Man. I was so careful. I bought my Panther upgrade last month but decided to wait until the term was over before I installed it. My plan was to upgrade my 4-year-old iMac from OS 9 to Panther, then upgrade the PB, and finally have the Fabulous True Home Network I always wanted.
The good news: I backed up all the data on the iMac before I started.
The bad news: The iMac took the first Panther disk and said the machine would require a firmware update before it could proceed. I hit “eject” and the machine hung. I hit restart and the screen went black. I got the disk out but the screen remains black. My theory is it’s stuck in a twilight zone between two the OSs, and doesn’t know what its display is. John’s is, the monitor perhaps picked a really coincidental moment to curl up and die.
In the meantime, I have my laptop. And my frustration.
Any thoughts? Send them.
In the meantime, two things: Catching up on the news these last few days, I’m not surprised Kathleen “Glamour Shot” Parker came to dear ol’ Strom’s defense (sort of) on the nation’s op-ed pages, but I’ve been too busy doing laundry and Christmas shopping to do what Greg Beato did, i.e., see if her thoughts about Jesse Jackson’s out-of-wedlock fatherhood were any different.
Amazingly — I mean, who’da thunk? — they were. Beato’s got links.
Second, I don’t know who it was that thought the first “Angels in America” was disappointing — oh yeah, it was James, in the comments — but I just saw part II last night and it was breathtaking. Breath. Taking. Huge themes, deftly woven, passionately stated. No wonder right-wing critics can’t stand it; it’s too good.
Make the time to see it on one of its frequent replays. More tomorrow.
Maureen McDaid said on December 22, 2003 at 1:29 pm
You liked it??!!
I am an ideological outsider, having never voted for a winning candidate until I started voting based upon support for the medical research that will help my son’s disease.
So I can’t be classified as some type of right wing nutcase. But Angeles in America was very mediocre. I almost never watch TV, but on Sunday nights at 9:00 p.m., I make a margarita, dim the lights and fire up HBO. I usually am rivited, due to both the tequila and the programming.
But during AIA, my mind kept wandering, bored. I even started surfing the channels. I stuck it out, but it became more than a totally cliched, dogmatic screed.
And I don’t get your last comment – Why would a right wing critic not like it because it is too good? That is absurd on its face. They may dislike it because of the obnoxious villain-zation of the right, but not because it is too good. Asethetics are not ideology.
Please don’t get sloppy.
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anne said on December 22, 2003 at 11:39 pm
I vote get a new iMac (or whatever you want). Our vintage iMac (1999) died this fall. The resident mad computer scientist wanted to fix it. The teenager who shared it with him, backed up by mom (me), said “get a new one”. (My life was affected only in that I had to share my powerbook with them for the duration but that was enough!) Computer Medic said $400. A quote for 1999 iMac’s on eBay was $100.
We “couldn’t afford it” but we did buy a new iMac. We’re all happy. The mad computer scientist promptly loaded all of his music into iTunes. The teenager was ecstatic that she could download something like 67 songs (legally, she tells me) in 5 minutes. I don’t have to share any more.
We may still decide to fix the old one. I’m not sure why. We’ll probably use it about as much as we use the old PowerMac/PC in the basement or the Apple II+ that still works.
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ashley said on December 23, 2003 at 2:46 am
Since we all want to respect the RIAA, and only download songs legally, then we would never, ever want to use a tool like Poisoned.
Poisoned is a multiple-network downloading tool that allows you to easily and quickly find files anywhere on several networks and share them. It runs on OS X.
So we would never, ever want to use Poisoned. Ever.
Actually, I’ll usually look in the iTMS first, but when they don’t even have Tennessee Ernie Ford, come on…
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Nance said on December 23, 2003 at 9:19 am
Maureen,
Yeah, I did like it. If one of the purposes of art is to make us look at familiar things around us in a new way, then yes, “Angels in America” fills the bill. But what I really responded to is the life in it, and that’s why I get very frustrated with right-wing critics who dismiss it as a piece of left-wing political agitprop. An angry gay man seeking to explain, to himself and to the rest of the world, what AIDS did to his community at a specific time in history, might have turned out a pissed-off, angry lecture, and “Angels” is anything but. It’s pissed-off, but it’s also funny, searching, incisive, intelligent and — dare I speak the cliche? — life-affirming.
So it’s pretty annoying to hear conservative nit-pickers say, “There’s no evidence Roy Cohn used his Washington connections to score a personal supply of the best pharmaceutical hope for a treatment and hoarde it in a locked refrigerator in his hospital room!” No, but the play’s subtitle is “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and Cohn was, demonstrably enough, an awful human being capable of just that. If there were a conservative Hollywood, I shudder to think of what the movies and plays about Bill Clinton will try in search of a larger truth.
Anyway, complaining about politics in art is silly, whether it’s Angels or Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie. I’m just amused by conservative whining about lefty playwrights, directors, actors and other artistic types. Do I walk into my bank and bitch there are no liberal bankers? Send your kids to NYU film school and then complain.
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