WombatNation

A Leader of the Clash Dies at 50

Joe Strummer suffered a heart attack and passed away yesterday at the age of 50.

The Clash’s three LP masterpiece Sandinista! was the first really great, life-changing music I experienced. One of my brother’s high school friends was exposed to the Clash’s music while DJ’ing at Johns Hopkins. He told my brother to check out a couple bands - The Clash, U2, Adam Ant, and Black Flag. This was 1980, I was 15 years old, and finding music by any of these bands in Biloxi, Mississippi, at that time was not particularly easy.

When Sandinista! came out the following year, I snapped it up and listened to it over and over. The music and the lyrics exposed me to not only the best band I had ever heard but also to other cultures and to leftist politics.

Listening once again to all three LPs of Sandinista!, I’m amazed I can still remember the lyrics to many of the songs. From the initial jangly strains of “The Magnificent Seven” to the shuffling dub dirge of “Shepherds Delight”, this is simply a stunning album.

If you have a copy of Sandinista! or know someone who does, be sure to read through the six-page foldout lyrics sheet with cartoons by Steve Bell. Holding this big lyrics sheet in my hands reminds me of a lot of what we gave up with the move to CDs and downloaded music.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson

This book received a lot of what I think was overly harsh criticism for not providing a significant amount of in depth technical coverage of the cross-functional area of emergence, i.e., cellular automata, self organization, complexity theory, etc. Obviously, one book on single topic can’t be all things to all people. While Emergence is obviously not the most technical of books, I think it serves as a excellent introduction to the related fields. In addition, I think it was particularly strong in pointing out the social implications of specific examples of emergent behavior.

A likely follow up read for me will be Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Johnson frequently refers to her book for descriptions of emergent behavior in vibrant, urban communities. Jacob’s book also came up in the very humorous Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, which I also recently finished reading.

Steven Johnson’s weblog

The semi-annual letter from Rice president Malcolm Gillis just showed up in my mailbox. The letter isn’t published to the Rice website, yet, but click on alumni letters on the Office of the President’s page if you care to see old alumni letters and eventually, the fall 2002 letter. In addition to pointing out the top ranking in Seventeen Magazine, he notes the following awards and results for Rice this year:

• Named “Best Academic Bang for the Buck” by Princeton Review
• U.S. News top five colleges for educational value
• Fiske Guide to Colleges - Best Buy
• USA Today/NCAA Academic Achievement Award for highest graduation rate of student-athletes among Division I-A schools: 91 percent
• Second lowest student-to-faculty ratio (after Caltech)
• Full-time faculty teach 96% of undergrad classes
• Despite the Hopwood decision that prohibited most affirmative action programs, the student body diversity has returned to a level close to before the Hopwood decision
• Student tuition is only 40% of actual cost of undergraduate education
• Ranked second among private universities for lowest debt per student

Ed Felten is excited that Princeton ranked #22 on Seventeen Magazine’s list of 100 Coolest Colleges. I was quite surprised to find my alma mater, Rice University, ranked #1.

Rice is a fantastic school and I had an incredible experience there, but the first item on Seventeen’s list of desirable qualities “From frat parties to professors’ involvement, from campus safety to great shopping,” is not a possibility at Rice, since Rice does not allow for the existence of social fraternities on campus. This is a good thing. Instead, Rice has a residential college system that Rice’s first president Edgar Odell Lovett wisely borrowed from Princeton.

I wonder if the writers at Seventeen Magazine researched the Night of Decadence party?

AlterNet: Does Trent Lott Speak for the South?

Trent Lott’s continued appalling statements make me embarrassed to have been raised in the State of Mississippi. The reputation of Mississippi is already sadly too low in the eyes of most US citizens, but Lott seems compelled to drag it deeper into the white trash.

In case you missed it, here’s what Lott had to say at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party:
“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

Strom Thurmond ran that year as a segregationist. Thurmond’s platform was “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Slate provided the following additional quote from Lott’s idol during a campaign speech for the 1948 Presidential campaign, “I want to tell you, ladies and gentleman, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

Warning! Don’t read this if you haven’t seen Treasure Planet from Walt Cyborg Disney Pictures, but plan to do so. You’ve been warned.

If you liked Titan A.E., I think you will like Treasure Planet. There’s a time and a place for mindless animated films. It may not be a lot of time and it may not be a large place, but it’s there.

Treasure Planet is ostensibly based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but there are more than a few passing similarities to Titan A. E. Let’s see:

1. Boy is bitter about his father leaving him, but still misses him
2. Boy is a rebel stuck in a crap job, but can surf radically through space on a single person vessel with a generic rock soundtrack blasting in the background
3. Boy comes into or is in possession of secret, 3D light-projected map and is the only one who can operate the map
4. Boy travels on spaceship staffed by mutineers/traitors who need to use the boy’s map to find the treasure
5. Boy is betrayed by large, older guy who he thought was his friend
6. The large, older guy later turns soft, and saves boy’s life
7. I could go on and on and on

One of the biggest missing elements is boy meets girl. The only hooking up is done by the cool cat chick captain and the older goofy dog professor.

B.E.N. reminded me of the donkey from Shrek. Goofy sidekick. Begs desperately to hang with the protagonist. Voice by former SNL star. Causes a lot of trouble, but also saves some bacon. Okay, not enough connections to sue over.