>> Woo-hoo, it finally went through! iTunes users, click here to see my first iMix playlist: The Best Of My First iTunes Year. It's a compilation of some of my favorite songs I've bought through iTunes in its first year. (Self-explanatory, right?)

And yes, if you don't have iTunes, you can also follow the "Read more" link to see the tracklist, but that's lame, dude. See it the way it's meant to be seen. And vote for it! And buy some stuff!

1. Johnny Cash - "Hidden Shame"
2. JC Chasez - "All Day Long I Dream About Sex"
3. Sugababes - "Hole In The Head"
4. Blondie - "Good Boys"
5. George Michael - "Amazing"
6. Ella Fitzgerald - "Cry Me A River"
7. David Byrne - "The Great Western Road"
8. New Order - "Touched By The Hand Of God (12" Mix)"
9. Nina Simone - "Sinnerman (Felix Da Housecat's Heavenly House Extended Vocal)"
10. Salt-N-Pepa - "Push It (Remix)"
11. Ludacris - "Stand Up"
12. The Streets - "All Got Our Runnins"
13. Tina Turner - "Unfinished Sympathy"
14. Interpol - "Obstacle 1 (Arthur Baker's Return To New York Mix)"
15. Stellastarr - "My Coco"
16. Pulp - "Last Day Of The Miners' Strike"

Maybe I'll add more commentary later?

>> Gee, Apple. Thanks for releasing the new version of iTunes, with all the nifty new toys in it, on the night that I've got a report to write. Thanks very much.

I'd better go buy a soda -- it's gonna be a long night.

UPDATE: Indeed it is. I've been trying to publish an iMix playlist, but since everybody who's ever owned a computer likely has the same idea right now, iTunes keeps erroring out. Ah well. If I don't get it up by tomorrow morning, I'll just post the tracklist here. And of course, I still haven't started this damn report.

>> All I really want to do right now is go to sleep. But it's only 8:30. And I should probably eat something else today, since all I've had is a sandwich and a muffin. (A very good muffin.) But I'm tired and poor. And I want to go to sleep.

Woof. Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof.

Here, read this Powells interview with Salman Rushdie that I found while looking for stuff on him to use in a report this Thursday. When you get to the part about the prospect of war in Iraq, just keep in mind that he said all of this in late 2002, and remember that there's a reason why some people become famous authors and essayists: because they're right all the fucking time.

>> Marine Mammals of the Gulf of Mexico. There are blue whales out there!!! I will not leave this life until I have seen a blue whale. Via this old MeFi thread (which also revealed that there are killer whales out there too!)

>> Hmmm. My old Geocities site, the cradle that held the infant which eventually became this site, has been deactivated and will be deleted in thirty days. Shall I let it pass, or keep it around as a fossil?

>> My current desktop (51K, opens in pop-up window)

Every day that this poster stays up in the New York City Subway is a day on which I feel a little bit more hope for the human race.

>> Ugh.

That's all I've got for you. Just... ugh.

What an un-fun time in my life.

>> Prol is right: Audioscrobbler does need a serious pop injection. All you lovely folks who've also just signed up: Make an effort to play your happiest silliest pop music over the next couple of days; the place is drowning in alt-rock at the moment. It's cool, nobody's going to laugh at you. And if they do, I'll come kick their ass. Just let me know.

I'm still obsessed, though the lag-time (and consequent inaccurate timestamps) and a few bugs which ate a couple of songs off my playlist do have me a little miffed. I'm definitely hoping things will get smoother soon, though.

>> Well, it had to happen sooner or later -- Elvis Costello wrote or co-wrote the lyrics to seven of the twelve songs on Diana Krall's new album; she also covers "Almost Blue," my all-time favorite Costello tune. Hmm. My sister will undoubtedly buy it, so maybe I'll steal a listen from her sometime.

>> Despite the fact that I need to survive on approximately $16 for the next nine days or so, I'm gonna have McDonald's tonight. Why? Because goddamn it, I want it. It was One Of Those Days. Woof. I feel like I was beaten with heavy pillows for several hours.

>> NYU's adjunct faculty and teaching assistants may be going on strike tomorrow. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that -- I strongly support their being treated better, and being more fully compensated, by NYU, and I also support their demands for improved access to facilities and office space, but some of their other demands seem excessive, and I'm wondering which ones have put the negotiations into a deadlock. I'm hoping it's not some of the more far-fetched ones that I'm reasonably certain I don't support, like the job-security clause guaranteeing them the right to teach any course they've previously taught. In any event, you can see for yourself the full list of union demands, side-by-side with NYU's offer. I do know that if a strike is called tomorrow (and continues until Thursday, which is the next day on which I have classes), I'm not going to cross a picket line, so either I'll be attending class at an off-campus location or I won't go at all.

Again: I don't know how I feel about all this, but I certainly hope it's ended quickly and reasonably.

>> Audioscrobbler is already a victim of its own success -- the queue length to get your songs uploaded is at 22,000-plus right now. Yowza. I really wish I had some money to throw at them towards the purchase of new hardware, but I was already running dangerously low on cash before I had to buy a new NYU card today. Blah. Now, of course, I will find the one I "lost" within the next three days, just like when this happened freshman year and I thought it got thrown away in the trash. On the plus side, the picture turned out decent, and it looks the way I do now, so I can continue to use it for student discounts long after I leave school. Mu hu ha ha. (OK, actually doing that is unethical, so I probably won't do it. But for the duration of this summer at least, I still consider myself a student.)

If you're signing up on Audioscrobbler, again, keep leaving your IDs in the comments so I can poke about in your profile. It brings me joy.

>> I officially gave up on Kinja last week. (That link goes to my feed, which I no longer check.) The reason behind this was simple, and it's a sentiment which I seem to share with a lot of fellow bloggers, but I've seen very few posts on the subject.

I like my weblogs to be weblogs, thank you.

I like actually having to make a browser go to some quasi-real location in space to see the writings of my favorite web pundits. I like the designs they build around their words; some of them are beautiful, some of them are ridiculous, but all of them are charming. I recognize that some people find the sortability and immediacy of RSS feeds to be quite useful, but I am not one of those people. I don't need my blogs to be standardized and collated. I love them just the way they are. (Saxophone part.)

So yes, I will no longer be keeping up with Kinja, where you had to click through to the original site to read anything useful anyway; and I will also be deleting the dusty old copy of NetNewsWire sitting in my applications folder that I haven't touched since sometime in early 2003. Viva les sites. A bas le RSS! Or other non-French words to that effect.

However, speaking of completely superfluous feeds -- and this isn't hypocrisy, I swear; I love supplemental toys, not redundant ones -- I have an Audioscrobbler profile now, which tells you the songs I've been listening to with (a.) more detail and accuracy than KungTunes used to and (b.) a hell of a lot less annoying effort on my part. It looks to be an excellent and entertaining service, and I hope everyone sticks with it. If you sign up, let me know and I'll add you as a friend (Oh Jesus, is it a social network too?); that seems to help things get even more interesting.

UPDATE: OK, I'm totally obsessed with Audioscrobbler. It makes me want to skip my classes tomorrow and sit around listening to music just so I can pour more raw data into the thing. Ah, me. I'm such a sucker for a good database.

>> This weekend was so gorgeous, it almost single-handedly made up for the unbearably hellish winter. Almost.

Anyway, I spent it eating delicious foods, hanging out with beloved friends, gazing at shirtless men, seeing Kill Bill Vol. 2, and getting sunburned. And today I wore shorts for the first time in NYC since... I honestly don't know when. And then I lost my NYU ID card somewhere. Argh.

Still, my enthusiasm is not dampened. It's supposed to be raining by the end of the week, but thank you, whoever's in charge, for the phenomenal weather over the last four days. This came very close to being the perfect weekend, so kisses for that.

>> Stuart's got a linklog now, and he's posted some good stuff, so go check it out, yo. He's also finally gotten me to commit to buying a Mountain Goats record...

>> I slept until 2:30 this afternoon. It sucked. Especially since I had an optional-but-recommended make-up class to attend. At 11AM. Whoops.

I looove sleeping but I hate sleeping too much. By the end there I was waking up once an hour, thinking "Gee, it's almost certainly time to get up," and then something went soft in my body and I felt really bizarre for a moment and then whoosh, I'm waking up again an hour later. It was most disorienting. And now I have a headache. Ugh.

Although the raging politics posts below might seem to say otherwise, I had a lovely day yesterday running about in the sunshine with some of my friends. Any day that takes in the chicken curry fried rice at Sammy's, the white chocolate ice cream at Cones, and a game of Scrabble (even though I lost) is a winner.

>> More politics, sorry.

This article -- James Fallows' "Blind Into Baghdad" in The Atlantic -- is a couple of months old now, but I've only just gotten around to reading it from a link at Oliver Willis. Right from the beginning, my jaw dropped.

Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, on Donald Rumsfeld -- and this is intended as a defense of the man --

The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, "who is death to predictions." "His big strategic theme is uncertainty," Feith said. "The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence."

In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. "You will not find a single piece of paper ... If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, 'Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld's office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, 'Let me tell you what something's going to look like in the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!"

...Excuse me? People were not permitted to inform Donald Rumsfeld of hypothetical situations? What kind of twisted logic is that? I mean, it's one thing to advocate flexibility -- that's pretty reasonable -- and another to insist that nobody tell you what your actions might cause. I mean, is Donald Rumsfeld sitting in the Pentagon in a black turtleneck and beret, smoking languidly, and telling the Cabinet that "The future, eet eez larger than mankind... why bother, you know? Let us allow events to wash over us, non?"

Actually, I was going to make a more pointed existentialism joke, but then I found this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre: "Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position." Drawing consequences, eh? We know which philosopher Rummy's not keeping by his bedside!

Depressingly, there's more. Lots more.

The military's fundamental argument for building up what Rumsfeld considered a wastefully large force is that it would be even more useful after Baghdad fell than during actual combat. The first few days or weeks after the fighting, in this view, were crucial in setting long-term expectations. Civilians would see that they could expect a rapid return to order, and would behave accordingly—or they would see the opposite. This was the "shock and awe" that really mattered, in the Army's view: the ability to make clear who was in charge. "Insights from successful occupations suggest that it is best to go in real heavy and then draw down fast," Conrad Crane, of the Army War College, told me. That is, a larger force would be necessary during and immediately after the war, but might mean a much smaller occupation presence six months later.

"We're in Baghdad, the regime is toppled—what's next?" Thomas White told me, recounting discussions before the war. One of the strongest advocates of a larger force was General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff. White said, "Guys like Shinseki, who had been in Bosnia [where he supervised the NATO force], been in Kosovo, started running the numbers and said, 'Let's assume the world is linear.' For five million Bosnians we had two hundred thousand people to watch over them. Now we have twenty-five million Iraqis to worry about, spread out over a state the size of California. How many people is this going to take?" The heart of the Army's argument was that with too few soldiers, the United States would win the war only to be trapped in an untenable position during the occupation.

Keep reading. Please. I remember this piece getting a lot of heat in the blogosphere, but very little discussion outside... again, I urge you all: read it.

Does anybody remember the old days, when we were saying "Well, we don't really have much of a sense of Bush's credentials, but at least it looks like he's surrounding himself with capable people?" Well, it turns out we got Donald Rumsfeld slashing our army to ribbons, Condoleeza Rice twiddling her thumbs while the people below her are expected to do her job, and Colin Powell getting publically embarassed by his supposed "teammates" on several occasions. Meanwhile, we're still unsure about whether or not Bush ever actually does anything in his own administration --

This is the place to note that in several months of interviews I never once heard someone say "We took this step because the President indicated ..." or "The President really wanted ..." Instead I heard "Rumsfeld wanted," "Powell thought," "The Vice President pushed," "Bremer asked," and so on. One need only compare this with any discussion of foreign policy in Reagan's or Clinton's Administration—or Nixon's, or Kennedy's, or Johnson's, or most others—to sense how unusual is the absence of the President as prime mover. The other conspicuously absent figure was Condoleezza Rice, even after she was supposedly put in charge of coordinating Administration policy on Iraq, last October. It is possible that the President's confidants are so discreet that they have kept all his decisions and instructions secret. But that would run counter to the fundamental nature of bureaucratic Washington, where people cite a President's authority whenever they possibly can ("The President feels strongly about this, so ...").

-- but you can give him the benefit of the doubt if you want. My point is: Vote against Bush in the fall, because whether or not you think he's capable, it's becoming increasingly clear that his people aren't, and that's the only way to get them out.

To me, the more likely inference is that Bush took a strong overall position—fighting terrorism is this generation's challenge—and then was exposed to only a narrow range of options worked out by the contending forces within his Administration. If this interpretation proves to be right, and if Bush did in fact wish to know more, then blame will fall on those whose responsibility it was to present him with the widest range of choices: Cheney and Rice.

Read it, read it, read it.

>> A month or so ago, after the extraordinarily vicious and widely-publicized attack on four U.S. mercenaries in Fallujah, Kos (of Daily Kos) left a comment in one of the threads on his site that was profoundly disrespectful of the victims of the attack. He had his reasons for not having a positive impression of the people involved, but his comment was pretty far over the line, and his "apologies," such as they were, were wishy-washy. A lot of advertisers in the Democratic party pulled out of his site. I personally stopped reading. But one of the most disturbing things about the whole affair was the voracity and rapaciousness with which certain right-wing bloggers demanded the crucifixion of Kos, mass-mailing his advertisers and spamming the comments sections of sympathetic blogs with anti-Kos screeds. It was widely seen that they were forcing the hand of most of Kos' advertisers, creating a climate in which it was impossible for them to be affiliated in any way with Kos, including having a conversation with him about why he said the things he said and why his apologies were inadequate.

Like I said: I stopped reading his site, because I'm a big boy, and I can make decisions for myself about when somebody's crossed one of my personal lines. It doesn't help that his site and its many collaborative contributors were beginning to take on a mentality that was starting to mirror the "by any means necessary" / fact-distorting logic of the warblogs. I've found alternate sources of lefty political information, and I'm perfectly happy.

Now. Let's give the people who mounted the anti-Kos campaign the benefit of the doubt for a second, and assume that they really were reacting violently against what they saw as toxic political discourse, and since Kos' comments were pretty fucking insensitive, they weren't far off the mark.

Bearing that in mind, I want you to read this:

Hillary wants to be on the VP ticket so that she dispels the notion that the Clintons are sabotaging the campaign and so that she can also go out there and really be the star. She'd be the star because she'll be the one bringing excitement to it. And, by the way, she'll get all kinds of criticism and the Republicans will launch all they've got at her, and she'll endure that. They know that they're pretty confident Kerry is going to lose and if Kerry wins there's always Fort Marcy Park. So they're rolling the dice on this.

Fort Marcy Park is where the corpse of Vince Foster was found -- Foster, of course, being the Clinton family attorney found dead of an apparent but mysterious suicide during the "Travelgate" scandal in 1993. That's Rush Limbaugh talking. Rush Limbaugh is implying two things: One, that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered; and two, that were she to join the Kerry ticket, she would have him killed in order to be promoted to the presidency.

Toxic discourse? Anyone? The people who were repulsed by Kos are all lighting up the switchboard at Limbaugh's show to berate him now, right? Right?

That's the argument a lot of bloggers are making right now, so I know it looks like I'm hopping on the bandwagon, but come on, it's staring you in the face. A left-wing commentator says something profoundly indecent, and he gets his advertisers pulled and his name dragged through the mud. A right-wing commentator says something equally indecent and what happens? Cricket. Cricket. Cricket. Sure, you'd think Limbaugh's name would have enough mud on it by now to stop him from saying shit like this, but as long as people keep tolerating him -- as long as they continue actively seeking him out -- he'll keep it up.

I'd really like to see somebody with a non-left-leaning blog mention this and discuss the fact that it was A Very Bad Thing. That's all I want. If you demand certain standards of moral decorum from your opponents, you should demand them from your allies as well.

>> Anybody out there got a good-quality (clean, at least 128kbps, no radio sounds) MP3 of the radio/single version of Justin Timberlake's "Rock Your Body" -- the version with not one but two beatbox parts? Asshole is too busy bangin' Cameron Diaz to slap a copy up on the iTunes Music Store for me to generously purchase. So I'm resorting to illegal meanz to procure what I need.

I would be eternally grateful if you could help me out -- it would help me to put 2003 to bed. And yes, I know, it's April 2004. Drop me a line if you've got it, please.

>> Wow, that's kind of awesome -- Ben & Jerry's is installing a chemical-free "thermoacoustic" freezer in one of its NYC scoop shops; instead of using chemicals to chill the air inside, it uses sound waves! I wonder if this is going into the shop on 3rd Ave. & 9th Street, my local dealer parlor... By the way, I heartily recommend the new-ish Oatmeal Cookie Chunk. Mmmmm. Via Boing Boing.

>> Uhhhh soooo tired. Woke up at 9:30 this morning, which I was sort of proud of, because I had to do a short research paper before class (that includes the research), but astonishingly enough I ended up finishing it with almost an hour to kill, so I could have slept in! God damn it! Now I've got my voice lesson in less than two hours and I haven't practiced and I'm so tired that I fear I will fall asleep with my face comically pressed into the piano in our dorm's practice room. Bleh.

FYI, I've been practicing at the lessons with Charles Aznavour's "She." It's not coming out that great but oh well... I will say that I, and the lessons, seem to have improved since the inauspicious beginning; my last one was pleasantly surprising and I appeared to be not disgusting my instructor at every moment, which is nice. That, of course, means this lesson will be a complete train wreck. But afterwards I will go to sleep. Mmm. Sleep.

(Falls asleep with face comically pressed into keyboard of laptop)

Oh, by the way: Fuck the rain, yo. Though it was kind of amusing to get an actual thunderstorm in the city for once -- I think I can count the number of proper thunder-and-lightning storms I've seen in New York during my college career on one hand. I miss the daily summer storms in Florida...

>> Well, that's the end of that one. McCain says "no, no, no" to running with Kerry. Ah well.

Like I've said: It wouldn't have been perfect, but it would've won. And it'd be nice to have that as a given.

Dear John Kerry, Pt. 2: Please start impressing people. Please.

>> Aaaaaaarrrrrgh.

Last month I submitted some material for a fiction prize here at NYU. Re-reading one of those stories tonight, I caught a huge sloppy bullshit flub -- I repeated the same piece of information in two paragraphs of the piece. MotherFUCKER. I knew my chances of winning were pretty damn slim to start with (and man, this piece isn't as good as I remember it being), but that... bleeeaaaagh. Bleeeaaaagh.

That just makes me feel like the biggest stupidest cunt in the world. Argh.

>> My respect for Mandy Moore continues to grow -- she's doing a cover of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" with Michael Stipe for her new movie, Saved!, in which she plays an evil Bible-thumping teenager. Aaawesome.

>> And in my dream last night, I was talking to somebody about something I'd seen on a blog yesterday (specifically, this at Kottke). This is getting out of hand.

Yesterday was kind of a lame day. Josh is shooting his senior film this weekend, so I haven't had him to hang out with, and all of my (few) other friends were otherwise occupied, so I ended up spending the day doing some cleaning and... nothing else. I made some tacos for dinner and they were just OK, and I spent three hours deleting thirty songs out of my iTunes library in a pathetic attempt to keep it at a manageable size for my iPod. I don't want to have to go back to cherry-picking what's on my 'Pod at any given time, but it's inevitable -- I've got less than a gig left on it...

Moral of the story: I got nothing to interest you going on here. You'd better hope I find some more whale-penis links, because my personal life isn't going to keep you riveted to the screen at this moment in time... am I actually going to have to do homework to amuse myself this weekend?

>> Oh my God. Last night I had this bizarre, but really sweet, dream in which I took my future son to some kind of aquarium park to see the killer whales. He loved it.

Then I fire up Boing Boing this afternoon and find this. (Probably not safe for polite company -- that said, you really need to click on it.)

I really, really, really didn't need that image overlaid on what was such a strangely beautiful dream. BUT TOO LATE NOW!

>> Happy Good Friday, everybody. In deep and solemn honor of Jesus' sacrifice, I'm going to clean the bathroom in our dorm room. Because I feel it's important not just to relive his pain, but to magnify it by several degrees.

Man, it's a shame my favorite Jesus joke doesn't translate in text. It requires some mime. Ah well... Thanks for dying, Jesus. You were a great guy, but if you were still around these days, we'd probably be a little sick of getting nagged all the time. You'd probably stand right next to my mother saying "It's true, Chris, you really ought to take the GREs now, while it's all still fresh in your mind" or "What do you mean, you haven't done your resume yet? They don't come to you with jobs, young man."

OK, OK, yeah, shots at Jesus are cheap, he's too wide a target (Because he's so goddamn fat? SORRY, SORRY). Seriously, happy Good Friday, everybody. There is still something rather nice about the idea of somebody who loved other people so much he died because he thought it'd help them out. I'm a committed agnostic, and I suspect I always will be, but there's nothing wrong with being a Christian, and there's plenty right about it, so long as you do your preaching by example and not by coercion. So to all my friends and readers who live the Christian life in an eminently respectable and respectful way, I tip my hat to you today. To those of you who don't... well, I'd say I hope a bunch of newly-married lesbians with adopted heathen babies sodomize you to death with the broomsticks they ride around on because they're all witches. But that wouldn't be very nice, so I won't say it. I'll just let it hang in the air, pregnant with possibility (inseminated in the missionary position by two opposite-sex possibilities who codified their relationship in the eyes of God).

I'm clearly going insane. I need more chocolate. And now I'm off to buy cleaning supplies. (I really am cleaning the bathroom. You-know-who help me...)

>> Umm, excuse me? Sting and Twista have a song together?!? (iTunes link) What... the... nutty... fuck.

Here's some related reading.

>> How You Remind Me Of Someday: If you ever needed proof of how much Nickelback suck, then here it is: their two biggest hits, one in each stereo speaker, simultaneously. Surprise! They're nearly identical! (And actually, I like this a lot more than either song on its own. Radiohead should give this a shot.)

>> One of those silly quizzes I don't normally do, this one via Prolific. You could do without reading it, most likely...

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:

"all mah emotions within and never to allow one sob without -- for" (From Nick Cave's And The Ass Saw The Angel, which I've started reading twice now and then been distracted away from)

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?

A window.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?

Probably some music videos, but I can't remember exactly when the last time I watched TV was. (It was sometime in the last week I'm sure.)

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:

12:34.

5: Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?

12:41.

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

Some traffic sounds outside.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

Weird question. I went downstairs a few minutes ago to start some laundry, but that didn't involve leaving the building, just my apartment. If the question is, "when was the last time you left any building and entered the open air," then it was leaving Faye's Cafe (an NYU sandwich shop) last night around 6. If it was "when did you last walk out of your building into the open air," then it was yesterday at noon.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?

Kinja.com. But I'm thinking of giving up on it.

9: What are you wearing?

Blue t-shirt with a stain on it, olive cargo pants I wore yesterday, black Nike flip-flops. It's laundry day, remember.

10: Did you dream last night?

Yes. Weirdly, I dreamt that my roommate came home to sleep, even though he'll be gone for the next week. (He didn't, though.)

11: When did you last laugh?

A few minutes ago, reading one of August's old comics. (It's FAAAABULOUS outside!)

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?

A small Elbow poster and a giant Underworld poster, both copped from work.

13: Seen anything weird lately?

Does the punk documentary D.O.A. count? The Sid & Nancy scenes definitely weirded me out...

14: What do you think of this quiz?

It amuses me to do it, especially since I should be doing work for the class I have in a couple hours.

15: What is the last film you saw?

D.O.A. in our school library. A couple of days before that, in the theatre, Hellboy.

16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?

A giant stack of CDs and a lovely dinner. Then, an apartment. A big one.

17: Tell me something about you that I don’t know.

Uh... who are you? Since "you" are somebody who wrote this quiz and who I've never met, I could tell you my middle name is John. You don't have a clue.

18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?

I'd give people the magical ability to respect others.

19: Do you like to dance?

In theory, yes. In practice, absolutely not. It's a body-image thing.

20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?

Well, that depends. If he's discrediting the right wing of the Republican party for the next half-century, then yes, he's doing something that needed to be done. But that doesn't change the fact that he's also a power-crazy nutcase. Well, OK, he's not a nutcase. But he is something for whom authority over the rights and morals of other people is profoundly exciting. And that's some scary shit.

We really need to get him out of office, by the way. In case you hadn't picked up on that from earlier posts to this blog.

21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

Anasazi.

22: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?

Jack. Or Logan (heh). Or Johnny Cash Conroy, which is what I really wanted the nephew I ended up not getting to be named. (It was a girl, don't worry, nothing bad happened.)

23: Would you ever consider living abroad?

I already have, briefly (in England). Would I do it again? Yep. In fact, it's very likely that I will if the subject of Question 20 gets booked for another four years.

>> God help us, here we go with another post on politics:

I've done a lot of reading today, and I'm starting to think that we might've already blown it in Iraq. Regardless of whether or not you supported going in there in the first place -- and as you know, I didn't -- it's clear that now that we're there, we definitely need to make sure the country doesn't self-destruct and descend into awful sectarian violence. But I'm starting to think we lost that chance a while ago, and it's because we disbanded the Iraqi army.

Reorganizing and repositioning the standing army of Iraq to support the coalition's government-building exercise would have been a tremendous task, obviously. But a non-foreign army in Iraq should have immediately been seen to be absolutely necessary, because without one, the average Iraqi on the street really is going to think that their country has been fully occupied by an invading force, and they're not going to be happy about it -- and that's why you're seeing explosive growth and actions from the homegrown militias of clerics like al-Sadr. It's pretty basic stuff: If the U.S. Army disappeared tomorrow, those militias out in Wyoming would get a lot louder very quickly. That fact is pretty much guaranteed in our Constitution.

Without an Iraqi army, composed of committed and involved Iraqi citizens, what do we have to oppose al-Sadr's thugs with? Only our own occupying soldiers -- and this is an enterprise in which we do not have the unanimous support of all Iraq. The Shiites in Iraq --the majority of the population -- appear to be pretty split on the issue of al-Sadr, according to the Iraqi blogs I've read. Some think he's a power-seeking asshole making a big mistake, and some see him as a genuine alternative to a new political reality that they see as a threat -- namely, the coalition's prospective government. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong (and the tragedy is, they're wrong -- the Shiites are going to have plenty of power in the new Iraq no matter what), what matters is that they see things that way, and we're only going to reinforce their views by slapping down somebody who's managed to convince a lot of people that he's a legitimate leader. The U.S. sees al-Sadr as a thug, and they're probably not far wide of the mark, but a tremendous number of Iraqis -- not some kind of splinter group, a truly large number -- think the U.S. is way out of line to be going after him. And that can only make things get very, very ugly the more we turn up the heat on him.

It really bothers me that we've promised a democratic government for Iraq, but we're cherry-picking who's allowed to speak for the Iraqi people. al-Sadr's a shithead, sure, but he's a shithead with a somewhat legitimate claim to influence in Iraq. If we'd kept the Iraqi army in place, he wouldn't have gotten half of that legitimacy to start with -- his militia wouldn't have been needed to "keep order," which it does (or is considered to do) in large parts of the Iraqi south (though their definition of "order" is more than a little bit draconian). But we made that mistake, and now our actions aren't being seen as protecting Iraqi interests, they're seen as defying them by the people who believe al-Sadr is on their side. And again, there are more of those than you think.

Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be who you want them to be. And while we're right to insist on proportional and fair representation for all Iraq's stakeholders, and to prevent the process of government-creation from being hijacked, we don't have the right to choose who the leaders of Iraq are. You can argue that we do because we "liberated" them, but that's a contradiction in terms -- if we were honestly liberating them, and not just doing our damnedest to set up a government we like more than the Iraqi people do, then we'd deal with the people they've chosen to send to the table, and like it or not, al-Sadr is a man of influence and power. Does that mean the new Iraq will probably have some profound problems as it gets off the ground? You'd better believe it. But you also may recall that it took us a while to get the Bill Of Rights, the abolishment of slavery, and most of the other smooth power-structures we currently enjoy. And Iraq isn't just populated by demagogues like al-Sadr, though it's got plenty of those; it's also got a lot of reasonable people who plan to work as hard as they can to improve their country. But if we keep pushing this as hard as we are now, and keep playing the role of the violent colonizer rather than the generous shepherd, we're gonna push the reasonable people right out of the political process and put all the influence right in the hands of the people with weapons.

This is the way things look to me right now, anyway. You're welcome to show me evidence that contradicts, complicates, or supports this conception of events. Obviously, I'm only here, I'm not there and here, so it's pretty difficult for me to see the whole picture of what's going on, but it's also remarkable what a poor job the traditional media is doing of showing us how things stand. The extent of al-Sadr's power and influence is being grossly misrepresented over here, and the Iraqi bloggers whose sites I visited today were unanimous in trying to point out this failing on the part of the U.S. to really engage with the significance of the force he represents. If he's painted as the head of a tiny splinter group, then people are going to be very surprised if and when he leverages his power to start an even more savage uprising than the escalating challenge we're seeing right now.

>> Finally, a new update to the MP3s page. I've been getting a bajillion hits from Fluxblog, all from people expecting a traditional MP3 blog, and it would seem that I'm letting them down. I'm not really so bothered by that, but I'm hoping at least one or two people are amused by what they do find here... Anyway, hope you enjoy this week's / month's / century's update. It's got a song on it that I dare you not to like. Seriously, I dare you. I might even double-dog-dare you.

>> 
Happy Passover, everybody.

(Image by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing)

(And just FYI, I'm having a happy Passover because my roommate is out on Long Island working Passover events and is gone for a week and a half! W00t! I've never written about him here, have I...)

>> Goofing around with Kinja, since Karen told me to at a party this afternoon. Can somebody tell me how to give this site a pretty li'l icon in the Kinja database instead of the ugly empty square?

And man, it's driving me nuts that so many people don't use titles on their posts, or that their RSS feed isn't reading them properly... everything looks different! Blargh!

>> Dear John Kerry,

I would like you to win the election for President. Therefore, I urge you to ask John McCain to be your running mate -- if you haven't already. I refer you to this excellent proposal for a way to get him solidly on board:

If I were McCain, (my) terms would be stiff. I'd be saying, "Here are my ten issues (balance the budget, campaign finance reform, staying the course in Iraq, whatever). Make them yours. If, once in office, I see you backsliding on these issues, I am warning you now, I WILL stir up trouble. You think Gore and Cheney had power in the West Wing, you ain't seen nothing yet. Yes, I will be a loyal veep, yes I will back you up on the issues important to you, even those I may disagree with. Yes, you will have to make decisions that I may not agree with that I will have to support publicly. But on these 10 issues, my issues, I will be the judge of how tenacious you are in fighting for them, and if you abandon them you will rue the day you picked me as your running mate."

I'm a raving liberal, but I'd be pretty comfortable working with a decent guy like John McCain on the issues where I differ from him. And let's face it, the guy's the closest thing the Republican party has to a saint, at least in the popular eye. If you were to team up and show the country what real uniters-not-dividers do... man, I shiver at the thought.

While you're at it, it'd be nice if you'd grow a fucking spine on equal treatment for us gay folks, but as long as you keep George "Christ Told Me I Should Hate You Guys, So I Guess I'm Gonna" Bush out of office, we'll keep talking about it politely, OK?

Sincerely,
Chris Conroy

P.S. Please pay no attention to the post I made about picking Clinton as your running mate a while ago. That would have been stupid. The fanfic glee of it was intoxicating, though.

>> Oh, and just FYI, despite a couple of stupid bits and some plot holes, I strongly endorse Hellboy, which we saw last night and heartily enjoyed. It was... kooky. And funny. And gross. And kind of better than the comics, in a way (I've just started reading them). So go see it, it deserves your cash more than most of the stuff on release at the moment. Yikes.

>> Whoa, great timing -- via this fantastic Twilight Singers fansite (which, I'll add, is Movable Type-powered) and Pitchfork, I learn that the Twilight Singers are (a.) releasing a covers album -- the tracklist is the second item at that link, (b.) already recording their next proper disc, and (c.) sadly not playing "66" anymore -- but they've swapped it for "Something Hot," which is almost as good. (But not quite.) I'm so very excited to be seeing them in the next few hours... :::skips with glee:::

>> The New Yorker on Neck Face, who's high up on my Top Ten of Awesome Things About New York City. Via The Modern Age.

>> Dude, I was seriously going to write a post about how this needs to happen: Marilyn Manson is releasing a Greatest Hits album. I'll almost definitely buy it. I've got a lot of time for Marilyn Manson, actually. (To paraphrase Zoolander: You should listen to your friend Marilyn Manson. He's a cool dude.) Need to be persuaded yourself? He's gonna put a cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" on it...