The real free market

About a week ago, I was listening to The Stephanie Miller show. A caller phoned in with the typical conservative talking point about how social-welfare programs enabled poverty and kept African-Americans and other minorities down. As I expected, the host and her mooks parroted the usual Democratic and ineffectual counter arguments but it occurred to me as I listened that a better response might have been along these lines:

"Dear caller, the reason we need anti-poverty programs is because of the economic system we've locked ourselves into. There is a 'free market.' It's called the 'labor market,' and it's where individual workers are pitted against each other in a ruthless race to the bottom of the wage scale. Meanwhile, oligopolistic corporations use their bought-and-paid-for politicians to rig the system so they can confiscate as much wealth as they can get away with, starving the commonwealth.

"If you want to reduce people's dependence on social welfare, at the very least you're going to have to radically redistribute wealth in a fairer way, and give workers the right to flex their muscle in the work place (i.e., "unions")."

Star Wars in 3D (sigh)

There's a bill board opposite the building where I work that's advertising the upcoming release of The Phantom Menace in 3D:

Two things struck me as I walked toward the office the first day I saw it. One, reissuing it in 3D, 4D or in every hidden dimension string theory predicts will not make The Phantom Menace a good movie, or even an acceptably bad B-movie.

It's an atrocious movie (I'll direct you to this site for a devastating critique).

I taped it years ago when Fox ran it (and when I had a TV), and every so often I rewatch it to make sure I haven't made a mistake regarding its quality. I haven't.

It bears repeating: It's. An. Atrocious. Movie.

The second thing that struck me is the composition of the poster. Ostensibly, the prequels are about the fall of Anakin Skywalker from grace and his transformation into Darth Vader yet nowhere is there an image of either Anakin or Vader (I don't even think any of the pod-racers depicted are Anakin's).

Instead, the most prominent image is Darth Maul. Darth Maul? Really. One of the most insipid and unthreatening villains in SF villain history.* In the background are Obi-wan and Yoda, and backing them, the "phantom menace," Darth Sidious.

I think the advert points up the saddest legacy of the prequels - Lucas focused on all the wrong elements, wasting the talents of several good actors and spoiling the viewing pleasure of millions of people who fell in love with the idea of Star Wars and were hoping to see the creation of a 21st century myth.

* One of the reviewer's more salient points in the review I link to above is that the saber duels between Maul and Qui-gon/Obi-wan and (in Revenge of the Sith) between Obi-wan and Anakin are emotionally unsatisfying and can't compare in power to the awkwardly staged but incomparably better duel between Vader and Guinness' Obi-wan in the original movie.

Calvin - RIP



Calvin, 1995-2012

 The new year has not gotten off to the best start: My little buddy Calvin passed away last Monday morning (Jan. 9).

It was all very sudden. The week before Christmas I had taken Calvin to the vet's for his 3-month check up and everything looked pretty good for a 16-year-old cat with hyperthyroidism, a heart arrhythmia and early stage kidney disease. Right after New Year's, however, things went rapidly downhill. That Monday (Jan. 2), I discovered that he had had a messy bowel movement and had noticed that he wasn't eating so I made an appointment for the next day and took him in. Dr. Kelban (my #2 vet; #1 being Dr. Dais) ran the blood tests; the kidney and all his other organs looked good but his red-blood-cell count was deep in the basement, almost at the point where vets begin blood transfusions. She put him on an appetite booster and steroids (and off the thyroid meds for a few days), and I kept a close watch on him. The rest of the week I was on tenterhooks, watching him continue not eating and getting weaker and weaker. On Saturday, he began making what I call "distress meows" so I got him an appointment that day with Dr. Dais. She put him on IV fluids, and we were going to see if I couldn't get some food down him via syringe.

The latter worked fairly well but I wasn't able to get near enough food down him to make it worthwhile before he refused to open his mouth any longer. Through Saturday and into Sunday, he was getting visibly weaker but he was still occasionally mobile and - in all honesty - I was thinking that these would be the last days we would be together; there was no recovery on the other side of this crisis.

Beginning last month, I started working Sunday-Thursday; same shift but my weekends begin on Thursday nights nowadays. I was loathe to leave my little guy alone but that weekend was the Consumer Electronics Show and I knew my colleague would be swamped if I didn't come in. Fortunately, one of the Graveyard editors was coming in at 8 pm, so I planned and did come home early, anticipating the worst.

When I got home Sunday night, Calvin had moved from the spot I left him in to the closet in the bedroom. I took a look - he was resting quietly so I left him alone. Before we all went to bed, Calvin had moved from there to what had become one of his favored resting spots - the rug beneath the bathroom sink. Extraordinarily inconvenient if you wanted to use the bathroom but I wasn't about to move him elsewhere if that was a place he was comfortable in. We settled in for bed around 11 that evening but a couple of hours later I was awakened by Calvin's "distress meow" and I went in to the bathroom. For the last few days, whenever I settled down with him, he would usually quiet down and I would spend the time rubbing his back and belly. And so it went this time. I settled onto the bathroom floor with him, smoothed out his fur and spent the next hour or so being with him. After about an hour, he got up crawled over my legs and staggered out into the hallway, where he collapsed - too tired to go much further. I picked him up and we went into the living room where we settled down in front of the TV and watched videos for the rest of the night. Around 5:15 am Monday morning, Calvin began meowing, he staggered up from my side and collapsed over to his other side, breathing stertorously. He did that for a few minutes (no more than 1 or 2, I would think, though it seemed longer) and then he ... stopped.

Calvin was never a lap cat but he had one of the sweetest natures I've ever encountered - cat or human - and he was never adverse to accepting a back or belly rub, and he is missed.

In the aftermath, both of The Boys (Puck & Oberon) and Miss Grey are spending more time with me (a decidedly mixed blessing when I want to use the computer). And I don't know how Irene's taking things. Calvin was her "boyfriend," and some days the only time I would see her was when Calvin came around to hang out with me - she was forced to accompany him.

Shakespeare on the OWS movement

Coriolanus, Act I, scene i:

Menenius: What work's, my countrymen, in hand? where you go
With bats and clubs? The matter? speak, I pray you.

First Citizen: Our business is not unknown to the senate; they have had inkling this fortnight what we intend to do, which now we'll show 'em in deeds. They say poor suitors have strong breaths: they shall know we have strong arms too.

Menenius: Why, masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbors,
Will you undo yourselves?

First Citizen: We cannot, sir, we are undone already.

Menenius: I tell you, friends, most charitable care
Have the patricians of you. For your wants,
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as life them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment. For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack,
You are transported by calamity
Thither where more attends you, and you slander
The helms o' the state, who care for you like fathers,
When you curse them as enemies.

First Citizen: Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.

First tragedy; then farce

In light of the recent death of Kim Jong-Il, I had this stray thought that Pyongyang's dynasty is showing a remarkable resemblance to the first three emperors of the Roman Empire.

Kim Il-Sung => Caesar Augustus: The deified founder of the dynasty who created the political framework upon which it works (more or less) and saved the nation.

Kim Jong-Il => Tiberius: The reasonably competent despot who commanded the loyalty of the ruling elite largely because of his father's charisma, and whose suppport was broad but shallow and not heart-felt.

Kim Jong-Un => Caligula: The dissolute, far-too-young-to-have-this-job grandson of the first emperor whose reign will be short and bloody.

Fortunately for the world at large, North Korea is not the hegemon that Rome was in its day, but the prospects for the peninsula, at least, don't look promising.

Malcolm - RIP

Malcolm - c. 2000 - 22 November 2011

Soon after moving in to the apartment complex where I live, me and Malcolm met. I work a second shift and normally get home around 11:45 or so in the evening. One night, I was walking along the path from the carpark to the apartment when I saw two feline figures run across the path and into the bushes. As I came abreast of the bushes, I saw that one of the cats remained under the bush - a black-and-white kitten who was mewling piteously. Figuring that mom would come back as soon as my offensive presence was removed, I continued on.

However, I grew curious about the kitten's fate so - after about 45 minutes - I went back outside only to find the poor little guy still under the bush, still crying. So - against common sense, which is often wrong anyway - I picked him up and brought him inside.

Malcolm (aka, The Niblet, as he was known while still a kitten) smoothly fit in with my other at-the-time four cats - Emma, The Monkey, Calvin & Meggie - and he proved to be a good natured, friendly and very special little cat (even if he never saved me from a life-threatening situation or parlayed his good looks into a lucrative (for me) career hawking pet-related products).

For the last six months he'd been gamely battling severe kidney disease. Part of his medical problems included increasingly severe anemia and uremic ulcers developing in his mouth (which made it difficult for him to eat and made his saliva bloody). On the 22nd, his mouth began bleeding uncontrollably and I rushed him to the vet's. Dr. Dais, our "family" physician, wasn't there but my second favorite vet, Dr. Kelban, was. She took a look at Malcolm and recommended that it might be best to put him to sleep. I had always known that we would reach this point sooner or later - At what point did his quality of life become so bad that I should let him go.

I just didn't wake up Tuesday morning expecting that this would be the day that I would have to make the decision.

But he was losing weight, the numbers in his blood/urine analyses were getting worse and worse, he could hardly eat and he was spitting up blood. The vet wrapped Malcolm up in a warm blanket and let me have some time to say good-bye. Then we put him to sleep.

He will be missed.

Why Shakespeare really is Shakespeare...

I haven't seen the new film Anonymous, which purports to explore the question of who "Shakespeare" was, but I am squarely in the camp that believes that the man known as William Shakespeare wrote the plays that are attributed to him.

I subscribe to The New York Review of Books, and in Nov. 24th's edition there's an essay by Garry Wills, "Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater," where he touches upon the issue while discussing Verdi's three Shakespearean operas. I found his defense interesting since it comes from the POV of theatrical logistics rather than a historical or literary one:

"Thus, in the modern theater, performers are fitted to the play, but in Shakespeare's time, the play was fitted to the performers.... Nothing could be more absurd than the idea of the Earl of Oxford writing a long woman's part without knowing whether the troupe had a boy capable of performing it. Only Shakespeare, who knew and wrote for and acted with and coached John Rice, knew what he could do and how to pace him from play to play....


"Shakespeare was not a full-time writer without other responsibilities.... But what might look like a distraction for such authors...was a strength for Shakespeare, since it made him a day-by-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish, actor by actor. The company was, after all, mounting plays with bewildering rapidity, studying, memorizing, and rehearsing in the morning and evening while performing in the afternoon. Without that experience, Shakespeare could not have written as he did. Lord Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, writing in their homes, could not have known such things. As Ivor Brown says, 'Shakespeare was a smuch on and around a stage as in his study.'"