Seeking A Homeland

Fired up! Ready to go!!

Actually, ready to collapse into bed is more like it, I'm so tired. Certainly too tired to do a long post tonight. I wanted to stick in a couple of videos, though.

Barack Obama was in town this morning, speaking at the University of Denver, a school known best for its championship Pioneers hockey team. He was scheduled to speak in Magness Arena at 10 AM. At 4:30 AM, when the temperature was probably about 17 degrees, people had begun to line up outside the doors. By 8:30, when the doors were scheduled to open, the line was hundreds of yards long.

Magness Arena has a seating capacity of 8,000. It filled up, with another thousand or two standing on the floor. They put overflow into a gymnasium in the same building. It filled up. They grouped the people left over in a nearby lacrosse field. Overall, estimates are that about 19,000 showed up--with only a day's advance notice, despite almost zero mention in the media that he was coming, and on a frigid work day. I took a vacation day and my wife happened to be off work, so we pulled the kid out of school for the first part of the day and all three of us went. I think my daughter learned a lot more than she would have in a few hours of class, anyway.

Obama was an hour late because he spoke to the people outdoors and to the people in the gym before he came to the main arena. While waiting we heard a lot heartfelt but unexceptional speeches by kids from DU, local dignitaries, etc. Gary Hart was there and I would have liked to hear him speak, but the didn't.

Then came a surprise. The person who introduced Obama was Caroline Kennedy.

Obama gave a speech that was not unlike the one he's been giving all over, but with some local flavor. I also thought he was really magnanimous in the way he announced what most of us--at least I--had not heard: that John Edwards had quit the race. He also showed a little more than usual that he has thought long and deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of politics.

Afterwards I went to a precinct captains only meeting of about 700 people and Obama came and talked to us too, although only briefly.

Hillary's husband, whats-his-name, that truth challenged guy, was going to be speaking in town tonight at 9 PM. I didn't go. I doubt that very many people did. Tomorrow, I think it is, the President of the United States will be in town to speak. They can probably fit it in a broom closet.

It was a great morning. I'm still hoarse.

edit, from the news the next morning: " the former president told a crowd of more than 3,000 cheering supporters who showed up on a snowy night at the University of Denver's Magness Arena."

Overwhelmed

Sometimes I really overcommit myself!

1) I agreed to be a Precinct Captain for the Barack Obama campaign. The Colorado caucuses are Feb. 5th, two weeks from tonight. The pre-caucus party I'm supposed to be organizing, and I think I'm going to be hosting, is Jan. 31st, nine nights away. I've got hundreds of phone calls to make, and I'm going to try to go to the doors of the people I can't reach by phone. I'm also going to try to have a speech of some sort written and more or less memorized for caucus night, too.

2) I've applied for a job that would have me transferring from the Business Division to the Elections Division. That would mean an even more interesting job, by far, and a lot more money. In order to sound informed when I'm interviewed, I need to study up on HAVA and such. My interview was supposed to be today, but I got a reprieve--the guy who's going to interview me rescheduled it for Thursday.

3) A couple of books I had on hold at the library came in and I picked them up on the way home tonight. I was already reading this slim but very intense book by Jaspers and Bultmann, this Man Booker Prize winning novel and this autobiography of Jurgen Moltmann. Now, on top of those, I've got The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a book about (mostly) classical music of the last hundred years, and The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By coincidence, those last two, very different books are both by New York times staffers. Or maybe it isn't such a coincidence, after all.

4) My wife talked to someone a week or so ago about refinancing our house and getting some cash with which to knock out some higher interest credit card debt, and I need to get some papers together for that. The possible advantages might be even greater after the Fed made the biggest cut ever in the prime lending rate.

5) It was my intention for the new year to post here more often, but that's going to have to wait. I have one longer, more substantive post saved in draft form and another in the back of my mind, but I can't take time to finish them.

Will someone please volunteer to do my sleeping for me?

Beltone store here I come

I should probably head out to a Beltone store tomorrow and get myself fitted for a really powerful hearing aid, because I think I'm completely and permanently deaf now.

My friend Wing, who teaches guitar, called me up and asked me if I wanted to go with him to hear one of his students play. He was even willing to pay for the ticket if I would drive, so I said sure, why not?

We went downtown, to LoDo, and found this place practically in the shadow of Coors Field called the Marquis Theater. Maybe at one time the space was a restaurant or something, but now there's not a table or a chair to be seen--just an empty space with a bar to one side and a stage about 15' x 8' and 1' high in front. If there had been more than the barest illumination inside, it probably wouldn't have looked real clean, either.

Here is a little bit about the show. Not only were Wing and I the oldest people there, I think we were most likely older then the parents of everyone there. Apparently this is what metal has become, but there was no spandex or big hair. The last band we stayed for was called Solemn Empire.

Mostly, the music was LOUD. The vocals were not singing, really, but more like hoarse, incoherent screaming. Wing's student announced that his last song was about the president of the United States, so I thought, "Oh, this'll be good," but for all I understood it, it might just as well have been about cute kitty cats in Sunday School, or about Goebbels roasting in hell. I suppose the latter seems more likely. The music sure didn't have "a backbeat, you can't lose it," either. (I doubt that anyone there had heard that song, or even heard of the artist.) Rhythmically it all had this herky-jerky, stop-and-go pattern. I imagine that if one were high, it would have a disorienting effect that might amplify the high. On the way home Wing, who knows far more about such things than I, said that the bands that began this style were ones I've heard of, but never listened to--Tool, Korn and Slipknot.

Wing and I avoided the area right in front of the stage, and not just because of the volume. There was this bunch of guys (and a few brave girls) who almost looked like they were fighting. They weren't really, though, I think, because no one got hurt, because when they got knocked out of the circle they went right back in, and because they were smiling.

Actually, I was smiling the whole time, too. Except maybe when I imagined my sweet little daughter being one of the girls crowding the stage. Do I seem like I hated it? In fact, I had a good time. It might be a little different, but it's still rock 'n roll--not just the music, but the duct-taped instruments, the scuzzy surroundings, the suggestions of booze, drugs, rebellion, violence, sex and freedom--the overall experience. Just don't expect to drop by my house and hear any of that music playing in the living room.

A Colorado blogger's final post

The first U.S. casualty of 2008 in Iraq was a Colorado blogger named Maj. Andrew Olmsted. His final post was written in advance, in case he was killed, and posted by a trusted friend. It is well worth reading and agree with him or not, he deserves to be heard. There is a newspaper article about him here.

Out of respect for his sacrifice and in accordance with his express wishes, I'm not going to say anything else about it here. My sincere condolences go out to his family and friends, and most of all to his widow. I'm also going to remove from my blog, at least temporarily, the tabulation of the cost of the war in mere dollars. Seen in proximity to this post it seems obscene.

Scotch Mist - A Film With Radiohead In It

As long as I'm experimenting on embedding videos, here's a great one:

Radiohead continues to explore new ways to distribute their music outside the traditional, corporate media behemoth channels.

First they offered their newest album, In Rainbows, as a download for any price you cared to pay for it. (The site, which I just linked to, is still there, but the offer is gone.) Now they offer a 52 minute long movie with every song on the album, although not the album version, absolutely free. It's a great album, btw. I had trouble really connecting to a couple of their albums, but not this one. Thom Yorke's voice seems to be located somewhere along a line between John Lennon and Tim Buckley, which is a fine place to be.

With These Hands I Demand the Future

There are several progressive Christian blogs I visit every so often, and one of them is a believer's journal, written by Tim Ensworth, a UCC minister in Waterloo, Iowa. Today I found a post he wrote a couple of weeks ago titled "shame on burger king!" that really got my attention. I don't eat at BK often, but I have sometimes, and it looks as though when I did, I was supporting a claque of robber barons.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the CIW for short, has been campaigning to have the piece rate paid to agricultural workers in Florida who pick the tomatoes that wind up on fast food burgers, tacos and so on raised by an extra penny per pound. That might add--what--an eighth of a penny to the cost of a Whopper? So far McDonald's and Taco Bell have agreed to the increase. Burger King, on the other hand, not only refused to match their increase but sabotaged the deal the CIW had struck with the other chains.

The Nation has been following this story (see here and here) and they suggest the action center set up by Sojourners, the progressive, evangelical Christian (no, it's not necessarily an oxymoron) group as a way to exert pressure on Burger King. After they acquiesce in this, maybe we should try to get them to do something about those awful, tacky commercials, too.

The CIW web site is sort of a mess--lots and lots of information packed into too small a space--but the following video they made compensates for that. It has no information to speak of, but it is a moving tribute to the people whose underpaid labor produces the junk we can unthinkingly stuff down our gullets as we barrel down the highway.