My Deployed Wife

We were lucky this past Thursday when an ice storm missed us, but not very far from here, in Central Massachusetts, conditions are very bad. Entire towns are without power, and some won’t have it back until mid-week.

Carol is a volunteer with the Medical Reserve Corps. Today she’s at a middle school in Worcester, helping the families that have taken shelter there. Carol called a minute ago and said that while driving there it was almost as if there were a line along the road, where all of a sudden trees were down everywhere. Doctors and nurses are the core of the corps, but Carol is a nutritionist, and this morning on her way out at 6:30 she joked that she’d put everybody on a diet.

Embedding down with Hulu

Some people — those younger than I — really, really keep up with what’s going on. I sort of keep up. For example, I don’t know how big an audience Hulu has, but every time I see it I’m impressed by how much video is there, although some of it — hot, current stuff like Battlestar Galactica — has an expiration date.

The first thing I watched on Hulu was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, after it jumped over there from iTunes. It was created by the slightly horrible and very fannish Joss Whedon, who previously had done the short-lived sci-fi series Firefly. You’ll find Firefly on Hulu, including this episode that features actress Christina Hendricks, now famous as Joan in the AMC series Mad Men. Rated TV-14

K3: Suitable for framing

Long term, printing digital photos doesn’t make sense, so for Carol’s (too close to Christmas) birthday, I gave her a Kodak M820 digital multimedia frame. These things have a ways to go, but they’re starting to be at least workable. It can play videos, but not completely smoothly. But heck, it’s still a nifty gadget. I kept the lights low so the screen wouldn’t wash out, and the camera made everything look more yellow than it is.

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For you rabid K3 fanatics, here are the ladies presented on DogRat for the first time in full TV resolution. This was taken in October. Bright red coats for a cold, gray day in Holland!

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The Randayn View

When Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics a couple of months ago, I said it’s time to leave Milton Friedman behind. Now somebody at Newsweek is wondering the same thing I am about Ayn Rand. Can her ideas survive the economic crisis?

Ayn Rand, full of her fetishes and obsessions, sure wrote some strained and stilted dialogue in her screenplay for The Fountainhead, which was expertly directed and photographed, yet is anything but a typical 40’s Hollywood movie.
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Here is an excerpt from the novel, taken from the scene where Dominque follows Howard to his room:

He asked: “What do you want?”
She answered: “You know what I want,” her voice heavy and flat.
“Yes, but I want to hear you say it. All of it.”
“If you wish.” Her voice had the sound of efficiency, obeying an order with metallic precision. “I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin, your mouth, your hands. I want you — like this — not hysterical with desire — but coldly and consciously — without dignity and without regrets — I want you — I have no self-respect to bargain with me and divide me — I want you — I want you like an animal, or a cat on a fence, or a whore.”

Hey, that’s quite an offer. The free market at work! Ayn Rand wrote a couple of great trashy novels, with literary and political pretensions. College boys ate it up, and somehow her aspirations were legitimized beyond Hollywood. I say embrace Rand as the romance novelist she was, who obsessively painted portraits of her idealized leading man, and stop giving credit for her work being anything more than that.