Philip Fibiger

There’s a site called songfight.com where each week, a song title is posted, and bands have a week or two to compose a song with that title, and submit it to the fight. They’re posted to the site and voted on by the readers of the site. sometimes they’re mediocre, often heavy on the whiny-male-singer-songwriter genre, but sometimes they’re spectacular. There was one entry (that won) by a pair of engineers at Be. Paul played with them when he worked at Be. The song title was Standing In The Death Car, and it’s one of the most fun pop songs i’ve ever heard. You can grab the song here.
I heard the bolts start to rattle, the trestles start to shake
I saw the coaster operator, he was reachin’ for the brake…
sixty feet per second, we disconnected from the loop-de-loop

I feel culturally illiterate. I went and tried out for Jeopardy today. There were about 35 people there taking the test, overwhelmingly male. The test is 50 short answer questions, the questions are displayed on the screen for 8 seconds, and then they go onto the next one. I feel dumb about geography and theater (operas and musicals). I think I probably got between 25 and 30 questions right, you need 35+ to pass. Out of the 35 who took the test, 4 passed and got to play in the video-taped mock game. One of the 4 who passed was a guy sitting near me named Ron Ostrow. While they were grading the tests, we were all talking about the answers..he said ‘i was in a movie called Quiz Show, this one was one of the main plot points’ talking about King Baudouin, and he couldn’t remember where he was from (Belgium, someone else knew). Anyway, I really thought i recognized him, but didn’t know from where. I went home to look up who he played in quiz show..someone inconsequential..but then i realized where i recognized him from. he played Will on Sports Night, which we’ve been watching reruns of on Comedy Central. My first brush with celebrity in Los Angeles.

I often have a pretty fundamental disagreement with the politics of the economist, but I think that this article about the possibility of a war with afghanistan, and the possible gains/losses, is really interesting. I think that these sentences from the article really sum up how I feel about the possibility of war with afghanistan: bombing Afghanistan would probably be both unproductive and unpalatable. One of the poorest countries on earth, it has been battered by 22 years of devastating warfare. It might be possible to bomb a war-torn ruin of a country back into the Stone Age. It would be hard, however, to see the point.
To interject a little news about my life into these last few posts, a couple days before this tragedy in New York and Washington, there was an earthquake in los angeles, with the epicenter about 4 miles from our apartment. It was a 4.2 on the richter scale, and occured about 2 and a half miles under the surface of the earth, which is pretty shallow. I was sitting at my desk working at the time, and it felt like an 18 wheeler had crashed into our apartment building. The quake only lasted 10 seconds or so, but it was pretty intense. Nothing was damaged, but it was the most powerful earthquake in the Los Angeles basin since the 1994 earthquake in Northridge.
We’ve done a bunch of cool stuff in LA as well. We went to see belle & sebastian at the wiltern theater, saw a taping of the ellen show, and then just yesterday went to a free preview screening of riding in cars with boys, a new drew barrymore film. and we were paid 10 bucks each to be in a focus group for a half hour afterward. Paid to see a free movie and talk about it. I should do this more often.

it’s sort of incredible to think that life just goes on after yesterday, but being distanced by about 3,000 miles and 3 time zones, it really does feel that way. the death toll seems like it will be as staggering as i had feared, with thousands dead in each of the two towers, as well as up to another thousand dead between the airplanes and the pentagon. the racism and bigotry of this country is certainly rearing its ugly head right now, and it just knots my stomach. andy mentioned something on irc about arab children getting beaten up at school, and i read a report of gunfire directed at a mosque in texas..i fear that it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
slate has a well thought out essay on the possible repercussions of retaliation. it’s definitely worth reading. i also found this set of photographs of the disaster, which i thought were very beautiful, in spite of the dark subject matter.

today has been a pretty scary and unbelievable day. when I sat down to work at 8:45 (which was almost noon on the east coast), i started reading my email. I started hitting a series of messages with titles like ‘world trade center….1/2 gone‘. now, at 8:45, my brain was barely able to comprehend this. I tried to find a reliable news feed on the internet, but most sites were swamped, and ended up turning on the television.
the scope of this act of terrorism is almost too much to deal with. oklahoma city was organized, but really it was half a dozen militia members who managed to go out and rent a ryder truck. here we’re talking about simulatenously hijacking 4 jumbo jets and piloting them. in addition to the groups that actually hijacked the planes, there had to be dozens of support people and enormous amounts of money to pull this off..and who’s to say that it’s not going to happen again tomorrow, next month, next year? emily said earlier today, “I don’t understand what the terrorists think that they’re going to gain. They killed an enormous number of innocent civilians, and as a result, we’re going to bomb the shit out of them.” while neither of us agree that this is necessarily a good thing, it seems pretty likely that the US is going to retaliate, and it’s not going to be good news for the group or country responsible.
as scary as the though of continued terrorism against the united states is, the repercussions of these events are going to be even worse. i think that we’ll see a restriction of personal freedoms in the united states..in airports, travel, beefing up survelliance on the internet, things like that. i’m also worried about the reaction toward arabs in the united states. even if this attack wasn’t planned by osama bin-ladin, i think that US anti-arab sentiment will grow. if the yahoo message boards i browsed through this afternoon, with their racial epithets and calls for retaliation/isolationism are any indication of public sentiment, it’s going to be a rough couple of months. i hope that everyone i know in new york city is safe and healthy.
here are a couple of interesting discussions/articles about these events:
cnn had good coverage throughout the day
a discussion of today’s events on metafilter
the discussion of the events on slashdot
the frontline report on osama bin-ladin

today emily and i went to a taping of the tonight show. our friend steve had picked up free tickets at universal studios, and couldn’t go because he had to work..so we waited in line in the sun for an hour and a half, and then went to the taping. the guests were mark walhberg, a comedian by the name of dane cook, and snoop dogg was the musical guest. it was fun, definitely a worthwhile way to blow a few hours. who knows, maybe we even ended up on tv.