Molly

I met Molly Ivins in 1992 and she was already famous. It was a couple of days before the election, and everyone knew Bill Clinton was going to win, and Molly was having a bourbon with a bunch of other reporters at the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock. She was really tall and she had shocking red hair and she looked like she could kick your ass if she wanted. And she was funny. Lord, was she funny.

She also was a liberal-progressive, wrote for all of the really lefty magazines, but her humor was so irresistible that Creators Syndicate picked her up for general newspaper use — something that didn’t happen much to liberals then and still doesn’t happen much today.

She was a Texan, and was perhaps the world’s best skewerer of all politicians with a last name of Bush, and journalism would be a whole lot better off if it had more people with her passion, no matter what their ideology.

Molly Ivins died this afternoon. She was 62 and had been fighting breast cancer for years. You can read her last column here and a tribute from her editor here.

Back to Memphis

I lived in Memphis for less than a year in 1990. I loved it there and if I hadn’t gotten a job offer out of the blue that I just couldn’t turn down, I’d probably still be there today.

One of the things that struck me about Memphis was the enormous depth of musical talent…the crappiest hellhole bar would have musical talent that you couldn’t hope to hear in a lot of towns. I was reminded of that when The Show came to town, and Roy Head‘s kid sang his ass off, and so did a couple of other people, and I predict you’ll be hearing about a few of them very soon.

The vista is ugly from here

Windows Vista is a new tech toy, and I like new tech toys, so I’ve been debating over when I’m going to upgrade. My home machine should have plenty of muscle: A dual-core processor, two gigs of memory, a quarter-terabyte hard drive with lots of free space, a relatively new video card with 250 megs on-board memory, and so on.

But installing a new OS is fraught with imminent peril, and I’ve got some persnickety pieces of hardware (including a draft-N wireless card), so I’ve wondered about whether this is such a good idea. No problem: Microsoft has written some software it’s titled ‘Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor,’ that is supposed to probe my system and let me know of any potential pitfalls it finds.

So: Yesterday, I run the adviser. It promptly crashes. I unload the antivirus and anti-spyware programs. It still crashes. I take out the media server software running in the background. The crashing continues.

If my computer won’t even run the adviser, how am I supposed to feel about the software? Insecure, that’s how. I’m going to wait a while before I upgrade.

Goodbye Stardust

The Stardust, the hotel where I got my first big Vegas gambling win back in 1994 (a few hundred bucks playing screaming-hot nickle blackjack), is being torn down. Here’s the ‘before’:

…and here’s the ‘after’:

It’s part of the endless ‘progress’ in Vegas, although I hate to see it go. The ‘Dust had cheap gambling, good craps, some real characters and Wayne Newton in the showroom. That’s all gone now.

Wish you were here

I have gotten the following e-mail about a half-dozen times this week from various work colleagues:

COME HOME. DON’T EVER LEAVE AGAIN.

Meanwhile, I absorb a little more warmth — although today’s high is expected to be a ‘cold’ 62 degrees — while taking classes in the most Zen-like learning environment I’ve ever experienced. Yeah, I’m just aching to go back to work.