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: