While I have not given it enough listens to say exactly where it will end up, this album has been steadily working its way up my current playlist.

I was a bit concerned at first, given that it starts out rather more peppy and upbeat than I tend to prefer when it comes to non-time-wasting music. However, if you stick with it, this is a pretty thick album. I couldn’t really tell you what the songs are about, on account of I rarely listen to lyrics. Musically speaking, though, there is a lot going on here, and not in an annoying, Broken Social Scene sort of way. They throw a bunch of different styles at the listener over the course of eleven tracks, but by and large, it works.

From Montreal (as is apparently every hot indie band these days), Islands includes a couple of former member of the Unicorns, whose 2003 album Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? set new records for cloying preciousness. Fortunately, they have dialed those tendencies back significantly with the new band.

Give it a listen if you’re looking for some good, interesting indie pop.

Remember during the toothless hearings the Senate Judiciary Committee held into the White House’s warrantless wiretapping scheme, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez kept qualifying every answer with stuff like “The program we are here to talk about today”?

Now what is most assuredly only one of many other shoes has dropped. USA Today has the goods:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans—most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime.

Because, really—who needs probable cause? If six degrees connect you to Kevin Bacon (actually, it’s only three degrees in my case), surely it can’t be that many hops to someone who can be connected to a terrorist organization. And just in case there were any doubts about the scope of this project, the article goes on to state that “The agency’s goal is ‘to create a database of every call ever made’ within the nation’s borders.”

Meanwhile, prepare for an avalanche of justifications from the administration’s apologists and toadies along the lines of “People who are innocent don’t have anything to worry about” and “The real outrage is that the existence of this program was leaked” and “9/11 changed everything.”

Despite the fact that it appears in USA Today, the article is comprehensive and well-written. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Warner Brother announced a few days ago that it is going to begin offering movies and TV episodes for download via Bittorrent. According to this San Francisco Chronicle article, “the films are expected to cost about the price of a DVD, while the television shows, such as “Babylon 5,” will cost about $1 or more.”

This step is promising, although, given the content industry’s history, potentially problematic.

A dollar for a television episode seems fairly reasonable, assuming there are no commercials that the viewer will be forced to watch. Pricing downloaded movies roughly equivalent to their DVD counterparts sounds less reasonable, given that there is no packaging or media.

However (and this is BIG however), if past behavior is any indication, the downloaded episodes and movies will be loaded with digital-rights management. Downloaders will be most likely be subject to one or (probably) more of the following restrictions:

• they will only be able to play them on the computer to which they were downloaded,
• they will not be able to burn them to disc to play in a regular DVD player,
• they won’t be able to make copies,
• they will have to use some kind of proprietary software to watch them (which likely will only come in a Windows version,
• the files will expire after some amount of time.

It is entirely understandable that content providers such as Warner Brothers are afraid of piracy, but there needs to be some middle ground where legitimate users have some flexibility. If I want to store all my media on a central computer and watch it on other machines over a network, I should be able to do that. If I want to make backup copies of movies I pay full price for, I should be able to do that, especially given that files saved to a hard drive are much more likely to vanish in a puff of smoke than read-only media like a DVD.

On the whole, it is encouraging to see companies like Warner Brothers at least experimenting with new distribution models like Bittorrent. Whether they start finding sensible ways to use these models is a different story entirely.

There is yet another new poll out today, this one courtesy of the New York Times and CBS News, showing that the public’s opinion of the President’s handling of major issues has dropped to new lows:

• Terrorism – 46%
• His job – 31%
• Iraq – 29%
• The economy – 28%
• Foreign policy – 27%
• Immigration – 26%
• Gas prices – 13%

It is difficult to read numbers like that as anything but craptracular. At this point, it would seem that about the only people left supporting the President are the die-hard Republican nutjobs who would shout loudly that we have to support George W. Bush even as he stood in front of them strangling puppies and kicking their elderly grandparents.

That being said, it is unclear to me that even poll numbers that low mean prospects are good for Democrats. Just from a general survey of the polls charting Bush’s declining popularity, I do not recall that anyone asked respondents if they would vote for him again.

Perhaps due to feeling as though we have been down this road before, I strongly suspect that many Bush voters, despite giving the President terrible marks on the issue, would still say they like the guy and identify with him. If that is the case, then I find little solace in these poll results.

For my money, the Secret Machines’ first full-length, Now Here Is Nowhere, was one of the best albums of 2004—huge drums, epic, sprawling arrangements, and tight songwriting.. Not too many records come out these days that make me think, “Now this is the rock,” but that one definitely fit the bill. I still listen to it somewhat regularly, despite the fact that it is going on two years old.

Thus, you can imagine my anticipation when I heard that they were coming out with a folllow-up this year.

Sadly, Ten Silver Drops does not nearly live up to the reputation of its predecessor. Most of the same elements are there, but they never come together.

Songs begin and end, but don’t really go anywhere in between. For much of the album, I got the feeling the band had reassembled all the parts from the last record, but couldn’t figure out what else to do with them. Where the first album drew the listener in, this one almost immediately becomes background music.

Maybe I’m wrong, but my guess is that these guys are a one-trick pony. It’s unfortunate, but at least Now Here Is Nowhere is still good.

I have been struggling with Tomcat for the last week or so, partly for my own edification, but mostly for several work projects that will be coming up over the summer.

Actually installing Tomcat is fairly easy, even on a Linux box. Download it, untar it, copy it to the /usr/lib/ directory, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. However, getting it to work through Apache (rather than its own built-in webserver) is a different story entirely.

“Just use the mod_jk connector” is the helpful recommendation on any number of web sites. Sadly, like many open-source projects, the mod_jk documentation is for shit. After three days of fighting with it on CentOS, I gave up and tried it on a Debian box, as I’m a lot more familiar with Debian-based distros than I am with RedHat stuff. A few days later, I finally have Apache serving up JSP pages via mod_jk. Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest notion of what I did to get it working. Now the plan is to go back to CentOS and see if I can get it working there now.

For anyone reading this site who has no idea what any of that meant, just consider it an explanation for the gaps in my posting schedule over the last week.

I have been thinking some more about the Times Magazine article to which I linked in the previous post about Christian Conservatives’ growing assault on the availability of contraceptives.

As I said in that post, they have a rhetorically easy (if logically dubious) argument regarding abortion, because they can say they want to stop the killing of babies. However, with their growing opposition to birth control, it becomes clear that the for the Right, abortion is just the symptom of a bigger problem: the de-linking of sex and procreation.

There are so many threads hanging from this argument that it is difficult to decide which one to pull. It is not hard to imagine why the sex-procreation disconnect is so troubling to religous conservatives’ worldview—it loosens the bonds of male-dominated family life, means women aren’t tied to the house and family, opens up the possibility of myriad non-traditional family structures, and upsets several thousand years’ worth of Christian doctrine.

However, let’s not forget the fear that a declining birthrate strikes in the hearts of conservatives everywhere. Make it easier for people to have sex without producing babies, and you end up with a birthrate that is not sufficient to maintain the population levels necessary for our tax and welfare structures to balance out. One wonders how much the fear of the dirty brown masses is the root cause of the Right’s fight to roll the clock back to the 1950′s.

I have to admit, I have only been tangentially following the (as it turns out) rather torturous saga of Plan B, the emergency contraception pill. Legally available over the counter in a number of European countries, it is currently available only by prescription here in the US. While it was been recommended for OTC sale in this country by both the AMA and FDA advisory committees, Bush administration appointees to the FDA have held up the decision indefinitely.

To add insult to injury, there have been repeated and widespread instances of pharmacists who are evangelical Christians refusing to fill prescriptions for the drug.

One need not be a rocket scientist to figure out that opposition to making Plan B available is rooted in the “pro-life” policies and beliefs of the Bush White House and its Christian Conservative supporters. Judging from the “Contra-Contraception” article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, however, the so-called morning-after pill is only the tip of the iceberg. (more…)

Somehow, I missed out on the fact that yesterday was the National Day of Prayer. Given that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, I am rather surprised that there even is a National Day of Prayer.

Although, considering the current political climate in this country, perhaps “surprised” is not the right word. Maybe “disappointed” is more what I am looking for.

Nonetheless, silly notions like Constitutional law aren’t going to stop George W. Bush from getting his God on. According to this Washington Post article, Bush took his participation in the National Day of Prayer as an opportunity to declare that “America is a nation of prayer. It’s impossible to tell the story of our nation without telling the story of people who pray.”

Funny—and here I was, thinking we were a nation of laws.

Especially precious is this gem:

“In my travels across the great land, a comment that I hear often from our fellow citizens is, `Mr. President, I pray for you and your family.’ It’s amazing how many times a total stranger walks up and says that to me,” Bush said. “You’d think they’d say, `How about the bridge?’ Or, `How about filling the potholes?’ No, they say, `I’ve come to tell you I pray for you, Mr. President’.”

Yes, potholes and bridges are clearly the issues that one might imagine citizens asking the President about, because sky-rocketing energy and healthcare costs, a lousy job market, a pointless war that has killed thousands of Americans and Iraqis, and the shredding of Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and other executive branch power-grabs aren’t issues that would be on anyone’s mind.

You can bet that the White House will be ratcheting up these sorts of “values” events between now and November. With his approval ratings in the low thirties (and maybe heading lower) and no meaningful policy initiatives to put forward, about the only strategy Bush has left for drumming up Republican votes heading into the midterms are wedge issues like religion: prayer, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and marriage-protection legislation.

The Guardian science page has released a list of the top ten science fiction films, as decided by a panel of selected scientists.

Overall, the list makes for interesting reading, and while I agree with most of the films on the list, I might rearrange the order—Blade Runner is great, but number one? Of all time? I’m not so sure. My big complaint is the inclusion of The Matrix.

I am amazed that this movie is consistently included on these sorts of lists, on account of it is brain-dead. The “science” (and believe me, I only use the term grudgingly) of the film is laughable, as are its much-vaunted Big Ideas. “What if everything you see and hear is just an illusion?” Hello, ninth-grade existentialism. Yes, it was entertaining, but mostly as a result of the kung-fu.

It makes me wonder why the editors of these top ten and best-of lists always feel the need to include the Matrix movies. Off the top of my head, I would guess it has to do with the fact that sci-fi offerings have been pretty thin of late, and The Matrix is about all that comes to anyone’s mind when looking for films from the last ten years.

I still say Dark City was a much better exploration of similar ideas.