Thursday, April 13, 2006

My Date with Dowd


Maureen Dowd is, of course, the entertaining and frequently incisive op-ed writer for the New York Times, and it seems she and I have been getting together lately. Purely on the inner plane of op-ed consciousness, mind you—I am sure that the lady wouldn't give me the proverbial time of day if she ever met me.

However, we are connecting: on Friday night, I posted a piece called "All Ways Are My Way", which included a simple point about the "reclassification of leaks" trick that the Bushies have resorted to lately. I featured a little Carrollian metaphor and an Alice image to illustrate the point (I always write and post the previous evening for the following day's work—for example, this is being written on Wednesday night). On Saturday, Dowd appeared with a Lewis Carroll analogy to make the same point (though I liked her phrase "Immaculate Declassification" even more).

Then Wednesday I find out that she's also taking a page out of my Tao of Hogwarts book: she referred to Rumsfeld as "He-Who-Should-Be-Fired." It's so nice to know that someone else thinks of world events in Harry Potter terms—I was beginning to think I was being rather childish.

So Ms. Dowd, since we've struck such a harmonious chord between us this week, you are the recipient of the Daily Rev Quote of the Week award, for this remark, which was shot directly at the Tyrannical Triumvirate:


To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, these guys wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.


Oh, and Ms. Dowd, you can find my phone number here.

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Geek Wednesday Follow-up

After I'd posted yesterday's piece about running Windows XP on the new Mac Intel-equipped machines, I encountered this report at Ars Technica. It raises a couple of points about the prospect of getting these strange operating system bedfellows together under the same hood, which some of you might want to be aware of. Note that the author points out that the standard file system for XP installations—NTFS—can't be written to on the Mac machines; which means that FAT32 is your only route. Also see the difficulty described having to do with running this installation on a MacBook laptop: even though the Mac desktops now come with a two-button mouse, their laptops still rely on the old Control-click dance well known to users of the erstwhile one-button Apple mouse. Well, there's a compatibility problem there, though it appears that some ingenious developer has come up with some software to work around it. The closing verdict seems to be that while it is indeed generally easy and straightforward to do this, it is not a ripple-free pool still at this point. But that's Boot Camp for you...

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