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I don't blog too much about my family, but this weekend marked my twin sons' fifth birthday, and some milestones -- we're still standing! -- simply must be commemorated. We partied at Tilden Park. The theme, as often for these October boys, was Halloween. There were sack races. (That's Matthew on the left and Jack on the right.)
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Remember how hard President Bush tried to beat Kerry for failing to mention our brave Polish allies? Remember that Kerry tried to point out that Bush's not-so-grand alliance is shrinking, not growing?
This, from a Q&A in the Sunday New York Times Magazine with Polish foreign minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, pretty much speaks for itself:
| | Q: Poland's defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, just announced plans to withdraw all 2,500 of your troops from Iraq next year.
A: It is not true. Our minister of defense mentioned that we would like to end our mission at the end of 2005, but that is not the official position of the government. |
And then this correction:
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An interview with the foreign minister of Poland, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, on Page 23 of The Times Magazine today includes an outdated reference to his country's commitment to keeping its troops in Iraq. On Friday, after the magazine had gone to press, Prime Minister Marek Belka announced that Poland would begin to withdraw troops at the beginning of 2005. |
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So I needed to log into my cellphone account with Verizon to look something up. I don't do this very often, so I don't have the username/password combo at my fingertips. I have a set of passwords that I generally use, so I tried each of them, but Verizon's unbearably slow Web site decided that my traditional username wasn't the right one. Then I remembered vaguely that the site had some sort of rule that it had to have more characters than my standard login. I gave Verizon my Social Security number, my cell number and my zip code, and they told me what my username was. I tried my several passwords again. At last, I found the right one! Only now Verizon wouldn't let me into my account; instead I received the following message:
"After several failed attempts to login to your account, your account has been locked. For security reasons, to unlock your account, please use the Forgot My Login Information link, validate your account information and reset your PIN."
So in other words, first Verizon made the system difficult for me to log into -- then they used the fact that I had to try several times to log in to lock me out. Now I'm stuck with a password that is not one of the ones I generally use and remember. Guys, it's just a stupid cellphone account! It's not my life's savings.
To add further insult to the proceedings, the password-reset email Verizon sent was heavily formatted HTML, so it got flagged as spam...
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Britt Blaser's piece on the Kerry biopic "Going Upriver" is an eloquent observation on wartime experience rooted in the writer's own service in Vietnam. I'm not going to excerpt it here; you should really read the whole thing.
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Dave Winer and I were talking about journalism, politics and the upcoming Bloggercon session I'll be leading, and I mentioned to him that I have not regularly watched television news in 20 years. He seemed more than a little shocked by that statement and suggested it required disclosure, so here it is: It's true, I don't watch TV news on any regular basis, never have. From my teens on I got my news from newspapers and magazines; once the Web came along that became another center for my personal information flow. Our house has only one TV and we don't even get cable.
Of course I turn the TV on for earthquakes and terrorist attacks; of course I watch the presidential debates, and the TV is on for election night. When I'm traveling I'll sometimes turn on the hotel TV for a taste of the cable news networks and the local broadcasts. That's about it. For me, TV simply feels like an inefficient way to learn what's happening in the world; it takes too much time to tell you too little, and it's pretty much hopeless when it comes to any subject of any abstraction or complexity, particularly economics.
So there it is. I completely understand that this information diet seems alien to most people and marks me as peculiar and even un-American. Oh well. And I know that by not watching much TV I'm disconnected from the central arena in which our politics are (temporarily, I believe) forged. But I will not hand over the hours of my life to a medium I neither trust nor enjoy.
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