NP: The Who, Face Dances

I'm not sure if it's more amusing or galling, but if your political party is on a downturn, fueled, as it were, by an economic crunch exacerbated by high fuel prices, wouldn't you want to avoid the perception of cozying up to the big oil companies?

Not if you're a Senate Republican, apparently. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post shows some of that new mainstream media spine by cleverly attaching the amount of money each senator has received from Big Oil to their sycophantic quotes. The Dems don't get off scot-free, either, but they're also not the one with the image problem at the moment.

Or, at least, not the major image problem and the looming Titanic metaphor, anyway.

You have to wonder if Rafael Pamiero got off on the potential perjury charge because the Senate didn't want to call attention to the fact that they do, in fact, swear witnesses in at hearings much of the time.

NP: Muse, Absolution

Not the first, and hopefully not the last, in a series.

This guy at the San Francisco Chronicle has joined me on the Olbermann bandwagon:

Part Jon Stewart (the funny), Dennis Miller (the erudite and biting sub-references), H.L. Mencken (the skewering of power and stupidity in equal doses) as well as crusading journalist, Olbermann is clearly the future.

Not of cable, of course. Of broadcast network news. His show is what a modern newscast will look like to the masses. They just don't know it yet. And maybe networks won't realize this in time to adequately use him.

NP: Sparta, Porcelain

The burning question -- such as it is -- is if the big, complicated MS Access query will finish running before the massive text search operation going on across some 5 or 6 million records in SPSS. Or if smoke starts coming out of the monitor before either of them are done. Meanwhile, I can pretty much just sit and watch and wait.

I feel like I've managed to learn a couple of tricks in Access that could put me further along the path of subverting the program to my will the way I typically do with Excel, a skill I'm trying to propagate through the team here in the office. It's not that I want to make these programs do things they might not normally want to do, it's just that, if I've got something I need done, I'm limited by the tools at hand. You can use the handle of a screwdriver as a hammer in a pinch, you know what I'm saying?

The other big revelation here this week is that promoting gigs via our shiny new internal blog is exactly as effective as promoting them via mass e-mails. Which is to say, not at all.