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From the front lines of the losing battle against sports metaphors I get the papers more than I read them (a full recycling bin's worth every week). But if something's really good I can still depend on my friends to point it out. Such is the case this morning. Craig Burton just emailed a pointer to this morning's Doonesbury, which is about a subject dear to what's left of my brain: metaphor (including the gratuitous use of sports analogies). Sports borrows much its dramatic vocabulary from war, of course. Sometimes we confuse the two, as Microsoft apparently did by unsuccessfullly trying to convince the ref (Judge Jackson) that the market really is a battlefield. Interesting last night to hear Al Gore refer in his concession speech to "the victor and the vanquished," and then give his own sorry self a kick in the ass with the line "it's time for me to go." (Also to sound a bit like Ol' Dubya by retitling America the Beautiful as "America, America." But then, maybe he was just reading the longhand on some Web page.) I've been amazed to hear how many people were somehow moved by what both candidates had to say. I missed the Bush speech, but I caught Gore's on the radio. True to form, he was stiff and artless right up to the end. NPR's commentary was down-the-line Liberal, even more than usual (commentary by E.J. Dionne and somebody else). Normally it doesn't bother me because NPR is simply the best news organization left on radio (or maybe the only one). But jeeez. Can't somebody say that this election was Gore's to lose and he threw it away? I'm not talking about the post-election legal wrangling in which everybody looked bad, but the campaign that preceded it. He did everything to distance himself from the generally positive regard in which the public holds his own administration, and everything to camouflage his own positions in verbal noise that was hardly any different from Bush's. I read that Dubya's cousin said that Al could have won the debates just by saying, "What is it about eight years of prosperity that you don't understand?" From beginning to end Gore lost the game by playing not to lose. Yeah, he lost on a technicality, but if the election were two weeks later he would have lost outright. In a game that came down to personalities, the party boy won. As if you need another reason to hate commercial radio For years I kept a car radio button set on KKSF/103.7, San Francisco's "smooth jazz" station. KKSF was a truly great station, a labor of love by some unsually bright programmers, air talent, engineers and the family that owned the thing. They were the first to publich CD samplers of music for AIDS relief, and were constantly involved in their communities. They were also among the first stations to use the Net as something more than a place to put up billboards and spam the audience with unwanted advertising. Though none of them knew me personally, I had enjoyable email conversations with Tim Pozar (engineering), Blake Lawrence and Roger Coryell (air talents). They're all gone from the station now (far as I know). Anyway, KKSF went through the death morph that's the oldest story in radio, and what now radiates at 103.7 is a body snatcher format, promoted by monstrous graphix-packed emails that won't stop coming. I've been sending UNSUBSCRIBE replies to the station since 1998. Nothing has happened. Nor have any human beings responded to emails sent directly. So I just thought I'd publish a quick little kvetch about it. There are responses to this message:
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