be known as Looters), and that they are every bit as weaselly as any liberal villain she ever imagined? And doesn’t it bother anyone else that absolutely no one involved in this colossal meltdown can explain WHY we “must act immediately,” or exactly what this specific plan will accomplish? We’ve already seen that the plan itself contains fewer details than any given credit card application, and that the $700 billion number was completely random. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask: Where will this money come from? Who will receive it? What will they do with it? How will that help?

Great story by Maggie Jochild at Group News Blog about “sneaky” night-time frolics at Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for critically ill children. I love whoever thought of this and whoever helps it happen.

September Madness, too big to fit here.
(Hat tip to my brother)

The Rogue Columnist:

“For the first time in my life, I’m afraid for our country.”

[...] You know the high points: most of us are doing worse now than eight years ago, and it’s becoming clear that the next generation may well see lower living standards that its predecessor. Has that ever happened in America? We’re bogged down in an amorphous, endless “war on terror” that has been used as an excuse to shred the Constitution. We torture. The gap in income between the richest and poorest Americans is at its highest level since 1929. We’re doing nothing about global warming or peak oil. We’re the world’s largest debtor, taking on more to clean up — if it works — some of the swindles that constitute the capital markets. The health care system is not only broken but becoming lethal. Our education system is failing. Pensions, job security, well-paying jobs at all — falling away. How much time do you have?

[...] Now we also see this financial crisis, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine brought home, where wealth is looted, further “free market” dogma implemented, and the plutocracy only consolidates its grip. I don’t think we’re quite lost yet. I do believe this election is our last chance to save constitutional government, to keep the Republic our Founders bequeathed to us. This is it.

For the first time in my life, I am afraid for our country.

I’ve been noticing this, so I enjoyed Leonard Pitts pointing it out in his elegant and punchy way.  It is sort of grimly amusing to hear the Bush administration going “PANIC PANIC PANIC” and everyone else going “Yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.”  I guess we have all learned something in the last eight years: credibility is hard won and easily lost. You keep lying to people, they stop trusting you! Who knew? Now if we could only shorten the cycle.

… courtesy of Dennis Perrin:

MCCAIN: (whispering) I’m taking you out, gook boy.

OBAMA: (whispering) Step up, cracka.

Via Atrios, a NYTimes article about the closure of a “voluntary supervision program” for Wall Street investment banks by the SEC chairman:

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” [chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Christopher Cox] said in a statement. The program “was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate” of the program, and “weakened its effectiveness,” he added.

No shit, Sherlock!

Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.
– Attributed to Samuel Goldwyn

On its face, a very Philistine thing to say. And yet, after finishing two novels with agendas recently, I’m more than a bit sympathetic. To be sure, every piece of art has a message, intentionally or not; but I have found that if you start with the message, and then craft the art to fit, the result is usually not great art. (Vide “Left Behind,” so ably and extensively skewered by Fred Clark at Slacktivist.)

There was a small buzz awhile ago about The Shack by William P. Young. I got on the library waiting list behind, as I recall, over 200 people and patiently waited my turn, which came this week.

Now I have some admiration for any author brave enough to cast God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit incarnate as characters in a novel. I wouldn’t want to write that dialogue, though, and I’m not sure Young should have. The whole thing felt forced and phony, and Young’s inexperience as a writer showed through every telegraphed plot-punch.

Which is not to say that I disliked Young’s message: the idea that God values relationships and love over the Law and retributional justice is absolutely A-OK with me. But the novel just can’t pass the “show, don’t tell” test.

Sadly, I have to say the same about Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. But Stephenson is such a tremendously skilled writer that it has to be intentional. Nearly every character in this 900-page novel is as flat as Kansas, and stupendous events like “future of the planet is at stake” fights in space (I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler) read like comic book pages. (Edited to add: OK, a comic book crossed with a physics textbook.) What is Stephenson up to here?

I imagine that it has something to do with his apotheosis of the intellectual, and the obvious value he places on formal logic and rule-driven dialogue. Emotions are allowed if observed and described at arm’s length, as factors in an equation. But this leaves the characters strangely bloodless and motiveless, and ultimately, it left me stranded on the surface of the novel. I nearly abandoned it several times, but my J-ness kept driving me until I finished it. I’m not sorry that I did, but unless I am granted some kind of epiphany about something I missed, I won’t be in a hurry to read it again.

Number of Google hits in the last week for “suspend[ing] this|my blog”:  250+

… here’s a little twist from Diana Butler Bass over at Progressive Revival:

For most of the twentieth century, American evangelicals and Pentecostals believed that the Anti-Christ would, most likely, come from Russia–as would the army to lead the Anti-Christ’s legions at the Battle of Armageddon. With great regularity, fundamentalist and Pentecostal pastors identified Soviet leaders with the Anti-Christ, believing that with Russia’s every military move the apocalyptic clock ticked closer to the end of the world. A common way of talking about Russia and the apocalypse was, “as Russia rears its head.” Ms. Palin used the phrase in the exact way, with the exact intonation, as had millenarian pastors for decades–belying a kind of theological connective tissue between her church and her geo-political worldview.

Um … can I panic now?

Jamison Foser on Media Matters’ “County Fair” recommends we take the McCain campaign’s announcement with a pound of salt:

This is really simple: John McCain has not suspended his campaign. His campaign staffers are on television, attacking Barack Obama. His ads are still running. His campaign offices are still buzzing with activity.

He. Has. Not. Suspended. His. Campaign.

Anyone who says he has simply isn’t telling the truth.