Great Minds Think Alike?

WITH regards to my post from yesterday, Crooks and Liars is reporting on the buzz that Sarah Palin is planning to spearhead her own conservative movement.

For the life of me, I can't quite figure out why so many Republicans continue to champion someone who is so patently the product of circumstance rather than qualification. But if anyone's going to lead a boisterous, self-righteous, radicalized party of racists, xenophobes, hypocrites, self-important and self-styled militiamen, religious zealots, and pundits who think feeble-minded ignorance is the same as being straight-talking, she's definitely the one to do it. Maybe then the proper conservatives, freed of the burden of having to shout over the din of the Limbaughs and Malkins, can get their act together and start putting forward some coherent political alternatives to the Democrats' centrist muddle du jour.

The New GOP Look: Shaved Heads

NOT more than a few days after some of the more vitriolic members of Free Republic, a conservative blog and sounding board, called Malia Obama "a typical street whore" and "ghetto street trash," and "wonder[ed] when she will get her first abortion" (story here)—comments provoked because she had the gall to wear a T-shirt with a peace sign on it—a slight but distinct majority of the Young Republicans have elected Audra Shay, no stranger to racist comments herself, as their Führer.

The public face of the GOP is starting to look more and more like the BNP. I can't help but think that what would be best for the Republicans—maybe not from a practical standpoint, but an important ideological one—would be to split into two wings: in one, the vile, belligerent chauvinists who wept or threatened to take up arms because a black man was rightfully elected, and in the other, the more rational members of the party who might not agree with Obama's policies but for whom assassination and insurrection aren't particularly attractive solutions. Based on the Young Republicans' vote, however, it would seem that the latter category is quickly fading into a voiceless minority. But is it really worth it for them to continue colluding with the racist arm just to maintain a certain strength in numbers?

Review Roundup

MOST of these reviews were mentioned on my Twitter account when they appeared, as Twitter's brevity is better suited to quick shout-outs and announcements, but enough of them have been posted recently that I thought them collectively worth mentioning here.

There's the Complete Studio Recordings of the Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach Quintet (which didn't really exist under that name) over at All About Jazz. Read the review here. The disc is a re-release that combines the original versions, albeit out of sequence, of Clifford Brown and Max Roach's At Basin Street and Sonny Rollins' Plus Four. Even now, I'm still no closer to understanding why they altered the sequencing.

Then there's my review of Warren Buckland's (ed.) Puzzle Films: Complex storytelling in contemporary cinema in the TLS. You'll need a subscription to the archive or a nearby newsstand to read that one. Reviews of Michael Tratner's Crowd Scenes: Movies and mass politics and Jerry Oppenheimer's Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel should be appearing in the same publication soon.

Finally, I've reviewed the first English translation of Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann for Rain Taxi. That one can be found here.

As soon as I've worked my way through a backlog of editing, I'll be posting reviews (here and elsewhere) that I've been meaning to get to for months now.

More on VoIP: Google Voice and CallCentric

IT'S a bit after the fact by now, but I wanted to follow up an earlier post on my experiences with VoIP with two bits of info.

The first (and the bit that might seem like old news) is the fact that Google Voice is finally prepping for its ribbon-cutting. Heaven knows it's been a long time coming. Ars Technica posted a short profile of the forthcoming service about two weeks ago, and it looks like it will be of real benefit to VoIP users who also have already linked PSTN (that is, traditional phone numbers) to their SIP numbers. No-cost, reliable voicemail hasn't always been VoIP providers' first priority, but it looks like it's going to be Google Voice's strong suit, particularly the transcription feature.

In re-reading that last line, it sounds like I'm suggesting that Google Voice is a VoIP provider. I'm not. Google Voice is a slightly different beast and will only enhance VoIP. At least at the beginning, anyway. I have no idea what their future plans are. But I suspect that as mobile and VoIP replace traditional landlines, Google Voice will start to offer more in that vein.

The second point is that I forgot to mention CallCentric in my list of recommended pay-as-you-go VoIP providers. I signed up with them not long before writing the VoIP post, and I've been pleased with the call quality as well as the features on offer. Like some of what's to be had from Sipgate, CallCentric offers incoming fax numbers and fax storage, caller ID blocking, call waiting, and more. You can also set up rules as to how certain numbers should be handled, such as forcing calls from a specific person to voicemail. The CallCentric website might look a lot less slick than most, but the important things — e.g., call quality, cost, features, reliability — are certainly there.

"I Have Been Wading in a Long River and My Feet Are Wet"

SINCE coming across that quote of Sherwood Anderson's years ago in a now-forgotten context, I've been wont to use it when feeling like the slow march of survival is taking more and more time away from the things in life that matter. The quote became lodged in my thoughts early this morning as I was updating my All About Jazz profile page, and I hit up Google to see who else was mentioning it and why. Sixteen hits, two of which are from said profile page. But it did bring me to the author's essay "When I Left Business for Literature," which I'd previously only read in excerpted bits and pieces like this one:

[I]n America things are somewhat different. Here something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave, foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! we did get ourselves into a bad hole! We were going to be superhuman, and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we were somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch!

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves to laugh occasionally at ourselves for our pretensions; but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, the land for the free and the home for the brave. We actually meant it, and no one will ever understand present-day America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big, ugly, hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the Cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

The full essay is available here.

Microsoft: Desperately, Frantically Trying to Do Something Right

... AND so, in due course, Microsoft ended up pulling the IE8 vomit video (see my earlier comments here). Not because the company recognized poor taste when they saw it, but only "after widespread disgust at the graphic nature of the ad". Is this the first time Microsoft has responded to customer feedback? Must be, because no matter how many crash reports I send and how many updates and bugfixes I apply, Word 2008 is still crashing on me about three times a day.

By the way, did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is now out? It's got private browsing — and doesn't need clumsy attempts at being "edgy" to prove it.