UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I have to admit it, I’m a glutton for punishment. While I may not be able to tolerate watching the narcissistic twentysomething drivel that’s on MTV 25 hours a day (what happened to music videos?), I do seem to be strangely drawn to that which I loathe in the media. It’s kind of like holding your hand over a burning candle or eating a habañero pepper: an endurance test. So occasionally I’ll turn on Fox News or flip the car radio over to the blowhards on KTLK, and just see how long I can stand it.

Such is the case with Katherine Kersten, a “writer” for the Minneapolis StarTribune, whose “column covers a range of topics reflecting her experiences and interests, with a special emphasis on American culture, politics, religion, family life and education” according to her bio blurb.

What are her qualifications for twice-weekly space in the state’s most widely circulated newspaper? Beats the hell out of me, but clearly I’m not the only person who’s asking the question…

1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6

And that’s just out of the first 10 results that came back on Google. (Of the other four, two were official Strib pages, one was an article she wrote for that bastion of fair and balanced journalism, the Wall Street Journal, and the other was for an anti-public education think tank.)

Suffice to say, Kersten’s empty-headed regurgitation of every imaginable right-wing talking point is scarcely worth dissecting, but that leaves unanswered the greater question of what possible qualification she can have for this job. Perhaps it’s just a sad reflection of the state of journalism in the U.S. today that so little attention is paid to getting the facts, as long as “both sides” (yes, there are always two—and only two—cut-and-dried sides to every possible issue) get their equal share of airtime and/or column inches.

And, of course, since the left has been and continues to be grossly over-represented in the media (just ask Rush Limbaugh… or Sean Hannity… or Bill O’Reilly… or— hmm…), it is now every TV, radio station and newspaper’s duty to graciously cede as much time and space as possible to any random Joe or Jane Redstate who has a larynx or basic typing skills.

After a little more digging to try to find any hint of Katherine Kersten’s journalistic credentials—specifically, changing my Google search from Katherine Kersten to "Katherine Kersten" biography—I came across this blog. (Yes, it appears that just about the only place online where her existence is acknowledged, besides at the Strib’s own site, is on blogs complaining about her appalling Strib column.) I’m still not any closer to her résumé, but I thought this blog was worth linking to anyway. It’s not easy to nail down exactly where this writer stands politically; unlike Kersten’s hackwork (and probably mine as well, but I’m not on the payroll of a major newspaper) his writing seems to be well-informed and reasoned, and removed enough from direct opinionated rant to allow the reader to form his or her own opinion.

Well, we have this unbiased source (check the URL), which identifies her impressively as such: “Katherine Kersten is Director of E-Pluribus and Distinguished Senior Fellow for Cultural Studies at Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.”

Hmm… fascinating. I’m not really sure what “Director of E-Pluribus” means (or even might possibly mean), and I also don’t know what it takes to become a “Distinguished Senior Fellow for Cultural Studies” at a think tank no one I know has ever heard of, even though it’s based right here in town, but I’ve just found a nice and tidy list of companies to boycott.

I harbor a secret fantasy: I truly want to believe that Katherine Kersten is part of the same realm of subversively parodic entertainment as the Weekly World News or professional wrestling. Perhaps she really belongs with the likes of Phil Hendrie (or to a less covert extent, Stephen Colbert). Maybe I’m just taking her too seriously; I’m not in on the joke. But sadly, I don’t think it’s a joke. Or if it is, it’s not a very good one.

The quest for truth continues. If anyone out there happens to know what Katherine Kersten did prior to writing for the Strib, particularly anything that might actually qualify her to write for the Strib, please let me know!

Scott Anderson is Director in Extremis and Distinguished Senior Fellow for Something Something Blah Blah Blah at Center of the Known Universe, a wondrous place that only he knows about.

I’m working on another song for my new CD. This one’s in the bluesy/funky vein, with a working title of “Bluesy Groovesy.” (Hey, it’s only a working title.)

I realized while listening back to this that it’s actually somewhat reminiscent of latter-day Red Hot Chili Peppers. With a sucky bass player. :P

This is just the basic track right now… it definitely needs something over the top… to, uh… put it over the top.

Update March 2, 2007: I’m now up to version 0.6; more details are on the CD page. Still needs some keyboards and maybe some sax or other instruments but I’m waiting for my MIDI controller keyboard to arrive (which should be today if the snow doesn’t keep the FedEx truck away again… they gave up on trying to make the delivery yesterday; Tom Hanks would not be happy).

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

The first release candidate (version 1.2) of “Morgantown Expressway” is ready. I have a rather humorous track of my almost-4-year-old son rambling on about light sabers and Pokémon, which he did directly after sitting in while I recorded the saxophone parts, and I’m still debating whether to include it in the final mix or not. Here, it is not.

Read more about the new album here.

Update February 24, 2007: I’ve tweaked the mix a bit; here’s version 1.4, which I think is going to be the final version that will make it onto the album.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!

Alas, the woes of using open source software rear their heads. WordPress abounds with undocumented, or at least very poorly documented, features.

My dilemma: the default function for displaying a list of page links (used on this site to populate the Points of Interest panel in the sidebar) sorts links alphabetically, and there isn’t any obvious way to make it sort by the database’s menu_order field, which logically, to me at least, should be the default especially given that this is how they’re sorted in the admin tool.

Finding little help in the documentation or by my usual means (Google), I decided it couldn’t be done without modification. In my previous installation of WordPress I actually modified the core code itself to change the sort order, but when I upgraded to version 2.1.1 today, it overwrote that change. This time I decided to try the plug-in approach, so my changes would actually stick through version changes, and so I could get familiar with the powerful but arcane plug-in system WordPress uses for extensibility.

After poking around futilely trying to get my plug-in to work (to the point where it was sorting all of my blog posts the way I wanted the pages to be, but not the page list), I stumbled upon a relevant post in the WordPress forums, where a snide jab at “theme designers” (which seemed to be such a broad swipe that it included me) happened to mention an input parameter in the function that calls the page list!

Silly me… the system has built right in a very simple way to sort the list by whatever field you want, and all you have to do is pass in the right parameters in your theme files. The change couldn’t have been simpler… but learning that it was possible certainly could have!