July 2008 Archives
There's a new laptop waiting for me in my mailroom, and this one is a tablet. Even though I'm still quite fond of the Inspiron 700m that I've used for the past three years, I've decided to make the move to Windows Vista: my desktop PC dual-boots Vista and XP, but I've recently made Vista the primary operating system. The 700m isn't quite up to the task of running Vista. It has a single-core Centrino processor, and its graphics are comparatively weak: they lag behind even my wife's old Latitude D610 and won't play my son's Lego Star Wars game. I suspect that the machine won't be up to the video editing that I want to be able to do on a notebook in the coming months.
I've had my eye on tablet pcs for the past couple of years, and two of my colleagues have used them: one swears by them, the other threw up her hands in disgust and bought something more conventional after a year. My handwriting is terrible, so I hate taking notes on pads of paper, but I also don't like clicking on a keyboard when I'm attending meetings or listening to lectures. Plus I'm trying to decrease the amount of paper in my life: I've been scanning documents like crazy overt the past few months, and I'm subscribing to an increasing number of digital publications. I'm hoping that the tablet's portrait orientation will make it more fun to read digital magazines and perhaps also lead me to print out drafts of manuscripts less frequently.
I was disappointed that Dell hasn't seen fit to release a consumer-oriented tablet yet: at two grand, their Latitude tablet is priced for corporations and is more than I want to spend on a machine that I'll be dragging around. Then I read a piece on my favorite tech blog, Engadget, about the Hewlett-Packard tx2500z Tablet, which the company bills as an "entertainment notebook." The tx2500z tablet runs on an AMD dual-core processor with ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics, and it feature both passive and active touchscreen capabilities, meaning that you can use a finger to navigate your way around but also use a pen for notetaking and handwriting recognition. I took a look at preconfigured model being offered by Circuit City. As some online reviews have suggested, the screen appears a little washed-out compared to a standard laptop as a result of the passive digitizer. It's certainly not as vivid as my current laptop, but it seemed quite usable.
When I discovered an online coupon from HP that offered $500 off a customized tx2500z priced above $1399, I decided to go for it. I placed an order on July 19 for a system with the following specs: AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-80 (2.1 GHz); 12.1" diagonal WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen (1280 x 800) with Integrated Touch-screen; 3GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm); 320 Gb SATA hard drive; ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics; HP "Echo" Imprint Finish; Microphone; Webcam; Fingerprint Reader; Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n; Bluetooth; LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support; 8-Cell Lithium Ion Battery; Vista Home Premium SP1 with System Recovery DVD; and Microsoft(R) Works 9.0.
According to my confirmation e-mail, the order was sent to the factory and was expected to ship by July 31. Then, lo and behold, I received an e-mail on July 25, just as my famiy and I were leaving for a week of vacation, that my order had shipped. When I clicked on Fed Ex's tracking link, I discovered that it was shipping from "Shanghai, CN." It was fun tracking its progress. The tablet was in Anchorage, Alaska, the next day and Memphis, Tennessee, at noon on July 27. It arrived in Newark that evening and was in my mailroom before 9:00 a.m. on July 28.
I'm looking forward to testing it out on my return to the city this weekend and will post some first impressions then.
[Image source: tabletpcreview.com]
Mel Blanc would change his vocal characterization of Marvin over time. In my mind's ear, he will always sound the way he does in "Mad as a Mars Hare" (1963), the episode in which he utters his classic remark (after getting hit by a rocket from Earth), "I'm not angry. Just terribly, terribly hurt."
As "Mars Hare" opens, we find Marvin looking through a telescope: "Hmm, yes. Very curious. Very interesting. I do so enjoy observing the flora and fauna of that tiny planet. I think Man is the most interesting insect on earth, don't you?" He adjusts the telescope and then says: "There is a growing tendency to think of man as a rational thinking being, which is absurd. There is simply no evidence of any intelligence on the earth."
I find myself thinking something similar every morning when I open The New York Times. This morning, for example, we find an article on the front page of the business section entitled "Oil Survey Says Artic Has Riches." Here we learn that, with the melting of the ice caps brought about by global warming, areas that "were once considered too harsh to explore" are now accessible, and "a race has begun among Arctic nations, including the United States, Russia, and Canada, for control of these resources." The survey suggests that "the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world's total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas."
Hmmm: burning oil produces carbon and leads to global warming; global warming makes Arctic oil more available, which will lead to more burning of oil -- and more global warming. Oh well, let's hope the energy companies will be more interested in the natural gas than in the oil. (Well, one can hope, right?)
You can find "Haredevil Hare" on disc 3 of The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One. Unfortunately, "Mad as a Mars Hare" doesn't seem to be available on DVD at the moment, though it was released as part of a VHS collection entitled "Marvin the Martian: 50 Years on Earth." You can also find it on YouTube:
A transcript of "Mad as a March Hare" is available at http://www.theclassictoons.com.
So I've added a feature that I'm calling "The Past Week at ahistoryofnewyork.com" at the top of the left-hand column of the sidebar. It'll display the titles of the last seven posts on the blog in the form of clickable links. We've resolved to put up a new post each day, so showing the last seven posts should approximate the previous seven days' work.
Click the continuation if you're a Movable Type 4 blogger and want to know how to include a similar feature on your blog.
In a previous post, I compared the fortunes of the Mets and the Yankees as the month of June began. The Mets were 27-27 and the Yankees were 28-27. A lot has happened since then. At the time, I was looking forward to Joba Chamberlain's finally starting for the Yankees and to Pedro Martinez's finally returning to the Mets after nearly two months on the disabled list. As June began, the Yankees seemed to stumble: after Joba's first start, which last only 2.1 innings, the team's record was 28-30. Meanwhile, Pedro looked good in his first outing. Joba would eventually find his way, pitching better with each outing. Pedro, on the other hand, would lose his way, looking simply awful in his fourth game back, a 9-0 loss to the Yankees. He found his form again last Saturday against the Rockies, but left after 4+ innings with a slight groin strain. Ominous.
The Yankees started June in 4th place, one game above .500 and 5.5 games out of first in their division. At the All-Star break, they've improved to 5 games above .500 at 50-45, but they're 6 games out of first.
The Mets started June at .500 and 4 games out of first. Their sloppy play led to the firing of manager Willie Randolph and coaches Rick Peterson and Tom Nieto in the middle of the night after the first game of a Western swing. They continued their .500-calibre play for the beginning of Jerry Manuel's tenure as coach.
And then something happened to the Mets: the players loosened up off the field and tightened their play on the field, and the team reeled off nine wins in a row before the All-Star game. Carlos Delgado found his stroke, Mike Pelfrey found his control, and the reserves and part-time players (subbing for injured starters Ryan Church and Moises Alou) started providing timely hits and big defensive plays. At the break, the Mets are 51-44, 7 games above .500 and only half a game behind the Phillies. General Manager Omar Minaya's looking like a genius these days.
Despite the ugly 9-0 loss in the fifth game, the Mets ended up winning this year's Subway Series 4-2.
Meanwhile, Boston has finally overtaken Tampa Bay in the A.L. East., while the two Chicago teams remain atop their respective divisions.
What will the second half hold? Here's hoping that the baseball races remain close and scintillating -- and that the presidential race turns out to be anti-climactic, with Obama opening up a big lead.
What's that you say? McCain has closed the gap to a statistical dead heat according to the latest Newsweek poll? Nate Silver -- please explain!
As I complete the revisions to my manuscript on emergent literatures for NYU Press, I've been rereading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, originally published in 1992 and now in a second, revised edition (1998). Schlesinger criticizes what he refers to as the "cult of ethnicity," the idea that "America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history" (20-21)
There's a lot to like in Schlesinger's book -- and a lot to critique as well -- and I'll be including a brief discussion of it in my emergent literatures book. One of the things that feels dated about the book is its preoccupation with Afrocentrism, a movement that has receded in importance in the ten years since the last edition of Schlesinger's book. His remark that twelve percent of American are black, and the felt pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf" becomes the subject of Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1998), which argues that multiculturalism as an educational movement owes its power to the interest that African American intellectuals and educators have taken in it as a way of addressing the social and educational problems that blacks in America still face.
Schlesinger is no apologist for white resentment: although he believes firmly in the importance of "America" as an ideal, he also believes that the diversity of the United States is one of its chief characteristics and greatest strengths. He just doesn't want diversity to become fetishized in a way that prevents Americans from thinking of themselves as Americans first and representatives of some other group -- racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, or whatever -- second.
One remark in particular caught my eye: Schlesinger described the election of an "Irish Catholic" -- John F. Kennedy -- to the presidency of the United States in 1960 as "a signal of ultimate acceptance that relieved Irish-Americans of the need for ethnic cheerleading" (62).
Unfortunately, Schlesinger passed away in February of last year: he didn't live to see Barack Obama become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. I wonder what he would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is it possible that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had on Catholics? Or is the matter of race too important and divisive to make the cases similar? The "Catholics" that Schlesinger seems to have on his mind in the book are white Catholics.
Only time will tell, but it's worth pondering.
After I installed the SP3 update on three Windows XP machines, I discovered that Microsoft Update no longer worked. The updates would be downloaded, but the installations would always fail. Click below if you'd like to know how I solved this problem.
In today's New York Times article about advance ticket sales for the early morning showings of The Dark Knight on July 18, we find this sentence:
"In the public mind, opening weekends have been eventized," said Thomas Tull, the chairman of Legendary Pictures and an executive producer of "The Dark Knight."
"Eventize" is not to be found in the online versions of either the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster. It isn't even in the dictionary at law.com! A search of the New York Times archives, though, does result in an additional citation -- from "Box Office in a Box," an article about DVD promotion, written by Jon Gertner and published on November 14, 2004. Gertner writes:
Feldstein and Peter Staddon often used a word I would hear a lot around Los Angeles: "eventize." As in, "We really need to eventize the hell out of this release." For the "Star Wars" debut on DVD, that meant parties, paparazzi, robots and a red-carpet treatment that mimicked in miniature the fanfare accompanying a big-screen theatrical opening. A boffo event, in short.
There's also a site called Eventize.com. Its tagline reads: "Promote Products and Services by turning them into Events!" The site promises that "Eventize.com does just what it claims it does. Eventize.com turns products and services into an event with the purpose of promoting and marketing it. Many hollywood marketing gurus are already eventizing their media products and realizing the huge benefits of in terms of promotion and marketing."
Holy lousy language, Batman!
I was heartened, at the end of May, to see George Packer's review-essay "The Fall of Conservatism" in the New Yorker. Packer argues that this "era of American politics," which was "born in 1966," is now dying, in part because although "conservatives knew how to win elections; however, they turned out not to be very interested in governing." As a result, Packer writes, "conservatives will have to spend some years or even decades wandering across a bleak political landscape of losing campaigns and rebranding efforts and earnest policy retreats, much as liberals did after 1968, before they can hope to re-establish dominance."
I certainly hope so. The first presidential election in which I could vote took place in 1980. My college buddies and I planned a long evening of cards and beverages as the returns came in, but Carter conceded before we even got started. Politically, I've spent my adult life in the opposition, as the conservatism movement waxed. Even the setback of George H. W. Bush's failed re-election campaign ended up damaging liberalism, and the Clinton presidency was seemingly hobbled from the start.
How I would love to watch the waning of conservatism and the waxing of liberalism over the next thirty years!
I was further heartened by the Newsweek poll in late June that showed Barack Obama with a 15-point lead over John McCain.
But today's lead article in salon.com is the surest sign yet that American conservatism is a dying ideology. Written by Louis Bayard, the article is called "Jesus loves you -- and your orgasm," and it's a discussion of Dagmar Herzog's new book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics.
Here's the publisher's blurb about the book:
The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true - have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no.
Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It's 1950s redux. Politicians--including many Democrats--insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a "sex education" curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.
The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex--not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America--a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won.
How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of "hot monogamy" -- for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.
Huh? The "multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry"? "Hot monogamy"? According to Bayard, Herzog's book goes on to describe what she calls "Christian porn," in which evangelically minded sex experts offer advice to help their married and monogamous readers achieve a "soulgasm," promising that "magnificent sex will be yours forever."
Okay, wait: isn't "Christian porn" supposed to be an oxymoron? I typed "Christian porn" into Google, and this was the first hit: www.sexinchrist.com/pornography.html.
Herzog seems to take all of this this as a sign that liberalism is in trouble. I think it's more likely the other way around. When the right has to takes its cues from pornography ...
Today marks the six-month anniversary of my knee surgery. All in all, things are going very well.
I had my last visit with my surgeon, Andrew Feldman, two months ago. At that time, he was very pleased with my progress, saying that I was ahead of where most patients would be after four months. He told me that there were four areas in which things might go wrong: the healing of the tibia, the stability of the ACL repair, the flexibility of the knee and joint, and the overall alignment of the leg. In my case, everything was working out perfectly.
He was particularly pleased with the alignment of the leg.The picture at right shows a recent picture of my knees. You can see that my "good knee" (the one at the right of the picture) is naturally a little bow-legged. The repaired knee, at left, is much straighter. In fact, Dr. Feldman over-corrected just a little, meaning that my right leg is actually a little knock-kneed. This assures that the weight is borne through the outer part of the knee, away from the damaged medial area.
For the last two months, I've been working out steadily on the elliptical trainer in the gym, trying to build up strength in my quad and hamstring. Last month, I began rollerblading again, which also gives those muscles a nice workout. I'm currently wearing a brace whale blading, to avoid wrenching the knee in the event of a collision or fall.
I'm still not supposed to be subjecting the knee to any significant impact, but I have been experimenting with a few minutes on a treadmill a couple of times a week, just to see what it feels like to run. It's feeling better and better. Clearly, I'm not going to be running a marathon at any point in the future, but I do hope to return to tennis and squash and to be able to play soccer and baseball with my sons. That seems like it'll be possible. Right now, I can kick a soccer ball pretty well, but I have more work to do before I can run after it gracefully.
The last four months have been a process of learning how to walk comfortably on the realigned knee. I still walk a little stiffly, and I limp a little if I've given the knee a real work out. My flexibility is good, though I can't yet bend my right leg all the way up to my buttock. The knee is a little stiff when I get up after sitting for a while. And there is a little numbness and an occasionally prickly sensation around the area where the plate has been attached to my bone (beneath the diagonal scar in the picture) and in the muscle lining my tibia (tibialis anterior). From my experience after my previous ACL-repair, I expect that I'll always have some odd sensations below the knee.
On rare occasions, I'll feel an arthritic twinge from the medial side of the knee, but it's nothing like the nearly constant pain I had before the operation. Indeed, for the most part I don't experience the knee as "painful."
So I'm pleased with my progress thus far, though I realize I still have a a lot more work ahead. Progress now occurs at a slower rate than it did during my intial rehabilitation. But all the time spent at the gym for the past four months is paying dividends beyond a stronger knee. My next visit with Dr. Feldman is sometime in September. I'm hoping for an equally positive evaluation then.
Now if only I could finish writing that book manuscript ...
