Life and Lore

Dear Mr. Rove and Ms. Meiers:

Don’t appeal. Please do your duty as citizens now and actually show up when you receive a subpoena from Congress.

Judge John Bates ruled today that White House staff are not exempt from Congressional subpoenas.

Duh.

Judge Bates wrote that they may assert executive privilege, but they need to actually, you know, show up and respond and stuff.

One wonders how deep the White House staff depth chart though immunity from actually showing up went. Did it extend to a junior speechwriter? How about a porter? Maybe a tour guide?

Somewhere Richard Nixon is smiling and muttering, “If Mitchell had told me we just didn’t have to show up, no one would know the name Gerald Ford unless they were old college football fans.”

It is amazing how I can maintain or lose weight when I keep a food diary. Being diabetic, that can be important. If I rationalize that simply tracking weight and blood sugar is a substitute, I always end up with a nasty surprise.

The tenth time this happens, I should no longer be surprised. The good news is that the periods between each revelation shrink.

I continue to be astounded at the number of sites who try to dictate a consumer’s choice of browser.

I absolutely understand Microsoft.com not downloading Office templates and other little programs if the customer is using Firefox. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.

But the days of “This site has been optimized for blah blah blah browser” were always just the height of laziness. When Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were slugging things out, they each rendered some commands in different ways. Programmers would have to write extra sites, sometimes even almost double their worktime, to get a page to look the same in both browsers.

And those 5 percent of Apple users churning away with Safari were never anyone’s friend.

I received a huge shock today, though when my new medical practice wrote me. I have joined a “boutique care” practice. That means I pay extra, and the doctor’s office coordinates all my care. They also limit the practice size, see me on the same day (or at the very latest, the next one), make all sorts of special arrangements.

None of this is covered by insurance. Only the actual medical care is covered.

But with a couple of serious health problems, I went for the fancy plan.

And the new practice, part of a national chain, explicitly says in an email back to me that their site will not work with Firefox. I don’t have the demographic breakdowns, but I would bet that the household income of Firefox users skews higher than IE users. More importantly, Firefox has about 15 percent of the US market now. How does anyone build a web application that tells 15 percent of any population cohort that they are not welcome.

I’ll be wearing sweat pants to my first exam because I’ve found sweats and a Tshirt are the most comfortable attire for a very long physical exam. I sure hope they don’t have a dress code.

Just over 4,300 American service personnel have died in our wars against Afghanistan and Iraq as I write this. There is plenty of political discourse about the validity of our attack and how the wars have been prosecuted. Meanwhile, George Bush’s legacy remains a faith-based imperialist who mismanaged the economy, the latter being particularly poor for our first MBA president.

But Ben Stiller (and celebs Jack Black and newly golden again Robert Downey, Jr.) are launching their own offensive this spring with Tropic Thunder, a spoof of a war film spoofing itself. You can judge from the trailer yourself, but everything I’ve read indicates the intensity is more Hogan’s Heroes than Platoon.

Still, I have to wonder whether America is ready to laugh about war right now. And if we are, what does that say about us as a nation, and what does it say about the 4,300 and counting?

Riddle me this: How does Karl Rove’s lawyer have the poker face to stand up straight and say that Rove is immune from appearing before a House committee?

I am not a lawyer. I don’t even pretend to understand many legal issues. But I’m guessing that Reps Conyers and Sanchez had access to plenty of top-notch legal advice. So are we witnessing a Battle of Semantics that hinge on the definition of the word “is”?

At the heart of all this is an even bigger issue. Even if Mr. Rove, a former White House appointee, is not legally required to obey a Congressional subpoena, doesn’t every good American patriot owe it to the representatives of The People to appear?

This entire gambit strikes me as hypocritical and unpatriotic. Wearing a flag pin in your lapel doesn’t make you a man of the people. Honoring a House of Representatives subpoena may not do that either, but I can’t help but believe that refusing to appear automatically disqualifies you.

I fell hard for Gmail’s clean interface. Everyone loves the storage and the ability to save all your mail (creating one heck of a personal profile for the Google ad servers to target).

But as chat and other areas junked up Gmail (much like the original search interface was junked up), I found myself longing for the all-in-one simplicity of Outlook. New tools there, especially Xobni made Outlook more intriguing.

To match Outlook, I was using Plaxo Premium to sync multiple categories. I also bought 37 Signals’ Backpack until I donated to Remember The Milk for task management.

Finally, I threw in the towel using Outlook 2007. I took 4 or 5 of my key mailboxes and left them on Gmail. For day-to-day use in my office, though, I used MS Outlook and Google’s new IMAP capability. Google still wins because it gets its treasure trove of data. I win because I get to use the tools I like and the interfaces I like.

Google even made the solution simple with clear, complete instructions on configuring your email client to work with Gmail

We (oldest boy, wife and I) watched V for Vendetta last night. The music started and while we could hear music and some bits of dialogue, watching the film was like watching an old silent movie. We struggled for nearly 30 minutes until my son hit on the idea of close captioning. Sure enough, that worked. Maybe, we reasoned, the feature was for people who weren’t artistic enough.

Ninety minutes into the film, as we read the dialogue, middle son came home from work. He announced that he loved the movie. My wife and I exchanged glances. He’s not one for subtitles, much less 90 minutes of silent close captioning.

That’s when the oldest, the music and electronics guy, discovered that the amplifier powering the television’s speakers was broken. Turning the balance to the left or right provided the full soundtrack. Keeping the balance knob centered provided output through only one channel.

We watched the remainder of the movie with full sound, and while listening to Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving was interesting, the film lost its intensity. The mind fills in so much detail. I knew the way both stars spoke so I easily filled in their voices. But I didn’t know much of the cast, and listening to them in my mind was interesting. Likewise seeing annotations like “Jazz music begins playing” didn’t tell me whether I was listening to bebop, jazz, piano, trumpet, guitar or anything about tempo.” I filled in that detail too.

Two things come to mind.

First, the hidden and unavailable is indeed more intense and with your mind providing part of the soundtrack, perhaps more intriguing. Second, I wish that my hearing-impaired brothers and sisters had more and better options available to them. Living in a silent world must be tough. Living in a silent world without good description is just lousy.

I remain extremely impressed with Chelsea Clinton. It can’t be easy growing up in the White House, especially in our days of the cult of celebrity. JFK’s kids got caught up in it. Amy Carter sort of escaped much of it and we won’t go near the Bush girls.

But anyone I speak with about Chelsea always praises Mama and Papa, regardless of their own political leanings. Yes, I think Chelsea has tried to go by two sets of rules this year. You can’t actively campaign and declare a media embargo, and the press was fair with her for years when she was declared off limits.

Still I have nothing but admiration for the way this 28 year old handled a question about the impact of the Monica Lewinsky scandal on her mother’s presidential bid.

Sitting in a major city (think top 3) far above the noise of the night as I type on a laptop. My work laptop is next to me. This is my play laptop.

Although it’s a Sunday night, I logged on to the office’s VPN to make sure things were going well and respond to some emails. Then I switched laptops, plugged the cable (sheesh, $439 a night, and I don’t have wireless?) in the back and got hit with an amazing revelation.

These cheap bastards actually wanted another $16!

I couldn’t believe the screen so I called the concierge. Yep, she confirmed that each computer in the room had to have its own separate charge. It’s bad enough that the motel chains in each lodging group give away broadband, but the flagships charge. What’s worse is that I’m the highest possible level of elite status in this chain and sitting on the executive floor.

There is free wireless broadband in the lounge! Forgive me for wanting to actually work in my room.

Yes, I’m a travel snob. I don’t believe a soda should be one price in a machine on 30th floor and a lower price in the gift shop and half the cost of either across the street. I’ll order room service every night because I hate hotel restaurants. I’ll pay top dollar for a room, and I got to this status by spending hundreds of nights in hotels.

I have never, ever anywhere been told that the room connection was per computer, not per room, and I’ve traveled with as many as 3 laptops (don’t ask). I’m still flabbergasted. Charge me $16 for a movie due on DVD in two weeks, but if you must charge for a commodity service like Internet connectivity, have the decency to charge a reasonable price once.

(I’ll make you a deal, hotel folks. Leave the same bar of soap in my room the entire stay, and you’ll cover your costs)

Jason Castro continues to be my favorite American Idol contestant. He doesn’t have the best pure tone or range. For those, you likely want to look to Carly Smithson on the women’s side. But the boy with the long eyelashes and longer dreds better go up-tempo soon, even if it’s emo, because the angst and fluttery vocals make him a great stylist, and I want to watch him for another month or two before Smithson and perhaps Ramiele knock him out of the finals. For pure musicianship, though, I’m really like David.

That’s my problem with picking a winner. As Simon Cowell told a contestant last night, “You’ll do fine as long as this remains a talent competition and not a popularity contest.” Take that, Taylor Hicks. But Simon was talking about narrowing the scope to which singer had the best stage presence or could deliver the best live vocals of pop music and its billion genres. If this were truly a vocal competition, Julliard and a handful of conservatories would have sent opera singers. This is a pop/rock/R&B/more music/less talk competition. And with those contests come the futtery eyebrows, the sassy attitudes, the Elvis hip shake, Beatle cuts, glam rock and rapper battles.

I face the same issues when I play in my fantasy baseball league. I’ve been doing that since there was a Rotisserie League. The core group of guys I play with — perhaps five in all — have been doing this together for 23 years. I quit at the end of last year because of a spat over rules, mostly because I was tired of rules. Then again, I finished third (the rule was over a tie for 2nd instead of third, and the difference in money may have been enough for dinner two at Applebee’s). I collected a nice payday. Great, I”ve done that three times in 23 years. I’m a little behind because I always lose.

Why?

I spent the first 15 years playing the game as a baseball fan would, picking players I enjoyed watching who did lots of intangibles like a catcher backing up a play at first or a second baseman with great range who knew how to play baserunners and the batter simultaneously. Hit behind the runner when you’re down 1-0 in the 8th with no one out, and you have won my admiration.

Except those players don’t do well in fantasy baseball. The guy who hits 21 homeruns while batting in the 6 spot as a DH and who doesn’t break .250 does well. It’s only recently that I began to even appreciate those players when I’m playing the game. And that, rather than the rules, led more to my disillusionment than anything else.

So how am I to process the banner ad I just saw for a fantasy fishing contest. I’m sure there are folks who love to watch that activity, and I’m sure there are plenty of intangibles. I just find it amazing that you can find others willing to dedicate hours every year for decades on the right mix.

I don’t think fantasy fishing will last, but I sure hope the people playing that game enjoy it like I used to enjoy the baseball version. I agreed to play another year. It’s March 12, and the draft is in 2 weeks. I haven’t looked at anything related to baseball in almost six months. Maybe I’ll actually pick up the 2008 equivalent of Gorman Thomas or Dave Kingman.