american idol...i think not

So it's been over two months since the last post, and I blame that 100% on grad school. It has been quite a hectic year, and this last term has found me busy. No real life updates (hope to have a job update soon, however), but I did want to pass along a little note.

I went home after an interview for yet another mindless but money-paying job tonight, and since both Jeopardy and King of the Hill were over, my no-cable-paying self was left with either American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, or NOVA on PBS for entertainment while my delicious Totino's pizza to cook. Needless to say, I took the intellectual high ground...

The episode, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, was about one Mark Everett, leader of an indie-rock band, and his quest to learn more about his dead, estranged father. The neat part is that his father just happens to be a world-famous (or infamous) physicist who first developed the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. If that sounds like a lot to swallow, just start clicking around wikipedia and your feeble brain will get inundated with confusing thought experiments concerning quantum suicide and theories about infinite alternate universes.

But the documentary was very nicely done. They do a great job weaving together the story of Mark finding his father with a fun and simple yet informative explanation of Hugh Everett's theories, creating...wait for it...parallel stories! Oh, that felt nice. Points for me.

Last, but certainly not least, Mark "E" Everett is a musician...

I don't need to say more, I know, but they played some of his music as cuts during the film, and it didn't sound too shabby. I know I will checking him out (band is The Eels), and you should too. The film is nice too. It won a BAFTA award, so you know it's got something to offer.

Anyways, hope all is well. Spring in Eugene is almost too pretty to bear (I still have to think about which form to use with that word). I saw a raccoon outside McKenzie on my way over.

why i enjoy the university atmosphere

In most places, when you walk into the men's room, if you find some reading material it's usually yesterday's sports page or, if you're lucky, a magazine. But if you were to walk into the stall up here on 3rd floor McKenzie at the UO, you'd find last quarter's issue of the American Political Science Review. Instead of reading about A-Rod and steroid drama, I got to learn about the first study to demonstrate a link between genetics and various forms of political participation.

Thank you, Plato

keepin up

Well hello. The Chumblog has seen better days, I know, so this post will try to remedy that.

Much has changed since we last left off. In case you haven't heard...

• America has a black President (though whether he is actually that amazing is still up for debate
• I (successfully?) completed the first term of grad school
• the new topical blog has gotten off to a verrrry slow start
• I have struggled to kickstart a new era of ma vie (in more ways than one)
• the ducks beat the oklahoma state cowboys in the 2008 Holiday Bowl!
  

All of these things have combined to create quite a new world for a chumber. Fortunately, each new experience brings excitement. My life has been consumed by equal parts of

• reading; (okay not really, but I gotta pretend)
• class
• rererediscovering that great phenomenon we call "music" via last.fm, as well as other things which shan't be spoken of on the interwebz...
• getting closer to the ideal computing setup via, among other things, rhythmbox to listen to my music and share it with others, dropbox to sync files between my desktop, laptop, and cloudtop, simplifymedia to share my music and listen to that of even more people, and ubuntu to string it all together
• trying to forego eating out for buying groceries and, shocker i know, making meals
• playing pool and, occassionaly, playing pool well
• and becoming friends-bordering-lovers with my roommate (although no one should fret...old roommates have special real estate saved in my heart).

There have been countless news articles and happenings that I've wanted to comment on here, but I never really got around to it. I'll make up for it with two today.

In a great opinion piece for the NYT, the top dog over at Netflix gave his opinion on how President Obama should handle the issue of exorbitant pay to big time CEO's. I'll let you read the article on your own (it's short), but this pretty much sums it up:

Perhaps a starting place for “tax, not shame” would be creating a top federal marginal tax rate of 50 percent on all income above $1 million per year. Some will tell you that would reduce the incentive to earn but I don’t see that as likely. Besides, half of a giant compensation package is still pretty huge, and most of our motivation is the sheer challenge of the job anyway.

If only we had more guys like Reed Hastings...

Completely unrelated but even more interesting to me is the saga of a legal proceeding involving a grad student at Boston University and that evil, silly, asinine, backward consortium of crooks called the RIAA. After doing something that most like every college student has done at one point, Joel Tenenbaum was served by the RIAA and very quickly was facing the difficult choice of settling for $10,000 or going to court against a huge corporate legal machine. That is, until a Harvard Law professor, Charles Nesson, who runs a class on hands-on legal experience and specializes in internet and society, decided to take on the case as one the course's projects. The project has brought on several young law students and has generating quite a following. One early victory was when the students working on the case successfully convinced the judge to allow a pretrial hearing to be streamed over the web (against heavy RIAA complaints of course). For more on the case, see this article over at Ars Technica.

I've always been excited about file sharing and the new (I hope) music discovering paradigm that can be created with things like computers that are linked together over things like the internetz. While plenty of people find this to be highly bad and illegal and maybe even wrong, even calling it 'piracy,' I'm keeping an open mind about it all. The article linked below makes mention of how Radiohead made more money than their all their previous cd sales combined using one simple, seemingly dumb tactic: allow people to choose their own price and download the CD for whatever they wanted. The experiment worked great, and other artists have picked up on it. I just bought my first from Roman Candle...gave $3.50 for their latest. I think it's great. They even had a choice of bitrate and file type. The future is on it's way....For a really long but absolutely exquisite and perfectly informative discussion on the whole debate, read this piece written in the aftermath of the shutdown of OiNK's Pink Palace, a filesharing community that I was a member of and miss everyday.

Okay, well, that's looking like a pretty good post. Hopefully it won't be several months before I find the time to rant again.

And, one more thing. Listen to the everybodyfields. It will sooth your soul.

really Mr. Kristol???

In his New York Times opinion column Monday (see title link), William Kristol opined that the "ignorant masses" are really no problem at all these days. I don't know how I feel about that, but I do know what I think about the following statement made by Kristol

Indeed, as Sept. 11 did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia, so the market crash has resulted in remarkably little popular hysteria or scapegoating.

The reason he brings this up is, quite honestly, a little mystifying to me. I guess the point is that intellectuals aren't always right, so we should embrace this vulgarization (even though Kristol can't seem to decide on if it exists or not). However, I think it is pretty absurd to argue that the post-9/11 era has been without heightened levels of animosity toward Muslims and those who might look like Muslims. What society is he observing? There are too many accounts of people objecting, with anger, that Barak Obama is a Muslim and/or Ay-rab. There are too many McCain supporters drumming up the non-issue of Barack Obama's middle name. Sure we didn't intern Muslim-Americans, but that is a credit to our moderate progression since earlier times, not evidence of a lack of widespread xenophobia.

Kristol also stipulates that politics in democracy are always "vulgar," pointing out, rather pedantically, that fellow conservative journalist over at the Journal Peggy Noonan was wrong when stating that Sarah Palin's candidacy is symptomatic of a "new vulgarization" of US politics. What Noonan explains, and quite effectively at that, is that Palin represents the final shift to vapid down-homeyness. Beginning with all prestige and no "vulgus" appeal, to a delicate mixture, to Bush (whether he retained any prestige is hard to determine), to finally Palin, the quintessential no experience, plenty of twang candidate.

Noonan is correct in pointing out that Palin brings absolutely nothing to the ticket save for that intriguing one moment disappointing the next colloquilism. Saying "maverick" and "hockey" and "folks" doesn't make you qualified, and that's just about all Palin has. For crying outloud, Sen. McCain, on his awkward Letterman appearance, cited Palin's experience on the PTA when listing off her three life accomplishments. This is laughable: how many presidential and vice-presidential candidates have been on the PTA? I'd be willing to bet lots, but you never heard of it as evidence of experience until 2008. I think that simple fact reveals a lot about just how much Palin is lacking.

just a few short days left..

...that is to say, just a few more days before the excitingly scary world of grad school actually begins, a two-year (at least) commitment to drastically limiting my life to the activities of reading, writing, and gtf'ing. Yes, orientation is, from what I hear, a fairly intense week of meeting, meeting, greeting, and meeting. After that week, it's GER 311 and then the lecture portion of HIST 104, the course I'm GTF'ing for. Tuesday finds me in my seminar on methods and writing...HIST 612. Wednesday is Monday again (both of which days are my office hours...9-10:30), and thursday...dreaded thursday...is the first day of leading the discussion section. Who knows how that will go. Apparently they will mostly be Freshmen, so it's their first time too. I don't really remember if I was scared during my first classes in college. I'll have to come up with an intimidating entrance.

But living in Eugene has been great. The town is fun and beautiful, there are tons of bike trails, great concerts and restaurants, and a lively community in general. Since being in Eugene, I have:

• bought a bike
• seen the Ducks win twice at Autzen, and once on tv in West Lafayette
• picked up keys to my office, the mailroom, and history grad student lounge
• seen the Old 97's at W.O.W. Hall and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles at Eugene Celebration
• read a bit of historiography
• gotten the idea for a more focused, topical blog
• not started that blog
• become slightly more liberal
• moved in to my first big boy apartment
• setup my new computer to dualboot Vista and Ubuntu
  

All of these things have been fun and exciting. But, this wonderful freedom is soon ending, as mentioned above. Hopefully this will be exciting too, and I'm sure it will. The problem is, it will also be very very very very busy, and probably difficult and perhaps even overwhelming.

Oh, and in addition to my list above (I guess I could just add to it, but why?), I have also experience the high price of West Coast commodities, though some new California friends tell me I ain't seen nothing yet... Hence, my diet has been pretty sparse i.e. ramen, totino's ...mm tasty, and lots of sandwiches, tap water, and pasta roni.

Something else I forgot but definitely deserves its own paragraph is my trip to the coast. Technically it was in celebration of Clayton's birthday, but this is my blog. We went down a super cool trail through old growth forest that ended at a huge secluded beach. Then we left to explore the super cool tidal pools where I saw real life starfish for the first time in my life. For some reason, I was thinking they would be soft, but they are still hard when living. Maybe it's because of Patrick. Who knew?

Anyways, it's taken me about an hour to write this...mostly because I am very easily distracted. I'll have to get some pictures of all these wonderful, new things up here at some point. Of course that will involved a combination of buying a new camera and taking Ali's.

Until next time....listen to the everybodyfields (I'll let you find that one w/o my help of linkage)!!!

http://history.uoregon.edu/faculty/profiles/index.php?name=jarnigan

the life of a chumber, chapter three - 2 (+) years in the emerald city

Well, I know it's been a while, but welcome back to me.

I (we) arrived in Eugene, OR this past Sunday, after an exhausting but fun (at times) trip across the country.  After starting in Oak Ridge, TN, I spent four weeks working in Tulsa, OK, first languishing at landscape work and then standing and sweating over a hot grill at Sonic on 38th and Harvard.  Finally all of that ended and I hit the road, along with my travel companions, the Hilshers - that is Gerald, Vickie, Ali, Wade and Kramer.  We made our first stop after a 13 hour drive in Breckenridge, CO, which happens to be named after Buchanan's VP John C. Breckinridge.  The first "i" was changed to an "e" when Breckinridge sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

After a short walk through town and breakfast at a sidewalk table with the Krame, we started back out for Ogden, UT, which is just past Salt Lake City.  Along the way, I stopped to snap a picture and grab a genuine Desert Southwest rock.  Then came the last major stretch of our journey, up through Idaho and finally taking us into the Beaver State.  Since we had been driving basically nonstop for days, and it was a good 10 hours anyway, we stopped in Bend instead of trudging on to TrackTown.  The resorty town of Bend was definitely enjoyable and merits a trip back as soon as possible, although we did take time out to ride the ski lift up Mt. Bachelor.

After what felt like a year, we headed for Eugene.  The first few days have been consumed by setting up Ali in her lovely apartment, as well as some funner items such as a daytrip to the coast, where we saw the country's largest sea cave, which just happens to be a haven for hundreds of massive potato-looking sea lions.

Today the rest of the crew leaves and real life begins to set in, though fortunately it doesn't really begin until Sept. 29th for me.  Be on the lookout for trip and Eugene pictures to bring some life to the blog.

Until then, should you want to spend a solid 30 hours driving time jaunting across much of the western United States, here's a custom roadmap of our journey.  I should warn you - most of it is pretty boring, so you'll need a good stack of CD's, including a good themed mix such as this one I came up with.

podtesting

Summer is here and I really haven't done much of anything. My room is hardly walkable due to the mounds of "stuff" and I am yet to find a job. Several things looked promising but fell through for various reasons, but I'm still hopeful. The most stressful thing is just getting to Oregon. The AAA Trip Calculator tells me it will cost a square $550 to take a 1998 4wd 4Runner to Eugene...and I would have a loaded-down 97 model :( I just have about half that in the bank right now, and that's only one expense I face in the months ahead.

One good note is that I did find a place to stay (hopefully) that is just half a mile from campus and fairly reasonable. And thinking about grad school is still exciting. I recently preffed to be a grader in Modern Europe, a section leader in Western Civ, or a grader in War in the Modern World. They all look interesting and have neat professors, so that should be fun. Of course it's very nerve-racking as well, since baby Centenary and it's 800 students didn't exactly prepare me for that inevitably odd TA-student relationship.

Anyways, one thing I wanted to do this summer was keep up the Saturday Morning Blue Plate Special via podcasting. This is a first rough test in that effort; I only dug up an old janky Labtec mic, and I'm not sure if it sounds good enough. But we shall see what Schleuss and the good folks at KSCL think.