Posts

Just posting quickly to wish everyone a happy new year. Hope 2004 is better than 2003 for everyone.

One of the Christmas gifts I received this year is Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles. As you might guess, it’s the authors’ attempt to rank the 500 greatest singles in the long history of country music. As all of these lists are, it’s more a beginning than an end, but the essays that accompany each selection make the book a must have for any fan of country music. As a Texas music/alternative country fan, my favorite singers and bands get little mention, but that makes sense in the context of a list of best singles, rather than of best songs, singers, or performances. One nice thing about the book is that the authors take an expansive view of country music, so songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” take their place alongside country classics like Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” Even if you disagree with every choice on the list, you’ll understand country music better after reading it, and you’ll hear new things in the songs that are listed. Great book. For what it’s worth, the reviews at Amazon.com are what I expected. The book pays little attention to country music since 1990, and really, since 1980. That may not seem fair to some reviewers, but it seems right to me, since it’s hard to place recent singles in a proper historical context. Besides, I find that the value in all such projects is less about how the works in question are ranked and more in the discussion of the items that are included. In that regard, the book is excellent. If country music isn’t your thing, you may like Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, the book upon which Heartaches by the Number is patterned. One further note: one’s appreciation of a book like this is much enhanced by the availability of online music stores like the iTunes Music Store. The ability to find many of the songs on the list and listen to them at the drop of a hat is incredible. Sadly, I think that you’d have more luck with the Dave Marsh book than Heartaches by the Number; the selection of classic country music available throught iTMS is not that deep. ...

Every once in awhile you encounter an observation so revolutionary and yet so obviously true that you have to catch your breath. I’ve recently started reading March Schmitt’s weblog, The Decembrist, and was rewarded with this: I do think that the backlash against the Medicare bill is not long in coming, and No Child Left Behind is already one of the most locally unpopular federal initiatives in a long time. But as I've written before, it's not easy for Democrats to find centrist language that shows how they would do things differently, that goes beyond the liberalism of "more." As it is, I suspect the backlash against this crappy, lazy, irresponsible legislation will not be a call to improve it, but simply another backlash against government. "Look at this Medicare mess," seniors will say: "government can't do anything right!" And when Americans are pissed off at government, who do they call? Republicans. Revolting, but true. Read the whole thing. He elaborates further here. ...

I love Firebird unreservedly, but I’ve been plagued by a particularly annoying bug recently. For some reason whenever I click on a page, a blinking cursor appears just as if I were editing the page. I haven’t had much luck searching Bugzilla, so I’m going to try reinstalling. I wonder if something was corrupted, because I’ve been using Firebird 0.7 for awhile and this bug has only recently cropped up. Update: Simon Willison points out that it’s a feature that you can turn off with the F7 key. According to this page, it’s called caret browsing. It’s designed to be the ultimate in mouse avoidance, apparently, enabling you to move around on the page and select text without taking your hands off the keyboard. ...

Here’s a table of Linux equivalents for Windows software. In this world, Linux has more of everything!

I’m no lover of Halliburton or this administration’s relationship with the company, but it seems clear that Halliburton isn’t making money hand over fist in Iraq, as is frequently alleged or implied. That still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be giving a lot more work to Iraqis or at least competitively bidding jobs out.

Wikipedia, like many popular and growing Web sites, is short on hardware. They need $20,000 to upgrade and keep things running smoothly. As I’ve noted before, this is a project worthy of support.

The Valerie Plame affair has not been in the media much of late, but the investigation continues. Oh, and people at the CIA say that the White House is still leaking classified information in order to damage or discredit Joseph Wilson and his wife.

Donkey Rising provides a preview of the new retirement program that the Bush administration is going to propose: What

Wal-Mart has launched a new music service, and of course they’re selling each song for 88 cents rather than the 99 cents that the iTunes Music Service charges. As you may suspect, Wal-Mart’s licensing terms are draconian. You’re also limited to Windows Media Player for playing the songs. I know that the iTunes Music Store limits you to using iTunes, but iTunes is nice to use.