Jeff Frankels Weblog | Views on the Economy and the World: [F]or the last 40 years, rhetoric notwithstanding, Republican presidents have pursued policies… farther removed from the ideal of good… economics than have Democratic presidents. This is especially true… [of] the textbook version…. But… it applies even to the “conservative economics” version that puts priority simply on small government. The criteria underlying this generalization about Republican presidents are:
Growth in the size of the government, as measured by employment and spending.
Lack of fiscal discipline, as measured by budget deficits.
Lack of commitment to price stability, as measured by pressure on the Fed for easier monetary policy when politically advantageous.
Departures from free trade.
Use of government powers to protect and subsidize favored special interests (such as agriculture and the oil and gas sector, among others)….
Republican presidents have since 1971 indulged in these five departures from “conservatism” to a greater extent than Democratic presidents. The name I would give to this set of departures… is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but, rather, “illiberal”…
To which DeLong Adds:
Real conservatives take note: you will never have a party until you kill the Republican Party, and replace it with something new. You should start now, for all of our sakes.
Were there ever any "real" conservatives? Well…I guess Goldwater was one. But here’s the problem: Real or not, this is what conservative ideology gets you. Small government means no regulation of big corporations, of big money. When big corporations, and big money become more powerful then government, they will simply turn government to their own ends and that leads right back to "big government", just not big government in the people’s interest. So you end up with all the points Frankels makes above, even if you started from a sincere belief in "small government" ideology. When money becomes more powerful then the law, money inevitably becomes the law.
So. No fiscal discipline because big business doesn’t want discipline, it wants its profits and it wants them now. Fed monetary policy becomes whatever big business wants it to be at whatever moment in time it wants it to be that. Free trade is out because if big business hates anything more then regulation it’s competition. And…special interests? When you have government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, the common folk are the special interest group. And when big business takes over the nation’s news media, it gets kinda hard to find out just how deeply the corruption has taken root. All you see, is the spectacular meltdowns. Iraq. Katrina. The Dot-Com bust. The Housing bust. How big was that deficit again?
That’s what small government ideology gets you. When money becomes more powerful then the law, money becomes the law. Anyone who seriously thought (as I did once) that the way to keep government honest and the economy strong was to cut government down to the bone should be, after decades of republican dismantling of the New Deal, if they are honest, thoroughly disabused of that notion. A government that is smaller then money will never resist the corrupting power of big money. That is what we are seeing now. The moment, the instant the regulatory boundaries were taken away, corruption began running wild. Money does not self regulate.
Some of the people pushing the small government ideology didn’t reckon on that. But probably, most of them did. They talked up free markets, but they weren’t interested in freedom. They wanted the money. It’s easier to get when the law can be bought off. You keep a market free the same way you keep the streets safe to walk at night. It takes a rule of law, backed by impartial justice. There is no safety, let alone freedom, where the police work for the crooks, upholding laws that were written by crooks, for crooks.
And one more thing: morals. The people crafting the laws we all live by need to be people who understand that stealing is wrong. That lying is wrong. That cheating is wrong. Wrong because sooner or later the bills come due, and while Jesus may forgive you, reality is a hard assed motherfucker.
In China now, they’re undergoing an upheaval in the baby formula market. Children are dying after being fed baby formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t carelessness. It wasn’t neglect. It was greed. Melamine, a chemical used in plastics, contains a concentration of proteins which make it useful for hiding the fact that the milk in baby formula has been diluted. Profits are always higher, when there is less product in the product.
Via SLOG … Bad as the Bush gang have been for our economy and our standard of living, things could have been worse. Remember when they wanted to "privatize" social security? "Privatize", being another way of saying, "Let’s give the social security trust fund to Wall Street to play with…"
In a post about the economy, the Reality-Based Community makes a very important observation:
If George W. Bush’s/John McCain’s views on Social Security of a couple of years ago had been national policy, your retirement could have shared in this meltdown.
The upshot is a state of radical uncertainty: as Paul Krugman says today, "nobody knows what will happen next."… There is a very, very long list of things that could go horribly wrong from here on out. The liquidation of Lehman is one; the possible collapse of American International Group is another. Beyond that are countless hedge funds and other financial institutions which, collectively, present significant systemic risk.
But the biggest and most obvious risk of all is the one associated with Lehman’s own debt, which is now trading at less than 35 cents on the dollar. That’s a big loss for the institutions holding it—but it also means an unknowably huge loss for anybody who wrote credit protection on Lehman Brothers at any point over the past five years. Those sellers of credit protection are staring down the barrel of billions of dollars in claims, and they’re going to have to raise that money quick by selling anything they can get their hands on—and that might well include stocks.
Those would be the stocks that were supposed to make social security more…secure. See how deregulation works?
They’ve hated social security with a passion almost as lively as their hatred for FDR, the man who created it. All that money that went into the trust fund from worker’s paychecks to fund their retirement was money the kings of Wall Street figured rightfully belonged to them.
Of all the available nightmare story lines, the getting shot by a crazy old man you just happened to run into on the street who is clearly mistaking you for someone else is one of the fun-ist. Which is not to say I’ve ever had that one before, because I haven’t. But I just woke up from it and I’m here to tell you it gets your heart beating.
THE novel ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was based on a nightmare in which Robert Louis Stevenson saw a dapper Englishman change into a hideous monster. Mary Shelley’s ”Frankenstein” was also based on a nightmare, as may have been Bram Stoker’s ”Dracula.” New research suggests that such links between nightmares and creative vision may be more than accidental.
Nightmare sufferers, the new work indicates, may have a natural tendency to gravitate to the arts. Nightmares live with people all their adult lives, even though for most they are only dim memories from a long gone childhood. Nevertheless, nightmares evoke a fear so great that the memory of them can bring dread even years after they appeared.
Despite their power, nightmares are rare in adults. Researchers estimate their frequency at about one per year. Only one person in 500 has them as often as once a week. While nightmares are perhaps the most vivid of all experiences during sleep, researchers have found it difficult to give them systematic study. They are hard to capture: one sleep specialist says that during 3,000 nights of sleep studied in his laboratory, there was only one nightmare. Nevertheless, a group of sleep researchers has recently zeroed in on nightmares. Foremost among these researchers is Ernest Hartmann, a sleep researcher and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Dr. Hartmann has devoted much of the last several years to a series of studies on nightmares and the characteristics of those who have them often. Based on his findings, he proposes that some people have a genetic susceptibility that makes them more sensitive to experience in general, and leaves them with a lifelong proneness to nightmares.
If these people have a troubled childhood, Dr. Hartmann asserts, they appear to be vulnerable to schizophrenia as adults. But if their early environment is healthy, they are likely to go on to marshal that same sensitivity in the creative arts.
Most of my dreams are fairly benign…even the vivid ones. They’re usually just slice-of-life replays, with perhaps a few interesting curve balls thrown in. Like when I dream about taking a stroll through my old high school neighborhood, and I notice features in it from all the other places I’ve ever lived in all mixed together. I dream about doing housework. I dream about shopping for groceries. I dream about hanging out with old friends who I haven’t seen in years. If I don’t jot them down in my dream diary (I keep an ad-hoc one) they’re usually forgotten by mid-morning. But about five times a month or so I have a really gut slamming nightmare. When I was a kid they used to terrify me. Now, at least once I’m fully awake, they’re mostly just a bother. Dreams make sleeping worthwhile, otherwise I’d really like to have that time available to use for something. Death comes soon enough…I don’t need to spend a third of my life playing dead too. But nightmares make it troublesome.
In key research, Dr. Hartmann and Dr. Van Der Kolk studied 50 men and women who reported having at least one nightmare a week since childhood. Dr. Hartmann recruited his subjects through advertisements in Boston newspapers.
The most common nightmares involved being chased, or being threatened or hurt by an attacker. Unlike many ordinary dreams, nightmares were almost always in color and included other especially vivid sensations including pain, which is rarely experienced in ordinary dreams.
No, Yes and Yes. I didn’t really notice this before until I saw it refered to in the research, but yes…my nightmares are all in vivid color, as opposed to my usual dreams which are mostly in black and white. (Something else I’ve noticed about my normal dreams is that I can’t read in them. I am utterly unable to decipher a printed page when I happen across one in a dream. Sometimes, that’s very frustrating. I can draw. I can read gages and instruments. But not words. let alone sentences…though I can discern individual letters. I’ve actually tried in my dreams to read one letter at a time and try to make a word out of them and I can’t. It’s like the part of my brain that assembles letters into words just isn’t online when I’m dreaming.) And yes…in a nightmare I can feel pain. In the one I just had, the crazy old man shot me first in my right arm and I felt it like a hammer blow. When crap like that happens, I’m always a little surprised when I wake up to feel the pain completely gone.
But actually being chased by an attacker is rare in my nightmares. Over the years I’ve come to divide them into three categories. First is the simple, straightforward falling dream. These almost aren’t dreams, really, so much as having a sudden sensation of falling. They always happen just when I’m drifting off to sleep, and when they do they slam me back awake. It’s really irritating.
The second kind is the scary nightmare. These are the ones where you’re placidly dreaming along and then suddenly something happens that scares the steaming shit out of you and you slam awake with your heart pounding. Like the one I just had. Yes, sometimes it’s being chased by an attacker. But more often it’s something that just pops out at you. You reach into a cupboard for something and suddenly something inside the cupboard starts chewing on your arm. Or you step off a curb and instead of the road being solid its molten asphalt and you sink into it. Sometimes there doesn’t even have to be any scary imagery to go with the sudden fear. I’ve had scary nightmares where I’ve just walked into an empty room and suddenly become completely and abjectly terrified for no reason I could figure after I’d woken up.
The scary nightmare. Just…out of the blue a nice pleasant dream suddenly goes bad on you and you wake up with your heart racing. I hate it. But they stopped terrifying me long ago. At least, once I’m fully awake anyway. I can live with them so long as they’re only once a week or so. But there is a third type of nightmare that I would love to not ever have again, and that’s what I call the disturbing nightmare.
They don’t scare you, they don’t slam you awake with your heart pounding. These are the ones that really creep you out and you wake up feeling disturbed and that horrible disturbed feeling lasts for the whole day. I’ll tell you about a recent one.
I dreamed I was a kid again, and working at a fast food joint. I had the day’s cash in a box I was supposed to take to the bank. Along the way I skimmed some of it into my own pockets. I have no idea why I did that. Understand, I have really strong feelings about stealing. It comes from a longstanding family issue I won’t discuss here. But this is important, I have really strong feelings about stealing. I just won’t do it. I won’t even touch something that doesn’t belong to me without permission. Yet here I am in my dream doing just that. And then I get to the bank and for some odd reason instead of counting the money, in this dream the bank just weighs the money box. I get a receipt, and I take it back to the fast food joint I work at, and the boss says it wasn’t properly signed. For some reason, this prompts me into confessing that I stole money out of the box.
So now everyone there knows I’m a thief. The police are called in, I am arrested, and I’m sitting in the back of a police car feeling absolutely horrible. For some reason they don’t handcuff me, just put me in the back seat where I can sit and feel like a crook. I feel guilty, ashamed, miserable, I’m just wishing I could do it all over again and not steal that money. And then I wake up and it was all just a dream after all. But I still felt miserable. All fucking day. And…really creeped out.
But more significant, in Dr. Hartmann’s view, is the general personality of the nightmare sufferer. Such people, in his view, are markedly open and defenseless, not having developed the psychological protections most people have. They have what Dr. Hartmann calls ”thin boundaries.” They ”let things through.”
Most of the people in the study described themselves as unusually sensitive since childhood: easily hurt, particularly responsive to the feelings of others, unhappy as children even though there were no overt family problems. They also had a high incidence of relatives who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia, and four of the subjects themselves were said to be schizophrenic.
I’ve no history of that in either side of my family tree. Where my creative gene came from I don’t know, other then I am related on dad’s side to an important family of California artists. My maternal grandfather had the geek gene, and in his day and age radio was a new thing and he started one of the first radio shops in western Pennsylvania. I haven’t really developed any of it much, because of internal stresses related to my horrible love life. The stereotype is that an artist can’t really create unless they suffer. It’s a damn lie. If a suffering artist manages to create at all, it’s in spite of how they feel inside, not because of it. That internal stress, coupled with my inability during some stretches of my life to get any of it out of me creatively, may be what’s behind the frequency of my nightmares. Mostly, I just deal with them, the same way I deal with loneliness. I endure it.
So…in my dream just now…I was walking through a parking lot to my car…not the Mercedes, but for some odd reason a white convertible of some kind. I’m carrying a box with a paint gun in it. I notice two guys sitting suspiciously in a dark blue sedan watching me, and I worry for a moment that they’re going to try and rob me. Perhaps that was the first hint that the dream would go bad, because otherwise it’s fairly benign. I make it to my car, and put the box in the trunk. Then I notice that there is a sign where I’ve parked, that limits parking to just two hours.
I need more time, so I start walking around looking for another place to park my car. I see a sign that says parking is available at Arlington TV. Why a TV store would be renting parking spaces too I’ve no idea…dreams just get whimsical at times. So I go looking for Arlington TV. I can read signs in this dream, and see in color…in retrospect two more hints that the dream would eventually go bad on me. I can’t recall now though, whether the dream started out that way. I only vaguely remember being with some friends and we were walking around this shopping center by a park of some kind…and I started walking back to my car with this box with a paint gun I’d just bought in it.
So now I’m walking around looking for Arlington TV. I ask for directions and a friendly lady points me in the direction of a small strip shopping center. See the roof with the TV antenna on it, she asks. That’s the place. So I start walking over to it. I’m almost there when I see an old guy walking down the sidewalk toward me…and by old I don’t mean grandpa old, but middle age old. A thing I am myself now I guess, but I don’t see myself as being internally. In this dream I’m still in my mid-twenties or so. That’s kinda where my mental self-image has been for ages. The old guy on the sidewalk is wearing a dark brown hunting jacket and a cap, and work pants of some sort, and an old pair of leather shoes…not boots. His clothes aren’t ragged or torn or dirty or anything, but they look…rumpled. As though he’d been sleeping in them. His face is worn and tired and lined with creases…I can still see it clearly. He’s clean shaven but his beard is very heavy and you can see it as a dark shade around the chin. He looks a bit upset, but not terribly angry. Oh…and he has a .45 automatic in his left hand. He’s not pointing it at me, or at anything else in particular…he’s just walking along with it in his hand.
There’s a moment in dreams like this, where you just know you’re fucked. I try the old pretend you don’t see anything and walk on by trick and of course it doesn’t work. The old man looks at me with that vaguely put-off look on his face and asks me if I’ve seen Jeff. I don’t know any Jeff, and I say so and he raises the gun in my direction and asks again, more insistently where Jeff is. I get the sense that Jeff is somebody this guy has issues with. So I start running and he fires and I get hit in my right arm, just above the elbow. It feels like my arm got slammed with a hammer. So I start running and ducking and weaving through this empty parking lot with this old guy with a .45 right on my heels. He’s shouting that I know Jeff and I’d better tell him where he is. I take a turn and run into a grassy area beside the shopping center, that has lots of low scrub brush scattered all over it. As I run and dodge around the bushes I’m thinking that if he kills me here he could just walk aimlessly away, still looking for Jeff, and my body could just lay there for days or weeks or months and nobody would find it and when they did nobody would ever know what really happened to me or who killed me or why they did it…
…and then I wake up. Urrr! I don’t think I’ve ever had both scary and disturbing in one nightmare before. I can still see that guy’s face. Nothing really remarkable about it…just a middle age guy with a beaten down look, as though he lived a hard, low pay life that he’d shuffled through without the slightest sense of wonder or curiosity. You take one look at him and you just know his home has bare walls, no books or magazines, just a TV and an alarm clock and some basic furniture. He punches the clock every week day and watches TV at night. Maybe on the weekend he does the laundry, vaccums the carpet, washes his car and hits the neighborhood bar. I can still see his face.
I’m going to go through the entire day now with the sense that there is some dream me laying face down in a vacant lot in some distant dreamscape somewhere and my friends in that world are wondering what happened to me and my body won’t be found for months and when it is nobody will ever know what happened to me or why. Last we saw Bruce he was going back to his car with the paintgun he’d just bought. We never saw him again. We know he made it back to the car beause the paint gun was in it. But months went by before somebody finally came across his body. They found it in a vacant lot not very far away from where his car was parked. The cops say his wallet was still on him and they don’t think it was a robbery. Nobody can figure out what happened… I’m going to be creeped out by this one all fucking day…I just know it…
Pink Floyd founder Richard Wright died today at his home in England. He was 65.
A spokesman for the band confirmed that Wright had been battling cancer, the AP reports.
…
Wright wrote and sang some of the band’s most memorable songs, such as "The Great Gig in the Sky," and "Us and Them" on the 1973 album "The Dark Side of the Moon."
Dark Side of the Moon was pretty much the sound track to my college years. I was a young gay man, just off his first serious heartbreak, headed toward an even bigger, much more disasterous one, still trying to make sense of the world, still believing I could find my creative place in it, find my soulmate, and unleash all the creative potential inside of me. I still believed that everything was possible to me creatively. But…it wasn’t… Not without that once missing piece in my heart…
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave, but don’t leave me
Look around
Choose your own ground
Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be
And especially…
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.
I swore when I first heard those lyrics that I’d never let that happen to me. And somehow…I did…
Part of the reason I took the long weekend, besides it’s my birthday and I wanted the time free, was I wanted to try and get re-acquainted with my drawing table. But all weekend long so far I haven’t even been able to look at it.
I can’t draw. But it wouldn’t be correct to say that I’m blocked. My head is full of ideas for cartoons and other artwork. I just don’t want to sit down to the drafting table and pull it out of me. I don’t want to go there. Inside. Where the drawing comes from.
I ran away from it for almost fifteen years, from the mid-1980s to 2001, when I started posting my political cartoons here for the first time. What I found when I picked up pencil and pen again after so long was I’d lost a lot of it. It was a struggle to get it back. But then I got better. Better then I’d ever been. I’m starting to be afraid now that I’m headed for another dry period. And it’s not dry in the sense that I have nothing to put down on paper. I have lots to put down on paper. Tons. But…I don’t want to any more. It just seems so pointless now…
I remember back in the 1980s…which were a terrible period of time in my life…first the interest in drawing and painting went away, then my interest in photography. Eventually all my creative interests just…stopped. That was the period I took up computer programming, which eventually led to a whole new career and lots more money then I’d ever dreamed of making. So you could argue that it was a net gain. But it wasn’t. It was deathly cold and horrible. That’s where I’m headed. Again. It looks like.
…but not entirely, thanks to a few kind people. I got some messages from a few online pals, and my brother called and one other guy who I haven’t spoken to much since November 2004. A few rays of light in an otherwise crappy day. The weather was dreary, rainy, and just ugly over all. Gray overcast sky and rain that either drizzled or poured. And the combination temperature and humidity were almost perfectly ugly. It was right at the point where it was almost too hot, and almost too humid…but not quite. The moment I stepped out onto my front porch the air was just wrapping me in a suffocating blanket, but not so much that I had to run right back in. It was perfectly balanced on the precise point between miserable and insufferable. So the weather was in tune with my inner state at least.
I figured I’d go get myself a birthday cake. I had it in mind to treat myself to a German chocolate cake, so I took a drive to a nearby German bakery to buy one (there are actually several here in Baltimore). From the sound of it I figured it would be a decadent treat. Well for those friends of mine who think I’m getting a bit too wrapped up in all things German (because of a certain someone), don’t worry. I found out that German chocolate cake has coconut in it. Okay…I hate coconut. With a passion. It’s like little plastic shavings in my mouth. I’d as soon eat chocolate covered sawdust. But the same bakery had a really nice looking Hazelnut Torte so a small one of those went home with me. And a brat and kraut because I hadn’t eaten all day.
I’ll say this…you eat some real German sausage and American hot dogs start looking a lot less appetizing. And that’s true with a lot of European food we try to mass produce over here. For example…I love cheddar cheese…absolutely love it. The sharper the better. And never more since I’ve been able to get some real English cheddar at Whole Foods. Now I can’t even look at the domestic product anymore. They add food coloring to it for god’s sake. And…stiffeners…to make it behave like it’s been aged. And American cheese…the stuff I used to eat all the time in grade school…I found out it isn’t even cheese, really.
So…anyway…I took Thursday and Friday off to have a long birthday weekend, and then basically just vegetated around the house. Mostly because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling. The price of gasoline is still high, and I’m worried about the economy and my future at Space Telescope if NASA suffers major budget cuts. But I am also getting tired, very tired of traveling by myself. It isn’t fun anymore. When I got the job at Space Telescope, and had real paid vacation time for the first time in my life, and lots of it, traveling was fun. It isn’t fun anymore. 55 and single really sucks. In another five years I’ll be grandpa material. That’s not exactly boyfriend material.
I think I’ve finally pinned down this feeling I’ve had for years…finally found the words to express it better. It’s not so much loneliness. It’s not so much uselessness. What I feel like, is a leftover part. Something in the bag of nuts and bolts that’s still there after the thing has been assembled. It goes in the drawer and maybe you find something to do with it someday but usually it just sits in there forever. That’s how I feel at age 55.
The Day The Music Died. And The Day After That. And The Day After That…
My favorite form of vacation is to just throw my maps and my cameras and my luggage in the car and just drive. I love taking long cross-country road trips. When satellite radio came along, I figured it would be ideal for that. How wonderful, thinks I, to be able to dive from one coast to the next and hear your favorite radio station the entire trip. If I wanted to taste the local fare, I figured I could always switch back to broadcast radio.
I had actually stopped listening to broadcast radio long before satellite radio came along. Too many commercials and too little content worth listening to. And then the hate jockeys of talk radio came along, to drive the final nail in. I grew to loath radio. It was driving across the so-called heartland of America one trip, and hearing nothing but hate, hate, hate on the local broadcasts, that finally convinced me to get satellite. That was when I owned the little green Geo Prism. By the next year’s road trip I had the Honda Accord, which initially came with XM.
But I wanted Sirius. I’m a gay man, and what appealed to me about Sirius was it had a gay channel. XM didn’t. An additional plus was that I like big band/swing music and Sirius had a channel specifically for that and all XM had was a general 1940’s music format. But you have to appreciate that having a channel dedicated to a gay audience really appealed to me. When it comes to mainstream broadcasting, you feel less like a part of the audience and more like a topic for discussion. Particularly during sweeps months. So when I bought the Honda Accord back in 2005 I actually had the factory radio ripped out because it was XM only, and had a conversion kit installed that allowed me to install an off the shelf Sirius car radio.
For about half a year after I installed it, I enjoyed listening to Sirius immensely. Then they changed the channel lineups.
OutQ was still there. But Swing Street was gone. Just…gone. I was actually listening to Swing Street more then OutQ for reasons I’ll go into in a moment. So when they dropped it I was really pissed. At first they made the channel into a general all purpose "American Standards" channel. It eventually became the All Frank Sinatra All The Time channel. I complained over and over again on their customer support email address, which I take it gets routed straight to /dev/null. Of course nothing came of it.
But that wasn’t all. Air America hopped over to XM. Then the trance channel, Area 53 moved to channel 33 and was renamed Area 33 and the format changed slightly. Now they only play trance at night. I found when I got Sirius that I kinda like listening to trance while driving. Something about the relentless beat combined with the asphalt zooming past just clicked with me. Now I could only listen to trance at night. And Spa 73 went from New Age to International music and became completely unlistenable. I’m not a big New Age fan, but it’s nice to listen to while driving, or doing household chores sometimes.
Okay…there were still the classic rock stations. But the more I listened to them, the more I found them playing the same songs over and over. After a while I just stopped listening.
Out of over a hundred channels I’d have thought there was room there for the formats I liked to listen to. And they Were there for a while. But then they just…went away. And what replaced them was crap. Hadn’t I been there before with broadcast radio?
And what of OutQ? It’s too raunchy most of the time. Particularly Derick and Romaine. I don’t mind there is room for adult format radio on satellite. I think that’s great actually. But for the same reason I really don’t like my DVD catalogs stuffed with tons of pornography simply because I’m a gay man, I really resent the implication that because I’m gay, all I want out of a channel that targets gay folk is raunchy sex talk. I was hoping for more like the Signorile show and Sunset Cruse, which is a really sweet love song call-in dedication show that runs late on Sundays. I loved Sunset Cruse. Absolutely loved it. I used to listen to it constantly while I drew my political cartoons on Sunday nights. All the heartfelt love that came through on that show really kept my spirits up while I was drawing cartoons about the latest spew of anti-gay bigotry in that week’s newspapers. It was sweet, it was heartfelt, and it raised my spirits to face the coming week. If it wasn’t for those two things, Signorile and Sunset Cruse, I wouldn’t bother with OutQ at all.
Oh…wait… They recently replaced Sunset Cruse with…Derick and Romaine. Well we all know that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
So. The gay channel didn’t turn out to be as great as I’d hoped, and like everything else on Sirius I enjoyed when I first signed up, it’s gone into the trashcan. My swing channel is gone…I can put my iPod’s classic rock playlist on shuffle and hear more variety then I get on the classic rock stations on Sirius…the symphony hall channel is too hard core for me and the pops channel too lite…they only play trance for half a day now on the trance channel…and Spa 73 is almost unlistenable now.
I was actually contemplating putting the factory radio back into the Accord before I traded it in. The only thing that kept me from doing it was Signorile and Sunset Cruse. When I got the Mercedes last October, it came with a Sirius radio. Now Sunset Cruse is gone…replaced by Derick and Romaine’s crappy piss bar raunch. I still listen to Signorile. I pop it on occasionally for the trance channel when I’m driving at night. But I find myself now scanning the channels for something…anything…worth listening to and I can’t find it. Luckily the Mercedes sound system is iPod enabled. I recently upgraded the pre-amp coming off the AUX input on the Mercedes sound system…the sound levels for attached iPods were too low and people were complaining and Daimler listened. Now the iPod sounds as good as any CD, and it holds tons of music. I have a swing playlist on it that I can play in shuffle mode and imagine I’m listening to Swing Street again. I wish I’d captured the station ID when it was still on the air.
New music? For now I’m getting it on Pandora. At least until the RIAA kills internet radio. If I could get internet radio in my car I would be happy again. Especially Pandora. Seriously, the music industry should be paying Pandora, not the other way around. I’ve bought more new music listening to Pandora in the last year then in the previous ten. In the meantime, when my current Sirius subscription runs out, I’m not renewing.
The music industry is going to kill Pandora, and Internet radio. They want to kill satellite radio too, but it looks like its killing itself just fine. I guess they figure they have to so we can all be pushed into listening to mass produced lowest common denominator crap. But I won’t be pushed. I’ll just stop listening. And…buying.
The center of Hanna has actually settled over the city, according to the latest weather radar. No rain. Just the occasional wind gust. I’m going to take a wee stroll…
I just looked at NOAA radar for the area. If you do a base reflection loop you can see clearly the center of the storm is strolling right up the bay.
It’s calm outside now, drizzling that fine rain you always get from tropical rain bands. You can see on the radar that the south side of Baltimore is near the edge of Hanna’s center of rotation. The center actually looks like it’s hugging the bay’s western shore. Its between Washington and Baltimore as of 1:21 according to the radar images. Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.
I’m looking at the NOAA radar look for this area and it looks like Hanna’s center is passing a lot closer to Washington and Baltimore then they were saying last night. Good thing it wasn’t a hurricane.
Looks like all the little seaside towns along the coast from the Delmarva north are going to get their beaches clobbered. I doubt this thing’s going to do much damage beyond beach erosion though. Which is bad enough for those places.
Wow…as I was typing this my Japanese maple just took a wind blast and got a real good shake. This thing may bring some trees down around here after all…
Hanna’s bopping along though Virgina now, heading to the Chesapeake Bay. But it looks like it’ll cut across the Delmarva peninsula and head out to sea, instead of running right up the bay like Isabel in 2003 and Agnes in 1972.
We’re getting some wind now, but it isn’t bad. Just some brief gusts that shake the tops of the trees a little. A fine, driving rain is coming down in alternating bands of heavy and light, which is typical for the outer bands of tropical storms. So far it doesn’t look like anything to worry about. A couple weeks ago I was worried about a friend down in Orlando. Now I’m getting a taste of it here in Baltimore. But Hanna’s moving pretty quickly. We have flash flood warnings and high wind warnings up, but they say tomorrow will be sun-shiny and blue skied.
Right now the wind is shaking my Japanese maple just outside my front bedroom window. It does that for a little while and then stops. The rain is pretty constant now though, alternating between pouring heavy and fine. Just a day to stay indoors. I’m going to try and get some cartooning done.
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