The Senate’s vote to turn the aid to Iraq into loans is being spun as part of the Bush Junta’s evil plot, but who actually voted for it? Mostly Democrats.

I guess it’s okay when they’re in it for the oil money.

I think this may be the most entertaining change in the iTunes Music Store: the full integration of audiobooks gives you Music To Listen To Ann Coulter By.

Herbie Hancock, on Apple.

Herbie Hancock, in the iTunes Music Store.

The interview is interesting reading (“I was using it [OS X] before other musicians were using it.” and “I hate OS 9 (laughter). I hate going back to that.”), but what I really like is the commentary on the “celebrity playlist.” Sheryl Crow has a bland paragraph that was probably written by her publicist, but Hancock explains in detail why each of the tracks is interesting and significant (sometimes to him, sometimes to the world). Note to Apple: Hancock’s commentary sells, Crow’s doesn’t.

[and if you’re a Windows user who hasn’t installed iTunes yet, Great Googlimoogli, what are you waiting for? It’s not as fast as it is on a Mac, but all of the features are there, including Rendezvous music sharing.]

Update: After purchasing Hancock’s picks, I’d say that I like everything except Missy Elliot’s Slide. Miles Davis’ 27-minute Bitches Brew starts off rather … “non-musical” … for my tastes, but picks up several minutes in. Elliot I just don’t get; Hancock sees something in her music that separates it from typical posturing {c,}rap, but all I hear is the surface, and it’s so grating that I can’t get past it to look for what he found. Obviously I won’t be buying her recommended playlist.

Pardon the shameless cheerleading, but I finally got around to hooking up my new film scanner (Minolta Dimage Scan Multi PRO), and it’s just too cool for words. These are the raw scans with the default settings; no Levels or Curves, no Unsharp Mask, just crop and resize (in iPhoto, no less; I didn’t even bother loading them into Photoshop). If a few quick snapshots at the zoo come out looking this good with no effort, I can’t wait to pull out the good stuff.

Even better, this was done on my shiny new 15” PowerBook under the last Panther beta, using Minolta’s standalone scanning app. 100% native OS X goodness, fully compatible with the latest version of the OS.

People familiar with my model photos will know how long I’ve been coddling my unstable and often-stubborn Nikon LS-2000. Five times into the shop, and it’s still a pain in the ass to work with. Worse, it’s SCSI, and while I could have gotten it to work when I migrated my graphics apps from a PC to a modern Mac, it would have been a hassle. The Minolta is a true plug-and-play FireWire device that I can turn on whenever I need to without rebooting.

Best of all, it’s a multi-format scanner, so I can finally make high-resolution scans of all the medium-format film I’ve been shooting. I’m doing some studio shoots next time I go down to LA, and I’m really looking forward to pulling out the RB-67.

update: Okay, it has one stupid feature. Like other film scanners, it has a locking screw that holds the head in place when you transport it. The only documented way to move the head to the lockable position is to use the supplied software (which would really suck if you packed up your office in the wrong order). You will search in vain for a button or menu item in the software that says “lock the optics”; you do it by hitting Ctrl-Shift-L on Windows, or Command-Shift-L on a Mac.

If this is a quagmire, can someone please mire some quags in California? Soon? Pretty please?

It was a pleasant three-quarter-mile walk to my neighborhood polling station, and I’m delighted to report that my chad-cutter performed perfectly. If all of the other dangerously obsolete voting machines perform as well as mine did, and people actually follow the instructions on the ballot, there will be no excuse for a Florida-style clusterfuck.

Win or lose, though, I’ll bet $20 that the mostly-anonymous accusations made against Schwarzenegger will be quickly forgotten, even by the obviously-biased LA Times. Because nobody’s actually interested in whether he did those things or not; they were just convenient dirt.

I didn’t need much coaxing on the first part; it’s been obvious for a long time that Gray Davis is no friend to California citizens, and his recent determination to screw things up so badly that nobody can fix them was just icing on the cake.

Who to vote for was trickier. McClintock has a few gotchas, but he’s otherwise palatable. Unfortunately, he simply can’t win. Bustamonte’s pandering to the Hispanic community is most clearly demonstrated by his refusal to make even a token effort to distance himself from his racist ties. Most of the rest are in it just for the cheap publicity, and have nothing to offer a local school board, much less an entire state.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of voting for Georgy. She’s a little too fond of Clinton for my tastes, and she’d be eaten alive in office, but a strong showing would have made a few pros sweat about their habit of ignoring the tech community. Not gonna happen now, though.

In the end, what pushed me toward Arnold was the coordinated media smear campaign. He’s been in the public eye forever, and the worst dirt they can dig up is a handful of bald-faced lies (quickly disproven) and unsupported allegations of “groping”? That makes him one of the cleanest politicians in the country.

Oh, and for the record, it’ll be a ‘Yes’ on 53 and 54, too. Infrastructure is one of the few legitimate uses of tax money, and diverting it from other, “social” programs is a good thing. And since the racial data that would be banned by 54 is often used to fund some of those other programs…

The murder rate in the US is now the lowest it’s been in 40 years. It would be nice to think that it has something to do with the thousands of new gun-control laws that have been passed in that time, but sadly there’s no supporting evidence for that.

Which shouldn’t be surprising, since everyone in the business knows that most murders are committed by people with a history of violent crime, and career criminals aren’t in the habit of obeying laws. That’s sort of why we call them “criminals,” after all.

[note the sudden switch between rates and absolute numbers in the referenced article, without mentioning the significant increase in population over the periods compared. Even when the news is good, it’s gotta getta spin…]