SmartRemarks

I love my PowerBook. My computer is my life… or at least, it allows me to conduct it, and contains most of the relevant details of it, and connects me with the world beyond it. And using a Mac makes the whole process, really, downright fun sometimes.

Nevertheless, I admit to living dangerously where the safety of my loved one is concerned. I know the mantra that hard-drive failures are a matter of “not if, but when”… but despite that, I’ve never really had a regular backup routine. I have some archived files that are years old, but most of the more recent documents on my current machine (purchased over three years ago now) aren’t backed up.

Recently, however, I decided to own up to this irresponsible conduct and change my ways. I’ve been putting off a system upgrade (from OS X 10.4 to 10.5; this Mac is from the last pre-Intel generation, so it won’t run 10.6), but I knew that before installing a major upgrade a backup would be a Really Good Idea, just in case Something Went Wrong. This drive has worked flawlessly for as long as I’ve had the computer—in fact, I’ve never had a drive failure—but better safe than sorry, right? Plus, its 80GB capacity was about 75% full, and I know performance starts to take a hit above that level, and I figured before I started weeding out old files I should have everything backed up. And I expected that regular incremental backups would be easier after the upgrade, anyway, thanks to Apple’s nifty TimeMachine utility, so any headaches involved with this “safety” backup would be a one-time thing.

So yesterday I pulled a pristine new 500GB external drive out of its box, and attached it to my trusty PowerBook with a FireWire cable, and downloaded the latest version of the handy freeware backup utility SuperDuper!, and carefully shut down everything else that was running, and had the program begin making a bootable clone of my PowerBook drive on the external drive.

And guess when my hard drive decided to fail?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: computers, hardware, irony, mac, PowerBook, troubleshooting

Yesterday’s inbox contained a political e-mail message forwarded by my girlfriend’s parents. They’re not especially political people; their sensibilities (to the extent they’ll even discuss them) tend toward a somewhat mushy moderate conservatism, the kind of folks who instinctively vote Republican, even though the party’s center of gravity has moved far away from them. Indeed, they even said as much in the forwarded message—”you’re much more interested in politics than either of us”—yet they invited a response, practically asking for an informed rebuttal even as they implicitly treated the viral message as credible and worthy of attention.

Which, once I read it, was really hard to believe.

This is the message they forwarded, word for word:
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Congress, conservatism, Constitution, e-mail, government, health care, insurance, Medicare, Michael Connelly, Supreme Court

No, I haven’t posted in several weeks, but no, I haven’t abandoned this blog, either. I’ve just been exceedingly preoccupied with other things. More on that at a later date. It’s starting to ease up, though, so for the moment I at least have the opportunity to offer a short new post.

About? Superman: Secret Origin #3, which shipped last week.

As I wrote at the time, I actually kind of enjoyed the first issue of this Geoff Johns-written revamp of Superman’s backstory; it didn’t really seem necessary, but at least it was being done reasonably well. I had some more reservations about the second issue (which elaborated on Lex Luthor’s origins in Smallville in a way that made it completely pointless to have transplanted him there in the first place, and which reinserted the Legion and a kinda-sorta Superboy career into Clark’s youth in a way designed to pluck all the most obvious emotional chords, but which still had some fun elements). The third issue, though? This one was an outright disappointment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: continuity, DC Comics, Geoff Johns, super-heroes, Superman

I’ve been preoccupied with other affairs lately, and haven’t been much inclined to write blog entries, as the date stamp will attest. However, sometimes events crop up in ways that just demand to be shared and commented upon.

Two news stories this week converged (at least in my mind) to compel the question:  just how do we allow so many deluded, deranged, venally twisted cretins to have power over us in public office? How do they get that way, and how can they stand to look at themselves in the mirror?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Al Franken, Congress, David Vitter, Dick Cheney, equal marriage, Halliburton, Keith Bardwell, racism, Senate, southern states

Open sewers run through the streets. Disease is rampant, up to and including recurring outbreaks of the plague. Criminals are routinely castrated, disemboweled, and hacked to pieces in public executions. The rotting heads of political enemies are mounted on public gates. The bloody torture of animals is a popular form of entertainment. Wretched poverty is commonplace. Literacy is not. Deference to a rigid caste system is expected of everyone. Weekly attendance at a church of the official religion is mandatory, with crippling fines imposed on those who abstain. Government censorship is taken for granted. Prejudice against foreigners and indeed against anyone even slightly divergent from the norm is encouraged.

Is this some third-world hellhole? Some imaginary world of dystopian fantasy?

No. This is England at one of its greatest historical moments, under the reign of its most esteemed monarch, Elizabeth the First. This is the England we romanticize and glorify and consider the forerunner of our own modern liberal democracy.

And astonishingly, almost miraculously, this is also the world that shaped the most brilliant literary mind in human history. This culture that would be alien and repulsive to us were we suddenly to find ourselves in it, stripped of the cleansing distance of centuries, somehow gave rise to a visionary who crafted timeless works that speak to us today every bit as much as they did to audiences four hundred years ago. A man whose artistic insight encompassed not just linguistic invention but social dynamics, personal psychology, and humanist philosophy.

How is this possible?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: history, literature, philosophy, progress, psychology, Shakespeare, writers

In one sense, everyone knows Superman’s origin. At least the sound bite version: “strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,” “rocketed to Earth as an infant from the dying planet Krypton,” and so forth.

The thing is, it’s really hard to build actual stories on a sound bite. And in another sense, hard as it may be to believe, Superman as seen in the comics hasn’t had a coherent origin for the better part of a decade now.

Superman’s backstory was fairly consistent for decades, from its first full telling in 1948’s Superman #53 to 1961’s classic Superman #146 all the way through 1986… notwithstanding lots of retroactive detail that got inserted over the years (especially under Mort Weisinger’s editorship in the ’60s) and a few minor tweaks to accommodate the Earth-1/Earth-2 split. The cumulative history was enough to justify a Superman Encyclopedia in the late ’70s compiling it all. Then all that was swept away in 1986, in the aftermath of the continuity-reshaping Crisis on Infinite Earths, with John Byrne’s Man of Steel mini-series and the simultaneous relaunch of all the Superman titles. It was controversial at the time—particularly for the way it retroactively erased Superboy—but it provided a clean slate on which to create new Superman stories in the new DCU continuity.

For a while.

Then in 2000, as part of a change of creative teams, Superman experienced a “time storm” that left his backstory in doubt. In 2003, DC published Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright mini, which confused things even more, as it contradicted MoS in many respects but was never acknowledged as fully canonical either in-story or by the editorial PTB. In 2006, Infinite Crisis shook up the DCU again, though not as severely, and in the aftermath hints were dropped about a whole new set of changes to Superman’s backstory—nothing comprehensive, though, just various tweaks like another new look for Krypton here and a revised introduction for Mon-El there. The thing is, there was still a relatively unbroken sequence of stories tracing back to MoS in 1986, and characters and events from many of those stories were still being used or referenced regularly. Confusion reigned.

Now, after a seemingly interminable wait (for those of us who care about these things), comes Superman: Secret Origins—issue #1 was released this week—by writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank. It’s the new Definitive Version. And it’s… not bad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: continuity, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Geoff Johns, Legion, Lex Luthor, super-heroes, Superman

In the midst of the cesspool of paranoia and paralogia into which the ranting right is dragging so much of our political discourse these days… the latest iterations thereof being the Fox-driven hypocritical demagoguery about ACORN, and (even worse) the WSJ’s incredible suggestion that this(!) of all things somehow merits a special prosecutor…

…a reader comment about the latter on John Cole’s blog put it all into perspective in a way that can’t help but provoke a grin, and that definitely merits sharing:

…does anyone else think that its great that Obama can have all these Czars and communists in the same administration without them trying to kill each other? Team of Rivals, Fuck Yeah! The man’s a diplomatic genius. After this, solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should be a cakewalk.

Really, what more can be said?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ACORN, conservatism, Obama

(And thank heaven for that.)

So Sen. Max Baucus’s Finance Committee has finally released a health care “reform” bill, months after every other committee charged with the task. (Or a “Chairman’s Mark” version of one, at least—i.e., something actually readable by laymen [pdf]).

The predictable result? It’s awful. Any Democrat who would vote for a bill that looks like this has absolutely no political sense whatsoever, much less policy sense, and should be drummed out of office on general principle.

Fortunately, most of them seem to realize that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Democrats, health care, insurance, Max Baucus, Republicans, Senate

Side note for my countless loyal fans (well, I haven’t counted ‘em, anyway):  today marks the one-year anniversary of my launch of this blog, and this is the 173rd post I’ve published in that time. Total cumulative visits to date are nearing 16,000. Not earth-shaking, but not a bad track record, I hope!…

—

Anyway. Today’s topic. As a matter of personal disposition I’m a humanist, so I tend to enjoy works of art and storytelling that dovetail with that philosophical orientation. I believe that in the long run, for all our foibles and shortcomings, human culture moves in the direction of justice over injustice, cooperation over selfishness, integrity over expediency, wisdom over ignorance.

Art is a wonderful means of reminding us of the enduring power of these values and principles. It should come as no surprise, then, that my favorite films include life-affirming works like Holiday, It’s A Wonderful Life, Casablanca, and Inherit the Wind. Such idealistic fare is perhaps scarcer than it used to be—we live in a cynical age—but it’s not yet extinct; I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy qualifies, for instance.

However, I said all that by way of preface for this:  two of the best films I saw this summer were, philosophically speaking, the diametric opposite of life-affirming. They were very different in subject matter, but both were terrific, superbly executed, deeply satisfying movies… and both will leave you with the conviction that “human intelligence” and “human compassion” are oxymorons, and indeed that humanity is a thoroughly despicable species in general. I’m talking about In The Loop and District 9.

[Beware: spoilers ahead!]

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: District 9, humanism, In The Loop, Iraq, movies, Neill Blomkamp, Peter Jackson, Sharlto Copely

So, where did I leave off?

…That’s right, there was a speech Wednesday night. A pretty significant one, in fact, for reasons I described at some length.

What of it, then?

I can’t deny that it was a very, very good speech. Rhetorically powerful. And yet, what it says about the direction of health care policy, and thus about Obama and the Democratic Party itself… still remains substantially up in the air.

(Even as every pundit who can string three words together attempts to read the tea leaves and tell us otherwise.)

I’ll try to avoid that kind of divination. But opinions? Analysis? I have those.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, government, health care, insurance, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate