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.