Since I said I wasn't sure who I was going to vote for in the Democratic primary, a number of different e-mailers sent me off to read this article by Chris Durang. It makes a pretty strong case for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton and darn near convinces me.
I think I picked an interesting week to poll the readers of this site as to who they thought would be the Democratic nominee for the post of Prez. Early on, Hillary Clinton took an early lead and for several days, Obama was around 31% and Edwards was around 16%. But even before he announced he was getting out of the race, the numbers for Edwards dropped into the single digits and Obama began picking up what I'd guess was most of that support plus some from each of the other choices. For what it's worth, I selected Hillary when this poll went up but if I had to make a prediction today, I'd probably flip a quarter...or maybe pick Obama. It feels that close to me.
I'm not even sure who I'm going to vote for in the Democratic Primary next week. A couple of the candidates who are on the ballot but out of the race probably reflect my views better than either Clinton or Obama but I don't see the point of a "symbolic" vote for them. No one ever notices how many votes the withdrawn candidates get so the symbolism doesn't register anywhere that matters.
I know a lot of folks keep coming to this site to see if there's any news on the strike...so for you people: There's no news on the strike. At least nothing I've heard. The rumor mill says they're still having informal talks. That's probably true. At least, we'd probably hear if it wasn't. The rumor mill further says those talks are going well. That may be one of those news items based on nothing. In any case, there's no indication as to when those talks might turn into real negotiations, which would presumably be a matter of formalizing the terms.
Meanwhile, officials of the Screen Actors Guild are criticizing what they know of the Directors Guild settlement and asserting that they will not allow it to become a template for their own, upcoming negotiations. One might infer they're saying that now because they know that the WGA reps are accepting a large chunk of the DGA deal, at least as a rough model even if some of the terms and numbers change. And one might be dead wrong to infer that. We don't know. The DGA deal has, probably unfortunately, become the AMPTP's starting point for bargaining. Any union (not just WGA or SAG) is going to have to do a certain amount of pushback against it.
When will we hear something? Your guess is as good as anyone's. I still think an immediate goal is to make enough progress in the next week or so that the WGA will feel comfortable about granting a waiver that will allow the Academy Awards to have a real writing staff. I'd certainly trust our leadership to make that determination and to trade that off if they feel they're making genuine gains. Still, the fact that one or both sides wants to make a deal ASAP doesn't mean that's going to happen. So sit tight.
I can't resist stealing the following blog post by Josh Patashnik...
The final question at the GOP debate tonight asked the candidates whether they believe Ronald Reagan would have endorsed them. Within the span of four minutes, they told the audience that Ronald Reagan wouldn't have supported a candidate who changed his position on key Republican issues, wouldn't have supported amnesty for illegal immigrants, would have reduced the size of government, and would have reverted to the gold standard. The jury's out on whether these men are qualified to be president, but they sure aren't qualified to teach eleventh grade American history.
I've long felt it was a toss-up as to whether Republicans were more or less mired in the myth of Reagan than Democrats were in the fantasy of John F. Kennedy and Camelot. Lately, the McCain campaign has been trotting out photos of their candidate with The Great Communicator. This whole campaign may turn out to be a duel between those photos and the ones the Democrats will be wielding that show McCain hugging George W.
As I've mentioned, I'm now teaching Humor Writing once a week for the graduate students program down at U.S.C. For yesterday's lesson, I brought in a pile of Henny Youngman jokes and had the members of the class — most of whom had never heard of Mr. Youngman — read them aloud. Then we discussed which jokes we liked and why and the kind of rhythms and structure that made most of them work.
A few minutes ago, having Youngman on the brain tonight, I decided to see if I could link to a clip of him performing. I found this one, which is from the mid-eighties when his delivery was slower than it had once been and his reception was bigger. What interests me about it is that we discussed most of these jokes in our lesson.
In case you want to know more about The King of the One-Liners, I wrote this piece about him some time ago. Or you can just click below and enjoy some of Henny Youngman's greatest hits.
This is a blanket "thank you" to all the folks who wrote in with suggestions and/or offers of help with my computer virus problem. Lucky me, I had two at once. From what I can tell, the first one somehow managed to bypass and then disable my virus program. It should not have been able to do this — it's an old, known virus that the software is supposed to protect me from — but it did and that opened the door for the second. Both infected my main computer and the first one got onto my main computer, my secondary computer, two external Maxtor harddrives and three SanDisk cruzer flashdrives. Quite an ambitious little fellow, I'd say.
Cleaning involved my regular virus program, an online virus scan and two other virus programs which I downloaded and ran in trial mode. Collectively, they identified both viruses — albeit under an array of different names — and removed the one that was only on one computer. Getting rid of the other was a little harder. I had to go in and manually kill processes, delete hidden files, delete registry entries and restore a few files from a recent backup. All four pieces of anti-virus software I used claimed they could remove this second virus but for some reason, none of them could. Still, they gave me the info that enabled me to research the virus and then figure out how to do the manual scrub job.
End of story? Unfortunately, no. I got the virus off my main computer but not before it nuked something in the boot sequence. I'm pretty sure all the data's there...I just can't get to it. To deal with this, I took the easy way: Shipped it over to my computer guy and told him to build me a new computer, boot the old one off another drive and then transfer my data over. I was about due for a new P.C., anyway. It should be here by the weekend.
But thanks to all who offered help. A couple of you suggested I chuck the Windows systems and defect to the World of Mac, where viruses are pretty much non-existent. True...but I think I have too much invested in this software in terms of knowledge, money and emotion to start cross-dressing now. And you'd better all be glad I feel this way because if I ever did switch to a Mac, someone would surely invent a killer virus for them...a bad one that would nuke your data, destroy your system and tell everyone you went to high school with that you wet the bed.
January 30, 2008
