The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • Jacked!

    OK, so one sign of not writing enough on your blog is having it highjacked and you don’t even notice. Bleh. Somewhere between May 27 and today (Jun 4), some nefarious party registered itself and inserted nasty code into one or more of my pages… possibly through comments. When I tried to visit today, ZoneAlarm piped up and warned me that “wp-stats-php.info” is a suspected phishing site and would be blocked… meaning I couldn’t see The Mongrel Dogs, either.

    But the 21st century is amazing. I googled “wp-stats-php.info” and found a ton of pages by users with a similar problem, and indeed, some with solutions. Yay. I am particularly indebted to the following people and pages:

    For the curious, my solution was to back up everything (just in case), then nuke the files and restore from an April backup. Having learned my lesson, I also upgraded immediately to the latest version of WordPress (2.5.1) which apparently doesn’t suffer from this vulnerability.

    Minor editorial: Although the blame for not updating regularly lies squarely with me, I really think the WordPress crew should come up with a simple, one-touch way to do that. Right now, backing up the database is a scary proposition for someone not a MySQL pilot. There used to be a neat script that did one-touch backups but for reasons that I cannot understand, it’s been deprecated and removed. *sigh*

  • Another disturbing slip

    On 2008 May 22, John McCain attacked his presumed opponent Barack Obama (and of course, that’s just politics, so it’s fine), saying

    But I am running for the office of Commander-in-Chief.

    Here’s the problem. McCain is wrong. He’s not running for the office of Commander-in-Chief. In case it’s slipped his mind, he’s running for the office of ???????? ????? ????????President of the United States. One of the roles played by the President — but only one — is Commander-in-Chief.

    At first I was going to just note this and move on, assuming it’s just a mildly disturbing shorthand, a tea-leaf you have to peer at. I was going to caution that this creeping tendency — to identify the nation’s highest civil office soley with its military aspect — is a sign of the crumbling of our American ideals and that we all just blow by it too quickly.

    Then I went online and read a few posts that scared the bejeebus out of me. Because apparently a lot of people don’t recognize even the abstract point. They literally do identify the two roles as if they are inseparable. In my life I’ve played the game of “What would it take to turn the Republic into an empire?” It’s always been fun and diverting. Suddenly I realize: We’re already almost there, not legally but in the far more important substrata of our social discourse. Too much of the America populace is ready to bow down and accept a strong man.

    Yet people always like to tell me It Can Never Happen Here… when it virtually already has.

  • Thespiatic

    Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. Someday soon I’ll document what a blur my April and May have been, as explanation if not excuse. Meanwhile, let me share my tiny contribution to the recent play The Peter Pan Project, conceived as a community-written work. The prompt was, “Describe the moment you grew up.” My response is below the fold.

    But first, I have to say: I was not ready for the emotional punch of hearing someone else read my words to an audience. The staging was absolutely perfect (thanks, Aaron!) and the impact was overwhelming: A solitary actor, at the right edge of the stage, a forlorn spotlight piercing the otherwise pitch-dark room. And these words:

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  • The decline of American political reporting

    As always, let me begin by stating I am an Obama supporter, so I’m a mite sensitive on the following. But it shocked me this morning to hear NPR’s coverage of the “debate” last night. We’ll leave aside the astonishing fact — which they tried to explain away — that forty minutes (nearly half the debate!) focused on indirect or minor issues of the campaign … on the sort of thing that everyone knows is silly but raises because it’s going to matter to someone else. Yes, I mean Jeremiah Wright and Rezko and especially the tempest-in-a-teapot “bitter” comments.

    But then the NPR anchor mentioned that the “point” was to see if Sen. Obama could survive the same pointless assaults in the general. The reporter, Juan Williams, sagely agreed and commented “Obama seemed pretty bruised by both sides” in the debate.

    Both sides? Really?

    I had been under the naive delusion that the two sides of the debate were Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. Is Juan Williams really implying that the Illinois senator bruised himself? That he was launching attack upon ludicrous attack on himself? No, that’s just nonsense. So I had to think deeper, and suddenly I had a flash of inspiration. Juan Williams was being unwontedly candid about the dynamics of American political coverage.

    There were hotel furnishing in Bulgariathree sides represented yesterday: Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, and the self-appointed, self-important, scandal-driven, smug media. Apparently they too are officially arrayed against Senator Obama, at least now that he is the presumed frontrunner. It’s the most striking confirmation of the bias the press has against anyone succeeding… first they build you up, then they cut your feet off, then they blame you for tumbling and failing to meet everyone’s (that is, their) expectations.

    Viewed that way, Senator Obama was bruised by both (other) sides in the debate. Indeed, considering he was taking fire from an unexpected direction and from a supposed non-combatant, he came through pretty well, I think. It’s going to be a slog to the convention, and it’s going to be hard on any American interested in a fair process, but I think he showed the strength that will carry him there.

  • Bitter taste

    {Minor edits for grammar.}

    For full disclosure, I am an Obama supporter, I feel he is the best candidate both in terms of electability and in terms of actual ability to do the job. I’ve watched his campaign with interest and rising enthusiasm. All of that said, I think people have to recognize that his statements in San Francisco, saying that working class people are “bitter” and so “cling” to their guns and their religion, has been a giant misstep. It was a gaffe pure and true, and he is paying the traditional price: Time spent off-message, defending and responding rather than proposing and advancing.

    A lot of what he says is true, nonetheless, and if you read the context, you will see that his major sin is choosing words that can be taken many ways. And hey, it’s politics, and politics ain’t a tea party. His opponents can, and probably should, use this to their advantage in an attempt to define him for America. That doesn’t mean that I agree that his remarks were “elitist” and “talked down” to working class America. But it’s McCain’s right, or Clinton’s right, to make that case.

    Obama’s main problem was his choice of the word “cling”:

    And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

    This would all have passed without notice if he had chosen his words better. For example, if instead of saying people “cling” to guns or religion, he could have said they “fall back on” guns and religion — the things in their life that they can control, that give comfort and surety. Why didn’t he? To be honest, because it is all too easy for a Democrat to fall into language that dismisses such beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Here’s the bigger question: Why is it so easy? Because for a generation and a half, one party (the Republican party) has used those beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Appeals to patriotism, to gun ownership, to faith, are easy and cheap and — if the record of the Republicans is any guide — meaningless.

    The truth of that lies in the speed and tone of the response from both McCain and Clinton. They piously promise to protect the little guy, they publicly feel umbrage for him, they pat him on the head. They don’t speak to the concerns that Obama did, the reasons that he thinks that middle America might be “bitter”. They don’t offer any actual solutions for their distress. Instead they facilely promise to somehow recover every job that’s been lost.

    Obama missteps because he tries to speak about the plight of the working class without having been a member. He doesn’t get the lingo. Fair enough. But the other two nominally-major candidates go much further. They celebrate their false membership in the working class. They too have never belonged but they appoint themselves to feel the outrage of the class.

    In the end, in my opinion, that is condescending — that is “talking down” to the working class.

  • Star Wars at 31

    Apparently Spike TV is running all of the Star Wars movies as a “mega saga event” over the course of the next weekend. I happened to come across their “ultimate trailer” online, which stitches together bits from all six movies. And strung together like that, all those bits suddenly make clear what’s gone so horribly awry in the Star Wars franchise:

    The later movies (Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith) are certainly much busier than the first three.

    But they aren’t any better.

    It would seem that George Lucas’ sole “lesson” is “more lasers! more droids! more ships! more explosions! Oh, dear God, many more explosions!” It’s become a cliche that modern filmmakers allow special effects to overwhelm the story; George gives them a play-by-play on how to do that.

    Meh.

  • Lunacon 51 (2)

    Lunacon 51 (2)
    Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

    The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. 🙁 But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

    As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

    I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

    I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I checked out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

    I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

  • Lunacon 51 (1)

    Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

    It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. 🙁 At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard. 🙂

    It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).

  • Why We Fight

    Every once in a while, someone comes along and says something that makes you wish you had said it first. For me, it’s often Keith Olberman. In this clip, he calls out President Bush and names him for what he is. Let’s hope it’s like we read in those fantasy novels — that naming someone undermines their power.

    Only eleven months to go — this old Republic might just manage to survive the Worst President Ever.

  • Review: His Dark Materials

    His Dark Materials:

    • The Golden Compass
    • The Subtle Knife
    • The Amber Spyglass


    a triology by Philip Pullman
    InstaRating: 4 out of 5

    This trilogy has apparently sparked quite the bitter controversy, especially online. It’s a tale of High Fantasy, quite consciously in the vein of Tolkein or C.S. Lewis, but it takes a tack quite different than, say, The Chronicles of Narnia. Rather than a vague naturalistic faith that is actually Christianity in disguise, Pullman’s universe has Christianity in fact — but it’s unremittingly evil, dedicated to snuffing out all that is light and free in the world. I can see why believers are outraged…

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