Marching Forth around March Fourth
Posted on:: February 10th, 2003
Kevin Jones writes to a private list:
Talked with a friend last night who is business manager of chanticleer, an acapella men’s singing group, multiple grammy winner, etc. the March 4 event they were scheduled to sing for at the White House; presentation of congressional medals to jessie norman and others, has been cancelled. Their contact at the national endowment of the arts told him that all cultural and social events at the White House “in that window” had been cancelled.
Inference drawn: bush will be in the war room and they don’t want to appear to be sipping champagne while …..
(Quoted with permission.)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I saw the same point made elsewhere, and had two (only two?) cynical thoughts:
1) The Bush administration is determined to preserve the facade of unanimity around the upcoming war–thus the cancellation of cultural events at the White House. God only knows how many bulletproof windows Jessye Norman could shatter should she hit one long high note of protest and hold it.
2) The Bush administration has already successfully parlayed the poetry symposium flap to paint war opponents as a bunch of lily-livered eggheads, and now has no need for further cultural events for the duration.
I incline toward explanation number 1–number 2 is too complex.
By the way, the traditional fare is port and cigars in the war room.
You may now thank me for my careful prosthesis.
Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we’re using the star operator, and noting that this variable we’re working with is a pointer. If we didn’t, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.