General Puzzlement

There are 18 categories in the 104th King Williams College General Knowledge Quiz, and 10 questions in each category. I've looked at earlier editions of this quiz, and I'd count myself generally knowledgeable if I had one sure answer to a question in each of the eighteen categories. This year's quiz has foiled me again. Here are two of the categories:

7)
1. Which language was developed by a Polish ophthalmologist?
2. Which language of the Romance group has a definite article suffix?
3. Of which European language is the origin unknown, even to the experts?
4. Which geographically Scandinavian language is not linguistically Scandinavian?
5. Which European language is the only survivor of its branch of the Indo-European group?
6. Which Slavonic language is spoken in a country whose national language is not Slavonic?
7. Which European language is spoken by about 1% of the population of Switzerland?
8. Which European language has a past tense form which looks like a future?
9. Which Slavonic language has done away with the case forms
of nouns?
10. Which European national language still retains the dual number?

10) Which river:
1. received the defeated Aunus?
2. floats laden barges by banks of myosote?
3. was central to the non-payment of a mayoral debt?
4. was identified without doubt by the discovery of the initials AD
5. saw Captain Schenk acquire an engineer to replace the deceased Walter?
6. despite being in flood, could be crossed dry-shod following clerical plantar immersion?
7. provided drinks for kine, and horses, and little humorous donkeys?
8. along with Cairo was passed unnoticed by the raft in the fog?
9. was a source of shelly snails and green lettuces?
10. witnessed a case of unwitting filicide?

Now, of these, I'm pretty sure that the answer to 10.8 is the Ohio River in the Adventures of Huckelberry Finn, and I think 7.3 must be Basque. I'd hazard a guess on the rest with a range of confidence rapidly tending toward zero. My modest goal is met if those two are correct, though I have to admit the majority of the questions don't remind me of anything I've ever actually known. But what's a puzzle to me is readily anwered by the specialist as a matter of course; these questions undoubtedly call up an immediate range of unambiguous reference in the minds of those to whom this is the stuff and substance of their knowledge, knowledge which is broadly lingustic in 7 and broadly literary in 10. You can just tell there's a plausible special answer to each of these gnomic utterances in easy reach of those who happen to know.

Machine For Flying by Leonardo Da Vinci

 Here's a wooden model made from drawings by Leonardo of a machine for human flight powered by hand cranks and foot stirrups.

It's currently suspended from a ceiling at the Tech Museum in San Jose.

The Back of Me Brogans to Yeh

Bush declares that he's not insulted by Shoe Guy's action, but I don't think he's the decider in this. People will make up their own mind about how insulting Shoe Guy managed to be. For my money he crossed the border into perfect effrontery with the first shoe, and the emphatic second one sealed the deal.

Insult? A+

I See A Financial Transaction In Your Future

Just a sideshow mage, maybe a little too proud of his gifts considering his present station. Lodged in the little booth behind the round cloth-covered table in an obscure part of the arcade.

Here's one, you see, here's a good one now. All I ask is a quarter, the fourth part of a dollar, and for your trouble you can have a thousand dollars for it. You see? You see the attraction? A thousand dollars for a quarter: Yours! Oh, and but all you have to do is tell me what's under the hat…

You see? You see the potential of it now, the negligible loss balanced against the considerable gain? Eh? Eh?

Your wondering what might fit under the hat, whether there might be a hole in the table making room for a much larger object than you might at first suspect, whether between the tassles there you might get glimpse of whatever it might be. And it's only a quarter to guess.

And it's a secret, you see. And the mage, you understand, this is what I do, this is the thing handed down to me, for an additional quarter the mage will reply with utter truth to any question put to him by the seeker, and for a dollar answers a fifth question for free.

Time was it was a dime, and before that a penny. It was a dime when I was coming up, always a dime, but I was told about the penny I'm old but not that old, heh heh.

Yes, yes, it was always ten dollars to buy the answer from the mage, decline the chance to gain a thousand dollars with an independent guess but instead pay up and have the thing straightforwardly revealed by the simple offices of an ageless business proposition cloaked in the mysterium of initiation into the ancient ways of the mage.

Yes, yes, it's always been ten dollars to be a mage. The secret revealed, yes. It kept the number of new mages down back when guesses were a penny each, yes. Ten dollars was a lot then. Nowadays it's not so much, but nowadays who wants to be a mage? Who wants sit in a booth all day long giving true but necessarily unhelpful answers to the straggle of seekers happening by? They want their thousand dollars but they can't find it in themselves, you see? Still, a quarter here, a quarter there. It's a living.

Oh, but yes. Your ten. You've paid to join now, you'll have your secret revealed now, you're fit to use it or pass it on yourself, oh yes. All rights and privileges, just as promised.

It's my head, you see. It's my head that's under the hat.

Go on now.

Recently Sighted

Here's a caricature of Glenn Reynolds, writer of the well known (among people who know about these things) blog Instapundit. I photoshopped Reynold's head on the body of a robot stacking colored blocks (even though I suck at Photoshop), in response to a contest proposed by Brad Reed last year at Sadly, No!, who asked his readers, for his own sarcastic reasons, to submit images of a robotized Reynolds.

I'm pleased to see Brad's chosen to use my caricature a few times since then when revisiting yet another of Instapundit's pronouncements.

On his blog Reynolds is known for going on succinctly enough about the business of being wrong in public, frequently approaching the limit of what might be described as the greatest lower bound of words in any realized rhetoric needed to issue wrongness into the world, with the use of his trademark phrase Heh. Indeed. — words which by virtue of being unleashed on the internet have the power to incorporate a cleverly coded reference to some other more lengthily propounded wrong devised by someone else out there on the web, thereby economically encapsulating the greater amount of wrong in the smaller container of his famous phrase. I imagine on a good day, Heh. by itself is rhetoric enough for Reynolds, an elemental monad of wrong excreted on his blog along with its linked nonsense for the nourishment of his large and avid flock of readers.

Reading Glenn Reynolds and his asociates risks exposure to a debilitating dosage of wrong over time, and it's the chosen task of the folks at S,N! to fashion a palliative out of ridicule, contumely and if necessary, relevant information in an effort to helpfully disabuse readers of the sort of notions that regularly ingesting such wrong produces. Brad's contest to robotize Reynolds was, I suppose, in support of such efforts. Good times, good times.

UPDATE April 15, 2009: Blue Dog Texan, over at Firedoglake, resuscitated my Reynolds caricature today. Good to see its getting wider circulation. Take that, Sadly, No! Contest Winner Person! HA!!

An American Tune

 
Eric Rauchway links to a segment of the Colbert Report in which Paul Simon sings "An American Tune." Here's an earlier solo version from the Dick Cavett Show, bad hair and all:

I wasn't aware that Simon had lifted the tune from elsewhere, but this comment in the "more info" section of the above video points to the tune Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded (The Passion Chorale) by J.S. Bach. I gather plenty of people have heard about this over the years. News to me.

…the tune catches at me ironically in view of Simon's title. Not only did he crib it from J.S. Bach (I presume) but Bach cribbed it from Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). It's from his 1601 'Lustgarten, Deutsche Lieder zu vier, fuenf, sechs und acht Stimmen' (Pleasure Garden, German Songs for 4,5,6 & 8 voices) & appears there as a rueful little lovesong of at least 3 verses called 'Mein G'mueth ist mir verwirret' (My mind is confused). There the tune isn't solemn at all but one of the bouncy, syncopated dances popular then. Who knows? As our knowledge of truly old music deepens it wouldn't be surprising to find that Hassler borrowed an even older dance. So Simon also knows a good tune when he hears one. Understanding a tune's past uses deepens our appreciation of its present & this one's proved its universal staying power.

The tune of "Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded" is traced to Hassler in 1601, but the lyrics, epitomising mystical union with the suffereing godhead, are attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, and date to 1153.

If it was a bouncy tune before Bach got his hands on it, Bach changed all that, giving it a formal gravity that Simon's performance takes advantage of. Simon's lyrics don't lead to a mystical union with the suffering of the mediaeval Christian godhead Bernard mapped out in Latin 850 years ago, just the simple and more universally applicable recognition that sleep must come to each and all, that tomorrow will come another day to wend through, however much all doubts and disclocations and yearned-for transcendence may wrestle with one another for attention in the late of night. And the doubts are Simon's doubts, and the dislocations are implicitly America's dislocations, and the hoped for transcendence caught by his lovely dreamtime image of the Statue of Liberty sailing out to sea with all her freighted implications, out to greet the world, for whatever that might prove to be worth, make "An American Tune," despite strong prior claims to authorship, his own.

A Higher Quality of Low Humor

 
It's… The Monty Python Channel on YouTube.

Sadly, no "Spanish Inquisition" in the collection as yet, but then, what did you expect? An argument?

Holding The Medallion Holding The Medallion

We Are Wizards

 
Brad Neely's alternate reading of Harry Potter, in many, many YouTube parts. Recommended for the quality of Neely's voice as much as for his wit.


 

"I'm really going to miss those granite countertops…"

Scores of funny mashups have been made of this scene from Der Untergang and posted on YouTube. Here's one of the latest, and funniest:

Fire Joe Morgan Fires Itself

Sad news on the internet traditions front. The glorious tradition that was Fire Joe Morgan has come to an end.

Fire Joe Morgan devoted itself to skewering the pronouncements of baseball's raft of media "analysts" who never let actual, you know, analysis, get in the way of a dead cliché. The paragon of this practice for the site's purposes was ESPN's Joe Morgan, as the blog's title indicates, but its writers reached out across the country to other sportswriters deserving the back of the hand, and delivered in full measure. What great fun it was to read.

Fire Joe Morgan will be missed. Maybe, someday, like Fafblog, it will return. I can only hope. No, really. As a Giants fan, that's really all I ever get to do.

Armistice Day

I suppose the First World War was the last chapter in one facet of the great social upheaval ushered in by the French Revolution. It obliterated the last remaining wisps of the ancien régime throughout Europe, leaving behind a continent of resentful, exhausted survivors who, even in the face of the collective insanity of that horrible conflict, soon enough turned their nations to mutual slaughter once again. Everyone notices that the Second World War was caused by the First, and all the ancillary conflicts around the globe spawned by the outcome of the Second World War can be traced back through the Second and the First to The French Revolution and the utter transformation of social relations demanded by it.

If Chou En Lai didn't really say, "It's too soon to tell," when asked his thoughts on the impact of the French Revolution, history will insist that he would have had to have said that, being Chou En Lai, and ascribe it to him.

The Armistice, entered into on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, halted the age-old murderousness of Europe for a time, and for that we can all be grateful. Only a few short decades after Armistice had been achieved the murderousness returned, redoubled in viciousness and on a truly global scale, the Second World War, which we have not yet outlived, consequence of the First. But there is that oddly symmetrical moment, 11/11/11, the six ones of the Armistice, that pause of peace, to look back on in wonder.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Professional pollsters puzzling over the apparent lack of a Bradley Effect in last week's presidential race will be heartened to know that one of their fellows, Scott Rassmussen, has looked closely, very, very, closely at the election results and come away with the startling discovery that the majority of people who cast their ballots for Barack Obama were actually crossing their fingers behind their backs and voting for Ronald Reagan instead.

Which suggests that, as always, there is no news of any kind that is not, in some universe very much like our own, good news for Republicans.

UPDATE (11/11/08):

Two Comments!!!!111!!!!! Whooooooooooooooh!!
 

Pretty Blue Here

 
Related to the previous post, in Santa Cuz County Barack Obama captured 77.41% of the vote, McCain, not quite 20%.

UPDATE: Santa Cruz Frenchier than France! From Le Figaro:

If you were American, would you vote for McCain or Obama?

John McCain: 25.14%
Barack Obama: 74.86%

Cartographic projections of the Results of the 2008 Presidential Election

Mark Newman at the University of Michigan bends a map of the United States to reflect the size of the population in each of its counties — the heavily populated counties expand and the less densely populated ones contract — and then he paints the resulting map with colors ranged along the spectrum from red to blue representing the margin of victory in each country for McCain or Obama respectively. Pure red is for counties that gave at least 70% of their vote to McCain, and pure blue is for counties that went for Obama by 70% or more, with all the purples representing results in between. It's an arresting exercise in trying to visualize what our country's coming to.
 

Flowerbucket

Now what?

—Callie Schell, via Digital Journalist
 

The line it is drawn, the vote it is cast

Been A Long Time Coming

Soaring Rhetoric! Baseless Charges! Now Half Off!

 
On this day in history, there were only two days left until
the end of election season so they added an extra hour to the clock just to make it all last a little longer.

Penalty time, I guess.
 

Thanks, Studs, For Everything

 
Studs Terkel, May 16, 1912-October 31, 2008

In an age of increasing unreality, for what it was worth, he channelled the voice of real America.

World Champs!

 
Congratulations to Viswanathan Anand. Well done.

Oh, and to those other guys, too.
 

Arbitrary Dylan Clip

Bob Dylan |MTV Music

History Begins With Statehood And Other Wonders Of The Far North

In a historic decision that leaves one of the Senate’s giants in political limbo, Stevens, 84, was convicted on seven counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in improper gifts and home renovations he received from 1999 to 2006. The verdict is a stunning blow to a political career that has lasted more than 40 years and covered Alaska’s entire history as a part of the United States.

—John Bresnahan and Martin Kady at Politico.com

The BIG Endorsement! Finally!

 

 

Wassup 2008

 


Sweet.
 

And We Bid You Goodnight

 
Merle Saunders, February 14, 1934-October 24, 2008
 

Addendum to Interuptus The Second

 
Following the well-attended lecture, she bought Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine and brought it home.
 

Addendum To Interruptus The First

 
Yes, it was she who announced her wish to see the movie Charlie Rose's War with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts when it first came out.
 

Interruptus

"You're goin out?"

She's dressed to go out and passing through the room says to her daughter, "I'm going to see a lecture by Naomi Campbell."

"Eh?" or its equivalent from the daughter, naturally. "Naomi Campbell?"

"Oh, ha! I mean Naomi Wolfe."

"Uh, Naomi …?"

"…?… Oh, ah, Klein, Klein, Naomi Klein," says she. They're both laughing at it now.

Dismal? I'll Show You Dismal. . .

 
Paul Krugman sits down to talk with Bloomberg News about the current financial crisis. [Part 1 of 5 parts]


 

October Surprise, 1989

(Photo by C.E. Meyer, USGS)

When the world falls apart some things stay in place/ Levi Stubbs tears run down his face

Levi Stubbs (June 6, 1936 - October 17, 2008)

A Bee

The bee found the thick dusting of wind-spewed pollen on the roof of my truck, and began industriously harvesting the stuff, as is the way of the bee.

The bee waddled and scooped its way along the flat open surface of the truck's roof, slathering itself with pollen as it went.

Krugman, Recently Cited in the Quotidian, Wins Nobel-ish Prize

 
Paul Krugman, recently cited here in the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), has won the prestigous Sveriges Riksbank Award in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel, or whatever the hell it's called, briskly and commonly and in fact mistakenly referred to by all as the "Nobel Prize in Economics."

Our condolences go out to Professor Krugman for the inevitable solecism imprecise wording thus forever attached to his deserved fame.
 

The Student Is Always The Last To Learn

 
Finance Students Keep Their Job Hopes Alive in today's NYT.

Cash Family Values

 
"… I have a girlfriend in Austin, Texas, whom I'm going to ask to keep an eye on Mexico."

Happy Birthday, Monk

 


Thelonious Monk (October 10, 1917–February 17, 1982), piano.
With Charlie Rouse, tenor, Larry Gales on bass, and Ben Riley, drums.

Another Great Depression? Pshaw!

 
The Panic of 1873

Heirloom

 

 

West Cliff Santa Cruz

 

Something everyone since Alexander has noticed

 
Note to the Obama camp:

We won't be able to kill our way to victory in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

&mdash Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff quoted on Democracy Now Oct. 9, 2008.

BREAKING: KRUGMAN AGREES TO QUOTIDIAN BAILOUT PLAN: STOCK INFUSION, NO CASH FOR TRASH!

 
Just now New York Times columnist Paul Krugman announced on his blog his support for the bailout strategy outlined here at the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal) the other day. It's good to see him come around publicly, and the sudden support for something I've blurted out from someone who actually knows what they're talking about warms the spirit, as always.

Obama relates

 
A moment came in the second presidential debate when Obama turned to swat at those who thought him green behind the ears. That's what he said, green behind the ears, a WTF of a phrase he pronounced and then literally denied by turning away from the camera and giving everybody a good long look back there, where truth to be seen there wasn't a patch of green in all the voluminous nether of either ear of him.

Turning away like that he deftly exposed the viewer to the fact of his actual color: not a bit of green back there, you see, on that brown-eared handsome man. See for yourself. See? He's looking away, he doesn't mind you staring at the uniformly brown skin of his behind those ears. It's just brown skin. He's kind of insisting. Go ahead and look.

Obama could do worse than making this his rallying cry for the next few weeks

 
Someone stuck the "stock injection plan" as an option in the bailout bill signed into law on Friday. Call your congesscritter and demand that the Treasury Secretary exercise his option to take an equity share in any and every institution applying for a bailout. Don't let the government spend a nickel of tax money to buy worthless paper when it can use its authorized billions to buy ownership shares in the companies that brought this whole mess on in the first place.

You'll notice that Wells Fargo and Citgroup are signalling it's a fine time to be buying poorly performing banks right now if you've got the scratch, so the government will be in decent company if it decides to start gobbling up financial institutions right and left. It might even want to swoop in and take over Wachovia first, just to show who's boss.

Stock Injection! No cash for trash!
 

Cactus Flowers

Fiduciary Figura

At Michael Bérubé's recently reinhabited blog, the Professor assigns his minions the task of suggesting figural representations for the current financial situation. He refers to the famous fellow Auerbach's rule of thumb:

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality.

So, Ben Bernanke (Stan) and Henry Paulson (Ollie) try to deliver the bailout package to the Hill. Figura?

Musical Interlude

We interrupt this blog's succession of word and images to provide a suitable moody musical accompaniment to the ongoing slide into oblivion of global financial markets, just because we care.


 

The world is a scary place. It really is.

The Republicans Say This Speech Was Far Too Mean

Rep. Pelosi's Remarks on Floor Ahead of House Bailout Vote Today

Madam Speaker, when was the last time someone asked you for $700 billion?

It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration's failed economic policies--policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.

Democrats believe in the free market, which can and does create jobs, wealth, and capital, but left to its own devices it has created chaos.

That chaos is the dismal picture painted by Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke a week and a half ago in the Capitol.

As they pointed out, we confront a crisis of historic magnitude that has the ability to do serious injury not simply to our economy, but to the American people: not just to Wall Street, but to everyday Americans on Main Street.

It is our responsibility today, to help avert that catastrophic outcome.

Let us be clear: This is a crisis caused on Wall Street. But it is a crisis that reaches to Main Street in every city and town of the United States.

It is a crisis that freezes credit, causes families to lose their homes, cripples small businesses, and makes it harder to find jobs.

It is a crisis that never had to happen. It is now the duty of every Member of this body to recognize that the failure to act responsibly, with full protections for the American taxpayer, would compound the damage already done to the financial security of millions of American families.

Over the past several days, we have worked with our Republican colleagues to fashion an alternative to the original plan of the Bush Administration.

I must recognize the outstanding leadership provided by Chairman Barney Frank, whose enormous intellectual and strategic abilities have never before been so urgently needed, or so widely admired.

I also want to recognize Rahm Emanuel, who combined his deep knowledge of financial institutions with his pragmatic policy experience, to resolve key disagreements.

Secretary Paulson deserves credit for working day and night to help reach an agreement and for his flexibility in negotiating changes to his original proposal.

Democrats insisted that legislation responding to this crisis must protect the American people and Main Street from the meltdown on Wall Street.

The American people did not decide to dangerously weaken our regulatory and oversight policies. They did not make unwise and risky financial deals. They did not jeopardize the economic security of the nation. And they must not pay the cost of this emergency recovery and stabilization bill.

So we insisted that this bill contain several key provisions:

This legislation must contain independent and ongoing oversight to ensure that the recovery program is managed with full transparency and strict accountability.

The legislation must do everything possible to allow as many people to stay in their homes rather than face foreclosure.

The corporate CEOs whose companies will benefit from the public's participation in this recovery must not benefit by exorbitant salaries and golden parachute retirement bonuses.

Our message to Wall Street is this: the party is over. The era of golden parachutes for high-flying Wall Street operators is over. No longer will the U.S. taxpayer bailout the recklessness of Wall Street.

The taxpayers who bear the risk in this recovery must share in the upside as the economy recovers.

And should this program not pay for itself, the financial institutions that benefited, not the taxpayers, must bear responsibility for making up the difference.

These were the Democratic demands to safeguard the American taxpayer, to help the economy recover, and to impose tough accountability as a central component of this recovery effort.

This legislation is not the end of congressional activity on this crisis. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will continue to hold investigative and oversight hearings to find out how the crisis developed, where mistakes were made, and how the recovery must be managed to protect the middle class and the American taxpayer.

With passage of this legislation today, we can begin the difficult job of turning our economy around, of helping those who depend on a growing economy and stable financial institutions for a secure retirement, for the education of their children, for jobs and small business credit.

Today we must act for those Americans, for Main Street, and we must act now, with the bipartisan spirit of cooperation which allowed us to fashion this legislation.

This not enough. We are also working to restore our nation's economic strength by passing a new economic recovery stimulus package--a robust, job creating bill--that will help Americans struggling with high prices, get our economy back on track, and renew the American Dream.

Today, we will act to avert this crisis, but informed by our experience of the past eight years with the failed economic leadership that has left us left capable of meeting the challenges of the future.

We choose a different path. In the new year, with a new Congress and a new president, we will break free with a failed past and take America in a New Direction to a better future.

— via Talking Points Memo

Epic Fail

The House votes down the bailout.

Fuschia foliage

 

 

U.S. Announces Recall of Chinese Candy Maker's "White Rabbit" Candies

 
One pill makes you larger,
And one pill . . .
Gives you kidney stones?
 

September 11 Departed

Inexorably, the image shrinks to fit the failed memory of that horrible day.

Technically Speaking, She's the Lipstick . . .

Obama compliments Sarah Palin.

Public Service

Republicans have gone from championing a thousand points of light to recommending faith-based initiatives to haw haw haw Obama worked for a Catholic social service agency, what a retard, all in one short 20 year span.

Rush Transcript

Governor Palin, you've been very busy these last 18 months running the state of Alaska. Do you have any regrets about not having enough time to be a mother, guiding Bristol through her difficult transition to womanhood? What do you say to those who think mothers should spend more time with their families?

—from the forthcoming Barbara Walters interview

Juneau Rhymes with Juno

News that Sarah Palin's daughter is five months pregnant confirms a growing suspicion that Northern Exposure was actually a docudramedy.

Any Lobster in a Storm

The vaunted Medium Lobster returns to Fafblog, channeling Baron Samedi.

Welcome to the Official Beginning of the Race for the Presidency: on your marks, . . .

Let's throw out the first officially false rumor of the Presidential Campaign Season, which traditionally begins (you thought it had begun already? HAH! That was just the exhibition season [O.K., O.K., two years is a long exhibition season, but it's over so put all that complaining aside for all the fresh Presidential campaign complaining to come]) on the Labor Day weekend before the election in November. Mere weeks to go before the voters choose a new President or the Supreme Court choses one for them.

I want to be the one to spread the baseless rumor that Dianne Feinstein was on the top of John McCain's short list for Vice President for weeks. She "broke her ankle" and couldn't attend the Democratic Convention, but that was a ruse, according to this nonce, just a ploy to get away and give her people more time to negotiate with McCain's team over what exactly the role of vice president is in the post-Cheney era.

McCain/Feinstein! It would have been the Unity ticket for the ages! The comity of it! Democrat and Republican coming together for the good of the country, surrounded by CEO's singing Kumbaya all hand-in-hand with Beltway pundits and cable news anchors! Charley Rose and Joe Leiberman and Jack Welch publicly kissing each other's ass, as ever! Broderella ascending in a puffy cloud of hosannahs into the heavens! Unity!

But no, some sticking point in the protracted negotiation bogged things down, it says here. How many troops can the Vice President deploy of her own free will in the post-Cheney era, anyhow? Isn't the vice presidency now, Byzantinely, after Cheney, the place where the Grand Vizier sets up shop, the Vice President now the one who runs things for the acknowledged figurehead of a leader?

Of course the canny Feinstein wanted to see how much of that role might still apply post-Cheney. How much of a deputy and how much of an executive substitute would she be? What exactly was she being offered?

Naturally a transcript of the Feinstein/McCain team hashing out these questions doesn't survive, but it is rumored that John McCain took Ambien three nights in a row during this period before announcing ferociously early this past Thursday morning, "Aw, fuck, it, I'm going with Palin! PAAAA-LIN! PAAAAA-LIN!!! HAAAHAAAAHAAA!" to a startled housekeeper.

The negotiations with Feinstein dithered to a stop, and Palin, no more bothered than the average American by thoughts of what it is a vice president is supposed to be, accepted McCain's sudden offer immediately.

It says here.

Happily, No!

So the smart move here would be to largely ignore her and focus the attention on McCain.

— Brad at Sadly, No

Happily, no.

The smart move for the Obama campaign won't be to ignore Palin at all, but to let it be Joe Biden's ongoing role to savage John McCain, and Hillary Clinton's ongoing role to savage Sarah Palin: Joe ignores her, goes after McCain, Hillary does a hit and run campaign of ads and personal appearances attacking Palin's politics, one glaring example at a time. Sarah Palin argues with Hillary, John McCain argues with Joe Biden, Obama takes the ball and heads for the basket untouched.

You don't rule the rhetoric of a campaign by ignoring what's served up by your opponent. You rule the rhetoric by dominating the conversation at every turn, e.g. turning what is utterly ridiculous in your opponent immediately into a lot of utter ridicule: the idea that Sarah Palin is experienced in foriegn affairs because, you know, look how close Alaska is to Russia, deserves the thousand flowers of ridicule thrown its way.

Hillary Clinton has every reason to be personally insulted when Sarah Palin baldly claims to be just the woman to continue the Hillary's historic campaign. Senator Clinton plainly owns a deeply held vision of social justice for women utterly opposed by everything Sarah Palin stands for. She can be an invaluable voice for the Obama campain if she's let loose on Palin.

I'm hoping the Obama campaign doesn't treat her the way the Gore campaign treated her husband during the 2000 campaign, but instead gives her the oportunity to represent. The Republicans need to be given the bum's rush, and if it takes all the leading lights of the Democratic Party to do the job, so be it.

"All I can say is, I am blessed to have the opportunity to continue to be part of a country where you can succeed and do well."

 


Here John McCain gives due credit to his wife Cindy's father in a general sort of way, without actually naming the fellow, who, after coming back from WWII, amassed a huge personal fortune in Arizona. He's the one, Cindy McCain's dad, who actually achieved the Republican wet dream of a successful business John McCain now has the good fortune to be attached to. So when McCain says he's blessed here, he's acknowledging his own success at advantageously positioning himself among the luxuries permitted by the achievements of another fellow, which is good Republican work in any age.

You can succeed and do well. And a Republican can take grateful advantage, like a remora. Way of the world, my friends. Ask John McCain.

The Art of the Backwoods Margarita

 

Bicycle Blender from Eric Maas on Vimeo.

Dimensions, eh?

Dimensions is a brilliant basic primer on the elements of topology with a nerd factor of about infinity plus 2.

The site features a nine-part video presentation, with inspired CAD visualizations throughout, here, and supplementary written commentary for each part begining here. This is one of the best web presentations of seriously sciencey geekery I've ever encountered.

[…via Metafilter]

Idol

Is it Pandering If She's Only A Trophy Wife?

Indeed, McCain felt so comfortable at the event that he even volunteered his wife for the rally’s traditional beauty pageant, an infamously debauched event that’s been known to feature topless women.

“I encouraged Cindy to compete,” McCain said to cheers. “I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

— As quoted by CNN

Offering up your wife's services to sweeten some deal is a perogative of naked patriarchy that is perhaps less common in the modern age than in the past.

The gesture resurfaced at the annual Harley get together in Sturges, South Dakota, where McCain had gone to plump up his mojo. In a field of however many motorcyclists, the guy who flew jets in war holds the trump card. However chancey the lives of motorcyclists, however "outlaw," those lives can't match the life of a guy who bombed people from a jet in war and even crashed a few times, too. Even the toughest Harley types whose legitimacy derives from having done a respectable amount of time have nothing on John McCain.

I think Hunter Thompson described the practice of sharing out the women among Hells Angels in his book. No one at Sturgis is unaware of the tradition. All the show us your boobs/Miss Buffalo Chip stuff functions as a ritualization of that paleopatriarchical practice which McCain nicely recalls with his remark.

Oliver Stone's Head A-Splode!!

Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found.

The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together making it more likely that they could be inhaled.

The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form.

As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement.
[…]
The official said the Ft. Detrick findings represented an "opinionated analysis," that three other labs are conducting tests, and that one of those labs had contradicted the bentonite finding. But, the official added, "tests continue."

—ABC News, October 29, 2001.

Intriguingly, the Headline for the above story on the ABC News website reads, "Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi," with the sub-head, "Tests find laced anthrax, Atta met Iraqi."

Everyone now knows the ballocks in the repeated claim that Atta met Iraqi. There's no further room for argument on that. Atta did not meet Iraqi, though it was convenient to say so for many highly placed [cough Vice President] administration officials talking on and off the record in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, the Vice President repeated the claim publicly again and again.

Privately he and his minions provided unsourced comments linking Atta with the anthrax based on the suspect report from Fort Detrick claiming to have found a uniquely Iraqi chemical signature on the anthrax used in those shocking terrorist mailings that began one week after 9/11.

The meeting, along with Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons, have led some to question whether Atta and Hussein were not somehow behind the anthrax attacks in the United States.

Yep. A suggested connection sourced to "some" between "the meeting" [no qualifier there, no "purported," no "hypothetical," no "unsubstantiated" -p.r.] in Prague connecting Al Qaeda with Iraq, and the anthrax attacks as a second wave of terror from the same source. The same "some" who peddled the Atta met Iraqi balderdash were promoting the "opinionated analysis" from Ft. Detrick with all the CSI-like sciencey stuff in it to show that Iraqis had to have made the anthrax. That too was false, though equally convenient.

Fort Detrick is the home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Bruce E. Ivins worked, Bruce E. Ivins who couldn't account for his lab being contaminated with anthrax numerous times over a five month period beginning in late 2001 and ending in April 2002, but also where the FBI sent one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes to be investigated. Was it Ivins whose analysis of this envelope so clearly and conveniently for the Vice President's purposes pointed to the Iraqis? Yes. Yes, it was his work.

Bruce E. Ivins is said to have committed suicide Tuesday, ingesting a whole bunch of Tylenol with codeine just as Federal authorities got around to informing him that they were finally ready to press charges against him after all these years.

A Bit of The Swiftness from Johnny Griffin

[Video Updated 11/14/10-p.r.]

Journey At The Center Of The Earth

Crazy Rich

 
Treatment for the obscenely wealthy, via the NYT.
 

Monday Morning Cartoon Requiem

 


Author Thomas M. Disch, who wrote The Brave Little Toaster, committed suicide July 4, the same day Jesse Helms died for other reasons.

The 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote "Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distanced mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, [Disch] has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers.

— Locus

Pro Patria

Indeed, I have long harbored a desire to hold a monthly flag-burning ... of the Confederate battle flag, in my front yard. "Heritage" be damned. If one wants to take pride in the martial efforts of your great-great-grandfather, then research his service and get a copy of his local, regimental, flag. This is your heritage. The Confederate flag is racism, death, oppression and treason. As you can see, flags do matter.
—Eric Alterman at Media Matters

They do matter, yes they do. And the glory of a flag is enhanced by the elevation it provides from which to spit on selected other flags, as it turns out.
–

Stunning News From A Previous Future

Along with any number of other less savory relics of the German past, a complete copy of Fritz Lang's masterpiece, Metropolis, has been hidden away all these years in Buenos Aires, it turns out.

For most of its life, Metropolis has only been available in the considerably shortened and re-edited form given it by Paramount Pictures in the wake of the film's initial disappointing showing in Berlin in 1927. Lang's complete film was presumed lost forever until a recent investigation at Buenos Aires's Museo del Cine proved that the copy held there contains all the original footage.

I'm counting on you to come through for me on this, Criterion Collection. I want.

Who's been saying that shit for years?

 
John McCain vs. the Green Monster [via…]

Saturday Morning Cartoon Carnival

 
SNAFU-related program activities:


 

Yet Another Amendment

My politics are so individuated that the set of people who agree with all the positions I take excludes even me at times.

Which is to say that if some time ago I enjoyed the idea of gathering together with a huge crowd of Americans prepared to register its disgust in government, in Washington, D.C. this Fourth of July weekend, by burning the White House down, to the ground if possible, in the measured manner of the civil Paris mobs of old, my enthusiasm for such an assembly is now somewhat tempered by consideration of the death of the namesake I belittle in the sidebar to the right, whose life ended as an ancillary product of just such an erruption in Paris a long time ago.

Not that I begrude the Paris mob its ferocity, given conditions. The roused crowd is the ancient actor in civic life, whose lost function it is to intervene directly when the strains of governing properly prove too much for the current class of rulers. Crowd control is the first order of proper governance. Without it all the other improprieties of the current class of rulers become impossible, and yet at times a chastening crowd must form, just as surely as thunderheads must form over Kansas in the summertime, the crowd loosing itself on its government for all the reasons. The reaction of the government may result eventually in better crowd control or immediately in its own dissolution, such are the stakes.

I do not argue that this government must not be chastened.

George Carlin, Forever And Ever, Amen

The Wounded Sea

 
For those who can't stand reading about the death of the Ocean, this week's NYT Magazine is no help at all. It features a long article by Donovan Hohn called Sea of Trash, focusing on one small part of the problem, the enormous accumulation of discarded plastics in the Pacific in an immense, slowly rotating assembly of detritus called the Garbage Patch, a portion of which has followed the prevailing North Pacific current to landfall on a remote beach in Alaska.

If reading about it is too hard, here's a series of videos on VBS.tv devoted to the Garbage Patch that you might watch instead. No one has a solution, no easy solution, no hard solution, no magical solution: the Ocean is deeply wounded. If this is all too depressing, check out the VBS.tv series on tourism in North Korea. It's a veritable laugh riot by comparison.
 

Soon To Be A Minor Motion Picture, No Doubt

Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on.
[…]
All the women apparently had similarities to the suspect's late mother, with whom he reportedly had a poor relationship.
[via BBC]

Clarification

 
For those puzzled by what Joe Cocker was singing about at Woodstock:



[via…]

Eh. . ., Fix Push?

 
Yes.


 

Meme Watch

 
Born on this date:

I am aware of all internet traditions.

That is all.
 

When "Take this job and shove it" just won't do.

 
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, sends a letter of resignation to his boss at Yahoo!

It almost makes me want to get a job, just to see if I can come up with a cleverer way to resign.

[via…]
 

Fun with words

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Roben, you mentioned those exotic assets, hard to price. Isn't this a case where you take the hit for a couple of bad quarters, strip out those non-performing assets, write them down, and then you're a healthier, leaner country at the end of it -- company at the end of it, or is this something more dangerous than that to Lehman?

ROBEN FARZAD: It is more dangerous, because we didn't realize that the assets can't really be cordoned off that neatly. Leverage, as I've said before, has really long tentacles. It's almost like rust in a car. You know, the more you scratch away the rust, you find the rust deeper into the car.

Good enough, but what he really said was, "Leverage, as I've said before, has really long testic… um… tentacles." Check it out at 3:13.

In Farzad's defense, I think the idea of using really long testicles for leverage goes all the way back to Archimedes.

Bloomsday 2008

 

Once upon a time Padraigin Mcillicuddy ran a radio show, "A Terrible Beauty," on KPFA in Berkeley. Irish Music and notes on Celtic happenings around the Bay. Somehow she got hold of a copy of RTÉ Radio 1's dramatic reading of Ulysses by James Joyce, and in 1986 or so, arranged to have the whole thing broadcast, all 29 and a half hours of it, beginning on Bloomsday, June 16, and carrying on through the night and into the next day. It's a magnificent piece of work. I followed along with it for hours, watching as the words on the pages of the book took life in the voices of the cast. I had other things to do, of course, including sleep, but I returned the radio often over the course of those hours and as I listened and read (and watched in the way only radio dramatizations can make possible) Joyce's Dublin come to life for me.

Since then every Bloomsday I've taken out the book, and opened it up randomly and started in again, sometimes engaging with it for an hour or so, sometimes prodded to revisit the whole long thing, always with the memory of that program in mind.

Happy Bloomsday. I'll be off in the corner here reading for a bit.

[Map of Dublin via]
 

The Big Picture

 
Boston.com has a newish blog, The Big Picture, the purpose of which is to post enormous pictures, pictures which would which normally be cropped or shrunk to a smaller size to fit the news stories they accompany. Each post consists of a dozen or so thematically similar images chosen by the blog's author, Alan Taylor.

I wish I could post huge photo images via Blogger, but that seems to be out of the question. Well, free is free, so I'm not really complaining. Nothing beats the sense of immersion provided by a great big picture, though. Taylor has a fine eye, and the advantage of picking through the work of really talented photographers from all over the world. Lose yourself in the blog. It's astonishingly good stuff.

[Brazilian Indians riding a bus to a meeting to protest plans for a hydoroelectric dam which will flood their home acres. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)]

Bonny Doon is burning

 
Usually Michael and I play chess on Tuesday, but this week Tuesday was out, so I went over to his house yesterday instead. A little after 3 p.m. I stepped out onto his porch to smoke a cigarette (yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up.) and said, "Fire!"

A huge billow of smoke was roiling up into the sky to the north, visible above the ridge behind the University. Michael got his camera after awhile and I took this photo.

Bonny Doon is an amorphously defined area in the Santa Cruz Mountains ten miles north of Santa Cruz and west of the San Lorenzo Valley. It's heavily wooded, with redwood, madrone, oak, and lots of pine in the higher elevations where redwoods can't grow. People there are prickly about preserving their isolation, despite and/or because of the fact that they are within twenty miles of six million people. There aren't any stores there except for the Bonny Doon Vinyards tasting room. Coming so soon after the Eureka Canyon fire, in which 4,000 acres went up in the eastern edge of the county, the Martin Fire confirms the suspicion that conditions are all too ripe for a disastrous summer here in Santa Cruz.

Fingers crossed.

Snoring Is Not A Victimless Crime

I am reliably informed.

Romulan named to head US Air Force

In a stunning move, Robert Gates has named Gen. Norton A. Schwartz (clearly a pseudonym) to head the US Air Force, after dismissing its previous leader last week. Gen Schwartz rose quickly through the ranks in the Beta Quadrant, serving as commander of the Tal Shiar before being promoted to his new post.

Stock Market Reels With Sudden Spike in Oil Prices

Even as uncertainties abound about the fundamentals of the energy market, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East regained center stage after Israel’s transportation minister and a deputy prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, said Friday that an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites looked “unavoidable” if Iran did not abandon its nuclear program.

Iran is the second-largest oil producer within the OPEC cartel and exports nearly two million barrels a day. Because the world has few supplies to spare, any interruptions in Iran’s exports could push prices to higher levels. The world currently has about three million barrels a day of spare capacity, and consumes 86 million barrels a day of oil.

—NYT, June 6, 2008

Investors are dumping dollars and jumping into oil futures, which makes sense. The dollar is sinking, and oil looks to be a safe bet to maintain value in the long term, right up to the point where the very last barrel sucked out of the ground is priceless. Talk of $5 per gallon of gas in the US by November isn't out of line at all [although the ostrich talk is a bit twee. My money is in auroch futures].

An "unavoidable" attack on Iran would certainly cinch the deal.

The Return of Robert F. Kennedy

Forty years gone, a slideshow of photos of folks gathered along the route as the train carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Arlington Cemetery in Washington passed by.

Readying A Strike On Iran?

Watch this space:

Air Force Leadership in Shake-Up

Defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne to step down.

Bonus mordancy:

The error was considered so grave that President Bush was quickly informed.

New Directions in Very Hungry Caterpillar Studies

ZOMBIE CATERPILLARS CONTROLLED BY VOODOO WASPS!!!!1!!

Where's Bo Diddley?

Bo's gone.

An Assisted Triple Play!

So you know: just now, in the eight inning of tonight's game, the Giants completed a round-the-horn triple play, third to second to first, on the first pitch thrown by their reliever Yabu to the Padres hitter Kouzmanoff.

Yabu is credited with the most efficient pitch in the history of baseball, eh?

Using the wrong word

Aid Agencies Push Myanmar For More Access To Quake Area, by Tom Wright in The Wall Street Journal online, May 29, 2008 7:07 a.m.

A twofer: arguably the wrong word for the country, unarguably the wrong word for the calamity.

Dammit, I Want My Flying Car, And I Want it Noooooooow!!!

Chromolithographs of the year 2000 by Villemard, Paris, 1910.

GOP Strategists Mull a McCain "Blowout"

This report from David Paul Kuhn at the Politco website demonstrates the eternal priniciple that with the aid of the meagerest hope the path to victory can be spied. Republican strategists "mull" [love the word] the possibility that McCain might outperforming his ticket and actually take the electoral college by a greater margin of victory than George Bush ever did.

Making the unlikely occur takes great effort, and since it is unlikely that McCain will be president, it is up to Republicans to do the great unlikely things it will take to see it happen. All the way up and down the line Republicans made that great effort in the 2000 election, from the mob of them who crowded into the election office in Florida and shut down the count of votes that would have granted Gore the victory, all the way up to the Republicans on the Supreme Court, who dragged the 14th amendment through the looking glass in a decision favoring Bush, and while certifying his victory took the unprecedented yet obviously necessary precaution of legally extinguishing their own ruling in passing, declaring that it could not be construed as a precedent in any future case, preventing future litigants from throwing the blatant traducing of the meaning of "equal protection" it was based on back in the Supreme's face. Like the Cheshire cat, the ruling disappeared itself, leaving nothing but the smile a Republican victory produces.

There's no saying what it will take for the Republicans to pull it off this time. But that's what they have strategists for, I suppose.

My thoughts are with you, Forrest.

UPDATE May 28, 2008: Forrest got evacuated for a few days, but his place escaped the flames. He and Robin are back home and breathing sighs of relief, as are we all.

"They are all multi-instrumentalists and they polka like real men."

An interview with Tom Waits conducted by … Tom Waits, at ANTI:

Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it wont be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick (2) words to live by.

Cactus blossoms as big as grapefruit, Santa Cruz, 2008

Rose Blossoms Big As Cabbages, Santa Cruz, CA, 2008

This big blossom is one of four or five behemoths of blooming produced by the rose bush out front strictly on its own initiative, in accordance with the principles of Irish Relaxive Gardening, the bush assiduously denied the intercessionary aid of any of the commonly applied dusts, emoluments or sprays known to anyone who attends at all to roses, but left instead out there by the sidewalk on its own to use what rain it can to grow as big as it's going to get in the soil provided for it by whoever it was who put it there in the first place.

Little More Than Two Minutes of Alan Watts Talking As Animated By Those Guys From South Park

I suppose the animation is meant to make the words spoken by Alan Watts more convincing by reducing them, as Watts was always wont to do, to their simplest elements. In that sense the South Park guys are the perfectly appropriate illustrators for his talk.

N.B. It is inconceivable that Alan Watts ever talked for only two minutes at a stretch, so this video must certainly be considered to have been taken out of context, which context was assuredly some marvelous spoken riff of Coltranean discursiveness that Watts was so capable of delivering, which riff may have as likely as not, for Watts's own impish reasons, turned back upon what he says here and made happy nonsense of it.

350

The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

Simple, straightforward, easily grasped.

350.org

More at TomDispatch.

350. Pass it on.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Next Four Years But Were Afraid To Ask

In the latest NYRB, a downbeat analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, concluding with the following remark:

To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most—get out or fight on.

— Thomas Powers, "Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?" April 30, 2008, in The New York Review of Books

The Great American Derangement

Matt Taibbi has a new book :

Robert Vesco, fugitive pirate, reportedly dead in Cuba

If Mr. Vesco indeed eluded the American authorities until his final day, it was the fitting end to his nearly four decades on the run. He was wanted for, among other things, bilking some $200 million from credulous investors in the 1970s, making an illegal contribution to Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and trying to arrange a deal during the Carter administration to let Libya buy American planes in exchange for bribes to United States officials.
[…]
Having lived comfortably in Havana for more than a dozen years, Mr. Vesco was convicted and jailed there for fraud in 1996 after reportedly double-crossing Fidel Castro’s relatives in a bogus wonder-drug deal.
[…]
After serving most of his time in a private cell in a large prison in eastern Cuba, Mr. Vesco was quietly released in 2005 and lived so simply in recent years in Havana that a friend said he did not know what had happened to his fortune.

—A last Vanishing Act for Robert Vesco, Fugitive, by Marc Lacey and Jonathan Kandell of The New York Times

It's hard not to compare the $200 million gained by the wiley Mr. Vesco with the salaries granted to the principals of financial services companies imploding right and left around the globe these days. Mr. Vesco purposely engineered the financial fiasco that lead to his wealth; the officers of financial services companies are somewhat more thoughtlessly complicit in creating the conditions for the fiasco we're currently experiencing. But such officers are granted salaries of the same order of magnitude as the sum said to have been lifted by Mr. Vesco, some nine-digit number sanctioned with a straight face by the Board of Directors at places like Bear Stearns and Citbank and Countywide for the services of the fellow who was all the while not only heading the company right off the cliff, but reaching out and joining hands with others all across the financial serivices sector to jump at the same time.

The principals, the officers of all the financial services companies currently going to rack and ruin around the world, have it better that Robert Vesco did, for, although it's true that Mr. Vesco's $200 million was made of a much more robust dollar than the 8 or 9 digits of dollars of their own salaries, and therefore represents a comparatively larger sum than what they'll ever get away with, still, they bear none of the burdensome bother of illegality borne away down the years with all his loot by Mr. Vesco.

Mr. Vesco was a pirate who made an enormously successful raid and got away with it for decades. The last sentence of the Times obit hints that in his last years Mr. Vesco's fortune was gone, but who knows? It would be irresponsible not to speculate on The Lost Hoard of Vesco. Perhaps it was stolen or squeezed from him while he was in prison, perhaps there's a Howard Hughesian will. Only time and the airport paperback racks will tell.

How To Be At Once Depraved and Correct

A Moment of Zen from The Daily Show:

May Day

"If I were a worker in a factory the first thing I would do would be to join a union." — Franklin Roosevelt

There was a lot of factory work in America back when Roosevelt said that. Implicitly he was endorsing a force that had for decades organized workers to fight and sometimes die for decent hours and decent pay and decent working conditions for every worker not only in factories, but on railroads and in mines and everywhere else, waged against powerful, well-armed interests who had both the law and the firepower in their favor. Long ago, people died to establish the standard of the eight hour day, the one that rolls so easily off the paycheck of today's worker in America. The forty hour week, overtime, all that cost blood, which goes unconsidered, except on ceremonial occasions such as May Day as experienced elsewhere in the world. In America the other word for labor history is amnesia.

I read somewhere that representations of these guys are a common feature of May Day parades in other lands, statuettes and commemorative floats devoted to their images still being dragged through the streets after all these years, memorializing in other lands what is in America an almost universally forgotten martyrdom of labor history:

The Reluctantly Deployed Dog of April 2008

Sunday Flowering Stuff Blogging

Irrefutable!

—via Pharyngula

Friday Stationary Object Blogging: The Sawing

Tom Scribner's statue on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.

Friday Stationary Object Blogging: The Flowering