In the Letters section of the Oct. 9, 2003, issue of the New York Review of Books a reader, commenting on Garry Wills's review of Hillary Clinton's Living History, asks an interesting question:
[Wills] remarks that Mrs. Clinton is not alone in being a woman in love with a "lecherous m[a]n of ideals and accomplishment." Mr. Wills mentions four presidents of the United States and two civil rights leaders, all Democrats. Was this a conscious choice or are prominent Republicans, including presidents, more discrete, more faithful, more satisfied in their marriages, or less interested in sex?
Mr. Wills replies:
I referred only to Democratic presidents not because Republicans are wanting in lechery, but because they are wanting in achievement. The following never rose high enough to prove in the Oval Office that they were not "more satisfied in their marriages or less interested in sex"--Newt Gingrich (R. Georgia), Henry Hyde (R. Illinois), Robert Livingston (R. Louisiana), Robert Barr (R. Georgia), Helen Chenoweth (R. Idaho), Jim Bunn (R. Oregon), Jim Nussle (R. Iowa), Jim Longley (R. Maine), Enid Waldholtz Green (R. Utah), Joseph Scarborough (R. Florida), Jon Christensen (R. Nevada). The Republicans' greater moral probity is also on display in the godliness of Messrs. Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, and Jim Bakker.
I see that the producer of one of my all-time favorite television shows has died. Here's the start of the nytimes obituary.
Marshall Jamison, the first producer for the 1960's satirical review "That Was the Week That Was" on American television, died Sept. 2 in Orlando, Fla., where he lived. He was 85."That Was the Week That Was," often known by the shorthand "T.W.3," came to American television from Britain, where it had satirized the week's events. In the United States, the program was broadcast on NBC for two television seasons, beginning in 1964.
Though some critics said the American child lacked the sharp teeth of its British parent, the show was controversial in the United States, and Mr. Jamison found himself part of that controversy when it was abruptly announced in June of 1964 that he was resigning as producer. He said then that he felt the network and the production company were wrong to try to make "T.W.3" into "a popular, mass-appeal network show."
Ah, that brings back memories. Nancy Ames sang the theme song every week. When the Goldwater campaign pre-empted the show by buying air time in the show's time slot she sang:
The GOP bought three more weeks of our space
They could keep us off until after the race
So we'll say Merry Christmas right now just in case
From That Was The Week That Was.
TW3 was the show that gave David Frost his start in American television. It regularly showcased the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer. It featured some terrific writers and performers whom I had never seen before but who went on to have long careers: Alan Alda, Buck Henry, Woody Allen (he did a monlogue where he talked about how he got a job where he was paid to "look Jewish"), Bob Dishy, Phyllis Newman, and many, many others.
It was The Daily Show of its time.
During the bubble years of the stock market in the late 90's, it was possible to make money simply by following the pack. Those days are gone.
One way to make money in the stock market today is to look where "everybody else" isn't looking, at companies that have been beaten down for one reason or another.
Enter Arne Alsin and his new Turnaround Fund.
I've just invested in the fund and here are my reasons. (Note that I'm not recommending what you do with your money; I don't know you, and in any case I'm not a financial advisor. I'm simply offering my rationale; do with it as you see fit.)
Take a look at The Turnaround Fund's web site. Read the prospectus.
You can thank me later.
Update: See how my investment has done after four months.
Update II 2004/01/11: Removed reference to "very low expenses." As someone pointed out, the expense rate of 1.75% is not low.
Well, I just made it official: I've come out in support of Wesley Clark for Democratic Presidential Nominee by making a (small) contribution to his campaign.
That said, I'm generally very pleased with the current crop of candidates. Based upon the information that is currently known to me, I could whole-heartedly support either Clark or Dean for president, and I could work up enthusiasm for Kerry or Edwards (why do so many of the Democratic candidates have first names for last names?). I like Kucinich (at least he has a genuine last last name), but I doubt that he stands much of a chance. And I could support most of the other candidates...
...except, of course, for Lieberman. If I wanted a Republican, I'd vote for a Republican.
In a previous entry I wondered out loud why, for a site that is still essentially unknown with nearly zero other sites linking to it, Google searches seemed to place this site's pages relatively higher in the rankings than I would have expected. I went so far as to imply that because I was a member of Google's AdSense program, that might have skewed the results in my favor.
Since then I've reconsidered. I now think Google is rewarding me because my pages have a relatively high signal to noise ratio; that is, I don't have a lot of embedded graphics, fancy menus, and other clutter on my pages, so the content isn't buried in a sea of irrelevancies.
Of course, that is still speculation on my part, but I think it fits the facts.
Kevin Drum points to an opinion piece by Nancy Smiler Levinson in the LA Times about three different parents ignoring their children because of their cell phones:
In the middle of a story, a mother's cellphone rang. She pulled the telephone from her purse and started talking. The librarian stopped reading and asked, "Could you please put the cellphone away?"The mother continued talking, and the librarian repeated her request.
The mother then stood and said, "I'll talk outside the room, if that's what you want," and she turned to leave. Her child, 2 years old, burst into tears and called, "Mommy, mommy" The librarian told the mother it was not permissible to leave a child there, especially now that the child was distressed.
Finally, the mother said into the phone, "I'll call you later," and returned to her seat. She sat the remainder of the story hour, glowering at the librarian.
The moral is:
Once upon a time, parents offered conversation and attention to their children and granted them a measure of respect.
With all due respect to Ms. Levinson, there have always been lousy parents, who find ways to ignore their children. And those children grow up to have children of their own and ignore them in their turn.
The problem is not cell phones, per se. The problem is that there are relatively few people who are capable of being effective, attentive parents.
Parenting: one of the most important jobs in the world, and yet one for which there are so few truly qualified applicants.
My web site is still very new and I haven't made any real effort to publicize it as yet, mainly because I'd like to polish up the design, add more content, and get on a regular blogging schedule before inviting the hordes to descend.
That said, I'm rather mystified that I'm getting as much traffic as I am--almost all of it via searches done at Google and its affiliates. Since the traffic is merely a handful or so visitors a day, I have the time to analyze it a bit.
Some of it is to be expected; the most popular search terms that drive people to my site revolve around some combination of 1776 and musical, with or without some additional qualifying terms. That's fine because I have a couple pages devoted to the musical 1776.
Some is a bit surprising; the single most popular search term that brings traffic to one of my pages is king syrup. Go figure.
I've seen visitors who had apparently waded through 140 or more items in their search results in order to find me. (Hey, thanks, whoever you persistent folks are!) But what confuses me are the search terms that cause a page on my site to rank fairly high up in the rankings.
You see, I've been led to believe that one of the most important criteria that Google uses to rank sites is the number of other pages that link to them. By that criterion, I should be just about dead last, because at last count, practically nobody was linking to my site yet.
So I was surprised a few weeks ago to see that my little riff on Maria Bartiromo and her alleged conflicts of interest had gotten such a high ranking from Google (at one point it was number one on a search of Maria Bartiromo Citigroup). But perhaps that could be explained as a "news" type of item; my site benefited by having an entry on a somewhat topical subject.
That doesn't explain the phenomenon that I just saw, however. Do a search on Ken Jennings actor and I'm number one of over 7000! Now a lot of those other 7000 sites are very well established sites with lots of other sites hyper-linking to them. And yet my little interview with Ken Jennings comes up number one.
How to explain it? I can't. I haven't a clue. I can, however, speculate, and that's all this is at this point. I'm a member of Google's AdSense program, meaning that I run ads for Google's advertisers on my pages. Do you think that Google gives a boost to those sites that run its ads?
No? Didn't think so.
NB Obviously Google's page rankings aren't static. What ranks high today may be low tomorow. So if you try to replicate the results that I've described, I can't promise that you'll see what I'm seeing now.
Update: I've reconsidered and now have another theory as to why some of my pages rank so high.
An article in the September 2003 issue of Scientific American discusses the possible health benefits of exposure to very low levels of otherwise harmful radiation or environmental contaminants. Just as exercise stresses the body, forcing it to respond by rebulding the stressed muscles, very small doses of carcinogens may have a similar effect, giving the body a chance to protect and strengthen itself.
The effect is called hormesis.
Note that the emphasis is on very small doses.
If you are looking for accurate information about the law firm Hogan & Hartson LLP and the lawyers Dori Ann Hanswirth, Tracey A. Tiska, and Katherine M. Bolger, here's the best place to go.
Update: Amazon is no longer selling the Norcent DP300 DVD Player; it has apparently been replaced with the Norcent DP-302V DVD Player
With DVD players now selling for less than $50, I've been wondering how the inexpensive players stack up with their older generation predecessors.
So I ordered a Norcent DP300 DVD Player from Amazon.com to find out.
For the most part I was impressed. It handled just about every DVD that I threw its way, including some that other players had problems with because of errors. In addition to DVDs, of course, it can play back CDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs, and it has MP3 decoding technology and NTSC/PAL conversion built-in.
Alas, while it could play back DVDs made from my Mac, it had problems synchronizing the audio on my picture slide shows.
Some models apparently have a back-door secret code that lets you make them region free.
Will post more later.
It looks like Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, the Living, is finally going to be published in November, 2003.
Written in 1938 before his first short story "Lifeline," the novel was considered too "racy" (as in graphic sexual content) to be published. After having it rejected by several publishers, Heinlein apparently thought he destroyed all copies. Except one. The Heinlein Society has the story.
Thanks to Kevin Drum for the pointer.
Update: I see it has already climbed to #47 on the Amazon bestseller list.
After spending another sleepless night (I hated the side effects of the Benadryl), I decided to try the prescription for Prednisone.
I took three tablets at nine this morning, and it seems to be helping already.
Update on 2003-09-05: Prednisone is obviously a miracle drug. Swelling has gone down and there are no new lesions. The itching has almost stopped.
I've been watching the DVDs of the first season of The West Wing imported from the United Kingdom. (The American release is coming out in mid-November.)
One of the first things I noticed about this British import is the warning: "Suitable only for persons of 15 years and over." Funny, because one of the things I've always liked about The West Wing is its lack of gratuitous sex and violence. Anyway, I assume that The West Wing must be pretty popular in Britain for it to rate a DVD release over there.
The first season is probably The West Wing's best season, not I hasten add because the quality went down, but because it started at the top of the quality curve so there was nowhere to go but sideways.
The first season introduced most of the recurring characters and had some of the most memorable story line arcs, including my favorite, the call girl story. Of course, it does have a few mis-steps; I never really believed the breakup of Leo's marriage, and the brazen sentimentality of the In Excelsis Deo episode is a bit over the top. Then again, there are some of my favorite moments, such as when CJ finds out what her Secret Service code word is.
It was a shock to view the second through fourth episodes because of the music. I remembered that the main title theme was only hinted at near the end of the pilot episode, but I had forgotten that the next few episodes used a tacky electronic version of the theme; it's not until the fifth episode that it receives the full orchestral treatment.
Other than that, watching the first season has been like renewing the acquaintance of some old friends.
I'm at home right now, recovering from a case of contact dermatitis, presumably contracted during my last weeding session. I think I know enough to recognize poison ivy by now, and I haven't seen anything resembling it. However, there was one plant that I thought might have been poison sumac, so just in case I made sure I washed my hands and arms afterwards. About a week later I came down with itchy lesions on my neck, abdomen, arms, and legs. Especially the legs. A coworker said he's never seen a case this bad.
Yesterday my doctor confirmed the disagnosis of contact dermatitis, but we can't really say where I picked it up for certain. Since the worst seems to be over, I think I'm not going to fill the prescription for a steroid that he gave me; he said my case was right in the middle between mild and very severe, so it's my call as to whether to try the steroid. Saturday night I would have gladly tried it. So I'm sticking to my hydrocortisone cream. Last night I took several benadryl which he told me would control the itch and make me sleepy. It sure did. When the alarm went off this morning I was too tired to wake up.
At least I got a good night's sleep.