Song of the Day

The other night I tuned into the live-stream of U2's Rose Bowl concert, and I was surprised when I couldn't really tear myself away. I haven't been a hard-core U2 fan for years, and I haven't even listened to their last album. But watching the concert rekindled some of my old affection, and I've been replaying my U2 CDs and checking out some of their music videos online. I've even discovered some videos I've never seen before for some older tunes. And thanks to a number of uploaded concert videos of dubious quality, I've learned that on this tour they've started playing two songs they've never played before in concert: Electrical Storm and Your Blue Room --- both favourites of mine. I'm starting to think I might need to go see them when they come, even though I'm not usually a fan of arena shows.

Anyway, that was a long preamble for just this one old song (no video, since I like the album version so much):

a presidency in photos

I just lost the last half of my evening (how?) reading through this long post on Errol Morris' blog for the New York Times that I found via the wonderful tool of "Shared Items" in Google Reader. In it, Errol Morris asks the head photo editors of AFP, AP, and Reuters to share what they feel are the representative or iconic photos of George W. Bush's presidency, with commentary. From there I hopped over to the Reuters Photographers blog, where a number of their Washington photographers have personal entries to the same effect.

Bush hearing the news of the World Trade Center plane crashes from his Chief of Staff (AFP).

The Political Compass

While surfing a fellow Tweeter's blog, I found a link to a great site. The Political Compass explains itself as "a case of a journalist and an academic working on the inadequacies of simple left-right political identities." It's great --- a political site with scholarly understanding, historical accuracy, AND Canadian spelling! Click here to go take their questionnaire.

Here's where I fell on their spectrum:

Clockwise from the top right (Authoritarianism), it makes sense to think of the points of the cross as Fascism, Neo-Liberalism, Anarchism, and Communism. The vertical axis is the social dimension, the horizontal axis is the economic scale.

Here's another chart they have of international contemporary leaders:

Neoliberalism, and the rise of curtailed civil liberties, is responsible for the fact that most major political parties in North America would fall into the upper right quadrant. The site also plots the major parties in the Canadian elections of 2005 and 2008 --- and it's interesting to see how they've shifted.