JarJar Nixon's Blues Kitchen

Maureen Dowd's essay in yesterday's NYT is worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/opinion/30DOWD.html

My only criticism of tonight's well-planned, well-executed Memorial Day concert on the west lawn of the Capitol tonight is that most of the music and entertainment was clearly aimed at people my age (Allison Krause, Tom Hanks) rather than the World War 2 generation they were attempting to honor (with the exceptions of Charles Durning and Ossie Davis). As my mom said before leaving the living room to go look for some stuff in the garage, 'Where's the march music? Where're the World War 2 songs?' The programmers could have made a bold decision to capture more clearly the music of the 1940s and, in turn, inspire new generations to understand their parents and grandparents through their own music and popular culture.

Went with my mom and Callie to the new Air and Space Museum out at Dulles Airport. We saw the huge collection of airplanes and, more important, a large screen simulcast of the World War II Memorial inauguration down on the Mall between the Washington monument and the US Capitol building. The hangar-sized museum holds everything from the Crosley Flea to the space shuttle. We also saw Gemini 7, the Enola Gay and the Concorde.

Then in the evening we drove down to the Mall and, amazingly, found a parking space at 17th and D Streets, just two blocks from the Memorial itself. There were still thousands of people wandering in awe among the 50 columns of the memorial. In front of many of the columns--one for each state--visitors had placed red, white and blue ribbons as well as photos of deceased veterans. One veteran from Maine played a wartime tune on his trumpet. A family from New York carefully added a black and white photo of perhaps a grandfather or great-uncle to the side of a column.

Driving into and out of DC we listened to WAMU-FM, a big public radio station in DC, play music from the War era, including a recruiting song for the WAC (Womens Army Corps), in which my mom enlisted in '44.

Visited today the elegeant Asian Reading Room in the Library of Congress. It was all wood and leather-bound volumes and the few researchers poring over documents were wrapped in monastic quiet and sobriety. It felt like I was an extra in a scene from "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." While waiting to meet the specialist in Vietnamese reference works I opened a copy of John King Fairbank's last book, a wide-ranging book on China published the year of his death in 1990. Skimming the first chapter brought me back 22 years to my first semester at George Washington University's grad school, when I read Fairbanks' classic work on modern China's response to the West. I still have etched in the grad school compartment of my brain the sudden shock of having to read thousands of pages a week in Professor Bill Johnson's Chinese History seminar and in being urged to think criticially about the works I supposedly had mastered. I would try to memorize all the historic details, and then Prof. Johnson would open the seminar with a question such as, "That book was written about the 19th century, but what was he really saying about our times?" and everything I had prepared to say would just melt away into incoherence. I probably learned more about big picture thinking and practiced skepticism than in any other class I have ever had; if i had to point to one essential course that I could not remove from my my feeble mental toolkit, that would be it. I am sure that the Asian Reading Room of the LoC has taken many other visitors away to a similar portal in their minds.

Calista went for 'happy time' at the dentist today (probably the same eumphemizer who came up with 'sleep management' to describe Iraqi prisoner treatment), and she only seems to have one cavity. Callie went berserk before we got to the dentist (barf lunchtime-pizza-on-Grandma's-carpet berserk) but she was docile and all smiley to the dentist and Flossy the parrot.

For her reward (yes, I had to bribe her to get here there) she netted a Sleeping Beauty costume and red plastic shoes. She insisted on wearing it to dinner tonight at the Press Club; on the way in a Mediterranean Ted Turner look-alike knelt down and gave her a high five and insisted she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. At the dinner table Callie leaned over and whispered to me, "I have a new boyfriend."

Just this morning she told me she dreamed she was kissing a boy--so yes, I am already getting Anxious Dad Syndrome.

Went with Grandma and Calista to Wolf Trap Farm Park in Virginia tonight to hear the US Marine Band perform marching band favorites and selections from "South Pacific" and other tunes. This is the same band that plays for President Bush--the conductor of the band is the Musical Director for the White House. More than 60 musicians play in the band, and they are all full Marines as well as grads from some of the nation's best music schools. The whole program was dedicated to World War II veterans, so when the director asked any veterans in the audience to stand my mom stood. She was in the US Army in the States during the War and then worked as a civillian in Guam and Korea immediately after the War. After the concert we walked to the meadow nearby and saw a loud, bright, intense fireworks display. Some of the background songs included "Coming to America" and a fine WIllie Nelson version of "What a Wonderful World." Best of all, the whole evening required no tickets or admission fee.

Went with Calista to the giant dog fair at the National Geogrpahic Building, then to some of the Smithsonian museums. Callie got a kick out of the Jack Russells drag race down M Street and the multi-screen, mammoth-size video of a reclining elephant at the Hirshhorn. Plus we saw oracle bones in the very bottom subterranean floor of the Smithsonian and scary masks from Mali in the Museum of African Art.

We metro'd there and back amidst crazed noontime-drunk white kids going to the WHFSestival (mostly fake alt-bands playing too loud) and Saturday-happy black kids rapping out fightin' words to each other. I felt safer among the Af-Am kids, because at least they were sober.

Went to graduation at Hopkins last night. I forgot how long it takes to get up to the Homewood campus, which is almost on the other side of Baltimore. I was so late I ended up in the wrong group (in with the Masters of Finance people--people who have an actual facility with numbers) and had to GO BACK DOWN off the stage and queue at the end of their group. But then I was at the front of the MBA group and the academic dean called me up to the stage as the first MBA'er. Not bad for a mediocre student who rarely had time for things like homework and perfectly formatted assignments. I met a rare student from Vietnam (most Vietnamese you see on campuses are American, not VN citizens) studying finance as well as my old class buddy Ron Ticker from NASA. My poor mom and Callie put up with the three-hour ceremony. Callie danced around a lot in the handicapped area next to the grads' seats on the field, and my mom enjoyed Mark Steiner's commencement address (he is the creator of WYPR-FM--Baltimore finally has decent public radio). His words of admonishment at the end of his brief remarks were apt for us graduates from the education, business, public safety, IT and finance programs: be patient, be skeptical, be hopeful and labor hard. At the reception Callie danced more, this time to the Peabody Ragtime Ensemble. The clouds were dark and ready to open, but the rain stayed away and we made it home about a half past midnight.

From the May 19 Wall Street Journal:

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WSJ: Most ad folks think the 30-second commercial is the optimal format. Your "Webisode" lasts for several minutes. Do consumers have that long an attention span?

Mr. [Jerry] Seinfeld: There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.
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Think how this applies as well to education, business and even public diplomacy. The goal may not be entertainment, but Jerry's message is essentially the same: deliver high quality content focused on the customers' interests&needs, and you will earn their attention. Fail to have a decent product for their minds, or ignore where their hearts are, and you have lost them.

Excerpts from an AP-based story by James Taranto in the May 17 WSJ www.OpinionJournal.com:


Iraq Insurgents Hit the Gas

....And our counsel of patience in the search for weapons has been vindicated, as the Associated Press reports today:

A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.

"A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said.

Sarin, developed by the Nazis in the 1930s (though apparently never used by them), is the same gas that the Aum Shinrikyo cult used in a 1995 attack on a Tokyo subway that killed 12. Fox News adds that "mustard gas was also recently discovered" in Iraq.

It shouldn't surprise us that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are beginning to turn up only now. After all, Baathist remnants in Fallujah were fairly quiet until last month, a year after Iraq's liberation. This isn't good news: If the enemy in Iraq is escalating its tactics to include chemical weapons, our soldiers are in even more peril, and there's a possibility terrorists have exported such weapons too....

Ok, made it back to DC. Slept about 5 hours between Sunday and Tuesday mornings, but my 4-year old--who had the potential to be a berserker based on her 10-hour howling spree from LA to Tokyo a couple of years ago--was gentle, helpful and alert most of the time. Watching over a kid for an extended period of time is far harder than any kind of work I have ever done, and is perhaps the best test of strength, patience and endurance anyone has ever created. This time I think I got a bye bceause she was well-rested and ANA makes a mean onigri and personal-size pizza.

I just read the new Seymour Hersh article:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

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I have been checking this site daily ever since Tommy Vallely told me about it a couple of months ago: www.RealClearPolitics.com

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Now that Cal has worked through the entire Dune series, prequels and sequels and everything in-between, he is tackling the collected works of B.B. Warfield. His mind is like unto the maw of Shai-haluud devouring any incendiary knowledge in its path.

I am flying back to the States tonight for a few weeks vacation and my only questions are:

--Where are the Colonel and Project Tor when we need them?

--Will Kevin Haney ever come out of his sweat hut?

--Has Matt Bortniker finished his novel?

--Steve Pepper is desperately needed at the CPA's broadcast operations--can someone contact him via Radio America?