Matthew Daly

My niece just celebrated her fourth birthday, and her cake had this on it.



It is either the most awesome or the most horrifying thing I have ever seen, and I still can't decide which.

prarierabbit, I owe you an apology, because I woke up Sunday morning and realized that I had managed to sleep through the Sarah Palin tour. It sounds more positive than the story I had heard about some previous stop. According to our paper, nobody who wanted a signed book failed to get one, and she stayed an hour over schedule to make that happen and apparently took very few breaks. She went through about 1200 books in four hours, but I haven't heard from anyone who was let down by the lack of quality time. There was a small crowd of protesters and one guy who got himself arrested for protesting outside the approved zone. Sounds pretty much like she treated us right, and we didn't make big asses of ourselves, so win-win.

On the other hand, of course, some members of my home town are less capable of not making asses of themselves:

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Up to about 42000 words in my NaTexWriMo challenge. I keep hitting the limit of what I know, and then I struggle enough to carve out a whole new section, and I've actually been pulling ahead on my word count per day. I guess it's valuable to have something to hit my head against, so I'm very glad to have been doing it. I think I'm finally optimistic that I'll find a way to make it to the end, even if I'm not perfectly sure where those last 8000 words are going to come from yet.

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally. It's a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.” - Sarah Palin

As I said before, while cleaning out my house a month ago I came across my collection of silly books from my childhood. The one book that I was particularly sorry to not see in that list was Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor, which was a chronicle mostly of the lies and gaffes perpetrated by Ronald Reagan and the rest of his administration. The entries are very brief with almost no commentary, so it's sort of like what Al Gore's Twitter feed would have looked like in the 1980's. It's a fun little book that walks the line between humor and rant very effectively and from the looks of things you can pick up a used copy for the cost of shipping, so you might want to give it a read and pass it along to a loved one for Holiday.

The one comment that does stick with me was Slansky's prediction that the Republican party would go back to this well and provide us with more telegenic personalities who were unconcerned about the substance of their comments provided it allowed them to pursue their agenda. The word "truthiness" didn't exist at the time, but I think Slansky would have found a use for it. He has turned out to be even more accurate than he could have predicted, as since 1992 the Republicans have either nominated slick-talking idiots or principled people who then were forced to pretend to be slick-talking idiots. I suppose that the one point in Sarah Palin's advantage regarding her political future is that being proud of being inaccurate seems to come naturally to her.

Oh, my two favorite ex-beauty queens are back in the news.


Carrie Prejean is still working the conservative martyr angle, which is pretty neat to watch. I mean, when you've confessed to distributing child pornography but think that the world still wants to hear your inspiring story of the traditional values that were instilled in you, it's a transcendent moment of hubris that comes along so rarely even in our modern lifestyles. Sit down before you read this or you might fall down.

"There is an extreme double standard that conservative women are under attack for whatever it is," Prejean told Vieira. "If Sean Hannity went out there and said some of the things that Keith Olbermann has said about me, if he says anything about [Sonia] Sotomayor, Michelle Obama, he would be off the air. Why is there this double standard? That's the reason why I wrote this book."

Take a moment, there's a lot there to soak in. The only reason that Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama's underage sex tapes aren't released to the public is because Hannity is too scared to release them. Everybody does it, but she's the only one paying the price for it. There is no recognition that Sotomayor and Obama are strong women who really could be your models of how you take responsibility for the regrettable things that they have said and the mistakes they have made in their lives (and they both obviously have said regrettable things).

And and and you won't believe!!! Sarah Palin is coming to my small town to shill her own book next week. She's trying to stay away from the big cities with their nationally televised shows that ask the mean questions, and being shepherded by fools like she is, she must have been informed that Rochester is a part of Real America. Tee hee, I can't wait to see the look on her face when she finds out that we're mostly a suburb of Toronto. (Actually, my theory is that she's here to hit up Tom Golisano for a few megabucks.) I'd like to go, but it's sure going to be a madhouse.

Reading through my FOAF lists, it amuses me to point out that I've started LyX'ing up the solutions to all of the problems in Bondy and Murty's Graph Theory with Applications, my college graph theory textbook. Naturally, given the scope of the material, it might be unreasonable to expect that I could grind out 50K words in a month, since precision is more central to mathematical writing than to novelization and so editing is critical instead of counter-productive.

That being said, 8948 words so far, 13,948 if you use the time-honored conversion that a picture is worth a thousand words.

And how cool is it that authors are releasing PDF's of out-of-print college textbooks? This is not the only $50 book in my library that is now free for download.

Damnit. I had such nice things to say about folks from Maine six months ago when their legislature passed same sex marriage laws. Today, it's more clear that the statespeople are better than the voters in off-off-year elections, because they've rolled it back. There is a part of my brain that wants to focus on the fact that a 53-47 margin is something that would have been unimaginable ten years ago and that at the local level there are countless stories about individuals facing the issues and opening their eyes and seeing a truth that they will never unsee. But in the end, the march of progress has been delayed today, and we have consciously decided to curtail rights to citizens of the United States due to hatred and fear, a decision that has never been endorsed by the long-term perspective of American history.

I will briefly suspend my no-name-calling rule in this blog. Equal protection under the law is a crucial element in a free society. If I know you, and you somehow believe that you have the right to parcel out privileges to the sorts of law-abiding citizens that you like and deprive it from the law-abiding citizens that you do not, then you suck. And if I know that you feel that way, and especially if for some especially unbelievable reason you're puffed up about this power of yours, then I will treat you like the nine-year-old toddler-abusing playground bully that you are until you amend your ways. And I'm normally the guy who will give out cookies to people who make small steps along very long journeys, but you won't even get a cookie from me when that day comes because this is just too basic a lesson for you to not grasp immediately.

I seem to have caused a rant. Patrick Nielsen Hayden has gotten it into his mind that I am a cause for the failure of the liberal agenda, what with being so high-minded and feel-goody that I am unwilling to do the dirty work of libeling my enemies to secure victories. Specifically, in this case, my failure to endorse Florida Rep. Alan Grayson's tactic of suggesting that the Republican plan is hoping that the elderly "die quickly".

I respectfully believe Mr. Nielsen Hayden to be wrong on two counts, one political and one personal. The political reason is that there is no reason to believe that we benefit from proving that liberals don't suffer from an "asshat gap" when faced with the Michelle Bachmans and Joe Wilsons on the other side of the aisle. Passion is great for rousing the base, to be certain, but you pay a terrible price with arousing the opposition when your passion is fueled by disinformation or ignorance. Liberals should know that better than anyone, since we got here largely because we were just that pissed off at Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. It is undeniable that the most fervent birthers and teabaggers don't need reality to fuel their mistrust of liberal ideals, but there are independents who do, and we risk losses as great as our recent gains to the degree that we provide equally foolish targets. Beyond that, I don't think that there's any way to have a good faith discussion about the very real and difficult decisions that need to be made about the future of health care in the United States until everyone stops drinking the crazy juice that makes you say that the other team wants to kill Grandma. I think that both Chuck Grassley and Alan Grayson need to STFU and start listening; if I seem more motivated in calling out Grayson it is only because I think that he is marginally less inclined to ignore me.

On the personal side, Mr. Nielsen Hayden brought out several of my quotes which would indicate that I am both passionate and idealistic, and concluding: "Call me kooky, but I'm basically getting the impression that Matthew Daly simply says things that sound good in a show-offy way, no matter how completely they contradict earlier observations. This holds whether he's nobly patting himself on the back for his broadmindedness toward "thoughtful conservatives", or harshly insisting that "justice delayed is justice denied." In his mind there's no contradiction, because both kinds of statements leave onlookers with a warm glow of righteousness."

Most folks here have known me for a while, but some are new friends, and some are strangers. So let me be plain. I am not good, and I am not nice. It takes effort for me to be as good as I am, I'd like to be nicer, and I think that good has gotten me further than evil when you do a full audit of my life. But if I follow the path of good in defense of important causes, be certain that I have conceptualized and contemplated the path of evil and concluded that, today, good made the better case. There are other days when I've done what I've known to be evil for what I felt were the right reasons, and I rarely have misgivings on those matters.

There are two questions that I have to ask myself: is the cause important enough that I need to win, and is the undertaking of evil enough to bring about victory. If I am satisfied with the answer to both of those questions, then the gloves come off. If not, then on they stay. For instance, when Mr. Nielsen Hayden suggested that I call him kooky, I decided that actually doing so wouldn't convince him or anyone else and would invite the response that I was a hypocrite instead of just a Pollyanna, so I decided not to call him kooky. On the other hand, I decided to passively-aggressively post about the whole thing on my blog where I am more likely to receive kind responses than if I wrote all of this tl;dr crap on Making Light.

The relatives who care about our genealogy were in town over the weekend. I don't care enough to get my hands messy with it, but the results are interesting. I've got a whole bunch of branches and even though most of them originally came from England and Ireland they all took their own interesting paths. The Dalys, frex, did something to score a trip from Ireland to Australia, then worked their way east to Hawaii and landed in San Francisco (although, surprisingly, they are evidently not the Dalys of Daly City) and worked their way east before settling in the Rochester area with some adventures in silver mining and the like scattered in. And then they married into some classy East Coast families who've been around since the Mayflower landed.

So, today I got an email cascade giving a report on breaking news in ancestor chasing. I'm a little fuzzy on whether the person in question is an n-grandmother or an n-great-aunt (for some n), but they discovered that she was descended from Thomas Chittenden (the first governor of the independent Vermont Republic, and later the first governor of when it became the fourteenth state), and from him all the way back to John Lackland.

And my first reaction was "Whooo! I'm descended from a King of England!!" And my second reaction was "Wait, I'm descended from the crappiest King of England. I'm descended from the thumb-sucking lion in Disney's Robin Hood." Of course, nearly every WASP in North America is in the same boat, including every President except Van Buren. I guess there wasn't much for the nobility to do in the thirteenth century except impregnating every attractive woman they could find. So, I suppose I will be content with having been descended from Eleanor of Acquitaine.

So yesterday, I found myself acquainted with this 1973 "flamewar" between Eleanor Cameron and Roald Dahl over the utter lack of literary merit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which ultimately led to a revision. And, not an hour later, I was excavating a dark corner of my house when I came upon a crate filled with childrens books, including Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and a first edition of Dahl's most famous work. So, in case anyone was confused about whose side to take, let me summarize my findings.

Cameron rules, Dahl drools.

"So I shipped them all over here, every man, woman, and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe. It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely. They are wonderful workers. They all speak English now. The love dancing and music. They are always making up songs. [...] They still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle. They insist upon that, The man, as you can see for yourselves across the river, wear only deerskins. The women wear leaves, and the children wear nothing at all."

Funny, but I don't recall Johnny Depp and Deep Roy acting out that part of the story. Fortunately, my visualization is aided by a lovely Joseph Schindelman line drawing of not-at-all-large wooden crates with eyeholes and legholes drilled into them so that they looked in places like rectilinear insects capering around to amuse me. DAMN IT, this is why I wasn't horrified when I was taught about transatlantic slave ships. I appreciate whimsy, but this is whitewash.

I used to think that Roald Dahl was a moralist of our age, but that was before I read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and The Witches. After that, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Dahl is a petty man who works out his frustrations on fictional characters created to have flaws that ordinary people in civilized society would have the strength to tolerate. There are folks who argue that the 2005 movie was better than 1971 movie because it was more faithful to the book; in truth, that is not a small part of the reason that it was inferior. David Seltzer deserves an enormous amount of praise for the insight and courage to make a movie that was ultimately much less troublesome than the source. Including, I might add, a magnificent bastard who is more likely to quote Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde than rattle off four consecutive simple sentences.

I've been unsettled at this whole David Letterman story. On the simple side of the ledger, Letterman is a crap boss who plays sexual politics at work and is now getting a bump in the ratings (and increased advertising revenue, presumably) because rubberneckers want to stare and point at him apologizing and joking about it. I don't know what it will take to make America stop caring about his ego, but I wish we'd hurry up and find it.

The unsettled part is that the guy who blew the whistle is looking at fifteen years in prison because he attempted to negotiate an out-of-court settlement for potential civil damages that had been done against him. Admittedly, that's a very charitable assessment, but he could have planned to sue for the civil damages because his girlfriend was directly affected by Letterman's adultery and workplace sexual harassment, and it makes sense that it surely would have been worth more to Letterman to settle those charges before a public lawsuit was announced. Except I got around to looking it up this morning, and that's actually the definition of extortion.

It is against the law to threaten to sue someone if they don't take some mitigating action (evidently not just money and property, but also providing services).

Did you know that? I sure as hell didn't. All those times that some Usenet troll would harangue about how their lawyer was drafting motions yadda yadda yadda, it was waving a smoking gun around the place. It's a shame none of us were David Letterman, or we could have called our local District Attorney and had taxpayer money spent to fight our battles. This is a golden illustration of why a strongly progressive tax system is rational; rich people get more public services than the rest of us and therefore they should pay a premium for the premium treatment.

A few points on Roman Polanski.

- "There's the notion of art for art's sake, a certain leeway that's always allowed to the creative artist. In the 19th century it was elevated into an ideology. It's true we have a rather different vision of artistic licence [sic] – and, come to that, of licence in love." If this is an attitude in which the United States wishes to differ from France, then it is a facet in which I am proud to be an American, and I encourage my French bretheren to step back from their foolishness in the same spirit that I receive their alarm when we are blind. We have not arrived at this point in a particularly graceful manner, but I am glad that football MVPs and hit singers and actors and priests have started to pay the penalty for their crimes just as ordinary citizens do. We should be further along, but I would rather be here than where we were thirty or even five years ago.

- I don't want to hear the crap about how this is a case of repressed American sexual puritanism. A thirteen year-old girl was drugged and anally violated despite her emphatic and repeated demands that the perpetrator stop. This, Ms. Goldberg, is rape-rape*. It's a crime in Europe too. Indeed, in Roman Polanski's home nation, evidently the penalty for his crime is about to include chemical castration.

- The notion that the judge reneged on the plea deal is similarly absurd. Let's review the case (as informed by the wiki article). Polanski is initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor. He cuts a deal with the DA where all of those charges are dropped and he agrees to plead guilty to a single count of statutory rape. Then he is sentenced to report to prison for ninety days of (pay close attention to the next two words) psychiatric evaluation. He is released after serving about half of this time. Then there is a second judicial hearing for the final adjudication of the sentence. It was initially suspected that Polanski was going to get probation, but then he found out that the judge was likely to sentence him to return to jail, so he fled the country. This isn't a judge going back on his word, this is a judge who is granted the authority to actually read the evaluation that he ordered and make his final determination based on that. Polanski got the second-sweetest deal I've ever heard of for a child molester and it still wasn't enough for him.

- I also have no sympathy for the fact that he was arrested at a film festival where he was attending in public. Polanski had thirty years to settle this matter in a manner that was more dignified by returning to the United States and submitting himself to face the charges that he plead guilty to or attempt to retract his guilty plea and have a trial for the original slate of charges. He did not take this opportunity, so he gets an embarrassing arrest.

- I have sympathy for the woman that Polanski raped, and am grateful that she gave such clear and chilling testimony to the grand jury, but she is not entitled to exonerate him. This is larger than her. This is ensuring the dignity of the thirteen year-old girl who is today on the casting couch of the lecherous forty year-old director. This is about telling every powerful and talented person in America that you can't skip bail just because you can afford to. Ms. Geimer isn't alone in wanting closure for this incident, but that closure should come from Polanski receiving a sentence and serving it, not from our judicial system deciding that some people are beyond our law.

- I am simply horrified at the degree to which the Hollywood rank and file are on the wrong side of this issue. I honestly am having trouble processing the knowledge that Terry Gilliam and Harrison Ford and Guillermo del Toro are cool with drugging and raping a child, and I honestly don't know if this will impact the way that I perceive their work going forward. It will undoubtedly affect the way that I perceive Hollywood the next time they choose to lecture me on some issue that they feel deserves my attention, because it won't get it. On the other side, I am pleased for the celebrities that have dared the veil of silence to criticize Polanski. Neil Gaiman. Kevin Smith. Kirstie Alley. Undoubtedly more that I haven't seen. These range from people I admire to people that I revile and some people that I don't know, but today they are right.

*) ETA EXTRA BONUS SIXTH THOUGHT: Whoopi Goldberg has apparently attempted to clarify her comments, saying that she was referring only to the fact that the only charge against Polanski is unlawful sex with a minor. So now we get to add in the "innocent until proven guilty" canard that would suggest that Polanski couldn't have drugged and raped a thirteen year-old girl because if he had then the district attorney would have prosecuted him on those charges. It's one thing to get drunk and run over a kid, it's another thing to use your influence to haggle the charges down to running a red light, but it's a whole new thing when you evade responsibility for even that and thirty years later your apologists are saying "Hey, he ran a red light thirty years ago, get over it already!"