Speaker For The Diodes - May 8th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit -- these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

"There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

"Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

"I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it."

-- David Simon, "In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police", The Washington Post, 2009-03-01 ( single page) [ pointed out by dariusk]

12:21 pm - Whoops! Oh, crap.

Oh crap. I hate when a near miss turns into something big. It looks like I misccalculated how much I had in my checking account when I went to the pharmacy after going to the ER, by about two cents, which caused a five dollar payment elsewhere to bounce, which elicits a $27 fee from my credit union. So instead of a two-cent mistake, it turns into a $27.02 mistake. Feh. It always seems so unfair that the largest fees I ever see at my credit union are imposed specifically when -- because -- I don't have the money to pay them. There's a sort of wrongness to that.

And the timing ... this is just after I got a politely ominous letter from Baltimore Gas & Electric, mentioning that the temporary dlay in electric service terminations mandated by the Maryland Public Service Commission is no longer in effect and I've still got an overdue bill. (I'd been making small payments hoping that a pattern of paying something would nudge me to the bottom of their turn-off list, but have not caught up.)

Okay, so I'm not buying groceries or cat food today ... I have just enough in my purse to return my checking account to a non-negative balance. Now if I can find where the leather pouch of quarters migrated to, I can at least pick up a loaf of bread, and I'll cut the good cat food with the brand Perrine doesn't like quite as much for a few days.

Whee. I'd planned to write about the BGE situation later today anyhow, after a more careful look at the situation, but the overdraft notice has me a bit off balance. If any of you feel like helping me with a situation that is partly (the overdraft part) caused by my own careless mistake (yeah, my record-keeping suffered while I was having that two month dizzy spell, but I really should've done the math first anyhow), I wouldn't say no to a bit of PayPal help to buy some bread, milk, chocolate, cat food, and cat litter. In the meantime, I'll try to get through to the phone numbers in the BGE letter for energy assistance.

This might work better if I hadn't stayed awake all night tossing and turning (and wrapping my leg in an elastic bandage and unwraping it again, to try to get twitches & cramps to go away and let me sleep). Wish me luck.

Maybe it's time to put my TeleType on eBay. I don't really want to get rid of it, but most of the other things I have that might possibly be worth any money are guitars, and those are my tools. I'm not using the TeleType for anything; I just like knowing that I have one and can read or punch paper tape if I ever need to, or show younger folk what the old days looked like. (Not that an ASR-33 will fetch much, compared to what I need.) It's got an RS232 interface, so I'd planned to get around to connecting it to a Linux box someday just to post to Usenet from it.

Allrighty then, grab me a bite to eat, then try to overcome my paralyzing dread of dealing with bureacracies. %cringe% I really want to sleep.

03:59 pm - Seeker Structure

This entry started off as a comment replying to another comment by sodyera. I figured the entry it was attached to had probably scrolled off people's friends-pages by then, and copied it to post as a separate entry -- which I'm finally getting around to now (partly 'cause I feel like I owe y'all something more interesting than my money and health woes or how loud Baltimore traffic is, and I can post this without spending time I shouldn't spend right now writing).

I wonder whether Legend of the Seeker, a show I described earlier as a guilty pleasure because I enjoy it more than I respect its artistic merits, would work better if they didn't try to split the difference between "44-minute chunks of one epic tale" and "separate weekly episodes of a series", and just went one way or t'other. Either drop the "this is a long quest-type story" part and make the background epic more setting-and-theme than something that needs to be advanced ... or abandon the attempt to be a regular television show where new viewers are guaranteed "a story" if they catch a random episode unless there's a "to be continued" at the end, and concentrate on telling the epic at its own pace (with occasional side-quests, yes, but not a guaranteed one-per-week) and let the end of each episode fall wherever it may in the sequence of events (tweaked, of course, to come at what would be a good spot for a commercial break, of course, but not worrying about it being a 'wrapping up' point).

Buffy pulled off the rather unusual trick of telling three stories at once on three different time scales, and made each episode work as a normal telvision show, as a segment of a twenty-odd chapter miniseries, and as a contribution to a seven-season myth, but Buffy was unusual (and didn't start out shouting "this is an epic" right out of the gate -- awareness of the larger structure unfolded over time). Buffy also didn't seem as confined by the conventions of its genre. (It couldn't entirely disregard those conventions, but could invert, pervert, and subvert them as needed, in ways thet Seeker either can't or appears unwilling to.)

I like Seeker, but it ain't no Buffy. It might be interesting to see what a less convention-bound sword&sorcery television epic would look like.