Write Your Own, Pt. 1

Thomas L. Friedman column (circle your choices):

The other day I (had lunch with/was thinking about/was skiing with/saw) (King Abdullah/Henry Kissinger/a homeless man/ a fuzzy bunny) and he was (talking policy/eating an eggroll/wearing a tam o’shanter).

Suddenly I (realized/discovered/remembered/imagined) that (the Bush Administration/Barack Obama/the economy/the entire history of mankind) could be (explained/wiped out/summarized) by (a childish scribble on a napkin/a billboard in the background/drinking heavily).

See? It's so easy a child could do it!

I know what I am giving for Christmas

From Chronicle Book's description:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

Release date is sometime in April.

Curse that spam filter...

My Spam Filter informs me that it has spiked perhaps the most important email of my life.

You have received a message that is probably SPAM.

To: admin@seanibus.com
Mailbox: admin@seanibus.com
From: ""
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, at 07:30 am
Subj: Re: Message from President


I am so sorry I missed the president when he needed me. I ought to give Barack a call and see what's up.

Things I think about, Pt. III

I felt compelled to look this up today.

The U.S. accounts for more than 48 percent of all defense spending in the entire world, if you take into account the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the cost of maintaining nuclear weapons, which is not paid for by the military (who knew?).

In 2008, the whole world spent $1.43 trillion on military stuff. The U.S. spends $711 billion of that.

If you add up our spending and that of our NATO allies, that comes to something like 72 percent of all military spending on the planet.

I also wanted to look this up:

The U.S. operates about two thirds of all the aircraft carriers in the world. We have 12 active super-carriers (with at least two more inactive but fit to recommission quickly), plus at least 10 of the smaller amphibious assault ships, which are effectively aircraft carriers. Even using a fairly generous definition of "aircraft carrier", there are only 13 active non-American carriers on the whole planet and only England and France have more than one (the Royal Navy has four, the French have two).

This leaves me with an important question:

Shouldn't we be kicking butt somewhere or something?

Do I know how to pick 'em or what?

My mother has long said that every time she finds a food or beverage she really likes, the company discontinues it. I'd think she was making it up, but I have watched it happen many times.

Seems much the same is true for me, but more on the career track.

When I was a teenager, I developed a passionate interest in rock music and set about collecting as much new and classic vinyl, both 45 and 33 rpm, as I could get. This interest led me to a passionate interest in radio. I grew my hair long and set about to play Led Zeppelin deep cuts late into the night.

That didn't work out so well. Not only did CDs kill my beloved vinyl, Clear Channel and others killed my beloved radio. Within a couple of years, I was playing pop songs by Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and wondering if it was possible to be any more bored on the air.

So I tried newspapers. That worked out pretty well, until everyone decided newspapers were dead. And now it doesn't work so well any more.

Simple, I thought, I'll switch to magazines - they've got deep pockets. And that worked really well for four or five years.

And then this: magazine ad pages down 12 percent last year. My formerly lucrative clients at Time and People magazines were down 19 and 12 percent.

And in the meantime, I have developed a number of hobbies, all which could have been good career paths. Early in my newspaper career, I developed a passion and modest talent for Photography. My particular favorite was Kodak slide film.

Sensing a pattern?

Lately,I have gotten terribly interested in brewing beer at home. I joined just in time for a horrifying crisis in the supply of Hops and soaring prices for commodities such as Barley.

Sean strikes again.

So now newspapers are dead (but just haven't stopped kicking) and magazines are dying, and film-based photography is a historical curiosity and radio is both painfully dull and automated and beer is too expensive to drink.

Any suggestions on my next career move? Anyone have an industry you'd like to see collapse within the next decade? I'd be willing to take a job there and work my usual magic - for a small fee.

Save Top Chef

I'll admit it - I love Top Chef on Bravo. I never miss an episode. My wife and I sit glued to the tube dissecting dishes the way football fans analyze the minutia of every play. I try to skim over the obnoxious product placements and the sometimes completely demented challenges that would try the skill and patience of many a professional chef. I just like it because it is about cooking. And I love to cook.

So I was completely dismayed to find that the producers of Top Chef have abruptly replaced judge Gail Simmons with someone named Toby Young. It's not that I miss Gail so much (I found her cranky and rather difficult to look at; she appears to have some odd plastic surgery. Just my layman's opinion). It's that this Toby Young guy is a complete jerk, at least based on the opening episode last week. He seems predisposed to hate everything. He talks about himself incessantly (I don't care that he ate real German food while living in an isolated shack in the Alps). He makes glib, shallow pop-culture references constantly (comparing an avocado sorbet to the performance of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder? Spare me).

I didn't know who this guy was until I saw the episode last night. I am reliably informed today that he is modestly famous for having some sort of book about Graydon Carter and Vanity Fair, which in itself tells me as much as I need to know about how seriously to take him.

I want him gone.

So I voted on Bravo's dorky little online poll on the show's site, checking the box that suggested I want Gail Simmons back, which isn't entirely true, but she's certainly better than this obnoxious twit. But I fear that the poll is just part of a conspiracy to make Toby Young some kind of cult hate figure - the judge we love to boo. This would be a great pity - I do not want to boo Toby Young; I want to have him to disappear so we can talk about food instead of some literary C-lister.

Perhaps it won't help, but I did find that Bravo has a "contact us" link hidden carefully at the bottom of the site. So I sent them a note:

Dear Bravo,

Please ask the producers of Top Chef to take Toby Young away as abruptly as he came. He is irritating beyond endurance and seems mostly interested in discussing himself and demonstrating his considerable, but gratingly shallow, knowledge of pop culture. If I wanted a glib, self-centered Englishman to comment cruelly about food, I would invite Simon Cowell to dinner. As it is, I just want to watch a show about cooking.




Contact Bravo and complain about Toby Young.


Are you with me? Can we get this guy exiled for the finals? Can we guarantee that he does not return next season? Join me in my cause. Save the show I like, despite itself.

My brother, my uncle, and me, sometime around 1973. Doesn't seem that long ago, does it?

The end

I am finding myself strangely compelled by this. Not so much for the visuals, but because it had never occurred to me before that the music of the Apocalypse might actually be just as soothing as this suggests.

Things I think about. Pt. II

I realize this month something that I have probably always known, but have never been able to articulate:

I hate bullet points.

Bullet points are to writing what a plain cinder block wall is to architecture: functional but an affront to style.

Ok, sure, writing is about communicating clearly, and bullet points are a fiendishly efficient way to communicate information. But they're just so damned ugly. It is not an accident, I believe, that the really great writers of history don't use bullet points.

Where would this country be today, for example, if our Founding Fathers had access to the easy Bullet Point function in MS Word?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with the following unalienable rights:
- life;
- liberty;
- the pursuit of happiness.

Not cool.

This is just to say...

I have gambled away our nest egg

And sold the children

Into servitude

Even though

You were probably

Going to take them

To the park this afternoon

Forgive me

They were being annoying.

Oh, and I

Burned down the house.

Truth in Advertising

I ran across this on a discussion group recently and I immediately thought of my college friend Patti. Long ago, she was involved in an escapade that I I will not detail since she is now a respectable woman of the world with real prospects, such as a seat in Congress or a cushy judicial appointment. But suffice it to say that it ended with the marquee of an innocent hotel reading "Our Shower Leak Pee." (If you know her, ask her yourself - she'll probably be happy to share the story, complete with photos).

Dave for president

Ok, so he's often old and stale these days, but once in a while, David Letterman still rises to genius...

Not so silly

Brother Geode asked a question on my post about Obama's citizenship status that deserves an answer, but it's taken me a while to get around to it. So here goes.

Geode writes "C'mon man, what about the McCain/Panama controversy? Where's your fair n' balanced? When that tempest comes a-blowin', you gotta show BOTH SIDES of the teacup."

I don't know whether he means to suggest that the McCain controversy is equally silly as the Obama one, but for the sake of something to type about, I will assume he does.

Turns out, McCain's birthplace is an actual issue, one in which I have something of a personal interest.

The New York Times had a nice piece about this a few months ago, but here's the essence of it:

The Constitution doesn't set the bar very high to qualify to be president - you have to be at least 35 years old, have lived in the United States for at least 14 years, and be a "Natural born Citizen." Easy, right?

The problem here is that "natural born citizen" doesn't have any particular legal meaning. So right from the start people were arguing about what that should mean. Clearly it means you must have been a citizen from birth - no naturalized persons need apply. But could it also mean that you must be physically born inside the United States?

Congress quickly tried to settle the issue with a 1790 law that said that yes, anyone who was a citizen from birth was considered "Natural born" no matter where in the world they were born. But that law was eventually repealed and there has never been a legal test - a few nominees, including Barry Goldwater and George Romney, were born outside of the actual United States (Goldwater in Arizona when it was just a territory and Romney in Mexico, where his parents were working), but none of them won.

So now comes John McCain, whose father was an admiral who happened to be stationed in the U.S. controlled Panama Canal Zone in 1936, when young John was born. So although he is clearly a citizen from birth, he was born outside the 48 existing states at the time.

It seems likely that should McCain win, someone somewhere will try to challenge his eligibility. And that's good, because it seems to be unlikely that any court would actually entertain such a lawsuit for very long and the issue would be settled once and for all.

And that's a good thing for me. Not that I want to be president, but because it is a question that has interested me since I was a child. It happens that I was born in Canada, where my father was a diplomat. Because my parents are both Americans, I am a U.S. citizen from birth. And because my father was a diplomat on an official mission, I cannot claim Canadian citizenship under their law (The U.S. has the same law for diplomats posted here). It causes me occasional headaches when I cross the U.S. border because the Border Patrol takes one look at my passport and demands to know when I was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. But it also allows me to irritate bureaucrats who demand my birth certificate - I have a birth certificate, of course, but I like to produce my official "Consular Report of Birth Abroad," which by law has the same effect as a birth certificate in terms of proving citizenship. It's fun to watch some clerk frown and squint and try to figure out what this document represents.

But the question still lingers for me - am I considered a "Natural Born Citizen" under the Constitution? Should McCain win, I may finally have my answer.

Such a fine line

It is perhaps surprising that one of the greatest nuggets of philosophical wisdom comes not from some Greek thinker or revered English playwright, but from the 1984 Rock-N-Roll spoof "This is Spinal Tap." In it, the addled philosopher-rocker David St. Hubbins observes "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."

I will hazard a guess that John McCain has never seen the movie.

In picking Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, McCain has done what seems to be an astonishingly clever thing. Palin is successful and bright, by all accounts personable, vivacious, and energetic. She's the kind of woman that any man would like to have as a mother, wife or daughter. She's the kind of woman that any other woman might admire and aspire to be.

And yet, McCain may have veered dangerously close to David St Hubbins' dreaded line.

For one thing, he has neatly kicked a rhetorical leg out from under himself. Never again will anyone be able to listen with a straight face when he accuses Barack Obama of bring a naïve, inexperienced lightweight. Palin is just 44 years old and has been governor for just two years after serving as a small town mayor. In terms of heavy-weight national and international experience, or even just life experience, she and Obama are roughly tied. If she's ready to be president in the event of McCain's death, then Obama is ready to be president in the event of McCain's defeat.

But perhaps even more seriously, McCain has made the one mistake that neither candidate should have made (and yet both did). He picked a person who highlights his most serious perceived weakness. There are few people in the country that could have highlighted more painfully McCain's age and frailty, or thrown into sharp relief his status as a grey-haired Washington insider. Perhaps only Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal could have done more to make McCain look like a feeble and aging veteran senator.

Of course, Obama has made roughly the same mistake. By picking Joe Biden, Obama has tied his fortune to a serious, respected, graying elder statesman with a lengthy Washington career. The choice of Biden doesn't remove a rhetorical weapon for Obama, as McCain's choice did for the GOP, but it will still make it painfully clear that Obama is young and relatively inexperienced. Perhaps worse, Biden is lively, funny, and irreverent (if excessively verbose at times), likely to charm the press and voters. This will be a painful contrast with the dour, distant, and slightly disapproving demeanor that Obama has projected so far.

Unfortunately, it may not be so easy for voters to decide in November which side of David St. Hubbins' line they are standing on.

The Silly Season

A friend of mine back in Washington used to call election time the "Silly Season." And he was right. A sign of how silly things have gotten this year is an article that appears to be causing great interest and jubilation among Right Wingers, in which political gadfly author Steve Miller writes that Obama is not a "natural born citizen" of the United States, as required by the Constitution in order to become president.

The article says, in part:

Barack Obama is not legally a US natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth; a law that was in effect between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, when the law was changed.

However, the new law did not preempt the former law in the cases of those born between the above listed dates when the old law was in effect.

Therefore, Senator Obama may very well be disqualified as the Democratic candidate in the upcoming Presidential campaign.

Presidential office requires the person elected to be a natural-born United States citizen if the child was not born to two US citizen parents.

US Law very clearly stipulates: “If only one parent was a US citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.”

Barack Obama’s father was not a US citizen, and Obama’s mother was only 18 when he was born, which means although she had been a US citizen for 10 years, his mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years prior to Barack Obama’s birth.

In order for her child to have been a natural-born US citizen, his mother would have had to be 21 at the time of his birth.

In essence, Mrs. Obama was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic US citizenship.

His mother would have needed to have been 16+5 = 21 years old at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen.

Barack Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office of President under current law.


This would all be terribly interesting, of course, except it is wrong. Obama was born in Honolulu, which even the most hardened Wingnut would have to admit was part of the 50 United States in 1961. And the 14th Amendment, passed slightly less than a century before Obama was born, makes one thing clear up front, in its very first sentence:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

UPDATE: It appears that Miller simply lifted a bit of Internet mythology that has been circulating for several weeks and has been attributed to various authors (but frequently with significant details altered), making it unclear who came up with it first.

It has become so common, the great Urban Legend Reference Page has weighed in.

My new political orientation

I don't know where this comes from, but I shamelessly stole it from some guy who was using it as a signature line on a discussion group.

Things I think about, pt. 1

Would it be correct to think of the woman who gave birth to the world's foremost cellist as "Yo Yo MaMa"?

Things my five year old has learned

Frogs come from eggs.

Caterpillars become Butterflies.

Plants grow from seeds.

Saying fuck in the school gym is a bad idea.

Calling your camp counselor "gay" is also a bad idea.

It is possible to be expelled from summer camp.

Singing the Indiana Jones theme as loudly as possible is great way to make Dad start yelling.

Sometimes it is necessary to deal with an overbearing older brother with a controlled application of violence.

"Unbreakable" plates aren't.

Dirt tastes good.

Batting your eyelids in an adorable and apologetic way sometimes gets you out of real trouble.

Thanks for nothing...

My friends at Paste magazine cheerfully acknowledged their mistake recently and returned my check...

Every Homeowner's Nighmare

Oh my god, there's a leek in my bathroom.


Damn. Now there are multiple leeks.