Red Wine

Up the creek

2005-08-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Now that the pressure's off (slightly) at work, I was able to take a long weekend to go car camping with the family in the Cascades. We never stay in organized campgrounds, the way we had to when we lived in California. Nope, in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, you can camp for free just about anywhere except campgrounds and trailheads.

Since this blog has a readership approaching zero, it's probably safe to mention where our favorite spots are: along the North Fork of the Sauk River, southeast of Darrington. Take Road 49 off the Mountain Loop Highway and head upstream to several fine riverside campsites. Our favorite site at a 90-degree bend in the river was occupied, so we found a new one, complete with two fire rings and an ancient table, not far from where Sloan Creek joins the North Fork, elevation 2,000 feet. We pitched our tents in an old-growth grove where trees up to 6 feet in diameter provided a shady canopy over a site that could easily have held a dozen people. Surrounding it were thickets of ripe huckleberries. The road was a hundred feet away. So was the creek, but that was OK -- we heard it loud and clear, and strolled over whenever we wanted to soak our feet. Gourmet cooking and reading P. G. Wodehouse aloud around the campire -- now that's the life! We didn't see another soul all weekend.

The trout weren't biting, but we didn't care. They'll just be bigger next time.

It's alive

2005-07-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

No posts for almost a month? Here's why.

My group has been hard at work building a new version of MSN Shopping that finally went into public beta last Friday. While it still has a few rough edges, it's a huge improvement on our current site and, in fact, is suddenly one of the better shopping sites on the Web. It has five times as many products as our old site and a bunch of cool new features: improved product and price comparisons, .

How do we compare to a few other large sites? (July 18 data)

Site

Results found

Results visible

Refine by...

Sort by...

Old MSN

1,733

Price range
Brand

Price
Relevance

New MSN

10,047

5,000
(all 10K
if you
refine)

Price range
Brand
Seller
Screen size
TV type
Display type
On sale
Free shipping (soon)

Low price
High price
Popularity
Highest rated
Lowest rated
Name A-Z
Name Z-A

Froogle

"About
730,000"

1,000

Price range
Seller

Price

Amazon

3,160

Brand
Type
Screen size

Low price
High price
Bestselling
Rating
Name A-Z
Name Z-A

Yahoo

1,573

Price range
Brand
TV type
Screen size
HDTV compatible
On sale
Brand

Price
"Top results"

(The most interesting comparison, I think, is between how many results Froogle claims to have and how many it actually shows. Froogle may claim millions of results, but it never displays more than 1,000 results for any search.)

My role? I designed the new user interface and a number of front-end features, including the Recently Viewed section (it remembers what you've looked at, and doesn't share that info with Microsoft) and the nifty little +/- controls that let you see more data without having to reload a page.

Try it at beta.shopping.msn.com.

Anyway, that's what's kept me too busy to post.

Albanian wedding

2005-06-22T22:55:00.000-07:00

My band played at Seattle biggest Albanian wedding of the year over the weekend. OK, Albanian-American, really ... but the bride was Albanian, so they were in charge.

I love playing at weddings. They're always a logistical mess -- everything runs late, dinner takes too long to serve, nerves are too fraught -- but people's emotions are close to the surface, and when musicians connect with the audience, the connection runs deep.

Which it did Saturday night. We learned half a dozen Albanian songs for the gig, which astonished them, and between those and our standard lineup of Balkan hits, we kept the dance floor jammed for five hours. The bride called us two days later, saying all her relatives were still talking about the music, amazed that Americans could play it that well. Her unofficial MC told us that while it's easy to bring in an Albanian band from out of town, "they play for money, and you play from the heart." The relatives from New York, we hear, will be heading back with stories about what they heard in Seattle.

That's still what does it for us: the look on emigres' faces when they hear their music played with the right fire in the belly. They know it when they hear it. It's all about raw emotion, not intellect. It's not music under glass, the way too many American academic preservationists play it. It's as alive as the Delta blues, and it comes from much the same place, somewhere deep in the solar plexus.

Holla!

Daddy dearest

2005-06-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

Unlike the O.J. case, I'm mildly pleased that MJ beat the rap.

My guess is that he may have been, in fact, guilty of at least some of the charges. But the jury rightly stuck to standard of reasonable doubt, and when you're half convinced the alleged victims' families are less interested in justice than in cash, doubt is reasonable.

I have little interest in celebrity foibles, and to the extent I care about this case at all, I wonder why Michael did what he may have done. It's hard to avoid wondering whether whatever happened to those kids in Neverland was an echo of what happened, a generation earlier, to a twisted little Peter Pan who also happened to be a gifted performer.

Child abuse, as a rule, doesn't occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an environment in which one generation's victims become the next generation's perpetrators. I don't say that Michael was either. I don't say that the sins of the father were visited on the son. I say nothing. Neither does Michael.

Deep Who?

2005-06-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

So Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt after all? That's interesting to know after all these years, but by now, it's not much more than a historical footnote. A 20-inch story, tops.

The Seattle Times, though, played it like the Second Coming this morning: lead headline and two stories on the front page; a full page of analysis, complete with an obligatory Watergate timeline, on page 3; and two and a half more pages of navel-gazing inside. Call it four pages of newsprint, all told. I lament the trees that died in vain.

I mean, who cares about Watergate, let alone, Deep Throat, today? Except for fueling a generation of journalistic hubris, it had no lasting political impact. My college-age sons might dimly remember a mention of "Watergate" in some American history class, but if they even bothered to look at today's paper, I'm sure they would have been as baffled by the flood-the-zone coverage as everyone else under the age of 50.

And editors wonder why their readers are disappearing...

Art at any price

2005-05-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

Let's see if I have this right. The thrust of art critic Sheila Farr's main front-page story in this Sunday's Seattle Times is that the art that the city is buying is too safe -- it's not controversial enough. Taxpayers aren't forking out enough dough for art that offends them.

Here's how it works: In 1973, the Seattle City Council passed a law requiring that 1% of its capital budget be spent on art. In the first few years, Farr reminds us, the city commissioned some works that raised the public's hackles, like the $80,000 chunks of concrete and rock lying on the ground in Myrtle Edwards Park. But today, she says the city is buying ... bland art.

What did she expect? Inevitably, the 1% program has become "welfare for artists," as a friend of art bureaucraft Virginia Wright puts it. "A lot of really good artists don't want to be involved in the process because it's cumbersome," admits city arts commissioner Richard Andrews. The artists who get the money "know how to sell it and work the system ... a lot of it is mediocre work," adds former commissioner John Feodorov. His advice to artists who want a ride on the public gravy train: "Get a job."

That won't happen as long as the 1% program continues to spend -- how much, exactly? Farr's story doesn't say; apparently it didn't occur to her to ask. But do the math: The city's 2005 capital budget totals $479 million. One percent of that is $4.8 million.

About $3 million of that comes from City Light, whose participation in the program is being challenged in court. Even if you don't count that money, the remaining money in the 1% program is enough to cover roughly 10% of the Seattle public schools' $20 million deficit this year.

So rather than asking why public art is bland, readers might be wondering: Why is Seattle spending anything on public art, bland or otherwise, at a time when it's planning to close public schools for lack of cash?

(I know, I know -- the money comes out of different budgets. But it all comes from the same place: taxpayers' pockets. And if they wanted to, the city and the school district could offer taxpayers a deal: We'll drop the silly 1% rule if you'll let us raise taxes for schools by the same amount.)

Readers might wonder -- but The Times doesn't. No surprise that an art critic is oblivious to reality. But it's curious that the editors who gave this story most of the front page, and two full pages inside, didn't even think to ask how much public art costs taxpayers -- or whether there might be better ways to spend the public's money.

Very stale

2005-04-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Ariana Huffington, possibly the ditziest candidate ever to run for governor of California and lose, has now set her sights on publishing: She's inviting 250 of "the most creative minds" in the U.S. to contribute to a blog she's launching in May to "punch holes in that very stale way of looking at the world." The NYT evidently expects it to become the left's answer to Matt Drudge.

Who are the most creative minds in America? Her list includes Walter Cronkite, Norman Lear, Mike Nichols, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Jann Wenner, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gary Hart, Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

So now we know the secret of creativity: Get on the media A list in New York or L.A. Then wait a generation.

Not the real world

2005-04-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

A while back, I wrote that the real bias in the press is not to the left or right, but towards government. Most journalists spend their days swimming in a sea of government -- in part because it's so easy to cover -- and over time, come to mistake this for the real world, where people rarely interact with government and prefer it that way.

A publisher in North Carolina recently came to the same conclusion:

Look at the front page of almost any daily newspaper in any town in America. What do you see? Invariably there will be a story or two about some victim group or person who is being helped by a government program...

You’ve all seen them, especially around the holidays. Editors seem to think this activity is the essence of American life. Except for the advertising, a newspaper reader from another planet would never know there was a private sector. Editorial content is skewed heavily toward the activities of the welfare state because that’s the sector that reporters and editors identify with.

Unfortunately for newspapers, most people have nothing to do with the welfare state and its many mechanisms, except for funding it with their tax dollars. The private sector is where they live. They go to work, raise their kids, pay their taxes and don’t ask anything from the government except for national defense, good schools, garbage pickup, water and sewer hookups and effective police protection. They don’t want to be hit over the head with stories designed to make them feel guilty for not needing government welfare.

He goes on to offer thoughts about why newspapers have become divorced from the real world. If you're interested, read the whole thing.

The power of prayer

2005-04-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

Back in 2001 -- less than a month after 9/11 -- Columbia University Medical Center released a study in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine claiming that infertile woman were twice as likely to become pregnant via in-vitro fertilization if Christians prayed on their behalf. The press went nuts. The New York Times covered it, and it made Good Morning America.

Some of us refused to believe. As it turns out, rightly so: CICSCOP now reports that the study was a fraud. Here's what's now known about the three men originally cited as its authors:

Dr. Kwang Yul Cha left Columbia shortly after the study was published and refuses to answer questions.
Dr. Rogerio Lobo, who recently quit as chairman of the OB/GYN department at Columbia, claims he knew nothing about the study until six to twelve months after it was published. A press release citing him as the lead author has been removed from Columbia's Web site.
Daniel P. Wirth, who has no medical degree, was indicted a year after the study appeared on charges of bilking Adelphia Communications out of $2.1 million in phony consultant fees. The FBI later said "Daniel P. Wirth" is also known as John Wayne Truelove, who was charged with 13 counts of mail fraud and 17 other violations of federal law. He is also suspected of bilking Social Security out of more than $100,000 by collecting payments in the name of his dead father. He subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and faced a sentence of five years in federal prison and forfeiture of more than $1 million in ill-gotten gains.

And this farce -- which further tatters Columbia's reputation -- is nevertheless the best-documented evidence in scientific journals of the power of prayer.

As CISCOP notes, "In the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions."

Remember this when the old men in Rome elect their new head witch doctor.

Puff piece

2005-04-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

Paul Andrews, the Seattle Times' Dan Gillmor wannabe, is hardly known for incisive writing, but his total puff piece the other day on MoveOn.org was even more vapid than usual.

MoveOn, in collaboration with Michael Moore and Hollywood, arguably cost Kerry the election -- but when Paul talked to MoveOn's Adam Ruben, he couldn't even bring himself to ask what went wrong. Instead, he set up a straw man in the form of a magazine article that "went so far as to suggest" that MoveOn et al. blew it -- and then spent the rest of his piece saying it ain't so. Which right-wing rag would say such a thing? Um, Rolling Stone.

Hey, Paul! Get a clue. Yeah, MoveOn used the Internet, and yeah, they raised $60 mil -- but they wasted it all. How many votes did the loony left change last November? Zip, zero, nema, nada. You don't win campaigns by preaching to the choir. You win campaigns by moving to the center. MoveOn doesn't get it -- but Hillary does, and that's why she's the Democrats' best shot in '08.

Good news is no news

2005-03-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

Attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq have fallen "dramatically" since the Jan. 30 elections and are down 25% since last fall's attack on Fallujah, the AP reports. Again one senses a corner being turned.

Where does The Seattle Times play this rather interesting news, after months of drumbeat coverage of quagmire? As a brief on A9, the least prominent of four war stories on a slow day, with a tiny 1/18/2 headline.

Live, continued

2005-03-22T23:29:00.000-08:00

Here's an early taste of our band's recent live recording:

Kerta mange daje in Windows Media and MP3 formats
(Windows Media is half the size and sounds slightly better to me)

This is a song in the Romany (Gypsy) language composed by Shemo Ibrahimi from Kosovo, about a young man who's been drafted into the army and who asks his mother to brew him one last cup of coffee before he goes. The most famous recording is probably that by Esma Redzhepova, who performed it at her Seattle-area concert earlier this year -- she happened to spot me singing along in the audience, and graciously invited me to share her mic for a chorus. Our version features Eva Moon on lead vocal; I'm on clarinet.

What we need is a good 5 cent nickel

2005-03-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

The U.S. blows it again when designing a new coin, the 2005 Lewis and Clark bicentennial nickel:

What's the problem? There is no numeral for quantity -- no big 5. The coin's value is a mystery if you don't happen to know what "five" means. Even if you expect everyone living in the U.S. to read English, which would be controversial, it's colossally rude to assume that every foreign visitor can. Quick, what's "five" in Japanese?

The dime is worse -- instead of 10 or ten, it says ONE DIME, and if you don't know what dime means, tough. The quarter says QUARTER DOLLAR, and if don't recognize QUARTER or can't divide 100 by 4 in your head, too bad. If I had a 50-cent piece lying around, I bet it'd say HALF DOLLAR instead of FIFTY CENTS.

American coins are like American units of measurement: our own little secret code. If you don't understand it, go back to where you came from. Even our coinage is Darwinian.

Movement in search of a cause

2005-03-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

A few thousand people got damp at a rally in Seattle yesterday. The Seattle Times called it an "anti-war" rally, but the banners in the newspaper photo told a different story:

CIVIL UNIONS FOR ALL. UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE. STOP ARMING DICTATORS. SUPPORT FAMILY FARMS. FAIRNESS IN LENDING. VOTER BILL OF RIGHTS.

These issues, of course, have no connection with the war in Iraq, except perhaps STOP ARMING DICTATORS -- and that was the explicit goal of the war, an irony lost on the crowd. The anti-war movement has been hijacked by the professional left, and as a consequence has failed to achieve anything.

The real war in Iraq today is being waged against the Iraqi people by terrorists who blow up civil servants and behead women and children for kicks. But no one in Seattle marches against that war.

Objectively suggestive

2005-03-18T14:01:00.000-08:00

A Texas state legislator wants to ban "sexually suggestive" cheerleading routines at Texas high school football games. "It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on," he said.

Every red-blooded American should support this proposal for its sheer entertainment value. It will be infinitely amusing to watch a state legislature objectively define "suggestive." By how many millimeters may a behind shake, exactly? Are there other body parts that need to be immobilized? Is it legal to git down if you do it in a chador?

The real winners will be Texas state troopers. Instead of hunting for speeders, they'll have to spend Friday nights in the stands at Nacogdoches High with their binoculars and radar guns, making sure every hip-swiveling Debbie remains within the limits of the law. It's a dirty job ... but someone's got to do it.

Live

2005-03-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

Tonight, most of my band heard the initial mix of the songs we recorded live two weeks ago. It's not bad! We'll probably release some of it as a home-brewed CD. It's our first recording in two years. We performed it live for a small audience at Seattle Drum School's L.A.B. (Little Auditorium in Back), a new, superior performance space with a spacious low stage for musicians, splendid seating for a crowd of maybe 50 and room for another 50+ dancing up front.

I'll post some MP3s from the next mix ... or maybe even a clip from the raw mix once I pry it out of Eva's hands. She did a great version of the Bulgarian slow song Snoshti te videli. The band sounded good on Yuri Yunakov's tune Belmont, too. Stay tuned.

Beta

2005-03-01T23:46:00.000-08:00

I don't write much about work. But if you have the time and interest, check out a new site I helped build: the beta version of the next generation of MSN Shopping.

I designed the new user interface for MSN Shopping. It's the next generation of the UI for Windows Marketplace, which I also designed.

What's different on MSN Shopping? Check out the old and new views of the same category: Women's Casual Shoes. Old view: 60 products. New view: 1,048 products --more than an order-of-magnitude improvement.

Check it out: MSN Shopping Beta.

Albanian wedding

2005-03-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

I am so stoked. An Albanian friend has asked our band to play at her wedding in June, and she lent us a double handful of Albanian CDs to listen to. We have a small Albanian repertoire already, but need to add more.

Whoa, what music! Modern Albanian folk-pop bands are as tight as the big-name wedding bands anywhere else in the Balkans, with killer melodies and lovely, traditionally flavored vocals. I'm spending every minute of my commute these days listening to Xeni, Irma Lebohova, Aziz Murati, Alma Velaj, Bujar Qamili and more. Alas, I live only 12 minutes from work, so I may have to start taking detours to catch my favorite tracks. Man, we are going to learn some of this stuff.

Being American

2005-03-01T22:34:00.000-08:00

I'm a Euro-American of long standing; at least one branch of my family has been here since the 1700s. I have three friends who are about to become U.S. citizens. One is from Canada; one is from India; one is from Bulgaria.

Here is what I have told them, and what I gladly say to anyone who aspires to become a citizen of my country:

The day you become a citizen of the United States, you are 100% as American as I am. You are equal to everyone. It doesn't matter where you were born. You have taken the oath and you are one of us: a citizen of an idea, not of blood or birthplace.

This may not be an unmixed joy. No matter how carefully you raise your children in your culture, they will grow up to be 75-100% American. Their children will speak only English, with a perfect TV accent. In two generations or less, America will absorb you into its mainstream.

And our nation will add flavor as a result. Welcome!

None dare call it victory

2005-03-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

In Afghanistan, a free election and a peaceful handover of power.

In Iraq, a free election and a peaceful handover of power.

In Palestine-to-be, a free election and a peaceful handover of power.

In Israel, a decision to withdraw from Gaza.

In Lebanon, the Syrian puppet regime collapses.

In Syria, a Baathist heir begins handing over other Baathists to Iraqi cops.

In Egypt, talk of someone to run against Mubarak.

Hmm. Normally, any of these would be the No. 1 story of any six months in the Middle East. Yet they've all happened in the past six months. And the rate of change seems to be accelerating.

Hmm. It's almost as if everything were turning out exactly as Bush publicly hoped it would. Almost as if he'd been right all along about the war -- albeit at a painful cost. Almost as if we were ... winning.

Update: On NPR this evening, I heard women (and some men) were demonstrating outside the Kuwaiti parliament building, demanding the right for women to vote and run for office. Happening in a vacuum? I don't think so.

Live in the studio

2005-02-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

And for those in Seattle, my band is making a live recording Saturday night to which the public is invited. We'll be playing about a CD's worth of songs at a nice new recording and performance space. Check it out.

Balkanarama live recording session
7:30 PM Saturday, Feb. 26
Seattle Drum School Lab (park in back)
12510 15th Ave NE, Seattle
15th Ave. at 125th St.
All ages -- $5 for studio expenses

The problem with journalism

2005-02-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

The chattersphere is all over bias in the press these days. Is it too liberal? Look at the numbers on party affiliations in newsrooms. Is it too conservative? That's what many editors defensively say they're told.

I worked in large newsrooms for 20 years, and say this traditional left-right debate is orthogonal to the real issue. The "press" (MSM, elite media, whatever you call it) has a bias ... but it is not towards the party of Howard and Hillary. It is towards government.

The press inhabits a world that is dominated by the multiple layers of the state, from city council to state legislature to Congress to White House to EU to UN. Look at the core local newsroom beats: city hall, police, courts, fire, schools, state house, planning commission, social agencies, the military and, of course, the politics desk and Washington bureau. Oh, and a business writer. And a dozen sports writers.

Throughout their careers, journalists spend large amounts of time talking to and writing about public employees. Their conversations take place in and are to a large extent about the world of the public employee: a world that is always doing its best to meet urgent needs, but is sadly short of resources.

Over time, the bureaucratic view becomes most reporters' worldview: Government is the driving force of civil society and its sphere should increase. New programs are needed. Local residents are urgently in need of assistance. Advocates rally in protest against cuts. Study shows need for tax increases.

The problem is, this is not the real world. It is a soap bubble upon the surface of the real world.

The real world is business: private employers pursuing gain in a Darwinian environment almost entirely outside journalists' view. This is where the decisions are made that have the greatest impact on most Americans' daily lives. Where do jobs exist? How good are they? What is for sale, and how much does it cost? These questions are primarily answered, or dictated, by business. I don't mean this critically; capitalism is the best thing we've come up with so far.

Most of the decisions that most affect most Americans' lives happen in the world of business: where they live; what they eat; who they work for; where their job is; how much they earn; what they can buy; prices at stores they shop at; the value of their home; the value of their car; the entertainments they attend; the trips they make; and so on.

Journalists are largely blind to the world of business. Many have little facility with numbers and less with balance sheets. It is easier to write about subjective states of mind: conflict, bias, grief, victimhood, fear, concern. And so they do.

Government is easy to cover: It meets in public at regular locations and intervals and even publishes agendas in advance. It is required to talk to the press.

Business is hard to cover: It meets in private where and when it pleases, and is rarely obliged to say anything to anyone about the decisions that are made.

Guess which gets more column inches?

I submit that the bias observed in the American press is driven more by government's world view than by how reporters vote. Journalists are almost all Democrats, but it's not because they identify with the party. Rather, they identify with the interest groups that identify themselves with the party: politicians and public employees above all, academics, artists, writers, intelligentsia, public-employee unions, advocates for the downtrodden and all the other usual suspects that so predictably show up in news stories.

Business interests are just as deeply in bed with government, of course, but they try to keep it private, and they don't invite the press to watch. So it doesn't get covered ... except afterwards in the rare cases where it becomes scandal, or in the 0.001% of business decisions that the press otherwise happens to stumble across.

And there, I submit, is the bias: not to the left or right -- but towards the public rather than the private sphere. Most journalists don't notice it -- they think the world they live in is normal. It's not. The real world is people everywhere quietly doing private deals, far beyond the reach or interest or understanding of the press.

Back

2005-02-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

Just emerged from a very busy time at work.

CBSchadenfreude

2005-01-10T20:23:00.000-08:00

The red states of the blogosphere are falling all over themselves reading between the lines of CBS' internal verdict on the 60 Minutes hack job that used clumsy forgeries to attack Bush's National Guard record. Was it motivated by bias? Duh. Were the documents fake? Duh. Did the report say so? No. What, you expected it to? At least give 'em credit for not releasing it at 5:30 on a Friday.

My reaction is one big yawn. Who cares whether CBS News self-destructs? You mean, like, it hasn't already? I can't remember the last time I tuned in to a network news show on purpose.

The far more interesting question is where the news center of gravitas will be in, say, five years.

TV? Feh. A newsbot? The Daily Me is a dead end. Bloggers? Entertaining parasites. Newspapers, online or off? They'll be wondering where all their classifieds went -- and how many FTEs they took with them.

What then? We've gotten so good at deconstruction that we've forgotten what construction is.

My 2c: Something will arise from the next-next generation of social networks. News mediated for you by the sum of the vectors of everyone you trust, plus everyone they trust. The algorithm won't choose stories; it'll suggest sources -- and respect your selections. Eventually, money will start flowing in this direction.

It might be v3 of something like Dan Gillmor's startup, but more likely will emerge from somewhere completely unexpected.

I do know what the future won't be: blow-dried.

Melting point

2005-01-07T19:18:00.000-08:00

Seattle is the northernmost large city in the Lower 48 -- it's at roughly the same latitude as Québec or the very tippytop of Maine -- but it has a surprisingly mild climate. We typically get one or two light snowfalls a year, and it's a big deal when even a few flakes fall: Businesses send people home, TV stations go into panic mode and drivers lose their tiny little minds.

Having grown up in Southern California, I crave weather. Anything out of the ordinary is good, especially snow. Nothing adds as much magic to reality as a snowfall, the deeper the better. In the winter of '96, our first in Seattle, we got 18 inches over New Year's, and I thought: Hoo-ya! This place is all right.

Well. For the past week, the National Weather Service has been predicting snow in our suburb, and for the past week, the NWS has been full of it. We saw a couple of flakes the other morning, but nothing stuck. The massive wave of frigid Arctic air predicted just a couple of days ago has been rerouted to Montana or somewhere. The moisture has all been stolen by California. It's 38 and dry outside. Nothing's happening. We've been had! I want my blizzard back! Death to El Niño!

UPDATE: We got an inch of the white stuff Sunday morning. BFD.

Chestita nova godina

2005-01-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

Behave well in this life, and in your next one you'll get to join a band and play live music for a club full of Balkan émigrés on New Year's Eve. Our band did, and once again got to enjoy the curious thrill of having fans come up and start talking to us in Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian because they assume we're countrymen. Except for Amir, we're not -- just Americans in love with songs from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, Greece and Albania.

There's nothing better than seeing people from the old country shed tears in their new homeland out of joy at hearing their favorite music again -- sometimes for the first time in years. We often see fans point cellphones at us after calling friends back home to say, "Can you believe this? We're in Seattle USA and we're hearing ..." We can't think of a better way to say: Welcome to America at its very best.

To our Bulgarian friends in particular: Chestita nova godina! Happy New Year!

Vie d'Arthur

2005-01-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

You know how it goes: A movie gets mixed reviews when it opens, so you wait for the DVD. I passed on King Arthur (Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Kiera Knightley) in the theaters, but caught the director's cut the other day, and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Perhaps critics expected a remake of Camelot, one of the worst hit movies ever made, and were taken aback to see a movie closer to Gladiator in its gritty depiction of a pre-romantic world.

If Arthur really existed, he may well have been what this film portrayed: the dux bellorum who rallied Britons against the Saxon incursions that filled the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the island's last Roman legion. No fairytale Camelot, just blood, guts and honor. Kiera Knightley's Guinevere, closer to Xena than to Vanessa Redgrave's limpid adulteress, feels forced -- but the male relationships that form the dark heart of the movie, on the Saxon side as well as the Roman, do not. Recommended.

Greed neverending

2005-01-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

King County taxpayers and visitors currently cough up just shy of $1 million a week in taxes to subsidize local sports palaces built on the public dime, including KeyArena (Seattle Sonics and Storm), Qwest Field (Seahawks) and Safeco Field (Mariners).

This gravy train is supposed to end in 2020 ... or maybe not. The Seattle Times reports that the Sonics plan to ask the state legislature to make the stadium taxes permanent. A million bucks a week forever. More, in fact, because the revenue base for the 2% hotel/motel tax, .017% sales tax, 0.5% restaurant food-and-beverage tax and 2% car-rental tax will grow over time.

Expect people to be instantly up in arms over this. There's still a lot of animosity over the way the baseball and football stadiums were foisted on the public -- miltibillionaire Seahawks owner Paul Allen shoulda paid cash -- and the stadium levy that raised the most money last year, the restaurant tax, is the one that hits locals hardest.

When will state and local governments wise up? Pro sports are entertainment, not public services. They already lead a soft life, with guaranteed revenue from TV deals and other licensing agreements. They don't deserve public subsidies of any sort -- not in Seattle, not anywhere. Let NFL, NBA and MLB teams pay their own way or go belly up. Maybe they'll discover en route that journeyman jocks aren't inherently worth $5 million or $10 million a year...

Catastrophe

2004-12-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

Like billions of others, our family has been following the mounting death toll from the Asian tsunami with horrified fascination. My wife and I donated to the relief effort last night, and both sons more to the relief effort than the government has, and I'm sure the same is true in the U.S., which is never stingy in cases like this.

As usual, the people are out in front of their leaders. Expect more of the same in future large disasters.

Once was enough

2004-12-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

As even folks outside Washington are dimly aware, our state has been in the throes of the closest gubernatorial election anywhere, ever. Republican Dino Rossi led the election-night tally by 261 votes. A mandatory machine recount shaved his lead to 42 votes. Then a statewide hand recount turned up enough new votes in King County (the Seattle area) to tip it to Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129 votes.

While excitable types are calling this another Florida 2000, that's not the case. It's just a very close election. There have been no signs of irregularities, no butterfly ballot, no hanging chads, no dark machinations.

Now Rossi is calling for a Ukrainian-style revote, on grounds that the close outcome will be "shrounded in suspicion." Suspicion of what, exactly? He doesn't say.

I voted for Rossi -- not out of any love for Republican real-estate developers, but because Gregoire has been a sloppy manager as state attorney general and has an ugly tendency to blame underlings for her mistakes -- but he's out of bounds here. This isn't a stolen election, just a very close one. And close doesn't matter: In our system, if you're ahead by one vote, you win.

When Gregoire's final, 129-vote margin is certified today, Rossi should concede ... and try again in four years, if no more attractive Republican emerges. Based on past form, Gregoire will have a few blunders to answer for by then.

Nous desirons un pont nouveau

2004-12-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

If you live in Seattle, you know all about the horrible traffic on highway 520, an old floating bridge across Lake Washington, which separates the bright lights of Seattle from the jobs and good schools of its Eastside. The bridge has only two lanes each way, and commuters approaching the bridge back up for miles in stop-and-go traffic.

Everyone knows the 520 bridge needs to be replaced, but in true Seattle fashion, the powers that be can't decide how to do it. Last I heard, they were leaning in favor of a new bridge with three lanes each way that would cost $6 billion or so and couldn't possibly be built before 2012 (not counting lawsuits).

So we can only envy France, which just removed a traffic bottleneck between Paris and the sunny south with a beautiful new bridge at Milau. It's 1,125 feet tall, it's gorgeous, it cost only $400 million ... and they built it in three years.

Hey, France! Can Seattle please borrow your engineers?

Blue city

2004-12-15T23:00:00.000-08:00

I think I've discovered a new indicator of red vs. blue neighborhoods: Christmas lights.

Out in the reddish 'burbs of Seattle, where I live, at least every other house is gaily festooned with the latest in Christmas yardwear: white icicle lights (the sure sign of similarly colored yuppies), woven net lights and, God help us, giant inflatable Santas, reindeers and such, now on sale at Home Depot for $39.99.

But when I drive into town to catch the blues, I'm struck by how few houses have Christmas decorations of any kind. Occasionally you'll see a tree in a window, or a modest string of lights on a porch. But most of the houses are dark. There is no joy in Drizzleville this year.

What's going on? Hypotheses:

A. Jim McDermott's constituents are too depressed by Kerry's loss to decorate. Christmas is cancelled for the duration.

B. The houses aren't theirs -- I have to drive on main drags like 85th St. to get to friends' houses, and only renters live on main drags. Renters don't decorate.

C. Houses in Seattle contain no children, and there is a strong correlation between the presence of children and Christmas decorations.

D. Conscientious Seattle greens oppose Christmas decorations because they use electricity and therefore are directly responsible for the death of baby seals in the Arctic, or baby penguins in the Antarctic, or coral bleaching, or something.

While all of the above are probably true to some extent, my money's on C: No kids = no Christmas lights. Many Seattle neighborhoods are amazingly devoid of children. And, as we all know, neighborhoods with no kids are blue -- and neighborhoods with kids are red.

So drive down your street. If tasteful, energy-conserving restraint rules, you are in blue America. If every eave is dripping with candlepower, you are in red America. You read it here first.

Disclaimer: Our front yard is dripping with Christmas lights -- but they're the new, energy-conserving LED lights that consume next to no juice and feature this amazing electric blue that people stop in front of our house to ask us about. So we're closet greens in red country. My! It's a rainbow coalition out here. Would that Seattle were so diverse.

The real world

2004-12-07T21:16:00.001-08:00

I posted the following at a blog that asks: How can the left get through to the right? As an erstwhile acid-dropping rad, I suggest this isn't the real issue. Intelligence does not skew left of center. If you think otherwise, you really need to get out more.

I work at a large software company where the average employee is at least as bright and intellectually rigorous as the average tenured professor I encountered during my undergraduate years. The dominant political culture ranges from Republican to libertarian, with nary an evangelical in sight.

I have observed a pronounced tendency for my left-leaning friends to segregate themselves in occupations -- e.g. the public sector, subsidized arts, NGOs, journalism and academia -- where market forces and objective performance standards apply weakly, if at all. The inhabitants of this mystic realm often mistake it for the real world. Not so.

The real world is tougher, works harder and is even more competitive than yours. And it earns the money you spend. I respectfully suggest that you have more to learn from it than it has to learn from you.

Five years later

2004-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Back when I was in the news business, I worked for a brilliant editor who detested anniversary journalism: the tiresome rehash of an event n years later. It's artificial and subjective, and generally reveals more about the agenda of those who cover it than about the original event.

So it was with the Seattle Times' coverage of the fifth anniversary of the anti-WTO riots in Seattle: 20 inches or so of meaningless prose -- almost an inch per person who turned out at a tiny rally in Westlake Park. It wasn't even about the WTO -- the face-paint crowd's bogeyman of the moment is, of course, the Iraq war. As one aging boomer, Lisa Morrow, told the Times' gullible Sara Green, "The WTO puts profits ahead of human well-being, and the Iraq war is pretty much doing the same thing."

Pretty much, yeah. The U.S. is easily up a trillion or two on the war so far, right? Oh, Halliburton. Which, as everyone knows, secretly drives our foreign policy through the awesome power of vice-presidential nostalgia. Silly me to have forgotten.

Well, the idiots will never learn, but you'd think a newspaper might. Nope. The Times' story buried the lede -- the humiliatingly tiny turnout -- and instead rehashed attendees' rhetoric. The jump hed said "Past battle honored." The mess here in 1999 wasn't a battle, it was a riot of deluded anarchists, and nothing about it was, or is, worthy of honor.

Sitting in

2004-11-29T21:06:00.000-08:00

One of these days I'll get around to commenting on Seattle politics or media, but for the moment music is keeping me busy enough. We played at Seattle Center over the weekend for a crowd of several hundred people, a number of whom actually got up and danced. That's a rarity when the audience is mostly American -- most Americans seem vaguely uncomfortable even doing the ol' rock-n-roll shuffle, let alone steps they've never seen before. We were missing our violinist (on tour in Europe) and guitarist (major family event) at this show, so we asked Paul Beck to sit in on cymbalom. A successful experiment -- he played everything almost flawlessly after only one rehearsal and added a fine solo on Ederlezi. A Bulgarian in the audience, Ivan, came up afterwards and told us, "Perfect!" That's what we like to hear.

Kupon

2004-11-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

Kupon is the Bulgarian word for a big party, and that was the scene at our band's gig Saturday night. About 100 Bulgarians (with a few Serbs, Bosnians and Croatians) jammed into the smallish restaurant and danced kjuchek all night. As often happens, they spent the first set eating, drinking and clapping politely. But by the time we started our second set, they were fully lubed and ready to rock -- not least because the that's when the 20-something émigrés showed up, dressed to kill as usual. We'd planned to stop around midnight, but when the audience is screaming, shaking booty and slapping $20 bills on your sweaty forehead, you just keep going. We finally had to stop at 2:00, closing time. Most of the crowd would have happily danced until dawn.

You never know

2004-11-15T20:53:00.000-08:00

Our band played over the weekend at a local Greek restaurant. Full house, and many of the early arrivals hung out all night over bottles of Makedonikos red, a good sign. You never know what's going to click. This time, it was the moldy oldie Ochi chorniye, the only Russian song we play. Our version gets hijacked by a demented Dixieland band halfway through the first chorus, and maybe that's why Americans dig it. We threw it together in about 15 minutes. Other songs we polish for months, and they get polite applause. Maybe it doesn't pay to think too much.

This Saturday, we're playing at a new Bulgarian-owned place up on Queen Anne. If the Balkan emigré crowd shows up, it'll be wild.

The best music in the world

2004-11-15T18:31:00.000-08:00

Did I mention music from southeastern Europe? That would include mostly Rom (what was once called "Gypsy") music from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania -- what one might call Formerly Ottoman Europe (but if one did, one would be politically incorrect ... not that there's anything wrong with that). This is, by any rigorously objective standard, the best music in the world. The people in the music business who promote what is called "world music" generally limit it to songs from Africa and the Caribbean -- wonderfully inventive regions to be sure, but thin gruel compared to the amazing sounds that come out of the real estate roughly reaching from Beograd to Istanbul.

In praise of the noble grape

2004-11-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

Introducing a personal commentary on events in and around Seattle and, to a lesser extent, matters further afield. Your host, who prefers to labor in thinly veiled obscurity for now, lives in the Seattle area and works at a large software company that shall remain nameless. Not that it matters -- this is about real life, not work. If you want dirt about Bill, go elsewhere -- I've met him, he's smart and all too normal, a good man in all ways that matter.

Your host's personal interests include politics; journalism (I worked at major metro dailies in California and the South for many years before accepting a position at The Evil Empire); music from southeastern Europe, of which more later; pinot noir; and sexy babes, foremost among whom I include my wife of ahem years.