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Okay, now they're just plain making shit up...the TSA is now claiming that terrorists are staging "dry runs" of airplane terror events based on finding totally random crap in the luggage of completely unrelated people. In one cited example, blocks of cheese are claimed to be "similar in size and shape to plastic explosives."
Aw, c'mon, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! How much more of this total nonsense is going to go on?!?!?! They've stretched so far beyond the realm of credibility now that they might as well just disband the lot of them, cancel all air traffic, and send everybody home. For a moment last week, I thought maybe these guys were finally going to pull their heads out of their collective asses when the head of the TSA admitted that taking away cigarette lighters was "security theater", but apparently not.
I would also like to spew a little venom at the Bush Administration, who very obviously leaked this story as part of their recent campaign to cry "Wolf!" as much as possible to distract people from their latest poll numbers and their Mexican standoff with Congress. First it was Chertoff's "gut feeling", then some other vague warnings about terrorists, and now this. What really steams me, though, is the way the national news media report these stories with the doe-eyed ingenuousness of a five-year-old who has just learned that babies GROW UNDER CABBAGES and feels the need to pass this along to every person he meets. I'm beginning to think that this French tax official isn't the only one with a giant hole in his brain.
I never thought 'd say something like this, but I, for one, was actually glad that the Lindsay Lohan story got more attention than this, because that's about how much actual news value this shit has.
Permalink | Comments (0)I read about this on Slashfood yesterday, but here's a more detailed item from a New York Times blog: Chef Grant Achatz, who owns the noted restaurant Alinea in Chicago and was chosen as one of Food & Wine's "Best New Chefs" in 2002, has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth.
Some quick reading indicates that early stage cancers of this type have a very high success rate for treatment, but that trails off significantly as the cancer advances. The stories I've read don't give a lot of exact details except to say "advanced", so his prognosis may only be so-so. He is 33 years old. Tough news for anyone, but especially ironic for a chef, who relies on his palate as much as his hands to perfect his craft. I hope his outcome is a positive one.
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The consensus about last night's Democratic candidate debate seems to be that the gimmick of using YouTube videos didn't really have much impact -- the videos were carefully vetted beforehand, so even if they were clever in their presentation, the questions themselves were still pretty typical.
So if you're still trying to get a grip on who and what the candidates represent, you might find this interactive issues matrix interesting. It's alphabetical by name without separation by party affiliation, which I think actually does a better job of clarifying positions -- you can see where the Dems and Repubs line up pretty closely on some issues, and you might be surprised at the positions of a few of the major candidates.
Permalink | Comments (0)Yesterday I posted about "None Of The Above" being the leading choice among Republican candidates for President.
Today, the Boston Globe reports that the Massachusetts legislature is considering a bill that would make "None Of The Above" a valid ballot option in state elections.
I know Massachusetts Republicans are a pretty desperate crowd, but this is just frosting on the cake!
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Guess who's leading the pack among the several dozen Republican presidential candidates. Not Fred, not Newt, not Mitt, and certainly not John McCain (who may not make it to next Tuesday, let alone next February).
It's "None Of The Above"! "None Of The Above" is the choice of 23% of Republicans in a new poll. Rudy Giuliani comes in second at 21%. That's almost as bad as the English woman who came in second in a one-person pie contest.
(Meanwhile, Hillary still leads the Dems with 36%, with Obama and Edwards both significantly behind)
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This NY Times blog had a brief mention the other day about the end of the 300-year-old tradition of wearing wigs and robes in some kinds of court proceedings in Britain. (Ignore the other half of the NYT blog post, which tries to make some sort of tenuous link to Muslim hijab dress code)
As that ITV article notes, barrister wigs like the one shown above are premium items sold by high-end speciality "legal outfitters" like Stanley Ley. Like most of the pomp-and-ceremony that the British revel in, the traditions stem from the high styles of the late 17th and 18th centuries. The garb will no longer be required for civil and family court, though will still be used in criminal court.
Anyone else find that this makes them instantly flash on the "Poofy Judges" sketch from Monty Python, where the judges were wearing racy women's underwear underneath their robes?
Permalink | Comments (0)Yesterday I wondered what the Pope was going to do to annoy the (roughly) 1 billion Hindus on the planet. Well, looks like the fundies beat him to it: the United States Senate opened their daily session yesterday with a prayer from a Hindu priest, only to have it disrupted by a group of Christian fundamentalists. Here's a link to the C-SPAN video of the incident, courtesy of YouTube.
Of course, according to the Pope, those guys aren't really Christians anyway, they're just deluded sort-of Christians. I bet they didn't realize that they were filthy heretics themselves; maybe they would have joined in solidarity with the Hindu priest instead...NAAAAAH!
Next episode: hilarity ensues when a group of militant rabbis tackle the Dalai Lama and give him hell about shaving his head.
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Not satisfied with pissing off the Muslims, Pope Ratzy has declared that Protestant churches aren't "full churches of Jesus Christ". He's a bit more willing to say that the Eastern Orthodox church is kinda sorta okay, but not really because they don't acknowledge the Pope as the one true authority. Meanwhile. he's also okayed bringing back the Latin Tridentine Mass that prays for the Jews to "be delivered from darkness" by being converted to Catholicism. He hasn't found a way to insult the Hindus or the Buddhists yet, but I'm sure he's working on it.
Tell me again EXACTLY how this is encouraging understanding between religious groups? 'Cuz to me this sounds like the same old "our religion is better than your religion" crap. It's especially absurd when one Christian sect says this to another, but all the way around it just demonstrates the utter hypocrisy in suggesting that religions have anything to do with promoting compassion and understanding between people.
Permalink | Comments (2)Answer: 13
Question: What is
A) universally recognized as an unlucky number;
B) the title of a movie starring Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood
C) Vice President Dick Cheney's approval rating
D) all of the above.
(This post lifted verbatim from Crooks And Liars, who have the skinny on Uncle Dick's poll numbers)
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The Washington Post reports that long-time supporting actor Charles Lane has passed away at the age of 100. (via)
Charlie Lane was in EVERYTHING. He was in "It's A Wonderful Life", he was the other father in the waiting room when Little Ricky was born on "I Love Lucy", he was Homer Bedloe the evil railroad man on "Pettycoat Junction", "Green Acres" AND "Beverly Hillbillies", and a million other roles. He specialized in exasperated bureaucrats, nasty bank men, crotchety old men, and other petty bad guy roles. Like a lot of character actors, he never wanted for work, but never got a lot of notice. He's just one of those guys you instantly recognize on some late-night rerun.
When I saw the MetaFilter post, I was a little taken aback, because I was sure he was already dead. Hollywood doesn't have many people like Charlie Lane anymore, and the ones who are left are dropping like flies. You'll pardon me if I don't go for the cheap "It's A Wonderful Life" pun here...I'm sure you can work that out for yourself.
Permalink | Comments (0)I suppose that really isn't a startling revelation to people who live in the five other New England states, but here in Ye Olde Bay Colony itself, I think we tend to reserve the term for offensive drivers.
But, according to this Boston Globe article about a sharp increase in police calls to resolve disputes on the bike path in Arlington, it's apparent that a motorized vehicle is not necessary. Any wheeled conveyance will suffice.
From personal experience as a pedestrian and as someone who has actually ridden a bicycle on the path (Don't get too excited, I haven't ridden my bike in about 10 years), I agree with the person at the end of the story who takes the rollerblading crowd to task. They slalom back and forth along the path and create an extra-wide target when they have their arms waving about at their sides. The walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders and other users of the path all pretty much stay in their limited space, but not the rollerbladers.
My other big peeve from my experience trying to ride a bike was always with the lunch-hour walkers who see fit to walk four, five, even six abreast down the path, forming a human wall that no one can get past and who seem totally oblivious to bike riders shouting "On your left!" at the top of their lungs because they're deeply engrossed in office gossip. That was VERY common out on the Lexington-Bedford portion of the path, which was my usual route in those days.
Permalink | Comments (2)The Atlanta Journal & Constitution reports that Atlanta TV station WTBS is going to give up being a "superstation" and return to its distant roots as a local "independent" station.
WTBS is owned and operated by Turner Broadcasting (which, in turn, is owned and operated by Time-Warner). It was, in fact, Ted Turner's major stepping stone on the way to becoming the media mogul we know and love/hate today. Turner bought the station in 1970, then bought the Atlanta Braves a couple of years later so he could have programming to run on the station. The Braves turned into winners along the way, and Turner's station became a big deal in the local market. With the advent of cable in the 1980s, he parlayed his station into being a cable network and invented the very concept of a "superstation" -- basically a local station with a national audience. Eventually, there would be several other well-known superstations: WGN from Chicago, WSBK here in Boston, and WPIX in New York are the best known, with KTLA (Los Angeles) and KWGN (Denver) filling out the West Coast block.
For some years now, WTBS's over-the-air broadcasts have merely been the TBS cable network programming. As the AJC reports, the station will now return to traditional "independent" over-the-air broadcasting entirely separate from TBS, and the station is even changing call letters to "WPCH", which will be branded locally as "Peachtree TV".
My own personal guess is that this is just all preparatory to Time-Warner selling off the station completely in order to pursue other broadcast opportunities in the Atlanta market.
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The Sydney Morning Herald reports that an honest-to-goodness white humpback whale has been spotted off the eastern coast of Australia.
He's been dubbed "Migaloo", which means "white fella" in the Aboriginal language. I suppose the aborigine who first saw him must have thought he was a typical American tourist. Scientists aren't sure if the whale is an albino or if humpback whales just naturally have white pigmentation once in a while.
Our friend flerdle happens to be on the scene in Brisbane for a bit -- any chance of a first-hand report, flerdle?
In related news, New Bedford police report a tall, grim fellow with a wooden leg trying to convince passers-by to join him for "a little cruise to the South Pacific".
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The BBC reported yesterday that a group of Italian scientists are claiming that Lake Cheko in Siberia might be the impact crater of the meteoroid that struck the Earth in 1908, causing immense devastation in that part of Siberia and even global climatological effects.
According to the BBC story, many scientists are skeptical of the claims, since there are a number of other similar claims for various sites in the region. The Italian team says that the crater lake is about the right size and could have been made by a "soft impact" after the initial explosion.
(*The honor of first biggest, of course, goes to free-at-last Paris Hilton)
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I only travel by air occasionally, but just enough to have encountered a wide variety of security procedures at a number of airports in the U.S. and Europe, and by far the longest and slowest line I've experienced was at O'Hare Airport in Chicago (as seen above). Hundreds of people, shuffling along in their stocking feet, belts unbuckled and removed, holding their pants up with one hand while trying to manhandle their carry-on bags as they work their way up to a mere TWO checkpoints.
Meanwhile, WBBM-TV, the CBS station in Chicago, has been reporting on security problems at O'Hare and ran a report earlier this week that charges that some 3,800 security badges that permit airport employees to access all areas of the facility are missing. Their investigation also alleges that for all intents and purposes anyone can simply walk into restricted areas if they happen to look like an employee, no questions asked.
As long as they aren't carrying knitting needles or a big bottle of shampoo, I guess.
Permalink | Comments (1)In yesterday's Washington Post, columnist Sally Quinn clues us in on a plan being circulated among the few remaining sensible individuals in the Republican Party to give Dick Cheney a way out in the face on the onslaught on revelations about his myriad impeachable offenses. The plan would let Cheney step aside as he undergoes pacemaker replacement surgery later this summer and then would have Dubya appoint Fred Thompson to serve out the remainder of the term.
Not only would this let Cheney escape, it would give Thompson a serious leg up on the rest of the Republican presidential field. As Quinn notes, none of the current front-runners would want the job, nor would Bush want to give it to them (for a variety of reasons). But Thompson would be seen as a moderating influence in the waning days of the Worst Administration Ever, and it would be a great big "fuck you" to the likes of John McCain (and, as we all know, Dubya is all about petty revenge like that).
I'm a bit conflicted about this particular idea. Cheney really, seriously, has to go. He's done enormous damage to the government, to the Constitution, and to American prestige abroad. My personal opinion is that he richly deserves impeachment and a public humiliation of the worst sort, then imprisonment for the remainder of his mortal days. But it's obvious that the Democratic leadership in Congress has absolutely no interest in doing anything of the kind. So the question is whether letting him slink away just for the sake of getting rid of him is in any way acceptable.
Where my alarm goes off, though, is that the B-side of the plan, putting Fred Thompson in his place, is exactly what the Republicans need to wind up with a viable nominee next year. And what America needs least is a new Republican president completely beholden to all of the political interests which have been steering the Bush Administration for the last 7 years. Thompson on his own might not be completely awful, but if he owes his job to these people, there's no question about what to expect -- more of the same.
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Of note at several news/comment blogs today is the observation that recently the Bush Administration and other spokespeople for the military in Iraq have made a shift in their rhetoric: they've taken to describing ALL anti-coalition forces in Iraq as "Al Quaeda", where previously they distinguished between Sunni, Shi'a and other factions individually.
Given their past performance, I would expect to see this trend continue, expanding to replace the names of other groups opposed to the Bush Administration such as "liberals", "the Democratic Party", "Massachusetts", and so on.
Well, I suppose Dubya was right after all when he said he was a uniter, not a divider.
Permalink | Comments (0)Are you ready for a little cognitive dissonance?
The latest MSNBC/Newsweek poll tracking how well Americans know the facts about current news events is out, and the results confirm that we're getting stupider faster than ever!:
The number of people who think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 has RISEN since the last time this poll asked the same question. 41% of Americans continue to believe that it was Saddam's evil-doing, up from 36% in October 2004.
A whopping 89% of respondents could not identify John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. EIGHTY-NINE percent, boys and girls!! The only upside to this is that 81% could not correctly identify who won this year's "American Idol", so at least there's that.
Meanwhile...this article in The Nation by Rick Perlstein uses some findings from a 20-year meta-analysis of opinion polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (which many of you will know from their frequent appearances on NPR) to make the assertion that Americans are getting more and more progressive, not less (as the media tend to report).
While Perlstein is making a pitch for the resurgence of the Democratic Party, it's worth stripping away the partisan element of the piece and thinking about the poll data a little. 69% of Americans agree with the statement that "government should help those in need" (even 58% of Republicans agree with this). The same percentage, 69%, believe that the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.
More tidbits: 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt", up from 41% 13 years ago. 75 percent of the population SUPPORT Roe v. Wade. 62 percent support amnesty and eventual legal status for illegal immigrants.
So what can we conclude from this, my friends? As a group, Americans are generally very liberal -- the "liberal" tag has simply come to mean "anything I don't like" because we've allowed the political right and the media to frame it that way. And that's part of the problem -- we're collectively, and dangerous, apathetic and uninformed to the point that a very small, very vocal, and very right-wing minority has been able to dictate the terms of public discourse. The disconnect between the core beliefs of the majority of the American people and the current political powers-that-be is significant to the point that people like Vice President Dick Cheney have been able to all-but-overthrow our representative government and replace it with a plutocratic authoritarian dictat.
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Apparently Uncle Dick has decided that the Office of the Vice President is a whole separate branch of government.
Except, of course, when he needs to invoke executive privilege to hide something he doesn't want the public to know about.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's blog has some of the particulars in this recent kerfuffle, including Congressman Henry Waxman's demands (in his role as chairman of the Oversight Committee) that Cheney cough up a variety of pieces of information regarding the Scooter Libby case.
And, as always, Our Hero Keith Olbermann has the requisite blast of righteous indignation.
I know this is being covered wall-to-wall on every newsy blog and mainstream news outlet, but I have come to the conclusion that every time shit like this is made public that it is the duty of every single American to shout from the rooftops about the unabashed abuse of power that has been the hallmark of these evil people. My friend Tony has recently discovered the following quote:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena." - Theodore Roosevelt
And while I appreciate that he is using this to chide me for getting my rant on (and I do take his point), it really is nothing short of an obligation to muster some degree of outrage about all this. There is little practical redress to the situation -- it is a foregone conclusion that there will be no impeachment proceedings despite more than ample grounds for prosecuting Cheney, and we are compelled to wait out the remaining days until January 20, 2009. One can only hope that the hue and cry is loud and prolonged enough to reach the ears of the several dozen individuals presently hoping to succeed him and convince them that this is the wrong path.
Or, perhaps the time really has come to take up arms and, as the Declaration of Independence says, "...institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
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The CBC reports this morning that the European Space Agency is looking for qualified candidates for a simulated manned mission to Mars to be conducted sometime in 2008-2009.
The simulated mission is mostly about testing psychological and physical effects of prolonged spaceflight. The test will run for over 520 days, replicating the planned 250-day trip each way and a 20-day surface mission. Except for simulating zero-gravity and exposure to solar radiation, the ESA hopes to make the simulated mission as close to identical to the "real thing" as possible. They need six volunteers, all of whom have to meet the same basic qualification criteria as the ESA's own astronauts.
I'd sign up, but I plan to be busy playing Spore in 2009, and that will probably keep me busy for 520 days right there.
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Tony Blair's permanent summer vacation starts next week, and the British press are indulging in the obligatory "legacy" and "last days" stories.
The overwhelming consensus is that Blair's decision to support George Bush so closely on Iraq has nearly overwhelmed anything and everything else he accomplished as PM. Blair had already been PM for several years when the Bushies stole the 2000 election, and his initial splash on the world stage was very different than the lockstep lickspittle position he found himself in after 2001. "New Labour" and the "Third Way", which had hallmarked his relationship with Bill Clinton, took distant backseats. Still, the overall popular sentiment in Britain is that Blair did a good job on most things EXCEPT Iraq, and he leaves office with much higher public approval ratings than Dubya will.
Here's a piece from 3QuarksDaily contributor Matthias Matthijs that considers the successes and failures of Tony Blair as well as the prospects for his "heir apparent" Gordon Brown (link goes to an interview with Brown in this week's Time Magazine). Matthijs says don't expect much different from Brown.
This brief story from the BBC frames the legacy question in Blair's appearance before the House of Commons liaison committee last week, during which Blair himself was given the opportunity to present his spin on how his administration went and why he did the things he did. Blair said that he always did what he believed was the right thing. It's that very notion of falling back on his own inner sense of "right vs wrong", which, not surprisingly is shaped by his devout Christian faith, that failed him so badly.
This piece in The Guardian by author Martin Amis (one of my favorite writers, BTW), is a much closer look at Tony Blair. Amis was allowed to tag along with Blair recently and get substantial 1-on-1 time with him. Amis writes about the visible ebbing of power from Blair in these final days, and about the strange and rarified world the PM lives in (and, in one of my favorite parts of the article, how incredibly different that world is from the world of the President of the United States). In this article, Blair's own whip-smart mind and his self-awareness come through -- the comparisons to Bush's lack of curiosity and his need to be surrounded by fawning sycophants who keep up the illusion of his imperial throne are powerful.
If you read all three pieces, I think you'll be left with a very good and well-nuanced sense of Blair and his mostly unwanted legacy. Blair is still a young man in terms of political careers, much like Bill Clinton, so it's unlikely that he'll disappear entirely from the world stage. Blair has always had to endure comparisons to Clinton, but most of the time those comparisons are apt. Bill Clinton has done some very interesting tap dancing since 2000, but his circumstances are quite different than Blair's (I don't think anyone expects Cherie Blair to turn up as the next Labour PM), so Blair has the chance to chart a different post-power course. For his sake, I hope he puts as much distance between himself and George Bush as possible and recovers some of his promise.
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This is Massachusetts State Representative James R. Miceli. Yesterday, he was one of the 45 members of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (our fancy name for our state legislature) to vote in favor of a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
This man is my state representative. But let me state as publicly as possible that HE DOES NOT REPRESENT ME.
He represents prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. He represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the very notion of equal rights under the law. He represents hatred, bigotry and fear. He represents an appalling willingness to dehumanize others for the sake of moralistic pandering. He represents disrespect.
James R. Miceli has decided that he would like to take it to the next level: he has announced his candidacy for the Congressional seat vacated by Marty Meehan. Representative Meehan has supported gay rights in his role as Chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and in general during his tenure in the House.
Through the oddities of district alignments, while I presently live in Miceli's state house district, I do not live in Meehan's Congressional district (my Congressman is John Tierney, who supports gay rights issues). Consequently, I won't get the opportunity to vote against him, should he somehow manage to get the Democratic nomination, but I look forward to supporting a candidate to replace him in the state house and urge Democrats who live in the Fifth Congressional District to actively oppose this man.
Massachusetts has now made it abundantly clear that intolerance and bigotry have no place in our laws, and those who champion such should not be allowed to claim to represent us on Beacon Hill or on Capitol Hill.
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"-- "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
Lest you think that the current political brouhaha about immigration is a new-found issue with the right-wing, it's worth remembering that immigration policy has been an ongoing political issue since the mid-19th century. Whenever the United States has faced an onslaught of immgrants, whether they were the Potato Famine Irish, the Gold Rush Chinese, or the huge waves of Italian and Eastern European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there's always been a political backlash resulting in misguided and flat-out discriminatory immigration policy. When you approach the issue with a little context, it makes it clear that the current bunch of right-wing loonies are part of a very long tradition of conservative bigotry, hate-mongering, jingoism, and politics-of-fear.
The Statue of Liberty, erected in the 1890s at the height of anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, was intended as a direct challenge to those who would shut the door on immigration. Emma Lazarus' famous poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the monument, makes clear the difference between the notion of a country open to all comers, rather than closed to "outsiders".
Our sordid history with regard to immigration has other ways to haunt us as well. A new book that looks at Mexican immigration to the United States in the early 20th century unveils how the federal government processed immigrants in holding camps that Adolf Hitler would later use as models for designing his concentration camps (via Fogonazos, which has a wealth of photographs of these American camps). The U.S. would have another go at concentration camps when they interned the Japanese, but these particular camps were the ones Hitler liked. These camps even made use of the now-notorious "Zyklon B" chemical that the Nazis used to kill millions of Jews -- in the American camps the chemical was used as a fumigant.
Presently, the righties are very enamored of concentration camps and other brutalities. Mitt Romney says he would double the size of Guantanamo. 51% of Americans want to build a giant fence between the U.S. and Mexico. And we are all too well aware of the tolerance for torture.
The one thing you can say about conservatives, they've always got someone to get their hate on for. Maybe we need a new Statue of Liberty along the Rio Grande to remind a few people how we all got here in the first place.
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Just because every village HAS an idiot doesn't mean every village NEEDS an idiot -- overheard online
Something to keep in mind as the leaders of the G8 group of industrialized nations are meeting this week in Germany.
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The Boston Globe reported yesterday that a research group at MIT has developed a way to transmit electricity to electric-powered devices without wires.
Borrowing from the name "WiFi" that sometimes gets applied to wireless computer networking, they've created the appalling term "WiTricity" for their new technology. Right now all they have is a proof-of-concept experiment, but they were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from a distance of 7 feet.
Nicola Tesla, of course, did the same thing a hundred years ago with his eponymous Tesla coils. Tesla dreamed of and promised a world of free electricitiy available wirelessly from massive coils and towers. He attracted the attentions and money of many wealthy investors, but his bitter rival Thomas Edison eventually prevailed with the wired alternating current system that we use today.
Permalink | Comments (0)Not one, but two giants in the history of junk food have gone to their final reward:
Pamela Low, the food chemist who developed the sugar coating for Capn' Crunch cereal, passed away last Friday. According to the Boston Globe obit, she based the formula on a brown sugar syrup her grandmother used to pour over rice to serve as a dessert treat. Millions of American dentists owe their fortunes to this woman as several generations of children destroyed their teeth with the sweet crunchy goodness.
Meanwhile, on the salty side of the snack street, MSNBC reports that the inventor of CheezWhiz has died. But even though he deserves recognition for that invention, his legend only grows from there, as he also went on to develop the McDonalds french fry. This man, my friend, has had more impact on American culture than almost any other single individual of the last half-century.
(I think it's only fitting that he died of a heart attack, don't you? I'd hate to think he choked on a celery stick or something)
Permalink | Comments (0)Now that the Bush Administration doesn't have Tom Ridge to trot out, waving his arms and screaming "Orange Alert! Orange Alert!" like the robot from "Lost In Space", they've upped their game a little bit by periodically trying to spook everyone with some half-assed terrorist plot they've "foiled in the nick of time".
A few weeks ago it was the guys who were going to shoot their way into Fort Dix, and this week it was the crazed Jamaican Muslims who were going to blow up JFK Airport.
These stories play big for a day or two, and all the networks trot out their "anti-terrorism experts", and the right-wing bloggers get to thump their chests and fling some more poo, and we're all supposed to stay cowering in our bunkers. This time around, in fact, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party went on record saying he thought a few terror attacks would prove what a great job Bush is doing keeping America safe.
The spin cycle on this shit doesn't last as long as it used to, but it's still pretty depressing to see that anyone puts the slightest bit of credence into it. I almost punched out my TV when NBC's "anti-terrorism consultant", answering a softball lobbed at him by Ann Curry on the "Today" show, actually said he thought the reason these plots happen is because Muslims hate our American freedoms.
For starters, in each one of these plots that shows up, the ham-handed actions of the FBI turn up over and over and over and over. Some informant bankrolled by the FBI infiltrates the group and practically bludgeons them over the head "urging" them to buy guns and explosives, make plans, and so on. J. Edgar "Madge" Hoover would be so proud of the agents following in his footsteps.
Next, even while the Serious Law Enforcement Officials inevitably say that these foiled plots would cause "massive destruction on an unimaginable scale", once somebody who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about weighs in, the actual assault being planned turns out to be technically impossible, logistically unfeasible, or downright foolish.
Keith Olbermann had a good piece about this the other night (link goes to the always-informative Crooks & Liars, who usually have these video clips first). Even the current mayor of New York City publicly said people should "get over it" (Bloomberg is being touted as a possible 3rd party/independent candidate for President, BTW, and it would be very interesting to see him up against Rudy "I'm The Hero Of 9/11" Giuliani).
On the positive side, though, they didn't really achieve their objective of keeping Scooter Libby's jail sentence out of the media. I also notice that with each new Republican debate, the already-announced candidates look more and more desperate trying to keep on message with this stuff. So maybe even the die-hards are beginning to see that their jig is almost up.
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Start hanging on to those Loonies because they're finally worth something. The Canadian dollar is expected to reach parity with the United States dollar by the end of 2007, according to this Reuters article.
Plus, I'm sure this is going to translate into more fat, middle-aged Canuckistani men wearing their grape-smugglers up at Old Orchard Beach. ::shudder::
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Jesus Has Returned At Last!!
The bad news? This time, he's a shark.
Good luck with that, you guys.
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This Ananova story about a German zoo hiring a local clown to come in and cheer up their monkeys is getting a lot of play. And apparently so are the monkeys, who go ape (ahem) whenever they see her coming to visit their enclosure. I guess they must not have a Chuck E. Cheese nearby.
(Everybody seems to have the same wire story, so it would be cool if somebody actually IN Germany could follow up with a few more details, like which zoo it is, and maybe score some photos of the clown entertaining the animals. Ananova has a history of simply spreading around any old story without offering much in the way of details...just like FOX News.)
Permalink |I've said it before, and I 'll say it again: I do not believe that "Al Quaeda" (whatever that really is) will ever be able to stage another successful terrorist attack on American soil. however, I am firmly convinced that fundamentalist right-wing Christians WILL.
The events at Jerry Falwell's funeral yesterday do nothing to dissuade me.
And what is the likelihood that this fellow will go to Gitmo? Less than zero, I suspect.
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Previously on BKO, I posted about concerns among marine biologists that the coelacanth was finally extinct, but apparently there was at least ONE MORE lurking in the depths of the South Pacific.
Of course, now that one is dead, too. Sheesh.
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Former commandant of the United States Marine Corps Charles Krulak and former CENTCOM commander Joseph Hoar have written this editorial in today's Washington Post. It addresses the Bush Administration's policies on the use of torture, recognizing from personal experience with combat that torture is next to worthless as a method of intelligence gathering and serves only as a method of terrorism itself. While it might create a level of "security theater" designed to assuage a panicky public, it creates a whole new set of problems: not only does counterterrorism seem to embolden and strengthen the resolve of the insurgents, it all but guarantees that these same methods will be used against our troops now and forever.
Sadly, 43% of Americans approve of the use of torture (scroll for it; it's a long way down the page), and, as my post below discusses, collectively we are deliberately ignorant about the things we do, deliberately in denial about the reality of the situations that confront us, easily spooked into panic-drive over-response, and able to gin up our own fantasies and mythologies to justify that.
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Jerry Falwell dead of a heart attack at age 73.
RELATED: It was revealed today that Jerry Falwell HAD a heart.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Permalink |This story at Wired this morning says there's good news and bad news in store for the burgeoning hybrid car market. The EPA has revised the way it calculates mileage for hybrid cars and is about to issue new figures that will significantly downgrade the predicted mileage for all models.
The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid still come out on top with mileage ratings that outperform any conventional automobile, but even they have been knocked down about 20% from the original estimates. For some of the other hybrids, like the Ford Escape and the Pontiac G6, it puts their estimated mileage in the mid-20s. At that point, there's no point in buying a hybrid at all because the added cost of the vehicle isn't convertible into fuel cost savings. While it only takes about 14 months to recoup the added cost of a Toyota Prius in money saved on gasoline, it would take 10 years to achieve the same break-even point for a Mercury Mariner hybrid.
I'm still considering buying a Prius next year to replace my aging Honda Accord, so I appreciate the more realistic expectation for the mileage, but even moreso the knowledge that the fuel cost savings will be real...probably even sooner than the 14 months currently predicted if the price of gas hits that magic $5.00 mark it seems headed for.
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It's the collective shriek of millions of gamers reacting to the story that Electronic Arts is pushing off the release of Wil Wright's new game, Spore, to late 2008.
I am one of the shriekers. We've been reading about this game and getting the occasional glimpse at it for several years now, and at the electronic games shows last year, Wright and EA were saying it would be released in time for Christmas 2007. But EA's latest financial report indicates that now they're not anticipating releasing the game for a full year beyond that.
These kind of deeply immersive games are few and far between. Civilization IV has been out for a couple of years now and there is another expansion pack for it coming soon, but adding a few new scenarios to a well-established game like Civ is usually not worth the asking price. And, honestly, I am tired of Civ IV and want to move on to something else. If Spore is only half the game Wil Wright has promised it will be, it will still be groundbreaking. But I guess we won't know that for sure until AFTER Hillary beats Rudy next year.
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Back In January, I posted this NYT graphic which demonstrates how George Bush has managed to squander away $1.2 TRILLION dollars with his unnecessary war.
Today at Dangerous Intersection, Erich Vieth posts about some of the other things that could have been done with all that money, such as giving every single man, woman and child in the United States $3,000.00 to reinvest in the economy, or, better still, giving EVERY HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET $150.00. While $150 might be thought of as chump change in this country, the average Bangladeshi only earns $380 a year, and the average annual income in Ethiopia is only $141.00.
In the comments of that post, "grumpypilgrim" (one of the other regular authors of that site) has a collection of factoids about trying to imagine the sheer amount of one trillion dollars. A one-trillion stack of dollars, he tell us, would weigh more than BOTH of the World Trade Center towers and would be 55,000 miles tall (about 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon). One trillion dollars would build more than 200 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers (the U.S. Navy has 10).
Meanwhile, over at the Boston Globe, there's this photo essay that considers what you could do with $456 billion, which is what this group says the war has cost so far. Considering that it's only about a third of the amount John Allen Poulos is citing, the possibilities are still staggering: nearly 3000 first-class high schools, free gasoline for every car in the United States for fourteen months, 30 civil engineering projects of the scale of the Big Dig, feeding and educating the world's poor for FIVE years.
The mind boggles.
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While the first round of voting in the French presidential election had some element of suspense to it due to the better-than-expected showing of a third candidate, the final run-off this weekend looks to have a foregone conclusion.
Meanwhile, did any of you watch that collection of tired, pasty-faced, cancer-ridden, old, white men trying to pass themselves off as Republican presidential candidates? Cripes, other than Governor Blow-dry, it looked more like a waiting room at a proctologist's office than a group of potential presidents. Maybe Giuliani should put the dress back on.
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Yahoo News had this AP story (via) yesterday which reports that VeriSign is teaming up with at least one major bank to offer debit cards with single-use disposable passwords.
This particular security feature is long-overdue for debit cards. It has been possible to use single-use passwords for online credit card purchases for a number of years. In the AP story, VeriSign claims that the reason this hasn't been implemented sooner is that consumers would need to carry a password-generating device much like the SecurID token that is common in corporate offices. Their new product basically just shrinks the electronics required to the point where they can fit in the corner of a standard plastic debit card.
I hope this becomes standard issue very quickly. My wife and I have both had to replace our debit cards over and over again because of security breaches -- I think Bridget had to replace her card four times last year, and I had to replace mine two or three times. Single-use passwords would reduce the need to replace thousands of cards every time there's a breach, and would alleviate the bother on the consumer's end of having automated payments based on a debit card number break each time the cards are replaced.
I just wish it wasn't VeriSign. They're evil.
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Unless you were living under a rock or otherwise detached from the media universe yesterday, you undoubtedly heard the story about thousands of people in Japan being duped into buying sheep after being told they were poodles.
Well, guess what. It's bullshit. This Japanese blogger carefully dissects the entire story (via) to explain that whoever originally reported the story (apparently the Australian version of MSNBC) misunderstood some remarks made on a talk show made by an actress.
As the blogger explains, she didn't say she HAD a sheep, she said she'd heard a STORY about someone else who had one...in other words, the good old fashioned Urban Legend. The blogger then traces the story itself back to an earlier source -- another Japanese blogger with a post from February of 2006, who also basically tells the same story as a FOAF-style story.
She then points out that the place where the scam is supposed to have occurred is Japan's leading sheep-raising area, making it highly unlikely that people would not recognize sheep there. Also, she notes the total lack of coverage of the story in the Japanese media, indicating that they would be all over this story themselves with their own unique brand of "weird news" coverage had it actually occurred.
You gotta love the Internet -- less than 24 hours from "breaking news" to "urban legend"!
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MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has turned his Murrow-esque rants into a regular element of his program. Not surprisingly, this takes some of the effect out his words -- powerful rhetoric is only diminished by making it commonplace -- but he can still get a good stemwinder going when he wants to.
If you have not already seen the clip of his piece from earlier this week where he slices and dices Rudy Giuliani like just so much Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house, it is definitely worth watching. The political blog Crooks And Liars is good enough to post downloadable versions in both WMV and QuickTime formats.
I was almost out of my seat and cheering by the time he got to the end of this one. It would do my heart good if just one Democratic presidential candidate would get behind a talking point like this and shut up these bullshit artists once and for all.
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Most of the coverage of the death of Boris Yeltsin over the last day or so has been prefaced with lofty words of praise about being "the first democratically elected leader" and "leading Russians through tough times" and so on.
This Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi (the son of NBC correspondent Matt Taibbi) offers a somewhat less platitudinous memorial based on his own experience of living in Russia during the 1990s. Best article I have read anywhere lately about any topic, by the way. Go! Read!
Permalink | Comments (1)Why did we invade Iraq?
Saddam was responsible for 9/11!!!...no, wait, that wasn't it.
Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was going to nuke America!!!....oh, right, not that either.
Ooh, I've got it! We had to get rid of Saddam and his regime to make Iraq safe for Freedom And Democracy™!!
Hmmmmmmmm...okay, so how does that explain why we're so busy reinstalling all of Saddam's loyalists in high government positions and key military intelligence roles?
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The Guardian reports that a Polish fellow dining in a London restaurant ran into the kitchen, grabbed a chef's knife, and cut off his penis in the dining room.
I think 18% would have been totally sufficient, don't you?
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In a blow to Caribbean beach resorts everywhere, last week Pope Benedict abolished limbo. Not coincidentally, the Pope just celebrated his 80th birthday, and Vatican spokespeople say the Holy Father can't bend over backwards enough to get under the bar anymore. Henceforth the devout will simply have to settle for the Conga...although some more liberal parishes have already embraced the Hokey-Pokey, saying "that's what it's all about".
(Just one question: how can you abolish something that was just make-believe anyway? Okay, one more question: if you're a practicing Catholic, how can you justify such absurd ideas in the first place, and what does it say about the validity of your ascribed beliefs if they can be winked out of "existence" like that? Yeah, I know, that was two more questions.)
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Blogger Cynical-C (not be confused with another cynical blogger we all know and love) has been keeping track of all the assorted pundits and panderers who have been all too willing to assign blame in last week's Virigina Tech shootings. So far the count is up to 56 different things to blame, ranging from perennial favorite Satan to liberalism to violent video games to the victims themselves.
Still missing from the list: fluoridated water, Elvis Presley, the Soviet mind-control program, and low-carb diets.
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Bad week to be a warmonger, eh?
Earlier in the week, British cabinet minister Hilary Benn told an American audience that it's time to stop using the moniker "Global War On Terror", because it makes "a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common" feel more powerful than they really are. While a spokesman for Tony Blair wouldn't endorse Benn's remarks, the mouthpiece offered some lame equivocation.
(It's not the first time a senior official has pooh-poohed the "GWOT" label, either, if you'll recall)
Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has publicly told the president that he thinks "the war is lost." While Reid deserves some credit for being willing to say this and let himself be quoted publicly, his late awakening to something that has been painfully obvious for years is not unlike being the guy who told Custer "there sure are a lot of Indians".
I actually think the rest of the Democrats should get on this bandwagon. Not simply because the war IS lost, but because it gives them some degree of plausible deniability for being gutless, spineless toads when they all voted to approve military action before the war began. "We gave you approval, and you've failed, now it's time to go," shifts the focus of attention back on the Bush Administration's incompetence and doesn't leave them looking quite so slippery...just stupid. In fact, it even gives Republicans the same out and lets them put some distance between themselves and Chimpy in advance of 2008.
Of course, you could also go the semantic route. The author of this post at Dangerous Intersection would like us all to stop calling the conflict in Iraq a "war" at all. The actual "war, the blogger contends, ended a long time ago, and is more realistically a "military occupation". This technical difference also gives the Democrats and anti-war Republicans a good way to redirect the focus and make some headway in extricating us: "We authorized the war, but not a prolonged occupation. Time to get out."
Permalink | Comments (1)The upcoming presidential elections in France only get the slightest of peripheral attention in the American press, even though the climate of political change in France is white-hot. Though I've loosely followed British national politics for a number of years, I have to admit to only having a jot more information about French politics than, say, the Stanley Cup playoffs (which is to say, not much). I know a little about the two major candidates and the race issue, which has galvanized French voters, and that's that.
So I was very glad this morning to read this first-hand analysis of the elections at 3Quarks Daily which looks at the sudden emergence of a center-right candidate who has sucked away support from both the far-right LePen faction and from the Socialists and their popular candidate, Segolene Royal. Another 3Quarks post also pointed me to yesterday's NYT Sunday Magazine piece about the driving issues behind French politics.
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Researchers at Harvard published an article in the journal Science yesterday that says they've found similarities in the proteins of Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils to those of modern-day chickens.
Sounds like they're gonna need a re-write for the ending of Jurassic Park IV...and a really big fryolator.
Permalink |The local news media in Boston are reporting today that the European discount airline RyanAir would like to extend its service to the U.S., using secondary airports on the East Coast and that Manchester, NH and Providence RI are seriously bidding to be the Boston-area site.
In that Boston Globe article, the CEO of RyanAir is reported as saying that he "envisions the new airline charging as little as 10 euros" (currently about $14) to fly from Dublin to the U.S., raising hopes that the fares from the U.S. to Ireland would also be significantly cheaper. I don't know if you'd really be able to fly to Dublin from Boston for under $20, but I'm sure it would drive the prices down dramatically.
Permalink |Our baby fell out of the window
You'd think that her head would be split
But good luck was with her that morning
She fell in a barrel of....
Shhhhhhaving cream, be nice and clean
Shave everyday and you'll always look keen
(BONUS! Link to free download of the original Benny Bell song)
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It's amazing that more than two weeks into the liberation of Iraq---as residents in Basra are cheering British forces and Americans occupy Baghdad's airport and Saddam Hussein's main presidential palace---the antiwar crowd is still spinning a doomsday scenario. But it's getting harder and harder to take seriously the claim that freeing Iraq will make it harder to win the war on terrorism. [...] Who said war never solved anything? ---Brendan Miniter, Assistant Editor, Wall St. Journal's Opinion Journal.com, 4/8/03
[Liberals] can't deny that President Bush has won his two wars, and won them resoundingly. ---Paul Mirengoff, Powerline, 4/26/03
"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals." ---Charles Krauthammer, 4/19/03
I guess I was too preoccupied with the victory parades, sweeping up all the rose petals the Iraqis keep throwing at our feet, and carving Chimpy's face into Mount Rushmore to remember to post about the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War (you know, the one that was "all wrapped up" three weeks in?), but luckily there's a fellow from Maine who posts at Daily Kos to help us remember all the good news as declared by the right-wing media back then.
(via tingilinde)
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(Nice artist's rendering of what Mars might have looked like with liquid water, don't you think?)
Space.com reports that NASA's Mars Express orbiter has measured the ice in the southern polar ice cap on Mars using a probe that does subsurface imaging. According to their findings, there's enough water in the southern ice cap to flood the entire planet to a depth of 30 feet.
Scientists have done previous estimates of the amount of water frozen in the northern polar ice cap, which is larger, but the team that performed these measurements will now probably direct their instrument to re-measure and re-estimate the water volume at the north pole.
Permalink |Okay, anyone who DOESN'T think that today's "news" about Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's "confession" is anything but spin from the Bush Administration to deflect attention from the Gonzales Scandal, please raise your hand.
Yeah, I thought so.
Let's try to turn that spotlight back on the actual fuck-ups. shall we? The latest issue of Rolling Stone (!) has this excellent piece featuring a round-table discussion with a group of national security and military experts who are looking a little further down the field in Iraq and coming up with a very, very bleak analysis.
Permalink | Comments (1)Today's Boston Globe reports that the popular local restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods is installing payment terminals at every table in every one of their locations.
There's a growing realization that a lot of credit card fraud comes from waiters who steal your card number when they take it away from the table to ring up the check (just ask my wife's brother-in-law, who was sent up the river for doing just that), and a growing acceptance of self-service payment.
Personally, I think this is a killer idea and you'll find card swipers at tables in just about every imaginable chain restaurant in short order (pun not intended). Easily one of the most aggravating parts of dining out anywhere is the silly business of attending to the check: it requires no fewer than 3 trips to your table by the server if you are paying with a credit/debit card. It slows down the servers and can keep you waiting long after you're done eating -- with a squirmy small child in tow that wait can be nearly unbearable.
I forget where we were, but I know I have dined somewhere where the server brought a wireless swiper to the table. I think that's a much better concept for high-end restaurants, where it would look incredibly tacky to have a swiper bolted to your table. The wireless device even had a printer that immediately gave out a receipt. But at your average Crapplebees or Chili's, this is perfect.
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The image above is a photograph of a recent solar eclipse taken from the vantage point of a satellite in non-geostationary Earth orbit. The smaller object is the Moon as it passes between us and the Sun. Here on Earth, of course, the disc of the Moon appears to block the Sun, but from a different vantage point the true size difference between them is obvious.
(The weird color is an artifact of the image processing -- the eclipse does not make the sun turn purple -- but it makes for a cool picture).
Hey, guess what!
If we hadn't gone over THERE in the first place, we wouldn't have quite so many to fight at all!
This Mother Jones article runs the numbers on acts of terrorism worldwide and finds that they have increased SEVENFOLD since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Mission Accomplished!
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Jeebus, that didn't take long. Deval Patrick hasn't even been governor for two months, and he's already a complete and utter joke. First it was the Cadillac SUV, then the drapes, then giving his wife a secretary on the state payroll and now he's in Dutch for making an ill-advised phone call trying to score a loan for a company he used to serve on the board of.
What a political embarrassment this guy is. Politicians are always a bit on the self-aggrandizing side, to be sure, and if you look around it's not hard to see plenty of pols who have secured themselves, their families, and their assorted followers all manner of personal perks and luxuries. It is part of the game we play with our elected officials -- we overlook some petty (and sometimes not-so-petty) self-enrichment as long as they give the appearance of working for some useful purpose and occasionally pass the spoils on down to us once in a while. In fact, people seem to prefer a degree of embellishing -- anyone old enough to remember when Mike Dukakis was governor will recall that he was ridiculed for riding the T to work and mowing his own lawn. But people cannot bear a politician who sets out to gild his own lily before he does anything to merit it.
What's all the more disappointing, though, is that this guy pulled off one of the most unlikely outsider campaigns in Massachusetts political history and carried the mantle of being "not like the rest of them" right through the election. That means quite a lot in a state like this, where the Democratic party is so thoroughly entrenched at every level of power in government that most of the regular politicians are simply content to wait for their "turn" for the top of the pyramid.
At least a machine pol would have learned a few lessons about public humility and discretion. Even non-stop self-promoters like Bill Galvin know when to shut up and keep quiet about certain things. And Galvin was smart enough to back out of the governor's race early in the face of the groundswell of support Patrick was able to muster, figuring that he would be better off not going up against such anti-incumbent sentiment.
What makes Patrick look especially greedy and stupid through all of this is that everybody has fairly fresh memories of Republican Jane Swift doing the exact same sort of bonehead things during her worthless occupation of "the corner office". Her desire to pluck the big shiny ring of executive privilege cost her entire political career in the end, left to be an asterisk in the history books. Luckily, as far as Jane Swift goes, she was only temporary. This guy is just starting a full term and has already turned himself into a complete laughingstock.
I really wanted this guy to be different. To be the one who gave the Democrats a new direction and the chance to reclaim some semblance of a legitimate platform from which they could restore the devastation that the Republicans have wreaked on American government and free society. Instead, he's managed to prove that the allure of the perks held greater appeal for him than any real agenda for governing, putting him squarely in the same league as generations of worthless political hacks.
Somebody give me a recall petition to sign.
Permalink | Comments (1)Not content to spend their time blowing up Mooninites, the BPD has moved on to a new enemy in the War On Terror: traffic counters.
Yes, traffic counters. You've seen them: a non-descript looking box sitting at some intersection, usually with a pair of cables stretched out across the street to tally all the cars that pass by at certain hours.
Well, yesterday the Bomb Squad was called in to blow one up, despite the fact that it was the City of Boston that put it there themselves. They were suspicious, later reports revealed, because the box was a different color than the other ones around the city.
You can't make up this kind of stupidity. No word on who Da Mayah is going to strong-arm for a million bucks this time.
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Canadian cell phone service provider Telus has ended their porn-on-demand download service for video-enabled cell phones after only six weeks, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail.
There had been much public outcry against providing such a service, particularly from a Roman Catholic archdiocese, which threatened to boycott the company.
My prediction -- at least one American provider will launch something similar in less than 5 years (indeed, probably much sooner). Telus's only real mistake was being ahead of the curve on public acceptance. If a "safe" porn brand like Playboy were behind it, there would be an American market for it almost overnight. And if some major player doesn't embrace it, I guarantee there will be somebody who develops a private network for it...provided such a thing doesn't already exist and just keeps a very low profile.
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This is going to get blogged to death over the next day or so, but you HAVE to go and have a look.
The ABC News website has a photo slideshow of correspondent Bob Woodruff's simply miraculous recovery from the massive head wound he suffered in Iraq. The picture above is a CT scan of what was left of his skull (the entire left side was blown away) when he arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Last summer he had a cranial implant to replace the missing bone, and now, scarcely more than a year after his injury, he is recovered and back to work.
The photos are a promo for a primetime special featuring Bob Woodruff that will air next Tuesday evening.
Permalink |For you religious types, it's Shrove Tuesday, but for the rest of us, it's just National Pancake Day. Hop on down to IHOP and get your free short stack RIGHT NOW!
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Former Boston Globe media columnist Mark Jurkowitz, writing for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, looks at last week's news coverage and notes that the story of Anna Nicole Smith's death ate up more than 20% of the "newshole" on the cable news networks for the entire week, and more than 50% of the time on Thursday and Friday (the story broke late in the afternoon on Wednesday).
Fifty percent. For two solid days. And they're not done yet, either.
(By contrast, the Anna Nicole story only took up about 5% of the newshole at online news sites, and about 8% of network news broadcasts.)
I think the only person who should be glad about this particular statistic is Lisa Nowak.
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So they're finally getting a Whole Foods supermarket up in Portland, Maine, but they're fighting over whether or not to sell live lobsters.
In Maine.
Live lobsters.
You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone selling live lobsters in Maine, so frankly if the Whole Foods people are so against it, I think they could probably skip the whole thing and be none worse for it. Instead, as you've probably read, they're going to give each lobster its own cozy little room in the tank instead of the usual "pile 'em up in one big tank" approach.
Oooookay.
I guess it's okay to be concerned about the suffering of lobsters, though it seems to me we're investing a lot more in their suffering than the suffering of human beings (anyone who's taken a walk down Congress Street in Portland will know exactly what I'm talking about).
Once again the Whole Foods folks are being a bit hypocritical. They don't want to cause suffering for live lobsters and they don't promote boiling them live either -- they will gladly stun them for you using a "humane" device called (and I am not making this up) "The Crusta-Stun". But let's say you are too squeamish to buy a sea mudbug, living or stunned, and instead opt for the convenience of packaged lobster meat. Well, the Whole Foods folks are glad to sell you some of that, too, but this is the big-ass machine they use to get that meat -- a high pressure machine that literally forces all of the meat out of every last nook and cranny of a lobster shell, even the little tiny legs (as every REAL Mainer knows, you always suck the meat out of the legs). I'm not entirely clear on how this is more humane than boiling, or even the infamous ice-pick method of lobster murder. I suspect it's humane the same way we "humanely" slaughter cows, chickens and pigs -- i.e. mechanized to the point that it doesn't seem like slaughter.
Me, I am a traditionalist and firmly believe in tossing live lobsters directly into a big ol' pot of boiling water. It has been my own personal tradition for some time now to kiss each lobster on the carapace before I throw them in the water to let them know that they are loved for their tasty sacrifice. I think that's pretty humane. Maybe the Whole Foods store can hire a lobster kisser to bid each one adieu as they leave the store.
(links via The Secret Life Of Lobsters)
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On the left is the 2005 residential phone book for the city of New Orleans. On the right is the 2007 residential phone book.
This AP story from last week details the ongoing debacle of restoring the city. Of the 105,739 applications for assitance received by the agency overseeing the "reconstruction", to date only 532 have been processed. Only half of the $750 million in federal aid funds granted have been disbursed due to "paperwork problems" in Washington.
And yet all this is back-burner stuff while we obsess over a dead bimbo with a bad boob-job, a batshit-crazy astronaut, and LiteBrite "bombs". We deserve exactly what we've got coming to us, I'm afraid.
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Oh, I just don't even know where to begin. This whole debacle is beyond stupid, it's George W. Bush-stupid.
Somehow, nine other cities across the country managed to have these little LED signs all over the place and no one thought they were bombs, but Boston's Finest came out and publicly decreed that a circuit board, some wires and a battery "were consistent with improvised explosive devices". I guess the light-up monster giving the one-fingered salute must be some kind of Islamo-fascist code, eh? (That's what seven generations of police in-breeding will do to people, I guess)
Somehow, nobody at the "guerilla marketing company" or Turner Broadcasting managed to take a moment to consider just what sort of reptile-brain thinking goes on in your major metropolitan police department. Then, when the shit hit the fan, Turner's own people at CNN were among the first to start banging the panic gongs for a "terror alert" and balls-to-the-wall live coverage. The paranoid among us have already jumped on this to say that the whole thing was a cleverly-designed maneuver a la "War Of The Worlds", but to me it only goes to show that the so-called "television journalists" are completely unable to do anything but parrot back what they are told. Frankly, that explains pretty much everything that has happened in this country for the last seven years, but it sure is getting old.
Then, "da Mayah" and our sparkly-new governor jumped the gun a bit with their public statements, only to have egg on their faces an hour later when every blogger on the planet except me broke the real story about the cartoon characters. Instead of ponying up to being mike-grabbing attention-hounds, the pols have spent every moment since issuing various stern pronouncements about what they're going to do to Turner Broadcasting. What they're going to do is jack-shit, and we all know it, so they might as well just have said "Oh, sorry, never mind" and admitted they and the Boston Police overreacted. Apparently they've been watching tapes of George W. Bush in action.
But, the stupidity doesn't stop there. The "struggling artist" who put up all the signs for the marketing company managed to videotape himself and a friend hanging the signs all over the city late at night and POSTED IT ON THE INTERNET. They arrested him last night on some bogus charges that I'm sure will get dropped once the politicians have covered their asses, but he deserves to be arrested again for being so fundamentally stupid as to post his self-incriminating video (complete with rockin' techno music that features a robot chanting "BOOM-chaka-laka"). Americans don't have to spy on each other, I guess, because they're obviously willing to implicate themselves in the dumbest possible stunts.
Somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is cackling with glee. Who knew he was such an Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan?
Permalink |Back in November, I briefly noted a Washington Post article about the announcement that Clear Channel, the largest radio conglomerate in the country, was going to be split up and sold off in chunks, with all of its television holdings and almost 500 small-market radio stations being let go, while the new owners would get to keep the big-market properties.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this radio industry news website that picked up a Wall Street Journal report indicating that Fidelity Management and several other institutional shareholders of Clear Channel are strongly opposed to the deal. If the deal does not go through, Clear Channel would still be on the hook for a huge payout to the buyers (possibly as much as $500 million) and the stock price of Clear Channel could go through the floor.
Shareholders will meet in March to make a decision on the buyout. Stay tuned.
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Remember the story in the news a week or so ago about the guy who shot a duck and put it in his fridge, only to discover a couple of days later that the duck was still alive?
Well this has got to be the luckiest damn duck in the history of duckdom, because she has now survived her THIRD brush with death in as many weeks. The duck, who is now known as Perky, had to undergo some surgery to put a pin in her damaged wing and almost died from the anesthesia.
Vice President Cheney's office had no comment on rumors thar Mr. Cheney has requested to have his gun cleaned and his lawyers moved out of range.
UPDATED: Looks like Barbaro the Horse needed a little bit of Perky's luck. How sad.
Permalink |I am late to the party on linking you to this story, but it also didn't seem to get a huge amount of attention from the "MSM" when it was fresh: Sir Ken Macdonald, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK (sort of a national version of what we call "District Attorneys") recently spoke to the British Criminal Bar Association and publicly repudiated the notion of a "war on terror".
In the course of his remarks, Macdonald said that overzealous and "fear-driven" efforts to curtail civil rights represented a threat to the rule of law:
"It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."
"London is not a battlefield...On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'. The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."
Substitute American place names as appropriate, please. This message really needs to be heard widely and understood thoroughly. The only war is the one we started in Iraq for no valid reason whatsoever. How long can Americans propel themselves to undo the fundamentals of their own society based solely on the fear-driven response to a single incident?
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CNet News reports this morning that the Maine legislature overwhelmingly voted to reject the federal REAL ID Act that mandates a standard national identity card system to be implemented by 2008.
The Portland Press Herald reports that the vote was unanimous in the Maine State Senate, and 137-4 in the House. Opposition to the law comes from both conservatives and liberals. Both sides are concerned about the profound impact on civil liberties, as well as identity theft and the overall cost of an unfunded federal mandate.
Unfortunately, the Maine resolution is not binding on the federal legislation. However, as CNet reports, Maine is not the only state legislature expressing dissatisfaction with this new law. Washington, Montana and Georgia are also considering similar resolutions, and the National Conference of State Legislatures also opposes it (mostly on the grounds of cost).
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I've been following the remarkable story of the last year of Art Buchwald's life (see here and here), so it only seems appropriate that I should include mention of his passing.
The Washington Posts' obituary mentions that the Post's Ben Bradlee was one of the last people to talk with Buchwald before he slipped into unconsciousness earlier this week. Bradlee says that Buchwald knew the time had finally come, but he hoped he wouldn't die on the same day as Fidel Castro.
No problem, there, Art. Goodbye.
UPDATED: Here is Buchwald's "final column" in the Jan 19. Washington Post. He wrote this as he was headed into hospice (which he subsequently left) to be printed after his death.
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Any fucking questions?
Meanwhile, speaking of zombies, have you seen the clip of the digital "reanimation" of Orville Redenbacher that they're going to start using in commercials? Apparently the first one aired the other night on the Golden Globes award show. It won't fool anybody into thinking Orville is back from the dead, but it is mighty creepy.
Permalink |The NYT Technology section reports today that AT&T, the new owner of SBC Communications, which in turn is the owner of Cingular, will be "de-branding" Cingular just in time to coincide with the rollout of those super cool Apple iPhones in June.
In the story, a talking suit for AT&T says that they don't see any issue with losing customers due to de-branding. "If you give them what they want, the brand is secondary," the mouthpiece said. There's more than a little irony there, you have to admit. I mean we're talking about a cell phone service provider. But in the larger perspective, she's made an interesting observation: the "wireless service" business has gone through so many mergers, changes in ownerships, identity swaps, and so on that the branding has become nearly meaningless. It's "brand of the week", and all you can hope for is to remember which name you're supposed to write on the check when you pay your bill.
Wireless service providers are not the only ones who are driving the very concept of branding to its inevitable doom. If you're like me, you've been the victim of at least one bank merger and subsequent name change. Ditto for cable companies (not surprising, since they're often the same people as the cell phone companies). It seems to be mostly service-oriented brands that suffer from "brand of the week", but because the engine of commodity-driven capitalism has devolved into a never-ending stream of M&A, it trickles into every aspect of our consumer culture.
I'm still trying to decide what the larger impact of the failure of branding means. Does it imply that service businesses will, in fact, have to return to paying attention to the quality of their actual service offerings in order to keep anyone as a customer for more than a month at a time? Or does it mean that the spiral of shitty service and customer churn will only increase as no one feels any need to pay anything more than lip service to the interaction? I mean, I think most people would accept the proposition that most wireless service providers, cable companies, banks, credit cards, and so on already suck ass, but just how bad can it get before the whole thing collapses? People in the former Soviet Union eventually got used to the charade of "service" in their economies and developed elaborate black markets, layers of privilege and other mechanisms to manage their daily needs; are we headed for a similar "Potemkin economy"?
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Over the weekend we learned that the Viking probes NASA sent to Mars in the 1970s may have indeed found signs of life, but might have killed the organisms by exposing them to the wrong chemicals.
So this morning I read that the Mars Orbital Surveyor satellite is presumed dead since it stopped responding a few months ago.
NASA might be to blame for uploading a bum software patch that overheated the battery, but personally I wonder if the LGM's are just getting a little old-fashioned payback for us taking out their homies. Sort of like an interplanetary gang war.
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As regular visitors here know, my anger toward and hatred of George W. Bush has become so visceral that I can't even bear to watch him or listen to his voice except in the smallest of clips without elevating my blood pressure.
So I chose to watch Adam and Jamie blow up a scale model of the Hindenburg on MythBusters last night. I figure if I have to choose between two different flaming Nazi gasbags, I might as well choose the one with some entertainment value.
I also knew that there would be plenty of media coverage to make sure that I would know the content of the speech, even if I didn't watch it personally. And I was right, of course. In fact, the White House was even good enough to give the media a few excerpts of the speech beforehand so they could get their spin machines up to full speed before 9:00 p.m.
As usual, rising to the top of the commentary, is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Here's the link to the video of Olbermann's piece at Crooks & Liars (I might change this link to some other source later). And, as I have made it a practice to do in the last few months, here is the complete transcript of the editorial:
President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results. But in our third story on the Countdown tonight: too bad.Permalink |Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far. So, let's look at the record: Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America. Now, he says it is vital for America.
He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions. He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.He has told us the war is necessary. Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.
In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden. He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training. He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence. He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis. Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".
He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.
He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government, the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam. We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers. As they stood up-we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course'.
The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists. The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.
And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.
Is this what we've been fighting about for three years?
Permalink |As the news media slowed down for the holidays last week, I noticed that they started trotting out the "We're All Gonna Die!!" stories about the H5N1 avian flu again. Heaven forbid that we shouldn't be kept in a state of near-total panic at all times, you know.
Nothing's really changed since the last time they got everybody freaked out about this except that there have been more bird die-offs and another couple of clusters of human cases. But once again, the human cases occurred among people who raised poultry and lived in tight quarters with the birds. Still, stories that predicts death tolls as high as 80 million people feed right into our seemingly insatiable desire to be freaked out.
Via Marginal Revolution comes a link to this public health report which tries to make some sensible estimates and still manages to come up with a high-end of 81 million deaths within the realm of possibility, but with a more statistically probable figure of 62 million. Cold comfort if the situation really ever does come to pass -- an issue which they don't deal with directly. Of note in this paper is the finding that 95% of those 62 million deaths can be expected to occur in lower per-capita-income countries where public health infrastructures are weak; not a surprising result, actually, but the inference is that the actual impact on developed nations will be relatively minor and probably not worth whipping the public into a frenzy. Efforts need to be made more toward improving public health conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, not stockpiling vaccine for people with little risk of infection, let alone mortality.
In the meanwhile, a MetaFilter post links to this slightly breathless news story from the Daily Mail which proclaims that a new vaccine could prevent "all forms" of influenza, including H5N1. Despite the headline's implication that this vaccine will be available any day now, the details of the article reveal that things are just getting started with testing some very promising results. If the vaccine works as hoped, it would allow people to receive a flu shot once every few years instead of each year and have a broader range of immunity to influenza "A" viruses. The vaccine also holds the promise of being able to be manufactured much more quickly than traditional flu vaccine, allowing a far more rapid response to unexpected breakouts. This would be particularly useful in fighting epidemic occurrences in those very places where the H5N1 avian flu is likely to strike.
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Congratulations are in order to President George W. Bush for smashing records in 2006:
Over the weekend, the number of American troops killed in Iraq exceeded the number of Americans killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001. He now tops Osama Bin Laden as the Number One Terrorist Leader...with a bullet, as they say.
Meanwhile, former Iraqi despot and previous record-holder for Most Iraqis Killed, Saddam Hussein found himself in sudden death overtime. That means he won't get the chance to reclaim his record from Dubya, who presently holds the record with an estimated 655,000 excess deaths since the beginning of combat operations in 2003. It took Saddam 20 years to kill a quarter of a million Iraqis, but Bush has tripled that in just a little over three years -- now that's a "Mission Accomplished", eh George?
And, of course, his big accomplishment -- taking the prize as "Worst President Ever" as judged by presidential historians. He now tops a list crowded with other Republican notables such as Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Bush's own personal hero, Richard M. Nixon.
About the only thing he missed out on this year was Time's "Man Of The Year" cover, which apparently went to me...or was it you? Anyway, way to go Georgie-boy!
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Lost in between the media tributes to James Brown and Gerald Ford came the news item that the long-time president of CBS, Dr. Frank Stanton, passed away on December 24 at his home in Boston.
Stanton was a genuine pioneer of broadcasting, and probably the last of that original generation of the men who built the networks.
Stanton first came to the attention of William Paley as one of the first people to conduct quasi-scientific audience research in the early days of radio broadcasting. I say quasi-scientific because social science research was truly in its infancy in the 1930s, and the rigors of research standards were not yet as thoroughly entrenched, so that what passed for quality research then would not really pass muster today. Nevertheless, Stanton's "breakthrough" -- the "Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer" -- became a basic element of audience research for half a century and was used by radio and television broadcasters as well as film studios.
Stanton was a distant, reserved, analytical sort of person according to most historical accounts. The polar opposite of William Paley, who was outgoing, enthusiastic, and at times imperious. Though they had a strained personal relationship, and though Paley eventually betrayed Stanton's trust, they made an effective leadership team in building CBS into the most popular and well-regarded of the three major broadcasting networks. Paley often used Stanton as his hatchet man or fall guy for some of his controversial moves, and also sometimes took credit for Stanton's principled stands on journalistic integrity and "quality" programming. As a result, history remembers Paley a bit better than he perhaps deserved, and Stanton is little remembered at all except among students of broadcast history.
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Is it me, or does Chevy Chase actually LOOK like Gerald Ford now? He could milk this for a big comeback.
It's thoughtful and gracious of the newsmedia to say such noble and lofty things about Gerald Ford. He does deserve his moment of respect, unquestionably. Nevertheless, it's worth remembering that the parallels between the Ford Administration and the current Bush Administration are a bit too strong -- Ford, a genial but somewhat dullheaded man (sounds familiar), surrounded himself with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and good ol' Poppy Bush himself. The big difference, of course, was that in the wake of Nixon there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of making the same sort of power plays these men would do thirty years later. I also think that Ford had a great deal more personal integrity than the current moron-in-residence and recognized his personal and political limitations.
At least he did no lasting harm -- a legacy his present successor will not be able to claim.
Permalink |The Netherlands officially ended over-the-air analog television broadcasting at the stroke of midnight today. They estimate that all but about 74,000 of the 16 million households in the country get their television service from cable or satellite. Over-the-air digital broadcasting will continue for at least ten years, when the spectrum licensing comes up for renewal.
Meanwhile, it seems that Sony's unhappy because all these new televisions they plan to sell are getting cheaper faster than they'd like. Prices for LCD televisions are now projected to drop 25-30% in the U.S. in 2007. Our own looming deadline for the end of analog TV has been pushed back to 2009 so that everyone involved can eke out that much more profit before the Big Switch, but good ol' Sony's not happy that they won't make quite as many gazillions of dollars as they'd hoped. I'm sure, though, they could crank out a few more PlayStation 3 boxes to more than make up for it, if they really wanted to.
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The always-interesting blog tingilinde has some factoids you might be interested in WRT casualty figures in Iraq:
As of Thursday, there are 2,884 DoD-confirmed deaths of American troops. That's pretty common knowledge.
Steve (the blog author) says that the Environmental Protection Agency values one year of a human life at $172,000, and overall the EPA values an average human life at $3.7 million ($2.3 million if you're over 70, but we're talking about soldiers here). By the way, that's marked down from a previous government estimate of $6.1 million. However, Steve has extrapolated the $172K figure out to $7.7 million per soldier based on an average age of 30 and an average lifespan of 75.
Using Steve's numbers, he comes to the figure of $22.3 billion as the total worth of the lives of troops lost so far in Iraq. Based on estimates that the war costs the American taxpayer roughly $250 millon per day, the cost of those 2884 lives is equal to about 90 days of operations (even less if you use the standard $6.1M figure). As of Sunday, the duration of the war surpassed the total length of American engagement in World War II, and today makes the 1,354th day of the war.
The dead are a drop in the bucket. Unless, of course, they happen to be your loved ones. But tell that to the Decider-In-Chief.
Permalink |Were it not such a fucking travesty, it would almost be funny to watch all the hawkish righties who've discovered in the last week that we fucked up in Iraq and we're up to our necks in the problem that they created, with no way out.
One of the most loathsome people on the Planet Earth, Henry Kissinger, has all of a sudden decided that he needs to start paying attention to his legacy, and is out stumping hard to rehabilitate what little of his stature he has left. Even though he's been advising Bush and Cheney on this debacle right along, he took some time recently to make sure he got a little press saying that "the war is unwinnable" (and, let's face it, nobody knows about uniwnnable wars like Henry). And in this profile from "New York" magazine, read how he tried to browbeat the article's writer into submission about the extent of his role in shaping Bush's policy.
On the plus side, he'll be dead soon.
And don't think that this sudden "Oopsie, I goofed" tactic is unique to American politicians. Tony Blair may or may not have actually been agreeing with David Frost that Iraq is "a disaster", but popular Conservative MP Boris Johnson certainly knew what he was about when he supported the war and has so much backspin in this op-ed in the Telegraph that if it were a tennis ball it would fly backwards.
Permalink |Just like Martin and Lewis, Quebec and the rest of Canada are making noises again about splitting up. Late last week, Bush's meat puppet Stephen Harper (who, I am assured, does NOT eat babies) pushed a resolution through Parliament that recognizes Quebec as "a nation within Canada". He did it to forestall the possibility of a new referendum on separation in Quebec, since provincial by-elections this week are expected to go big for the Bloc Quebecois, who have pledged a new vote.
Meanwhile, across the pond, something similar is afoot in the United Kingdom. The debate over Scottish independence has grown from a fringe issue into a serious political question in the last few years. Public opinion polls show a majority approval even among English voters for allowing Scotland to leave the Union. The three major political parties in Britain oppose the idea, especially the ruling Labor party, which counts on seats from Scotland and Wales to hold on to its majority in the House of Commons. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who is likely to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister next year, and who is Scottish himself, has been making a lot of public effort to dissuade the people of Scotland. And, most experts agree, if Scotland wins independence, there would be no choice but to cede it to Wales and Northern Ireland as well.
Y'know, maybe it's time to rethink that whole Confederacy thing again and let all those Red States go fend for themselves...
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Via Bifurcated Rivets comes this news article from the online version of The Australian: scientists may have discovered a way to reduce naturally occurring toxins in cotton plants to make the seeds edible.
Mmm...less toxic cotton seeds. Bet they'd taste good with some Diet Moxie.
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This news article from This Is London has some details about Queen Elizabeth's impending semi-retirement. She's planning on permanently relocating to Windsor Castle and handing over the majority of her official duties to Prince Charles.
Over the weekend I saw some video footage of her from a recent appearance to meet the cast of the new James Bond film, and she looked surprisingly frail. I suppose one shouldn't be terribly surprised that an 80-year-old woman might be getting frail, but she seems to have crossed over that threshhold that elderly people often do, where they all at once seem smaller and distant, as if leaving the world in little steps.
She's not giving up the crown, though, and just the other day announced plans to make an official state visit to the United States next year to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. One of her very first official visits as Queen half a century ago was to visit Jamestown for the 350th anniversary.
(Meanwhile, I read at CNN the other day that Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, is trying to get herself on the next season of "Dancing With The Stars" Now THERE's a class act for you.)
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Remember these?
Now ask yourself when was the last time you actually used one or were given one as change. Even the post office gave up on their campaign to distribute them. I think I have one in my bedside table drawer along with my keepsake 1-pound coin from England and a few Euro coins from France.
Now the brain surgeons at the U.S. Mint have come up with a new series of dollar coins featuring all of the Presidents of the United States (no, not these guys) in yet another lame attempt to get people to use the coins.
This is not exactly new news, by the way. The original plans for this were announced some time ago, but the original plan was to put the faces of the presidents on paper dollars. Then somebody had this flash of marketing brilliance. Oh, well.
As with the very popular series of "50 States" quarters, the new coins will be released a few at a time, in the sequence of each president's term. That means there will indeed be TWO separate coins for Grover Cleveland, and, as many news stories have pointed out, it means that coins featuring Bill Clinton and George W. Bush should be issued in about 10 years, but they both have to die first.
I'm not at all against the coins, I just think they're doomed to remain as curios as long as we have paper dollar bills. The U.K. did away with 1-pound notes in 1983 and the Euro has never had a 1 Euro bill. Since paper money only has a working lifespan of a year and a half, it wouldn't take very long to swap out all the dollar bills, but the hue and cry from the usual morons would be enormous.
Oh, and there's a petition afoot to abolish the penny while we're at it. As noted here before, the mint coins pennies at a loss of $0.004 per coin due to the cost of zinc.
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I am not ashamed to admit in public that I am a big fan of "Dancing With The Stars". We watched the very first season as a lark, since it was summer and there was nothing else worth watching, and have been completely hooked from the get-go. I am still smarting over John O'Hurley being screwed over in the first season, and don't even get me started about the viewers picking Jerry Rice over Stacy Keibler in the semi-final last season.
Indeed, once again, it's my contention that the audience voted out the wrong guy in the semi-finals, picking Emmitt Smith over Joey Lawrence. That Mario Lopez was going to the finals was practically a given from the very first week, but Joey was a better dancer and had just as much entertainment quality as Emmitt Smith. And anyone who really thought Emmitt was better than Mario in the final round really needs to do a reality check (see this Washington Post article from TV columnist Lisa de Moraes, who agrees with me.
Nevertheless, as the results of the first two seasons (and now the third) have shown, it's more about the audience picking favorites than anyone's actual dancing ability. This Slate article from Wednesday has a spot-on analysis of the show's underlying mechanisms and does a good job of explaning why the best dancers will probably never win that big disco ball trophy.
I do agree with the Slate author's assessment that Cheryl Burke is the best dancer on the show. She doesn't try to upstage her celebrity partners the way ALL of the male dancers do, and she does a good job of making the most of her celebrity's audience appeal rather than trying to turn them into ballroom stars. It also doesn't hurt that she is SMOKIN' hot without looking sleazy and cheap, like some of the female dancers do. I hope she's able to parlay this into something bigger.
There are a few celebrities I'd get a kick out of seeing in a future season: Mike Rowe from "Dirty Jobs" (because I suspect he's a good dancer), maybe one of the "Brady Bunch" kids (since it seems we'll be stuck with them as has-been-celebs for the rest of their lives), John Lithgow as "The Geezer" (I suspect he's got dance moves too), and Laura Innes from "ER" (because everyone thinks she's a cripple in real life, but she's not). If you've got suggestions, do chime in.
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Actual screen cap of an AP story about soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in which whoever wrote the caption felt obliged to mention her outfit. (via Jack at TPRS)
Excuse the hell out of me, but when was the last time it was considered necessary to mention who made George Bush's suit or what color shirt he wore? Are we really not over the need in our society to define women by their clothing? What single bit of difference does it make if Nancy Pelosi wears an aqua Armani pantsuit or a red polyester dress from K-Mart? Does it matter if Bush wears Hermes neckties or suits off the rack from Men's Wearhouse? Of course not.
When Katie Couric debuted on the CBS Evening News a couple of months ago, there was a lot of scrutiny given to her choice of wardrobe, too. On one hand, I can understand this to some degree because she's more celebrity than authority figure, even though she finds herself in a role we've traditionally granted "gravitas" to. What celebrities wear is part of the whole cult of celebrity in the first place. But even in Katie Couric's case, dishing about her outfit seems woefully out of place in the context of her role vis-a-vis Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson, and certainly in relation to the way we talked about news anchors like Cronkite or Jennings.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we've reduced politicians to celebrities (indeed, the line is so blurred that we're entirely willing to accept celebrities as politicians, so why not the other way around?), but the double standard is unnecessary.
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I get a lot of hits from people searching on Google for "cheap floam" because I had this post about how to make your own Floam at home for a fraction of the cost of what you pay in the toy store.
Consequently, I wanted to pass along this bit of information regarding Floam -- this local television station in Florida reports that some people have complained about Floam getting moldy, and laboratory tests confirm that the product can be a breeding ground for mold and other fungus that can make your child sick. Like other products such as modeling clay and Play-Doh, Floam needs to stay moist inside its container or it will harden permanently, and any moist environment is a likely place for bacterial growth.
Where does the bacteria and mold come from? Most likely it comes from your children's unwashed hands and/or the unwashed surfaces they play on. If you let your kid play with Floam or any of the innumerable other moist play substances on the market, be sure to have them wash before and after playing with it, and be sure to wipe down their play surfaces with soap and hot water before and after play (don't use antibacterial products, they only make the bacteria get stronger in the long run).
Permalink |Back in July, I posted a link to an article about newspaper columnist Art Buchwald, who had retreated to his summer home on Martha's vineyard to live out his final days having refused kidney dialysis after his doctors told him he was dying.
As of this writing, he continues to improve even without the dialysis and has, in fact, returned to Washington and to writing his column, as well as going on tour, plugging the book he wrote over the summer. We should all die so well.
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Well, there you go...there's Karl Rove's "October Surprise".
I've about come to the conclusion that John Kerry MUST be on Rove's payroll.
At the same time, the desperation among the Republicans is palpable given the way they couldn't slither over each other fast enough to get to a microphone to denounce Kerry. I predict that before today's news cycle is done, they'll also have found a way to blame this on Bill Clinton.
Personal to the Junior Senator from Massachusetts -- please stop trying to tell jokes. You're making Al Gore look like Adam Sandler.
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I caught this news item quickly over the weekend: News.com.au reports that one of the Pythons, Terry Jones, has been diagnosed with "bowel cancer" (which I assume is what is called colo-rectal cancer in the U.S.) The report also says his doctors believe they've caught it at an early and treatable stage, so at least the news is not totally bad.
Nothing about it yet on his personal website, but the story has popped up on a few other news sites as well, so I presume it's legit.
Jones has been rather prominent in the last couple of years for writing a series of opinion pieces for The Guardian (such as this amusing one from October 10), harshly criticizing George Bush and the "War On Terror".
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As fellow blogger Linkmeister noted, it didn't even take 24 hours for the Justice Department to assert its new-found authority to remove 196 habeas corpus cases from the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. under the terms of the "Military Commissions Act". The detainees in question will now be tried before military commissions in secret.
Supporters of the Bush Administration like to point out that the MCA is written to apply only to "non-citizens of the United States". However, as legal scholars point out, the protections of habeas corpus have been extended to citizens and non-citizens alike since first enacted, and with those protections removed for one group, there is genuine concern that protections could be and will be removed for everyone given the administration's zeal for extending its unilateral authority.
Motions are in the works to bring cases to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of this law, but with a stacked court controlled by justices who seem to hold little interest in preserving individual freedoms, the outcome is not certain, and should they uphold the law as it is written now, that only increases the likelihood of the Executive Branch seeking to extend its reach.
If you like your editorializing a little less hyperbolic, then read this New York Times editorial which plays up the domestic political aspect of the situation, but does not shrink from the real concerns at hand.
Permalink |I had the usual selection of assorted links all ready to post today, but when I went online this morning, I caught Keith Olbermann's latest monologue speaking out against Bush's signing of the "Terror Act" that wipes away nearly 1000 years of the rule of law, 230 years of American democracy, rejects the Geneva Convention and turns every person in this nation into a political prisoner whether they realize it yet or not.
And so again, I feel that it is important to post this for you today; there will be plenty of time for frivolities another day. For now these words need to be seen and heard. "The Beginning of the End Of America", indeed. If you are not willing or able to watch the embedded streaming video above, here is the complete transcript:
And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.Permalink |We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear. And now, our rights and our freedoms in peril, we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before, and we have been led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.
We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans, while his man-in-charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did -- but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been, only human. We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us. We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass." We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets. Or substitute the Japanese. Or the Germans. Or the Socialists. Or the Anarchists. Or the Immigrants. Or the British. Or the aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words. And ironic ones, Mr. Bush. Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act. You spoke so much more than you know, sir. Sadly, of course, the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And -- again, Mr. Bush -- all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghreib Prison and the stories of waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere -- anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" -- exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check. He lied to get it. He lied as he received it. Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."
'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush? The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush? Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush? The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, sir. They are lies, that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America." That terrorist, sir, could only hope. Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas Corpus? Gone. The Geneva Conventions? Optional. The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir, somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11, that with only a little further shift in this world we now know, just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died, did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, sir, all of them -- as always -- wrong.
My father held lots of opinions and beliefs about things that were a bit...well, paranoid is probably the most charitable thing I can say. In my father's eyes, everyone was a guilty son of a bitch until proven otherwise, and you never knew who was going to screw you next.
Though I have inherited much of that cynical outlook on life, I like to think that I am not quite so willing to believe the worst about everyone. One of the subjects of his scorn and derision was mail carriers. He was quite insistent that, even though they're supposed to carry the mail until their day's assignment of letters, magazines and such was completely delivered, the mailman that delivered to my parents' house stopped working at noon, especially on Saturday, whether he was done or not. He also was of the firm belief that mail carriers simply took home whatever mail they didn't deliver and either kept it or dumped it in the trash.
As with some of his other pet theories, I'd always scoffed at his disdain for the U.S. Mail, but this morning the Boston Globe reports that authorities found "truckloads" of undelivered mail at the home of a Brookline mailman who recently passed away. I'll just bet he knocked off at noon every day, too.
But I still don't believe a word of the story about "fish cheeks".
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Make of this what you will, but this South American news agency reports that Bush has purchased a 98,842-acre property in Paraguay, one of the preferred destinations of deposed dictators everywhere.
Maybe he's just planning on a little getaway after the 2008 election, so he can spend some quality time "clearing brush".
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For those of us who spend a significant portion of our days online, we've become quite familiar with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and his series of penetrating, truth-baring editorials calling the Bush Adminstration and its allies on the carpet for their incessant lies, cavils, misdemeanors and incompetence. It seems like every time he opens his mouth, the video clips appear on YouTube, Crooks & Liars, Digg and just about everywhere else almost immediately.
A few weeks ago, though, when I posted about what I think was his best monologue, wherein he excoriated Donald Rumsfeld for likening opposition to the war in Iraq to the behavior of the Nazis, my friend Tony replied with this comment:
This is an incredibly penetrating and compelling essay. The question is, is anyone listening?
His point is valid: Olbermann's show is buried in the middle of the night on a poorly-rated cable network. Even though every word the man is speaking hits like the hammer of justice, his viewing audience is negligible, particularly compared to that of his arch-nemesis, Fox News gasbag Bill O'Reilly.
In the days before the Internet, that would have been the end of it. A voice literally crying out in the darkness, unheard and unnoticed as the wave of right-wing extremism overwhelms this nation. But, as I said, Olbermann is getting plenty of notice from an online culture able to spread not just his message but his actual words more or less instantaneously and to people everywhere on the planet. Six or seven years ago, though, that would still be a small number of people, and the larger culture of people who do not live online still might have missed it.
But the power of his words and the power of the Internet are beginning to have an effect. Olbermann's television ratings are up 69%, and his editorials are discussed, disseminated, and (in the case of the right-wing media) disresepcted in a number of "MSM" outlets as well as major online news sites.
The broader implication of "is anyone listening?" is, of course, whether or not such outspoken sentiments carry any weight with the Bush Administration itself. In that case, all you can really say is that they have encased themselves so completely in a cocoon of denial, deceit and spin that nothing anyone says gets through to them. Ultimately, it's probably not all that important to reach the ears of Chimpy McAWOL and his band of thugs -- they have already cast their fate to the wind. But more and more ordinary people need to hear these things if there is any chance to stem the tide, and it appears like that is beginning to happen.
Permalink | Comments (2)A new paper published in the journal "Science" announces that astronomers have apparently gotten all that Pluto nonsense out of their systems and gotten back to some real work. They've discovered over 200 Jupiter-like planets in our galaxy using data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope, and they theorize that there could be as many as 6 billion more.
The scientists are hopeful that their enhanced detection methods will allow them to gauge an accurate estimate of the number of Earth-like (or "Class M" as some of us like to say) planets are in the Milky Way, and that further extrapolations of probability might yield a guess as to how many are inhabited (or at least inhabitable).
Rather than dig up a pant-load of links myself, here's a link to the boingboing post where I read all of this today. They've done the legwork, so let them take the credit.
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Not once, not twice, but THREE times on Tuesday, Fox News went out of its way to identify scandal-plagues ex-congressman Mark Foley as a Democrat, even though he is most definitely a Republican (link goes to yet another Crooks & Liars post of a Keith Olbermann rant). The stink of desperation is thick in the air as the Republicans have attempted every play in their book of dirty tricks to try to squirm out of this situation -- they've blamed the Democrats, they've blamed the pages themselves, they've tried to pin the whole thing on an aide (who promptly threw the bomb right back at them). About the only thing I haven't heard or read about yet is them trying to blame it all on Bill Clinton, which they will no doubt work their way up to soon enough.
But if all that spinning isn't quite enough for you, you may have missed this small news item yesterday: Congress has authorized $20M for a VICTORY PARTY to celebrate our "victory in Iraq".
Well, I guess if Republicans can be Democrats, then whatever the fuck Iraq has turned into can certainly be a "victory". It just better be one hell of a party, that's all.
Permalink |In the week and a half or so since the Republicans "compromised" with the White House on the legislation that permits torture, abrogates the Geneva Convention and eviscerates the 800-year-old legal tradition of habeas corpus I have been trying to think of a way to write about it here.
In the process, I have encountered a lot of well-written editorials, articles, and blog posts:
A blogger who calls himself "Wisco" wrote this post entitled "Remember When Everyone Thought Torture Was Evil?" He pays particular attention to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen originally from Syria who was detained, imprisoned and tortured by the United States government covertly for almost a year with no access to any legal resources. A confession was beaten out of him despite the fact that he was completely innocent of any charges. Wisco writes about the apologists and advocates among the American Right who continue to try to smear this man and promote torture as a "necessary weapon".
The Russian author Vladimir Bukovsky wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in the spring of 2005 entitled "Torture's Long Shadow", in which he offers his own first-hand account of being held prisoner and tortured by the KGB in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison. The graphic details will make you shudder when you consider that his only "crime" was speaking out against the Soviet regime -- we used to think of ourselves better than the Soviets, but, as Bukovsky writes, we have consigned ourselves to this same path where any justification can and will be found to imprison and torture anyone who comes under the displeasure of the administration.
More recently in the Washington Post, the editorial board of that newspaper offered a harsh criticism of not just Bush but Senator John McCain, himself the victim of torture as a prisoner of war, but when political points needed to be scored was willing to betray his own past. It is disturbing in the extreme that a "compromise" which consists of little more than a political face-saving gesture for both Bush and McCain which, in the end, astonishingly turns a blind eye to this despicable behavior.
The historian Niall Ferguson, who had been at one point a darling among the Right because of his historical assessment of the United States' unclaimed status as an "empire", now reminds us that another hero of the Right, Winston Churchill, opposed torture for pragmatic reasons: abuse of prisoners will inevitably result in torture and abuse on the part of the other side and turn into a downward spiral of atrocities. This was the very point of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, and technicalities will hold little water with aggrieved enemies.
Speaking of water -- waterboarding has been much discussed through all of this, held up by the Right as a "lite" version of torture (if any such thing can be imagined), but this post by "The Nation" editor David Corn should dissuade anyone except the most willfully blind apologist that it is anything but. Bush, he says, has cast his lot in with the worst dictators and murderers of the 20th Century.
I could go on with the links, as there have been many people of conscience who have spoken out publicly in the last couple of weeks about this.
One time, several years ago, on this blog I stated one thing very clearly:
I continue to hold fast to that sentiment. It is heart-breaking to even begin to think that millions of people in this country continue to support the actions of a group of people who have demonstrated themselves to have nothing but contempt for the groundwork of civilization itself, who are willing to broach any separation between decency and brutality, who are ready to cast aside every principle upon which law and government have made manifest for nearly a millennium, who have determined to exert and extend their power with only the foulest of intentions.
Liberalism in theory and form promotes tolerance and provides a great deal of room for the co-existence of a multiplicity of opinions and world-views, but for me the threshhold of tolerance has been reached as a consequence of these recent actions. I can no longer find any room for accommodation for anyone who supports these actions or the people who have undertaken them. I am compelled to judge any and all supporters as being profoundly evil themselves and from this time forward will show not the slightest consideration for them. They are deserving of nothing but my uttermost contempt and will receive no more.
I cannot say what the best practical course is to begin the fight against this evil. It is clear that the mechanisms traditionally available to the American people have been undermined and devalued to the point of meaninglessness. It is less clear where other traditional forms of opposition might take us. Unfortunately, there may not be many alternatives as we are marched down this path.
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As we were on our way home from visiting friends in Maine two weekends ago, we opted to stop for dinner in Portsmouth, NH, and as such needed to go around the infamous Portsmouth rotary, known all too well by just about anyone who has ever spent time on the highways of New England. Years ago, before they built the Piscataquis River Bridge as part of the extension of Rt. 95, the primary way to get to Maine was up U.S. Route 1, through Portsmouth, around the circle, and across the drawbridge. In the summertime, the backups went for miles.
The backups still happen even on Rt. 95, though not as legendarily long as they were years ago, but the traffic circle remains as a bypass into Portsmouth and continues to be a magnet for traffic accidents -- tourists not from the Northeast are often flummoxed by traffic circles, which are unknown in other parts of the country, and we Masshole drivers are just obnoxious enough to raise the difficulty level a notch.
Going around the circle from the bridge to the bypass, I found myself wondering why after all this time the circle was still in use. Earlier this year another infamous New England traffic circle, the Sagamore Rotary, was at long last replaced with a "flyover" overpass. The traffic backups at the Sagamore Bridge have been world-class for decades, but the overpass has been a dramatic improvement in its first season of use.
Well, despite the New Englander's love of keeping things the way they used to be just to spite the rest of the world, I was pleased to read this very brief news blurb on Boston.com that reports that the Portsmouth circle is finally about to be sent the way of the dodo. While this won't have much impact on the traffic flow to and from Maine at this point, it will undoubtedly reduce the number of traffic accidents locally and should make it easier for people trying to get to the many businesses on the bypass route to Portsmouth.
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The Krispy Kreme donut empire collapsed in on itself a couple of years ago after making the classic mistake of expanding their franchises too fast. The first one they opened in the Boston area, for example, which was in Medford (a town that already had 13 Dunkin Donuts locations, BTW), opened to mile-long lines only to find itself shuttered and empty. It has recently been reopened as a Kelley's Roast Beef location.
This news report from the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reports that the Palm Beach, Florida police department is considering turning a defunct Krispy Kreme store into a police substation. After all, the cops were already used to spending all day there anyway...
Via MetaFilter comes this news article about a 65-year-old man who had a long-running consensual sexual relationship with his 35-year old daughter and eventually married her. (They are now embroiled in a bitter lawsuit against one another)
See what perversions are caused when heterosexuals are allowed to marry?!?! We need a constitutional amendment pronto if we are to save America from this sort of twisted, sinful behavior! Write your Congressional representatives today!
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The daddy longlegs fly (not to be confused with the daddy longlegs spider) has had a bit of a population explosion in Britain this year, and, if my house is any indication, in America, too.
While the BBC article ponders what role the daddy longlegs (also called the crane fly) plays in the Circle Of Life, all I know is that about 10,000 of them have found their way into The (Real) Big Red House over the last month or so, scaring the bejeebers out of my child, who has an absolute terror about bugs.
One night, I was faced with three at once in Charlotte's bathroom, bashing against the walls as they tend to do, and occasionally flying from one side of the room to the other, causing Charlotte to shriek at the top of her lungs. I smushed one right quick, but the second one must have been made out of black-box material because he was unsquashable. The third managed to conceal himself until I had given up on the second one, but he was no match for the rolled-up copy of "Cuisine At Home" and left a permasplotch on the wall next to the toilet.
While we have plenty of spiders, too, I actually like to have spiders around because they catch the other bugs. No sign of any daddy longlegs spiders, though.
Permalink |A pair of news articles to share:
The BBC reports that horse chestnut trees in Britain are being ravaged by a disease that rivals the infamous "Dutch Elm" disease in its severity and threatens to wipe out almost every "conker" tree in the country. ("Conker" is a game played by British children using the horse chestnuts -- you swing your chestnut on a string and try to smash the other guy's chestnut).
Meanwhile, on this continent -- the New York Times reports that something is killing off aspen trees in the western U.S., but nobody is sure what it is yet. Long-term drought is one factor, but other trees in affected areas are not dying off as fast as the aspens, and scientists are puzzled.
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The BBC reports that yet another person in Indonesia has succumbed to the H5N1 "bird flu". Fifty people have died in Indonesia, and the global worldwide total of human deaths from bird flu has reached 140.
I notice that the catastrophiles who worked themselves up into a frenzy all last winter about the coming pandemic that was going to destroy humanity have managed to be a bit more restrained so far this year. Not that they probably won't try, but I think that the utter lack of a pandemic finally got a lot of people to realize that there was more than a little bit of crying wolf involved.
That's not to say that flu pandemics can't happen or that H5N1 doesn't have the potential to morph into a virus more readily communicable between humans. It is to say that the people who seem so deeply invested in imagining the worst-case scenarios really need to screw their tin-foil helmets on a bit more tightly and try looking at the world with a working reality.
People are imaginative creatures, and the point of these three posts today is that most people will believe what they want to believe even if there is no evidence to back them up or even when the existing evidence contradicts them completely. They will, in fact, go out of their way to seek out anything that has the most tenuous connection to their belief and overstate it as necessary to shore up their clearly erroneous and sometimes outright delusional beliefs.
This is called "faith", and it's an incredibly destructive human tendency. Faith and its various manifestations does more to harm our ability to cope with the world as it really is than almost any other human emotion.
As a culture, we have taken this to an extreme perversion by transforming fears into a form of "faith" -- we want to believe that the worst possible things are going to happen to us, despite all indications to the contrary: tusnamis, terror attacks, pandemics, even the "Second Coming" is a fearful faith. It's not just Americans, either; a Guardian article I saw the other day noted that most Britons think the world is a more dangerous place now than it was 50 years ago, despite plenty of evidence otherwise. Historically, Western culture goes through these cycles, most usually described as "Millenialism" due to the prevalence of the belief that "End Times" were upon them (as surely the belief curses our culture now). Ultimately even the most fervent doomsdayers are compelled to give in to the brutal daily reality of our dogged continuation, and the mania wanes to wait its turn for another century or so. And, oddly enough, the deluded people actually do eventually get their wish in some fashion through the inescapability of death, even if they don't get to go out in the blaze of glory they wished for or get that all-important resurrection they spent so much time praying for.
Our imaginations and our propensity to believe in them to the exclusion of our ability to comprehend the world around us are a far greater threat to our ultimate survival than dead chickens in Asia.
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Political writer Robert Dreyfuss has written this realistic and rather sobering look at the situation as it stands these days in Iraq and the Bush Administration's astonishing ability to look reality straight in the face and still spew forth an outrageous series of spins, equivocations, and outright lies about it, even as the wider community of Washington political elites are beginning to come to terms with the immensity of the failure. The piece contains some links to other articles written by Dreyfuss and others that further illuminate not merely the gravity of the situation but also the administration's absurd public stances.
(via this particularly comprehensive post by MetaFilter member "y2karl" -- I highly recommend reading all the links and even the MeFi thread itself)
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The BBC reports that astronomers have been able to tear themselves from the raging debate over whether Pluto is a planet to discover a new planet in a star system 450 light-years away.
The planet has a radius almost half again as big as Jupiter, but a mass that's only half that of Jupiter. This has led the astronomers to describe the planet as "puffy".
Sean Combs has reminded the astronomers that they should be calling it "Planet Diddy". (He's looking mighty puffy in that picture, don't you think?)
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Let's see...major religious leader whose every word is closely scrutinized and has a history of being somewhat inimical to the presence of Muslim Turks in his native country travels to said country and makes a very public statement invoking an ancient pope who considered Muslims evil and a threat to civilization who should be wiped out. He does this during a time of significant international strife when certain extremist Christian elements seem rather intent on carrying out this ancient mission by inciting military crises throughout the Middle East, and when Muslim sensitivities are high due to perceived threats from said Christians -- to wit the violent response to the Danish cartoon lampooning Mohammed.
Muslim response: let's declare a Jihad on the Pope and all of "Christendom".
Response from the Pope: "Oops, didn't mean it. Now STFU."
Riiiiiiight. That's going to fix everything. Meanwhile, the papal bureaucracy is taking the lead from the Bush Administration and trying to spin this every possible way to make it look like it's not Ratzy's fault. And his apology itself is a little backhanded; it sounds like what he's saying is "I'm sorry that your are a bunch of hot-headed lunatics who took offense." Not that the other guys come off smelling like a rose in this either, mind you.
Permalink |The big local business story here in the Boston area yesterday was that the media mogul who owns the local NBC affiliate here is buying one of the two major UHF stations in Boston, WLVI-TV (known to one and all in the area as Channel 56).
A few years ago, this could not have happened. "Duopolies" (the ownership of more than one TV station in a single market) were against FCC regulations. But the abolition of most of the ownership rules by the FCC has seen quite a bit of ownership consolidation. So far, the coalescence has not been as disastrous as it has been in radio broadcasting, but I think that's in part because there aren't as many TV stations as radio stations in the first place, and in part because the nature of television broadcasting has been different due to the strong role of the networks. With that particular landscape shifting quite a lot in the last five or ten years and showing signs of yet more drastic change to come, I suspect that there will not be a wholesale effort to create many duopolies other than in the largest markets.
As I was reading about this news last night, I wound up perusing through a discussion forum dedicated to talking about the local Boston television business. Once I got through the threads catting away about this news-celeb and that one, I ended up reading one that talked about the history of Channel 56 and found myself reminiscing about it myself.
Though we moved to Maine when I was 7 years old, we lived in this area for those first seven years, and Channel 56 was part of our regular television viewing when I was little, along with the other major UHF station here, WSBK (Channel 38). After we moved to Maine, we were without our familiar Boston stations for a few years, but cable television came early to our town in Maine and along with it came those two stations. At first it felt like a lifeline back to the place we used to call home, but as we grew up and stopped thinking of ourselves as being "from Massachusetts", they were more like a glimpse into a world we knew almost nothing about.
Channel 56 was always the weak sister compared to Channel 38; WSBK had Bruins hockey and then later the Red Sox. Channel 38 also always seemed to have better cartoons in the afternoons, even if you did have to put up with the incredibly annoying Willy Whistle. But Channel 56 had Star Trek and that was the most important thing for me. I vaguely recall an afternoon cartoon host on Channel 56 who was a railroad conductor character, and eventually he was replaced with long-time Boston disk jockey Dale Dorman. I also vividly recalling a period where Channel 56 bought a syndication package of a bunch of classic 1950s sitcoms and also Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life".
Both 56 and 38 ran as independent stations for a very long time, occasionally trading off on which station carried what show (over the years I can recall the Three Stooges running on each one for a time), then in the 1990s both of them affiliated with one of the new networks that popped up after the success of Fox. Of course, all of that is changing again, too. The UPN and WB networks merged and will debut next week as "CW" on Channel 56, while Channel 38 (which was bought up by Westinghouse just before they, in turn, were bought up by CBS) finds itself without any network and returning to its roots as an "independent" station.
Oddly enough, even though I've lived back in the Boston area for ten years now, I never watch either 56 or 38 these days. I am not in the target demographic for the younger audiences that UPN and WB were aimed at. I don't expect the change of owners at 56 to make a bit of difference for me, and I already watch Channel 7's newscast.
Permalink | Comments (4)Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is not generally known for her oratorical and rhetorical skills. Indeed, she comes from a political tradition of scalawags and scoundrels and has had some of her own errors in judgement with regard to the response to Hurrican Katrina. But sometimes you just have to stand up and speak out against the deplorable behavior of the Republicans who presently have control of things in Washington (and who may find themselves on the short end of the gavel come November).
This morning she rose to speak on the floor of the Senate regarding an education bill, but following more of the same moronic screeds from a pair of her Republican colleagues, she'd obviously decided enough was enough and had this to say:
"In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes by two colleagues from the other side, I'd like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did. Americans are tired of boneheaded Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that despite documenting mistake after mistake after mistake, even of their own party admitting mistakes, never admit they do anything wrong. That's the kind of leadership Americans are tired of."
Watch the CSPAN video of her remarks at YouTube
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I did a fair bit of Spanish cuisine this spring, and in the process I bought a few specialty items from La Tienda.com, which is one of the biggest importers of Spanish foods online. My larder now contains some incredible smoky pimentón, five pounds of Calasparra rice for making paella, and a few other goodies from Spain.
So, needless to say, I get a small-but-steady stream of e-mail spam from them announcing their latest specials, new products, etc. A couple of months ago, I got a somewhat breathless missive announcing that they had finally been able to secure a supply of authentic top-quality jamón íberico -- the famed dry-cured Iberico ham. Like Prosciutto di Parma and the more common Spanish Serrano ham, Iberico is aged over a long period of time under carefully controlled conditions, then sliced tissue-thin.
It's very hard to get quality Iberico ham outside of Spain, so it was a major coup for La Tienda. If you wanted to buy it, you had to be willing to wait at least a year to get it, because they've pre-ordered from the supplier, and they're only selling full hams at a total price of about $1200.00 a piece. So I took a pass on ordering it.
Little did I realize, though, until I read this NYT article last week what a sensation this offering has caused within the Foodie world. The foodie featured in the article even went to Spain so he could "visit" his ham. The article illustrates the unabashed trendiness of foodies: prosciutto is now totally pedestrian, darling, and Serrano is so last year, so anybody who is anybody is lining up to buy their own bone-in Iberico. The story alos talks a little about the challenges La Tienda has to go through to convince the USDA that it was okay to import the product; as you might recall, the USDA set down a handful of regulations a couple of years ago about food safety that have wreaked havoc with being able to legitimately import many traditionally-made foods.
Permalink |On Tuesday, Donald Rumsfeld delivered an address to the American Legion in Salt Lake City that accused anyone who opposed the Bush Administration's efforts in Iraq of appeasement and likened them to the Nazis.
News anchor Keith Olbermann, who has been vocal and outspoken about his disagreement with the administration and its apologists and supporters, took the time on his overnight broadcast early Wednesday morning to rebut the words of Donald Rumsfeld, in the process delivering an essay of immense conviction and fortitude. Olbermann invoked the spirit and the very words of Edward R. Murrow in doing so, and while he demurred at any positive comparison between Murrow and himself, I believe that he may have achieved something very similar.
I give you now without other further comment from me the full transcript and video of Keith Olbermann's closing essay:
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.Permalink | Comments (1)Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story, with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis - and the sober contemplation - of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land; Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration's track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq. It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right, and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril with a growing evil, powerful and remorseless. That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's - questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England's, in the 1930s. It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone to England. It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted it's own policies, it's own conclusions - it's own omniscience - needed to be dismissed. The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile - at best morally or intellectually confused. That critic's name… was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History - and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England - had taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty - and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today's Omniscient Ones.
That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count - not just his. Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden's plans five years ago - about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago - about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego. But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically. And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor's New Clothes.
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we - as its citizens - must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note - with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can too. The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that, though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism, indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute… I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow. But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, "confused" or "immoral."
Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954.
"We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men; Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were - for the moment - unpopular."
And so, good night, and good luck.
The online version of The Nation magazine noted last week that we have been at war inside Iraq now for longer than the U.S. was an active participant in World War II.
Yesterday, Chimpy promised that there was no way we were leaving as long as he's in office. Fortunately, that's only 881 days from now.
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Via Progressive Review, here's a very interesting post to a mailing list called, coincidentally enough, "Interesting People". The post is from a computer security guy, but he seems to know enough about chemistry and/or personally knows some chemists to offer a pretty thorough critique about the supposed plans to blow up all those planes using chemicals smuggled in shampoo bottles.
The gist of his analysis is this: organic peroxides are indeed explosive, in fact probably too explosive to handle to be able to mix them on the fly without killing yourself before you can kill anyone else. They're also extremely corrosive and probably could not be transported in cheap plastic containers like shampoo bottles. Also, they're easily detected by smell, and they don't smell anything like shampoo, so it should be easy to tell the difference, even for your average half-brained TSA employee.
But it's his concluding paragraphs that I had the most agreement with:
So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end? My back of the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes, etc. -- I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year? Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and it is even safer to fly than to walk!Permalink |At some point, we're going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I'm happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. (Emphasis mine -- BK)
The expert is talking about Iraq, though taken out of context you might wonder these days. The quote comes from this story in today's NYT about the increasing level of violence in Iraq and the growing willingness among Pentagon officials to admit that what we've managed to do is create a civil war (at least, they're willing to admit it when Rummy's not within earshot).
Meanwhile, if you have somehow managed to miss reading Sy Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker, go read it right now. With this appalling debacle showing no signs of doing anything but going from bad to worse, it is simply beyond belief that the Bush Administration greenlighted Israel's military action against Hezbollah so they could work out the kinks in the American war plans against Iran. Nevertheless, Hersh has been on the money about the machinations in the Pentagon and obviously has sympathetic sources in very high places.
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This just in: In a recent poll, 30% of Americans did not know what year the 9/11 attack took place.
On the upside, 95% (!!) were able to correctly identify the day and month of the attack.
No word on how many were able to identify who is buried in Grant's Tomb or what was the color of George Washington's white horse.
(via MetaFilter)
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While the cephalopods continue their struggle for dominance in the South Pacific, a new threat looms large on the North Atlantic horizon: giant crabs are invading Norway!!
I have the obvious solution -- send Captain Sig and the rest of the boats from Deadliest Catch!
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The BBC reports that a once-common butterfly that was considered to be nearly disappeared from the U.K. has made a roaring comeback in the Cotswolds district of England. The resurgence in the population of the Adonis Blue is thought to be the result of the milder winter weather and warmer summers that Britain has experienced over the last several years.
Fortunately for the people of Gloucestershire, the return of these butterflies has not resulted in anything quite as bad as this. Yet.
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Still NOT Dead.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco was unavailable for comment.
The BBC had this story yesterday about a company in the UK which will be stamping eggs with a temperature-sensitive ink which will change colors as the egg boils, telling you whether the egg is soft, medium, or hard-boiled.
I don't know which is the better idea: that, or the sticker that can be placed on fruits and vegetables to detect ethylene gas to tell you the degree of ripeness BEFORE you buy the half-rotten tomatoes at the Stop & Shop.
I do know that both of those ideas are 1000% better than CBS's lame advertising gimmick of laser-etching the Big Eye logo on eggs for the upcoming fall TV season.
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A couple of weeks ago, Wired had this story about a research team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH, as we say around here) which has had a run of positive results from their work on inducing "suspended animation" in lab pigs.
In this project, the researchers are inflicting mortal wounds on test subjects, then replacing the animal's blood with a cold solution that significantly lowers body temperature at a rate fast enough to offset irreparable brain and tissue damage. Once the pigs are cooled and the wounds repaired, the blood is returned to the animal and the body rewarmed to a stable temperature. A number of test animals have been successfully chilled and revived, indicating that this process might be further developed as a method for extending the window of survivability for critically-wounded people.
Dunno if this will work with cryogencially frozen heads or not, but maybe Ted Williams knew something we don't.
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A few months ago, the newspaper columnist Art Buchwald lay dying in his hospital bed, the infirmities of old age having finally taken a seemingly insurmountable toll on his body. Diabetes cost him one leg and sent him into kidney failure that was going to require ongoing dialysis. His prognosis was poor, and a sort of death watch set in, with people writing tributes to him and his friends and family making the final pilgrimage to say goodbye.
But in a turn of fate that would make Norman Cousins proud, Buchwald decided that if he was about to die he'd rather do it at home than languishing in a hospital bed. He decided to forego dialysis entirely and let death come naturally rather than prolonged through medical intervention, and returned to his beloved summer home on Martha's Vineyard to spend his final days. This NYT feature from yesterday tells us that instead of going gently into that good night, Buchwald's medical condition has actually improved a bit and his friends and family have been able to enjoy a very happy summer with him. While no one is expecting him to suddenly get well and return to the business of the world, there's some joy to be found in the way he has chosen to spend his remaining time.
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(One of the many Hezbollah fighters incapacitated by Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Except, of course, that he's five years old.)
It should be patently obvious by now that this war-by-proxy between the United States and Iran is a deliberate and calculated action by both sides to further their aims against one another by building a framework that can be used for justifying military escalation.
In particular, the useless jetting about by Condoleezza Rice spouting off an unsupportable cease-fire plan to other governments who will hear none of it would be laughable were it not for the serious consequences of such blatant stalling. It's been established that the Israelis sought and received American political support for this action a year ago, waiting for the right pretext to make their move. Foolishly (or perhaps cunningly) Hezbollah gave them the opening they were waiting for, not unlike the way Al Quaeda gave Bush carte blanche on 9/11.
But the gambit has not worked out quite the way Israel and the American neocons expected it would (about par for the course for the PNAC crowd), despite Israel's quick military success, and the Bush Administration's ploy of delaying a diplomatic solution to give Israel time to finish up threatens now plays into the hands of the Iranians, as have almost all of their efforts.
On the positive side, as long as Bush plays a stalling game, I think it's unlikely that the military conflict will widen. New Gingrich has been running around in public with the drool pouring down from his slavering mouth while he declares this World War III, and the neocons have been sickeningly fast to embrace that idea. Even that poor old sot Christopher Hitchens has been granted a little more time to babble on about how Allied war crimes in WWII are really the fault of the "appeasers" and if we'd learn from their example, the innocents of Lebanon would not have to die at the hands of the Israelis. Anything to rationalize an American foreign policy that has failed utterly, eh Chris?
Tell that to the little boy in the picture. Or this family. Or this woman in Beirut. Given that the Israelis decided a year ago that they were prepared to accept their own civilian casulties to further their aim and have shown absolutely no reluctance to kill Lebanese civilians and U.N. observers, there is little point in asserting any equivalence between Israeli and Hezbollah airstrikes. This is cold-blooded and calculated murder. Meanwhile, the mullahs in Iran get to shore up their international support without having to take on direct military action.
If this game plan continues in the way most of the neocon agenda has gone, the stalling game won't last forever. Bush will eventually commit American troops, and will almost certainly get a justification for attacking Iran directly -- a Hezbollah rocket hitting an American armored vehicle, a suicide bomber, something -- a rationalization that will score with American public opinion where months of saber-rattling and threatening words have failed to sway people. It's beyond repulsive to watch these machinations play themselves out knowing the consequences they hold.
Permalink |My wife e-mailed me this link to a BBC news report that a Chinese dissident somehow managed to "beat himself up" while in police custody to the point that he is now permanently paralyzed from the injuries he miraculously caused to his own spine.
Riiiiiiiiight, and those wacky Iraqis at Abu Ghreib were just having some frat-boy fun.....
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I don't know how much attention last week's Big Dig accident got in various local media coverage, but needless to say it has been pretty much the ONLY thing anybody here has been talking about.
If you've read anything about it, you might think that the picture above is a photo of Rt. 93 during the morning commute, but that photo is actually a picture of the morning commute in Delhi, India. It only looks exactly like the Expressway somewhere around the Schrafft's building. The photo comes second-handedly from Marginal Revolution, where the author, Tyler Cowen, has a link or two to some other posts about the unforeseen consequences of outsourcing.
Meanwhile, Adam at Universal Hub, who has been doing a fabulous job with daily roundups of the Boston bloggers' coverage of the problem reminds us that Andrew Natsios, the former head of the Big Dig project and the man many people think needs to be held accountable for a lot of those construction mistakes (not to mention the legendary cost overruns) is now the Bush Administration's head of the government's rebuilding program in Iraq, which is being carried out by none other than Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, which was the primary contractor for the Big Dig.
Ooooookay, then. Actually, that explains quite a lot when you think about it.
Permalink |Three brief examples of the absurdity of religion delivering needless suffering to people all over the world:
Example #1
Today, July 12, marks the beginning of "marching season" in Northern Ireland. People in Northern Ireland know today simply as "The Twelfth", much as we know Independence Day as "The Fourth". The anniversary marks the victory of the English King William's victory at the Battle of the Boyne, a key turning point in the English conquest of Ireland, but over the years has devolved into yet another opportunity for Protestant groups to incite conflict with the Catholics, who are the minority in Ulster. In recent years, the marches have grown increasingly violent, even as sectarian strife in Northern Ierland has found an outlet through political dialogue.
Now, some moron (an American businessman, of course) has decided to profit from this conflict by turning it into a tourist opportunity. Inviting Americans to go to Northern Ireland to see the marches (and, by extension, inviting them to witness whatever conflicts might arise). It's the moral equivalent of selling tickets to a lynching, another popular American pasttime of yesteryear. But, then again, the most popular sport in America is NASCAR, so I guess things really haven't changed at all. (via New Humanist)
Example #2
The death toll from yesterday's train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay), India is now at 185, with nearly 700 other people injured. Though there were some yesterday trying to pin the incident on Al Quaeda, the culprits appear to be one of two groups of Kashmir separatist movements with ties to Pakistan, a long-standing sponsor of a number of Islamic terrorist groups (including Al Quaeda).
The struggle over Kashmir, which is sectarian in origin, has fueled political tension between India and Pakistan for decades. Both nations now have nuclear weapons and both have indicated complete willingness to use them against one another -- at the end of 2001, the two countries stood toe-to-toe ready to unleash nuclear holocaust on one another after another terrorist bombing. Since then, the two countries have done much to open political dialogue, but, as this Washington Post editorial wonders, how much more provocation will be tolerated before an event sets off those nuclear triggers? The author of that piece opines that India needs to step up to the table on Kashmir, but that Pakistan needs to demonstrate that they have the willingness to throttle their wayward clients. (via 3quarksdaily)
Example #3
Is there really anything left to say about the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine? Israeli forces have already begun shelling Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon following the seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, and the government of Israel has deemed the kidnapping an "act of war". They will undoubtedly conduct additional military incursions, as they have been doing with regard to a similar situation in Gaza.
To me the only thing that's clear about this situation any more is that both sides are wrong on just about everything. There is probably no real political solution to be had, given that each side is willing to simply start killing the other regardless of the imposition of dialogue, "roadmaps", shuttle diplomacy, Camp David meetings, or anything else.
All of this grief, all of this suffering, all of this peril because religious people can't agree on their various flavors of imaginary beings. You'll pardon my disgust.
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Not to minimize the seriousness of the incident in Boston yesterday with the collapse of some roof tiles in one of the Big Dig tunnels, but here's another so-called "engineering marvel" in peril: one of the world's largest dams, located in Brazil, has developed a significant crack and could fail at any time.
Coincidentally enough, this problem also comes in the wake of a tunnel failure.
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My backyard has more mosquitoes per square foot than the Amazon rainforest, but even that does not compare with what you're seeing in the photo above: a cloud of mayflies in Wisconsin so dense that they showed up on weather radar.
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The DPRK launched SEVEN missiles yesterday, including the one we were so hot-and-bothered about last week. And despite all the noise the U.S. made about shooting them down, our bluff got called again.
Those of you who have been reading this site for a while will remember this link, but for those of you who are more recent readers, let me point you to a rather unsettling piece of "Flash art" from the South Korean artist Young-Hae Chang called "Operation Nukorea" which lays out exactly WHY this situation is not going to be resolved by American saber-rattling.
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George Bush stages 4th of July photo ops with troops at Ft. Bragg, NC, even though he has never attended a single one of the more than 2600 funerals that have been held for fallen American troops.
Permalink | Comments (3)Back in the summer of 2001, the southwestern Indian state of Kerala was subjected to heavy downpours of rain that was tinted red, as though the sky was raining blood.
Say what you will about omens and the like, but there has been a great deal of interest in what actually caused this red rain, and a number of studies over the last five years to try and answer the question. The Wikipedia article linked above has a lot of information about some of the initial findings and the competing theories, which range from red-colored dirt being swept up into the air and causing precipitation, to algae blooms, to actual blood from an unfortunate group of bats that were caught up in the storm.
There have also been a number of postulations that the coloration comes from astronomical sources, too. Meteoric particles, comet dust, and so on. A couple of weeks ago, CNN and other news sources reported on a paper published this spring which claims to have found cell-like structures inside samples of the rain that the researchers speculate could be alien bacteria. Their claims are based on experiments that indicate that the cells reproduce (despite lacking any DNA) even at high temperatures outside the range for terrestrial bacteria. Their work is fascinating, since it hints at not just extra-terrestrial life, but the possibility that life itself was introduced to Earth via extra-terrestrial micro-organisms. It's far from conclusive, but a very interesting claim nonetheless.
Permalink | Comments (1)I am always a sucker for "behind the curtain" stories and the like, so I really enjoyed this brief NYT article the other day about people who jockey for position to become contestants on "The Price Is Right"
It's a whole different ball of wax than sitting through the 100-question qualifying exam to be on "Jeopardy!". There's very little advance screening -- people who line up to be in the studio audience are quickly screened by the producers and are then randomly selected once taping begins. Two prohibitions: no costumes and no cheat sheets.
Oh, and only Bob gets to sleep with the stage models. It's in his contract, I think.
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Wired had this brief story the other day about efforts by winemakers to "downsell" their product in hopes of attracting a broader market. Rather than relegating cheaper wines to the "shelf of shame" in the back of the liquor store along with the MD 20/20 and the Thunderbird, wine producers have decided that snappy marketing, funky packaging, and ironic hipster branding will help push the plonk. No doubt they've been inspired by the success of "Two Buck Chuck", the "house wine" of Trader Joe's supermarkets, though the Wired story also credits the runaway success of Yellow Tail, the ubiquitous swill from Australia than takes all the humor out of the Monty Python sketch about Australian wines. (Seriously, NEVER show up at my house for dinner with a bottle of Yellow Tail if you expect to ever be invited back another time)
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Jack at TPRS links to this news story reporting that the Wendy's burger chain has decided to give up its "Biggie" size. But, lest you think they are heeding the government's call for fast food places to reduce their portion sizes, the folks at Wendy's have a different tack: the "Biggie" size will now become the "Medium" size portion. Their more-aptly named "Great Biggie" size will now be known, somewhat understatedly, as "Large".
Just so we're not mincing words here: the new "Large" soda is a 42-ounce behemoth equivalent to 3 1/2 cans (or about 3/4 of a two-liter bottle, if that helps you visualize it better). If you buy a non-diet soda, you'll be consuming more than half a cup of sugar (in the form of high-fructose corn syrup). And that's just the drinks.
They really ought to be offering diabetes counseling with every large meal sold, don't you think?
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I guess it's a three-way race now. Dunkin Donuts was recently acquired by a new corporate conglomerate which has wasted no time making big changes; we've all seen the new ad campaign already, but that's just the tip of the muffin. Here in the Northeast they've been test-marketing smoothies with great success (Charlotte is crazy for the Wildberry flavor) and expect to be rolling them out everywhere soon, and they're trying to figure out menu items they can sell to draw people back in during their slow afternoon periods.
This Boston Globe article and accompanying photo spread give you a peek at what to expect: redesigned stores (although the quoted exec is very careful to point out that DD will NOT suddenly sprout cozy armchairs and free WiFi), more locations (they just opened 2 more in our town in the last couple of months), and menu choices that sound unsurprisingly like you-know-who-bucks.
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Since we've all made it to 06/07/06 (or 07/06/06, depending on your whereabouts), let's take a moment to follow up on our friend Eric Julien and his Killer Tsunami.
You'll recall that his initial prediction was that we were all going to be destroyed on May 25.
So, when there was no tsunami that day, he speculated that maybe he'd made some mistakes in his calculations because of the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the tsunami would hit on "Devil Day" (yesterday, 06/06/06).
Not so much. But that didn't stop our friend Eric from claiming victory, oh no. You see, as it turns out, his website and all the attention it generated got picked up by some friendly extra-terrestrials, who destroyed the comet that was going to cause the tsunami, saving all of us (well at least all of us on the Atlantic coast).
And, just like with the existence of God, you can't prove that he's wrong! Way to go, Eric!
Permalink |It's official: United States military forces are no longer expected to observe key elements of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners as the Pentagon removes the prohibition on humiliating and degrading treatment from their detainee policies.
That hollow cackling sound you here is Emperor Palpatine's knowing laugh echoing through minds across the entire galaxy.
Permalink |This news story reports that a man in Australia has been arrested for putting a 14-month-old baby in a clothes dryer to dry her off after she got all wet.
Silly man, don't you know you're supposed to put babies in the microwave?
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Regular visitors to the Vast BKO Media Empire have already seen and heard about my daughter's dance recital, but you latecomers might enjoy this little photo of Herself mugging it up with a couple of her classmates at the dress rehearsal (I have no idea where she gets her proclivity for showing off...*cough, cough*).
It is dance recital season here, and, as they've done with everything else, the overzealous parentry of Greater Boston have turned this decades-old ritual of sitting through agonizingly bad but undeniably adorable tap routines into yet another excuse for elbow-jamming competition and bad behavior. Don't believe me? Read this Boston Globe article about people who camp out overnight in front of their child's dance school to buy tickets. Even the little townie dance school where Charlotte goes had to expand the recital to two performances this year just to accommodate everyone who wanted tickets -- a 1000-seat auditorium sold out for two shows.
At least no one has shot anyone or beaten them to death with a pair of tap shoes...yet.
Permalink |Pardon me, but didn't I just post about McDonald's deciding to re-dress all of its restaurants to look like Starbucks?
Well, now Jim Romanesko reports on his Starbucks Gossip blog that Starbucks is changing over their decor, too. And guess what? The new furniture is plastic chairs and little food-service-standard tables, so that the Starbucks are all going to look like McDonald's.
He also reports that Starbucks' test of an "Egg McMuffin" clone has been extended to more stores.
Can Mackie Macchiato be far behind?
Permalink |For the last several weeks, Vonage had been inundating me with e-mails, voicemails, snailmails and reminders on their website about their IPO and how anyone who had been a customer since December would be able to buy in. We've been Vonage customers now for about a year, and I am glad we switched, but it smacked a little of desperation after about the umpteenth reminder.
Apparently there was cause for the desperation, as the IPO tanked on its first day (which is usually the best day), starting out at $17/share but closing under $15. Big investors made money (they always do, don't they), but small fry are left wondering what to do next. Fortune Magazine took a look at what the motivations were behind the decision to do an IPO at this point in the emerging business and came up with a couple of conclusions: the most obvious one is that the initial investors are setting up a way out. With larger players coming into focus on VoIP services, Vonage might be a good takeover, or it could even lose out to the competition. The other suggestion is that the CEO of Vonage, Jeff Citron, sees himself as a visionary in the mode of Steve Jobs and is ready to stick to his vision despite the challenges. Worth keeping an eye on.
(FWIW, the only other time I was given the chance to participate in an IPO was when IDEO was bought out by Steelcase and everyone in the company was included. Several of us sold on the very first eligible trading day, which was actually a day or two after the price peaked, but those of us who did made money. If I had held onto that stock until today, it would be only be worth a little more than half the price I sold it for, based on a quote I just looked up.)
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(photograph by Guardian photographer Sean Smith)
A picture is worth a thousand words, they tell me.
Permalink |It has been a bad year for Sony what with the CD rootkit debacle, the continuing struggle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and the buzz over Wii. at E3 a couple of weeks ago. But proving once again that you just cannot teach an old dog new tricks, Sony is up to its old nonsense by trying to force videogame retailers not to resell used games when the new PlayStation 3 is released later this year (via Slashdot).
The videogaming community is deeply invested in the notion of reselling played games. Walk into an EB Games or any other purveyor of videogames, and you'll quickly realize the simple economics of the situation. New games routinely retail for $40-50, but only the most devoted fanboys and crazed gamer types actually pay the price for buying the titles hot from release. The resale bins are chock-full of used games that sell for a much more reasonable range of $10-20, and sometimes even less. The resale market keeps titles in play, keeps gamers coming back for more, and keeps the consoles relevant. Blinded by greed and the insistence on focusing on licensing as the model for ownership of software, Sony will only dig its grave that much deeper if they have their way on this.
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Earlier in the week, the people of Montenegro voted to disband their union with Serbia, putting to rest the final remnant of Yugoslavia.
The tiny country has just a little more than half a million people, and I'll bet that if any Americans know anything about Montenegro at all, it's the movie "Montenegro" and not the country. Nevertheless, the breakup has implications for the political stability of the Balkans in general and Europe as a whole. Opinions on the issue range from optimistic to glum, but generally the fall along the lines of "Good for you, but don't expect much". Here are some editorials as seen in The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian, and the BBC (which has quite a few good reader comments)
Meanwhile. just as nostalgia for Stalin and Mao remain strong in Russia and China, apparently many in Serbia and the other former parts of Yugoslavia are finding themselves wishing for the "good old days" under Tito, and now there's a brand new "virtual nation" calling itself "Titoslavia". Anyone can apply for citizenship, and for $20 you can purchase a symbolic Titoslavian "passport". More importantly, you can also buy the t-shirt.
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CNN is running a Reuters story reporting that the wrecks of four Revolutionary War-era British warships have been found off the coast of Newport, RI and that scholars believe one of the wrecks is the ship sailed by Captain James Cook when he "discovered" Australia.
Cook is one of the true legends of British naval history. His voyages came near the end of the Age of Exploration, but as such both contributed to and benefitted from the scientific advances that marked the 18th century -- navigation, cartography, and the natural sciences.
Cook sailed the Endeavour on his first landmark voyage in 1768, but commanded other vessels on his later expeditions. The Royal Navy, however, always made good use of its capital assets. The ship was recommissioned as the Lord Sandwich (perhaps in honor of Cook's discovery of the Sandwich Islands, a.k.a. the Hawaiian Islands) and used by the British during the blockade of Newport Harbor -- the British deliberately sunk the ship, along with a dozen others, to prevent the French from landing troops to aid the Colonial Army.
The National Library of Australia has Cook's logbooks as part of their collection, and you can view a digitized copy of the entire journal here. The Australian National Maritime Museum has a full-sized replica of the Endeavour and you can read about their efforts in this search for Endeavour here.
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Via FARK, here's a news report that the cost of minting pennies has gone up about forty percent in the last year and it now costs the U.S. Mint 1.4 cents to produce each coin. Apparently the price of zinc has more than doubled in the past year, and zinc makes up 97 percent of the material in each penny.
Permalink |Via MonkeyFilter, here's a news item in BusinessWeek about the latest plans from McDonald's: they want to redecorate all of their U.S. restaurants to look like Starbucks, right down to the comfy chairs, the earth tone paint schemes, and even fake bookcases. The plans even include replacing the instantly-recognizable mansard-like roofs.
The cost of each individual makeover will be almost half a million dollars, which the franchisees will have to pay on their own at corporate's behest. For some McDonald's locations, that represents an entire year's profit, so it's not going down as smoothly as a chocolate shake with the franchisees.
My personal suspicion is that this will fade away much like the evening table service concept they tried a few years ago, the "McDiner" concept they explored more recently, and the attempt to sell Ronald McDonald to adults. If you happen to actually see one of these "McStarbucks", maybe you can take a few pictures for posterity.
Permalink |Things looked mighty grim for Britain in 1940 as Hitler's armies occupied most of Europe, driving the British back across the Channel and preparing for an all-out air assault. Hampered by political restraints at home (including a fairly substantial pro-Hitler movement and lots of opposition from corporations doing business with the Nazis), Franklin Roosevelt could not actively intervene in the situation and so the Roosevelt Administration developed the "Lend-Lease" program in early 1941, providing Britain (and also the USSR) with critical military equipment and materiel.
Critics then and in later years claimed that the program was an outright means of supplying the British military, neither a "lend" nor a "lease". However, as this opinion piece in The Guardian explains, this week the British government made its final payment of £45 million to the American government, completing its repayment obligation.
Permalink |This NYT story, which I found the other day via a MetaFilter post, is the harbinger of the future: the developers of the MMORPG "Entropia" have tied their virtual economy to the real world by making their in-game currency convertible to U.S. dollars and providing ATM cards to the players that let them withdraw actual converted cash.
The "value" of the virtual economic systems created in these persistent gaming worlds has been noticed for some time. I'm sure everyone has read about the economist who published a study of the economy of EverQuest and concluded that the EverQuest "national economy" had an approximate worth equal to the national economy of Bulgaria. For some time now there has been a less-formal conversion of virtual wealth from games through the buying and selling of in-game objects and characters on eBay. In fact, that market is valuable enough that there are people in Korea, Japan and China who play the game "professionally", running up the value of in-game objects that can then be sold to other players for real currency. (And don't forget the protection rackets and prostitution rings in "The Sims Online")
The online worlds have a lot of economic advantages over other economic systems -- no taxation, no regulation, systems which allow and even promote cheating and other less-than-ethical mechanisms for creating wealth -- all the things the Republicans would like to see become permanent features in the American economy. Plus you get to pretend to be a big, strong hero with a magic sword, just like Dubya. But I'm digressing...
My own opinion is that this is just the tip of this particular iceberg, and if it has any traction at all you will see every other current MMORPG world go the same route within a matter of months, as well as the sudden appearance of lots of other persistent virtual worlds which really could care less about providing you with a game experience but will be all about trying to leverage this system to their own immense profitability.
Permalink |On the original version of Star Trek, Our Heroes were rather fond of Romulan Ale, and Scotty in particular demonstrated on more than one occasion that he had a leg more hollow than an open Jeffries Tube. So clearly in the 22nd Century synthehol wasn't around, but in the 23rd Century those wussy jumpsuit-wearing tree-hugging feel-gooders aboard the Enterprise-D wouldn't THINK of drinking real alcohol. Miss Whoopi's Bar & Grill served up hangover-free synthetic alcohol drinks as fast as a six-armed Aldebaran Slime Devil could suck 'em back.
Well, once again our timeline deviates from Jim Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard, because some scientists think it's possible to develop synthehol right now using existing technology.
This is probably not good news to those of you with substance abuse issues, but at least you don't have to wear those silly jumpsuits.
Permalink |The Marburg virus is similar to Ebola: terrifically lethal (though apparently a bit less so than Ebola), causes the body to bleed itself to death (hemorrhagic fever), spreads quickly, etc. It was documented as early as 1967, earlier than Ebola, and is named after a town in Germany where the disease was initially found among lab workers who had dealt with infected monkeys.
This New York Times article discusses a recent successful monkey-based trial of a vaccine that not only prevents Marburg, it also eradicates Marburg in patients whi have already contracted the disease if it is administered soon enough. Human trials have not yet occurred, but the results are hopeful, and also lend hope to finding a similar effective vaccine for Ebola.
You can all go back to panicking about bird flu now.
Permalink |Career officers in the military know that their duty is to follow orders, but it is reassuring to discover that behind the unquestioning mask of duty often lies a critical and realistic mind able to recognize a good order from a bad one.
In recent weeks, a number of retired top military leaders have stepped out from behind that mask and have joined the ranks of those opposed to the disastrous debacle in Iraq. Some have gone so far as to publicly call for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, while others have been so bold in their assertions as to suggest that Bush has done nothing less than start World War III.
As the Bush Administration's designs to launch nuclear strikes on Iran have emerged over the past week, it is significant and critical to hear these misgivings from the men charged with carrying out what has to be the worst example of American foreign policy in our history. We are already very far down a dark and dangerous path from which there may be no return; we need to hear the concerns of the men we count on to make the path safe when they tell us that we are in danger.
Permalink |(Okay, so perhaps that's a little redundant...)
CNN reports that a cathedral in Austria has recorded the sound of their bells ringing so that cellphone users can download and use the recording as their ringtone.
Because clearly the world needs even MORE evidence of your superficial adherence to your bizarre cultish practices, not to mention your religion.
Forgive me father, for I have sinned; here is my confession: Though these days the cellphone I have just rings with a rather nondescript tone, my last cellphone was capable of using those highly-annoying MP3 ringtones that people are overly fond of these days. I succumbed to temptation myself and downloaded one that left no doubt as to whose cellphone was ringing (click the first one in that list for a sample sound).
Permalink |It's nice to see that at least one celebrity understands the difference between acting and "reality TV". A Huffington Post article today mentions that a group of Ohio Democrats approached "West Wing" star Martin Sheen about running for the Senate. He politely declined. "You're mistaking celebrity for credibility," he told them.
He needs to have a conversation with his son Charlie real soon.
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The Aral Sea, formerly the 4th largest lake in the world, has been drying up for years due to Soviet water projects that diverted almost all of the water that fed into the lake to agriculture. It has been an ongoing study of an ecological disaster of immense proportions for a long time; I can recall reading about this in magazines like National Geographic years ago.
But a story in the NYT today says that all hope may not be lost. The government of Kazakhstan has a project that has restored a portion of the lake almost back to a self-sustaining level of viability, and scheduled for completion this fall is a channel that will connect the larger portion of the lake back to a water supply, potentially paving the way to replenish the entire lake at some point in the future.
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Found here.
Permalink |Charlotte entered her Early Barbie Stage a while back, probably last summer. She hasn't totally let go of the Disney Princesses, but she's definitely transitioning, and the evil geniuses at Mattel have obliged by skewing Barbie to younger children by crossing her over into princess territory. Barbie the fashion model/veterinarian/business executive/beach babe still waits in the future, while these days Barbie gets to be a fairy who transforms into a magical mermaid, plays in her own version of "Prince and the Pauper", and dances ballet in "Swan Lake". This is the stuff 4- and 5-year-old girls are made of.
A few weeks ago, Bridget caught wind of a live theatrical Barbie show that was coming to Boston, so we bought tickets to surprise Charlotte with. She doesn't know that we already have the tickets, but now the show is in heavy ad-rotation on Nickelodeon, so she is well-aware that it is coming soon, and every time she sees the commercial she is careful to point out to me that she wants to go see the show. I don't know how much longer we can keep the secret, because she's obviously made up her mind that we're going.
This morning's New York Times (with its cool new re-design, BTW) has a feature article about the live show and the young woman who plays Barbie. In the piece, the writer also talks about the changes in the Barbie universe as the franchise struggles against competition from both ends of its age demographic.
Permalink |Wired has a story about the upcoming switch to Daylight Savings Time this weekend and the move by the state of Indiana to finally recognize DST after many years of resistance.
I'm not sure I agree with the guy in the story who asserts that it's like Y2K all over again for every Hoosier computer user -- after all, all they really have to do is make a couple of quick changes and the computers will take care of resetting the time themselves. And I'm also not sure that I agree with the premise in the article that it's a test case for how screwed up everyone will be next year when DST begins and ends differently.
In case you haven't been paying attention, starting next year DST will begin in March, instead of April, and end in November instead of October. This is the work of one particularly idiotic Congress-monkey here in Massachusetts who labors under the false impression that we're going to save a lot of oil by rearranging the clocks. Someone need to explain the concept of Earth's rotation around the sun to this guy, but somehow this got enacted into law by being tacked onto some other energy legislation. At any rate, since most places in the United States have been observing DST for half a century or more, it shouldn't be that big a deal to have it start sooner and end later, it just doesn't seem to be a worthwhile change to me.
I can say that when we lived in Indiana years ago, it was a significant pain in the butt to be out of sync with everyone else. For half the year we were essentially in the Central Time Zone and for the other half in the Eastern Time Zone. At least now that particular anomaly will go away. Let's hope that someone will finally wide up and get rid of Daylight Savings Time altogether.
Permalink | Comments (1)Among the many things that cause me unnecessary aggravation, one of the worst offenders is the plastic packaging known as "blister pack". Apparently made from nothing short of Scotty's "transparent aluminum", it is nigh on impossible to open without resorting to power tools. Then, if, through some miracle, you do get the blister pack open, you're likely to find all sorts of twist-ties, plastic clips, miles of cellophane tape, and any other contrivance imaginable to keep your Barbie doll accessories safe from the hands of would-be shoplifters. Obviously the black market in tiny little plastic pumps and handbags must be enormous.
This wire story quotes a study which asserts that there are 60,000 "wrap rage" injuries in the UK alone each year. "Wrap rage"...heh.
Permalink |There's a news story getting a lot of play on the web today about a man in Minnesota who claims that when he called 911 via his Vonage phone service, the Emergency Call Routing service Vonage uses put him on hold for an hour, and as a result his house was a total loss to fire.
It's getting a lot of attention because there's a serious ongoing issue about emergency call routing by Vonage. In most places, Vonage does not yet have access to directly route VoIP calls to local 911 call centers and has had to fill in with their own call centers that are supposed to call your local 911 dispatch for you. The problem is a combination of heel-dragging and political posturing not only on the part of Vonage, but also on the part of the conventional phone companies and some FCC grandstanding.
However, over on Slashdot, there's a link to a Vonage customer forum thread about this story which offers some additional details and quite a bit of debate over this incident. Between the two, some salient details not found in the news reports are emerging -- that the Minnesota man waited a long time before calling 911 at all and that he led first-response police and fire crews on a bit of a goose chase around his property, which seem to offer mitigating circumstances to the claim that it's all Vonage's fault.
Meanwhile, I ran across this news article via another website: ongoing personnel problems with response from a 911 call center in Chattanooga, TN sometimes put callers on hold for extended lengths of time. This particular story has nothing to do with Vonage, but it does demonstrate that 911 services have their own problems that can lead to disastrous consequences. I guess if you're a Vonage customer in Chattanooga, you probably want to rethink your choices not only of your telco service, but perhaps also where you live.
Permalink |No, Abe Vigoda is still with us. I am referring to an Aldabra tortoise called "Adwaitya" who lived at the zoo in Calcutta, India (or Kolkata, as they have reverted to the non-English spelling). Adwaitya was reckoned to be 255 years old and was one of four tortoises presented to the famous "Clive of India".
The tortoise had been unwell since earlier this year, according to this Indian news website. UPI reports that the tortoise had lived at the zoo for 131 years. The tortoise is believed to have been born in 1750, but some claims say it could have been even older.
Slate has a short "Explainer" today about the astounding longevity of tortoises, in case you're scratching your head about it.
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The brouhaha last week over whether or not George Clooney actually wrote this post which appeared at The Huffington Post proves once again the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I am not a reader of overtly political blogs for the most part, and until last week I had never even looked at The Huffington Post for even a moment. I find Ariana Huffington to be distatefully self-serving and, given her bizarre political "conversion", mostly untrustworthy, and I have always written off the site as more of the same from her in a blog genre that is already overwhelmed by self-serving and untrustworthy people posing as knowledgable commentators.
But even if Clooney didn't write those comments on purpose and they were just edited together by some Huffington Post lackey, it was a very good distillation of thing he has actually said in public. Of course, it seemed pretty clear to me that the editing job got more than a little inspiration from this oft-quoted speech by John F. Kennedy, and probably suffers from more than a little wishful thinking that Clooney would fit that JFK mold as an actual politician. And Clooney has recently demonstrated more than a little interest in the high drama aspect of that period of American history, so maybe the same idea rattles around in his devilishly handsome head once in a while.
So I've added The Huffington Post to my daily blog crawl, even as I was just decrying the state of things over at Huffington's last bivouac, Salon, not too long ago. I feel all cheap and easy for doing it, but I can learn to live with that.
Permalink |I will save the anti-Christian ranting for another day, but for now it's a very encouraging sign that, despite the incredible amount of noise being made by religious wackjobs everywhere you turn, the number of Americans who self-identify as "non-religious" has doubled since 1990 (via Progressive Review). Even though that number represents only 16% of the population at large, that segment is growing faster than any other "religious" demographic; the only other similar demographic group to show growth is...wait for it...Muslims. (I found it somewhat quaint that this newspaper article also had to "explain" who and what atheists and other non-religious types are to all those God-fearin' Texans).
You'll permit me a brief anecdote: Charlotte was playing at the home of her little buddy Camille not long ago and something caused her to exclaim "Oh my god!" Her friend quickly admonished her that she was not supposed to say that but was supposed to say "Oh my gosh" instead. Charlotte took this to heart, I guess, because Bridget reports she heard Charlotte tell someone at day care that "we believe in Gosh". (It could have been worse; she could have said "Jesus Fucking Christ", because she sure does get to hear THAT expression a lot around here.)
And don't worry, I am saving up for a great big rant; I'm just not in the mood this morning.
Permalink |Why the fellow who creams every other program on basic cable by a mile, that's who! Take THAT, you cable news bitchez!
(Sorry, no eye candy pic of You Know Who. One time a couple of years ago, I posted an entry about that absorbent, yellow, porous chap and included a picture, and it got hotlinked to death by several clueless teenagers with LiveJournal sites who couldn't be arsed enough to copy the image to their own host server.)
Permalink |The other day at The Big Red House, I was observing that people seem to have forgotten that around this time last year we here in the Northeast were just recovering from a huge multiple-blizzard snow event that left much of the region shut down for days. In fact, the total snowfall for that event was greater than the famed "Blizzard of '78" that lives on in local memory as the benchmark by which all winter storms are judged.
Now I have just read that NOAA has decided to implement a category-rating system for snow storms similar to the ratings used for hurricanes, tornadoes, and other devastating weather events. The "Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale" (NESIS) rates snowstorms on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being the worst. These categories also get descriptive terminology: a Category 1 storm is "notable", while a Category 5 storm is "extreme". The blizzard from last January is rated as Category 4 ("Crippling"), and on the all-time scorecard they've come up with, it is ranked #8 of all time, with the 1978 blizzard right behind it at #9. The #1 all-time snowstorm was a Category 5 event in March, 1993, which I neither personally recall, nor does it seem to be one people talk about as "The Big One".
It's too bad they didn't have this scale a little sooner. With global warming set to turn New England into a desert sometime in the next decade, we probably won't have to worry about many Category 5 storms from here on out.
Permalink |According to this Cincinnati newspaper website, Cleveland is the only NFL city with the double distinction of never sending its team to the Super Bowl AND never hosting the Super Bowl.
There are presently six teams in the NFL which have never been to a Super Bowl, and certainly most NFL cities have never hosted the game, since the NFL tends to favor warm-weather cities and/or domed stadiums. Seattle's upcoming appearance in this year's game removes it from the small group of Never-beens.
Not that the folks in CIncinnati have a lot to brag about football-wise, but I suppose it's always a game of one-upsmaship between Cincinnati and Cleveland.
(via FARK)
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Or, if you prefer, seven ways to desperation: one network in the doldrums and six actors, none of whom can carry an acting career even in a paper bag. Not even the one whose face is on the cover of People magazine every other week.
One solution: four one-hour "specials" featuring "America's Most Beloved Sitcom Characters".
That sound you hear is popular culture sucking itself into total oblivion.
Permalink | Comments (1)Can you feel the excitement? Bill Gates promises that e-mail spam will disappear next week!
Well, that's what he said two years ago, anyway.
Of course, he also said "Longhorn" (a.k.a "Windows Vista") would ship last year, said the iPod was just a "fad", once claimed that no one needed more than 64K of RAM in a computer, and still swears that he has found Amelia Earhart alive in Bora Bora, so maybe he's not the guy to go to for predictions. Time to upgrade that crystal ball to something better than Windows 98, Bill.
Permalink |A pair of stories for you:
First, an excellent piece in today's Slate by media writer Edward Jay Epstein which takes a look back at a critical moment in the media business: the decision by Blockbuster Video in 1998 to turn down a proposal from Warner Brothers on the then-emerging DVD rental business, causing WB (and eventually all the other studios) to walk away from the rental chain as a primary avenue for their DVD product and going direct to sell-through, with Wal-Mart eventually replacing Blockbuster as the single largest source of revenue for the movie studios. The move proved devastating to Blockbuster, which went from being worth $8.4 billion in 1994 to just over $700 million today.
Eight years later we are staring right in the face of the end of the DVD era, at least according to consumer electronics makers, who are positioning themselves on one of two sides of the divide over the next generation technology: Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I blogged about Blu-Ray a couple of times when it was first announced a few years ago, and for a while it seemed like it would be the natural successor to original DVD. But I'll give you a guess which Japanese home electronics company whose name rhymes with "Phony" has turned it into yet another battle of incompatible standards and licensing issues, only to find themselves likely to be undone before the real products see the shelves in the next two years. This article from the Australian paper The Age talks about the standards war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and the coming obsolescence of your DVD collection. Both systems were on display in force at the recent Consumer Electronics Show -- check out these two posts from Endgaget last week.
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Just some random observatons --
First, could it be any more ironic that the recent spate of reported cases of humans with avian flu are all in Turkey? The joke headlines just keep writing themselves.
Second, while the media are busy whipping themselves into a frenzy, I notice that there are some people beginning to question the whole "Everybody's Gonna Die!!!!" meme. In this story, mathematician John Allen Paulos considers some of the statistical errors involved in predicting a 50% mortality rate from a biased sample. And in this story, some medical researchers have released a study indicating that cases of H5N1 are probably significantly underreported but mainly because people contracting the virus are not dying from it, also lending credence to the argument that predictions of double-digit population-ravaging mortality are overblown.
Thirdly, I wish this damn cold would clear up. My diaphragm is sore from all the coughing. I've already consumed an entire bottle of Robitussin over the last few weeks, but today I read that cough syrup is largely ineffective. Last night I bought some cough suppressant/expectorant medicine in pill form -- you've probably seen the commercials for it with the husband-and-wife phlegm blobs who set up housekeeping in some guy's lungs. I think they're probably living inside me. But at least I'm not sleeping with chickens, which is more than I can say for those people in Turkey.
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Somewhere along the way in your education, you probably learned about the coelacanth, a strange primordial fish living at the bottom of the sea, believed extinct for years until a few live specimens were caught in the 1930s. The current world's population of these "living fossils" is mainly concentrated in the Indian Ocean, ranging from the coast of Africa to Indonesia, where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet.
Now scientists are concerned that the coelacanth is threatened with man-made extinction as a result of bottom-trawling fishing. This recent BBC story about bottom-trawling in the North Atlantic and its devastating effects on some fish stocks gives you some idea of how the process works and why it is so injurious to aquatic habitats.
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Slashfood reports that Starbucks is getting rid of their speciality chocolate beverage, Chantico.
All the fancy little cups and cushy little brown pillows just couldn't convince people to try it, I guess. People are more accustomed to hot cocoa (or worse, "hot chocolate" made with Nestle's Quik or Swiss Miss powder), which is a far cry from the intensity of "real" hot chocolate. Honestly, even I don't like it enough to consider ordering it at a place like Starbucks -- it's the sort of thing I might make once or twice a winter, or order at a high-end chocolatier like Burdick's in Harvard Square.
If you are a fan, you can still get it while your local Bucky's has a supply, then it's gone.
Permalink | Comments (1)© BrianKaneOnline.com 2000-2007