Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker: The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon can now do in secret.

In other sports news, though I don’t follow football much, my sympathies are definitely not with the “New England” Patriots (the very name of which reeks of someone’s business plan— come on, real teams belong to a city!), but with the old hometown team. I will be waving the Terrible Towel tomorrow with a friend who also was branded by growing up in Pittsburgh during the Steelers’ dominance in the 70’s.

Non-Bostonians: here’s another example of what people are talking about when they talk about the agro Boston baseball media.

Just watched it. Somehow it ended up at the top of our Netflix queue, so it just showed up one day. I guess I expected to be more impressed. It was basically an action movie. Definitely more clever cinematically than, say Lethal Weapon or something. But still, not a whole lot besides people running after each other on the street or in cars in 1970’s New York.

Speaking of Netflix, they’ve added some neat features like friend lists and household profiles (So, if any of my paltry readership is a Netflix subscriber and wants to be a buddy, lemme know). Stilll, my biggest ongoing disappointment with Netflix is their limited selection. It’s not as pathetic as Blockbuster, but it can’t even touch our local, Hollywood Express. I was expecting a more Amazon-like comprehensive catalog with a web-based rental service. It’s sadly not the case. We might be better off just getting a Tivo and sucking everything off TCM.

OK, guilty pleasure confession time. I really like The Dresden Dolls. I feel like they’re a little juvenile, and that maybe I am not supposed to take them seriously because I’m not a teenage girl with a self-mutilation issue.

But it’s just so refreshing to have an alternative to guitar rock that doesn’t involve some solitary white boy making clicking and bleeping noises with his laptop. It’s refreshing to hear music with melody, odd chords, and, good heavens, dynamics, something that amplified music has almost systematically obliterated over the last 50 years. They’re also very good musicians: the guy’s a pretty good drummer, but the girl is seriously amazing on piano, and she can really wail. (It also turns out that she’s the friend of a friend and we met her at a party; Terri thought so, I didn’t think it was the same Amanda, but the friend confirmed it a couple of weeks ago. It’s hard to tell with all the make-up in the album photos…).

Have a listen to Half Jack or procure yourself a copy of “Coin-Operated Boy” and decide for yourself. Maybe Brechtian punk cabaret is for you.

They also have a song about former local NPR talk-show host Christopher Lydon. How funny is that?

We took the popcorn and cranberry strings off the tree and saved them for the birds. I strung a few through the branches of the tree outside the kitchen window where Edie’s cat bed is, to give her some avian excitement. Seems like the squirrels beat the birds to it, though, and I don’t want to encourage them. Alas.

The ex-Enron exec Ken Lay is doing a PR campaign to “tell his side of the story”. Apparently, he’s promoting it with Google’s AdWords. So, if you click here, and then click on the Sponsored Link for “www.kenlayinfo.com”, you can make him pay Google a couple of cents.

(I know, given Google’s recent stock price it’s like stealing from the rich to give to the richer, but wouldn’t you rather Google had Ken Lay’s $0.05?)

That’s the actual tagline in the trailer for Broadway Melody of 1940, which we’re just about to watch.

We took the tree down today, and wished it a fond farewell. We usually manage to stretch it out until MLK day, but this year it already showed signs of drying out well before we left for Pennsylvania, so as we feared, it did indeed not make it nearly that long.

Ok, the movie’s starting…

Our new desk finally came! It has spawned a long-anticipated cleanup, simplification, and re-wiring of the office. Look out, world.

The weather has been miserable today– hail, rain, snow, rain, sleet, snow, accumulating in many inches of slush. But since it wasn’t really quite frozen, we braved it to get some supplies (a bigger surge protector, Quorn patties, shorter ethernet cables, diet vanilla coke, lite Science Diet cat food, etc.) before the sun went down and the slush froze.

The press is on hold. I’ve ordered new rollers, but the supplier has a big backlog, and it will be a month or so before they come. It should at least give me time to get a place set up in the corner of the basement for the press.

My friends Doug & Tara are parents! I was barely used to the idea of them expecting a baby, and now I’m in disbelief all over again. They’ll be good parents.

Doug was always almost weirdly good with kids. It’s not a trait you usually discover in your college friends. But there was this one time we were tossing a frisbee. In a nearby parking lot, some little kids were running around; they seemed to be picking on this one kid and knocked him down. Doug quietly excused himself from our frisbee circle, went over to the kids, broke it up, produced a Snoopy band-aid from his coat, and talked to the knocked-down kid for a while. I feel like I’m remembering all the details wrong, but it impressed me; the rest of us were sort of doing our own thing and hardly noticed the fracas. Doug not only noticed, but did way more than the right thing.

Anyway, congratulations to the new parents, and congratulations to the new sprout who’s lucky enough to have great parents who come equipped with Snoopy band-aids.

Warning: addictive. (Like Badgers and Magical Trevor).

I usually try to keep the tech content to a minimum since there are so many other blogs that do it better. But if you are sick of waiting the 20-40 seconds that it takes Adobe Reader to start up to open a simple PDF, the amazing and simple utility Adobe Reader SpeedUp is worth every cent you donate to its author.

…is welfare. From the NY Review of Books: “In analyzing Wal-Mart’s success in holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. … The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart’s 1.2 million US employees.”

Well, we made it after an uneventful drive.

Did some more research on the press this morning before we left State College. I found a place where theoretically I can buy rollers, so tomorrow I give them a call. (Seems like a lot of the printing world is still not too web-savvy, so I couldn’t find a place that sells online).

I’ve also already learned much more than I ever knew before about my press, the company that produced it, and letterpress in general from Briar Press. If the press hadn’t had its manual intact, I wonder if I would have been able to learn to use it too well back in high school. Where would I have gone for information? A library? Written to some organization?

Still, the manual was really more than I needed to get up and running. It is thorough and well-written, and actually teaches a good deal of general printing terms and history. It’s as if they actually expected you to read it. When was the last time you bought anything with a manual that you were expected to actually read?

The other thing I’ve learned that’s pretty exciting is that is much cheaper than I thought to get your own “cut” made. The estimate is $7 for a 4×4″ block, and you just need camera-ready art.

Last thing, and I’ll shut up about the press until at least tomorrow. Terri’s mom found a block for a printing press with a logo of the Candy Cane, the candy/coffee/gourmet store they used to own in State College. It probably would fit my press if they ever want to print anything with that logo again, just for yucks. She found it while she was digging through some old papers on the Candy Cane to find the exact years they owned it, so that it can be part of the inscription on the State Theatre sidewalk brick that Kim, Glenn, Terri, and I are getting them for Christmas.

From the BBC: “Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka have reported that, despite the loss of human life in the Asian disaster, there have been no recorded animal deaths.”