Regime Change Guide

Via Dan Wood, it's the Regime Change Guide: What You Can Actually Do to Defeat Bush. Especially useful for people like us who live in a solid blue state who would like to do something other than just write checks.

serenitymovie.com

A Web site is now up for Serenity: good.

The Web site has a blog: even better.

The blog has an RSS feed: best of all!

Later note: a couple of other juicy related sites: Official Serenity fan site and FireFlyFans.net.

Apple Mac and Cheese

Apple Mac and Cheese:

Many of us at Macworld are fans of Alton Brown, host of the funny and educational Good Eats on TV's Food Network. (He also hosted the recent Iron Chef USA revival show.) But AB is also a fan of Apple and the Mac. So when I mentioned to him in January that we were trying to do a yearlong celebration of the Mac, he offered to whip up a brand-new recipe incorporating apples and "mac" — macaroni, that is.

The bad news, unfortunately, is that the recipe (PDF format) is more focused on the theme than tasting good, or at least that's the way it sounds to us. But that doesn't in any way lessen our long-time love for AB and GE.

Postmodern Sex Scandal

The political scandal that has now led to the demise of GOP Senate candidate Jack Ryan is pretty bizarre. Not because of the stories about how he tried to get his then-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, to have public sex. Though that seems kind of superfluous. Dude, you're married to Seven of Nine, the gal with the catsuit that launched a million sweaty fantasies. Everyone already knows you're having sex with her. Many envy the hell out of you for it. Do you really have to flaunt it? Man, that's just tacky. But back to punditizing. Kos pointed out that this is perhaps the first "sex scandal" that involved no adultery (he wanted to have sex with his wife); no violence (she said no, he was a heel and tried a few more times to get her to do it, then dropped it; I suspect that most men have asked their wives for something that pushed their boundaries at one time or another); and ultimately, no sex. So now you can get run out of politics for not having sex with your wife. That's so...postmodern.

gCount

Here's a cool little utility: gCount - gMail message count.

gCount is a menubar item that will display the number of unread messages in the inbox of a recently popular email service. It currently requires OSX 10.3 or later, though that may change.

SCLM

A few days ago, The New York Times ran a virulently negative review of Clinton's autobiography, written by their chief book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani. Other blogs have taken her review to task for its inaccuracies and pointed out how Kakutani has produced uniformly negative reviews of books about and by the Clintons. Today, the Times ran a second review of My Life, as they often do. This one was written by Larry McMurtry, the well-known author, and is considerably more positive, not to mention balanced and nuanced.

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved.

What I found interesting was the play each review got on the front page of the newspaper's Web edition. The negative review got a headline above the "fold," the first screen before you have to scroll. The positive review has no headline, just a link, down in the Books section. Tell me again how the NYT is part of the so-called liberal news media?

SpaceShipOne photos

We didn't get to go see SpaceShipOne fly (whimper), but buddies of ours did, and they took pictures! Check 'em out: Bill, Andy.

Electoral Vote Predictor

Here's a useful site: the Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004. So far, the maintainer seems to be doing a good job of keeping up with the state-by-state polls, which is what really matters—the nationwides are interesting, but they don't actually mean anything.

Things that struck me in looking at the current map:

• Kerry is currently ahead by 70, which is huge.
• It's amazing how many states can be red versus how few states are blue, but "safe Kerry" votes still outnumber "safe Bush" votes, simply because Bush has the votes in the states that don't have people.
• States like New Jersey, Washington, and New Hampshire really shouldn't be swing states as much as they are. Kerry's got to move them into the safe blue or at least weak blue categories to really have a shot.
• It's amazing to me that Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida are swing states. If Bush can't hold those, he's toast.

Stark Raving Beautiful

This link is to remind me (and Tom) that not all our local events can be found on the Chamber of Commerce official events page: there's also Stark Raving Beautiful (motto: Help Make Healdsburg Weird).

SpaceShipOne and the X Prize

I'm sure this is unsurprising to anyone who knows us, but I've been following the SpaceShipOne news fairly closely. And every news report seems to have a different take on my #1 question: did today's flight count as the first of the two required flights for the X prize? I've heard both no and yes.

This press release implies that the answer's no. Anyone have a definitive answer?

Food for Real Men

Who needs the Atkins Diet? Instead there's Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook.