This Is Just A Modern Blog Post

Today seems like a fine day to blog, but I'm hesitant to say explicitly why--for paranoid legal reasons, natch--but I'll at least say this: I'm 25 now, and I look back on my grade school career fondly; I consider myself very lucky to have had the education and the teachers I did. New revelations, nasty as they may be, have come too late to traumatize my formative years, so I feel terrible for today's students, but this changes nothing for me. My all-time teacher rankings, dare I say, would remain unchanged.

That was cathartic? I don't even remember what all that was about. Do I have anything sensical to write? Um. I'm reading The Metaphysical Club right now, and it's excellent. To my great, great shame I've started watching Heroes (on the Netflix) and I really kinda like it. A lot. I house-sat and cared for an autistic toy poodle last weekend. To truly understand what an experience that was you'd have to be my Twitter buddy. Suffice it to say, I watched a lot of The OC season 3. I apologize to those of you who took my New Year's resolution to blog more to heart. My bad.

Bitch, Please

Local bloggers are shocked—SHOCKED—to find online polls have flaws. You're all grown up now, Burnt Orange Report. I find these sorts of self-important blogger snits (way too common on BOR, btw) pretty mind-numbing. How a campaign uses an online poll, or if they screw up a subject line in an e-mail, or if they don't blog/twit/facebook constantly really should influence a person's vote about as much as Oxford commas and em dashes.

(Writing that paragraph I discovered something weird about em dashes and HTML.)

It's tax season, which means Obama's cabinet is probably, you know, not bothering to pay taxes. Tom Daschle absolutely should not be confirmed for HHS, I really don't see how there can be any question about it.

Today is, of course, the day of the "big game", the Magnificent Casserole. A certain nation-wide sports league keeps a tight lock on their trademark on the name of this particular game—you know, to protect the integrity of the Peerless Porringer—so be careful about how you advertise your party. And don't drink and drive. And if you do, and you get caught, make like a Texas lawmaker and don't cooperate with John Q. Law. (Haha, just kidding. Tonight is a no-refusal night in Austin. So go get Tom Daschle's driver, Mike Krusee.)

Thoughts on Barry-O's Big Day

Let me first get all non-inauguration thoughts out of the way.

First, in the Austin mayoral race, Brewster McCracken continues to show a steely determination to come off as the Biggest Douchebag in Austin, a town not lacking in douchebags. Here he teams up with another strong contender for BDA, Jason Meeker, to "dis" Lee Leffingwell. As always, be sure to read the comments.

Secondably, I got a $10 iTunes gift card for Christmas, and I was having some trouble using it. I typically only use iTunes for one-off songs from artists and albums I have no broader interest in. So here I have $10, but keeping track of the songs I have a passing interest in has never been a priority for me. But! I use Pandora pretty frequently, and in the course of using Pandora I've amassed a list of thumbed-up songs from which I selected a few good candidates for iTunes purchasing:
Arlo Guthrie - "Gates of Eden" (one of two great Dylan covers I've run into on Pandora, but the Them/Van Morrison version of "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" is not available on iTunes, because Apple is fascist.)
Keith Richards - "Yap Yap"
The Smiths - "Cemetry Gates"
The Smiths - "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (I'm embarrassed to say I don't have either of these chunes. It's not like I don't have a lot of Smiths either.)
Also on the must-have list would be "Holiday Road" (not the fucking matt pond PA version, even though I typically love them) but it's not on iTunes (!?).
Now, then we have the eMusic finds, while I was thumbing through my thumbs-ups. Does anyone/everyone know about Matthew Good (Band)? He has the sound of someone everyone would have known from some 90s sitcom? So my blues kick may have to be on hold while I explore his discography. Also Charlemagne, whom I thought might have potential, but meh.

Now, the inauguration. These are heady times indeed, no matter what the facebook haters may say. It still hasn't quite settled in that we now have a President who is fluent in English after eight years--nearly a third of my lifetime--having to pretend George Bush's simian sub-gibberish actually meant anything. I mean holy shit, I feel like that dude in LOTR, the kingy dude with the gnarly whiskers who gets duped by wormy and whitey, but then Gandalf holds an intervention and broseph wakes up from his slumber and vanquishes wormy. Yeah, I feel like that. I think we all do.

I want to dispel some conspiracy theories now--no, dispel is not the right world. I want to foment some conspiracy theories right now.

1) Chef John Roberts knows less about the Constitution than our new Kenyan Muslin terrorist-in-chief? No. Roberts DELIBERATELY fucked up his only lines in this whole lifetime of ours (he's basically the Jimmy Fallon of Supreme Courts, come to think of it) because he's the only buffoon standing between us and the Marxist President B. Hussein O.

2)Cheney hurt his back hiding secret illegal documents? No! The demon Cheney feels no pain. The wheelchair was just a ruse; he must muster all his strength to prevent combustion in that much daylight. Even with the wheelchair he had to suck INHUMAN amounts of blood from senators Kennedy and Byrd, who foolishly strayed too close to the desperate Cheney.

Faulty Analogy of the Day

Chris Hayes:

But here's my fear. Remember during the summer, when oil was $140 a barrel, how airlines started charging for each checked bag? It seemed to make sense at the time: bags weigh a plane down and necessitate more fuel consumption. It's possible to ignore that marginal cost when fuel is cheap, but when fuel is very expensive a surcharge seems appropriate. But: have you noticed that fuel costs have dropped 70% and yet airlines are still charging for checked bags? Can you imagine them deciding to stop charging for bags anytime soon?

There's a very, very worrying possibility that this kind of inertia will set in with our torture regime: something born of crisis embeds itself and becomes normalized.

Why should airlines stop charging for checked bags? Checked bags do indeed add to fuel costs as well as labor. They should've incurred an additional cost all along; high gas prices just forced the airlines to quit giving free rides.

For what it's worth, I'd like to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Gonzalez behind bars as much as anyone, but there is a potentially steep opportunity cost in prosecuting them and relatively little to gain. If the investigation and prosecution of those guys expends political capital that otherwise could have bought us universal healthcare or better infrastructure or global warming legislation or withdrawal from Iraq or whatever I have a hard time seeing it as being worth it.

"Fit" to Print

A couple days ago I posted on my the Facebook a link to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Because it's funny. But do you ever read the BBC news? They always have headlines like "Pakistan al-Qaeda leaders 'dead'", as if said leaders have turned into vampires or zombies but the BBC wants to sugarcoat the tragedy by burying the lede.

Lala Revisited

The Lala mafia paid a visit to my last Lala post, so I guess this is the key to increasing blog traffic? Okay, Lala finished uploading after a week or so of constant whatever, and I now have about 8000 songs available on Lala. Why the remaining 6000 songs didn't make it is beyond me. Whatever. The playlist thing is a real pain for someone so hypersensitive about privacy as myself. But, yes, having my music library at my fingertips at work is nice. So on the BoGA Scale of Websites Utility, which runs from one (1) (Paypal) to 10 (ten) (Craigslist), I'll give Lala a se7en.

So Much for New Year's Resolutions

Sorry. I've been biz-zay lately. I'll blog when I'm dead.

But! I live in the Austin of Texas, and if there's one thing Texans and other Neanderthals love it's bitching about their football team. Look, sorry, guys. It should have been y'all losing to Florida last night, but the BCS screwed you over and then you went and barely snuck out a win against Ohio State, validating your BCS screwing. USC, on the other hand got BCScrewed and then went on to play like the best team in the country. I don't want to get too deeply endicked in this stuff except to say: USC was probably the best team in the country this year. Then Florida, then Texas. Game.

Oh, but here's some nonsense:

Oklahoma & Ohio State should just not be invited to those games any more. Some teams know how to get ready for big games. Texas, Florida, USC -- those are the programs that are legitimate. I'd just assume see those three (along with Utah) in a four-team playoff. No one else is even close to matching their talent.

Right. Texas needed a last-minute comeback to beat a heavy underdog poised for its annual bowl game whuppin'. Next thing you know they'll want Colt McCoy appointed Senator of New York.

I'm Disappointed With Lala

I've been trying to use this site Lala as an alternative to Pandora and last.fm for my online music listening needs, but it's not doing it for me. And I haven't even made it past the upload stage. Which has been ongoing for like four days now.

My first problem was Lala was uploading all my playlists, which are not exactly things I like to share, and there's no easy way to make it not do that or get rid of them. My second problem is the upload estimated time went from 1 day 4 hours for most of the first day to 1 day 4 hours for most of the second day to 16 days most of the third day to 12 hours to, now, 16 hours, but it's only uploaded a little over 4,000 of my 14,000 songs. The program appears to have mostly given up at this point, and I'm about at the same place.

What Is The Author's Main Point?

I spent a bit of time on "The Drag" today, waiting to go clothes shopping in earnest (but that never panned out). I looked at some clothes at Cream and American Apparel, but then my well-honed aversion to spending held me from seriously considering any purchases. I wound up at Intellectual Property, where an orgy of consumerism (by my standards) swept me up. A new Michael Crichton hardcover for $8! A book about Wendell Willkie for $4! Toni Morrison and David Sedaris books 30% off! I don't get to much book readin' these days, so consumed am I with catching up on Economists and Harper's, so spending $50 at a bookstore is total frivolity for me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today was one of these lovely winter days in Austin where it's sunny and in the 70s and I'm happy to live here, even if there is no nature. (In lieu of nature, Austin has flocks--angry mobs, really--of horrid grackles and mutt birds who, say, shit on my head while I'm trying to enjoy a good David Sedaris at Austin Java.)

Ah, but there I was reading a book (with bird shit in my hair that I only discovered after it had soaked in), and I thought to myself how I would like to be published one day, but I don't have the patience to proofread a blog post, let alone an entire sellable piece of writing, neverevenyoumind talent. Sometimes I see Selected Writings (or Letters) of so-and-so, and I think, Well I could do that. Or someone could do it posthumously for me. Maybe after I die they'll go through my gmail and this blog and facebook, and some struggling editor, the rest of the world's legible words having already been mined and published, will deem my small contributions to the written word worthy of their own book.

The unfortunate thing, I think, as someone who holds himself in high esteem, is that The Selected Musings of Chris's Web Portals is unlikely to get off the ground until I attain some measure of celebrity. Triggg Palin will probably get a book deal--if he (she?) doesn't already have one--simply by virtue of being one of St. Sarah's little miracles. Same with the undeservedly famous Paris Hilton, George Bush, Kim Kardashian, and the rest. Maybe I can be famous for my stellar driving record? I'm close to 200,000 miles probably and never an accident. Not even in Austin! Or maybe I'll lead a long, uneventful life only to die spectacularly. Mistaken for a Jimmy Carter effigy and burned to death by the editors of National Review. Yes, there's always that.