Northbound

I was pleased to read the WP article reporting that Boris Yeltsin wasn’t buried in the Kremlin Wall or anywhere near Lenin’s Tomb — that he was buried in the prestigous Novodevichy Cemetery.  Yeltsin belongs in the same ground as Mikhail Bulgakov, not the austere crypts of Soviet appartichks.

I’m not a Yeltsin expert, but I did meet him, when I was in college.  He came to Dallas to speak at the local council for world affairs.  This would have been the first part of 1989, I think, before the Wall came down, when he was on the outs — before he was President, anyway.  He looked like a tough guy, a Russian Robert Mitchum, but thicker, more able to handle abuse and threats.  I just shook his hand, long enough to say hello in my lousy Russian.  He didn’t look at me, just sort of kept moving down the reception line.  RIP.

I don’t really believe in criticizing the work of other reviewers, but all I can tell you is that if I were going to write a review of a Donny Osmond concert for The New York Times, that I would start with talking about Donny Osmond, and not, you know, casually throw in references to Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman and Earth Shoes and Charles Ives and Cousin Brucie in the first four paragraphs before, finally, condescendingly, mention the Osmond Brothers at the tail end of the fifth paragraph.

Oh, I know why the author did it — you simply can’t have New York hipster credentials and review a Donny Osmond concert all in the same breath.  There has to be a degree of separation.  But you don’t have to make it quite that dramatic, or at least I wouldn’t think so.

Look, you’re either ashamed of Seventies pop culture or you’re not.  I remember being deeply ashamed of it at the time — deeply aware of the complete uncoolness of disco and my dad’s maroon leisure suit and K.C. and the Sunshine Band.  But if you’re not ashamed of it — and I don’t think you can be that ashamed of it if you’re going to a Donny Osmond concert in 2007 — then don’t be ashamed.  Confess your love.

You know, if the Rangers are really that worried about the proposed new minor-league stadium in Grand Prairie, maybe they should do something about it.  You know, like stop sucking quite so much.  And winning more than one playoff game every thirty years.  Stuff like that.

Where?  Specifically, to Gliese 581.  It’s not that far, really, only twenty light years — a doddle, really, in celestial terms.  It’s a big planet, rocky, temperate, and scientists say it may be the best shot for an Earthlike planet in our solar system.

So let’s go there.  Now.  Why wait?  Danger?  We laugh at danger.  I am laughing at danger right now.  Ha.  Ha.  Take that, danger.  Take that.

You want to send a probe first?  Fine.  Let’s do that.  Let’s send a probe.  Let’s start construction today.  Now.  Why wait?  What could we ever gain by waiting?  Let’s just go already.  By the time the probe gets there and transmits data, we can have the first spaceship ready to go.

To coin a phrase, faster, please.

My trusty ’97 Ford Taurus failed auto emission inspection in New Jersey last week, and that was all she wrote.  The car was ten years old, over 125k miles, and it needed transmission and emissions repairs that would have cost a good sight more than what the car was worth.  And it had a scraped-up front end, thanks to a local dealer whose idiot service department tried to drive it onto the grease rack when the grease rack wasn’t all the way down. 

So we did our research, found a car we liked, test-drove it, and settled on that car as the one we both wanted.  (I won’t tell the make or model here, and I definitely won’t give away the name of the dealership for reasons that will be clear as we go along.)

There was the haggling, which I won’t go into in detail, but we were offered a price that was about a thousand dollars over what we had been quoted just two days before, and two thousand dollars over the price that the dealership had on its website.  We whipped out the printout showing the lower price, which had just an incredible effect on the poor sales guy.  We ended up talking him down to just $500 over our counter-offer — say three thousand less than what he had originally offered as his rock-bottom price.

Okay, we got a good deal, that’s something to feel good about.  But then it started — the real business of the used car game.  We didn’t get the car right away — we were told that someone was “detailing” it, and who knows if that’s so or not.  We got led into a back area where some guy in the service department tried to sell us a new alarm — for a car that already had a perfectly good alarm in it already, thank you very much.  We idled for what seemed like hours as our sales guy brought us wave on wave of new paperwork, including something for overpriced theft insurance that we didn’t sign off on.

Then we had a final guy come over — looked kind of like Jerry Lundegaard, the guy William H. Macy played in Fargo, come to think of it.  He asked us about financing.  This, mind you, is after we had already written a check for the car.  We explained to him we didn’t need financing.  Then he started out on a spiel about the extended warranties.  I interrupted him and told him we weren’t buying an extended warranty, and then he got all hurt-looking and insisted that I let him continue.  I let him go on, not paying him any attention, and then told him again that we weren’t interested.   Then, he had me sign some sort of form that said that he had tried to sell me the extended warranty but that I didn’t want it.

I was ticked off by now, and didn’t mind letting him know.  “So is this it,” I asked, “or is someone going to come by to try to sell us the undercoating?”

He got all hurt-looking again.  “Oh, no,” he explained.  “We stopped doing that a long time ago.”

That’s just the way it is, Bruce Hornsby said.  Some things will never change.

But we got a great deal on the car, and it’s just gorgeous, and these things are worth putting up with the typical shenanigans at used car lots.

One and a half cheers for Dallas mayor Laura Miller for finally waking up and smelling the Cotton.  UT and OU will play the Red River Classic in the Cotton Bowl through 2015, and you can bank on it.  Sa-lute.  Now, if Dallas can get its act together long enough to, you know, actually renovate the durn thing, then we’ll see what’s what.

Now, if we can actually get a really good Baylor game to complement UT-OU — say an annual Catholic-Baptist Holy War against the Golden Dome of Notre Dame, well, then you’d have something.

Whatever your stand on the Supreme Court’s decision on partial-birth abortion, I think we can all agree that the Wall Street Journal could have found a better subheading for their op-ed (emphasis added):

Partial Reversal
Yesterday’s abortion ruling was only a baby step.

Yeah, I gotta think there could have been a better way to say that.

No, I am not upset by this story:

By 1997, [Albert Lord] had taken control of the company through successful proxy fights and was restructuring its operations. The result has a boon for shareholders and gigantic wealth for Sallie Mae executives, including Lord.

How much wealth? Lord, 61, has been building his own private 18-hole golf course on 244 acres in Anne Arundel County, an hour’s drive from downtown Washington.

Nope.  I am not upset by this.  I am not upset that Sallie Mae has been charging me interest well over prime all these years.  I am not upset that they haven’t let me renegotiate a lower rate all this time after I consolidated my loans in 1994.  I am not upset that the money is being funneled into the pockets of rich executives.  I am not upset that Mr. Lord will get to spend his cushy and plush retirement playing golf on his own private golf course, which will be used to schmooze politicians and the like into giving Sallie Mae even more perks and pelf.  I am not upset by any of this.

I am also not going to get too worked up if Mr. Lord gets conked on the head with a golf ball on the eighth green, mind you.

Who thought that this was a good idea?

Keith Olbermann will add a fifth voice to the studio on NBC’s Sunday-night football highlights show in the fall, the network said Monday.

Bob Costas anchors the show, with Cris Collingsworth and now Olbermann as co-hosts. With Jerome Bettis and Tiki Barber as analysts, the former NFL players will outnumber Costas and Olbermann by 3-to-2.

Olbermann, who first became known as a host on ESPN’s “Sportscenter,” has shuffled between news and sports during his career. His “Countdown” show on MSNBC has been hot lately, with Olbermann drawing attention for commentaries taking on the Bush administration.

Let’s think for a minute.  ESPN did the best NFL highlights show there ever was, NFL Primetime, with two people.  Two.  That was it.  And NBC is doing the same show with five — six if you count Peter King.  And one of them is going to be saying idiot things like “Tom Coughlin has a weaker grip on his job than Al Gonzales,” and “LaDanian Tomlinson’s three fumbles was the worst decision-making since Don Rumsfeld was fired.”  And Olbermann’s going to get hives every time Reggie Bush touches the ball.  You watch.

Memo to NBC:  Take whoever is producing this show, give me their job.  I’ll take it at half the salary, and put Costas and Collinsworth on a cheap set and let them do the show, and burn the promo bit with Pink butchering that Joan Jett song, and ratings will go up twenty percent, and you’ll save money.  Deal or no deal, to coin a phrase.

So Google is not only buying DoubleClick (which is not just advertising, but collects tracking data as well), but they’ve just signed a new deal with Clear Channel to subcontract out some of their radio advertising sales.  Did I miss something, or is the whole Don’t Be Evil thing just gone by the wayside?  I mean, Google is working with Communist China, I know that, but all Communist China does is oppress its citizens and engage in dumping products on the American market and threaten us with nuclear missiles and vote against us in the Security Council and stuff like that.  I’m not saying that’s good or anything, but let’s keep our sense of proportion.

Clear Channel plays Rascal Flatts songs.  Lots of them.  And they won’t stop.  Ever.

I mean, doesn’t anybody see what’s going on here?  It’s not enough that Clear Channel has munged up country music, but they’ve basically destroyed some of the better XM channels with their filthy ads on top of that.  And Google is partnering with them?  You have got to be kidding.

Now, it’s a free country, and Google can do whatever it wants, but don’t sit there in Mountain View and tell me that you’re not being evil when you’re tracking ad cookies on my computer and selling ads on my satellite radio.  Because that’s not just evil, that’s some advanced form of evil that you only get from beyond the Eight Dimension.  I just hope Buckaroo Banzai is on the case, because if Red Lectroids have taken over Google, well, I don’t have to tell you what the consequences could be.