I couldn’t believe how pitiful it was. Bo Derek honored to be reading scripted comments at the Republican convention, and tongue tripping over some token Spanish. And, no less pitiful, this National Review columnist complaining that the celebrity decks are stacked so far to the left that poor old Bo just won’t be enough to sway the tide:

Sadly, this isn’t going to be enough, and even more sadly, this matters. In

our tranquil, ill-educated times, showbiz sets not only the cultural, but the

political agenda. The drip, drip, drip of a predominantly liberal message

in the movies, TV, and the other entertainment media is bound to wear

through to the ballot box. We saw this in Britain, where a hostile cultural

scene proved to be the harbinger of the crushing Conservative defeat in

the 1997 election. Writing in the London Sunday Times the following

year, the newspaper’s then-resident leftist, the writer Robert Harris, noted

— with, probably, some satisfaction — that he couldn’t think of one

single “important” British writer or, for that matter, a film director, theater

director, composer (“apart from Lord Lloyd Webber”), actor, or painter

who was a Conservative.

As Mr. Harris went on to point out, “the entertainment and fashion

industries are now two of the biggest economic sectors in the world.

Never have we lived in a time more conscious of style, and never in

democratic history has it been less stylish to be on the right.”

Now, he was writing in a British context, but, like it or not, it’s not too

difficult to see the same process gathering pace over here. It’s not going

to be easy to reverse. On this battlefield, the Right are simply too few.

Eugene Kennedy’s long investigative report Mike Barnicle and American Twilight

on the Boston Globe‘s poorly justified firing of the outspoken commentator two years ago. Barnicle was by many accounts the most popular Globe columnist, offending many by tweaking their political correctness left and right. Kennedy feels it was one particular Globe editor’s self-serving hypocrisy that brought Barnicle down over a non-issue without an adequate opportunity to defend himself. It deserves looking at again since the Globe just did something seemingly similar to Jeff Jacoby, their only columnist with conservative credentials.

“That’s American twilight: Being found half guilty in the half light that’s too dim to

illuminate the whole truth, the truth that is complex while accusations are simple and

live forever on the Internet. Dusk is a great equalizer, right and wrong, honor and

dishonor, they look the same after sundown.” Jim Romenesko’s Media News

Tensions Cool in Philadelphia Streets. No ‘days of rage’ for Philadelphia 2000, says the mainstream press (it would be interesting to hear the perspective of the demonstrators). The police commissioner said: “They were folks who came here hell-bent on causing disruption. The Philadelphia Police Department is in control of the situation. Make no mistake about that.” The nascent new movement — energetic and focused, spontaneous and decentralized — touted in the aftermath of the WTO and IMF showings does not appear much in evidence. In fact, some protesters were quoted explaining that the protests had petered out because “their leaders” had been jailed early on. Strategists of the movement have offered that they will be targeting the Democratic convention in more force, because the Democrats are more prone to listen and be influenced by their agenda. Meanwhile, the one moment of any controversy on the convention floor almost seemed more than what fizzled on outside.

Judge Sets FBI Email Scanning Disclosure. The judge has granted the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for expedited processing of its Freedom of Information Act inquiry into the inner workings of ‘Carnivore’, after Janet Reno had decreed that the details would only be revealed to a “group of experts.” EPIC and ACLU say the tremendous potential for violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure mitigates for full and open disclosure of how Carnivore works. Once installed at an ISP site by court order, it “sniffs” or scans all traffic through the site, although the FBI assures us that only data related to criminal activity is filtered in and reviewed. How good are the FBI’s programmers at writing ‘perfect’ search filters? how invested?

Giant Trap Set for Monster in Lake. Scientists hope to net Nessie’s Norwegian cousin Selma.

Web Site Asks for Donated DNA Samples, appeals to donors’ altruism to help it build a DNA database it hopes will allow correlation between medical conditions and genetic loci. ‘The privately held company will use the data to “offer several products and services” to

other firms and research facilities, another section of the Web site explains. Among other

revenue-generating projects, the firm intends to “provide aggregate health and genetic

information to outside research facilities,” and to “sell and/or lease clinically useful genetic

associations to public and private research and product development institutions.” ‘

Fidgeting is neat

What to Do About All the Uncompassionate Conservatives? “Reject immediately this absurd notion that the

Republican convention lacks drama. For starters, there’s the extremely

dramatic ideological cosmetology. The Republicans want to show they

are compassionate conservatives, but that means they have to do

something with all the folks who are … you know … uncompassionate

conservatives.” Washington Post

Acme Klein Bottle:

“These are the finest closed,

non-orientable, boundary-free

manifolds sold anywhere in our three

spatial dimensions.”

CNET.com page of downloads of Napster alternatives

J.S. Bach, Man of the Ear: On the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, an attempt to grapple with how challenging it is to listen to his work.

Woven of independent and self-sufficient

musical lines that interact with split-second imitations and

sinuous counterpoint, his multiple-voiced works unsettle the mind

because, even at their simplest, there seems to be more

happening than can be comprehended through mere listening. His

fugues make us want to reach for the remote and stop time, so as

to untangle and hold up for scrutiny the passing show of musical

logic.

What happens to Bach’s music between the notes on the page

and what we hear remains enigmatic. There have been periodic

attempts to define the larger, sociological resonance of his

music, attempts to answer the question, “How do we as a society

hear Bach?”

…All of this lies to the side of the most troubling and most

rewarding aspect of Bach’s music: that its complexity still

terrifies us like no other body of composition. Bach remains the

intimidating composer par excellence. His contrapuntal

complexity has become synonymous with the very definition of

profundity in music. Composers seeking to demonstrate depth in

their work–from Beethoven to Liszt to Shostakovich–turn to the

fugue, a highly ordered work of multiple interacting lines of

counterpoint, as if it were the only form adequate to express the

most serious imagination.

Washington Post

Australia’s monetary policy body plagued by gnomes blocking front steps of building where it meets monthly.

It’s going to be a little harder to be a big man on the stock exchange floor.