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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Roll With It
We're back in the press room, post-launch/landing, and everyone's buzzing about the biggest bit of excitement of the day: SpaceShipOne went into a massive, uncontrolable roll right at the moment it hit the heights of its flight. There's good video of the roll here, with the commentator's words sounding uncomfortably close to "obviously a major malfunction," the understatement of the year from the Challenger explosion. The crew were all smiles at touchdown, and the inspirational Right Stuff-esque music played on schedule, but now we're all looking forward to the 10:30am press conference with the eagerness of wolves.
Major Tom Makes the Grade
The promise of seeing a spaceship launch, I discover at the age of 30, is not quite enough to get me out of bed at 4am. What does get me bounding out of my room at the Best Western in Tehachapi, 30 miles east of the Mojave launch site, in the pre-dawn dark? M&Ms. The special X Prize-themed M&Ms scattered on the passenger seat of my American-made big-boat rental car, to be precise. They're blue and white and have spaceships on one side and on the other, a single word: "Go."
I program the iPod with appropriate music for the short highway drive over: Space Oddity by David Bowie, Space Walk by Lemon Jelly, Major Tom by that 80's German guy, and easily the best space launch music ever recorded: Theme from Battlestar Galactica. As the first song starts, and David Bowie begins his countdown, and my boat pulls out of the parking lot, and the M&Ms begin their tortuous digestion, it hits me: this is real. A man will be risking his life to get into space today. History will be made, one way or the other.
I hope you're not too disappointed, I tell my younger self, that I didn't end up as Major Tom. I'm the papers, wanting to know whose shirt he wears. At the press conference yesterday, I asked whether the sponsors would be sending a can of 7 Up or a bag of M&Ms as part of the bags of personal items used as ballast, in lieu of extra passengers. (No was the answer, although SpaceShipOne designer Burt Ratan will be sending up bags of tools and -- the ultimate geek apendage -- his old slide rule).
The count goes on, and the atmosphere here in the press room is pretty jovial. They primed us with bacon, eggs, sausage, coffee and other rocket fuel. Now I'm ready to watch a man go into space. And that man, it has been announced, is Michael Melvill, the same guy who was on the first test flight earlier this year. He's 62, and we debate whether or not that makes him the second oldest man to go into space (after John Glenn at 77). But whose shirts does he wear?
Daily Blah for... Monday, September 27, 2004
Thank You For Flying the Friendly Galaxy
Even before the SpaceShipOne launch -- for which, by the way, I will have to drive hundreds of miles into the desert and, even worse, get up at 5am in the morning -- the porthole filled spacecraft promises to fulfill the dreams of big kids like me. Richard Branson has tapped its designer, the appropriately eccentric character Burt Rutan, to create a fleet of space tourism vehicles. Now of course, SpaceShipOne has only flown into the upper atmosphere, barely nipping over the theoretical line that divides Earth from -- well, from everything else. But that hasn't stopped Branson coming up with the most grandiose name he could think of for the service: Virgin Galactic Airways. I suppose if you're trying to persuade people to part with $150,000 a ticket, such an absurd moniker would help them with their bragging rights (hell, I know I'd never ever remove a "Galactic Airways" luggage tag from my suitcase; subsequent airline staff can only have it when they prise it from my cold, stiff fingers). I wonder whether you get frequent flier miles? Screw that -- I wonder if there'll be a test flight for the press?
Lost in Space
Sorry I've been so lax about posting again, dear reader. It's been the week from Hellishly Busy. Seattle was just the beginning of a very active period for me. Tomorrow I'm off to the Mojave desert to cover the next launch of SpaceShipOne. Two dream assignments in as many weeks. A reporter could get used to this.
Don't take offense, loyal Blah-ites, but I often think of you as a pack of ravenous dogs. If I don't throw you a hunk of juicy red meat every so often, you'll come after me. I don't have any juicy red meat today, but will you take this amusing crab cake of a link? It is, speaking of space travel, the revival of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the radio series, with most of the original cast. The script isn't as gloriously, intellectually manic as pure Douglas Adams, and it isn't even based on one of his better books, but it's still a tonic for the ear (try the surround sound version), and part of me has been waiting for this moment since 1981. I'm a little more trepidatious about the forthcoming Disney movie -- sorry, Mos Def as Ford Prefect? Whu? -- although this teaser trailer is succinct, referential and funny. Plus here is some must-see video of the movie's Marvin the Paranoid Android costume, created by Henson studios, being tried on for the first time. It's a little cutesy, to be sure, but at least the large round head is more suggestive of a "brain the size of a planet" than in the BBC version. And yes, since you ask, I am proud to be such a complete geek.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 21, 2004
High Flight
Good evening, ladies and gentleman. Welcome aboard Daily Blah Flight One, with service from Seattle to Idaho and back again. Make sure your electronic equipment is not properly stowed and is wireless connected to the Internet. Yes, this Blah comes to you live from an airplane, a test flight for Boeing's new "connexion" wifi service, already available on some Lufthansa flights. But in the press junket to end all press junkets, Boeing invited a bunch of us up to Seattle for what turned out to be a little loop-the-loop of Mt. Rainier – the kind you can't do on commercial flights, so breathtakingly close I thought the wings were going to clip the edge of the snowy peak – and on to a sumptuous dinner at the Couer d'Alene resort in the Idaho panhandle. Everything on the menu advertised itself as having been flown in from somewhere else; I had beef fresh from Chicago, and felt delighted to have been able to meet it halfway.
And so here we are, feeling full and decadent, on our private night flight back to coffee city, sending bragging emails and instant messages to whomever happens to be online. I have a bag of random gifts from the Couer d'Alene shop – potato lotion and huckleberry soap – just to prove I was here, that it was not a ridiculous dream, that we really did happen to hop over the blue-state/red-state boundary on the whim of an evening. Flight time is expected to be around 20 minutes. In the event of an emergency, exits are located in the upper left or right hand corner of your browser (joke stolen directly from my friend Katey – thanks, Katey). Journalistic hubris may be used as a flotation device.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, September 18, 2004
The Winning Ad
Simplicity is not a feature one expects from the Kerry campaign. They use too many words for this electorate. My favorite ad idea uses just one. It's a billboard poster that should, if there were any good sense on the left, go up the length and breadth of this continent. It would show Kerry at a podium marked with the crest of the President of the United States. Theresa is by his side. He is waving to a crowd and his eyes are, for a change, well-lit. Fireworks explode behind him, in the top half of the picture. To his right, there is one word, in yellow, there is one word, printed in the largest font size possible. The word is "Phew." Underneath, in smaller type: "Coming November 2."
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 17, 2004
A Monstrous Fraud
If you've spent the last week in a funk about Bush's growing poll lead -- as I have, judging by a quick re-read of yesterday's screed -- you ought to be mightily heartened by this Jimmy Breslin column, which calls the polls a "monstrous fraud" and pollsters "indolent salesman of falsehoods." Why? Because they do not and cannot call the nation's 169 million cellphones. These are disproportionately owned by the young, who disproportionately vote Democratic.
True, they also disproportionately don't vote -- but even 0.001% of 169 million could swing this election. And haven't you ever wondered why Bush was ahead by 2%-5% in the last polls of the 2000 race, but Al Gore ended up winning the popular vote by half a million? The difference could well be entirely due to cellphones. And an awful lot of young people have junked their land lines in the last four years. None of this is new information to those of us paying attention, but Breslin puts it across in such a forceful way it's impossible not to take heart. There's a newspaper columnist who knows how to campaign; who doesn't shirk when strong words are required.
The only problem comes if the "false" Bush-leads polls become reality because everyone believes them, and it infects the blue states with buyer's remorse about Kerry (blue states are really, really good at buyer's remorse), and cellphone-weilding Democrats, sensing all is lost, stay home on November 2. The snowball effect, in other words. Life imitating monstrous fraud. Kind of like the last four years.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 16, 2004
Waiting for James Brown
Kerry is failing the alpha-male test, big time. So, according to stories in today's NYT and Chronicle, is the suddenly elusive Edwards. A profile in the New Yorker suggests that Bob Shrum, AKA Kerry's Brain, does not have the moxie to match wits with Karl Rove. Shrum started his speechwriting career with McGovern, the profile reminds us, is an old tarrif-raising populist from way back, and has never worked for a winning Presidential campaign. Kerry has also brought on board the head of Dukakis' campaign and Joe Lockhart, the ineffectual White House press secretary from the end of the Clinton era, who has a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look and very little in the way of claws. All of which makes me fear for his sanity.
Rove, according to a conspiracy theory unearthed by Maureen Dowd today, may well be ultimately behind the fake CBS air guard documents (thereby drowning the essential truth they contain in an arcane debate about anachronistic fonts). Rove, Dowd reminds us, is a man who allegedly bugged his own office in a prior political campaign to suck the oxygen of media attention away from his then master's opponent. Rove is pure evil, but he's also a master of old-school, take-no-prisoners politics. Somewhere up there, LBJ and Mayor Daley are looking on with grudging admiration.
I look at the electoral college map, as more and more non-coastal states switch from light blue to light pink, and it suggests a mushy middle magnetically drawn to the side that demonstrates the most ruthlessness, the most desire to occupy the White House. Four years of disaster and shocking decline is nothing next to a billion years of evolutionary programming, which tells them to feed the hungry alpha-male first. The Bushies, as they demonstrated in Florida, just wanted the prize more than Gore, who spent the last crucial morning before election day with his mother. Clinton clearly wanted it more than the doddering Dole and Bush senior, who kept looking at his watch during the debates as if he had somewhere more important to be. Dukakis had a certain pleading neediness, but that's not the same as hunger. Don't even get me started on Mondale and Carter.
Kerry is a strong finisher, they tell us. But what will that strong finish look like? I keep picturing James Brown, Godfather of Soul, towards the end of his concerts, hobbling from the stage with a towel wrapped around his shoulders and a roadie at his arm. Then all of a sudden he casts off the towel, raises his arms, and bingo -- he's back, he's bad, he's funkier than ever. Kerry has been hobbling towards the exit with a towel around his shoulders for a couple of weeks now, and I find it hard to believe it's for real. He's smarter than this. He's playing patsy. He's going to let Bush think he's dead, then annihilate him in the debates. Edwards is going to resurrect his lawyerly zeal and treat Cheney like just another mendacious CEO in the dock. They cannot, with more than half the country still thinking it's time for a new President, with mounting Iraq carnage and swing-state job blues and Osama forgotten and a deficit the size of Texas, they cannot be so dumb as to throw away these gifts. Can they?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Download At Your Own Risk
This album download website is probably seven kinds of illegal. But it's run out of Russia. What can the long arm of copyright law do to stop it? Will Putin's newly autocratic Kremlin put a stop to these kind of freewheelin' web-jinks, or is this pretty low down on a to-do list that contains child-killing Chechen rebels?
Misdirected email of the week
"Because you are an active pilot and have unique general aviation knowledge, we invite you to participate in this comprehensive survey on single-engine-piston aircraft." [snip!]
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 10, 2004
Love and Death in Sim Suburbia
This was bound to be a low-productivity week. The San Francisco summer began, the fog and wind of August cleared off to reveal weather warmer than it was, apparently, at Burning Man. I learned how to beat the heat by making mojitos. My old J-school comrade Andrew West, whom I haven't seen for two years, dropped out of the blue on his way back home to Sydney, where he's going to help bring about another stinging defeat for a Bush ally, Prime Minister Howard. Another friend is leaving town for New Orleans, and we saw her off with a wonderfully surreal night of costumed karaoke. And on top of all this, I got my hands on a near-final copy of The Sims 2, a leading candidate for best game of 2004.
If you've played the original, all you need to know is this: it's even easier to get emotionally involved with your little virtual suburbanites. As well as the usual daily needs -- hunger, comfort, fun and so on -- each Sim now has an ever-changing list of specific aspirations such as buying a new couch or making a new friend, and fears, like seeing a bug or having a flirtation rejected. And they now live for a mere 30 Sim days or so, which makes every moment more precious. You want to fulfill all their aspirations, to give them as rich and rewarding a life as possible.
Naturally, with death comes its erstwhile companion, sex. Or rather, as it is called in the game, "woo-hoo." The one and only time I got my single housemates to experience it, woo-hoo turned out to be a very PG-rated affair that takes place entirely under blankets. Still, the foreplay that leads up to it can often be more exciting than anything you'll see on Sex and the City -- partly because you can never be entirely sure a Sim will be in the mood. A kiss, a pick-up line, a backrub could easily be rejected, and you get the sense of walking on eggshells. Rather like real life, really.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Neutral = Bias?
A new academic paper argues the mainstream media is effectively biased on the subject of global warming -- by giving equal time to the nut jobs who don't believe it exists. Publish quotes of equal length from those who represent the scientific consensus and those who don't, the authors argue, and you end up giving fringe beliefs more credence.
I agree, although to call it bias suggests intention. I'm sure these journalists are operating on the principle -- flawed, but a principle nonetheless -- that since America is divided down the middle between two political philosophies, even the science stories ought to represent both sides equally. This neutrality is all-pervasive: taught in journalism school, reinforced by editors, sanctioned by the letters department. And over the last four years, it has become a real problem.
The trouble is, there's no tradition of campaigning in the American media. Not any more. There used to be, back in the days of yellow journalism; if Pulitzer, Hearst et al saw something manifestly, self-evidently wrong, they went to war against it. (Cut to screaming three-column headline from Citizen Kane: Traction Trust Exposed!) Trouble was, self-evidence is in the eye of the beholder, and more often than not the newspaper magnates had their own interests, and higher circulation, at heart ("you provide the pictures," Hearst's infamous cable read, "I'll provide the war").
So a new sobriety settled like dust on their inheritors; a mechanical adherence to the truth as represented by the will of the people, in the absence of any better measure, though that will be schizophrenic. Say "newspaper campaign" to anyone, even here in San Francisco, and they'll probably think of Chronicle Watch, a daily box that keeps track of how many days a particular pothole-pocked road or busted bus stop hasn't been fixed. Useful, no doubt, but incredibly unambitious. Is that all we're prepared to hold our elected officials to these days? Lie all you want, but for God's sake, keep our roads in good shape?
Not to retread a well-worn phrase on this page, but it's different where I come from. If The Sun reaches the conclusion that the Chancellor of the Exchequer needs to be sacked, it doesn't meekly bleat the suggestion on its opinion page. It prints his face sticking out of a dustbin every day, and counts days until he resigns. God forbid Rupert Murdoch give anyone lessons in journalism, but he does have a shockproof sense of the power of media, and the theater people seek from it. So how about, for starters, a graphic of the Earth on the cover of the NYT every day, with the number of days since Bush pulled out of Kyoto -- and the number of days we've been waiting for some kind of a climate-change policy from this administration?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, September 05, 2004
Kerry's Commandos
Depressed and disillusioned by the latest polls, I've reached the conclusion that Kerry is getting it all wrong. He has failed to fully grasp the red-meat, alpha-male allure of his opponents, or the importance to this electorate of easy-to-read labels. Intellectually, what the GOP came up with last week was banal junk. But subconsciously, in the place where we feel the tug of fear and the reassurance of hierarchy, it worked a treat.
If I were running the Kerry campaign, my first act would be to create a volunteer group called -- without apology or irony -- Kerry's Commandos. The first inductees, the ones the TV cameras would capture, would be veterans, but part of the Commandos' appeal would be as a populist movement: anyone could join up.
The Commandos' orders would be to fan out across the country, leave their homes, take a break from their jobs (assuming they still have any), spread out across the diners and bars, talk shows and letters pages, there to do righteous battle with the vile slurs, the sickening mud slung against Kerry by the SBVTs and the Zell Millers of this world. A display of overwhelming force; shock and awe, if you will.
Sure, they would be given talking points, just like Republican troops – but only as an aide de memoire, or rather, an aide de colere. Few on the side of moderation will need much of a spur to remember what they're angry about. The points could be as short as this:
- Abu Ghraib
- 'Mission Accomplished'
- Net job loss over last four years, first time since Hoover
- 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States'
- Halliburton welfare
- 'Kenny Boy'
- Roe v. Wade
- Bush v. Gore
- Guantanamo
- Civil liberties? Hello?
- WMD? Hello?
The point being that if the outrage is heartfelt, sanctioned, focused, open to all, and tagged with a militarist mnemonic –- right there is the key to winning the heartland. Best of all, it would be stealing just about every leaf out of the Republican handbook. They'd be hopping mad. And effectively neutered.
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 03, 2004
The Absence of Jobs, and Mini-Jobs
As much as I've enjoyed covering the iMac G5 launch this week -- went down to Apple yesterday for some hands-on time with the new machine -- I miss my Jobs time. Not that it's particularly enjoyable (you go into the room, you try to have a conversation, he stares your questions down then gives the answers he wants to give; you, it is clear, are merely a conduit for his genius). It's just something I've grown familiar and comfortable with; seeing a cool new Apple computer without a guy in black turtleneck, jeans and salt-and-pepper beard standing next to it is wrong, like a missing limb. The Apple flaks told me their fearless leader is out of the hospital now, convalescing from his cancer surgery at home, fully intending to return to work later in the month. I imagine they're having to chain him to the bed right now.
In the meantime, a kind of G.I. Jobs doll called the mini iLeader has rushed in to fill the vacuum, according to Wired News. This 12-in. action figure has been photographed around the world, garden-gnome style. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to officially endorse the mini-Jobs. Which is a great shame -- what better photo-op could the new computer have than the little guy standing next to it? His big brother is very into minimalism, after all.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 01, 2004
State of Play
Moveon.org's most recent get-out-the-vote email says Kerry is ahead in the battleground states, 52% -43% and 47%-37% in recent polls. But Electoral-vote.com, a highly useful amateur state poll aggregator updated daily, says Bush is currently primed to pip his rival to the post, 280 electoral votes to 242. Which online grassroots operation to believe? Of course, given the horrific undemocratic outcomes made possible by the electoral college system, there's a chance both are true.
I just wish we'd hurry up and get to the election already. My nerves can't take much more of this.
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