Friday, July 02, 2004
Happy Foist of July
Instead of dumping another of my patented “sopor-tastic” essays, I’ll just hurl a bunch of tidbits into the ‘sphere here and hope something among them amuses you. I’m making no promises here. You may want to start drinking now and get in the right mood.
Last night we went and saw Control Room. It was a damned interesting movie - clear in it’s slant but substantially un-narrated and seemingly mostly chronological in presentation. Jump-cuts in the middle of interviews showed us when something had been deleted, and clearly a lot of things were not shown - which led it to be a fairly one-sided polemic, but under the circumstances I think that’s appropriate. A stimulating and provocative movie with some painful footage I probably would not otherwise have seen, it made the experiences we had in Iraq in the early part of 2003 much harder to force into pre-conceived notion-boxes. I recommend it.
The film also features news footage of american leaders, such as our commander-in-cheese, with regard to whom, my lovely sister sent this link to me yesterday. I just wish it came with more costumes, though I will admit that I hadn’t heard some of the quotes before. The phrase that comes to my mind is “laughing through the tears.”
But the patriotism rife in the site brings to mind that I spent some time yesterday at the U.S. Census website, which is actually a lot more interesting than I’d have expected (for geeks like myself who get off on demographics, mapping, and survey methodology). There’s a lot of toys to play with there if you want do learn stuff about who lives where and what they do, generally speaking, but there is also this page of trivial factoids about the 4th of July. So my beans are likely to come from North Dakota, whence one-third of our dry, edible beans are grown? Food for thought. But, don’t overdo it. They are beans, after all. Stuff’ll be exploding all over the place anyway - are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
These revelations lead me in two final directions, wherewith I will conclude my daily drone: in class yesterday I was informed that over the next 7 years the census is being phased out in favor of the American Community Survey, which will be an ongoing process involving annual updates instead of being a decennial phenomonon. Yes, I know, that’s pretty exciting, but it gets better - the ACS is expected to be more reliable than the census, in part because it will not be conducted by seasonal temporary workers who can’t find anything else better to do every decade or so! It will be executed by “professional enumerators” who will roam the countryside making sure THE MAN gets the numbers he wants. No longer will we be beholden to craven marshalls and their assistants as we were in the olden days before VH1. Nay, I have visions (yeah, I’m still having visions) that somehow blend “Men in Black” with “Bartleby the Scrivener.” These visions are soon to be repackaged as a blockbuster summer smash, or maybe a surprise breakthrough hit for CBS, called “THE ENUMERATOR: Year Round. Every Year. Full Time. Fully Equipped. And READY TO COUNT YOUR ASS.” I tell you, I’m tingling. In the good, reductio-ad-numerarium way.
Finally, all this patriotism and USAism seems to fit in nicely with my current reading, Walter Isaacson‘s biography of Ben Franklin. It’s not the best-written book I’ve ever read but it tells an amazing story, one which leaves me feeling - not merely superfluous, but like an actual drag on society. Where’s my junto? My best-selling newspaper? The college I founded? My epochal discoveries in natural philosophy? Well they’ve clearly already been conceived, created, founded, discovered. All that’s left for me to do is snipe at them from the sidelines like the whineybaby I am. Upon which point, I will share an adage I find in my book from Poor Richard’s Almanac: This one may originally have been mis-printed, a “r” being inserted, possibly, for an “s,” which replaced it in later reprints. But the original is the one that really resonates for me: “He who dines on hope, dies farting.” You tell ‘em, Benjie. He was the smartest little dog ever to sign the Declaration of Independence, you know, and he even found his own way home afterwards. Via North Dakota, it seems.
