Amazon calls an Audible

... and other puns.

I didn't really think it was a big deal when I read that Amazon bought Audible. And then I saw this on the New York Times Bits Blog:

Amazon isn’t saying much about what it will do with the company, but bringing audiobooks directly to its Web site and to the Kindle is the obvious first step.

What comes after that? How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then to switch back to the printed page?

Now that's something that caught my attention. As Amazon and Apple both get better at allowing their customers to move around movies, music, and books, people are going to really start using it more. I love that I can watch TV episodes or movie rentals on my iPhone and my computer. That I can order shows from Amazon at work and have them waiting on my TiVo when I get home. Did you know Toni Morrison loves her Kindle? I thought that was surprising.

Of course, for a counter point, here's David Lynch. (warning, vulgar language ahead).



(I'd just like to add that I agree with Lynch in principle: movies are always always better the bigger you can see them.)

Clinton in Kazakhstan

This is a pretty damning investigative report on Bill Clinton from the New York Times. I doubt it will hit much with the electorate because it's kind of ... obscure. So Bill Clinton helped a rich guy get a uranium contract in Kazakhstan and in return got $31 million from him for his Foundation. And so he subverted US diplomacy and the official State Department stance against the new Kazakhstan leader after some bogus elections.

The truth is, it's Kazakhstan, so even though it's pretty bad, it's not like he did this in some country people actually know about. Anyway ... this article paints a good picture of how a Clinton presidency could be difficult. Bill Clinton kinda does his own thing. Hillary is arguing against Dubai operating US ports and Bill is being paid as a consultant by Dubai on how to manage it. Hillary is issuing reports questioning Kazakhstan's rigged elections and Bill is having dinner with the President of Kazakhstan and recommending him to lead an organization that monitors elections and promotes open democracy.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, but this is the danger of an unelected political figure being given power. I'm starting to think that I really don't have any problems with Hillary--but it's Bill who seems to be the liability now.

We're Turkey.

Here's an interesting map I've seen a lot of people looking at. The US is by far the riches country in the world. Here's a map that compares the GDP of states with countries elsewhere that have similar GDPs. Washington's Turkey. And all of Canada matches Texas. And my college state of Minnesota goes well with Norway ... Our least popular state is also akin to Uzbekistan ... go figure.

Full Text RSS

So something screwy happened to my RSS feed, and just the titles were coming through.

I've decided to change that and just go to full RSS feeds. That means that for some people you won't have to come directly to my site to see what I'm blogging about. The entire thing comes through your reader.

If you haven't yet discovered the awesome-ness that is an RSS reader (I love my Google Reader) here's a "plain English" description of how RSS works and how you--yes you!--can put it to use.

If you're not very technically literate, this video will help you a lot. If you are really not very technically literate, press the play button in the middle of the picture below to see the movie.

Zodiac: the Movie

I didn't know much about the Zodiac killer before seeing the movie Zodiac, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, and Robert Downey Jr.

Now I know a lot. Like a whole lot. Zodiac is nothing if not comprehensive. At 2 hours 38 minutes it better be. But it's also engaging, interesting, well-acted, well-directed, and scary at times.

The movie came out in early 2007 and didn't get a lot of attention. But its director is well known (Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, Panic Room) and it's stars all good. The movie mostly sticks with the cops and the press, but every so often shows us the Zodiac murders. As I realized later, it only shows those that the Zodiac is known to have committed (turns out the guy reads papers and takes credit for unsolved cases). These scenes can be difficult.

I also didn't know that the Zodiac killer was the inspiration for Dirty Harry.

There is a lot of attention to detail, and the film really gets what newspaper reporting and detective work were like before the computer and then Internet age.

This is a very good true crime film. Its length can be forgiven by the sheer fact that every time a new title card comes on the screen "18 months later" or "2 years later" you groan--not for yourself, but for the characters in the movie who have to survive so much.

Good stuff. But long.

Quantum of Solace

Looking at the title to this post, perhaps you wonder what I am referring to. Let's go to the definitions:

Solace: consolation, comfort.
Quantum: a finite amount, probably a small amount, possibly to do with subatomic physics.

Quantum of Solace, therefore, is likely to be interpreted as a small finite amount of comfort or consolation.

So why in the name of all that is shaken and not stirred would you make Quantum of Solace the title of the next James Bond Movie. Here's the IMDb page. But why? Why choose a lame-ass title like this one.

Bond movies, especially once they started having to depart from the book titles, have always been eccentric to say the least. Let's take the Pierce Brosnan set:

GoldenEye.
Tomorrow Never Dies.
The World is Not Enough.
Die Another Day.

These are all laughable if you look at them long enough. But they all have something going for them that makes them work ... at least for a little while.

But Quantum of Solace? Count me skeptical. The movie looks like it has a good cast, but they will be laboring under a dumb title.

Neverwhere, the novel

Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was a good British fantasy, especially for an Anglophile like myself.

The central conceit of the book is that there are two Londons, and our hero has fallen from one to the other. The other London, London Below, is a piecemeal place of sewers and beggars who have fallen on hard times. London Below is full of the mythology that informs the world above, and you know that Gaiman had fun with the names. On Knightsbridge is Night (you should be afraid of the dark). We meet the Earl of Earl's Court, the black friars of Black Friars, the Angel Islington (two Tube stops there no less!).

It's a good fun fantasy trip that finds its own fantasy world (as opposed to knocking off JRR Tolkien yet again).

Good fun.

Oh yes, there will be blood

This weekend we walked over to the Grand to see There Will Be Blood. I'd wanted to see the movie for some time, but the Oscar nominations certainly made me want to get there.

It's ... it's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Weird, bizarre, and long. But nothing at all like Magnolia, save for the focus on family.

The movie starts quietly, with no dialog for 10 to 15 minutes. And then we get into the story. Daniel Plainview and his son HW who are some of the best oilmen in the business. If you've seen the trailer you get a sense of him. Daniel Day Lewis is incredible in the role. He sells it all the way through.

At some point, he goes a little off the deep end. Trying to pin where that happens exactly is a little hard, but good fodder for discussion afterward.

I did heartily enjoy this movie, although it's a tough one to recommend. The length, for one, and the themes for another. But the music, the acting, the visuals, and the wonderful directing (Anderson manages to make surveying look very very interesting) are all top-notch.

A very good film.

Another author visit - Alexander McCall Smith

Author Alexander McCall Smith is going to be in Tacoma on April 26, speaking at PLU as part of a Pierce County Reads program.

I just read his first book "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" in October, and after seeing Chabon at Pierce College, I'm excited to go to another author's visit. I got his second and third books as Christmas presents, so I'll probably try to read those before he gets here.

All that said, if Pierce County is going to get into the "everyone read the same book at the same time" program, maybe they should coordinate with Tacoma a bit. Tacoma's book this year is "The Things They Carried," a really wonderful book, and about the only Vietnam story that I really like.

So here's looking forward to a literary trip this spring.

On Barack Obama in South Carolina

What can I say tonight, except that the worried feeling these last three weeks has dissipated. February 5 is still going to be a challenge for Obama, but it's going in the right direction, certainly.

His acceptance speech tonight was very good (although I'm still pretty partial to the Jefferson/Jackson Dinner speech and the Iowa acceptance speech):



I am also heartened by the endorsement of Carolina Kennedy in the New York Times, especially after their editorial board endorsed Clinton earlier this week. I'm surprised Obama too got more votes in the primary than McCain and Huckabee got in last week's Republican primary combined.

I guess what I'm most feeling tonight is pride, which feels funny to write. But I am very proud tonight. Proud that I can say I'm one of the many Obama donors, that I've seen in him Seattle, that I blogged about how much he wowed me in February of last year.

I am very very excited. As I said, February 5 is going to be a very hard contest. But I have great hope.

Want to be in a play written by Brent Hartinger?

I'm directing a 10 minute play for the upcoming Festival of Northwest Plays. Not only that, the play is written by the local novelist and playwright Brent Hartinger!

That said, I'm looking for actors who might want to audition. We'll be doing auditions Sunday and Monday night. Looking for a man (20s - 30s) and a woman (20s - 30s) and a man (20s - ??).

Interested in auditioning or learning more and setting up an audition? E-mail me at erikemery@gmail.com.

No one reads anymore ... but they didn't used to.

At his lecture last week, Michael Chabon was asked about the decline of reading. He didn't believe that there was actually a decline. He said when he was young and bookish that there were only a couple kids in the class who were the same way and that looking at his son's class, the numbers still held pretty true.

And today I see an article in Harper's by the author and literary critic Ursula K. Le Guin who argues the same thing:

I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

Perhaps this is the new spin to stop all the stories about the decline of reading. Unfortunately the article is for subscribers only, and I'm not a subscriber, so I didn't get more than 2 paragraphs into the article for her to lay it out more fully.

But I think that it is safe to say that at one point people did read more. Flash back to pre-radio days and I would venture that they read a good deal more. Radio probably cut into the percentage of Americans who read and television and film probably really cut into it. I'm sure it has leveled off since, although the rise of the Internet has almost certainly got people reading more again, just not books.

What's interesting is that theater and books were probably both hurt by television and film but for different reasons.

Theater was hurt because it suddenly lost on the economies of scale and couldn't compete for a family's "entertainment dollar." Enough people chose not to go to the theater that it closed the theaters, and suddenly no one got to go to the theater.

Books aren't like that. Books are hurt by the fact that reading one takes 10 hours, that they can have dense, confusing parts (unlike television), and that, in contrast to sitcoms, can seem relatively boring.

All that is to say, in the last 50 years, I would venture that Chabon and Le Guin are right: reading has probably not declined substantially. But in the last 150 years, I'm sure it has plummeted.

Awesome. Just Awesome.

You owe it to yourself to take 4 minutes from your day and watch this YouTube video.



It's what YouTube is for.

More on Obama

This time from South Carolina, where he just picked up a newspaper endorsement. Here's the part I like best:

And America certainly has things to get done.

From terrorism and climate change to runaway federal entitlement spending, there are big challenges to be faced. Sen. Obama is the only Democrat who plausibly can say that he wants to work with Americans across the political spectrum to address such subjects - and he has the integrity and the skills of persuasion that make him the best-qualified among the remaining Democratic hopefuls to address these challenges.

He would be a groundbreaking nominee. More to the point, he makes a solid case that he is ready to lead the whole country. We see Sen. Barack Obama as the best choice in Saturday’s Democratic primary.

Gotta love it. Here's the full endorsement.

Drop Office?

So I'm considering not doing the next version of Microsoft Office ... my account for Office has a three computer limit and I've hit it, which means I can't load it on to my new desktop.

All right. S'cool. The price of the brand spanking new Office Student & Home Edition is about $140 +/-. Or, I could branch out and--for the first time since the early 90's when my family dropped WordPerfect--drop Microsoft Office.

I've been eying Apple's iWork and it's not that bad. I'm using a test version to see what I think, and it's a pretty similar environment to Office. Pages is fully compatible with Word (in that I can open any Word file or export any document as a Word file or as a .pdf). Numbers isn't incredibly powerful, but powerful enough for my needs.

Combine Apple's iWork with Google Docs and I don't know what exactly I'd be missing from Office. It's still kinda scary, I gotta say. Office has just been one of those indispensable tools for so many years. But making the leap to Apple laptops in 2002 was scary (for about 5 minutes) and then it became awesome.

I am using Google Docs almost daily now. I share spreadsheets all over the place and jointly edit documents. It's good for many things and bad for many others (although there's a new feature that shows up every month or two. The question is, can Pages and Numbers fill in the gap enough that I don't miss Word and Excel.

We'll see. I'm going to give Pages a month until my test runs out.

NYT columnists divided on Clinton-Obama

It's interesting to read the New York Times editorial page these day. Columnists aren't allowed to endorse candidates. But that doesn't stop them from picking sides.

Maureen Dowd seems to loathe the Clintons. And here's Frank Rich yesterday:

The playing of the race card by Hillary Clinton’s surrogates to diminish Barack Obama was sinister. But the Clintons are hardly bigots, and the Democratic candidates all have a history of fighting strenuously for inclusiveness.

Here's Kristof, comparing Obama to both Bill Clinton in 1992 and Abraham Lincoln:

In the same way, Mr. Obama’s years as an antipoverty organizer give him insights
into one of our greatest challenges: how to end cycles of poverty. That front-line experience is one reason Mr. Obama not only favors government spending programs, like early-childhood education, but also cultural initiatives like promoting responsible fatherhood.

Then there’s Mr. Obama’s grade-school years in Indonesia. Our most serious mistakes in foreign policy, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been a blindness to other people’s nationalism and an inability to see ourselves as others see us. Mr. Obama seems to have absorbed an intuitive sensitivity to that problem. For starters, he understood back in 2002 that American troops would not be greeted in Iraq with flowers.

He then goes on to say that experience gets you Dick Cheney, in a pretty solid blow against Clinton. The only columnist really on the Hillary Clinton side is Paul Krugman who has pretty solidly been for her for awhile now. It's an interesting time ...

Finito!

The rough draft of Sometimes I Despair, the book I started Nov 1, is finally done. It ended up shorter than I expected. It's about 300 words shy of 50,000. I rushed it at the end so I know that I'll be adding a few thousand more words in here and there. At the same time, there are probably
a few thousand that need to come out.

But the first draft is done.

Sweetness.

Dang. Obama lost in Nevada.

Edwards seems like he's done for, having taken a Bill Richardson-like 4%. Obama did 45%, and Clinton was at 51%. Those are big numbers for Obama, but obviously not big enough.

I have high hopes that South Carolina will still go his way. If you judge by the Latino turnout in Nevada it seems likely that California will go to Clinton. Maybe Obama could snag New York ... that would be an incredible coup for him.

Either way, it looks like Washington still might be in the cards come Feb. 9. I would prefer that things were wrapped up already for him by then, but I'll definitely be caucusing now. Here's the Washington State Democrat's Caucus Finder so you know where to go on the 9th.

UPDATE: I didn't realize this, but Obama actually won more delegates in Nevada that Clinton. He also tied her for delegates in New Hampshire. Since this is all about convention delegates rather than voters, I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more from the Obama campaign about delegates. From Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic.

Obama and Clinton are also both accusing each other of dirty politics in Nevada. It'll be interesting to see what sticks and what doesn't.

All roads ...

I finished HBO's Rome yesterday and have still been trying to figure out what to make of it. It's intriguing for a couple reasons.

First, the sets and the setting and the entire production really makes you feel like you are in ROME in 44 BC. And glad to have missed it, too. Life was very different back then. Violent and short.

Second, the starring duo Lucius Verinus and Titus Pullo are a great combo. They work well together, they are fun to watch, and the two actors pull off a legitimate friendship really well.

And third, the new look at historical people was pretty fun. I'm not exactly up on my ancient history, but I knew enough (and remembered some good bits from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) that helped.

I'm not sure I can recommend it to people, the way I can Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, the Office, and Lost. It was pretty good TV, but not crazy good TV. And with all the crazy good TV out right now, why would I recommend anything less? It was also violent and packed with sex and nudity, like any HBO show.

Next up, The Wire, which has been raved about on-line by Matthew Yglesias and is supposedly Barack Obama's favorite show. But Marilyn Strickland has told me for awhile to watch it too, so I guess she's in good company there.

UWT and Market Street

Peter Callaghan has some thoughts on the UWT master planning. Also more at Exit133 about the community's involvement in the process.

Previously the plan has called for closing Market Street. A lot of community members are against it because it is a major arterial. And, as Callaghan points out, UWT doesn't want the conversation to be solely about whether or not to close Market.

Callaghan writes:

[UWT] wants the community to begin imagining a university that will continue evolving from its birth as an option for place-bound students.

That might mean dormitories and apartments. It might mean dining halls and recreational facilities. It might mean applied research labs and places for the transfer of technology and innovation to private businesses. It might mean increased cultural opportunities for students, faculty and the community. It might mean more open space and more gathering space. It might mean parking garages and more transit opportunities.

Sign me up for all that in a heartbeat!

As to the question of closing Market, I'm not sure it's an all bad option. It would certainly disrupt traffic flow. I wonder if Fawcett could be widened and improved to be an alternate arterial if Market were closed ... although if you're going that far up the hill, then you may as well just count Tacoma Ave as the replacement arterial.

Closing the street might not be all bad ... but I just don't see a compelling rationale for closing the street.

Save the OddFellows Hall ... twice

I see via the Stranger's Slog that the Seattle Oddfellows Hall's new owner is raising rents pricing out the arts and civic organizations that currently make it a cool space.

From SaveTheOddfellowsHall.org:

After a century as a gathering place, assembly hall and home to numerous non-profit organizations the current owners of the Odd Fellows Hall have decided to cash out to the highest bidder. The pending new owners have indicated that they will be increasing rents by more than 200% for the existing tenants and their plans include renovating the building into market-rate office spaces and retail.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Tacoma has an Oddfellows Hall. It is home to two arts organizations, two art galleries, a coffee shop and a bakery, plus a whole bunch of artist lofts. That's right, the Tacoma Merlino Art Center is an old Oddfellows Hall.

But here's the rub: the Merlino Art Center, an incredible architectural jewel for the St. Helens Neighborhood, currently is NOT on the Tacoma Historic Registry. I'm not saying it needs to be saved, but it's worth remembering that a major arts center in downtown in a historic building is not protected in any way, shape, or form.

I'm just sayin' ...

Link to Entry on OddFellows Hall at Pierce County Building Index

Happy Hour - Michael Chabon - Happy Hour

Michael Chabon is a pretty cool fella it turns out. His lecture at Pierce College was read, something that initially put me off but eventually engrossed me. It was almost a short story in and of itself, including a good ending quote--"We're the Washington Post. We print facts."

The sentence probably doesn't make much sense to you, but I discovered that on the same day he gave his lecture to us, he published an article in the Huffington Post that slams the Washington Post writer Richard Cohen for trying to smear Obama.

His Q&A was very good too--lots of good questions, lots of good answers. I myself asked him how he handles genre, since he works so much with "genre fiction" like mysteries and children's books. I was also really stupid and forgot to bring a book for him to sign and since I have them all, I didn't really want to buy another one and get it signed. So I settled for a handshake and went my merry way.

We did start the evening with a couple friends at the Pacific Grill Happy Hour, which has some very fine (and not spendy) things on it. Interesting things, too, like spicy roasted pumpkin seeds, blue cheese tater tots, and Kobe beef hot dog sliders.

After the lecture, which was also attended by ZestyEnterprise and her SB, the four of us couldn't figure out where to go and eventually ended up right back at Pacific Grill for their second Happy Hour, from 9 - 10. Same good stuff, same good prices, but ... you know, later.

It was a very full and very fun night out. Thanks to Pierce College for bringing such a cool writer!

Apple is just cool

So. Apple had their very cool MacWorld event today. Last year, they unveiled the iPhone. They didn't come close to touching it this year, but they still know what's what when it comes to creating absolutely awesome stuff.

I do appreciate the changes that have been made to my iPhone. One cool feature: I can press a button and it will triangulate off of cell phone towers to give an approximate idea of where I am. This is handy if you're in ... let's say an unfamiliar neighborhood of Seattle and want an idea of what the streets around you look like.

I also like that i can add buttons to the home screen, like the cool people who have hacked their phones.

But of course the awesome new product at the MacWorld was the MacBook Air. Why is this so cool? Because it's crazy--and I mean crazy--thin. The thing can fit in to a manila envelope. It has no CDRom/DVD drive, but you can install a program on your home computer that will allow you to "borrow" its drive over a wireless network if you need to upload some software (unbelievably cool). Watch the guided tour if you want an idea of why this sucker is the bomb.

That said, there's absolutely no reason why I need one of these. It will be my present to me when I publish my first novel, but until that point, I'm going to have to stay away. It's crazy expensive, of course, even for Apple. And it's made for someone on the go--mostly planes, I'd say--who has to be able to work in hotels, coffee shops, etc and wants something truly "ultra-portable." And this is it. My tiny 12" powerbook (now discontinued with Apple) used to be about the best choice out there for portability from Apple but this one really blows it out of the water.

Also, if you're one of those folks who dreams of the idea of a computer with not a single moving part (save for the hinge that opens the laptop) you can pay even more--another $1,400 to get a solid-state hard drive. Your entire hard drive would be made out of the same stuff as thumbnail drives, iPhones, etc. It makes the computer incredibly reliable and much closer to indestructible ... but $3,100 for a laptop ... dang.

Makes me want to finish the book up asap so I can get one.

U.P. Town Center

Now that University Place has scrapped it's third town center developer, I read that they are holding a Town Hall (but where will they hold it? ... just kidding) to talk about it.
I know a lot of residents are opposed to the project. Here's one in the Tribune yesterday:

“We’re a bedroom community,” said Brian Stemp. “Do we need a large-scale Town Center?”

If you don't want your city to go broke, then yes. Because of our increased reliance on sales tax after the loss of funding to municipalities following I-695, cities are desperate to build more retail within their borders.

So once again, I'll make the point: if UP wants to keep its suburban identity, the best thing for them to do is to be annexed into Tacoma. As I mentioned in discussing St. Paul, there are ways to give UP a very strong district council that has the ability to rule on land-use questions in the UP District (perhaps even UP borough, if we want to borrow from the terms of the most successful annexation in history--New York, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, and The Bronx?).

Of course, more UP residents currently oppose annexation into UP than they do a town center. But if they like the suburban feel they have right now and don't want an urbanized core, they have three options:

1. Move, because UP needs the sales tax revenue.
2. Change Washington State tax policy.
3. Get annexed into Tacoma.

Am I missing an option?

Um ... moo?

Every so often a good headline catches your eye. Like "Zoo beefs up tiger exhibit" in today's Tribune.

For some reason I don't think they're adding cows to it. That seems like it would be a bad idea.

Michael Chabon's in town next week

Not sure if I'm late to the ballgame with this, but the awesome author Michael Chabon (Yiddish Policeman's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) is at Pierce College January 15 (next Tuesday). Cost for the general public is $15.

How do you say, "I am so there" in Yiddish?

I reviewed The Yiddish Policeman's Union for Exit133 here.

Link to Pierce College Event Page

11th & Yakima Intersection Annoys Me

There's a driving habit that I see again and again in Tacoma that only occurs at one particular intersection.

Picture if you can, 11th & Yakima. 11th is divided into 4 lanes--1 going downhill, 1 turn lane in the middle, and two lanes going up hill. Yakima is divided into 3 lanes, one lane each way, plus the turn lane.

So if you approach the intersection from any direction and want to turn left there is a turn-lane there to accomodate you. And yet! And yet 9 times out of 10 drivers going up hill on 11th who want to turn on to Yakima will not use the turn lane. They will instead turn from the regular lane of traffic as if there was not a turn lane present at all.

I see it regularly--probably weekly--and seldom see a driver who uses the turn lane. Most of them are turning from the lane of traffic. What could account for this behavior? My only explanation is that the driver is aware that there are two lanes going up the hill, and so assumes--incorrectly--that there are two lanes of traffic coming down the hill. But this is not the case. There is only one lane going downhill on 11th.

This would seem to create a potential area for serious problems: a car in the left lane and the turn lane could in theory both try to turn onto Yakima simultaneously.

But what it really does is slow my commute up the hill every morning. As anyone who drives around downtown Tacoma regularly know, the lights on 11th are timed for the drivers going up hill; the lights on 9th are timed for the drivers going downhill. Waiting for a car who is blocking the lane of traffic on Yakima for no good reason is really annoying. It throws off my ability to speedily get to Pine St. with every light timed in my favor.

So if you are one of the people who are unaware of the left turn lane on 11th ... become aware. And stop slowing down my morning commute!

St. Paul, MN: A Tacoma Sister City?

It's not just Duluth, as I blogged about earlier this week. St. Paul, Minnesota, has a lot of similarities to Tacoma as well.

It's growing up in the shadow of its more prominent, more artsy neighbor Minneapolis, very much like us. It's downtown core has been hurt in recent years (actually more recent years than Tacoma). Their urban malls closed and now getting businesses back in to the core is a challenge. Like Tacoma they are worried about departing businesses: 3M in their case, which just announced today that they are leaving St. Paul). They also have the random famous person who grew up there that they now idolize (Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts).

I do appreciate that St. Paul has given substantial power to their neighborhoods. The district councils have a fair say over land use issues. All the times I've stayed in the City, both downtown and out of downtown, I've had a good time. There's a lot going for it, and they are really self-consciously pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, just like Tacoma. The same city pride that exists here most definitely exists there.

It's a cool place.

Link to St. Paul, MN on Wikipedia

Flickr photo from user Clairity

Obama and Clinton

Congrats to her, although I'm still definitely an Obama guy.

I was deeply unimpressed with President Clinton's rant against Obama yesterday. And I might have feared the politics the Clintons would have unleashed if she'd been trounced again. But this is a good thing for the Democrats for a long time.

Here's a random question for the News Tribune, though ... Barack Obama's victory last week was surprising and certainly qualified as "breaking news." Hillary Clinton's victory tonight was surprising and is also "breaking news." But the Trib didn't e-mail me when Barack won, but they did when Hillary won tonight. It's not that big of a deal, but as an Obama supporter, I am curious why there would be a discrepancy.

The Goose

I'm sure my dad will be happy to hear that Goose Gossage made the Hall of Fame today. He was the only person to make it this year after being on the ballot for 9 years.

From the NYT:

Rich “Goose” Gossage, the intimidating closer with the explosive fastball and the Fu Manchu mustache, secured baseball’s highest honor on Tuesday when he was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Sweeney Todd -- The Movie

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street lives up to his name. Johnny Depp is scary and funny as the barber. Helena Bonham Carter is a great pie maker. The throat-slitting is incerdibly gory … it’s a pretty dang good adaptation.

I’d seen the musical in college and was not sure what I thought of it. It’s a classic revenge tale. Like Hamlet, but with the blood of Macbeth. Because it’s so audacious, it’s full of life, even though it’s so much about death.

The music is pretty catchy (although the music is not up to the same standard as the other movie musical I saw this week — Across the Universe — but that shouldn’t be a surprise). The acting is good, the story fun. But man, the blood, the blood … proceed with caution.

Across the Universe

When the preview for Across the Universe, Julie Taymor's Beatles musical, played in front of Spiderman 3, I thought they absolutely missed their audience. And it was a really bad idea. Even the preview wasn't very good.

But the movie, now having seen it at a second run theater in Minneapolis, is a lot of fun. The music is (naturally) great. Joe Cocker, Bono, and the cast make you fall for the Beatles all over again. The story is full, the music adds to it, and some of the scenes work just perfectly.

Sometimes there are throwaway jokes and lines that fall a bit flat, because they are too obviously quoting lines. Working in phrases like "when I'm 64" and "she came in through the bathroom window" can get a little tired.

But there is real joy here, I think, in its creativity and storytelling. I'm pretty tired of stories about the "tumultuous 60s" and Vietnam, but this one does it pretty dang well. Largely by avoiding the drugs as a key part of its storyline.

(The tradition tumultuous 60s stories being those that start with innocent kids experimenting with sex and drugs before the war plucks them all off into the convenient roles of solider, hippy, college student, black militant, draft dodger, etc; this one handles the period the best, I think.)

I'd recommend it as a rental, if you like the Beatles. It gets better as it goes along too. Particularly Let it Be, Come Together, Dear Prudence, and Revolution.

Duluth: A Tacoma Sister City?

What does Duluth, Minnesota, have to do with Tacoma? A lot, I think. It's about half our size, but is a major Great Lakes port. Its downtown is built on the same kind of sloping hill as Tacoma's, the have their equivalent of the Esplanade, and it has a cool historic and industrial lift bridge at the base of its downtown (seen above) ... plus their newspaper is called The News Tribune (confusing right?).

Having been there this week, I will also add that it feels a lot like Tacoma too. The old brick architecture, the industrial history is very evident, as it is here.

They have a couple things going for them: where Tacoma's slope levels out on just one street--Pacific Ave--Duluth has a couple of streets at the base of their hill. Their lift bridge is also still functioning ... so much they even shut it down for a day every year for a big party mid-span. I also noticed a core of hotels in downtown. Duluth does have pretty good tourism from what I can tell, a lot of it is from Midwesterners going north to Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters on vacation--Duluth is a good stopping point for that.

They have plenty of disadvantages to Tacoma, of course. Starting with the weather, of course. Not only is it damned cold, but when Lake Superior freezes over all the port traffic stops, which isn't that convenient. And they are a long ways from anything else, whereas Tacoma is pretty well connected--thanks to Sea-Tac and our proximity to a major metropolis...

Anyway, it's interesting to see other cities around the country similar to Tacoma.

Link to Duluth on Wikipedia

(Flicker photo of Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge from rrazor)

Obama has an historic night

issuesIn a state that is 97% white, Obama is 7% over the polling than Edwards and Clinton. It is an incredible night for him. What an incredible night ... I am so incredibly excited.