Your Wednesday Potpourri

Auditions!

If you are in Austin and I haven’t already invited you in some way, we (where we = Gobotrick Theatre Company) are holding auditions on Saturday for our November production of The Nina Variations by Stephen Dietz.

Drop me a comment for more info.

Google Chrome

There is no other tech news in this cycle. Google gots a browser. So you’re not a geek? You don’t try every app that comes down the tubes? Why is Chrome for you?

It probably isn’t.

Oh it’s faster than your browser. Mostly safer. Definitely simpler. But let’s face it… You don’t give up the SUV if you have the resources, no matter how ‘neat’ the Smart Car is. We like our cupholders and 12 speaker systems.

But you should download Chrome anyway.

But you just said… yeah yeah yeah. Chrome was built for one purpose. Applications.

There was was a small program called Bubbles that essentially ran browser windows for whatever you wanted that you could leave in your system tray as though the were running on your desktop. The problem of course was that is took a whole bunch of resources to leave it running.

Chrome has optimized the hell out of that process.

It’s not going to be you cruising browser. Not yet. but if you use Yahoo or Google calendars, Y!Mail or GMail, remember the Milk or another online task management system, Google notebook, or any of the online Office replacement products Chrome is something you’re going to want to splash into your life.

Create a toolbar with your Chrome links to those products and you will feel very much like they are operating from the desktop rather than the cloud. That’s a good thing.

Sarah Palin

Mock away. Hell, you most likely already have. I know I have.

But let me publish this before they dump her and I can’t take public credit for having thought it:

Sarah Palin will win John McCain the presidency.

You heard me.

John McCain was floundering with an unenergized base and an odd, hard to parse record (it depended on who he was trying to piss off at the time). The Democrats had an energized fringe and a fed up base that wanted to win even if their particular candidate wasn’t the torch bearer (PUMAs be damned – no f’reals).

And the cultural conservatives were out of play.

Let me step back.

What is the best way to energize the cultural conservatives in America?
Appeal to their persecution complex.

All politics isn’t local. It’s personal. Unless it’s not.
Picking on John McCain wasn’t personal for the cultural conservatives, he isn’t one of them. Their identity isn’t tied up in being a Republican, so Republican identity politics didn’t hit their hearts.

Sarah Palin is one of them. She is theirs. They know her, or someone like her. They know someone with a handful of kids (even with an autistic or Down’s Syndrome baby) from their church. They know someone who has a daughter who Got in Trouble despite their best teachings.

And now? Now the oh-so-smart liberals are making fun of her. Belittling her. Accusing her of bizarre backroom baby-switching. Now the liberals are condescending to this poor woman who already has so much on her plate.

And so she will be a rallying point. She IS a rallying point. The claims of sexism are already flying.

The snark on Daily Kos and Talking Points and other liberal bastions about her and her family are already being attributed to Senator Obama.

And the truth doesn’t matter. Qualifications don’t matter. Perception matters.

Her nomination isn’t historic any more than Pumpsie Green suiting up for the Red Sox long after the fact was. But that’s the narrative.

Attacking her for only being governor of a population that would barely crack the top 20 CITY populations (about as big as Charlotte) isn’t sexism. But that’s the narrative.

You want sexism?

Do a count of the ‘that' poor woman’s uttered in the next 60 days.

Count the number of times we are told that things (aside from poor Bristol Palin) that we are told, or are telling, are irrelevant or none of our business. Treating her differently than we treat John Edwards or Gary Hart because she’s a woman.

But that’s going to be the narrative.

And the cultural conservatives are going to rise up and protect their own.

They were going to stay home in November. Senator Obama was going to reap the bulk of the independents and his own fractious base, and McCain was going to be left with the inert Republican base. But now he gains the conservatives that were going to stay home, along with a healthy handful of braindead independents who are just going to vote for ovaries.

I hope I’m wrong.