The voice of Beijing’s ‘Smiling Angel’

When Lin Miaoke, 9, belted out “I Sing for My Country” as the Chinese flag entered the national stadium, she became an instant celebrity and was quickly dubbed a “smiling angel.” The image of her dressed in a pretty red dress appeared around the world.

But she apparently wasn’t the one singing. Chen Qigang, the ceremony’s music director, told state broadcaster CCTV that the voice hundreds of millions of people heard was that of 7-year-old Yang Peiyi. Yang had the voice and was supposed to perform but was yanked at the last minute because she had crooked teeth.

Los Angeles Times

Here’s the video of the song.

Dangerous and Unstable

It’s sort of funny when he’s just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we’d be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they’ve now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.

It’s beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.

This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he’s giving us of a McCain presidency.

Joshua Marshall

NewMexiKen agrees with Marshall. Keep your eye on the ball people. War, and war especially with a powerful foe, trumps all other issues — except, of course, who’s wearing a flag lapel pin.

To send or not to send, that is the question

James Fallows fears email.

I make my living writing things down, but even I have reached the point where I am not willing to put any sentiment whatsoever into reproducible form — in an email that could be forwarded, in a document that could be cut-and-pasted — without thinking about how it would look if it got into unintended hands.

Brad DeLong does not.

Second, for most of us the big problem has never been that people will repeat what we say, but rather that they will repeat what we did not say–or take what we say out of context.
. . .

In such a world as this one in which we live in, email and other means of communication that automatically create a record that can be used to push back against distortions is a blessing.

NewMexiKen has had to testify in federal court about what I meant in emails I had written, so I know what can happen. The written word is very powerful. It demands thoughtfulness, which is sadly lacking in so many email messages. (And, indeed, some of the informality of email has bled over into more formal documents too.)

Say what you mean, be polite, and don’t write what you don’t want repeated. Read, revise and proofread.

That said, I go along with DeLong.

And you?

Spying on other people’s computer

An interesting article at Slate about Spying on other people’s computers. I was amused by this guy’s solution to inappropriate use of the internets at work:

I stopped “special” surfing at the office when I put a linux box on a hub between the network internet router and the switches. I simply sniffed all traffic for image files and displayed it on a 42″ LCD out in the sales area. Images were displayed of what people were surfing. I also attached the ip address of the user to the image. It stopped inappropriate internet surfing in that office in 3 days. When everyone can see what you are doing, you get back to real work.

Frankly inappropriate internet usage at work is a problem unrelated to the internet. It’s a sign of an office of people without enough to do, or — more likely — without enough of the right things to do.

And, that is an age old problem.

The Olympics Sap-o-Meter hits a record high

Undaunted, the Sap-o-Meter stayed up late churning the treacle, and it’s got a new record to show for it: an inspirational 38 Sap Points.

If you watch enough NBC, you know that there’s a flag-waving mom behind every extraordinary achievement. Well, supporting last night’s record-breaking performance were a remarkable 13 mothers—that is, 13 mentions of the words mom or mother. NBC also continued to dream big, with a robust six mentions for the second consecutive night.

Slate Magazine

Mercy!

“Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) — Almost one-third of U.S. homeowners who bought in the last five years now owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, according to Zillow.com, an Internet provider of home valuations.”

Via Atrios.

The Twelfth of August

If you know anything about mythology you probably learned about it first from Edith Hamilton, born on this date in 1867. Hamilton’s book Mythology, written after she had retired as a school head mistress, was published in 1942.

George Hamilton is 69 today.

Mark Knopfler is 59. Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.

Pete Sampras is 37.

Cantinflas, the great Mexican comedian, acrobat and musician — and bullfighter — was born on this date in 1911. His actual name was Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes. Cantinflas was Passepartout in Michael Todd’s 1956 Around the World in Eighty Days. In English-speaking countries, David Niven was billed as the star. Elsewhere Cantinflas took top billing — he was the highest paid actor in the world at the time. He saved the movie from the stiff Niven if you ask me.

The movie producer Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12th in 1881. Known for his extravaganzas (e.g., The Ten Commandments), DeMille won his only Oscar for The Greatest Show on Earth.

And it’s the birthday of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana, on this date in 1889. According to The Writer’s Almanac a few years back, Ms. Sharp is the woman who —

invented the characters Dick and Jane to help teach children how to read…Sharp’s idea was to use pictures and repetition to teach children new words. She took her idea to Dr. William S. Gray, who had been studying the way children learn to read, and he hired her to create a series of textbooks. She didn’t write the books, but she created the characters Dick, Jane, their sister Sally, their dog Spot, and their cat Puff. Each story introduced five new words, one on each page.

Life 101

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one.”

— Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose.

“The problem is it takes most of us most of our lives to understand what we should have known from the beginning.”

— Leon Uris in Trinity.

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”

— Richard Ford in Independence Day.

Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty): “Everybody’d be nice to you if they knew you were dying.”

Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro): “Everybody knows everybody is dying. That’s why people are as good as they are.”

— Bang the Drum Slowly

Let’s Compound the Blunder!

From an insightful piece about Georgia-Russia by Gregory Djerejian.

This is what our foreign policy mandarins masquerade about as they play policy-making, in their Washington work-stations. It’s, yes, worse than a crime, rather a sad, pitiable blunder.

And one McCain would have us compound, I stress, again! An honorable man who served his country well, it is clear his time has past and his grasp on the most basic foreign policy calls we’ll need to make in the coming years is very tentative indeed. He’ll be surrounded by second-tier ‘yes-man’ realists and residual neo-con swill, few with any ideas worth pursuing if we mean to take the national interest seriously with sobriety and freshness of perspective. So let us help him exit off-stage gracefully, as he served his country with dignity when called upon, but let us not sacrifice our children’s future to ignorants with deludely romantic notions of empire. Been there, done that.

10 Ice Age Giants

The Pleistocene Era began 1.8 million years ago and ended roughly 10,000 years ago. During that period were several Ice Ages. Many giant sized animals and birds that seem familiar to us (because they resemble modern animals) roamed the earth. They became extinct, possibly due to environmental conditions or disease, or possibly because they were hunted by humans.

mental_floss Blog tells about 10 Ice Age Giants.

Georgia and the Utter Fecklessness of Condi Rice

One would have thought that having an ace Kremlinologist on board as Secretary of State might have helped America defuse this Russo/Georgian powder keg.

But apparently this resurgence of Soviet style aggression (re-birth pangs, perhaps?) wasn’t enough to make Dr. Rice disrupt her vacation.

I do hope that this episode is the final nail in the coffin of the myth of Condi’s competence.

Tim Dickinson

Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia

Many factors are involved in the present conflict but the central one is straightforward: the majority of the Ossetes living south of the main Caucasus range in Georgia wish to unite with the Ossetes living to the north, in an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation; and the Georgians, regarding South Ossetia as both a legal and an historic part of their national territory, refuse to accept this.

Times Online

Update:

Here’s is the essence of what I posted earlier that Rob may be referencing in his commment. On reflection, I thought it was weak and took it out. Upon further reflection, possibly it is a decent illustration. In any case the analogy is not meant to imply right or wrong, simply that it’s not simple.

Let’s assume Texas broke away from the United States about 20 years ago. Let’s further assume that west Texans would rather be united with their compadres and kinfolk in New Mexico, which is still part of the U.S. (In this analogy the U.S. is Russia, Texas is Georgia, west Texas is the part of Georgia that wants to be separate from Georgia — namely South Ossetia, and New Mexico represents the Russian Republic of North Ossetia.)

Texas is refusing to let the west Texans reunite with the New Mexicans. The U.S. is supporting the west Texans and has invaded Texas.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who knows?

You’re In Danger

And John McCain would ramp up all the worst traits of the current administration. His instincts are always toward force and the people advising him come squarely from the Cheney wing of the current administration. In comparison to Bush he’s not just more of the same. There’s every reason to believe he’d be much worse.

The current situation in Georgia and his response should make clear to everyone how dangerous a president John McCain would be.

Josh Marshall

Whatever you think of Obama and the Democratic Party, John McCain would be an unmitigated disaster as President of the United States.

If you’re against Obama, at least demand the Republicans chose someone capable of handling the job. Haven’t we had enough incompetence and wrong-headedness?

This and that

School starts this week in Albuquerque — Wednesday is the first full day. NewMexiKen never started school before Labor Day and none of my kids did either. What’s with this August-to-May school year anyway?

I bought regular gasoline yesterday for $3.58 (I’m rounding off the tenth of a cent from now on). I was thinking I shouldn’t fill up (that is, I should buy short), because the price will continue to drop at least until election day.

What percentage of time during the Olympic coverage on NBC is actually spent watching athletes do athlete stuff? 10 percent? 15 percent?

There are rumors that McCain will pledge just one term to offset the age issue. I know an even better way — no terms. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch tells us Why McCain would be a mediocre president. “A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job. His resume is much thinner than most people think.” Amazingly, McCain is even more of a dilettante than W.

Remember my rant about Comcast and the comment from a representative of Comcast? Well, it seems the outreach is real:

From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck’s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.

“When you’re having a two-way conversation, you really get to clear the air,” Mr. Eliason said.

The New York Times has more — Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear.

The iPhone is great except for battery life, which is OK at best.