remnants

Newsvine - Maher and Shandling honor George Carlin at service

Although his standup routines were often filled with four-letter words
— so many that early in his career Carlin was sometimes hauled off
stage and taken to jail — his dead-on ability to highlight the
absurdities of everyday life, and do so in such comical voices and
faces, made his humor come across as anything but harsh.

And, with that quote, I have violated AP’s copyright policy. Absurdities indeed. I cant think of a better tribute to such a brilliant, groundbreaking and truthtelling master of words and humor. Rest in peace, George.

The baseball season ended at 11:30 Saturday morning. Not for you, I know, and certainly not for the professional athletes still a few games away from halfway through their millionaire romp towards September or, if they’re lucky, all the way to October and a bigger paycheck.

But it ended for the Hershey Little League Colts 9 team sponsored by Hershey Realty or, as we liked to call ourselves, the Blue Jays. And my royal blue coach’s jersey hangs soaked in sweat and rain over the chair in the next room.

Waking up in the morning, we werent entirely free of concern about whether we’d pull off the game at all. We knew going in that at least two of our best players would be out of town. Friday night’s weather report threatened rain, even thunderstorms. Recent real storms had forced us to reschedule this final game at least twice and to move the field just as many times, to make way at the main league field for older age group playoffs.

When I arrived at the field, our little boys in blue were playing catch on the infield dirt. As I did before every game, arriving between 20-30 minutes before the first pitch, I made a quick count of our players. Normally, each team fields 10 kids - one for every normal infield position and four outfielders. There were twelve kids on our roster, but not since the second game did we have a full crew all at once, so, for most games, each kid was able to play the whole game without substitution. When I got to the field on Saturday, I counted 8. By the time we called “play ball!”, two more - the brother and sister pair - had made it to the field.

Unfortunately, our opponents for the day, dressed in yellow, were six kids short of a team. A few players and even some coaches for the other side thought that we werent playing until 3 in the afternoon, so we delayed the start of the game for almost a half hour to give everyone time to arrive. We juggled the lineups and field positions just so we could get the game in, and for the first two innings, we lent our opponents in the yellow jerseys two outfielders. And we inserted coaches as catchers for most of the game and pitchers for the entire game in order to occupy more positions in the field.

These are but minor details. We started late, but there was no game behind us, so we were in no rush, and nobody in the park, players, coaches or parents alike, had any desire to forfeit the last game of the season for any reason. The game would go on. It had to.

With our two best hitters - who were also the most reliable gloves - absent, the pressure was on me to offer up some slow sweet pitches, giving the kids the best chance at putting the bat on the ball. Still, it took us about three innings to find our hitting groove, and before we knew it, we were losing 12-0. There is no worse feeling for a pee-wee baseball coach than striking out three batters in a row. Each inning, I moved a little closer to the plate, trying to reduce the vertical curve of the ball without throwing it too hard. But as I got closer, they got better, and four times I had to duck all the way to the dirt to avoid getting hit in the face with a mean line drive.

We had our standard problems and beautiful small victories, despite the early score. We even had a double play, and every one of our kids was able to get on base at least once. Thats a big deal - these are 7- and 8-year-olds. Next year, a full third will probably have turned in their gloves for video games or music lessons. At 7 and 8, just about every boy and girl tries soccer and baseball, but attrition comes quick. We had our share of clover-pickers and daydreamers, but by the end of the season, every kid, from the best to the least best, had improved greatly in their own way. My son was one of the most improved from start to finish - this being his first season playing the sport. In April and May, my playing catch with him meant that I had to throw my back out, reliably, having to bend down on every throw just to pick the ball back up off the grass. But when we played catch a few nights ago, he was throwing it right to me and he was catching most of my throws as well. And his batting went from shy and nervous to confident and quick, and when he first rounded third and headed for home about midway through the season, with me fortuitously manning the 3rd base coach spot and waving him home, earning a probably over-done hug from his old man, he didnt stop there - he’s been getting better every game.

He wasnt the only one. We had a few nice pop fly catches, a great throw from shortstop to first, and they even got the hang of backing each other up.

There were still some little league moments, where we looked like the Bad News Bears. Jordan took a shot to the nose - playing in left field, a pop fly bounced a few feet in front of him and took a bad hop right at his face. We took him off the field and iced his nose for only a few minutes before he was wiping away the tears and running back out onto the field.

The drama of the game took on an extra bit of excitement when the dark clouds moving towards us from the west opened up for a 5-minute drenching downpour. We were in the field, and our kids suddenly leapt to life. Like a dozen blooming flowers our strange gang of first and second graders jumped with joy and yelped with glee, thrilled with the weather and very quickly soaked to the bone. And I was in the midst of it, standing next to my oldest son in left-center field, giving guidance and encouragement to our team, letting them know where the play was and reminding them to pay attention. Suddenly my youngest son ran out onto the field to stand next to me, his short-cropped hair and white shirt soaked all the way through and grinning from ear to ear. He wasnt there for any reason other than to try to share some of what the team was feeling, and there was no way I was going to tell him to get off the field. He was fine right where he was.

By the end of the game every kid and coach on the field and every parent and sibling sitting on the bleachers increasingly revealed the same intense yearning, as if driven by some psychic magnetism, to hold fast to the diamond. Even though we never caught up in the score, both teams were having so much fun that we extended the game a full two extra innings, and in the last inning we ignored the outs and just let both teams bat around.

Nobody wanted to go home. We had an up and down season, some good games, some frustrating ones. Some tears and some surprises, and our share of pouting and shuffling bored back to the dugout, dropping balls, running the wrong way, and bumps, scrapes and bruises. And at least once a game I found myself tying someone’s shoe, and we even had a surprise appearance by a baby toad in the outfield. But as this last game neared the final out, and the storm clouds had given way to blue skies, the atmosphere seemed to murmur the melancholic gratitude we all shared - a season, or any similar experience, doesnt need to be perfect or brilliant or unbeatable in order to be memorable - in order to be something we never want to let go of.

I wasnt the head coach. I volunteered before the first practice and it was the best decision I’ve made in quite some time. It was an experience I’ll never forget, but it was also the kind of experience that can inspire more of the same. We can always look back on the pictures and videos we made during this season, but those tangible reminders dont need to be all that endures as a result of what we did this year. Both of my sons made new friends because of this team. I made new friends, too. And I got to be the first to congratulate so many kids on things they had never done before - their first hit, their first double play, their first run, their first catch. Giving them high-fives, hugs and fist bumps, when their emotions are quivering excitedly between shock and impossibly pure joy, is like nothing else in the world.

When, as adults, we can live vicariously through the developing emotional and physical education of our children and their friends, themselves growing to realize and appreciate what it means to be part of a team, it finally makes me believe that we can get high on life.

So I’m sad tonight, because it’s over. My jersey is hanging there. My partner and I must have lamented about the end of the season for more than an hour after we got home today, reminiscing about all the good times we shared. But I’m also happy, because I know that it’s only this season that has ended - and because this season is the start of something that can last for a very long time, if we want it to. It doesnt matter if it inspires another baseball season, or a set of piano lessons, or a new adventure in camping, painting or learning how to hustle friends at the poker table. The inspiration is there for us to do with it as we choose.

So this goes out to all of our kids - Cameron, Jack C., Jack E., Jackson, Jonathan, Jordan, Kieran, Liberty, Luke, Miles, Wyatt and Zach. I love you all. And to our coaches, Vinnie and Brian, and our volunteers who stepped up to help whenever we needed help - Carly and Jake and Dan the Bat Man, and everybody else. And to every kid we played against, and all the coaches in between. I’m grateful to all of them for letting me in on their ride, and I always will be. So even when the rain washes our footprints away from today’s dirt, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to find our way back the way we came, whichever direction it points us in down the road.

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > A Pill a Day Keeps the Doctor Away?

More than half of Americans now take prescription meds to treat chronic health problems, according to a new study out today. The study is being played as bad news, with the wire services quoting doctors proclaiming that “things will get worse instead of getting better” and chalking the problem up to our “couch potato culture.”

But digging deeper into the study reveals that much of the increase is the result of good preventive treatment for diseases that were once debilitating or fatal, like the use of allergy medication and steroid treatments to prevent asthma flareups in kids, and higher rates of antidepressant use, especially among young women.

(For more on the latter topic, re-read reason contributor Will Wilkinson’s excellent article on whether an epidemic of depressive disorder is sweeping America. Answer: Not really)

The topic of prescription medication and its possible overuse has been hot recently. The tragic death of Heath Ledger, attributed to various prescription medications, served to launch the issue into the stratosphere of media attention and so now it is circling us, waiting for something else to happen, waiting for what we can only assume will be heartbreakingly devastating statistics proving that doctors are evil for prescribing possibly addictive or otherwise dangerous medications and that patients are faking their way to one of the diagnoses which will give them the opportunity to abuse yet another drug for recreational purposes.

But there is another way to look at this topic — this “problem” of so many people taking so much medication. Instead of considering its use and abuse to be the problem, we should be considering as the source of the problem the fact that so many Americans are suffering from serious health problems which can only be properly managed through various prescription cocktails.

What ails us

Nobody wants to be depressed. SSRIs make you feel like a zombie and they can wreak havoc on your liver and other internal organs, not to mention the side effects, which include weight gain, sexual disfunction and mood swings. It’s not unimportant that when we look at those potential and common side effects, they are each of them the kind of thing that can cause depression in the first place and worsen it in the second place.

Other popular pills include ones that fight pain, restless leg syndrome, allergies, anxiety, heartburn and other esophageal conditions, sexual disfunction, sleep disorders, ADD, blood pressure and digestive problems. The medications used to treat these conditions can sometimes be addictive, expensive or so powerful that the negative side effects offset any health benefits.

What is disturbing to me isnt that so many patients are taking these meds, it’s that so many patients need to take these meds. There is an underlying problem that is contributing to this rise in medicinal treatments, and it’s something we should not be ignoring.

Worse — a common theme among patients being treated so heavily with medication is that many of their symptoms, while physical in nature, can in many cases be linked to disorders of the mind — anxiety, depression, worry, stress, etc.

What worries us?

Since 1971, the financial situation for the average American family of four has become exponentially worse. First, we’re the first generation of Americans since before the Great Depression destined to be worse-off financially than our parents were. But thats just a vague accusation. Lets look at the facts.

That link in the previous paragraph goes to an hour-long presentation about the decline and imminent disappearance of the American middle class. I won’t force you to spend an hour in front of your computer watching a movie, so here are the details:

Between the early 70s and the early 00s, discretionary spending for families has dropped significantly. This is money that we spend on items like food, clothing, decoration, gifts, etc. As examples, we are spending 38% less on clothing and 18% less on food — including eating out — than we did 30 years ago. Some other items are a wash — smoking is down, alcohol spending is up. But the idea that Americans are overconsuming is flat-out wrong. With more options in the retail industry to find cheap clothes, no-name food, etc., adjusted for inflation, our discretionary spending is way down.

And our savings has become negative — this is because we are carrying a balance on our consumer debt. So where is the money going? Why does it feel like we’re always broke?

There was a 76% increase on mortgage payments, even though the average size of homes for the same demographic increased only from 5.8 rooms to 6.1 rooms (an increase of 5%). We’ve also seen a 74% rise in health insurance premiums, 100% more in child care, and 25% more in taxes. And the ROI (return on investment) for these items is similar to that of houses — our health insurance covers less than it did 30 years ago, but we’re paying a lot more for it (which results in more out of pocket spending).

But the worst of it is that, in order to maintain the most basic lifestyle (which, and this is important, has a lot to do with where you live, because moving a few miles to the other side of town — and into higher-priced homes — has a direct impact on the quality of the school our children will attend), we must employ both parents. And we must do it persistently — there are more parents of 3-month old kids who are working full-time today than there were parents of 7-year-old kids working full-time 30 years ago. That has an obvious and direct impact on child care. But it also means that the “default” for most families is that both parents need to work. This means that instead of 1-car families, we are all 2-car families. And it means that the risk to each family — which is something that hangs over our heads constantly — has risen in nearly incalculable ways.

The risk that an American full-time worker will lose his or her job has gone up something like 4 times since the early 1970s. With both parents working, this means that each parent has a huge risk of losing their job due to cutbacks, jobs shifting overseas, layoffs, etc. Combined, this means that the risk to each family that they will lose necessary income is about 8 times greater than it was 30 years ago.

And since our non-discretionary spending has increased so much, there is no wiggle room. In 1971, if a parent was laid off, there was enough of a cushion to get by for a reasonable amount of time while that parent looked for a new job, and there was also the option of putting the other parent into the workforce for an entirely new paycheck. Food could be budgeted down, as could clothing, cigarettes, entertainment, etc.

But today, most of our spending is trapped in necessary items: our house, our cars, our health insurance, etc.

What cures us

Nobody needs to be reminded that today’s financial climate for the average American family is stressful to say the least. These statistics prove it — and they demonstrate that this is not a cultural shift, in which people have changed their buying habits, their working habits, or their recreational habits in order to adjust to a changing society. Rather, this is simply what happens when our government gets its regulation habits all fucked up, gets its foreign trade policies twisted into confusing knots of corporate thievery, and changes the legal climate in such a way as to give every advantage to large, wealthy corporations at the obvious and direct expense of the average American.

So it’s no wonder that we are seeing this frightening rise in prescription medication. Lets also point out that the pharmaceutical industry is collecting huge profits (it’s not just the oil and food corporations), so the way that they are marketing, distributing and selling their products is contributing to the problem. A true and tangible problem with so many medications crossing the neighborhood pharmacy counter isnt that they are being ingested into people’s bodies, it is that they are part of the price gouging that is going on in so many other areas of middle class American life that we have no control over. We can buy the cheaper loaf of bread and shift from meat-heavy meals to rice and pasta, but we cant change the price of a pill. So medication is just another one of the non-discretionary purchases killing the American family.

All of this points to a situation where the average American goes through his or her day worried, for very good reason, about money, their job, schools, college savings, etc. And as the situation worsens — brought on by an increase in deadly weather events, the price of gas nearing $4/gallon, the loss of the dollar’s buying power, the food shortage, the health insurance debacle — the effect on our health gets worse right along with it.

So excuse me if I find cries to rid the world of effective pain medication because one of the side effects is “euphoria” to be hopelessly missing the point. Further, we would be better off if more of these prescriptions provided such pleasant side effects, because we need the distraction. We need to be comforted by something. And most of all, we need medication to deal with the physical manifestations of health problems which are becoming more and more obviously attached to the world around us. Greater pollution in the air and water is harming our health, as is the increased use of preservatives and artificial ingredients in the cheapest kinds of food available. Combine those with this American Stress, which seems to be be hitting people at younger and younger ages, and the problem should be clear: Too many people in America are sick.

So, if you’d like, go on and continue to rail about how doctors shouldnt be prescribing and patients shouldnt be taking all of these pills every day. But you’ll be missing the point. American health is a symptom of a larger economic and social problem that is affecting the entire world. Dont kill the messenger, and dont attack the symptom of the problem — attack the problem.

But thats another truly American issue, isnt it? We’re much better at ignoring the problem and attacking the messenger. The reality is, we’re in bad shape and we need lots of help. If I can take a pill to ease the pain I feel every time I swallow, I’m going to take it. Because just the underlying economic problems in this country, my acid reflux isnt going anywhere.

It gives me great pleasure to let everyone know that the efforts of the Steal This Wiki community have been mentioned in “Little Brother,” a novel by acclaimed internet writer Cory Doctorow. Described on its cover as a “rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion,” “Little Brother” is about what happens when teenage hackers get more than they bargained for in today’s dangerous world.

Wow, ok so: After a tricky start to the second half of the season — this is almost as funny as it ever was.

Now everybody hates Jim, which they have been setting up for the last several shows, and Michael is gay, like, for real, the seriousness of it coming out of nowhere.

Oh yeah, and Ryan has a severe cocaine problem.

So the epic narratives have whittled down to this. It’s okay. It was a bad year for these teams and I’m too stunned by the rest of it that I cant think straight. But hey Thursday was once the topic of every single Friday conversation and that lasted a long time.

Best night ever.

“Like taking candy from one of those guys who gives out candy at gay nightclubs.

I have rarely ever visited YouTube. It’s not that I dont love funny videos. But life is busy and watching video clips on the internet, when most of my internet use happens sporadically during the in-between times among tasks at work.

But it’s a sign of something that, having just watched tonight’s episode of South Park, even though I recorded the show, I’m constantly refreshing YouTube’s search page so that I can watch the in-show, SNL digital short-ish, quirky and dead-on performance by Butters (and one which is comedically important to the plot — I’m talking to you, Family Guy).

This was by far the best episode of this young South Park season. One for the ages.

Denby isn’t sure that vampy actress Asia Argento is the best person for the part she plays in Olivier Assaya’s new film, Boarding Gate, but she seems to fit the mold of what Assaya has in mind for his global thriller. Argento’s acting (or “bluffing,” as Denby calls it) recalls the lurid sexuality of women in film going back to the origins of the medium, but is the filmmaker sacrificing meaning for appearances? This is an alert and intellectual review of a film that, according to Denby, might benefit from a bit more consciousness itself.
in The New Yorker by David Denby, 24 March 2008
This abstract was edited by Brijit. Read more here…

I dont live in Buffalo, NY anymore, but I was born there, went to college there, and started my career there. I never had season tickets to the Sabres or Bills games, but I’ve attended my share.

My family spent all our holidays in Buffalo where grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins lived. Through my family, I was brought up a Buffalo fan through and through. My poor dad — he tried to keep me from it, to protect me from it. He pretended to not pay attention to the football games or the hockey games. But he always talked fondly of the Rockpile, and he took me to my first game at Rich Stadium and what is now referred to as the “old Aud” — the Sabres used to play a regular game on New Year’s Eve — we went to a few of those games, too. It didnt matter what he did to try to protect his kids from the heartbreak of rooting for Buffalo teams; it still seeped through.

I had cousins of my age, though, too, who had a say in the matter. I was introduced to the Sabres at an early age and rooted for the team that long-haired Lindy Ruff played on, along with the Olympic hero Mike Ramsey. I learned about the French Connection, and I learned to despise the Philadelphia Flyers and the Boston Bruins, and I learned about the heroic antics of Jim Schoenfeld, our kind of tough guy, who was strong enough to break the chains of the boards with a check, and who wasnt afraid to stand up to the refs.

Even though I didnt spend all my childhood in Buffalo, the city’s experience got through to me. My uncle worked at Bethlehem Steel. My cousin grew up to work at the Ford plant (which, by the way, is misplaced in the scene from “Buffalo 66″). I loved the time I lived there as an adult and, to be honest, I probably would have stayed there forever — with my friends and family — had my first wife not so despised the place. But I loved it. I loved the in-between nature of its downtown nightlife — almost a big city, but not really. I embraced Buffalo culture. I became a fan of the television writer Tom Fontana — I rowed in a boat at the West Side Rowing Club (I could write an article on my connections to that place alone) that was named after his father, who was a family friend and a fixture in the rowing community, who used to write for Hill Street Blues (many of the street names heard on the station’s intercom are from Buffalo) and wrote a rowing plot arc into an episode of St. Elsewhere, and went on to create “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Oz.” I frequented local food co-ops and made a point of knowing where to go to eat, drink or be merry in every neighborhood in town. And I went to a lot of games.

My dad, having grown up in Buffalo, went to Syracuse to pursue a rowing career and, through him, I became a solid Orangemen fan (now just “Orange”). It was with this team that I had an “approved” object of fanhood, growing up on stories about my own old man going to school with Jim Boeheim. My sister was baptized by the Catholic priest who for years sat behind the Orange bench with the team. Syracuse was okay, but Buffalo was not. This approach proved prescient when, finally, in 2003, the year my first marriage dissolved, the Orange won the NCAA Tournament. Years of anguish had been erased when Hakeem Warrick blocked Kansas’ last chance shot. And years of cheering against Georgetown in the 80s were redeemed. Other Finals appearances — losses — became irrelevant — merely backstory to Our Champions.

But I didnt go to college at Syracuse — couldnt afford the student load possibilities — so I went to college at the University at Buffalo. We’ll leave the Bulls out of this discussion — we’ve only been D-I for a few years so far.

During my last years of college and into my “regular life,” the Bills were losing their four straight Super Bowls. And not in random fashion either. People remember those games. Most of all, I remember the first one and the last one — the only two the Bills could have — should have — won.

The Sabres were mired in mediocrity for all of these years. I was too young to remember the 1975 Finals loss to the Flyers (though the event was still there), and so we rooted for the Sabres for just as long as we could, and back then it wasnt a complete failure to make it to the 2nd or 3rd round of the playoffs. Then came 1999. It was enough to make us forget about the mediocre best of times of the past 20 years, even those things which made us proud — Pat LaFontaine, Clint Malarchuk, Alex Mogilny, Brad May. In 1999 it was different. But then it happened, just like it happened to the Bills against the Giants, except it was worse.

Two words: No Goal. Before it became a bumper sticker, it was a tragic truth. I stayed up all fucking night watching that game go into endless overtimes. No goal. Fucking Bucky Dent? Fuck Brett Hull.

It’s been a reckless ride as a Buffalo sports fan. I cant explain it, other than it’s there, just like our relatives are there. Despite my father’s efforts, both my brother and I are deadly Buffalo fans — deadly as a suicide. We regularly commiserate about our shared pain. We dress each other’s kids in toddler Bills or Sabres gear. And neither one of us is even making an effort to protect this next generation from the anguish of rooting for Buffalo.

I posted a seed today about the Sabres making their last trade of this seasaon, moving their only remaining All-Star out west for some prospects. In it, we mourn the end of this season. But it’s more than that. Trading away Brian Campbell wasnt just about Brian Campbell or this season. It is the final act in the tragic play whose denouement began after the Sabres fell short of a nearly perfect season last year and lost their two star players, Daniel Briere and Chris Drury, to division foes.

Fellow fan cp33 pointed out in that seed how special last year was for the Sabres, and I was reminded of my modest string of articles that, from a distance and through different filters — political, family, social, literary — kept a watchful eye on the very special season that we saw take shape last year. And so I wanted to introduce or revive those articles here this evening as so many Buffalo fans are truly mourning something we’ve been watching die for almost a year now.

I dont know if there will ever be redemption for Buffalo fans. It’s no consolation to point out to naysayers that the Bills won the last two AFL Championship games, just before the merger. It’s no consolation to insist, rightly so, that the goal was, lets be clear: No Goal.

And having a little package of essays is no consolation, either. But I dont have to ask myself if I would trade these essays for a Stanley Cup, because when and if that Cup finally comes, part of the joy I feel will be a result of many of the things I explored in these essays.

So, here, for your reading pleasure, is a collection, in chronological order, of essays in which I mentioned or focused on the Buffalo Sabres. This is not a log of the 2006-07 season, or a documentation of the Sabres’ playoff run, winning streak or fall from grace. This is a road diary of sorts — the scribblings of scenery and prose sketches of a writer who happens to be a huge Sabres fan.

What happened last year is now, we can be sure, finally over. Maybe, if you’re like me and cp33, sitting and sulking, this can help you look back with fondness instead of frustration, which is most of what we’ve been feeling lately.

My Sabres Material:

It’s not just a ball game anymore — October 11, 2006

The force of grace — October 16, 2006

Why the Sabres may never lose — October 17, 2006

Chasing the reality dragon — November 1, 2006

The precious in-between times — April 5, 2007

Are you a crackhead ballerina? — April 20, 2007

Hope in a blue hockey world — April 26, 2007

Where do we go now, where do we go? — May 15, 2007

And the Sabres piss away their past into the winds of their future — June 29, 2007

One of the first dramatically visible pieces of evidence to expose the final urgency of Man’s disastrous effect on Nature was acid rain. From the automobile factories of the American midwest, particles of death rose to the atmospheric limits and generated great clouds of filth, bringing widespread chemical voids to the historic beauty of the Adirondacks and the British Isles. The destruction was independent of economic interests or social affiliations. Fish were killed, drinking water destroyed, and landscapes blown away as if by some nuclear blast.

We’ve been watching the nightmare of American politics unfold for decades without doing anything about it. We knew long before acid rain melted great swaths of Nature that pollution was Bad. And we’ve known long before now that our political system is corrupt and that it invalidates democracy itself.

In 2008 we have dreamy presidential candidates on each side of the invisible divide. Candidates who seem molded from the very polls which have now finally proven laughably false. We’ve constructed these candidates from the building blocks of soundbites and snippets of rhetoric that our consolidated media has been fashioning out of advertising trends and demographic profiles. And as products of our own daydreams, we are clinging to these politicians with a force grown of our own imaginations — imaginations not prone to logic or negotiation.

We have the Black Candidate. The Female Candidate. The Christian Candidate. The Great Negotiator Candidate. The Great Liberator Candidate. From afar, they seem as unique and precious as our own true selves. But even from afar, the most obvious feature, the only common denominator, is: the Candidate. And yet, somehow, we are allowing their flimsy exteriors to blind us from the truth.

We know that beauty is only skin deep. We know that we cant judge a book by its cover. We know that superficiality is bad and that we should be judging one another based on the content of our character, not the color of our skin, the nature of our genitals, the pride of our faith or the breadth of our grin. But look at this crowd of candidates — they are more of the same. The debates are meaningless, full of talking points and repetition, immature attacks, condescending platitudes and goals that dig into the mud for inspiration instead of looking to the sky.

2008 is politics as usual, but it is bringing out the most flawed arguments. We are allowing ourselves and the future of our nation to be clouded by the most immediate, the simplest, the most childish and the most ignorant impressions of this latest round of show-horses to be paraded before us.

I rarely recommend closing your eyes, but if you were to do that for just a moment, and listen, you would see that in 2008 we are being offered nothing more than the latest round of corporate sellouts, social revisionists, wrongheaded theologians and selfishly corrupt individuals.

Of course, we’ve been doing this for decades and more. But today the circumstances of the State of our Union are crashing together in an intensely tragic fashion. This is the dawn of a political and social storm of acid rain. In 2008 we are trying to break free, finally, of the demagogues who have managed to convince us that the best kind of security — the only kind of security for us — consists of a lock and and a key. Nearly every act of Congress and the administration since Rudy’s favorite holiday has been expressly against the best interests of a free and intelligent people.

But our solution — and be clear: these candidates are exactly our solution — is more of the same, with a new face. And it’s not like we didnt have better options, because we did. But in a mega super-store with every available gift for ourselves, we’ve chosen the pallet of expired milk and wrapped it in the trendiest decorations available.

So by supporting more of the same, we are encouraging our leaders to continue to treat us like a people who want to be under lock and key — a people opposed to their own freedom, and a people who behave, with full intention and deliberation, against any form of intelligence or thoughtfulness. In what should be an effort to restore America to its most fundamental values, we are choosing more of the same politicians who led us to this precipice in the first place.

I’ve been beating myself up for more than six years now, blaming myself as a part of this national community engaged in deadly propaganda, illegal warfare and corporate fascism. But I’m done. I am washing my hands of the moronic decisions of my fellow Americans.

You are Idiots! You are Fools! — You need to spend more time on the gift and less time on the wrapping paper. A 4-year-old child sees through this bullshit — a pair of socks wrapped in Spiderman paper is still just a pair of socks.

Our Candidates are selling out to the highest bidders — oil companies, health care companies, pharmaceutical companies, religious organizations, media conglomerates, and all et cetera. But it is not our Candidates who are leading the way in 2008. Rather, it is their supporters — the people writing articles on Huffington Post and on Newsvine trying to promote their Candidate’s own special brand of three-card monte. And so I’m left to wonder — what exactly is it that is making these pundits, these columnists you, go for broke in such rabid form to demand that your favorite flavor of the day be everybody’s else’s favorite flavor of the day? I can see, from campaign contributions, exactly what the price is for each of these Candidates.

But what is your price? Are you doing it for free? Are you really trying so hard to sell out your nation and your family for nothing? It sure seems that way.

You’ve been pretending for decades that we should be color-blind, that we should avoid sexism and racism and intolerance in all its forms, that we should maintain a true separation of Church and State, that our freedom is only as good as the example we set for the global community, that we value peace and fairness. And, now, it’s obvious, you’ve been lying all this time.

Who are you to blame the administration for its 935 lies? Who are you to accuse the administration of nepotism, favoritism or selfish pride? It is exactly these flawed values which are driving the 2008 presidential campaign, and it is exactly you who is to blame, now and for as long as your choices continue to degrade and humiliate the true spirit of America.

The Candidates will walk away from this election as victors or as the defeated, but they will walk, one way or another, to their mansion on the hill. And it doesnt matter, to them, or to you, which road we are led down. All that matters, according to you, is that the road you are on is one shown to you by your brand of smile — your book’s cover, your beauty’s skin, your kind of underwear.

So keep going with your pleasantries and your validations and your rationalizations. They are all as mindless, useless and full of shit as you believe everyone else’s to be. Keep drinking your acid rain, pretending that it’s something else destroying the world.

Maybe your children will save us all, eh?

Nobody’s ever called me rich before and I have no shame recognizing that I generally dont find myself paying for software applications. While that little roadblock has kept me from my share of wonderful GUI goodness here and there, I’ve usually been able to get done what I needed to get done using freeware or, now since the advent of robust online applications, various services from Google, 37Signals et al.

But I cant be the only one, as evidenced by NewsGator’s recent decision to open its RSS desktop applications to cheapskates like me. Long admired from a distance by users of simply free online apps like Google Reader and Bloglines, NetNewsWire (for Mac) and FeedDemon (for Windows) are the individual user’s products provided by NewsGator, which actually specializes in corporate-level RSS solutions. It’s obvious that NewsGator sees the new inroads its RSS applications will make as freeware products as sufficient leverage to promote its big-ticket items. From TechCrunch’s announcement of NewsGator’s new approach,

NewsGator will rely on revenues from its enterprise offerings going forward. The company will also increasingly record anonymous usage data in an effort “to help make decisions about what content [it believes] will be most relevant for you and for other users.”

I read this news three weeks ago with a skeptical eye. It’s not like I havent been tempted before, to switch away from Google Reader to something else. My first RSS reader was Bloglines, but I switched to Google Reader a year and a half ago when it launched updates worth switching for, especially considering I had been using Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs (which had recently acquired Writely, of which I was a beta member from the beginning). I liked the idea of merging my online activity as much as possible. And Google Reader fit the bill — it did what it claimed to do, and it did it well, and along the way it earned its share of devotees who, like me, didnt consider NewsGator’s announcement to be something worth dwelling on. But what Google Reader has never done, despite updates from some of Google’s other offerings, was incorporate itself into the larger Google scheme of things. I can, for example, introduce a Calendar event from Gmail, and I can open an attachment from Gmail right into Google Docs. But there are as of yet no real advantages that Google Reader offers as an integrated application. Yes, it’s recently added sharing between Gmail contacts, but thats a superficial layer and, at least for me, hasnt done anything except add to the static of incoming RSS feeds that I already deal with, considering I’m subscribed to some 120 feeds as it is. Importantly, my view into social-based news pieces is more than satisfied by Newsvine.

Maybe it was my office’s increasingly shitty and jammed-up internet connection. Maybe it was the consecutive repetition of several long weekends, which slowed my Monday (or Tuesday, or Wednesday, depending on the week) morning subscription loading time in Google Reader to something close to physically painful. But last week I finally gave in and downloaded NetNewsWire, just for a try.

I really didnt expect to end up sticking with it. Even though I dont spend a lot of time on the internet at home, when I do want to read news, I dont want to have to deal with syncing two applications manually, marking in Google Reader on Monday morning what I had read on NetNewsWire at home on Saturday, for example. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I launched NNW for the first time and was greeted with its own syncing feature, similar to what is offered on Windows browsers like Maxthon. I set up a new NNW account in about a minute, and was already well on my way to taking that most cautious of steps in this age of endless variations on endless application types, where people like me have had to build up a sort of tolerance for The Next Great Big New Thing that will Change The Way You Work on the Web. Because we cant change every day, can we?

After playing around with the interface for a while, using NNW’s preloaded subscriptions, I made the next move — I exported my Google Reader subscriptions to my desktop, deleted the preloaded stuff from NNW, and imported Google Reader’s OPML file. That didnt take long. It did take a little while, and some manual labor (the kind of manual labor we talk about when we talk about using computers — clicking and dragging), to restore the raw feeds into their folders. The Google Reader tags had become NNW folders. I struggled with this for a moment — about 20% of my subscriptions carried more than one tag (and couldnt reside, without redundancy, in more than one NNW folder), but then I remembered that, for the most part, my tag structure in Google Reader wasnt based as much on topics as it was on my reading tendencies, which I could easily translate into a single-tag (or single-folder, in this case) environment.

Now I had my entire subscription list before my eyes. The application spent a couple of minutes downloading the content, but it happened pretty quickly. Of course, the subscriptions were littered with relatively old material — articles I had read weeks ago in Google Reader. But scrolling through each item is incredibly easy, especially if you are accustomed to waiting in Google Reader while it repeatedly notifies you that it is “downloading next 20 items.” I must have had several thousand articles that were new to NetNewsWire, but it didnt take much time at all for me to identify the old and mark it as read. Like Google Reader, NNW provides helpful keyboard shortcuts. Scrolling between articles requires using only the up and down arrow keys. Hitting “Tab” from the article list brings you to the article’s frame, where you can again use your arrow keys (or your spacebar, or your “page up” and “page down” keys) to scroll through the longer entries. From there, if you hit Tab again, you’ll be brought to the list of feeds, and once more will bring you back to your article list. Or, you can hit “command-/” from anywhere, which jumps to the next article and brings the article list back to focus, where you can again use your arrow keys.

Once I scrolled down enough to get to articles I recognized as having read in Google Reader, I hit the “j” key and it marked the entire list as read. And that, dear reader, will be mostly my last mention of keyboard shortcuts. And I apologize for that flurry in the previous paragraph, but I couldnt help myself — I am impressed with its keyboard navigation, and we’ll leave it there.

Your list of articles, just as in Google Reader or Bloglines, can be produced by selecting either individual feeds or the folder. You can also, just as with all RSS readers, select all of your new items (called “Latest” in NNW) if you’d like to read them all in order.

These features arent new to the world of RSS applications, online or off. But what makes using a desktop application so much better than an online application is speed. You can set your feeds to be updated automatically every 30 minutes, every hour, or every even-numbered hour between two and twelve. Or, you can set your subscriptions to be updated only upon your requests to “Refresh,” and you can always refresh only selected feeds if you’d like. NetNewsWire has a familiar toolbar with familiar options, putting many important preferences or commands at the fingertips of the little mouse you have chained to your keyboard, including your refresh options, and other features such as posting to del.icio.us or even to your desktop blogging application of choice (freeware or not).

Other Preferences include:

• Using and customizing the unread count badge in NNW’s dock icon
• How NNW interprets “next” and “previous” unread selections
• Typical browser-like customization attributes for fonts and colors
• Various View options, helping you maximize screen space and presentation, including a built-in style sheet interface with several preloaded styles
• How NNW downloads “Enclosures” — embedded files such as Flash or audio (including syncing podcasts or mp3s with iTunes)
• Different kinds of syncing, which effect privacy and productivity, as discussed below

These Preferences are available in a native (command-”,”) prefs window that might represent the most efficient use of a preferences window I’ve lately seen. The View options warrant a closer look. As in iTunes, you can decide which columns to see. And just as in many mail applications, you can choose to see your list of articles or choose to just see your list of subscriptions with the articles themselves shown in a consecutive display. There are several ways to sort your feeds, and there are different settings for how your folders collapse and close. And changing the Style Sheet of your articles’ display is as easy as clicking on the status bar icon and selecting a different one. The application comes with most of the available styles, but there are several more that can be found online.

But thats not all. NetNewsWire isnt just an RSS reader. And, unlike Google Reader or Bloglines, which already reside online, NNW is, in and of itself, a fully-functioning browser. There are options in other online readers to, for instance, see the actual web page of the selected article within the frame containing the article’s feed. But NNW goes beyond that. Its tabbed browsing features allow you to load entire pages from any link in an article. So not only can you, if you choose, load the article’s url, but you can also load the article’s links into background or foreground tabs. You can also use the “Flag” and “Clipped” feature (similar to the “Star” feature in Google Reader) for your articles and for any urls you visit within NNW. And in addition to sharing items through del.icio.us, you are a File Menu action away from sending content via email. (There is one limitation to this — NNW provides two options for emailing material: You can email the link or the content itself. But if you want to email the content itself, you must be using Mail.app. To email just the link, NNW finds your system’s default email service, which can include webmail, and opens a “compose” page in your default browser.)

Even more flexibility is available with the html Archive feature, enabling users to save an article’s html file to disk so that it can be viewed in any number of other applications. I havent tried all these features yet, but NNW also integrates with Apple’s Address Book, iCal and iPhoto, and it uses Growl to notify you of fresh downloads.

You can also create Smart Lists of subscriptions, which automatically group your feeds based on content, title, dates, as well as on the status of different feeds. And adding feeds is easy, too — just set NetNewsWire as your default RSS reader and you can subscribe to new feeds directly from your browser. NNW also makes it easy to subscribe to certain kinds of feeds via a File Menu option that pulls from various search engines, social bookmarking sites and even local files and scripts.

And, yes — you can search your old articles.

Aside from cost, one of the big reasons I have historically steered away from using a dedicated desktop application for my RSS feeds (because some of them, for quite some time, have been freeware) was because I was able to do so much of my work right in my browser already. Why use two applications when you can use one? But NNW’s tabbed browsing turns the tables — now, I can do most of my browsing directly from my RSS application. And lets face it — Web 2.0 technology has done so much to leverage The Ubiquitous Database that a great deal of our visited webpages have an RSS feed as their point of origin. The only thing that NNW is missing right now that could be, for me, considered mission critical, is the lack of bookmarks, or, more specifically, the inability to have bookmarklets. If I were able to Newsvine-Seed an article’s url right from NetNewsWire, I’d be thrilled. I imagine that some enterprising young geek could hack the application’s context menu to include a “Send to my Newsvine Column” option.

Of course, once we start talking about fully-functional online applications, the NNW browser falls short. I can load my Gmail into NNW, but it’s the basic html version. And using other online apps creates similar problems — either the page doesnt load because it detects an unsupported browser or the application’s full feature-set is compromised to the point that it’s counterproductive to force one application to do everything. And so now I do look at my browser differently — there are definitely some strong advantages to doing some work on desktop applications. But dont despair — NNW has you covered. In your Preferences window, you can tell NNW to open urls in your default browser instead of in NNW itself.

Some of you may be appropriately concerned about your personal data being used by NewsGator for its own purposes. After all, using your personal data is exactly why NewsGator seems to have changed NNW’s license to freeware. So, what does this mean, and how bound to your NNW experience is your handing over of personal data?

Basically, if you are using more than one machine and would like to sync your subscriptions between the two, then NewsGator has access to (and is going to use) information about what you read, how you read it, and what you do with it. On the other hand, if your privacy concerns outweigh your productivity concerns, or if your browsing takes place on only one computer, you are entirely able to use NetNewsWire without giving NewsGator any information at all.

Straight from NNW’s Help Viewer:

What data is sent depends largely on whether or not you use NewsGator synchronization.

Account creation

If you create a NewsGator account, then details of the account are, of course, sent to NewsGator. This includes username, password, and any additional fields you fill out (such as email address).

Syncing

If you turn on syncing, NetNewsWire will send your subscriptions list and status information about your news items. (Since that’s the whole point of syncing!)

NetNewsWire syncs read/unread status, flagged status, clippings, and similar. NetNewsWire also sends additional attention data to NewsGator, so that we may calculate relevance by figuring out which feeds and which items get the most attention. This attention data includes things like which items were emailed, posted to a weblog, and so on. If you don’t want this additional attention data sent to NewsGator, open the Preferences window, click on Syncing, and uncheck the box next to Include attention data when syncing.

Syncing is optional. While we think it’s a cool feature, and we hope you use it, nobody is required to use it.

Without syncing

If you do not enable syncing, then no additional data is sent to NewsGator from NetNewsWire.

I am sure that at some point, somewhere, somebody is going to hack a way to use your own server as a sync link between multiple NNW applications across multiple machines. Whether NewsGator will appreciate this kind of end-user control remains to be seen. Remember, though, that even Apple enabled iCal to sync between machines using a personal WebDAV server instead of limiting the sync feature to .Mac accounts.

I have now been using NetNewsWire for about a week and I cant imagine a scenario that would drive me back to an online newsreader. Reading news feeds has become enjoyable again. I have the application running on two computers. It operates effectively behind my company’s firewall and executes snappy downloads at home on our sometimes fuzzy DSL connection. There is no waiting for downloads during my session, and the downloads themselves take place in the background with hardly any noticeable hang-ups introduced to the OS or other online apps (you can adjust the number of simultaneous downloads to fit your bandwidth capacity). It uses 0% CPU when running in the background (unlike my browsers), and barely hits 12% when in the foreground. Syncing to my NNW account happens almost instantaneously upon launching and quitting. And what have I given up? Spotty performance from online RSS readers and frustrating delays if I’m away from the computer for more than two days. And the cost?

Lets just say that even though I’m a cheapskate living paycheck to paycheck, it’s not like I’ve never purchased software for myself before. I couldnt afford this year’s MacHeist, but last year’s was better anyway, and I had no problem paying $50 for a set of applications that I still use all the time. And, as fortune has it, I happen to be in a position in my company where I can influence decisions on technology solutions. And if NewsGator’s enterprise-level offerings are as simple, direct, and powerful as NetNewsWire has become, I think they made a fantastic business decision in getting NNW out to a wide audience. I do encourage you to give it a run, even if you have been a devoted subscriber to online applications. This might be the one that changes your mind.

You can find NetNewsWire at NewsGator’s website. Version 3.1 requires Mac OSX 10.4. The Windows parallel to NNW is FeedDemon v2.6 which, for some reason, requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or later.