Potpourri

A roundup of various things:

• Over the weekend, I wrote out a check to the American Civil Liberties Union, you know, the one that Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese called a "criminals' lobby", and which George Bush lambasted Mike Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential campaign for being a "card-carrying member" of. I hope to be a card-carrying member myself soon, having made my contribution. The ACLU is best-known for defending the Constitutional notions of free speech and separate of church and state, and I generally think that they do a fine job, as I think these are the cornerstones of much that is good in our society. I should have contributed years ago.

  I also want to send a donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund sometime soon.

• I finally received my "signing bonus" for joining Apple. Basically, this was a concession they made when I was hired since it seemed difficult for them to bump up my salary compared to people in comparable positions. It took a while for it to get processed; I think it got lost in the bureaucracy. But it finally worked out.

• Speaking of Apple, with the announcement of the new G4s machines, our stock has shot up yet again, and closed over 70, which I believe is an all-time high. What's amazing about this is not just that it's gone up so much (it's doubled since I started), and not just that it has a lot of potential to keep going up, but that it underscores just how poor management was around here two-to-three years ago, when stock was well under 20. (I think it sunk to 10 shortly after the NeXT acquisition, when it was unclear what would happen.) While there's been a lot of inspiration in our products lately, they haven't quite changed the world; I think a lot of the rise has just been because Wall Street realized that Apple has a plan and is following through on it. That it's apparently a good plan is just frosting.

• I've been watching Homicide tapes again, working through the sixth season. I just watched the episode in which Chief M.E. Julianna Cox is written out, due to a moral dilemma that results in her being fired. It was a strange episode, seemingly with two meaty investigations at the start, but one turned wacky and the other was just a pretext for Cox's dismissal. Pity.

• Tonight I watched the latest and final episode of Crusade, "Each Night I Dream of Home", which is about the moral issues involving in investigating the Drakh virus, and has a few old friends from Babylon 5 show up (though not the one I thought when a Warlock-class destroyer appears at the beginning). It's okay, but not outstanding. Seemed to clearly be set-up for later episodes, but was rendered moot by (1) some of the episodes which occurred before these last five, which were actually filed first, and (2) the fact that there won't be any later episodes.

  A pity, the series was starting to get good. But, I guess the chances that it will ever be revived are very small. Meanwhile, Straczynski is reportedly working on a new SF TV series, and he's also doing his Rising Stars comic book...

• Dorothy Rothschild tipped me off to Imagine Radio, which looks potentially cool, but I've been having trouble getting it to work; at work it doesn't seem to recognize my RealAudio player. Hmm.

• I brushed the cats' teeth tonight, which they needed, I think. They hated it, though; I had to hold them in weird positions to keep them from squirming away. Newton liked the toothpaste but hates the brushing. I brushed their fur some later on, which they liked, though Jefferson (as I think I've said) gets bored or annoyed with the brush after a while.

• Not sure what I'll do this weekend, other than see movies. I'm thinking of driving up the coast to see the seashore, and end up in San Francisco for a day. Maybe jot down some comic and book store to check out.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)