Thane Plambeck

James Howard Kunstler

Cleaning house

1) It's a good time to throw away magazines.  There hasn't been a such a good time to throw them away for eight years.  Who wants to read what The Nation thought about Sarah Palin in September 2008?  Not me, at least not anymore.  Anything with a date earlier than Nov 3 is going to get the old heave-ho.  But I might glance through it first.  And it's hard not to do the cryptic first, too.  Magazines tend to accumulate:

2) Went shopping for clothes ("clothes" = jeans).  Threw out old clothes (jeans & t-shirts).  Should have thrown out more.  And no, it doesn't make sense to take that stuff to Goodwill.  Like EB White, I recognize that the act of throwing things away is essential to reducing clutter in one's abode.  He described getting into the habit of taking something out of his house every time he left it.   The object would then be dropped into a trashcan somewhere.  Going to the supermarket?  Drop an old blender into the garbage.  Going on a walk?  Take along that Elmore Leonard paperback, the one that got splayed by a drop into a hot tub.  Maybe I'll get into the habit. 

Obama wins electoral vote in Nebraska

As previously discussed, that's electoral vote, and not electoral votes.  From the Omaha World Herald:

Democrat Barack Obama won the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District on Friday, scooping up one of the state's five electoral votes.

In the process, he made history and shone the spotlight on Nebraska's unusual electoral college system.

Nebraska is the first state in the modern era to have a split electoral decision.

...

Nebraska and Maine are not, however, the first states to try a split-electoral system, said Randy Adkins, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Several states flirted with similar systems in the early 1800s, including Kentucky, Maryland and North Carolina.

One of the last to use it was Michigan, which split its electoral votes in the 1892 presidential election between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland.

States began abandoning the split system in the late 19th century. Political parties, especially those dominating in particular states, led the effort for a winner-take-all system.

"It's political greed," said George Edwards, chairman of presidential studies at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service and editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly. "The dominant political parties want all of the votes."

He hopes that Obama's win in Nebraska will spark national interest in the split system, which he said does a better job of representing the will of the people. "I think it would be very healthy if this sparked some discussion . . . and I suspect that it will," he said.

From Roughing It [mark twain]

What to do next?

It was a momentous question.  I had gone out into the world to shift for myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends; and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with).  I had gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not, after being so wealthy.  I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day, but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he could have my custom.  I had studied law an entire week, and then given it up because it was so prosy and tiresome.  I had engaged briefly in the study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in disgrace, and told me I would come to no good.  I had been a bookseller's clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it.  I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water.  So I had to go.  I had made of myself a tolerable printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day, but somehow had missed the connection thus far.  There was no berth open in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year." I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never go back home to be pitied--and snubbed."  I had been a private secretary, a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than nothing in each, and now--

What to do next?

Marrakesh Express

Obama with kid

Obama with kid, originally uploaded by thane.

I'd like to know who took this photo (I certainly didn't)

Email with an old friend from the UK

OLD FRIEND:  Maybe you like the absence of a nasty smell.  Had the same feeling when Blair went.  My worry is that over here, Obama cuts a slightly Blairesque figure - have I misjudged him? Fortunately the choice was not mine, but I used to wonder if Hillary Clinton might have been a safer pair of hands - albeit more than a little shopsoiled.  Anyway. Congratulations.

THANE:  Hillary would have run into entrenched Clinton haters I think, lessening her likelihood of getting things done. She might have even managed to lose to McCain. She ran a poor campaign in a strategic and (more indicatively) managerial sense. What's needed is someone like Lyndon Johnson, who intimately knew the agendas of all congress people and how to get them to vote the way he wanted. Obama might possibly have skills along these lines; it's difficult to judge. And the significance of a black president is much greater than a woman president given the history of the country. Also we seem to be picking up extraordinary goodwill from other countries, which have been ignored for eight years.

It's all good and much better than it would have been with HRC.

OLD FRIEND: I suspect that the USA's overseas image has been so bad for so long (following Iraq and also because of its perceived partisan stance in the Middle East) that any break with the past is seen as positive. I meant what I said in both senses when I feared comparisons between Blair and Obama. Blair brought a new sense of hope, dynamism and self esteem and then let us all down with his patent lying and inexplicable sucking up to GWB leading ultimately to deaths of so many (whilst wearing the Bible and rosary beads in public). It started with so much hope and then dissolved in the vanity of one man. I really hope that things are as they seem. I want to hope but have become cynical (sadly maybe).
Keep talking.

THANE: Bush was (and is) so unbelievably toxic. It was awful watching other people, including Blair but also many US politicians sucked in and damaged (Colin Powell comes to mind, also McCain, who made a poor strategic decision to line up with Bush throughout 2004-2008 so that he would be the heir apparent. McCain got nothing from that.)

The US Presidency tends to be more than most people can handle from a stress and management perspective.  Events ultimately encroach upon, engulf and destroy the person in the office.  FDR was the last entirely successful person to handle it.  People say he was always laughing, no matter how dire the circumstances. He loved being President and had a positive outlook that gathered people together and somehow collectively made them equal to the job at hand.  A truly great man I think, and more than equal to the challenge of the job (the Depression + WWII circumstances are horrible to contemplate, even now). Before that, Abraham Lincoln, and before that, Thomas Jefferson, who beat back many toxic opponents in his day and was a brilliant person on all levels. Maybe 50-75 year cycle and we're due for a great President, but yes, I have my doubts too.

The return of Sarah Palin to Wasilla, AK

Fleeing Ghost (Paul Klee), originally uploaded by Liz Valentine

Special message to McCain/Palin voters

Remember to get out and vote on Election Day --- Thursday 6 Nov 2008.

More Junior High Stuff

So, after finding my old diaries slightly more interesting than I thought they'd be, and also finding more things I'd written that I'd completely forgotten (I thought it was mostly letters, Nebraska football programs, and homework) (and, after cringing, actually like, sort of), I'm looking through more of this generally pompous bullshit and finding some nice things.

Sometime in Junior High I retyped this part of The Catcher in the Rye:

More Junior High Stuff, originally uploaded by thane.

Diary entries, 1 October 1975 and 2 October 1975

[ left side:  DEPRESSION ... | right side: Building up ... ]

From Infinite Jest

The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.  Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.  The competing boy on the net's other side:  he is not the foe:  he is more the partner in the dance.  He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self.  As you are his occasion.  Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive.  You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution.  Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.  Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions.  You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place.  It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.  All life is the same, as citizens of the human state:  the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

* * *

I'm pretty much exactly the same age as DFW; when I first ran into Infinite Jest I read it all in a weekend.  Now that he's gone, I'm brooding again over the tennis parts of it.  I really need to get around to typing in my many diary entries from Junior tennis, ca 1974-1980.  They're all in a few little books, one of them a proper "diary" that I think I took a photo of once [can I find it? Yes! (the photo --- but where's the book--- Ah, found it too!)]

Here's one from 15 July 1975:

I played Ron Messbarger at Sertoma today.  I lost 6-4 and missed baseball practice.  I am going to the Lincoln Juniors tennis tournament.  Dad and I are taking Bob Kirby and maybe Jeff Luke.  That tournament starts Saturday, July 19.  I am beginning to lose faith in myself.    I have to keep playing.   I lose matches I really should win.   

Another one: 19 to 21 July 1975:

In the Lincoln Juniors I won my first round match over Roland Augspurer of Columbus 8-3.  I then beat Bill Budde of Lincoln 8-6  Lost to Jim Backer 6-1, 6-2.  In doubles, Kirby and I beat Roy Oshima and Jim Lightner 5-7 6-2 6-4; I thought Oshima was mad at Lightner, and that helped.  Then we lost to the Storch brothers, 6-2, 6-2.  I hate Peter Storch.

Another one: Lost to John Ross!!!!  Maybe just psyched out on a match I thought I'd win for sure.

Another one: 29 Sept 1975: Called into the office for bothering Mark Jacobson.   School sent a home a note to Mom & Dad.  They are mad.  I am depressed.   

* * *

Back to Infinite Jest:

Schtitt knew real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game's technicians revered, but in fact the opposite --- not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty.  That real tennis was no more reducible to delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing, the games of which it's a hybrid.

Well, I was a junior chess player too, of sorts. 

12 January 1975:

Played basketball at 6:30 with Mickey Messbarger and Company [ ha MM are you reading this? ]   After that I went to his house to help him do his trigonometry.

25 February 1975:

Mr Haines is letting me move through trivial math units by letting me not do the tape questions [wtf?].  I can skip them.  Mrs. Wilkins is tolerating me more and more every day.  Wish Dad would spring for a new basketball net; what we have is virtually useless.  I beat Mr. McCan in Ping-Pong 22-20 and 21-15.  He said he wants to play me tomorrow.  He might beat me then.

2 March 1975:

Had to stay for church.  But the minister gave a really good sermon.  [ I've always liked a good sermon.]

3 March 1975.

Gave Mr Haines a report on "Bleen," a new number between 6 and 7.  Don't know where I got the idea.  Not my own.  Maybe Curt Peterson.

6 March 1975.

Done with eighth grade math, or what is supposed to be eighth grade math.  I love number theory.

* * *

Enough...back to brooding on Infinite Jest.

Post-Halloween Summit

Cole and Owen negotiate candy trades

Saturday reinkings

I really want to be AERIE

1 Across in today's (Saturday) NYT is It's often laid on someone else.  I had a sinking feeling this was going to be an annoyingly easy crossword.  Anyway---I wrote in BLAME and then MEESE for Predecessor of Thornburgh in the cabinet. (I'm an expert MEESE spotter.  If anyone wants to go hunting and shoot a few in the grids, well, please feel free to invite me.  They're getting to be an endangered species, those MEESE, and I take a special pleasure in hunting and killing them.)   

Then LIL for 2 Down, Start of many rappers' stage names.

So, I read the clue for 14 Across, High altitude home. 

That really, really, really wanted to be AERIE, but there was one little problem---it had to be written in backwards.  So, what to do?  I scanned the clues for hints about the puzzle theme, and found 35 Across:

Many thoroughfares ... or what this puzzle's Across answers consist of?

Filling in a few more squares and deciding to just go for it, I wrote in TWOWAYTRAFFIC:

What the hell.  Why not just guess that the odd rows will read correctly, and the even rows will read in reverse? 

This proved to be a case of Premature Guesstulation.  If I'd looked a little more carefully I might have noticed that my brilliant stroke involved writing the answer left to right in a row that, according to my newly-found fantastic crosswordianic theory, really should have the answer reading right to left.   

What to do?  Well, just keep solving until I'm forced to admit my error.

For 24 Down, Intoxicating round, I had to reink SHOT to ALES.   

Eventually, TWOWAYTRAFFIC gave way to STEERTSYAWOWT, which pleased me because it at least did involve "two way."

I finished the rest of the puzzle pretty quickly, and much faster than Friday.

Forgot to take a photo of it.

Added later: