Earlier I wrote a few words about the Bush Dyslexicon I was reading. Well, I’ve now finished it. Toward the end, things started to get repetitive; I felt quite certain that the author was re-using some of the Bushisms he was quoting, and overall it just seemed to be getting overly long. After reading Bush’s various malapropisms one after another after another, eventually you get the point. Fortunately, the Afterword wraps things up nicely, tying together all the points made throughout the book.

So now I’m on to bigger, fresher fish to fry: namely, Al Franken’s wonderful Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Anyone who’s been paying any attention to political books these days will already have heard about this book and probably formed an opinion based on which wing of the Plutocratic Party they belong to, but for the undecided amongst you: You Must Buy This Book. Besides exposing the deceitful tactics of the rabid right who (unfortunately) set the tone of discourse in American media, it’s also pretty damn funny.

<insert obligatory Terminator joke here>

OK, so Arnold Schwartzenegger is going to be the governor of California. Here’s a guy who has no particular experience to make him suitable for the job, and whose ideas regarding public policy don’t seem very well thought-out. He doesn’t appear fully comfortable with the English language, he seems to have some unsavory personality glitches, and doesn’t want to talk much about his wild partying in the 70’s. Hmm, does this remind you of anyone else?

Chalk up one more point for Form in the battle between Form and Substance.

Yesterday I wrote that I figured out how to connect my Palm to my phone with Bluetooth and how great and nerdy that is.

What I didn’t mention was that I had tried to do the same thing a month ago, and was totally and utterly stumped. Using the same pieces of hardware and software, doing nearly the same steps, I was totally stumped, and came to the mistaken conclusion that the software on the Palm just didn’t work with my carrier.

Maybe the documentation was poor. Maybe I was just having an off day. Whatever. Somehow a few words from a colleague and a little bit of googling yesterday, and suddenly I had solved the problem which I had previously thought to be intractable!

For a few months, I’ve been using a phone with built-in Bluetooth, which lets me wirelessly synchronize contacts with my computer. About a month ago I acquired a Palm Tungsten T, which also includes Bluetooth, but I haven’t used the bluetooth there to any extent until today. Suddenly, inspired by a coworker’s easy success connecting to the internet with his new Tungsten T2 and a Bluetooth phone, I figured out how to do this as well. It rocks! Anywhere I go, I can have access the internet (albeit slowly) with a proper web browser on the Palm (instead of the lowly WAP browser on my phone.

It’s nerdalicious!

Lately I’ve been bingeing on left-wing books complaining about our selected president and his corrupt cronies. I started off with Michael Moore‘s Stupid White Men, continued with the excellent The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, and am now following up with Mark Crispin Miller’s (at this point somewhat outdated) Bush Dyslexicon. The latter book is the one that’s got me in a posting mood at the moment.

Written in those halcyon days before 9/11, Dyslexicon deals mostly with Bush’s conduct before becoming president. Miller is able to deftly define what I’ve had a hard time putting into words: Bush is unfit to be president not because he’s unintelligent (he isn’t), but rather because he embodies the worst of what is wrong with the decadent upper crust of our society. Bush attended the finest schools our country has to offer, but failed to master basic English language syntax or understanding of how our country’s government works; His string of failed business ventures in the 1970s and 80s, which would have sent most people into the poorhouse, were instead perpetually financed and bailed out by his father’s associates; In spite of a self-professed lack of interest in issues of governance, he has used wealthy patrons to finance election campaigns (and, at least in the Texas gubernatorial case, occasionally win). Born into wealth and privilege, Dubya expects to have the world served to him on a silver platter, and remarkably, he has so far gotten what he’s expected.

I’ve recently gotten broadband service at home. When it works, it works great, but unfortunately our provider has decided to use some new bleeding-edge equipment that doesn’t play well with the houses on our street. The network uses the same co-ax as our cable TV, and if our TV “accidentally” sends voltage out the cable (which apparently some TVs do) it fries some critical piece of network equipment.

So, it can work great for weeks at a time, then be out for days and days. So I had no network access at home from noonish last Friday until today. And just when I had started messing with this blog! Crikey.

blog this, blog that, blog blog blog. everyone’s got a blog now, right?

i actually started blogging years ago, creating a quickly-abandoned site that is still floating around on a free webserver somewhere. In those days, I was relying on the web-based blogging system at blogger.com, which was just too prickly to really want to use on a regular basis. Now I’ve stumbled across this new-fangled blosxom doohickey which looks like it will make my blogging efforts a bit more manageable. We’ll see!