Thursday, July 29, 2004

John Edwards' Speech

I guess I can't ignore the Democratic National Convention (me being an American Studies major and all) so let me offer you some of my thoughts on John Edwards' speech last night. I was up around 4 am to catch it, and I wasn't disappointed. Edwards is an electrifying speaker who makes all this tired old campaign rhetoric sound fresh and new again. While I have seen Edwards speak better on other occasion this definitely was a good, solid speech.

Let's look at some specifics of the speech, shall we? The first thing that really grabbed me was the rejection of “the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past.”  A lot has been said about the appeal of an optimistic election campaign that Kerry and Edwards represent, as opposed to the negativism of Bush and Cheney. Edwards went out of this way to make that very explicit in his speech. Kerry and Edwards represent, “the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible because this is America, where everything is possible”. Edwards defines one of the interpretations of the American Dream here. The American Dream is all about possibilities, but the difference with the Republican intepretation is that the Democrats want the government to step in and actively create an environment of equal opportunities.

Of course, no Republican is against equal opportunity but they don't see as much as a role for the government to provide such an environment. Rather, they point to the self-responsibilty and self-reliance of the American people. However, the Republicans are wrong. Enter one of the crucial passages of Edwards' speech:

“John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck. You don't need me to explain this to you do you?
You know exactly what I'm talking about. Can't save any money, can you? Takes every dime you make just to pay your bills. And you know what happens if something goes wrong, if you have a child that gets sick, a financial problem, a layoff in the family -- you go right off the cliff. And when that happens, what's the first thing that goes? Your dreams. It doesn't have to be that way.”


Kerry and Edwards have been accused of being 'liberals', but I'd like to think that their liberal face is what will win them the elections (or so I hope). There'a lot of poverty in the US and minimum wages are atrociously low for a civilized country. You'd think that passages like the above would appeal to loads of people trying to make ends meet. Unfortunateley, 'liberal' is a scary word in the US and just a step away from socialism.

I'm not going to quote Edwards entire plan of action here, but I appreciated many of his point about health care, raising the minimum wage,  discouraging outsourcing of jobs, and making education equally available to all Americans.

A final passage I'd like to point out is the one dealing with the race issue, something that I found to be very tangible and disconcerting when I was in the US:

“I've heard some discussions and debates around America about where and in front of what audiences we ought to talk about race and equality and civil rights. I have an answer to that questions: Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. This is not an African-American issue. This is not a Latino issue. This is not an Asian-American issue. This is an American issue. It is about who we are, what our values are and what kind of country we live in. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”
 
What becomes apparent in this passage is that Edwards is deliberately targeting minorities and swing voters, but he does so by speaking about it to a broad audience. In doing so he makes it an American problem, and I think it succeeds in being appealling to minorities without coming across as patronizing.

All in all a pretty impressive speech, looking forward to the Kerry speech tonight. (PS: Check the full transcript of the speech)

Flickr

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

No George Lucas ! No!

Ok, some disturbing Star Wars Dvd news on Dvdfile.com (scroll all the way down). Apparently Lucas is making some pretty extensive changes to the Original Trilogy for the Dvd release. The article claims that changes include everything from:

“sound effects to the color of a lightsaber - to more substantive additions, including Ian McDiarmid (the evil Emperor) replacing Clive Revill in The Empire Strikes Back, to Anakin Hayden Christensen's face (badly) added to the body of Sebastian Shaw at the end of Return of the Jedi, or a chorus of cheering Gungians (or whatever those Jar Jar things are called) also tacked on to the finale of Jedi”

Why do you hate us George Lucas, why can't we just have a faithful and authenthic release of the OT?

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Monday, July 26, 2004

Just installed Firefox 0.9

I got so sick of Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time that I finally installed Firefox. So far, I like it. It has a clean interface, built in Google Search functionality, and it hasn't crashed (yet..). What's really useful about it is that you can opt to add tabs to your current browser, rather than adding new windows all the time. This avoids cluttering the taskbar, and makes keeping tabs (pun intended) on the websites you're watching lots easier. Also it's still version 0.9, so it isn't even the final version.

The only problem problem so far is that the custom themes don't seem to work as they should, but that probably has to do something with the desktop theme manager I'm running. *update: Themes work now it was Iconpackager software that caused the problem* I'm not a big Micro$oft hater, but it's good to know there are (viable) options other than Internet Explorer available. So if you're tired of IE as well, why not give Firefox a try?

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Currently listening to: Sarah Bettens - Go


This is the first solo effort of K's Choice singer Sarah Bettens. It's an EP consisting of 5 tracks, 3 up-tempo songs and 2 slower balllads. While the songs may not be as strong as those of written for K's Choice, there's some good stuff here. The songs aren't very original, but they are performed convincingly and just sound good. Standout tracks are the up-tempo title track 'Go' and the wondeful ballad 'Grey'.  A full solo album should be coming late this year and if this EP is an indication it'll be worth picking up.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

The New iPod, better and cheaper ?

Apple has made a new version of its popular digigital music player. The new iPod features longer battery life (12 hours!) and the Apple Click Wheel that we saw on the iPod mini. Better still, the price has gone down; it's $299 for a 20 gb iPod now. Once I save up some money I am so getting this one. However, I do wish that those funky colors for the mini were available for the regular pod as well.

Monday, July 19, 2004

Spider-Man 2

So Spider-Man 2 was released in The Netherlands last week, and I saw it on Saturday. I liked it a great deal and it is a better film than part 1, butI do have some issues with it. Most importantly I thought the pacing was off a bit. Director Sam Raimi takes a lot off to show us a clumbsy Peter Parker and the problems he's having to deal with. Of course, this is for a large part what the Spider-Man franchise is about, but Raimi takes so much time doing this that by the time the intermission came along not much had happened really. Yes we had been introduced by the villian, but he wasn't really used as a constant threath. By that time in the film it could have used a little urgency. That said, the second part of the film was pretty spectacular. Of course the "With great power comes great responsibility"-mantra was re-iterated, in a rather clumsy dream sequence with uncle Ben, but that was to be expected. However, Aunt May's speech was just a bit too much. Minor quibbles aside though it was a ver good an entertaining film. Doc Ock was a great villain, the cast pulled off some good performances, and combined with the spectacular the action sequences this really put this film a notch above the first film.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Portrait Illustration Maker...Nifty!!

Found a link to this Portrait Illustration Maker on Biz Stone's Blog. I got some pretty good results with it, and is ideally suited for creating avatars. It's a bit of work, but it's worth the effort.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Random Picture #3


Taken at last years' Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. It has kermit so it's cool.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

A Great Quiz Portal

Since I'm on the topic of quizzing, I might as well point out the wonderful Quizzing.co.uk website. It is the website of the largest quizzing organisation in the UK and it features full quizzes, loads of free questions, and advice on setting up your own quiz night/league. Definitely one for the bookmarks!

Victory!

So we (The Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies All-Stars) competed in a special pub quiz in Arnhem last Sunday, and we actually won! Yay! For more info regarding The Shiny Yellow Rubber Duckies, check our blog.

Sunday, July 04, 2004

The Job Predictor

Fill in your name and find your ideal job! Apparently my ideal job is being a Hypnotist...