Circuit City has decided to fire 3400 of its highest-paid employees (about 8% of its employee base) in order to immediately refill the positions with lower-paid newbies. This is an insult to the fired employees, a total morale killer for remaining employees (why would you strive to be better and make more money if you will just be fired when you get your raise?), and will affect the customer experience terribly.

This kind of corporate hacksaw mentality has to result in boycotts and (hopefully) the downfall of the suits at the top. Personally, I don’t often shop there as we don’t have one nearby. But I’ll now make sure to avoid it — this kind of behavior is ridiculous and should be punished.

I generally shop at Best Buy, as I prefer incompetence to evil.

I got to looking around, and there are a couple of fun good live acoustic and video performances of the Indigo Girls on YouTube. These two are the reason I starting singing with my singing partner Dave, and we’ve ridden that enthusiasm to almost no success but great enjoyment.

Perfect World

Least Complicated

Galilieo

Pink has a song called Dear Mr. President. I know about this because the Indigo Girls sing on it, and I’m a big fan of theirs. Someone has created a video for it that I find mostly very moving to watch (there are a couple of cheap and irrelevant shots, but a lot of moving imagery that acts as kind of a five-year recap of the lunacy we’ve all lived in, politics aside). It’s not related to Pink in any way, as far as I can tell — just some dude with a Mac and iMovie or something.

Texas state senator Dan Patrick has proposed a bill that would offer women $500 to not have an abortion. I don’t even know where to start on this one. But I think all moral and ethical arguments are too polarized. I think an interesting and compelling argument against this lunacy is that $500, even spent completely and wisely on a baby, lasts about two weeks at best if it’s your first baby. So you get two weeks of buying diapers, clothes, formula (if you don’t nurse, food and Lansinoh for yourself if you do), and other gear — after that, you’re pretty much stuck in the same situation you were if you didn’t have the bucks before.

Apparently opponents to his bill say that it breaks laws against buying babies — I’m not sure they can make that fly, but any port in a storm. But the $500 offer seems to imply that the decision to have an abortion is being made on only financial grounds, and $500 won’t even scratch the surface of what it costs to build and maintain a baby. I can tell you that from experience — I think I was at the grocery every single day buying some damn thing or other, and within two weeks we were so much more broke than we thought we’d be. And that’s just the beginning, but that’s material for another post.

So it starts to come down to bribery, then — $500 fast cash not to abort your pregnancy. There are so many levels at which I feel the urge to say “blech” on this one, I don’t even know where to start. Though it seems like a good place to start would be to take that pool of money and put it toward helping people take care of their children when they can’t afford to. Just a thought.

I guess my problem is that if he’s so damned concerned about children, how about helping the already-born children who DO need help instead of trying to pay people to ride out pregnancies they otherwise would not? $500 won’t solve anything for anyone in the long run, but it may entice enough desperate parents to have babies they might not otherwise have that you will end up with an increase later in families in need of greater help later. If you hate abortion, fight it. If you love children, help them. And these aren’t mutually exclusive. But gads, stop playing on the desperation of panicked pregnant women.
Oh, and another thing, on a related but broader level: it sure would be nice if government got the hell out of our pants. Just sayin’.

The Washington Post has run a piece written by the owner of an ISP, talking about his experiences after receiving a National Security Letter from the FBI. The limitations put on him by the gag order are alarming. Moreover, he makes the point that most other people in his situation have either provided the information about their clients to the FBI (without the FBI having any actual legal grounds to have it) or have been so silenced by the scope of the gag order that no one will ever know what’s going on.

Larry “Bud” Melman of Letterman fame has died, as has Woody Harrelson’s dad. Oh, heavens! Hollywood’s D-list celebrities have one left to go to complete the happens-in-threes cycle. Oh, God, end the suspense!! Who’s next?

Vice President Cheney wants us to stay scared. In this latest speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (I believe it’s very likely important to my point that this is the group he was speaking to), he blasts Democrats for wanting a scheduled exit strategy. Academically I understand the logic of those who believe that a target date will cause undue danger to troops, but we’re taking terrible casualties now anyway and we need to get out of a situation we can no longer fix, regardless of our responsibility to fix what we (and others) broke.

From December 15, 2005 (1411 days since the “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 1, 2003) to yesterday (March 11, 2007) we and Great Britain have had 1043 deaths to our troops. Lord knows how many Iraqi coalition-loyal soldiers, civilians, and whatever. I won’t worry about the insurgents for sake of this argument — they should be counted at some point as well, but to simplify things I won’t speak to that right now.

Again, that 1043 is just enlisted military in the British or American military presences. And that’s only deaths — there are plenty incomplete humans coming back from this. [Added later: this number does NOT include those who are mortally wounded there but die here or in Europe during treatment.]

War causes this, and sometimes war is necessary for the greater good. In this case, I didn’t think it was when it started, I tried to understand why it was important when it was going on, and now I can’t find an angle to justify it. (Admittedly, I was fairly well decided as to how I felt, but I swear I really did try to understand.) I respect what our individual troops are trying to do under the ridiculous circumstances under which we’ve put them, but I think it’s time to accept defeat, dejection, stalemate, indigenous apathy to our help, or whatever we want to call it. This war is not why people vow to give their lives to defend this wonderful country. Likely Afghanistan is (or was, before all resources were bled to Iraq), but this one certainly is not.

But Cheney is still piping us the same, tired argument. If we leave Iraq, we will all be in constant peril here in the U.S. That may be. But we are in that peril of physical attack already (not to mention technological and/or financial attack), since the anti-American sentiments have leaked to so many other Middle Eastern, Central American, and Asian nations that our killing a bunch of insurgents in Iraq will have no lasting effect. We need to stop encouraging other countries to hate us. I really don’t think we can kill them all. Therefore, it’s time to look at other options. None will be painless, but I’m really convinced that for every insurgent we kill, our actions and positions create two more. I think it’s time to stop manufacturing enemies.

The chairman and CEO of the Fox News Network played tastelessly into the Obama/Osama thing this week, prompting the Democratic Presidential candidates to back out of one of the upcoming debates because Fox was involved in the coverage. Ah, finally, the Dems are starting to realize they have a say in this whole process.

I’m no opera guy. But I was puttering about on YouTube tonight and thought to look for the performance by Aretha Franklin of Nessun Dorma. I don’t remember if it was the Grammys or the Oscars or the Golden Globes, but as I recall Pavarotti borked it and backed out at the last minute (as he apparently does fairly often). So with a day’s rehearsal, she did this. It starts a little silly, but it builds quite powerfully and ends magnificently.

It’s by no means perfect, but I find it to be one of the more moving pieces of live music, given the story behind it of such little prep time. Here’s Domingo doing a more traditional, costumed version of it.

As some of you may already know, Lizzie has become a Bollywood nut. Most nights when I’m here at my desk diligently cobbling shoes, she’s watching some other silly romantic pap imported at great cost from overseas. Tonight, though, she convinced me (while a big download processed) to start watching the one she had read about and gotten from the Skokie Library: Rang De Basanti.

Now, if I’m going to watch movies about India, I’m less about Bollywood* and more about historical films like Gandhi. This one kind of meets in the middle. It’s about a British film maker who goes to India to film a dramatic documentary about Bhagat Singh, someone I hadn’t heard of until tonight. Completely convinced it was all made up, I consulted with the Wikipedia Gods who have treated Doug, among others, so well, and found out that he was fairly accurately portrayed in this movie. If you believe those lying bastards.

I wouldn’t call this Bollywood. I’d call it a Hindi film (and Lizzie, the expert, agrees). There are a couple of musical numbers, but mostly it’s a very good story. In fact, it’s so good that the three hours it spans felt like only two and a half. You might not think this is a glowing review, but most three-hour Bollywood movies feel to me like five hours. So there you go. It’s quite tragic in spots, and (without giving up a spoiler) has a very predictable plot twist that normally would be silly but feeds the rest of the film very well. In other words, when you feel the need to roll your eyes, stick with it — the twist actually matters.

The problem is the length. I recommend it to everyone, of course, but more than three hours of anything can be hard to take. I suggest you give it a shot, though. The acting is totally different from Bollywood standards, and the story is compelling and nicely merged with the historical context of Bhagat Singh. And there’s a little epilogue screen about the corruption in Indian government at the end that kind of validates the whole shebang. Moreover, the acting is just better (from a western perspective) — you really do start to care about these people after a while, as opposed to the usual Bollywood reaction of wondering why the men twitch so much when they’re upset.

Lizzie will be the first to tell you that I pretty much hate movies. In my opinion they are manipulative and silly, and rarely provide enough payback for the time spent watching them. This one is pretty good, though.

* I love a good Bollywood romp now and then, but I can’t typically sit through a whole movie. Lizzie likes the dramas, as they tend to have more plot and can carry you through. I like the dumb ones like Jis Desh Mein Ganga Rehta Hain, starring the charming Govinda and having deliciously extravagant dance numbers in rural India mixed with dumb slapstick comedy and a melodramatic plot. Sadly, my tastes don’t translate well to marathon three-hour movies. At least if you’re an impatient westerner like me.