lake of frogs

Forget about the pregnancy non-issue. Here's a tidbit about McCain's VP choice that truly merits investigation:

'[Former Wasilla mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor.' (from Time.com; Emphasis mine)

For my money, this is the most disquieting of the issues that have arisen. Government censorship isn't conservative or liberal, religious or secular, northern or southern—but it's quintessentially un-American.

[H/T Plutonium Page at DailyKos]

Watched the big convention speech at Alex's. This is the first national convention I've missed since '96. One relative emailed me a couple days ago—"Having fun?"—on the assumption that I would of course be in Denver.

Honestly, I felt a little sad not to be there.

But I have other priorities this year, and other ways to contribute. And I'm really proud of the national delegates I campaigned for at the state convention, especially the young upstarts. They went to Denver so I wouldn't have to.

So, what else is to say that hasn't been said? The convention was a huge success. We have a brilliant standard bearer in Barack Obama. History has been made, and we have a little over two months to take it to a new level. Let the historiating begin!

Just for fun, I've republished my primitive photoblog from the Gore convention in 2000. Enjoy!

http://www.davelee.us/2000redux/

I decided to set up Facebook Notes to import posts from my Electoral College blog. This seemed the quickest way to promote the new blog to my political-geek friends. While I was at it, I thought it would be cool to also import the Vox blog, and other stuff like my Netflix reviews and Flickr photos.

(I can't move all my content onto one service, since each collection of stuff is for a different audience; Someone who finds me by Googling the presidential election process has no reason to care about my photos of cats, for example. But all of it would be fun to share with my Facebook friends. Fun for me, at least.)

Anyway, Facebook lets you import only one RSS feed at a time. So I had to find a way to merge the feeds into a superfeed for Facebook's benefit. I sampled several feed-merging tools; None of them had the flexibility I wanted, until I remembered Yahoo! Pipes, a tool for mashing up, filtering, and re-organizing web content. I had poked around with Pipes during the initial buzz last year but never really utilized it.

I was fairly quickly able to set up a pipe to:

• Aggregate multiple feeds (so far, just the two blogs) into a single feed
• Stamp each post's subject line with [Citizen Elector blog] or [Vox blog], adapting a popular pipe called "Add Feed Label to Each Item Title"
  
• Sort by date
• Output to a new RSS feed

It's working brilliantly, except for a bug where Facebook imported all my posts twice and I had to manually delete the dupes.

Hello, Vox! I've been away for a while. In the meantime I've been writing for classes, and for my new blog about the Electoral College.

One of the interesting things about writing is that the more you write, the more you can write. In my case, there are a few aspects to this, both ephemeral and practical:

• The more I write, the more words simply flow from that other universe of ideas and abstraction. When things are truly flowing creatively, I feel like I'm channeling that world.
• In the editing process, I'll frequently find a snippet that, despite being a worthy piece of writing, I need to cut because it's off topic or dilutes the point I'm trying to make. Such a fragment can often be a great springboard for another piece. I have a text file that's basically a scrapbook of morsels cut during revision, which I can strip-mine later.
• Writing non-fiction helps me organize my thoughts and define my point-of-view on the topic at hand. I've only been working on the aforementioned blog, Citizen Elector, for a few weeks, but just researching and writing what little I've posted so far has had a great influence on my thinking about some of the structures of our government.
• Writing fiction helps me organize my thoughts and memories of myself and my immediate world.
  
• I feel good after finishing a piece, and especially when posting or printing it. Later, I want to feel good again.

I met a friend at the Mall of America and ended up grabbing food at the food court. I believe this is the first time I've been in the vicinity of a Long John Silver's since going vegetarian in January. As a kid in Chicagoland, I really loved the greasy fish and chicken—and especially the deep-fried batter remnants that come with everything—when my grandparents used to take me there. As far as I know, the Megamall has the only LJS in Minnesota, and it used to be a little treat on my rare visits there.

Now, people seem to think it takes such willpower to be vegetarian, but it's come quite naturally to me. I just don't miss hamburgers, chicken, fillets-o-fish, or any of that stuff. But today... I can honestly say that this is the first time I've felt a real craving to fall off the wagon.

So I decided to survey the rest of the food court, wandering across by Baja Sol. Now this is not by any means a vegetarian or vegan joint, but my experience there was entirely veg*n-friendly.

They have not one but two signs indicating they don't use lard, always a Mexican-food pitfall for veg*ns. I ordered a veggie burrito, which has beans, squash, peppers, onions, and other good stuff. By default, it also comes with cheese (and apparently, sour cream, which either isn't listed or which I didn't notice).

My official status is still "vegetarian," but I'm phasing out animal products wherever possible. So I asked the Baja Soldier to hold the cheese. She asked if I still wanted sour cream. I declined that as well. She stabbed a button while chiming, "OK, no dairy!" (Is there a magic "vegan" button on Baja Sol's cash registers?)

While I was waiting for my food, I overheard the guy behind me asking if the guacamole contains dairy or eggs. (It doesn't.) I struck up a conversation, and it turns out he's been a vegan for six years.

The Mall of America, a veg*n hangout. Who'da thunk it?

This about sums it up.

So Hazel loaned me seasons 1 and 2 of Alias. I had never seen it, nor had it particularly piqued my interest in the past. Still, having been captivated by J.J. Abrams' Lost, I've become curious about his earlier work. (Well, Felicity not so much...) Having gotten midway into season 2, I can say that Alias is a very good bet for any Lost fan.

In Alias, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is a college student who moonlights as an agent for a double-super-secret CIA operation called SD6. She discovers early on that SD6 is actually an evil group bent on world domination, and becomes a triple-super-secret agent spying for the real CIA within SD6. There are many Byzantine contrivances to the story which keep things interesting to say the least.

Alias starts off feeling like a cross between Buffy and James Bond. That is to say, it's action-packed and pretty light in tone. But like most good series, Alias deepens as it progresses. Many of the themes, motifs, and stylistic features we love on Lost are there on Alias:

• Father (and mother) issues. Sydney discovers that her father is also a double agent. She seems barely to know the man—and what she does know, she doesn't like. Her mother died when she was young, leaving Sydney with a terrible hole in her life. Michael Vaughn, her CIA handler and "will-they-or-won't-they" love interest, is still driven in part by the murder of his father (also a spy) when he was very young.
  
• The jailed mastermind. The second season of Alias features an irresistible evil genius who deviously manipulates events even while imprisoned—much like Lost's "Henry Gale from Minnesota" a few years later, and Hannibal Lecter a few years before.
• Dead alive. One character's death is revealed to have been faked, and another dead character bizarrely starts to haunt someone (a current mystery as of the episode I'm up to). This sort of thing happens about every other episode of Lost.
  
• Weird science (or is it magic?). A major plotline is the quest for relics of Milo Rambaldi, a 15th century inventor/artist/mystic/architect/all-around Renaissance Man, who mapped out much of today's technology (not to mention tech that hasn't been invented yet). Sydney herself is apparently pictured in one of Rambaldi's manuscripts. This blurring of science and magic, and the implication that Sydney was somehow preordained as special, presaged some fundamental concepts and events on Lost.
  
• Style and editing. Many episodes will drop your jaw to the floor with those patented Abrams cliffhangers, and even they way they cut to the Alias logo will be happily familiar to Lost lovers.
  
• Music. Unlike Lost, Alias has a lot of light pop and techno music, but it also has original scoring by the incomparable Michael Giacchino.
• Terry O'Quinn. It's especially fun to see our Locke on Alias, if only as an occasional recurring character (an FBI assistant director). I've only noticed one other actor who later appeared on Lost: the doctor who gave Jack a hard time in the Season 3 finale, in a bit part.

It's amusing to find many other little Alias/Lost echoes (prechoes?). In one episode, science geek Marshall Flinkman offhandedly talks about how polar bears are invisible to infrared cameras. In another, a character is trapped in a flooding station while Sydney desperately pounds the airlock glass with a fire extinguisher. Sound familiar?

If you had one month to live, what five things would you do?
Suggested by Acerebel.

Write the screenplay.

Go vegan.

Pick a girlfriend.

Find the cats a home.

Convince Damon and Carlton to give me the real scoop on Lost.