Looking over last month’s search strings for the “previous entry”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000487.html, I saw the “wallace stevens they might be giants” search turn up “yet again”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000384.html. I poked around for a bit to see if there was any online buzz about other TMBG references to WS other than the obvious one. No dice, though apparently during one of John Linnell’s tours promoting his State Songs album, he read “Anecdote of the Jar” before playing the Tennessee song. Here ’tis:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I’m betting that there’s some other Stevens reference in a TMBG song that nobody has discovered yet. While it’s somewhat appalling to admit[1], I know TMBG lyrics way better than I know Wallace Stevens lines, so the way to find that undiscovered reference is to go back and reread Stevens. Which is as good an excuse as any.

fn1. It’s only appalling because if you asked me to make a Top Five Poets list, Stevens would be on it. Heck, Top Three.

First, some good search-engine-hit news: the “reign of the bikini”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000266.html is over. Google Images, apparently, takes about six months to catch up with the fact that a particular image is no longer on your server. Overall site traffic has plummeted, but at least now the numbers more accurately represent people actually coming to _read_ stuff.

On to this month’s unusual search strings . . .

*coolest name ever* — Inexplicably, Polytropos is ranked #4 for this phrase, as a result of a total throwaway entry, to boot.

*spider-man 2 landlord daughter* — [UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that, seeing as the preceding searching string is “_landlord_ daughter”, it has nothing whatsoever to do with all the comments that follow. Those comments are still accurate, and some might find them interesting, but are a complete and utter nonsequitur.] Aha! Apparently I’m not the only person who wondered whether she was meant to be a reference to someone in the Marvel Universe. I thought maybe when her mother picked her up she said her name, but in a comment on “my review”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000462.html, Snizzler clears that up:

The mother was speaking Mandarin when Spidey gave back the girl. She said, “Woa duh hi zi”, meaning “My baby”.

*dylan man in the long black coat metaphor* — Well, it ain’t _that_ hard. He’s death or the devil, possibly in the guise of a preacher. There’s some wiggle room there, but he’s no emperor of ice cream.

*we have returned to claim the pyramids* — Welcome, alien masters! Sadly, our kind do not communicate with each other by submitting searches to Google, though it’s a perfectly understandable mistake. I’d give you the phone number of our President, but I recommend waiting a few months. Preemption and all that.

*where do they have strongbow cider on tap?* — Not enough places, that’s for sure.

*taping a show but watching another* — This search string seems innocuous enough, but when you think about it it points to something significant: somewhere out there is somebody who is confused about how to perform this particular task, and yet is computer savvy enough to do an online search for an answer. They know their computer better than their VCR.

*werewolves miller’s crossing* — I’m pretty sure there weren’t any in the movie, though it would explain an awful lot about The Dane.

I planned on going to “Blogorama”:http://juliansanchez.com/2004_07_01_notesarch.html#108990679423973931 tonight. I honestly did. But Ella was sick last night and all day today, so come evening I was plum tuckered out. I actually ended up watching the Kerry speech, which I hadn’t planned on doing. Thoughts:

* Good-by-Kerry-standards delivery. Good speech. I agree with the PBS commentators that the convention seems to have gone very well, though I’ve used up my Shields and Brooks tolerance for the next decade.

* Whatever happens to Kerry this election, Edwards and Obama are just waiting in the wings for their turns. And they are both soooo slick. Republicans should be scared.

* I’ve been mostly disappointed with blogging coverage of the convention, though to be fair I haven’t strayed far from my usual bookmarks. But reading “Fafblog”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com just now I snorted my drink out my nose it was so funny. Immediate promotion to to the Top Five.

In the dream, I’m in a dingy basement that I instictively know is Room 19, the hangout for Catholic University English Department grad students, even though the layout is different. George W. Bush is sitting at a computer, flanked by Colin Powell, Karl Rove, and Andrew Card. (Card looks like Leo McGarry, since I don’t know what he looks like himself.) I’m just about to walk up to my buddy Lee to ask what all these people are doing down here when there’s a bit of commotion. For some reason I rush to my laptop to figure out what’s going on, and there it is, right on my screen: John Kerry has been declared the winner of the election!

My happy whoops and hollers are greeted by stony silence, since Lee is suddenly nowhere to be found and I’m surrounded by dour Republicans. So then (and this is the embarrassing part of the dream) I realize that I should just keep my head low and my eyes and ears open, because I’m about to be privy to Bush’s immediate response to losing the election, _and then I can blog about it_.

First he just stares at his own computer screen in disbelief. Then he looks at the people around him, as if for confirmation. “Maybe it’s for the best,’ says Powell, who is clearly relieved. Over in the corner, Ari Fleischer (?!) is clattering away at another computer, muttering “We can fix this we can fix this” under his breath.

George Bush stands up and turns to face his supporters. “We’ve reached the end of the road,” he says in a steady voice. “I want to thank each of you so very much for everything you’ve done. Please accept these pastries.” The speech brings tears to my eyes, and as I leave I think “Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.” But once outside I look at a newspaper and discover that he is “appealing” the election and plans to fight it every step of the way, even though Kerry’s victory was overwhelming.

It dawns on me that the whole moving pastry speech was a ruse to fool me into thinking he was a nice guy. “Well, at least he lost,” I muse. I am then consumed by a tremendous craving for sushi.

(If I actually find myself watching enough Convention coverage to make this the first of a long list, somebody shoot me. But we’ll call this C.O. #1 so that if a handful of other ones _do_ follow, I won’t have to keep trying to come up with clever titles.)

Re: the Gore speech: pretty darn good. Just like “when I heard him in November”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000153.html. So once again I have to ask: _where the hell was_ this _Al Gore in 2000?_

The Polytropos clan was on the road back from Michigan earlier today; right around 4:00 we were pulling out of Breezewood, just a couple hours from home. “Perfect timing!” I thought to myself as we tuned in to NPR for _All Things Considered_. It had been a pretty busy week and I had missed most of my daily news fixes on the radio.

Twenty minutes in, I was thoroughly disgusted. Naturally the leading coverage was on the Democratic National Convention, but the first story was all about security issues there, not the Convention itself. In that story, a delegate they interviewed talked about being in “fear mode.” Both she and person who interviewed her treated that as being pretty much normative; the unspoken assumption was that the same constant state of agitation that had many people in D.C. looking to the sky for cropdusters in October 2001 should still be in effect today. Where is this fear coming from? Not from the constant stream of terrorist attacks on our soil that have plagued us since 9/11. It may have something to do with “Homeland Security’s Color-Coded Harbinger of (Potential) Doom”:http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=29, which jiggers up or down to the tune of ominous warnings, but little more. And it certainly has something to do with a constant stream of news stories about security concerns — this latest barrage about the conventions being only the most recent example.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for caution, and for the courage and gritty determination to win out against the people that attacked us three years ago. But the time is long past for fear — as “Jim noted”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_02_08.html#005038, it’s unseemly (and it’s the second time this month I’ve referred back to that particular piece of his, with good reason). If Kerry stands up on Thursday and speaks out against the culture of fear that the current Administration is content to foster, he’ll have won not just my vote but my confidence.

That first story ticked me off a little, but it was the second one that really had me steaming. It was about — and remember, we’re talking about top-of-the-hour news here — the questions an ESPN reporter asked John Kerry about baseball, and whether he had “waffled” in his responses. It was the stupidest thing I’d heard on NPR in a good long while, especially because there wasn’t anything particularly waffle-y about his comments on the Red Sox and the DH rule and Pete Rose. They were all perfectly good answers, actually, so a piece with an already-vapid topic got even sillier trying to make it stick with inappropriate material. Not that this should come as a surprise, since the waffle-meme is a manufactured notion that the media has embraced — proof positive that, as George Lakoff notes, the Republicans are “winning the frame game”:http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/8/lakoff-g.html.

The worst part is, NPR is usually where I go to get _away_ from news coverage that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. At least there’s CSPAN for the convention speeches . . .

The trial of the Zimbabwe 70 has been due to start for a while now, but the latest word is that it will be delayed until Tuesday. Rumor has it that plea-bargain negotiations for some of the mercenaries are causing the delay, something that both the prosecution and the defense deny. A recent Guardian article somewhat breathlessly asserts that Simon Mann, the leader of the operation, is appealing to his contacts in the British government for intervention. If there really does turn out to be a plea bargain, speculation can begin about whether it came as the result of some backroom dealing.

Far more interesting, though, are the excerpts from a reputed letter from Mann to his wife that was smuggled out of his cell. In it he refers to Ely Calil, a British-based Lebanese businessman, oil millionaire, and senior executive of Logo Logistics, the company that owned the plane that was captured in Harare:

Mann said that he met Calil . . . in London and spoke about the situation in Equatorial Guinea. Calil offered to introduce him to Severo Moto, the exiled opposition leader who wanted to overthrow President Obiang.

‘I met Severo Moto in Madrid. He is a good and honest man,’ writes Mann. ‘He had studied for [the] priesthood but left the studies. He did so in order to better help his people. At this stage they asked me if I could help escort Severo Moto home at a given moment when simultaneously there would be an uprising of both military and civilians against Obiang.

What strikes me about this section is that it’s the first explanation for the situation that isn’t completely daffy. Mann’s official claim that they were only going to provide mine security in DR Congo has always been ridiculous on its face. But, as many news reports have noted, it seems incredibly (and uncharacteristically) naive for these guys to have assumed they could roll in there and just overthrow a government. But the letter, assuming it’s for real, points to another possibility: Mann & Co. were hired to provide security for Severo Moto while a coordinated uprising actually did the work of overthrowing Obiang’s government. This seems like a much more sensible mission for a band of mercenaries; there hasn’t been any such uprising, of course, but it could have been called off once the plane was detained. Obiang’s subsequent brutal crackdown certainly fits with this theory as well.

Related tidbits: Equatorial Guinea has also been in the news lately in connection with Riggs Bank, which is coming under fire for embracing the money of the worst sorts of dictators. As Kathryn Cramer has noted, Sandline International, the PMC founded by Mann after Executive Outcomes, closed its doors and ceased to exist on April 16, a month after he and his team were taken into custody. This article (which Kathryn also comments on) looks at the South African government’s efforts to curtail mercenary activity in general. They have laws against the sort of thing Mann’s team was trying to do, but are also (unsuccessfully) trying to discourage South Africans from flocking to Iraq for private security gigs. Convention wisdom among the families of the captured mercenaries is that South Africa will leave them high and dry in order to set an example for future prospective mercenaries. Whether anyone’s going to come to their aid at all is a question that will have to wait until Tuesday at the earliest.

They Might Be Giants isn’t what you would call a jam band, but like Phish (may they rest in peace), I’ve come to gauge their strength and direction by their live performances, not their albums. Between those shows and the band’s side projects, quirky experiments, and ongoing music delivery in the form of Dial-A-Song and TMBG Radio, their actual studio releases have almost come to seem like an afterthought. If all they did was continue to offer serviceable, adequate collections of tunes every few years, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing as long as the fruits of their real energy continued to be evident once or twice a year at the 9:30 Club.

“The thing that irks me about The Spine, their latest album, is that it’s serviceable and adequate, but could have been so much more.” That’s what I wrote a week ago, before picking up on the review again today after a fresh listen. And, surprise surprise, the dang thing has grown on me. Frank Blank describes the process well in Gigantic: when he first heard Flood, he thought it was just OK, but then one day in the car, its pure genius reached up and swatted him across the head. The Spine isn’t pure genius, but it’s a solid offering that’s a couple notches above 2001’s Mink Car. (I won’t presume to officially place it in my hierarchy until it’s had a year or so to percolate.)

If Mink Car was a pale shadow of Flood, then The Spine is a respectable shadow of Lincoln. It has that album’s propensity—even more than your average TMBG song—for existential despair masked in, and somehow redeemed by, catchy licks and an irrepressively bouncy spirit. This is from “Stalk of Wheat”:

And I was out of ideas like I is like I is
Like I is, like I is, I was out of ideas

I once had a dream of a gleam in my eye
And I’ll have it till the day I die
I had a thought bubble of trouble and strife
And it lasted for the rest of my life

That’s not quite so witty or incisive as this bit from Lincoln . . .

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders
What the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking of
Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you
Or is it worse because it’s always waiting where your eyes don’t go?

. . . but it’s definitely the same flavor.

The Spine is too short, by far. Thirty-six minutes for sixteen tracks isn’t anything unusual for a Giants album, but in this case many of the songs are meant to go longer. “Damn Good Times” is a frenetically peppy, absolutely delicious dance number (and Ella favorite) that is cruelly held to a mere two and a half minutes, and its high-energy counterpart, “It’s Kickin’ In,” is whittled down to only two. Meanwhile a middling number with substandard lyrics like “Wearing a Raincoat” lingers on past the three-minute mark.

At least the album’s best song, “Museum of Idiots,” is one of the longer ones. It’s track number nine, for those of you prone to trying it out in the music store, and if you don’t groove on that lovely lift when the horns kick in, I don’t know what to do with you. Other standouts include the opener, “Experimental Film” (whose video is animated by the mad geniuses of Homestar Runner) and “Thunderbird.” The two skippable tracks, “Bastard Wants to Hit Me” and “The World Before Later On,” bog down the middle of the album.

With the exception of the unexpected glee of those horns on “Museum of Idiots,” there’s not a lot that’s remarkable about the arrangements of these tunes. It’s TMBG, so they’re full of whistles, bells, and shameless experimentation in a variety of genres, but the instrumentation is mostly straight-up guitar work without the added punch of Linnell’s accordion or saxophone.

But there’s an up-side to that: these songs are going to rock when played live. The short ones will get their length, the lackluster ones will get their energy, and it’ll all come together in what I’m sure is going to be an absolutely splendid show that’ll be coming to my hometown in two days . . .

. . . at which point I will still be in Michigan. Ah well. They’ll be back.

Polytropos is one year old today! That’s pretty nifty, especially since a year is about six months longer than I would have guessed it would have lasted, starting out. That staying power comes from the fact that people actually seem to be _reading_ the dang thing, in numbers greater than I would have predicted. Having an audience, it turns out, is quite addictive.

I’m still working on making enough time & energy to post better stuff, more often, and thus (ideally) lift myself off the plateau that I’ve “complained about”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000385.html before. But it’s a tricky issue. Should I really be worrying about it all that much, when I could be directing writerly energies elsewhere? Or should I be happy that I actually have a place to _direct_ those energies, and keep running with it? I can see how, after blogging for a couple more years, this sort of thinking could land you in a mid-blog-life crisis, “like Jim”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/jimhenley/17347.html.

But now is not a time for that sort of thinking, but for good cheer and the distribution of cupcakes. Raise a glass with me: To the heady, chaotic freedom of the Internet, still present after all these years! To Trackback links! To people writing stuff! To another year of twists and turns!

“After some consideration”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000432.html, I’ve decided to keep my lot cast in with Movable Type, as opposed to switching over to WordPress. I toodled around with an install of WP long enough to discover the stuff I didn’t like about it, and while overall it’s really cool, so is MT. I’ll wait for the general release of 3.0, though. (UPDATE: And after the last swath of #*%*^% comment spam I just had to clean up, I have half a mind to embrace 3.0’s comment registration features, too. Not happy about that, but consider this fair warning.)

I ended up scratching my “need to try new software” itch elsewhere, by dropping Opera and embracing Firefox & Thunderbird. Firefox definitely wins the browser competition. I’ve long been a fan of Opera’s M2 email system, which is a whole different paradigm for managing email. Going back to a traditional email system, though, I discovered I like that just fine, too. The fact that I once again have to manually move emails to subfolders means that I’m a little more selective about what I choose to keep, and as a result my email archives will be less cluttered with stuff that I really didn’t need to save. F&T also give those nice “I’m using open-source software” warm fuzzies.

On the hardware front, I take little satisfaction in the fact that my desktop rig meets the “minimum system requirements for Doom 3”:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/20/141236&tid=112. “Minimum” ain’t gonna cut it for truly experiencing the game, and blimey, I don’t seem to have a few hundred bucks lying around for a new processor & video card. Looks like this particular bandwagon will be passing me by.