Last month, Comcast, my Internet provider, dropped its Usenet service.  I’ve been meaning to write about Usenet and its decline ever since Joey did, so this seems like a good time.  It wasn’t any big surprise; ISPs have been running away from Usenet ever since the feds said they could be held liable for illegal files passing through their servers.  Since a large part of the data passing through Usenet is pornography and pirated software and entertainment, and customers who actually used Usenet for anything legal were becoming scarce anyway, it didn’t really make sense for them to keep providing it.  I suspect most ISPs would have dropped it a long time ago, if not for one old sysadmin keeping it running out of stubbornness or nostalgia.

In its heyday, Usenet was simply awesome.  If you weren’t online in the early 90s, you have to realize that communications for most people were so slow that you could read data faster than it came across your screen.  I used to search the net for files by sending off an “Archie” search by email and getting the results back the next day.  There was no world-wide web; so other than Usenet newsgroups, the main things people did on the net were sending e-mail, getting files from FTP servers, and chatting on IRC.  (IRC deserves its own article.)  Everything was slow.  But with your own Usenet server, regularly pulling a feed from a neighbor and storing it locally, you could have thousands of worldwide discussion groups on nearly every topic imaginable right there on your local network, where access was more-or-less instant.

Usenet predates the Internet, so you didn’t even have to be connected full-time to use it.  People set up modem and radio connections to stream Usenet feeds into their networks.  It gave them a way to have conversations with people all over the world on all sorts of topics—not in real time, by any means; but fast enough that the conversation continued every day and you could get useful information out of it.  And all this was done with software that hasn’t changed much in 30 years, and hardware that was long since tossed in the garbage.

Nowadays, though, the main reason for running your own Usenet server is gone: pulling information from across the globe usually doesn’t take any more apparent time than pulling it from down the hall.  So ISP’s were farming out the service anyway.  Comcast was paying Giganews to provide Usenet to its customers, and who knows where Giganews’s servers are located.

But Usenet, like FTP, IRC, and other services, has been becoming more and more of a backwater anyway as the web has gotten more useful.  “Newsgroups” (or “groups,” as Usenet’s discussion forums were also called) that used to be full of interesting, on-topic conversation have dried up as web-based forums drew most of the traffic.  The St. Louis Blues group, alt.sports.hockey.nhl.stl-blues, dried up when a St. Louis newspaper started a Blues web forum that got popular.  And so it went.  With most new Internet users knowing nothing but the web, Usenet has become a hangout for those of us who have been online 10 years or more.  But that makes it less useful even for us, because most of the people we might want to talk to, whether we’re arguing politics or trying to get help fixing our car engine, are discussing those topics on the web somewhere.  So even we old-timers drift away and use it less.

It’s a shame, because Usenet worked so well.  No web forum has come close to it yet for ease of use.  With a basic Usenet newsreader, I could access thousands of discussion groups through the same interface, follow conversation threads, post to any of them, create my posts in whatever editor I liked, have it ignore the posters and threads I’m not interested in, and more.  In 2003, I posted 2043 messages to Usenet, containing over 300,000 words.  Most of it, I probably wouldn’t recognize if I saw it now (but I have it all saved), but it seemed important at the time—or at least fun.

Now, if I want to keep using Usenet, I’ll have to pay Giganews or some other provider for an account.  They don’t cost much, but honestly, I hadn’t been using it much in the last year anyway.  Most of my favorite groups had dried up, and the ones that hadn’t yet, like alt.support.diet.low-carb, were mainly the same old group of people running out of things to say.  Some groups have been stagnant so long, the participants have beaten the group’s topic to death many times over, so they’re just old friends chatting about everything else.

So, I guess I’ll wait and see how it goes.  If I start to miss it, I’ll sign up with Giganews or someplace.  I’d hate to think I’ve made my last Usenet post—especially since it was the one where I predicted the Chiefs would go 6-10 this year!  But I don’t use gopher or Veronica or any of those other obsolete services with names much cooler than “WWW” anymore either, so I guess all good things come to an end.  Probably I’ll do without, and just end up cussing every now and then that no one can make a web forum that works as well as ‘tin’ circa 1992.

I promised these a few weeks ago, so here they finally are: some pictures of the windows in St. Rose.  Photos don’t really do them justice, but these give you an idea.  Masses start in less than two weeks! As always, click to see them full-sized.

I don’t normally post about politics here, because I figure there are already eleventy billion other people doing that, and the odds of changing anyone’s mind are pretty remote anyway. I’ve gotten involved before in long, intense political discussions on Usenet, writing enough words to fill a novel. Other than a way to vent, there’s not much point in it. But, since Jason talked a little about voting, I thought I’d say a few things about my thinking heading into this election.

First of all, I’m no John McCain fan.  I would have been happier with almost any of the other Republican candidates, and I still don’t know how we ended up with a guy who was rumored to be considering running as an independent or Democrat in past elections.  He’s never seen an immigrant—preferably an illegal one—that he didn’t want to give a job and government benefits to.  He’s no real friend to conservatives, voting with us most of the time, but always willing to shaft us if it gets him attention in the press.  His main constituency is the media, which has always (until now, of course) showered him with affection whenever he bad-mouthed his own party.  He’s a bad candidate, and if the Democrats had put up a halfway moderate person, say someone like Bill Clinton without the sex addiction, this choice might take more than half a second.

But they put up Barack Obama, the most radical left-wing member of the Senate (he gets better ratings from left-wing organizations than Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist), and a product of the corrupt Chicago machine to boot.  Except for the ability to give a good speech, there’s nothing good to say about his candidacy, and plenty of bad.

I’ll start with abortion.  Now, maybe you, dear reader, consider yourself pro-choice.  That’s fine, I’m not looking to argue that here.  But you should know that Obama is not pro-choice, if that term means anything; he’s as pro-abortion as it’s possible to be without actually performing them yourself.  He’s even more in favor of abortion than NARAL, which did not oppose the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, while Obama voted against the Illinois version.  He has promised to make his first priority in office the Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove all restrictions on abortion nationwide, all the way through the entire nine months of pregnancy.

So no more restrictions on partial-birth abortion, which 80-90% of Americans oppose.  No parental notification; the school nurse can take your 14-year-old daughter for an abortion without your knowledge.  He promises new federal funding for abortion, even paying for them with Medicare.  He wants to make abortion a civil right, which could mean hospitals and doctors would be forced to provide abortions.  Pregnancy counselors could be in the same boat.  The RICO act could be used to stop all anti-abortion protests, and even take away the tax-exempt status of organizations that preach against it.

Now, like I said, maybe you normally vote Democrat because you’re pro-choice, in the sense that you don’t like the idea of a woman being trapped by pregnancy, especially in cases of abuse or health dangers.  That may be understandable, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.  (And that’s what we’d continue to have under McCain; he’s no pro-life warrior.)  We’re talking about making abortion as routine as possible, shutting down all opposition to it at every level from federal to local, letting abortionists use any method they want even if it means killing the baby well after birth, and making sure nothing slows the decision process down long enough for a woman to have second thoughts.  Is that really what you want when you say you’re pro-choice?  A president who makes that his number-one priority?  I don’t think that’s what it means for most people.

On the economy, Obama is also something we haven’t seen in a viable presidential candidate in a long time, if ever: an outright Marxist.  He talks openly about redistributing wealth, something most politicians dress up in language about punishing the rich.  Obama’s so convinced he’s right, though, that he forgets to hide what he means sometimes, like when he famously told Joe the Plumber how he should be glad the government is going to take more of Joe’s money and spread it around.  Hanging with guys like Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers just confirms what comes through his speeches and his books: he’s going to tax the heck out of us for our own good.

Of course, he promises middle-class tax relief; they always do.  It’s a lie (as it is when McCain says it).  It’s very simple: the middle class has most of the money and produces most of the stuff.  If the government wants to hand out goodies—and Obama’s promising goodies left and right—it has to get the money from the middle class, by hook or by crook.  Even if he doesn’t technically raise tax rates on us, we here in Illinois know there are other ways to squeeze us for it.  Our governor, Rod Blagojevich another corrupt product of the Chicago machine who will probably spend part of his retirement in prison like most of our former governors, also got elected by promising not to raise taxes.  Surprisingly, he kept that promise, but he made up for it by raising every fee he could find and increasing state-run gambling, which is a tax on the innumerate.  One way or another, Obama will make us pay.

Many people think we need to elect Obama to keep us out of foreign wars.  Apparently they weren’t listening when he promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, and suggested that he’d like to get involved in Darfur and other hot spots where the US has even less national interest than Iraq.  In places where he doesn’t suggest sending troops outright, he wants to send big piles of money to support the UN or other nations’ troops.  In short, he’s just as enthusiastic about projecting American power around the globe as Bush or McCain; he’d just like to do it in different places in different ways and let other countries boss us around more in the process.

Those are the big issues, but on pretty much every issue, you can assume an Obama presidency will mean more government control.  Do you homeschool, or think people should be allowed to?  Don’t be surprised if some new regulations come down the pike on that; teachers’ unions are the biggest supporter of the Democratic Party.  Own any guns?  If any gun-control laws come across Obama’s desk (which is likely, since we’re going to have a strong Democratic majority in Congress for at least two years), he’ll sign them.  Expect new attempts to tax the Internet, and to control what people can use it for.  Prepare for new bi-lingual efforts, more rights and benefits given to illegal immigrants, and less effort at controlling the borders (which is already a weak effort as it is).  We could even get the 55-mph speed limit back.

If you’re one of those people who thinks he’ll bring blacks and whites together….sorry, I don’t want to be insulting, but you’re naive.  Read his books.  From the way he talked about his “racist” white grandmother, to the way he idolized his bigamist deadbeat-dad and looked down on his mother, to the church and pastor he selected when he moved to Chicago, to the way he talks in his speeches about black “anger” and white “resentment,” he’s made it clear that he’s not another Tiger Woods, equally comfortable with all sides of his heritage.  He chose sides a long time ago, and if he’s elected, he’ll appoint judges and lawyers from the racial grievance industry who will only make the racial divide in this country worse.  Again, read his books; it’s all in there.

So, there are a few reasons I won’t be voting for Obama.  Since I live in Illinois, which leans hard to the left, voting for McCain wouldn’t do any good here.  The only way McCain would win Illinois would be if he won about 40 other states, and then my vote wouldn’t matter either.  So I’ll be voting for the Constitution Party, to help it get attention and funding next time around, in hopes that maybe one of these times we won’t have to choose between bad and much, much worse.

Were I in a contested state like Ohio, though, I’d proudly hold my nose and vote for McCain.  I might even take a page from the Democratic playbook and vote a few times, and volunteer to drive illegal aliens to the polls to vote in the names of felons and dead people.  Viva le democracie!

Yes, I ♥ Barry Manilow—according to Pandora, anyway.  Pandora is a very cool free online radio station from the Music Genome Project.  There are plenty of music players that will serve music based on artist or genre, but Pandora gets more sophisticated.  It classifies songs based on things like major or minor key, tonality, style, tempo, and lots of music terms I don’t understand, then tries to match them to your taste.  So you can start a “station” by selecting a single song, and it’ll serve up other songs with similar attributes, learning as it goes by letting you vote songs up or down.  That means it can find songs you’ll have a good chance of liking in genres you don’t normally explore.

So, I started it off with Rick Springfield, Beethoven, Ivan Neville, Donnie Iris, and a handful of others, and it started giving me some pretty good selections.  Occasionally I have to click the “Never Ever Ever Play This Again” button, like when it tried the Police, but mostly it guesses what I like pretty well.  Lately I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of Manilow it sends me, and I have to say, it’s really pretty good.  I’m not going to run out and get a Barry Rules T-shirt or anything, but his songs are upbeat and light, just the sort of thing that works well when I’m at work.  Mandy, I Write the Songs, Even Now: all pleasant, listenable songs.  It’s also sent me some Neil Diamond and other stuff like that, and I really can’t complain.  I find myself humming along and not getting annoyed with it, which is the ultimate test.

There are a couple things I’d like to change.  It replays songs too often:  no matter how much I like a song, I don’t need to hear it three or four times a day.  It also seems to prefer live music to the studio version, and I rarely do.  Maybe that has something to do with their licensing, or something about my picks so far makes it think I like live versions.

Those are minor issues, though.  For the most part, I think it’s a great service.  If you ever listen to music online, check it out.  My account name is “aaron694,” if you want to listen to my station and hum along to Copacabana with me.

Joey wrote recently about some old Unix hardware he bought.  Those were certainly sweet machines for their time.  Every company—Sun, HP, NeXT, SGI, etc.—produced machines with its own style.  PC hardware at the time was all the same: boxy off-white towers and boxy off-white desktops, all with noisy fans and lots of screws you had to take out to get at anything.  Nowadays PCs are starting to have some personality and user-friendliness, but they still don’t match up to those Unix boxes that were recognizable from one glance.

Once upon a time, I happened to acquire four HP Apollo systems.  With 33mhz processors and 48MB of memory, they competed pretty well when PCs were only 5-10 times that fast, but eventually I had to admit they’d become doorstops and get rid of them.  I kept them longer than really made sense, because they came with 21-inch monitors, at a time when a new 21-inch PC monitor cost thousands of dollars.  They just didn’t have the power anymore to run modern software on those big screens.  Still, it was cool having four of them in a Domain ring, all recognizing each other and sharing data in an odd system like Apollo Domain OS.

Joey’s right about the old HP Laserjet printers too; they’re workhorses.  My Laserjet 5MP is at least 10 years old and going strong.  Not that it gets used much; I think I’ve only bought four toner cartridges in that time.  It been powered up all that time, though, and it’s outlasted several PCs, mice, UPSes, and other hardware.  HP really built things right back then.

I never liked sauerkraut as a kid; but somewhere along the line my taste buds grew up, and I started liking a lot of those things that used to seem too strong, like kraut, mustard, or sharp cheeses. Like most things, however, kraut is better when you make it yourself. We didn’t grow any cabbages this year, but I decided to make some anyway. Call it practice for next year.

It’s extremely simple to do. All you need is cabbage, a good quality salt (preferably sea salt), and canning jars. The canning jars make it much easier than the old crock method. Caraway seeds are common, but optional.

Chop the cabbage with a cole slaw cutter or food processor. Some people like larger chunks and some like a finer texture, so use your own judgment. Put the shredded cabbage in a large bowl, with enough extra room to toss it a bit with your hands. Add two teaspoons of salt for every pound of cabbage. Optionally, add a teaspoon of caraway seeds per pound of cabbage. Stir this all up, then pack it tightly into canning jars, leaving at least an inch of head-space at the top. Pack it down with a wooden spoon or something, to remove most of the air space.

When you have all the mixture packed into jars, add enough filtered water to cover the cabbage. Clean off the tops and threads of the jars with a wet paper towel or rag, and screw on the tops. Don’t screw them down tightly, so the gases created by the fermentation can escape. Sit the jars in in a tray or some container that’ll catch any liquid which squeezes out. Put them away, preferably somewhere dark and room temperature. Within a few days, it will be fermented and can be eaten, but will keep for months and continue to improve in taste. If anything goes wrong, it’ll get a truly nasty odor; throw it out if that happens.

When you’re ready to use it, one of my favorites is to simmer some Cajun bratwurst slowly until cooked through, and then add a jar of kraut to them and continue cooking while the flavors merge. If I don’t have Cajun brats, I use ordinary brats and add plenty of cayenne pepper to the kraut. Enjoy!

Here are some pictures from last weekend, courtesy of Paul.

The new main altar on Oct. 8.

The gold dome above the altar, which I think will hold the crucifix.

One of the stained-glass windows, Christ teaching in the temple.

The schedule for Masses at Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Quincy, IL, has been released. Latin Masses begin on November 9th, after the arrival of Fr. Arnaud Devillers of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Sunday Masses will be at 8:00am (Low Mass) and 11:00am (High Mass), with coffee and doughnuts after the 11:00 Mass. Low Mass on weekdays will be at 12:10pm.  (Get directions.)

If you are interested, but have never been to a Latin Mass and don’t know what to expect, please ask questions in the comments, and I’ll try to answer or pass them along to someone who can.  It’s not that complicated, but there might be a few things it would help to know up front.  FAQ #1: No, you don’t need to actually know Latin.  Missals are provided with English translations of all the prayers.  (If you’re now asking, “Then what’s the point of using Latin anyway?” I’ll answer that in another post.)

We’ll be setting up a web site for St. Rose some time after Fr. Devillers arrives, so there should be a lot more information there when it’s ready.  In the meantime, I’ll keep updating here.

Correction: The High Mass on Sundays has been moved from 10:00 to 11:00am, to allow more time for people driving long distances.

Rating:

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: if profanity in movies bothers you, don’t watch this one. According to the director’s commentary, there are over 200 swear words in the movie, to the point where it’s almost a distraction early on. I’m not sure what the point of that was, since the book doesn’t have nearly that many, and books don’t have to go before rating boards. This is definitely not one for the whole family to watch.

Which brings me to my main problem with the movie: I’ve read the book. It’s the fourth book in a series by Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River. The five books follow private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, and they’re some of my favorite suspense/mystery novels. Not many authors can tell stories like these while simultaneously exploring their characters to the depth that Lehane does. One who does a similar job is Stephen R. Donaldson, but that’s another review.

I know it’s not fair to blame a movie for not having everything the book has, or for being less complex, so I’m trying not to do that. I know if you tried to faithfully reproduce these books on film, you’d need several hours (which is why I think most novels should be TV miniseries, not feature films). But some things about the characters still bothered me.

Casey Affleck, who plays Patrick, is just too young and pretty. In the books, Patrick is regularly beaten up or shot. He’s 35-40 years old, and feeling the aches and pains of a life with too many hard knocks. (Lehane even said he took a break from writing about Patrick and Angie when he looked back at the books and saw how much of a beating he’d been giving them, and decided they deserved a break.) Affleck does a good acting job, but it’s a different character; I don’t think he ever even gets a split lip.

Angela is even worse. In the books, although we see the story through Patrick’s eyes, he and Angela are very much equal partners, and she’s saved his bacon as often as the reverse. Here, although Michelle Monaghan looks pretty much exactly like Angie looked in my head, she’s practically a mouse except for a couple scenes. She mostly just tails along with Patrick, and when they have their big disagreement at the end, it comes out of nowhere. (Starting with the fourth book really hurts here, because there’s no history to explain where they’re coming from.) Looking at the reviews, some people didn’t even know if she was Patrick’s wife, assistant, or what. That character was a major disappointment in the way it was written.

Almost as disappointing is Bubba. Lehane describes him as “six feet four inches, 235 pounds of raw adrenaline and disassociated anger. And he’d shoot anyone who blinked at [Patrick] the wrong way.” Movie Bubba is a fat kid who shows some menace, but nowhere near the barely controlled mayhem of the real Bubba. He’s a fairly standard Hollywood drug dealer, and we never get any indication of the way he feels about Patrick and Angie. No time for that, I suppose.

So if you want a great story, with deeply drawn characters who go through the wringer, get the books, starting with A Drink Before the War. Having said that, the movie is pretty good in its own right. The crime plot is scaled way back, and isn’t any easier to understand for being simpler, but it’s still suspenseful and entertaining. The way it was shot in Boston with a lot of locals as extras gives it a “real” feel that serves the story well. I’m not usually a person who notices direction unless it’s bad, but I think Ben Affleck did a good job here.

I like Casey’s voice-overs; his voice matches the character better than his looks. Amy Ryan is good as the mother of the kidnapped girl, although I was surprised to see she was nominated for an Oscar for mostly acting stoned and crying a lot. Her character is more likable here than in the book, but she’s still easy to loathe, which is critical.

The real star might be Ed Harris, who plays his character to the hilt. He’s electrifying every time he’s on screen. It’s too bad that some of the plot simplification required scaling back his character, so his motivation ends up being much simpler than it was originally, but it’s still a great performance. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bad performance from him.

I’m giving it three stars, for people who can take the profanity. It might deserve more than that, but it’s hard for me to see past how much better it could have been, if they’d been more faithful in reproducing the characters, especially Angie and Bubba. Maybe someday someone will do the series right, starting at the beginning and using TV to accommodate the full stories. Until then, this is a serviceable take on it.

Some more pictures, exteriors this time.

Next time, lots of stained glass windows!