Devon Biere’s Blog

This week marks the 20th anniversary of Spike Lee’s film, “Do the Right Thing,” according to an interesting AP article with reflections from Lee and others on the movie.

In addition to making me feel kinda old (I was in high school at the time), this milestone brings back a flood of memories and feelings from my first viewing.  I didn’t see it in the theater but caught it on video a year or two later.  I suppose a spoiler alert is advisable, although I would think the statute of limitations has run out after 20 years.

I loved the movie.  It was vibrant, tough, tender, and funny.  The characters were larger than life, yet recognizable and real.  Watching Mookie navigate the combustible tensions and complex relationships in the neighborhood was fascinating.  The movie sets up the conflict and Mookie’s final choice about as overtly as possible, never more so than with Radio Raheem’s massive Love/Hate rings and accompanying monologue.  “One hand is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back…”

I had a very hard time with the ending.  I think I understand it, at least as much as a white guy from the suburbs can.  But I disagree with it.  I don’t think Mookie should have thrown the trash can.  I say that not as a white person, but as a human being.

According to Wikipedia’s entry on the film, Spike Lee stated in an interview appearing on the DVD that he “believes the key point is that Mookie was angry at the death of Radio Raheem, and that viewers who question the riot’s justification are implicitly valuing white property over the life of a black man.”  He’s the writer/director, so I can’t argue with him on Mookie’s motivation.  But I can and do reject his characterization of mine.

I choose Love.  I reject Hate.  And I hope I would say that regardless of my skin color.

Here’s one reason why: I’ve seen it work.  At the time the movie came out, I was a student at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA).  Located near downtown, it was a magnet school with a remarkably diverse student body from all over the city.  It was the most integrated environment I’ve ever experienced.  I’m not talking about “some of my best friends…” tokenism nonsense.  It was genuine and pervasive.  We simply didn’t care much about our surface differences.  We had colorblind casting in our stage productions.  We connected and befriended and dated across races.  It wasn’t until I graduated and went off to college and work that I came to understand how special that environment was.

Some (many?) people would say that Love works just fine at SCPA, but SCPA’s not the real world.  My response is that the “real world” will never look like SCPA as long as people choose Hate.  It’s easy to Hate.  And there’s no shortage of reasons to Hate in this world.  There will always be a reason to throw the trash can or worse, whether in Bed-Stuy or Northern Ireland or Gaza.  Hate, even when understandable or even justifiable, only breeds more Hate.

Love is much harder, but it’s worth it.  I’m talking about Love backed by resolve, empathy, self-respect, and action.  It is almost always more effective, in the long run.

And that’s the triple truth, Ruth.

Most of us are guilty of using corporatespeak from time to time.  I’m no innocent here, although I don’t know think I’ve ever used the word “synergy” with a straight face.  That said, I still say “it is what it is” every now and then.  (I know… I’m working on it.)

We won’t shake these things overnight, and that’s OK.  You can continue to focus on your “core competencies” and be “transparent” about doing your “due diligence.”  You can “circle back” with Judy and “take the discussion offline.”  You can even mistakenly refer to “exponential” growth without understanding what exponential means, because half the people you’re talking to don’t know, either, “at the end of the day.”

These words and phrases are overused, trite, and irritating.  They’re also mostly harmless.  And they continue to carry some vestiges of their original meaning, even after being flogged to death over the years.

However, there is one insidious phrase that I can’t stand.  I see and hear it all the time now… in work meetings, political debates, interviews, online discussions, and other public communications:

“Well, I don’t disagree with you, Rob…”

or the lazy variant:

“Don’t disagree, Rob…”

Really?  How big of you.

Why is that phrase a problem?  Because it’s gutless and frequently insincere.  And because the speaker often really means one of two things (albeit subconsciously):

“I agree with you, Rob, but I can’t quite commit to saying that clearly (especially with all these people listening) so I’m gonna hedge my bets and water down my verbiage a bit.  I’m terrified of being wrong.”

or:

“I actually DO disagree with you, Rob.  In fact, I’ll probably insert a ‘but’ at this point and then ease my way into a bland, mamby-pamby version of what I really think.  I’m terrified of being wrong.”

Either way, it’s a pitiful and baffling rhetorical tic.  Unless someone asks you, “Do you disagree with that statement, Senator?” there’s virtually no reason to use this weaselly phrasing.

End it.  Say what you mean.  If you agree, say “I agree.”  If you don’t, say “I disagree.”

Even Lumbergh had the cojones to say “Ooohh… yeah… I’m gonna have to go ahead and sort of… disagree with you there.”

This week, I finally started using Twitter (@devdog).  I am a longtime Twitter skeptic but I’m forcing myself to give it a shot.  I need to see where it fits in for me, given that I already use LinkedIn for professional networking, Facebook for personal stuff, and this blog for general musings.

As I was checking out the Twitterverse, it occurred to me that I had seen this format before.  The ellipses… the inane comments… the name-dropping… the self-indulgence… it’s the freaking Larry King column from USA Today back in the 90’s, brought back to life!  Apparently, Billy Crystal made a similar observation on Leno recently.  It’s absolutely true.  In fact, Larry King is on Twitter (@kingsthings) and he hasn’t missed a beat.  Here are a few recent excerpts, reformatted in the style of his old column:

I just finished taping Tavis Smiley’s show. it airs tomorrow night - he might just be the best in the business…  I am picking Dunkirk for the Belmont Stakes. I picked him for the Derby & he didn’t win & he didn’t run Preakness but I am sticking with him…  The remake of the Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 is a topnotch thriller. The best is years… Denzel Washington & John Travolta are superb…  Come see me in Vegas… They never get the credit they deserve, but jockeys are the best athletes in all of sports…  I have over 200 pair of suspenders… had breakfast with Tommy Lasorda at Dodger Stadium today…

OK, you say, that’s just Larry being Larry.  Carrying on in the inimitable style that was parodied so perfectly and mercilessly by The Onion many years ago (”Five minutes with Walter Matthau is like 10 years in an Ivy League school….  If I could be any nationality in the world, I’d be Flemish….”).

I don’t think so.  Here are some Larry-formatted tweets from a fairly diverse set of Twitter accounts.  I’m not picking on anyone, just having some fun to prove the point:

Exhibit A:

What’s happening in Vancouver this weekend? I’ve been looking for an excuse to travel up there this year… Here’s the scoop on Black Oak Books. It’s still operating on the web…  Truth: I had a pain in my stomach like being punched when I saw @om and @rww on the SUL…  Happy birthday to Howard Dean’s campaign guy –> @JoeTrippi… Oh Yoko, great John Lennon song, also in the movie Rushmore…

Exhibit B:

With the kids reading Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree”. He was amazing. “Where The Sidewalk Ends” was my fav as a kid… Dinner with the family. Got pizza delivered… Peter Frampton on sat radio. Classic… Frost Nixon was amazing… I just had a double cheeseburger, fries, and 2 scoops of ice cream… Also, what’s up with these cords/strings they always have in Euro bathrooms?

Exhibit C:

In mexico city for the first time. Buenos dias… just finished watching the lakers game. it got a little tense there for a while. but 2-0 feels very nice… I loved Pan’s Labyrinth, by the way… i miss lauryn & d’angelo… that’s the thing about conspiracy theories. u can speculate about sinister intentions all u want, but seldom do people offer any proof… Happy Birthday Vaughn Anthony…

Exhibit D:

Hanging with Dave & Laura, my friends from high school. I hadn’t seen Laura in 23 years… Time for a pedicure… Today is Arlo’s last day at the Montessori School! End of an era… I swear I just saw 1970s Castro driving a Jeep… IKEA’s 80s music mix is better than everyone else’s 80s mix… We saw UP today and we liked it too… Zombies are the new Pirates…

If those aren’t Larry King columns, I don’t know what they are.

By the way, Exhibit A is Dave Winer (@davewiner).  Exhibit B is Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong).  Exhibit C is John Legend (@johnlegend).  Exhibit D is Jennifer Robbins (@jenville).  All good people with good content, using Twitter exactly as intended.  I think it’s really just the format itself that brings out our inner Larry King.

Going beyond Twitter, how is the typical blog all that different from Andy Rooney’s commentaries on 60 Minutes?  Random topics, rambling prose, fixations on minutiae, cranky commentaries, sentimentalism.  Hell, I could imagine him doing a variant of this very post!

“What’s the deal with Twitter?  I mean, 140 characters, including spaces?  And punctuation?  I wonder who came up with that.  Can’t we get the spaces for free at least?  Ever notice how big the space bar is?  I sure have.”

Larry King is 75 years old.  Andy Rooney is 90.

I think it’s funny that all our trendy, modern social networking and digital self-expression tools have somehow made us all sound like a bunch of curmudgeonly commentators. 

FADE IN:

EXT. CLIFFS OF INSANITY - DAY

VIZZINI
As a matter of fact, Florin is comprised of 8 minor city-states.

INIGO MONTOYA
You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

VIZZINI
Am I going mad, or did the word “think” escape your lips!?  “Comprised” means “made up” or “formed.”

INIGO MONTOYA
No, it doesn’t.  You’re confusing “comprise” with “compose.”  “Comprise” means “to include” or “to contain.”  You should be saying, “Florin comprises 8 minor city-states” or “Florin is composed of 8 minor city-states.”

VIZZINI
For your information, I’ve seen it used my way all over the place.  Even in the Guilder Morning Herald.

INIGO MONTOYA
That doesn’t make it right.  Your way actually means, “Florin is included of 8 minor city-states” or “Florin is contained of 8 minor city-states.”  It makes no sense.  You may think I’m being pedantic, but you sound like an idiot.

VIZZINI
Oh… have it your way.  I’ll have to remember this for my next battle of wits.  You know, for a mercenary sot, you’re pretty smart.

FEZZIK
Wanna see me light my fart?

VIZZINI
Aaaaarrrrghhh!

FADE OUT

With Obama’s Supreme Court pick expected this week, Jeffrey Toobin has written a very interesting and timely piece on Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker.  Entitled No More Mr. Nice Guy, the article delves into Roberts’ background, beliefs, and career to help explain his partisan underpinnings and his polite but steely brand of conservatism.  I’m no Supreme Court jurisprudence junkie, but it’s been clear since the beginning that the Judiciary Committee got played like a slow jam (I’m looking at you, Senators Leahy, Kohl, and Feingold).

As Toobin writes:

“The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”

In other words, Roberts adjudicates the way you might expect him to, being a multi-millionaire, onetime member of the Federalist Society who worked as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, clerked for Rehnquist, and served as Kenneth Starr’s principal deputy in George H. W. Bush’s White House.

Around the time of Obama’s inauguration, it was widely noted that Obama was the first president to have voted against the confirmation of the Chief Justice who would later swear him in.  Oh, and for the record, they both screwed up the oath .  However, Obama went beyond a simple party-line, knee-jerk rejection of Roberts.  Recall that the Senate Democrats split evenly for and against Roberts.  From the article (emphasis mine):

In his Senate speech on that vote, Obama praised Roberts’s intellect and integrity and said that he would trust his judgment in about ninety-five per cent of the cases before the Supreme Court. “In those five per cent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision,” Obama said. “In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions . . . the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama did not trust Roberts’s heart. “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” the Senator said.

So, it should be no surprise that Obama is looking for a nominee with a “common touch” and “empathy” to bring humanity to the bench along with intellect and experience.  These are qualities that seem to be largely missing from the increasingly right-leaning Court.

Forget all the talk of textualism, liberalism, strict constructionism, originalism… all the ivory tower crap.  In the end, I want someone on the Court who will fill the those 5% gaps with fairness and pragmatism.  I wish the President luck and wisdom in making this selection.

Check out this amazing, custom-built Wall-E case mod!  This made the rounds several weeks ago, but now AcidCow.com has posted 110 photos of the project from start to finish, all on one page (hat tip: digg).  The project and photos appear to have originated at this Russian casemods.ru site.  Here’s a quick sampling…

I want one. 

• Jimmy Fallon was a computer science major in college before he switched to communications. ^[1]
• Our immune systems peak around age 18 and begin a slow deterioration thereafter. ^[2]
• Roger Bart, the actor who played Bree’s creepy pharmacist/lover/stalker on Desperate Housewives, won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for playing Snoopy in the 1999 Broadway revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” ^[3]
• Barnacles are actually crustaceans (not mollusks!), are typically hermaphroditic, and have the highest penis-to-body-size ratio of all animals. ^[4]
• The P-51 Mustang (the magnificent WWII prop fighter) flew more combat missions during the first year of the Korean War than any other U.S. plane. ^[5]

Crapnotes:
[1]  MSNBC article: “Funny man Fallon a college grad after 14 years.”
[2]  Kathleen Sullivan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Science Friday (May 8th, 2009).
[3]  Wikipedia entry on Roger Bart.  I looked him up because we got the “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” CD from the library.  The kids and I loved his performance.  He’s a riot!
[4] Carl Zimmer’s book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.  Apparently the… ahem… wonderschlong is an adaptation to overcome the difficulty of mating when one is permanently attached to a rock.
[5]  The Military Channel’s Great Planes: P-51 Mustang episode.

I use WordPress to power this site and have been thrilled both with the core blogging components and the great plugin ecosystem.  I’m glad I avoided the temptation to roll my own little blogging system this time.  It would have been a fun exercise, but I wanted to get up and running quickly and WordPress saved me tons of time.

Trevor Davis has a nice Tuts+ post highlighting 13 of the most important WordPress plugins (hat tip: DZone).  I use several on his list, including:

• Akismet - Identifies and filters comment spam
• Google XML Sitemaps - Generates sitemaps and automatically notifies search engines of updates
• No Self Pings - Supresses trackbacks that would have been generated by linking to your own posts
• WP-DB-Backup - Enables scheduled database backups
• WP Super Cache - Generates and serves static html files instead of dynamic scripts to reduce page load times and protect against traffic spikes

I also use and recommend these plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack - Supports search engine optimization
• Contact Form 7 - Provides a simple contact form
• FD Feedburner - Redirects the standard WordPress RSS feed(s) to Feedburner
• Google Analyticator - Easily integrates Google Analytics code into your blog
• TinyMCE Advanced - Provides many useful extensions to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing toolbar, including table support

I’ve only scratched the surface of what WordPress can do, but it does the job very nicely so far.  I’ll be sure to share any tips I come across or extensions that I find helpful.

I love Esquire’s What I’ve Learned feature, in which (usually famous) people share their opinions, life lessons, and arbitrary thoughts.

From Christopher Walken:

Most of the jobs I get are basically very unwholesome people. There’s always something wrong with the guy, and sometimes something deeply wrong. I’m tired of that. I tell my agent I want a Fred MacMurray part.

From Philip Glass:

When you hear for the first time the music you have composed, there is that astonishing moment when the idea that you carried in your heart and your mind comes back to you in the hands of a musician. People always ask, “Is it what you thought it would be?” And that’s a very interesting question, because once you hear it in the air, so to speak, it’s almost impossible to remember what it was you imagined. The reality of the sound eclipses your experience.

From Carrie Fisher:

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

From Michael Eisner:

When I read biographies, I’m only interested in the first few chapters. I’m not interested in when people become successful. I’m interested in what made them successful.

From B.B. King:

Water from the white fountain didn’t taste any better than from the black fountain.

From Tom Petty:

What I’ve learned about marriage: You need to have each other’s back; you have to be a kind of team going through life. That’s beautiful — to have that kind of friendship. You’re going to need it when you get old.

From John Goodman:

I always overtip. Because at the end of the night, your feet hurt and you get to count it up and there’s a nice feeling when you’ve gotten tipped well. I know what it’s like. My mom lived on tips.

From Alex Trebek:

Don’t tell me what you believe in. I’ll observe how you behave and I will make my own determination.

From Elmore Leonard:

If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I’d have it shot. Immediately.

I’ve started jotting down random bits of information that I run across in the course of life, reading, etc.  These are all 100% true and hopefully at least 50% interesting…

• Steve Martin lost his virginity to Stormie Sherk, who later became Stormie Omartian, the Christian singer and best-selling author. ^[1]
• After returning from his 5-year voyage on The Beagle, Charles Darwin never again left England. ^[2]
• In addition to the Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, there’s a fifth one… the Southern Ocean. ^[3]
• Billy Zane played one of Biff’s hoodlum friends, Match, in Back to the Future. ^[4]
• eBay has over 8.5 petabytes of data (web clicks, sessions, network events, etc.) stored on Teradata and Greenplum data warehouse appliances. ^[5]
• A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes, or 1,024 terabytes.  ^[6]
• It has been estimated that all the works ever created by mankind across all cultures and all languages (32 million books, 25 million songs, 750 million articles, etc.) could be compressed into approximately 50 petabytes. ^[7]

Who knew?  Who cares? 

Crapnotes:
[1]  Steve Martin’s memoir, Born Standing Up.
[2]  Carl Zimmer’s book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.
[3]  Learned while helping my son study for a science test on oceans.  The waters surrounding Antarctica were recognized as a distinct ocean in 2000.
[4]  Learned while watching the movie, confirmed by IMDB.  It was his first movie role.  He went on to play Match again in Back to the Future Part II.
[5]  Per Curt Monash’s research blog entry as referenced by his Slashdot posting.
[6]  Wikipedia’s Petabyte entry.
[7]   Kevin Kelly’s 2006 NY Times Article, Scan This Book!