{"id":113,"date":"2002-07-30T20:38:38","date_gmt":"2002-07-31T00:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/very_sorry"},"modified":"2002-07-30T20:38:38","modified_gmt":"2002-07-31T00:38:38","slug":"very_sorry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/07\/very_sorry.html","title":{"rendered":"Very Sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Success!  Already people are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marissalingen.com\/072802.html\" title=\"slowly but surely\">taking up the catchphrase<\/a> that I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Jul\/#26\" title=\"'Calm and Reasonable'\">suggested earlier<\/a>.  M&#8217;ris was even clever enough to chop off the first four syllables, leaving it at just &#8220;Moussaoui&#8221;.  Not bad, although it&#8217;s <em>still<\/em> kind of long and hard to spell.  Why couldn&#8217;t he have been named something simple, like Jones? Or Smith?  Or Lindh?  Oh, well.  M&#8217;ris also has some helpful suggestions for a gender-neutral version of &#8220;mistress&#8221;.  So far we have &#8220;lover&#8221; (which fails to convey that one party is married), &#8220;partner&#8221; (gender-neutral, but not <em>sexual-orientation<\/em>-neutral), &#8220;paramour&#8221; (too musty), and &#8220;love-monkey&#8221; (tee-hee!  But no).<\/p>\n<p>Recently I read a column by conservativish <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\" title=\"Home of Hank Steuver, Bane of Nerds Everywhere.  Ewwww.\">Washington Post<\/a> columnist Michael Kelly where he up and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A53621-2002Jul23.html\" title=\"'Do Have a Nice Day'\">apologized for not being very nice<\/a> in his columns.  And here it is, not even Yom Kippur.  Well, I think this is a capital idea.  Like Kelly, I am <em>also<\/em> ashamed of some of the not-particularly-nice things I&#8217;ve said on this site, and I so will attempt to make up for this with&#8230;<\/p>\n<h4>An Apology<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>On July 15, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Jul\/#15\" title=\"'Grody to the Max'\">referred to our steel tariffs as &#8220;lame&#8221;<\/a> and our farm bill as &#8220;even lamer&#8221;.  These were rash words.  I understand now that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&amp;s=editorial080502\" title=\"The usually-prescient New Republic, doing what they do best\">the tiny number of voters in key swing states<\/a> who benefit from these policies are clearly worthy of this sort of personalized attention from the Bush administration, and the rest of us should be a little more gracious about the whole thing.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>On June 15, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Jun\/#15\" title=\"'Do Your Homework'\">called the NY Times &#8220;clueless&#8221;<\/a> for not keeping permanent links to their articles on the web.  Honestly, who am I to criticize their Internet strategy?  I&#8217;m sure they thought about their website design very carefully, and no doubt they know a hell of a lot more than boring old <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/990321.html\" title=\"Web Usability Guru Numero Uno!\">Jakob Nielsen<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/Provider\/Style\/URI\" title=\"Inventor of HTML, as if you didn't know\">Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> do on the subject.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>On June 3, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Jun\/#03\" title=\"he really let them have it with both barrels\">approvingly quoted David Coursey regarding Napster&#8217;s demise<\/a>, when he cited the event as &#8220;proof of a loving higher power that smites evildoers.&#8221;  I also sneered at Rage Against the Machine for the same reason &#8212; for marketing themselves as revolutionaries while in reality just being exemplars of the same-old-same-old.  In retrospect, this was an unfair assessment.   After all, Napster and Rage Against the Machine are both against the RIAA, which makes them automatically worthy of our sympathy and support.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>On May 8, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/May\/#08\" title=\"'Patchouli-wearing Dim Bulbs'\">called the Cato Institute &#8220;insufferable&#8221;<\/a>, in retaliation for their reference to Californians as being &#8220;dim-bulbs&#8221; and &#8220;whiners&#8221;.  This sort of tit-for-tat namecalling is uncalled for and, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spinsanity.com\/\" title=\"You really should read these guys, every day if possible\">good old Ben, Bryan, and Brendan<\/a> would be quick to point out, degrades the level of our national discourse.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>On April 17, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Apr\/#17\" title=\"'Bay Area Radio'\">accused morning DJ Don Bleu of being &#8220;deeply cynical&#8221;<\/a>.  This in turn was cynical of <em>me<\/em>.  On the same day, I called conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage a &#8220;frothing right-wing nutcase&#8221;&#8230; but I also said that he seems to care about what he&#8217;s doing, so I think that one&#8217;s a wash.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>On March 10, 2002, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Mar\/#10\" title=\"Win2K vs. Win98'\">complained that Outlook Express 6<\/a> could not export its emails to a file.  This was a false charge &#8212; you <em>can<\/em> retrieve your mailboxes as files if you&#8217;re willing to familiarize yourself with the internals of Outlook Express and dig around in the depths of the Windows 2000 filesystem.  You can even convert your emails to non-Microsoft formats, if you&#8217;re willing to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gpl.no\/liboe\/\" title=\"GPL command-line 'OE to to standard MBOX' converter\">scour the web for various cryptic open source tools<\/a>. So sorry, Microsoft, my mistake.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>Waaay back in February, I implied that Chairman of the SEC Harvey Pitt was unsuited for his position because he had been the <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Feb\/#04\" title=\"'Marijuana (or: Econ 101)'\">chief lobbyist for the accounting industry<\/a> and had been directly responsible for halting former chairman Arthur Levitt&#8217;s attempts to protect investors.  I did not mean to impugn Pitt&#8217;s ethics or integrity.  Moreover, now that the danger is clear I have no doubt he&#8217;s doing a bang-up job to restore public faith in our capital markets.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>Six months ago, I had some unkind things to say about the Republican candidates for governor and their <a href=\"\/Journal\/2002\/Jan\/#23\" title=\"'Lucky, Lucky Davis'\">failure to provide us with an alternative and coherent energy plan<\/a>.  In fact, in light of their attacks on Davis on this topic, I believe I called them all &#8220;pathetic.&#8221;  Clearly I spoke too soon &#8212; Bill Simon&#8217;s website, once bereft of energy policy information, now has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonforgovernor.com\/issues-blueprint3.php\" title=\"'Renewing the California Dream', or so he says\">something to say on the matter<\/a>.  Strangely, the outline of his plan (invest in solar\/geothermal\/wind, renegotiate energy contracts, fund energy research at California universities) sounds <em>suspiciously<\/em> like what the Democrats (and even the Green Party) are saying.  But hey, if you can be flexible enough to satisfy your right-wing primary voters in the spring and the more left-wing general election voters in the summer&#8230; well, more power to you.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>In December 2001, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2001\/Dec\/#06\" title=\"'Dancing on Graves'\">gloated over Enron&#8217;s ignominious begging<\/a> of the California Department of Water and Power for electricity.  It&#8217;s never nice to kick someone when they&#8217;re down&#8230; and since Enron&#8217;s corporate crew clearly had a deep respect for the needs of their fellow citizens, I can hardly fail to afford them the same courtesy.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>Finally, in November 2001, I <a href=\"\/Journal\/2001\/Nov\/#08\" title=\"'High-Art Literary Tradition'\">made fun of Jonathan Franzen<\/a> for his churlish behavior regarding Oprah&#8217;s book club and his pretentious claims to membership in the &#8220;high-art literary tradition.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Come to think of it, I&#8217;m not sorry about that last one at all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This sort of tit-for-tat namecalling is uncalled for and, as good old Ben, Bryan, and Brendan would be quick to point out, degrades the level of our national discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}