… comes George W. Bush (presented by my Chimp-O-Matic GWB quote rotator):
I’ve been to war. I’ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to war.
George W. Bush
Charleston, WV
01/27/2002
I’m sure there is a bunch of partial soldiers sitting at Walter Reed who would all love to take a stab at raising twins instead. Or to take a stab at going to war like W did — by not reporting for duty in the Air National Guard.
I’m a big fan of Everclear. They’re a band out of Portland, Oregon. Actually, to be specific, they’re Art Alexakis and whatever backing guys he has with him. For years it was a trio with Craig Montoya and Greg Eklund, but there was a big shakeup a few years ago and Art is the only original member. He’s always been the songwriter, so it’s kind of his thing anyway.
ANYHOW, in my travels tonight while avoiding going to sleep, I found their Myspace page. There are a bunch of good videos from before and after the shakeup, but I particularly noticed some stuff in the “AM Radio” video. There are a lot of great cultural references, but there’s one fleeting moment where there’s a background image of the TRS-80 (the Radio Shack foray into the personal computing market). I was deeply impressed — people who are just trying to crank out a quick vintage geek moment tend toward the Apple IIE, the Commodore 64 or the IBM PC Jr. Maybe even the TI-994a. The TRS-80 hardly ever comes up.
We had three. The Model III, the Model 100 (which was a great ultra-portable version with an 40×8 LCD screen, a precursor to the tablet PC), and the Model 4P (”P” for portable — it weighed about 40 pounds, but had an aircraft-grade handle spot-welded to it to make it “portable”).
Scripsit was the word processing software, VisiCalc was the spreadsheet (and ultimately the most successful software ever written for the TRS-80), and I paid through the nose for Zork and Zaxxon.
And now I find out that my favorite overlooked band is writing songs with videos that include my favorite overlooked computing platform. I suppose there’s some vindication to be found there — I haven’t taken the time to pin it down just yet, but I’m sure it’s there. Art Alexakis is cool — he’s got tattoos and stuff. So any mention from him of the TRS-80 must make me cool by some transitive property. Right?
(And does it hurt my “cool” quotient to be trying to find some connection to “cool” by a “transitive property”?)
My daughter Nora goes to Martin Luther King Jr. Experimental Laboratory School in Evanston, Illinois. King Lab, for mercifully short. Today was the Martin Luther King, Jr. assembly. It was long. Interminably long, honestly. The kids were great, the ambition of the teachers was a little much (big elaborate musical numbers requiring set changes don’t go well with the K-4 set). It was a little under two and a half hours.
But that’s not why I’m writing this — I was proud of Nora and proud of all the kids today. But it got me digging around for the full versions of some of Dr. King’s speeches (largely because a video slideshow created by one of the eighth graders pulled a pretty obscure part of the I Have A Dream speech, so I had to make sure I was right about which speech it was from). I won’t bore you with links to all of them — they’re incredibly easy to find on YouTube.
But one compilation stuck out — it was a few segments of speeches about his opposition to war (from, if I recognize the type treatment, The American Experience on PBS). They struck me as so overwhelmingly relevant to our current situation that I thought I might share the video here. It really goes hand in hand with the mountaintop speech with which it ends beautifully and explosively) as far as eerie visions of the future.
At 2:30 today I was ready to never hear about Martin Luther King, Jr. again. Tonight I wish I could volunteer for his Presidential campaign (he’d be 79 today).
Chris Rock is on Comedy Central right now (some HBO special from a few years ago), and he just summed up America perfectly:
America is the only country where people go hunting on a full stomach.
For those of you who have to use Excel, I found a great forum tonight called MrExcel.com. It seems to be incredibly active, and may well have provided the fastest response to a fairly detailed question that I’ve ever received (I went to the kitchen for a carrot and came back to an answer — my office is about eight feet from the kitchen).
Anyhow, it’s a great example of a very active online community that seems to be friendly and results-oriented. And really, there are a lot of people there who are pushing Excel to its limits with some pretty innovative coding. Check it out if you find yourself in Excel Hell (no offense, Doug — it’s just not one of my core disciplines and I get very befuddled very quickly).