La Joga not-so-Bonita

So why is this Joga Companion thing so badly designed?

It's a World Cup add-on, apparently written by Mozilla for Google and Nike. Swank names, and the pop-up game play-by-play is a nicely-designed feature (and beats sitting on ESPN.com). But most of the rest of it is just a browser skin, a somewhat useful news feed, and some very useless behind-the-scenes video.

That's not the problem. The problem is that to install it, you have to download and install an EXE file, and then it looks like the Firefox installation. So when it got to installing "Firefox" in my Firefox directory, I understandably got a little nervous, so I thought I'd cancel and have a look-see (I thought, actually, that I might have clicked on a button to install Firefox if you don't have it). Normally the Firefox install routine doesn't blow anything away, you see, but I usually back my profiles up before doing those upgrades anyway, and I hadn't had that opportunity. Just a bit of appropriate caution, right?

So I open Firefox again to look at their website, and lo and behold -- it's installed even though I hit cancel. Everything seems to work. Well, so maybe it is just an extension. If so, why did they require an EXE install? If they have an EXE install, why does it install its stuff before asking you if you really want to install it? This is user-unfriendly coding practice, and I hope that Mozilla isn't holding this up as a model for third-party software -- we'd be edging into IE-style bad territory here.

It's annoying enough, then, but I decide to leave it alone because I was checking out the functionality. A little later I restart Firefox to run a separate user profile -- I find it useful to break some things up by tasks -- and guess what? Joga is installed in the other profile too. I didn't want it there, I don't want the distraction.

So, not entirely obtusely, I decide to uninstall the Joga extension (which is dutifully listed in the Extensions dialog). Close Firefox. Restart in the original profile.

And it's gone there too.

Dumb.

Music that makes your head hurt.

Well, I survived my first actual Nine Inch Nails concert. And my second. In the same weekend.

My friend Beavette kindly wrangled an extra ticket for me on two of the three nights of the Midwest leg of their "small cities" tour (Champaign, Milwaukee, Moline). Lots of driving, lots of "Head Like a Hole", and last night, lots of very aggro moshing. He's got a whole new generation of frat-boy fans, one of whom was dropped on my head. Yeah, we were about 8 feet from the rail -- probably the most intense concert I've ever been to...

I'm not a new fan -- I got into them because of Doom, and owned The Downward Spiral and Broken, but didn't go see them or follow the Halo releases closely (and they still ended up at the top of my Last.FM stats -- go figure). But I loved the new album a lot, and had just been soaking up the tour experience vicariously, as Beavette has bounced around the country hitting many of the shows. These were right in town, though, and priced a little nicer than when they were in Chicago, so it all worked out very nicely for me to be involved.

The opening band (Moving Units) is a kind of harder-edged Bravery/Interpol outfit. They seemed scared on night 2, with the lead singer actually dressed in a winter coat, almost as a suit of armor; but night 3 they cut loose and had more fun and did a better job pumping up the audience.

Reznor was pretty cool. Tight road band, didn't do much talking, great coverage of his material. The band used video footage projected on a scrim in front of the band to really good effect during some songs, making a lot of them more explicitly political, like "Eraser" (from 1994's The Downward Spiral) and "Hand that Feeds" (which is the one from With Teeth that MTV refused to let him play with a Bush photo as backdrop), as well as "Right Where It Belongs". It's still unclear to me whether any of these songs were written with political meanings at the forefront -- they're certainly abstract enough that they can apply much more broadly. (I'm not suggesting that he get topical, though -- that's a lot more difficult to do well.) At any rate, his audience certainly didn't seem to object to the politics -- there were quite a few middle fingers raised when Bush came on screen 20 feet high.

In Wisconsin, continuing the political theme, he took a moment out to excoriate -- as a former resident of New Orleans -- the 11 Congressmen who voted against the $50B Katrina relief bill last fall, one of whom (Sensenbrenner) represents the very Red suburbs of Milwaukee. Though the crowd enthusiastically agreed with Reznor, it's unlikely to have much political effect; last re-election he got 64%. In Moline he ripped into the music industry and said some nice words about the live crowd reminding him of why he does this.

Milwaukee, partly because of the venue -- an enormous ballroom, probably a former union hall of some sort, which made it very difficult to stage a show with anything like an arena sound or ambience -- the main crowd hazard was cigarette smoke and spilled beer. (I love the fact that these older buildings are still being used, but even though I completely understand why it's done, I wish they wouldn't paint everything black and have everything look unmaintained and ghetto when the lights are on.) There were a few fun freaks, including a miniskirted suicide-girl type wearing a "suggestion box" on her back. They couldn't do the scrims here, either, so the setlist was quite different -- I'm pretty sure they only played four songs from the new album, but they did hit Reznor's top all-time songs like "Something I Can Never Have", "Closer" and "Hurt".

Moline was in many ways a better show. Beavette and I hiked it out across the prairie beginning in mid-afternoon, but still got there in time (despite some navigational glitches attributable to Google Maps -- Double True) to stake out places on the main floor in what's basically a minor-league hockey arena. The not-especially-diminutive Beavette was determined this show to get up close enough to really see Reznor, and not get trapped behind one of the numerous obstacles known as "guys of normal height". Here's where my admitted bulk actually provides an advantage in life, for once. When the crush toward the front and the moshing began I took my job to be doing as much blocking and defense of position as possible. Beavette worried about a real crush -- she's been in a few -- but it never got that bad; there were a few mass waves that nearly knocked even me off my feet a few times (and here it was clearly a case of the bigger they come). Considering the longevity of Reznor's career it was interesting just how many frat boys with twenty years on me there were. There was a dough-faced cornfed guy who actually had almost a whole head's height on me, and a certain obliviousness that being that large and unmovable must contribute toward; I nicknamed him "Lenny", but ultimately Beavette was able to get him to stay out of her way just by tapping him on the shoulder and asking nicely. That's the Midwest for ya. (For my part, I actually ducked down to pick up somebody else's hat once.) There was a lot of crowd-surfing, too, but at least this venue treated it as a misdemeanor -- the guards were giving people soft landings in front of the stage and letting them circle around and re-enter. There were some punk, goth, and cosplay freaks here, too.

Here's where my head got hurt. I was keeping an eye on the overhead activity -- being off to the side most people were going right up the center past us. But behind us there was a slam-dancing hole of sorts and somebody must have come up from there and either did a running jump or just wasn't being conveyor-belted by the community properly, because the first warning I had was his torso slamming down on top of my skull, bam. It wasn't something that left a bruise on my head, but more of a soreness at the back of my neck. The worst that had happened to me in Milwaukee was some sloshed beer in my hair (and down Beavette's pants...). We did see a guy, as we left, who had a big 2-3" gash on his forehead (but he was too drunk to be feeling it).

The sound in the arena was much better than the ballroom, so that was a huge plus. (I had a touch of ringing in one ear after Milwaukee, but I think that was mainly positioning. At any case, though I'll never catch up with the aggregate concert decibels of Beavette or her friend G., I really should start wearing earplugs.)

The pre-show music was kinda interesting all by itself -- dance-punky tracks personally selected by Reznor, including a few favorites of my own, like Talk Talk's "Such a Shame". My own personal geeky take on this was to tag them all on Last.FM [using a list from echoingthesound.org] as "nin preshow music" (and about 80% of them are streamable).

Reznor hadn't been very athletic in Milwaukee, but that was just the small stage. His new clean & sober outlook has him (I'd guess) substituting working out for other recreations, so he's incredibly ripped, and here he bounced around a lot, even though he doesn't get into the crowd-surfing himself like he used to at old shows and other craziness (he leaves a lot of that to guitarist Aaron North, who frequently destroys guitars and tosses them to the audience). Oh, he also switched from a leather vest in Milwaukee to a kind of silk dress shirt in Moline -- with the sweat and the pleather pants it gives him a kind of rained-on businessman look. He's old enough and has been through the rock star wringer enough to be able to just wear what he wants, and that's cool in its own way. He seems to be big on the tambourine this tour, using it about a half-dozen times over the two nights.

The tour drummer Josh Freese, a last-minute replacement due to a falling out with his old drummer, is turning out to be a great choice and hopefully he'll be available to play with the band a lot in the future -- but he's already one of the most in-demand session drummers in the industry, so who knows if that will work out. I can't compare with other shows, of course, but it was my impression that the band was playing very tight and the drummer is always a critical gear in the machine. The keyboardist Alessandro Cortini and bassist Jeordie "Twiggy Rodriguez Ramirez" White were also excellent and very much contributing members.

Again, I'm no NIN connoisseur, but between the two nights almost all my favorite tracks were played and I wasn't disappointed once. Even the multi-layered "Closer" and other TDS material came off pretty well for a stage re-creation. There was definitely one track that I think I like more for having seen live, "Getting Smaller" (even though I already like it because it has what I consider the absolute quintessential Trent lyric: "I've still got my one good arm, that I can, I can beat, I can beat myself up with" ...) It was songs like this that really brought out the pogo dancing and intensity -- definite crowd-pleasers. I was trying hard to stay a little more subdued during "Only" because Beavette had expressed some distaste for frat-boys dancing to a song that she considers a kind of emotional skinning, but it was really hard to resist just bumping along. That may be a pure guy thing, there. But I'd like to see a stripped-down acoustic version, like he's done of some other songs. My big failing is not knowing the whole lyrics for songs that aren't in my top few favorites, let alone being able to identify them before they really get started, but that's why having Beavette along was a big boon -- she was always able to identify them from even the most tenuous of introductory phrasings.

To keep this from getting any longer, I'll just say that this has definitely been the highlight of my year so far. Beavette hinted at a Ministry concert later this year, and all I could say was "Hmmm."

Next time, bring a horse

I can't say enough about how brilliant this protest was. The Franklin quote is overused, perhaps, having been driven into irrelevancy by the right during the Clinton years, but it feels good to throw it back into their faces. The silent turning of backs, though, has to be quite effective, and must be exceptionally harder to mock than other artful forms of protest involving signs, puppets, chants, and so on.

I think we have to find a way to get more of this done, and not just law students. There are a lot of people who need to know they deserve no respect.

In 1997, the Serbian people (and others in the were weary of war and ready to rid themselves of the war criminal Milosevic, but the power structure was trying to ensure that could not happen, with court cases about election rigging flying from one judge to another.

The people were worried about the military, militias, and other dependent groups such as peasant factory workers being enlisted against any kind of protest. One of the more effective tactics -- at getting worldwide publicity, anyway -- resulted in a wire service photograph that I treasure on a bit of ratty newsprint, as thousands of cars crowded the center of Belgrade in gridlock and people cheered and sang standing on their cars. One man told the reporter, "This is an incredibly stupid regime, and they have no concept of irony."

From this history:
Nonviolent Action Used in the Protests in Yugoslavia

Marches
Marches often follow a regular route, passing by key buildings which symbolize the power of the regime. March routes will also pass through different neighborhoods so that the protest message can reach new people.... Student protesters from other cities have conducted long walks to Belgrade to link the protests and build awareness in the towns they pass through. One group made the journey by bicycle.

Student Strikes.
Students at several universities in Yugoslavia have gone on strike. They have been joined by a growing number of their professors.

Theater Performance Cancellations
Performances at cultural events have been canceled. Statements are read out loud to the audience from the striking cast members.

Noisemaking
People use everything: whistles, horns, bells, sirens, pots and pans. When the marchers stop traffic, many motorists honk their horns, not out of frustration over the traffic jam, but in support of the demonstrators. Whistles... are the most common noisemakers in the protests, often used in a call-and-response cadence.

Blinking Lights
When the marches pass by their homes and offices, people blink their houselights or flashlights [as a] sign of support.

Confetti
Supporters drop confetti on the marchers as they pass. Radio B-92 regularly showers the protesters with leaflets. On one occasion, hundreds of old Serbian dinar notes from the days of hyperinflation rained down on the protesters.

Flags
People carry all kinds of flags: Serbian flags, political flags, racing flags, flags from other countries, the gay pride rainbow flag, American Civil War flags [presumably the Confederate Naval Ensign], skull and crossbones flags, and scarves tied to sticks. While Serbian national flags are the most common, the main idea seems to be "whatever they had hanging on their walls."

Posters
Posters are mostly home made, often with humorous messages, such as " Snoopy Against the Red Baron" and "Our Leaders Are Deaf, Our Leaders Are Blind, But We Care".

Puppets
Two large satirical puppets were created to march in the Belgrade protests. One depicting Milosevic's wife in feudal armor, and one of Milosevic in prison clothes. It attracted wide popular attention and its creator was picked up by the police one night and badly beaten. He remains under medical care.

Badges and Paraphernalia
Entrepreneurs walk the streets where protesters gather, selling badges; whistles and horns; postcards of the demonstrations with the slogan "Greetings from Belgrade"; and cardboard eyeglasses made to look like eggs [?]--a weapon used against the state buildings.

Decontamination Actions
Students in Belgrade staged a cleaning action of the location where the Milosevic regime organized its counter demonstration [of largely unwitting dupes and proles].

The Brick Wall
Students built a brick wall in front of the Parliament Building after they were accused of being destructive. They wanted to show symbolically that they were trying to be constructive.

Statements from Professional Organizations
Five Supreme Court judges signed a letter of protest when the Yugoslavian Supreme Court decided in favor of annulling the elections. They were then followed by colleagues throughout the country. The prestigious Serbian Writers Union wrote a letter to Milosevic, asking that he honor the 17 November elections.

Noise To Drown Out the News
As reported above, from 7:30-8pm every evening, during the evening news on the state television channel, people go to their windows and make all the noise they can. Pedestrians blow their whistles cars honk their horns. Awards are given to the noisiest streets.

Jamming the Phone Lines
People make nonstop calls to state institutions to completely clog the telephone lines and make the government's work impossible. A list of numbers was placed in the independent newspaper, assigning different sets of numbers to certain neighborhoods.

Escalation
When the regime banned street protests, saying that they disrupted traffic, and placed militia on the streets to enforce the ban, many new nonviolent protest methods were designed:

Sitting
In some instances when cordons of the police pushed at the crowds to move, they immediately sat down in the road. During an all-night student vigil, the students were joined by an Orthodox priest who sat down right in front of the police cordon and began to pray.

Funeral March
Protesters held a silent funeral march from the cemetery in honor of a teacher killed by SPS supporters.

Holiday Celebrations
During the Christmas and New Years holidays, the opposition sponsored large street parties. Because of their celebratory nature and the large numbers they attracted, the police decided not to keep the streets clear that night. People used the occasion to go promenading on all the streets in the city center, as if to make a statement, "These streets belong to us."

Marching in Circles
Protesters march in circles on the pedestrian malls. Or they march in small circles right in front of the police cordons.

The Green Man
Protesters wait on the sidewalk until the "green man" [WALK] light appears at the crosswalks. Then everyone runs into the crosswalks for a few frenzied minutes of dancing and cheering. When the light turns red again, they quickly return to the sidewalks. [hilarious!]

Neighborhood Marches
Protesters meet in their neighborhoods at 8 pm and weave through the streets nearby, making noise and chanting slogans. With the police cordons concentrated in the center of the city, they have been unable to block all these small marches. However, when some of these small marches have met up with the police, protesters have been beaten.

Dog Walking
People brought their dogs to the protest one day, claiming that they were just out to walk their pets that day.

Traffic Jams
People brought their cars to the center of the city, creating major traffic jams and honking their horns. This chaos allowed the marchers to walk down the streets without being accused of disrupting traffic.

Photo Opportunity
Protesters pose in front of the police cordons for dramatic photos, sometimes asking police to pose with them. [Reminiscent of the famous "flower in the gun barrel" photos from the Vietnam era.]

Entertaining the Troops
Students stage skits of fights between protesters and demonstrators and read out loud from Dostoevski. Protesters speak with the police, bring them flowers and candy, kiss them on the cheeks, and draw hearts and flowers on their plastic shields. On one day, protesters wore their own "uniforms": medical coats, fire-fighting outfits, graduation robes to match the police's riot gear. In one city, there is a daily contest where protesters vote for the "most beautiful policeman."

Some of these tactics are surely familiar to protest veterans from Seattle, New York, and so forth. Many similar, and new, ones were devised for some of the "Color" Revolutions of Eastern Europe the last several years. Many of the ones listed here depend on mass numbers being available to, say, shut down a city. (During Iraq war protests (about which, yes, I was ambivalent) the police anticipated some tactics and ensured that groups would be surrounded and pressured to break.

That said, I think there are some approaches here that can be used in a sort of civil disobedience mode as at the Gonzales protest. The key is to make the protest artful and welcoming rather than strident. Yes, this is the old sixties divide all over again.

Bakers Duo

As a veteran Wikipedian, it is always my pleasure to take on such tidying tasks as disambiguating the James A. Baker who runs the Justice Department Office of Intelligence Policy and Review from the James A. Baker who was Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, White House Chief of Staff, and whatnot.

Since the obscure Mr. Baker is heavily involved in preparation of FISA warrant requests, not to mention defending administration policy on FISA before Congress, he's likely to get a lot more attention in coming weeks. Digby was confused Tuesday; last year Kevin Drum was (see comments), and before that Buzzflash (scroll down). In 2002, though, there was a big Democratic Underground thread that managed to eventually suss out the correct info.

Surprisingly, given the importance of the post, Baker doesn't have any sort of official bio page (then again, he's a career employee, not a political post -- he worked for Clinton too). I had to get some of it from his Congressional testimony (undergrad ND, then a JD and MA at UMich -- but no dates). Not surprisingly, he's exceptionally difficult to Google.

Scrubs

I'm really rooting for the Pluto mission to launch successfully -- if that means waiting a few days, so be it. The really important thing is that the spacecraft be on its way within the launch window that ends next month, because then we would tragically miss reaching Pluto before its atmosphere freezes again in deep space. We could still do science, of course, but this is one of the more important questions.

It was truly disappointing when NASA cancelled its predecessor mission, the Pluto-Kuiper Express, just as the Kuiper Belt and Trans-Neptunian Objects were becoming a fertile field of research -- really, one of the most interesting areas of astronomy right now. It wasn't that long ago that planetary astronomy was considered fairly dead -- and then the Pioneer and Voyager missions began to show us undreamt complexity, right here in River Solar System. Rings around every big planet, living moons, captured comets, and who knows what else.

Now that it's certain there are TNOs larger than Pluto -- the presence of any that even compete for the title all but guarantees there will be more -- the outer solar system has become a fascinating, even dangerous, unknown. The more we learn, the better -- and it's certain that ten years from now, when NH reaches Pluto, we'll have even more questions than the instrumentation aboard will be able to answer.

A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal

On April 4, 1967 -- one year before his death -- Martin Luther King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City.

Many will link today and tomorrow to his justly famous Memphis speech. It wasn't unique; it contained many passages that he used as he traversed the nation, and deliberate echoes of his March on Washington speech. Those two speeches bookend the era of his greatest fame and influence, and they are both notable, historic oratory, far surpassing the political speech of the cable news era. The I Have a Dream speech in particular is closely studied for its complex structure and rhythmic speech patterns. They are both stirring. That last speech, though, was something else, spoken by a man who knew his days were numbered, and chilling to this day for their seeming power of prophecy.

The 1967 speech, though, is the more relevant to our time here and now, and to my own personal arc.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Too many of us have not spoken.

Sound judgement

So back in July I realized I might be passing the point where I could put up with tinny, low-rent computer speakers. Well, one of my Christmas presents to myself was a nifty little 2.1 speaker set from Target (I'd link but it seems to be a discontinued item). Seriously, this is my first real woofer, ever.

(The funny thing is that the speaker cone is so flexible, there's a steady stream of puffs of air coming out the front. I've never had a speaker do that. Since my office is a bit clammy, my knees get chilly now.)

It's definitely an incredible improvement. I'm hearing instruments I never realized were there. It's so cool -- almost everything I play is like new music. I can hear imperfections in MP3s. <keanu>whoa</keanu>

Of course, as I've been fond of quoting, Tom Waits once said "Rock and roll sounds best on bad speakers a block away."