Island Passage

So I had to get out of the office. It was just so quite and warm, I thought that I would fall asleep and pitch forward onto the keyboard. So, even though I Ain't Lileks , I hied my tender self down the block to Zeitgeist Coffee and am mooching free WiFi. They are playing some kind of very weird alt-techno music and there is the sound of grinders and barristas pounding espresso baskets. Very different from the office, provocative. Zeitgeist is the very model for Cafe Nervosa on the old TV show Frasier . Lots of exposed brick and attitude. Very Seattle. I'm gonna hang here until my vanpool meets at 5 pm.

I just posted a response to Rob Harrison on myWhidbey.com. His posting was about the immigration debate that we are currently having in our country. He sets up a straw-man argument by short-quoting Emma Lazurus's sonnet The New Collosus . "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" I posted the entire sonnet: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to b...

I'm been a big fan of Megan McArdle since her Live from the World Trade Center days. She has become my model for not jumping into a discussion without questioning the assumptions. Here are four of her recent blog entries on healthcare, culminating with her suggestion for addressing the problem. I have included excerpts, but this is something that I think deserves a lunchtime read-through of the original entries. I am going to advocate her approach to my congresscritters. What's happening on health care? A few weeks back, I noted that national health care seemed to be the only major policy programme that the left could basically agree upon. Now, I hear the stirrings of a push for national health care rippling through the liberal blogosphere like a rising storm wind. If this movement actually takes off, I expect that we'll see a great deal of vehement argument between conservatives screaming that the liberals are going to screw up our health care system, and libera...

One of the things I don’t do on this blog is blog about work. A few days ago though, I had an experience that took my breath away. I stood in an warm, overcrowded conference room, leaning around the people standing in front of me to see the slides and hear the speaker. What I heard were people laying the groundwork for the next five, ten, or one hundred revolutions in the biological sciences. Yesterday I wasn’t just glad to have a job, I was proud to be associated with my company, Teranode . The speaker was John Wilbanks , Executive Director of the Science Commons . He had come to our company, Teranode Corporation, to brief us on what was happening in the NeuroCommons project. I almost hesitate to try to recap what he said, because I know that I cannot recapture the jaw-dropping, "Eureka!" sensation I felt. Creative Commons began as an attempt to create “open source” copyright law. The Creative Commons website allows users to point and click to create...

Some movies are so iconic that rumors of their sequels are evergreen. There are always people talking about a remake or sequel to Casablanca , and there actually was a sequel (of sorts) to Gone With the Wind . So when New Line Studios announced back in 2000 it had bought the rights to Forbidden Planet , fans of Robbie the Robot pricked up their ears. Well, it's been six years and no remake. During this morning's commute, the topic of a Forbidden Planet remake or sequel came up. We quickly realized that you couldn't use the "monster from the id." That's been done. If I wrote a sequel to Forbidden Planet it would have a "monster from the superego." It would have the voice of John Lithgow and it would be constantly nagging the United Planets officers about how they were falling short in thier duties and what would all the other spacemen think? ...And Peter Jackson sleeps easily.

It really wasn't John Stewart's fault that the entire Oscar presentation show sucked doorknobs ; but he was the guy standing out front, so he takes the heat. Part of the problem is bloat. The Academy Awards show is now competing with new award shows the spring up, mushroomlike, on basic cable and the weblets every week. So every year it tries to distinguish itself by becoming more and more long-winded, more and more pretentious and self-congratulatory. Pretty soon all this self-importance and political "awareness" and "courage" will fuse and they Academy will declare itself the third branch of the US legislature. Or, perhaps some new UN Council on Eating Your (Political) Vegetables. Once again, it's not fair to John Stewart, but look back at the times Johnny Carson hosted the awards. Carson's shtick as the bemused midwesterner surrounded by Hollywood glamour worked. Perhaps because it wasn't based on condescension to mid-America and uber-hipp...