Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

HIATUS?

I may put myself on a brief vacation from blogging -- I'm not sure for how long. By checking the sitemeter, I see that I have a couple of regular readers, at least, and I'm sorry to let you down, if that's what I'm doing. As for the rest of the heartless, non-PlanetCarlton-reading universe -- well, it doesn't matter what I write about you, does it? The feeling that I'm talking only to myself is just too strong lately.

I'm sure I'll be back before too long, if we don't have World Wars Five through Nine in the next month or so. Ciao. posted by Carlton at 8:59 AM

ONE MORE

Recently I wrote that:

I have felt that we were in a (deep breath) Golden Age of television. More sophisticated viewers, better effects technologies and production values, and competition from edgier cable channels had lifted all boats.

From the Onion AV Club:

Scott Tobias: Before getting into our discussion of the new spring shows, let me start by saying that I believe we're currently experiencing a golden age for television. (The classic Golden Age Of Television be damned!) Several things have happened to make it all possible: A diverse selection of specialized cable networks have produced such a quantity of original productions that the next great show can come from anywhere: FX, Bravo, SCI FI, Sundance Channel, Game Show Network, BBC-TV, or someplace else on the dial. As a result, the pay networks have had to raise their game in order to lure subscribers, leading to a bounty of riches from HBO (The Sopranos, The Wire, etc.) that's completely unprecedented. Meanwhile, network offshoots like the WB (and to a much lesser extent, UPN) can nurture quirky little shows like Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars for season after season without needing a significant spike in the ratings. And even the major networks are inching away from tried-and-true, three-cameras-and-a-soundstage genres in order to back shows that are more ambitious and cinematic. Add to that the rise of DVRs and TV on DVD, and we're living in a paradise for couch potatoes. Ten years ago, I thought NBC's Homicide: Life On The Streets was as compelling as any TV drama I'd ever seen; now, I can think of at least a dozen series that are every bit as good or better.

So everyone agrees. If this were the stock market we were talking about, it would mean that the bubble would be just about to burst, and we would all have to jump out of very high windows. posted by Carlton at 8:55 AM

CONDO HELL

(The moral of this story, if you don't want to read the whole thing, is not to get into a condo association with only three members.)

My second condo in Boston was the second floor of a three-family that I bought from the third-floor guy, who had bought the whole house and rehabbed it. He ran the condo association and had de facto control over any large project that the association wanted to undertake -- chief among these things being the purchase of a small strip of land that was enclosed within our fence that we all used as a driveway, but which actually belonged to the city. When I bought the place, he assured me that, "it may take a month or two, but we'll buy that land and pave it and have a nice driveway with deeded parking spaces, and that will increase the value of your unit." The first-floor people also bought from him, relying on the same promise.

Over the course of the 2+ years that I lived there (and Molly lived there for part of that time as well), my relationship with this man deteriorated to the point where we did not speak. There were some specific instances -- I had one late-night shouting match with him in the stairwell which was the final straw -- but much of our problem with him stemmed from this driveway issue. It remained unpurchased, we continued parking in the mud, on land that didn't belong to us, and nails from the renovation of the building kept rearing their points out of the earth. We received notices from the city stating that an auction of the property would happen on a certain date, but our calls to this man went unanswered, and the date passed. He was working on a building in another part of the city, he was living with his girlfriend somewhere else, he couldn't be bothered. He controlled the money we were going to use to buy the land, so we were helpless.

He did continue to use the driveway for his own purposes -- he was a contractor, and so he would park large trucks and pieces of machinery in the driveway, or use it as a staging area for pallets of tile, or pipe, or bags of trash, or a whole dumpster, or old pickup trucks that didn't move for months on end.

I should note that he continued to speak to Molly (who didn't want anything to do with him) and to the man who lived downstairs, although he had a falling out with the woman who lived downstairs, so it got to the point where, to get a message to him (like "when the hell are you going to move those fifty trashcans out of our driveway -- WHICH WE DON'T OWN, BY THE WAY") we had to give it to the downstairs guy, who would call and leave a message for the upstairs man. [Molly had a falling out with the upstairs man's shady roomate, who climbed onto our back porch, drunk, in the middle of the night one night when she was home alone, but that's another story.]

Anyway, about the time that I sold my place to move to D.C, some 27 months later, he finally got serious about buying the land, as a result of a second set of notices about an auction. I was selling, so I wasn't about to cough up any money for the deal, but I graciously offered to let him speak with my buyers, and see if they were interested. So . . . he scared off one set of buyers who had already signed a P/S agreement, but luckily we were able to find another -- a nice young couple, a bit like Molly and myself. At the closing, they asked questions about the condo association -- was the man responsive (no), did we have meetings on a strict schedule (no, because we couldn't even speak to one another), did he cash the condo fee checks on time (every five or six months, actually), was he really not responsive to requests (hahahahaha).

I'm telling this story just so I can remark that Molly is in Boston this weekend and happened by the old place, and noted that the driveway was still not paved, and that, evidently, nothing had changed.

Why does that give me so much pleasure? posted by Carlton at 11:41 PM

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

This is exciting. I'll go see it twice.

While my wife is in Boston setting track and field records, I took the opportunity to go see a matinee of Inside Man, the new Spike Lee "joint" starring Clive and Denzel.

In short, it was excellent. Well written, well-acted, making sense all the way through to something of a surprise at the end (and a clever one, at that). I recommend it. Three and one-half crowns out of five -- which is a very good mark, indeed. posted by Carlton at 4:09 PM

FROM Q TO F TO D

Here's an interesting and troubling article by Robert Dreyfuss at TomDispatch. [The bit with the letters actually comes from the intro, by somebody else, I gather.]

Baghdad, like Beirut, is fast being transformed into a carcass to be fought over (as are cities like Kirkuk and Mosul). The Kurdish north, the Shiite south, and the Sunni triangle are becoming fortified hinterlands for the struggle to control Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk. Iraq has become a Mad Max world in which angry youths wheel around in jeeps and pickups, don ragtag militia uniforms, and set up checkpoints and roadblocks guns drawn. The Shiite forces eye each other suspiciously and enviously, and their rivalries may yet turn to open warfare and violence. The two big Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, despise each other, and in the past have warred each against the other. The Sunnis too are thoroughly divided. Any of these factions might ally with just about any of the others, then break that alliance only to ally for a period with a former enemy and attack the former ally. There are no rules, only guns. Is it possible to imagine the U.S. armed forces in the midst of this chaos? No.

Have at it. posted by Carlton at 1:11 AM

QUESTION

Are we about to use nuclear weapons on Iran?

To reprint something I wrote about this in Jan:

Regarding this war with Iran that certain members of the administration seem intent on starting, I am reminded of something that occurred to me when thinking about the then-impending war with Iraq: If they had the nuclear weapons that we accuse them of trying to get, then we wouldn’t attack them. So we tell them to stop trying to get nuclear weapons. If they don’t stop, we’ll attack them, unless of course they’ve already got them, in which case we won’t. Why won’t we? Well, nobody attacks a country that has nuclear weapons. That’s why we have to stop them from getting them, because then we can’t attack them.

With that principle in mind, of course, we attacked Iraq, the “Axis of Evil” member that had the least chance of having nukes and which was causing the least trouble to its neighbors – as it turned out, they didn’t even have a program. We then shook our fist at Iran, which was further along the nuclear road and which has advanced further still while we’ve been busy getting our asses handed to us. We won’t say boo to North Korea, being a country that actually has nuclear weapons and ruled by a complete maniac and destabilizing its entire region.

So I just don’t understand why these crazy people want nuclear weapons!

posted by Carlton at 1:27 PM

PATTING SELF ON BACK, YET AGAIN

Some time ago, I wrote that:

My dumb thought is that, while he appears on this list, not too many people have been talking about the possibility that George himself is the leaker.
. . .
Wouldn't it be funny, don't you think, if this entire Valerie Plame brouhaha was somehow about covering up a mess made by the president himself?

Well, of course I was talking about the Plame matter specifically, and not about the more general brouhaha that is currently bubbling up from between the cracks. And I was imagining something that happened with W and Bob Woodward that undoubtedly never happened. And I imagined -- charitably -- that the whole affair was somehow inadvertent. Guess what? I gave Bush too much darn credit for character.

Still, it amuses me to no end to guess correctly every so often, even when I have no idea what I'm talking about.

posted by Carlton at 11:32 PM

GLAD I DIDN'T JOIN THE FOREIGN SERVICE

At a couple of stages of my life, I have considered joining the Foreign Service (or trying to do so, at any rate). Now I'm glad I didn't -- and, surprisingly, for the same reason that I'm glad I didn't join the Massachusetts National Guard in 2000 (which yes, I did consider).

Under the pretense that Iraq is being pacified, the U.S. military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad. By reducing the numbers of soldiers the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs that the military will no longer perform are being sloughed off onto State Department "provincial reconstruction teams" led by Foreign Service officers. The stated rationale is that the teams will win Iraqi hearts and minds by organizing civil functions.

The Pentagon has informed the State Department that it will not provide security for these officials and that State should hire mercenaries for protection instead. Apparently, the U.S. military and the U.S. Foreign Service do not represent the same country in this exercise in nation-building. Internal State Department documents listing the PRT jobs, dated March 30, reveal that the vast majority of them remain unfilled. So Foreign Service employees are being forced to take the assignments, in which "they can't do what they are being asked to do," as a senior State Department official told me...

Foreign Service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, as those inside State expect, the department will be blamed. The passive resistance to these assignments by Foreign Service officers reflects informed anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murders of diplomats.

This is Sidney Blumenthal (Salon) via Digby and Americablog.

As I understand it, this plan involves taking soldiers out of areas that are unmanageable (for soldiers) in order to get some good PR and sending in diplomats -- office workers with advanced degrees, essentially, to take their place.

[Plan slogan: "Iraqis: Shoot our Eggheads not our Jarheads."]

So, the State Department has been designated the scapegoat for all failure in Iraq, because they were right from the beginning and everyone hates a know-it-all. Still, the utter dim-wittedness of this plan leads me to some deeper reflection on the attitiudes of our leaders. None of it is good.

I can't decide whether:

1) the administration doesn't understand the call to public service, and so takes anyone who has signed up for such service (soldiers, Guardsmen, now diplomats) as a fool to be played;

2) the administration has such a l'etat, c'est moi attitude that it naturally confuses public service with absolute fealty to Bush, personally -- and so FSOs can be ordered on suicide missions like kamikaze pilots, naturally; or

3) things are just so messed up in Iraq that the administration is grasping at any straws that happen to come its way. [Next, we'll send in the National Park Service! After that, the Girl Scouts!]

In any case, if this really does come to pass, and our diplomatic corps takes any kind of significant casualties, we should add it to the list of strong American institutions that Bush will have broken when he leaves office, and which will take years, if not decades, to repair. posted by Carlton at 8:36 AM

DUKE IT OUT

I should point out that University Diaries, link at left, is providing a lot of coverage (links, commentary) of the Duke lacrosse scandal. She posts an awful lot - -I don't see how she has the time. posted by Carlton at 8:34 AM

X-ED OUT

Yesterday a friend of mine invited me to attend what might be called an "Xbox party" at someone's house. This involved two Xboxes linked together via ethernet and up to eight people playing at any one time, so we could all kill each other or get into teams that killed each other. The game: Halo 2.

I should point out that normally I stay very far away from video games in all their forms -- I've just never been any good at them, at all, and it's frustrating. Which might imply that I shouldn't have gone to an event centered around them. I don't know very many people here in DC, though, and you can't turn down too many invitations before they stop coming. So, I arrived at this party having not touched a game controller in at least six or seven years, which didn't make me a good mix with the guys, you might say. Still, everyone was very cool to me, and I served to make the weaker players look good. And I had an excuse, being a non-player. And it was fun.

During one of our breaks, I was talking to a couple of the others about the online game World of Warcraft, which I guess that I had heard of before, but which seems to take hundreds (thousands?) of hours of commitment by the individual player, along with outside-the-game co-ordination of up to forty players in "Guilds".

"So," I said. "I don't want to bring the geek quotient up too high in the room, but . . . " -- people laugh -- " . . . anybody watch the new Doctor Who series?"

The room shut down, and there were audible groans. I may be making up this memory, but I seem to recall one of the guys actually "waving me off" like deck crew on an aircraft carrier.

"I thought you were going to say Battlestar Galactica," said one guy. "And that's one thing . . . "

Je m'amuse.

posted by Carlton at 1:43 PM

LINKY DINK

Via Kevin Drum, Mr. Chait explains the world of right-wing publishers in one paragraph here. posted by Carlton at 12:45 PM