Russell Shaw is an idiot.

Please excuse this uncharacteristic, Atrios-style post. Sometimes it just needs to be said.

I try to stick to politics in this blog, since that's pretty much what we're all here for. Josh has given us a great, uncluttered place to speak our minds and I try not to abuse the privilege. But this particular entry is going to be a little different.

This is going to be a pretty dark trip; you may not want to take it. Fair warning. My apologies if you find it inappropriate or simply too dark to handle.

And yet, this is a story of hope. It's a story of sneering at the dark. It's a story of the indefatigable human spirit.

Okay, if you're still interested, read on below the fold. You've been warned.

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First off, there's nothing wrong with me. I wish it was me. It's my 18-year-old son. He was diagnosed with a virulent form of abdominal cancer the same week of the tsunami, in December 2004. Since then we have gone through unimaginable times of despair, hope and defeat, seeing the cancer go into remission, having it come back immediately, going back into the hospital. At this point he is receiving heavy radiation and chemotherapy at the same time, and it is taking a heavy toll on his young body.

He has had to watch these last few weeks as all his friends pack up to go to college. He's sitting in a very, very familiar hospital room in the pediatric cancer ward while his friends are off to college, blossoming into their adult lives.

I'm not going to lie to you. It's been nearly two years of a complete fucking nightmare, and it's not nearly over yet.

But oddly enough, this is a story of rising above all that. This is a story of hope. This is a story of incredible courage and a very real kind of victory.

My son and oldest daughter are very talented musicians and songwriters. Throughout the last year, a typical week would be my son spending Monday through Thursday or so in the hospital, coming home and recovering for a day, then off to play at one of the local coffee houses with his sister. They've achieved a certain amount of local success and have quite a loyal following.

They have used my little recording studio to produce a 15-song CD over the last two months. And no, I'm not providing a link; that isn't what this is about. What this is about is the fact that a boy who would have every right to be suicidally depressed never refers to his cancer. He races home from the hospital to spend hours and hours tweaking the songs, recording new parts, getting his sister's vocals just perfect.

When I see him in the hospital - which is every single day he's there - if he feels well enough to move, he's got his laptop open, working on their website, learning copyright law, and - perhaps most amazing of all - forming a local co-op of musicians to help them get their songs recorded.

Cancer? He has no time for it. He has a music career to get off the ground.

Music has been a friend to me from an early age. It has helped me get through some pretty rough times in my life. Right now, however, I feel silenced; I feel that the muse has left, maybe forever. Certainly until this nightmare is over. There is just no song in my heart right now.

But that's the burden of any parent with a sick child. The amazing thing - and what I'm terribly, terribly grateful for - is that music has been there for him during the most awful time in his young life.

It's a lesson for all of us. Someone asked me the other day if I was scared about something-or-other unrelated thing. Scared? I have looked into something far scarier than the face of personal death. Nothing on Earth could frighten me now.

That's something my son has taught me. I'm still trying to learn the other lesson: that human beings are, at the core, undefeatable.

(Crossposted at DemProgress)

I'm sure I'm not the only person to get this admittedly evil idea, but I haven't seen anyone blog about it yet.

So Lieberman has a four-point advantage over Lamont and Schlesinger is at... what? 4%? So... all we have to do to ensure Lamont's victory is bump Schlesinger's numbers up the tiniest, tiniest bit, stealing Republican votes from Lieberman?

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Too Machiavellian for you? Then get off the stage. As Ford Prefect said, "They care, we don't. They win."

Who can do this? Who can organize a get out the vote campaign for Schlesinger? It could work, you know. I'll feel guilty about it later.

A little break from politics, if you don't mind.

If you read Bob Dylan's rant about modern music today, he sounds unhinged. He isn't; he just isn't describing what he means very well, or it went over the reporter's head and didn't get on paper.

To understand what he means, you need to know what a "compressor" is. (Bear with me here.) In the audio world, a compressor is a device that takes incoming audio above a settable threshhold and mashes its dynamic range, again to a selectable extent. It is useful for making sure a singer's high notes aren't ten times louder than her low ones, and in many other ways, from getting tight drums to punchy bass to overdriven guitar.

Turn the "ratio" way up, and the sound really starts getting mashed together. You would recognize it immediately: "Oh, now it sounds like a radio". This is because radio traditionally had a limited signal-to-noise ratio, and the louder you could mash everything together, the more clearly everything could be heard. So compressors have always been used at radio stations for this purpose.

Compress things far enough and they actually sound "louder" to the ear; everything is squished into a very narrow dynamic range, all loud. In the last couple of decades it has become fashionable during the mastering process to heavily compress the final product, for what reasons who can say, because it sounds like crap, just as Dylan says. He hears the unmastered version in the studio, then compares it to the CD which is sonically squished, and rightly hates the sound - there's "sound all over it", as he says.

You read that right - producers purposely defeat the dynamic range made possible by CDs. In fact, CDs today in general have less dynamic range than vinyl albums did, for just this reason.

Now I am guessing here, but I'd lay odds that when Dylan is griping about the sound, this is what he means.

So now you know why your CDs with their pristine signal-to-noise ratio sound like crap.

(Crossposted at DemProgress)

Sometimes in the dense political landscape, choices are difficult to make. Who really is the best Democrat? Who is the better person? Who would I want sitting at my table over Sunday dinner? Who's the good guy?

Sometimes, the choices make themselves, based not on the issues but who a candidate chooses to surround himself with (sorry, Dan), the tone he takes, and the kind of people who support him. In other words, sometimes I am not sure who I should be for, but I always damn sure know the kind of people I'm against.

...Oh, what's the use.