R.I.P. John Hughes. Sigh.

Wikipedia, of course, has a whole article on the Brat Pack, including a chart and a discussion of who exactly counts as a member. Oh, Wikipedia. You’re so good to us.

Matt Haughey rocks.

There are good people in this world.

The current phase of my life is officially ten years old today. It was ten years ago today that I packed up my car, left Charlottesville, Virginia, for good, and moved back up to the New York area.

I just did a search of my blog for the phrases “ten years” and “10 years” and there’s a lot that came up. I’m very interested in the passage of time, and I’m self-analytical, so I’m often noting how much time has passed between different events in my life.

I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, to commemorate ten years since I’d graduated from law school. But it was ten years ago today that, after graduating from law school, studying for the bar exam all through June and July, driving up to Albany to take the exam, and driving back to Charlottesville to wind things up and sell my furniture, I officially closed the Virginia phase of my life. I had spent eight eventful years there, but I was long past ready to leave and move back to the big city.

On the evening of August 4, 1999, I arrived back at my parents’ house in New Jersey after the seven-hour drive from UVa. I had no job lined up. I was not yet out to my parents. Living with my parents, unemployed and closeted, was not fun. That first night back home, I went online and this guy struck up a conversation with me. He was 21, I was 25. He was cute, smart, and Jewish. I was instantly smitten. The next night, we met up, and I was really smitten, although nothing sexual happened. Nothing remotely sexual would ever happen between us. It was the beginning of 2-3 months of confusion, angst, and heartbreak. (Which was fine, because he was all wrong for me anyway.) It also led to me finally coming out to my parents (for the second time), because one night my mom confronted me about this “new friend” I’d been spending time with, and the unspoken truth was finally spoken.

The year from August 1999 to August 2000 was filled with flailing around, false starts, feelings of transition. I got a non-law job with a family friend in Princeton, found a roommate in Princeton who turned out to be horrible, and then moved in with a friend of mine. Finally, in the summer of 2000, I got a response to a resume I’d sent to the New Jersey court system a year earlier, and in August 2000 I started working in Newark. A couple of months later I moved up to Jersey City, and my year of transition ended.

It had been a shitty, confusing year for me. It started ten years ago today, and I’m glad it’s in the past.

But it’s still profound for me to realize that it’s been ten whole years since I said goodbye to Charlottesville. Writing this blog post is making me miss those years, that place, being young, 17 to 25. College and law school. Being on my own. Coming out. So much change, so much self-exploration, so much growth.

My life was at a dead end after college, and I’ve never known if law school — at UVa or elsewhere — was the right choice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, instead of going to law school in 1996, I’d continued working full-time at the UVa Music Library. Would I have wound up getting a library degree? Would I still have wound up going to law school eventually? Would my life have hit a dead end? Would I currently be working as a Barnes and Noble cashier?

Nostalgia can do weird things. My life is what it is. One could say that I’m still drifting. Maybe I would be drifting no matter what I chose.

August 4, 1999. May 21, 1995. August 21, 1991. Dates that are hinges.

Maybe we always drift and never stop until we die.

Just once I would like to read a group of letters in the New York Times about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the pro-Israel writers do not have Jewish last names and the pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab writers do not have Arab last names.

Okay, it does happen — but rarely.

I wish we human beings were better at seeing past our own ethnic identities. I include myself in that.

The New York Times ombudsman has delved into the story of how Alessandra Stanley’s article about Walter Cronkite contained so many errors (previously blogged here):

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Oh, and yet another error in the original piece was corrected yesterday.

No! No! No!

The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium’s pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are, remarkably, still at it.

No, Michael Massing. You’re wrong. For the umpteenth time, blogging did not begin with political blogs. The media may not have paid attention to blogs until bloggers started to write about things the media cared about, but that does not mean that they did not exist or that people were not reading them.

I am so tired of this shit. Blogging was not always about politicos getting into pissing matches with other politicos. It was about people sharing cool stuff with each other on the web and forming a community. Christ — blogging had been going on for quite a while before political bloggers started in and then began claiming that they invented the thing. Read Rebecca Blood’s early history of blogging. The term blog itself was invented before Sullivan or Kaus ever started turning their thoughts into pixels. Jason Kottke has been blogging since 1998. Rebecca Blood has been blogging since April 1999. And a certain someone’s blog is turning 10 years old in a few weeks.

I’m sick of the pre-political bloggers getting short shrift. Andrew Sullivan writes an addictive blog and has done great things with the form. But he started in 2001 — just two weeks before I did, in fact — which was well after the blog pioneers.

Just because the media doesn’t care about something does not mean it doesn’t exist or matter.

Apparently, back in the early part of the 20th century, my former college men’s chorus, the Virginia Glee Club, used to perform musical comedy. In drag. And also in blackface.

That’s what my former Club comrade Tim Jarrett discovered while digging through the archives.

Several photos are contained in the link. The blackface photos really make me cringe.

A possible origin of the vampire myth:

The myth, established well before the invention of the word “vampire,” seems to cross every culture, language and era. The Indian Baital, the Ch’ing Shih in China, and the Romanian Strigoi are but a few of its names. The creature seems to be as old as Babylonia and Sumer. Or even older.

The vampire may originate from a repressed memory we had as primates. Perhaps at some point we were — out of necessity — cannibalistic. As soon as we became sedentary, agricultural tribes with social boundaries, one seminal myth might have featured our ancestors as primitive beasts who slept in the cold loam of the earth and fed off the salty blood of the living.

Yikes:

Colbert I. King of the Washington Post once wrote a very telling column about how his parents instilled in him the need for punctuality. The underlining of their everyday lesson was that if you were late, you might have to run, and a young black man racing through the streets could well be detained before he reached his lawful destination.

Katie Couric smacks down New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley, without naming names. Stanley, who is apparently error-prone, made a slew of them in a recent appraisal of Walter Cronkite. And her copy editors didn’t do their jobs, either.

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

[via Kottke]

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

— from Wear Sunscreen

I’ve been daydreaming this morning — reading about the differences between New York and San Francisco, as well as some recent advice about moving to San Francisco.

Who knows if we’d ever move. But it strikes me that I live in the biggest city in the U.S. by population, with tons of diversity and culture, and I rarely take advantage of it. (I’ve mentioned this before, and I say it not to complain, but merely to state a fact.) Whatever apartment we moved into would inevitably become messy and we still wouldn’t clean the bathroom as much as we should and we’d stay in too often.

So even if we stay in New York, I could at least try to get out more, try more new things, and keep a cleaner bathroom.

Wherever you go, there you are. It’s simpler to change yourself than to change your location. But it’s definitely not easier.

I’m sitting at the gate at San Francisco International Airport, waiting for my plane to board for the flight home. I’ve been here for a few days for a work-related conference (which you already know if you read my Twitter feed).

Sigh… I could totally live here. Maybe it’s just the novelty of the place… maybe it would get old. And I’d miss Broadway. And worry about earthquakes. (Which is silly, since I lived in Tokyo for three years, and only a few times did I ever feel a tremor.)

And California… it’s beautiful, but it’s environmentally unsustainable, isn’t it? And the state government and budget are a mess. On the other hand, its political system is like ancient Greece compared to Albany.

My company has an office here… so I wouldn’t even need a new job… but on the other hand, Matt would have to find a new job.

Anyway. California dreamin’.

This really is a beautiful state. I spent six weeks here when I was 14 years old. I would love to come back some time — drive all the way down the coast with Matt, stop in tons of places. (But first, get behind the wheel of a car again and practice driving, since I haven’t driven a car in about five years.) It would be wonderful.

I had a long, leisurely dinner with Thom and Jeff the other night, who moved out here a few years ago. They love it here. Jeff is from here, and Thom is from Virginia. Sometimes I feel like they are my and Matt’s West Coast counterparts.

Odd thought: people always say “out West” and “back East.” American historical bias, since the East Coast was settled first. But the West Coast was settled more than 150 years ago at this point. Linguistic tics persist. What do you call Arizona and New Mexico if you live in California? Out east?

Traveling is mind-expanding, even work-related travel.

Time to go “back East.” Sigh…

For the last couple of days I’ve been regularly visiting WeChooseTheMoon.org, which has been streaming the original audio of the Apollo 11 mission “in real time” in honor of its 40th anniversary. I’ve also been following along occasionally with the transcript.

Kottke has posted a slew of links in honor of Apollo 11.

I don’t remember this much hoopla on previous anniversaries — or maybe I’m just more into it this year.

It’s easy to think that the present is superior to the past. In 1969 there was no personal computer, no cellphone, no Internet, no DNA testing. In fact, your cellphone today has more computing power than the Apollo computers.

And yet humans were able to send other humans to the moon.

The most amazing thing science has ever accomplished happened four and a half years before I was born. Technology has advanced so far in the last four decades, but we haven’t surpassed Apollo. The Mars Rover is pretty exciting — and Voyager 1 is approaching the edge of the solar system and will hopefully survive long after humanity disappears — but nothing can match the moon landing.

Humans were able to send other humans to the moon. Forty years ago.

RIP Walter Cronkite. He was one of the greats.

And so another one on my list has passed.

(See previously.)

John Noble Wilford, the New York Times’s science writer who wrote the front-page story about the moon landing 40 years ago, has a terrific essay about it in today’s paper.

It then occurs to me that if Columbus and Capt. James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happens.

Here is how he wrote his famous first sentence:

I think of what I will write. I have never made a practice of composing a draft story in anticipation of a success, or alternative drafts for failure. I trust myself to draw inspiration from what happens, thinking spontaneity will serve me better and endow the story with the energy of immediacy. But now, phrases and disconnected sentences spill out of my wakefulness.

I get up and read the articles I have written about the mission up to now. Reporters may feel impelled to write of the next day’s events as the culmination of the space race, the achievement of an ambitious national goal, a historic triumph. I swear to myself that I will not use “historic” in my top paragraph.

I reach for my notebook and try several opening sentences. They must be put on a strict diet. I cross out adjectives. I eliminate clauses that are superfluous and sound too much like heavy music for a movie soundtrack. I begin again: “American astronauts landed.” No, too restrictive and chauvinistic; it will be clear soon enough that the astronauts are American and the goal of a decade has been achieved.

I finally get to the irreducible essence in one short sentence: “Men have landed and walked on the moon.”

And an organization, founded to fight for civil rights, is disgracefully hypocritical if they refuse to recognize the civil rights of anyone other than themselves. They lose all moral authority, because then they become merely advocates for themselves. OF COURSE you are going to be advocates for yourselves – everyone is; you gain no moral authority from merely being an advocate for your own interests. So, you, hallowed civil rights organization, are “officially” neutral on the key civil rights issue of our time in this country? You are no longer a civil rights organization – you are merely an advocacy group. Like any other.

(From a Metafilter comment about this article.)

Does blog design still matter? I rarely visit actual blogs anymore, unless I want to comment on a blog post. I read most of my daily reads via RSS.

Nevertheless, I’ve redesigned my site a little bit. I started out wanting to add a Twitter feed, because I thought I’d be more inclined to tweet if they were accessible in the same place I blogged. But that meant I had too much stuff on my blog for one sidebar, so I decided I needed two sidebars in order to accommodate more data. I tried to code it by hand and it wasn’t happening. So I investigated a few different WordPress themes and decided to go with Neoclassical, which I downloaded and tweaked.

I’m still tweaking. And I still haven’t tweeted. I seem to have tweeter’s block. To those of you who already follow me on the Twitter account I set up a couple of months ago and still haven’t used, I’ve registered a new account under the name Tinmanic, so you’ll want to start following me there instead.

I’d end this post with a Twitter pun, but that would be twite.

I’m working from home today and someone has been playing the most beautiful jazz music for the past hour. I have no idea where it’s coming from. It’s nothing but saxophones, and it’s modern but has hints of jaunty 1940s supper club music but with some atonal moments. It’s like 1940s jazz music taken apart and rearranged. I feel like I’m listening to the ghosts of doomed lovers in 1940s Los Angeles.

I’ve walked up and down the halls of my building but it seems to be coming from the building behind us. I want to find out what it is. Shazam is of no use. This is killing me.

Okay, last week it was Karl Malden, and now Robert McNamara is dead.

To anyone else on this list, beware.