Scenes from Thanksgiving break

• Standing outside of Neighbor's Bar and Grill on Cedar Avenue for about half an hour after being booted due to a suspiciously early last call; watching the local residents play soccer in the parking lot.
• Realizing that "pieces of flair" still exist at Outback Steakhouse - a waiter gets one pin for every compliment he receives.
• Successfully roasting a turkey.
• Drinking Heineken foam from a Miller Lite bottle in a green room while sitting on a futon listening to Queen's The Game on vinyl.
• Spending an evening drinking white wine from a bottle with a snap-lid while watching recipes on You Tube.
  

Les Carabiniers is the most hipster film ever made

1. Lo-fi to the extreme
   
2. Hell of ironic and antiwar
3. Requires a liberal arts degree to understand (classical allusions, marxist ideology)
   
4. French; Godard; photo negative
   

Quick Kicks

• Does anyone know the source of this photo?
  
• Dexter this season has been slightly disappointing. The main plot seems to be going nowhere and the subplots are uniformly boring and implausible. The drama had better pick up in the remaining four episodes. Jimmy Smits alone is not getting it done.
• The new season of Top Chef seems promising. There are several intriguing characters and many of the chefs seem very creative.
• Pujols deserved the MVP. Thomas Boswell is an idiot.
• I have no clue what direction the Notre Dame football team is going in. I hope that the next three games provide some context.
• Netflix on Xbox might change my life, though I don't know if it's going to be for the worse or for the better. Whichever way, I'm about to watch a lot more 80s movies.
  
• As long as I'm on a geeky strain, I might as well mention that there are several great games out there for the thinking gamer. Braid and World of Goo are both amazingly unique experiences at very low prices.
• Check this girl out. Some brilliantly entertaining criticism.
• I'm on a soup and cookie-making rampage these days. It's almost time to shift gears for Thanksgiving, though.
  

Gay marriage amendments

First of all, don't get me wrong, I don't think that state constitutions should be amended as to restrict marriage between a man and a woman. But I just have to say that the protests that are going on right now probably would have been much more useful before election day. Intuitively, it seems that picketers are much less likely to influence the adjudicative process than the democratic process.

I am also uncomfortable with protesting outside of churches also from a strategic and moral standpoint. Scapegoating the LDS while ignoring the larger causes for the amendments' passage is shortsighted and leads to hatred. LDS make up less than 2% of the population in California and even less in Florida (though more in Arizona). Not only do the protests directed at LDS not help change public opinion, but they could easily degenerate into another form of the same bigotry that amendment opponents justly decry.

Interesting food facts of the day

"When we eat beets, the red pigment is usually decolorized by high stomach acidity and reaction with iron in the large intestine, but people sometimes excrete the intact pigment, a startling but harmless event."

And on a less puerile note, onion comes from Latin for "one," "oneness," and "unity," garlic is Anglo-Saxon for "spear-leek" and shallot and scallion from the Latin term for Ashqelon, a city in southwest Palestine.

Election Summary

More than anything else, Obama's victory makes me relieved. As a personification and product of the many successes of the civil rights era and further progress in race relations, it is a triumph and I'm happy to have witnessed such an historic moment. However, the euphoria shouldn't distract from the incredibly difficult work yet to be done. The victory is only a single step toward curing our myriad problems and not in and of itself a final success. I await fulfillment of these promises despite insoluble war and economy issues. Obama discussed all these themes more eloquently, but they deserve emphasis.

From many policy standpoints, I'm neutral or slightly favorable towards Obama. (As opposed to my strongly negative views of many McCain policies and maddening conservative rhetoric). Instead of begrudging, however, my support was enthusiastic due to not only his social impact, but his passive impact on the makeup of the Supreme Court and environmental policy. Robust enforcement and sane interpretation of current environmental statutes by new agency administrators will instantly improve upon Cheney's disastrous energy policies even without proactive implementation of new rules or statutes. The same goes for the Supreme Court - even uninspired selections by Obama would be preferable to McCain's, particularly given that Justices Stevens and Ginsburg appear most likely to retire next.

So I'm relieved. And that's all I have to say about that for a while.

The little things are important

I still feel that most people vastly underestimate the importance of biodiversity. I believe that threatening biodiversity is morally wrong. However, even the most cynical individual could find compelling the argument that preserving biodiversity provides benefits to our human existence. This article outlines just another instance where this happens to be the case. Environmentalism is important for everyone.

[slashdot]

EDIT: Twittering plants, blogging plant, robotic walking plant. I, for one, welcome these new human-granted plant capabilities.

If I think really hard, I remember when I cared about the differences between The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most and Swiss Army Romance

I'm emo, even if I'm not exactly sure what that means anymore. Whether it's music, fashion, or an emotional state, to me, the DC area emo scene circa the turn of the century encapsulates everything emo and, at it's peak, its nucleus was the auditorium at St. Andrew's Church in College Park, Maryland.

St. Andrew's was strictly and rapturously DIY: Cash only, no advance ticket sales, a totally unadorned stage, nothing on sale but merch, and loads of local bands opening for national acts (i.e., bands on Vagrant, Drive-Thru, or Fueled By Ramen). I saw at least a dozen huge emo bands in St. Andrew's viscerally intimate atmosphere. Crashing my car in the rain on the way to see Alkaline Trio and was one of the worst moments of my young life.

The greatest show I've ever been to, though, also anticipated emo's demise. Instead of just one huge emo band, several of them performed that night with a few local favorites. St. Andrew's was filled well over capacity with wildly vibrant expectations. The region's emo kids descended on College Park clad in their finest. One bespectacled girl who wore a striped sweater while lying under a tree, a leather bound book held to her chest, stared into the sky while the line progressed behind her into the church. It was probably the most emo thing I have ever seen.

Yet, that night signaled emo's conversion into a mass culture stereotype, personified by Chris Carraba. The crowd, accustomed to a full band's distorted grind, was skeptical of Carraba, then the only member Dashboard Confessional, and his completely acoustic set. However, he quickly caught on. About a year later, Dashboard's soft tones would blow up in the mainstream. Record execs eviscerated the emo-purity of Dashboard's solitary acoustic guitar and added a backing band, making the songs somehow much less emo. When drums were added to "Screaming Infidelities," the emo scene became unhinged as though Dylan had gone electric. This perceived betrayal created the emo caricature that garnered a spread in every supermarket magazine, killing the scene. It wasn't ours any longer, it's been sold and securitized to Universal Music Group though a distribution deal with Vagrant Records and that girl in your english class who wore a Get Up Kids shirt even though she'd never shed a single drop of sweat at a show.

When the Green Album came out, my emo fandom dwindled further. Every song on Pinkerton begat another emo sub-genre; it was emo's VU & Nico. Even better, Weezer had been mostly defunct since 1997 and unable to fuck up their legacy. The Green Album, and subsequent recordings, however, did precisely that and called into doubt whether Weezer, and therefore all of emo, had been fundamentally flawed from the beginning. Sickened by mall-emo, underground kids went back to the well of hardcore for authenticity and came back with screamo. Other more tender souls were captivated by Conor Oberst. Screamo eventually drifted back into punk while other emo kids merged into indie genericism. By that point my interest deviated to totally non-emo things like Dischord shows at Fort Reno and Wes Anderson films at Cinema Arts. (Let me explicitly note the sarcasm here.) Eventually, some jackass set off a firecracker in the middle of a crowd at a St. Andrew's show, quite literally blowing things up and making sure that nobody ever had a show there ever again.

Yet, my emo side will never die. While I don't still wear Dickies and I've never worn Chucks or a spiked belt (all emo standard issue), I still dress sort of emo, love girls with dark hair, bangs, and eye shadow, and wish I cared enough about an existing band to crush myself against hundred of other sweaty people and scream the lyrics all night. The basic environment of St. Andrew's affected me more than any other venue because of the community. We were owned something special and unique. It was ours. It wasn't just about musicianship, it was contributing to something true and DIY with people who understood. Emo's totally dead in all but its remnant form, but my memories remain.