This old world's had a hell of a year. Off with it, now. A new year for everyone, on the house, is what I say.
December 30, 2010
Happy New Year, it says here, again. . .
This old world's had a hell of a year. Off with it, now. A new year for everyone, on the house, is what I say.
December 18, 2010
December 14, 2010
Watering the Central Coast
The poisoning of the Salinas Valley aquifer may be irreversable by now.
Irrigation runoff, liquid mixed with the residue of powders and oils and potions habitually spread over the staggeringly rich agicultural acres of the valley, leaks down water's inexorable gradient to the lowest available spot, the aquifer, where that liquid is lifted by pump back again to the surface to collect the residue of yet another round of agricultural chemistry. It's hard to say at this point what sort of remediation could make some of the valley's water supply non-toxic again. The threat to Monterey Bay goes without saying: all these waters leak in that direction.
This is what happens when lawyerly types are left to design an agency. The Water Quality Board should act more like a fire department than a circuit court, immediately acting to shut down identified threats to the water supply with all the tools of the trade, rather than engaging in two years of hearings that may yeild some mitigating results in March.
But, no.
Irrigation runoff, liquid mixed with the residue of powders and oils and potions habitually spread over the staggeringly rich agicultural acres of the valley, leaks down water's inexorable gradient to the lowest available spot, the aquifer, where that liquid is lifted by pump back again to the surface to collect the residue of yet another round of agricultural chemistry. It's hard to say at this point what sort of remediation could make some of the valley's water supply non-toxic again. The threat to Monterey Bay goes without saying: all these waters leak in that direction.
Aiming to clean up some of the most toxic water in California, regional water quality officials are considering new rules to control polluting runoff from agricultural fields.
[…]
Water samples from the Salinas Valley were among the worst on the Central Coast.
[…]
After more than two years in development, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Board will consider adopting the new regulations in March.
This is what happens when lawyerly types are left to design an agency. The Water Quality Board should act more like a fire department than a circuit court, immediately acting to shut down identified threats to the water supply with all the tools of the trade, rather than engaging in two years of hearings that may yeild some mitigating results in March.
But, no.
December 10, 2010
November 28, 2010
November 24, 2010
Austerity at-a-glance for the Irish
The saving move, which will keep a lot of banks from losing money, is to make Ireland a poor country again, as it's been before and ever shall be, world without end, it would seem.
November 14, 2010
November 08, 2010
On What's Drawn From Our Sabers At Baseball-Reference.com
It's put down as a strikeout on the scorecard, the backward "K" signifying a called third strike to end the game.
The record of the event doesn't admit the batter's angry glance back at the umpire, however integrally bound to the moment as it actually transpired.
"Glanced angrily at the umpire" must go and live in the realm of yarns about the game, where all the narrative threads that lead to and then out of that angrily given glare at its end can be found, tellings associated however loosely with the game noted in the record.
The yarn, given what people are willing to listen to over and over, may or may not last. It's nice to have a basic record at the very least, and what baseball-reference.com makes of baseball's basic records is an invaluable aid to anyone experiencing the rarely exercised impulse to make informed comment about the game, for whatever good that ever does.
The record of the event doesn't admit the batter's angry glance back at the umpire, however integrally bound to the moment as it actually transpired.
"Glanced angrily at the umpire" must go and live in the realm of yarns about the game, where all the narrative threads that lead to and then out of that angrily given glare at its end can be found, tellings associated however loosely with the game noted in the record.
The yarn, given what people are willing to listen to over and over, may or may not last. It's nice to have a basic record at the very least, and what baseball-reference.com makes of baseball's basic records is an invaluable aid to anyone experiencing the rarely exercised impulse to make informed comment about the game, for whatever good that ever does.
November 07, 2010
What I Won
Many's the night I'd trudge the upper deck of Candlestick Park with the coffee urn strapped to my back, the heavy metal cylinder filled with a couple of gallons of atrocious once-hot miner's-camp-quality coffee I was expected to sell to the sparse crowd of regulars already overly familiar with its flavor who populated the upper deck of the place in those years. My supply had its uses in the mixtures they'd make of it with their bottle of something or other pulled as easy as you please in public from a pocket and poured into the solution of melted styrofoam and Foster's Restaurant Blend Coffee I had to offer. And of course there were always the innocents, the ones I'd never yet served the stuff, thinking to cut the uncanny chill of a nighttime game at Candlestick Park with what they'd soon realize they'd expected to be a much, much hotter fluid, however palatable. Even with all that I could expect to make $3.00, or, with a little rushing around from point of possible sale to point of possible sale, as much as $4.00 a night vending the stuff.
[In the freezing chill of the second deck at Candlestick at night, the starched white of the vendors uniform was soon enough splattered with errantly dispensed coffee. No matter how closely the cup was held to the spigot, there was always enough intervening wind to affect the discharge of the liquid stuff. Wet cold coffee covered the clothing of the coffee urn carrier at Candlestick.]
For most vendors, the night was done by the end of the seventh inning, all the crowd's appetite for popcorn or programs or peanuts or hot dogs having been pretty much accommodated for the night, the peak of demand settling in the third through fifth innings, then tailing off to the ignorably few potential customers in the eighth or ninth who weren't worth the trouble anyway. At the end of the seventh, most vendors would cash out and go home for the night, or come back out to the far end of the right field stands and watch what was left of the game if it was at all interesting.
Oh, the beer vendors, serving a constant demand, would come early and work as late as needs be, all through extra innings, sure, stationed at the exits to the parking lot at game's end in any case to get the last wave of customers before shutting down for the night.
But for the lad toting the coffee urn up and down the steps of Candlestick's steep upper deck, any hope for the immediate sale of a supply of coffee large enough to justify cashing out by the end of the seventh was met for most of the game with an informed resistance to the stuff among the regulars who made up the overwhelming majority of the smattering of people who ever sat in the second deck in those years.
Only with the passage of hours and innings, under the very predictable onslaught of a night's weather at Candlestick Park, colder and windier and somehow wetter without exactly raining, and, of course, as the night gets, darker, too, all on matching gradients running up through the innings, would even the most recalcitrant of regulars finally reach a point where they might seriously consider coffee, even knowingly cry out for some, if only for the cup to pour something stronger in. But that's the way it was every night. Aw, the coffee urn carrier in his coffee-soaked clothing, waiting through the long cold innings it took to make customers out of that crowd.
Worth it now.
[In the freezing chill of the second deck at Candlestick at night, the starched white of the vendors uniform was soon enough splattered with errantly dispensed coffee. No matter how closely the cup was held to the spigot, there was always enough intervening wind to affect the discharge of the liquid stuff. Wet cold coffee covered the clothing of the coffee urn carrier at Candlestick.]
For most vendors, the night was done by the end of the seventh inning, all the crowd's appetite for popcorn or programs or peanuts or hot dogs having been pretty much accommodated for the night, the peak of demand settling in the third through fifth innings, then tailing off to the ignorably few potential customers in the eighth or ninth who weren't worth the trouble anyway. At the end of the seventh, most vendors would cash out and go home for the night, or come back out to the far end of the right field stands and watch what was left of the game if it was at all interesting.
Oh, the beer vendors, serving a constant demand, would come early and work as late as needs be, all through extra innings, sure, stationed at the exits to the parking lot at game's end in any case to get the last wave of customers before shutting down for the night.
But for the lad toting the coffee urn up and down the steps of Candlestick's steep upper deck, any hope for the immediate sale of a supply of coffee large enough to justify cashing out by the end of the seventh was met for most of the game with an informed resistance to the stuff among the regulars who made up the overwhelming majority of the smattering of people who ever sat in the second deck in those years.
Only with the passage of hours and innings, under the very predictable onslaught of a night's weather at Candlestick Park, colder and windier and somehow wetter without exactly raining, and, of course, as the night gets, darker, too, all on matching gradients running up through the innings, would even the most recalcitrant of regulars finally reach a point where they might seriously consider coffee, even knowingly cry out for some, if only for the cup to pour something stronger in. But that's the way it was every night. Aw, the coffee urn carrier in his coffee-soaked clothing, waiting through the long cold innings it took to make customers out of that crowd.
Worth it now.
November 04, 2010
Subhead Frustrates Understanding
 |
| No, You Go Crazy |
I get why these two guys are joyously embracing. They're teammates, San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series Champions, and this page from the San Jose Mercury News is the front of a whole special section on the Series and its deciding game, the line score of which is printed above the picture of the two guys hugging. Fine.
But what's all this about 58 years of frustration? What frustration, and who held it all these years and for what exactly? I'm sure commenters have somewhere gnawed this question to rags and I'll add this:
The subhead reads, GIANTS END 58 YEARS OF FRUSTRATION, but of course the Giants won the World Series 56 years ago, in 1954, meaning that the frustration referred to in the subhead that is now ended must lie two years further in the past than that, not to be resolved by a mere World Series Championship in the meantime, but going back as far as some pivotal moment in 1952 in fact, 58 years ago, just as DeLillo would have us believe in Underworld, some irksome something persisting until this year's historic season put an end to it.
The precise nature of this frustration is left as an exerise for the reader.
November 02, 2010
World News Tonight
For a lucid account of game five of the 2010 world Series, I recommmend the BBC.
 |
| Giants 11- 7, Giants 9- 0, Rangers 4-2, Giants 4-0, Giants 3-1 |
November 01, 2010
San Francisco Beat
Here's Henry Schulman, the San Francisco Chronicle's Giants beat writer, the fellow whose job it is to follow the team around all year long reporting, by way of the Chronicle's Sporting Green, and in fewer than 600 words if at all possible, on almost every game the San Francisco Giants play throughout the lengthy Major League Baseball season. This is the last Giants game he'll have to report on this year, because, improbably, but according to Schulman's witness, known for its probity lo these many years on the beat, the Giants have won enough of them to become champions of Major League Baseball this year and won't need to play any more to prove it.
October 30, 2010
October 29, 2010
Texas Tagged Twice: Giants Lead Series 2-0
October 28, 2010
Study Shows Probability of Something Eventually Happening in A Baseball Game Approaches 1!
Last night Freddy Sanchez, appearing in a World Series for the first time, hit a double in each of his first three plate apearances, something no one had ever done before. Any batter who hits three consecutive doubles is realizing a marvelous improbability. Hitting two in a row is a rare event itself in regular play. But now there's a unique record of accomplishment against which to measure the first three at-bats of every future first-time batter: can you clear the unlikely bar that Sanchez set with his three World Series doubles?
October 27, 2010
A World Series Factlet: Attention Umpires
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
If you can't say it, you do leave it silently unsaid; sometimes this is for the best, sometimes not, your purposes being what they are.
You may or may not have vocabulary adequate to express that of which "whereof" bespeaks. If you can't form the meaningful words thereof, if it's out of the bounds of what's expressible by you, everything you can say can be about something else but never quite that which you might have said on that for which you must now remain silent perforce, not having the adequate words.
Or, it may simply never occur to you, either from ignorance or preoccupation, to say anything at all on the matter. Whereof you know not, thereof you shall not speak, so to say.
Or you may be interrupted or distracted before you have a chance to say what you had to say, leading to a silence equalling the other silences collecting around the prospective word thereof.
Wittgenstein was into some pretty abstruse arguments in his little chapbook, the Tractatus, but this last one, good old proposition 7, is the one that certainly justifies but rarely predicts my own silence on this and a raft of other subjects.
October 23, 2010
October 16, 2010
October 14, 2010
October 10, 2010
October 04, 2010
Baseball !!!
 |
| A Lesson in Lens Flare From The Giants' Official Photographer |
The San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division Sunday, the last day of the 2010 regular season. They improved on last year's record of 88-74 by an additional four wins, ending the season with the second-best record in the National League at 92-70. This is a good thing.
The National League's Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball's weakest club, won 57 games this year. It takes, unarguably, the assembling of a fair amount of talent to win more than a third of the games your team plays against the best ballplayers in the world. Sadly for true Pirates fans, a fair amount of talent is no match for the exceptional amount of talent assembled on the better teams in the National League.
Giving the Pirates a pass, the worst teams in baseball will win roughly four of every ten games played each year, and the best teams not quite six of every ten, with all the other middling teams spread somewhere in between. Every additional win over 81 wins is harder and harder to achieve. Winning 100 games in a 162-game season, just a fraction more than six of ten, is a relatively rare phenomenon in baseball, rarer than a pitcher winning 20 games or a batter hitting 50 home runs, singular accomplishments in themselves, and it didn't happen this year. The Philadelphia Phillies won 97, not quite as good a season as Pittsburgh's was bad, but certainly marking them as the favorite to advance in the playoffs leading to the World Series.
Great pitching, solid defense and some timely hitting is an age-old formula for winning baseball. The Giants benefited from the best pitching in baseball this year and a surprisingly solid defense, but only an average offense.
The San Diego Padres, built along the same lines as the Giants, had superior pitching and defense this year as well, and only five percent fewer runs scored than the Giants — not a horrible offense surely, not Pittsburgh horrible or Houston horrible or even Mets horrible at scoring runs, but no dynamo of offense like Cincinnati or Philadephia or Atlanta, either, — and it was almost inevitable that at least one team of that sort would advance to the playoffs. Being in the same division, the Padres and the Giants met 18 times during the year, and the Giants very average offense showed, throughout the season and again this past weekend, that it could win one of three games against the very best pitching in baseball. The Padres took the season series against the Giants 12-6, and they won this past weekend's series 2-1. Even excellent Giants pitching wasn't enough against the Padres this year: Jonathan Sanchez gave up one hit, a single, in seven innings against the Padres back in April and lost 1-0 to Matt Latos. A few weeks later he faced the Padres and Latos again, and gave up three hits in eight innings and lost 1-0 again, too. Latos, the Padres pitcher, won both games, and drove in the only run himself in the second game with a two out basehit. In the last game of the season Latos and Sanchez faced each other yet again, and this time it was Sanchez with the unexpected hit, a triple (!) that positioned him to score the first, and as it proved, the only necessary run of the game that clinched the National League West Division title for the Giants.
October 01, 2010
Giants Baseball: Torture
The Giants spotted the San Diego Padres six runs by the fifth inning and I made a quick retreat to the garage and succumbed to the ministrations of some Van Morrison: I found echidne's YouTube link to "Into the Mystic", and it was a balm. I looked on ESPN's MLB scores page and saw that the Giants had pulled four runs out of their hat to make a contest of the thing: 6-4. When "Into the Mystic" ended I used the little pictorial index of Van Morrison tunes at the bottom of the YouTube screen to scroll over to "Sweet Thing and The Way Young Lovers Do and I played those two, opening up a window with just YouTube in it, and playing Ballerina again in that window, too. By then it was the eighth inning and the ESPN Play-by-Play page showed the Giants had a couple of guys on base, two outs, and Torres, this night's Wille Mac Award winner for 2010, up at the plate.
September 27, 2010
September 20, 2010
Annals of the Long Now
Among the interviews collected at the Paris Review site is a recent interview with John McPhee, where he allows that the sense of geological time he rubbed up against for twenty years creating Annals of the Former World (1998), associating with geologists who say a million years is the smallest plausible unit they can think in, has taken its necessary toll on his own perspective:
The fact is that everything I’ve written is very soon going to be absolutely nothing—and I mean nothing. It’s not about whether little kids are reading your work when you’re a hundred years dead or something, that’s ridiculous! What’s a hundred years? Nothing. And everything, it doesn’t evanesce, it disappears. And time goes on, and the planet does what it’s going to do.
September 18, 2010
Is That My Shoe You're Eating, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
Two idiosyncratic masters of filmmaking, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, appear in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival [via kottke]:
The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.
My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.
The rest of the lenghty interview, in four parts, can be found here.
My man Werner's charming, insistent, ingenuous bluntness would be tactless in a fellow who cared at all about such philosophical trivialities as tact when the precision of a sentiment is at stake.
September 17, 2010
Baseball (!!)
With 15 games left on the schedule, the San Francisco Giants (83-64) took over first place in the National League's West Division last night, demolishing the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles 10-2. It's there to be found out in the forthcoming final two weeks of play whether this proves to be the high point of the season for the Giants or instead a local maximum on a path ascending to the global maximum of the Championship of Major League Baseball itself.
Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.
Any victory is sweet, and any victory over the Dodgers is sweeter, but especially a victory clinching this year's season series against what are surely, even to the dispassionate eye, a bunch of bums. "Well, the lads beat the Dodgers that year," is all the good that can be said to salvage the memory of many a season for the Giants, more's the pity, as all the club's fans are aware. But it can be said of this season, now, at the very least. The Giants beat the Dodgers this year. Baseball has done some good again.
September 15, 2010
Baseball (!)
 |
| The Popular Game of Baseball |
Sam offered me a ticket to tonight's Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Years ago, with my father and my mother's father, I went to a Giants-Dodgers night game at Seals Stadium. I don't remember how we got there, drove down Harrison and parked on some side street maybe, or took a jitney down Mission Street and walked. Today I'll be taking the bus over Hwy 17 to San Jose's Diridon Station, and from there the train to AT&T Park.
So there we were, sitting high up above and well back from the field not too far down the right field line, a young guy named Sandy Koufax pitching a pretty steady game for the Dodgers into the ninth inning that night, the Dodgers sitting on a two-run lead when lo and behold a rally broke out and the Giants loaded the bases. Koufax was done. My grandfather, who brooked no dispute when it came to baseball matters, begrudged, "This young guy's a good pitcher, Koufax" as Koufax walked off. Subsequent events proved the rueful truth of this judgement to all those who despise the Dodgers of Los Angeles. They brought in Art Fowler to face Leon Wagner, pinch-hitting for the Giants. Wagner, observing as he later put it that "the bags was bulgin'," stepped up to the plate and hit a grand slam home run into the right field stands that won the game for the Giants, 6-4. It remains to be seen what tonight's game has in store. Another wondrous victory for the Giants over the Dodgers would be fine by me.
September 14, 2010
Department of Unlikely A. mississippienses
Claude the Albino Alligator is 15 years old tomorrow. This is a picture of him from December of 2009. He's more than eight feet long now. I don't know how much that is in handbags. He lives in strictly observed comfort at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
 |
| Happy Birthday, you terrible thing. |
September 13, 2010
The Boat Fished Out of the Sea
My father knew a guy in Santa Cruz whose business was shrimp cocktail, packaging small shelled shrimp in little glass jars with some proprietary red sauce or other, cases and cases of the stuff he sold to grocery stores and delis, and handed out to pals when they showed up. I have a haze of a memory of going along on a visit to the guy one time in the earlier 1950's, Dad working the waif angle maybe to pry another carton of the things out of his pal. I've always wondered where they scraped the little shrimp up from, some nearby spot crawling with the things at the time, I suppose. Dad's pal worked out of a big warehousey sort of place hard by the old Union Ice Company's plant on Chestnut and Laurel streets in Santa Cruz. They don't do that sort of business near Chestnut and Laurel anymore, selling shrimp surrounded by some tomato-based something of a sauce in little glass cylinders. Whoever's selling shrimp, from wherever it comes from now, has another way to get it to market these days. And the Union Ice plant is long gone, the need for a facility to produce the vast quantities of ice demanded by the best practices of fishmongering on the enormous scale supported by all the fleets of boats identical to the "Santa Cruz" melting away years before the structure exploded and burned during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.
September 10, 2010
The Reported Explosion
Within just a couple of hours, news cobbled together of the the explosion in San Bruno had gained the attention of the entire world. The BBC News RSS headline, linked to an article on its website, stated, inaccurately, Blaze engulfs San Francisco homes and continued, inaccurately, "Dozens of homes have been set ablaze near San Francisco International Airport, after a reported explosion."
Residents and travelers alike have long noted that San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco, but on the shore of San Francisco Bay miles south of the city. If the body of the RSS feed is accurate, and the blaze, caused by a reported explosion, caused dozens of homes near the airport to be engulfed in flames, then its headline is simply wrong, as there are no houses both in San Francisco and near its airport. Complicating matters, the actual homes set ablaze in San Bruno are not only not in San Francisco but not particulary close to the airport, either.
The BBC's RSS feed makes for a crude approximation of the event it points to. "San Francisco" BOOM! would do as well. But it's notable that even garbled word of this local catastrophe was reverberating in London less than three hours after the terrible explosion.
September 07, 2010
Argument: On History On
James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer:
September 01, 2010
That Old Refrain
Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!
Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.
Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.
For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.
August 30, 2010
August 29, 2010
This Week in Rick Puchalsky
[For a much fuller discussion of the removal of Mr. Brent Lindsey from the rolls of the Cato Institute, FWIW, see this post and its ensuing cascade of comments at Crooked Timber]
I find myself at odds with Henry Farrell when he argues this way:
And yet somehow, every participating raindrop did share an irreducible responsiblilty for constituting the cloud's being. Brent Lindsey participated in a collective call for war, lending his agency to the project of creating the proper atmosphere for waging the thing like so many others did at the time. Later he admitted he was wrong about that.
I'll pass on the politics of atonement in Mr. Lindsey's case. Like so many others unaware of what he'd said, I was unimpressed at the time by his pro-war pronouncements and by his many recantations later. I don't know what the benchmarks for quality and frequency of expression are when repudiating the wrong a person has previously advocated, but I note that Henry and others seem to agree Mr. Lindsey has met their standards in this.
But what are we to think of anyone who, presented with the greatest, most momentous global challenge of a generation, the choice of whether or not the US should plunge into a vast open-ended foreign military adventure, chose freely and horribly and proactively wrong? What's the half-life of justified opprobrium for Lindsey's irreducible role in promoting the thing in the first place? What's the justified level of suspicion that Mr. Lindsey's thought on any subject is congenitaly faulty thought, inferior when put to the test, given the evidence of his expressed thoughts on going to war?
I find myself at odds with Henry Farrell when he argues this way:
If an actual causal relationship had obtained, one would expect that if one subtracted Brink Lindsey’s influence, one would see, at the least, a marginally appreciable difference in the likelihood of war.This is the "he was just a raindrop in the gathering stormcloud of war" argument in different clothes. Add or subtract Mr. Lindsey from that cloud and it retains its full force, yes. The influence of that one raindrop eludes measurement. But logically we could turn to any other raindrop of punditry in that cloud and say the same: subtract it and one would see no appreciable difference in war's likelihood. The gathered cloud was a mighty cloud, and made up of more than pundits. Even if Thomas Friedman himself had shut the fuck up, that stormcloud of war was set to break.
And yet somehow, every participating raindrop did share an irreducible responsiblilty for constituting the cloud's being. Brent Lindsey participated in a collective call for war, lending his agency to the project of creating the proper atmosphere for waging the thing like so many others did at the time. Later he admitted he was wrong about that.
I'll pass on the politics of atonement in Mr. Lindsey's case. Like so many others unaware of what he'd said, I was unimpressed at the time by his pro-war pronouncements and by his many recantations later. I don't know what the benchmarks for quality and frequency of expression are when repudiating the wrong a person has previously advocated, but I note that Henry and others seem to agree Mr. Lindsey has met their standards in this.
But what are we to think of anyone who, presented with the greatest, most momentous global challenge of a generation, the choice of whether or not the US should plunge into a vast open-ended foreign military adventure, chose freely and horribly and proactively wrong? What's the half-life of justified opprobrium for Lindsey's irreducible role in promoting the thing in the first place? What's the justified level of suspicion that Mr. Lindsey's thought on any subject is congenitaly faulty thought, inferior when put to the test, given the evidence of his expressed thoughts on going to war?
August 09, 2010
August 07, 2010
August 04, 2010
July 31, 2010
July 22, 2010
July 12, 2010
Opening A Bottle Of Wine The New French Way
Ah, you'll be pounding away at a jeroboam wrapped in a workboot before long, the way these French Ways go when brought over to America, is what I'm saying.
July 02, 2010
Death in the Gulf
View Larger Map
The orange tab labelled "A" is meant to indicate the whole Gulf of Mexico. The green arrow points to the place where the Deepwater Horizon once drilled.
image via NOAA
Keep in mind that all the estimates of probable landfall in the map created by NOAA are based on an assumption that the equivalent of 33,000 barrels of oil a day is gushing out of the ground a mile under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster took place, when it is currently agreed that two or three times that much oil is erupting into the waters every day.
June 27, 2010
The Futures Market for Violence in Afghanistan Holds Firm
Recently, for some reason I had cause to remark that some of the best political writing of the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Somehow, almost overnight, noticing Rolling Stone's political writing is the new black.
General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.
On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.
And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.
This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.
So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.
General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.
On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.
And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.
This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.
So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.
June 20, 2010
e to the i times pi
I guess the order of the exponents in Euler's famous identity doesn't matter, so that e to the italicized i times pi arrives at the same terminus as e to the pi times italicised i, which is another way of ordering those three fundamental mathematical objects, e, pi, and italicized i, when going on about the profound interrelation of those objects arrayed just so that resolves itself inexorably at long last into a confirmation that the mathematical value we call "minus one" actually exists, is, in fact, identical to the very same thing pointed to by those mathematical objects when so arrayed. And if minus one exists, well, there you are. All the rest of the numbers can be reached from that simple unit that we, QED, don't have one of.
Salman Khan of the invaluable Khan Academy wends his way toward a demonstration of the circuitous and lovely math involved here and here.
Salman Khan of the invaluable Khan Academy wends his way toward a demonstration of the circuitous and lovely math involved here and here.
June 16, 2010
"Bloomsday" 2010
Although Bloomsday has been commonly celebrated (at first by a small pack of literary drunks including Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien in Dublin some years ago) each and every year on June 16, I continue to maintain that only the June 16 which falls on a Thursday is legitimately called Bloomsday. Is Bloomsday Thursday, or is Bloomsday June 16? It's both, forever both. The rest of those June 16ths, like today's, falling on a Wednesday, well, I don't know. Sure, you can call such a thing "Bloomsday" if you must, but just don't call it Bloomsday.
June 14, 2010
Relief for the Unread, An Anniversary
On this date in 1966, the Vatican abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, originally instituted in 1559 to keep good Catholics current on what it was they were forbidden to read. The Index went through 20 editions in its 400+ years of existence, the final refinement of its accumulated distaste printed in 1948, specifying 4000 titles and the entire works of over 500 authors. From the first, hand in hand with the Index proper went wide-ranging and variously effective efforts to expunge from the stock of available reading material works identified there.
Since the moment the Index was nullified, the whole domain of reading has been thrown open to the searching eye, more's the pity. A judicious list, however contentious, of what's safely left unread would really come in handy some days.
June 11, 2010
June 10, 2010
The Gulf Oil Eruption of 2010, Day (n + 1)
Some of the best political reporting in America over the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, for some reason. Tim Dickinson takes the story of our oily Gulf for a spin in the latest issue, online here.
Here's a marvelous representation of Earth in cross-section in 5,000 foot increments, from more than 35,000 feet above sea level to more than 35,000 feet below. Scroll down toward sea level, and on the right you can follow a red line representing the descent of the drilling done from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It wasn't plain to me until I saw this graphic that the site of the eruption of oil, at about 5,000 feet, is actually 13,000 feet above the deepest point reached by the drillers,the oil shooting out of that broken section of pipe on the sea floor carried under immense pressure from way, way down below.
May 28, 2010
History Channel
All the dead seem to be. There they are, clogging up our remembrances. They seem to be, the way we regard them, cognizant of all their influential remains. The dead seem to be. It's not that they are, no.
We are. They seem to be.
May 24, 2010
May 20, 2010
May 19, 2010
March 26, 2010
Sinead O'Connor Lets Her Hair Down
Blessed Sinead O'Connor, mother of four, weighs in on the recent distresses of the Catholic Church, via the Washington Post.
March 23, 2010
March 21, 2010
Local Angle
Two recent articles bring the Grateful Dead to mind.
One, in the New York Times, reports on a exhibit of Grateful Dead related memorabilia culled from the enormous archive of just about everything that passed through the band's office down the decades to be stored by Ellen Law, the perfectly postioned pack rat who worked for the band. Others may have advised her to off the stuff, but she remained undaunted down the years, resulting in the accumulation of an enormous archive which is now the property of the University of California Santa Cruz Library. The current exhibit at the New York Historical Society is culled from that collection of stuff.
The second article can be found in the Atlantic Online, and is titled, "Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead," and in fact resolves toward the end to a discussion of the curiously effective practices that eventually made the Grateul Dead one of the most profitable enterprises in the history of popular music. For the most part, though, the article is an examination of the gradual rise to a begrudged sort of respectability of the scholarly study of the Grateful Dead, a branch of inquiry that threatens to turn into a permanent field now that UC Santa Cruz has created a locus for the orderly interment of the band's cultural remains.
March 13, 2010
War Story Revisted
Once my mother and I were riding in an overcrowded train. It was Victory Day. The man sitting opposite us looked like a peasant and was crying bitterly, washing his tears down with vodka. Every once in a while he'd break off to tell the same story. I heard it many times and remembered it. Here it is.
During the war he and his sister lost everyone close to them. Their village was destroyed, and they took shelter in another village, in an empty house. They were very hungry, and went from house to house asking for something to eat. Then the sister got sick, and the boy went by himself. They stopped giving him anything. Just when things were getting really bad, a miracle happened: at one of the houses they gave him a piece of pork. The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister. They were able to hold out for a couple of days more, and then some distant relatives found them and took them to the town where he lived for many years.
On that day he had gone back to the village where the miracle happened, to find the people who had saved his life and thank them, even though he didn't know their names. He got off the train and found a big feast going on in the village. In the middle of the table was a ham, with bottles around it. He sat next to an old man. They drank. The old man looked thoughtfully at the table, then said: "I don't like this holiday. It's hard on me remembering the war, I have a great sin on my soul.
"During the war my son was sick. The doctor said he had to have meat. I sold everything I could and bought a pig. I slaughtered it, but the pig was sick. What could I do? In the village there was an orphan who went around begging. I decided I'd give him a piece, wait a couple of days and see what happened. If the beggar boy survived, I'd give my son the meat. I invited him to have some of the pork. But he didn't survive, he didn't walk around the village any more. We had to throw the meat away. My son died. It's a heavy weight on me that I killed those children."
The man took a swig from the bottle and started the story again.
—as noted by languagehat, who goes on to add:
Now, in the comments at the Shkrobius thread a couple of people said they remembered this story from an old magazine, and one of them found a link: it's Мелкие неприятности ("Little annoyances"), by Pavel Nilin. The plot is close enough that it would be surprising if the two were unrelated; the main difference is that in the Nilin story there is no sick son—the villager tests out the pork on the boy and sees it doesn't kill him; presumably he and his wife eat the rest. Either the fellow Shkrobius and his mother saw in the train (he says in the comment thread that it was in the early 1970s) had read the story (which is dated 1974) and was telling it as his own, or Nilin heard the same guy and made a literary story out of it. Or, of course, it could be coincidence. But the interesting thing is how much more effective the anecdote told by Shkrobius is; the Nilin story, with its careful scene-setting and description of neighbors and so on, just dissipates the power of it.
Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara is an old book that has all the stories in it, as far as I'm concerned. Admittedly, I've only heard second hand about Somadeva's book myself, so I have no way of knowing how accurate my characterization is. Nevertheless, not having read it allows me to continue to guess it has a story in it just like this story among all the rest, a story repeated over and over again not only on the train by the inebriated traveller, but also over and over again by countless other travellers in caravans all over Central Asia and beyond for millennia.
The story as told on the train has neatly concentrated moral elements: we see the seeming bit of charity in the offered pig meat for the ploy it actually is on the part of the villager who, otherwise indifferent to their fate, only wishes to know if the starving children will sicken or die when fed the bad meat of a pig he otherwise plans to feed his own sick son to bring the ailing lad back to health. Shortly after eating the pork, sustained in the last moment before starvation by their fill of the meat given them by the villager for his own reasons, the boy and his sister are found by relatives and taken away to safety. But the villager mistakes the disappearance of the boy and his sister for a sign that bad pork has killed them, forbids his sick son the meat that might have saved the lad's life, and watches, wretched, as his sick son soon dies. The villager's act of inadvertent true charity has, misunderstood, inadvertently committed his son to death.
The great existential question posed by specifying the meat as pork is, "But would you eat that if your were starving?" Pork is the normatively forbidden thing, standing in for all the other forbidden tainted stuff avoided for all the reasons that might, yes, just might be consumed if it came down to it, which in fact it has come down to time and again down the ages for countless many people, people who have confronted the question in lean unequivacal terms, starving with but the arbitrary anything to chew on. Would you overcome your disgust and eat that? If it were truly distasteful? Even if you'd been told over and over again just don't? If it were made available, and you starving?
It's no secret about pork. The people who eat pork without qualm are conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the practice. Presumably the people who eat dog are equally conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the transgression of feeding on fido. And even the people who eat such stuff agree that it can go bad. So there's that in the story, the prospect of eating anything, yes, even the bad thing, when it comes to it.
In the story, the serving of pork adds piquancy to the threat of starving to death faced by the boy and his sister. Children will eat anything, and there's always a lot of keeping stuff out of children's mouths in the early going, keeping them on the path of the actual foodways of the culture they're emerging into and avoiding the pitfalls of the literal scenery chewing they are capable of early on.
By their nature as children and their condition as starvelings, the brother and sister in the story must eat the offered pork, swallowing with it whatever taint it may be said to carry.
"The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister." Note the brisk moral calculus revealed by the phrase "there was enough left for the sister." The starving boy eats as much as he can. Luckily for the sister, there's a surfeit, such as it is, of pig meat, and she lives too.
Note also the nested structure of the narrative. You're being told a story which was told (over and over again) on a singular train trip taken some time ago on Victory Day to the person telling you the story. And the person telling the story over and over again on that train trip on Victory Day to the person who's telling you the story proceeds to retell in his story another version of his own story as told to him by another fellow entirely in a village he travelled to, coincidentally enough, on yet another prior Victory Day. This kind of story nesting, being told a story about a story that has yet another story in it, isn't unheard of when it comes to storytelling. It's a prime sign that the formal events belonging to it, the forbidden food and its consequences, have been consciously arranged by a storyteller.
March 10, 2010
March 06, 2010
March 05, 2010
March 04, 2010
February 19, 2010
News From The World of Saints
If you take the set of all Australians and put the criminals and Irishmen over here, the remainder over there is your first Australian saint, Mary McKillop ("Mother" to her confederates).
It's noted in the news that during the course of a lifetime of good behavior Mother Mary of the Cross ("Mama Marie Delacroix" as the francophone would have it) was excommunicated briefly by a bishop for insubordination. I wasn't aware that the power of excommunication had devolved to mere bishops. I always thought only the pope or his designated staff could strike people officially from the rolls of the organization, but that may be due to my admittedly insufficient attention to what I'm sure are the condign rulings of the Church on the matter. Perhaps any altar boy has the authority when going about his appointed rounds.
I remember the story of the ex-seminarian who pressed the Vatican for an official certificate of excommunication, which he recieved in due course from whatever tribunal handles those matters back there on the home acres of the Roman Catholic Church, although not without a measure of bother on his part. It turns out that perhaps all along he could have just chosen one of the local platoon of bishops in the San Francisco Bay Area to get the job done with authority. Even those who've sidled away from the Church without engaging in the formalities observed by the ex-seminarian will appreciate, however, the coolness factor of having a writ directly from the pope's own penmen recognizing the sundered tie.
In the case of Mary McKillop the bishop apparently retracted his act of excommunication shortly after he issued it, retroactively nullifying its effect. Thus, after three days or so, Mary McKillip rose from those listed as dead to the Church, it being revealed to all that she had only seemed to be gone during that time, when in fact she had been present continuously in substance and spirit within the folds of Holy Mother the Church the whole while.
It's noted in the news that during the course of a lifetime of good behavior Mother Mary of the Cross ("Mama Marie Delacroix" as the francophone would have it) was excommunicated briefly by a bishop for insubordination. I wasn't aware that the power of excommunication had devolved to mere bishops. I always thought only the pope or his designated staff could strike people officially from the rolls of the organization, but that may be due to my admittedly insufficient attention to what I'm sure are the condign rulings of the Church on the matter. Perhaps any altar boy has the authority when going about his appointed rounds.
I remember the story of the ex-seminarian who pressed the Vatican for an official certificate of excommunication, which he recieved in due course from whatever tribunal handles those matters back there on the home acres of the Roman Catholic Church, although not without a measure of bother on his part. It turns out that perhaps all along he could have just chosen one of the local platoon of bishops in the San Francisco Bay Area to get the job done with authority. Even those who've sidled away from the Church without engaging in the formalities observed by the ex-seminarian will appreciate, however, the coolness factor of having a writ directly from the pope's own penmen recognizing the sundered tie.
In the case of Mary McKillop the bishop apparently retracted his act of excommunication shortly after he issued it, retroactively nullifying its effect. Thus, after three days or so, Mary McKillip rose from those listed as dead to the Church, it being revealed to all that she had only seemed to be gone during that time, when in fact she had been present continuously in substance and spirit within the folds of Holy Mother the Church the whole while.
February 17, 2010
February 16, 2010
January 30, 2010
Rick, Lost, January 2009
A year gone now, looking back at that terrible news.
Rick had six months to live when I took this photo of him in June of 2008.
January 21, 2010
The Truth Untold vs. the Told Untruth
"I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf war and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew," he said.
"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."
— John Major, former British Prime Minister, quoted in the Guardian, Jan 2, 2010
Mr. Major suggests that you wouldn't have found all the facts from what he was willing to let on in public at the time of the first gulf war. Being politic, he reserved some facts from what he was saying. Mr. Blair, contrarily, publicly suggested what couldn't be found in the facts at all.
Mr. Major suggests that he had a lot of verified information, not all of which he divulged in public, when he spoke as Prime Minister during the Gulf War. This is a testable proposition. A skim through the archives would quickly establish how much of the information claimed as verified by Mr. Major was actually verifiable in the event, and alternately, how much of it remains on inspection unverifiable or provably false.
Inevitably some portion of what Mr. Major knew at the time was the product of the sort of fundamentally weightless chatter forever emerging from Britain's military and diplomatic bureaucracy by institutional imperative, the sort of constantly offered muttering of what's politic to report that bubbles up to any PM's ear in confluence with any utterly certain facts on offer.
He, Major, doled out a subset of this avowedly true information ("I said less than I knew") when it came time to remark on the subject of the Gulf War, and assumed that Tony Blair, when speaking during the runup to the later invasion of Iraq, was operating under the same constraint, saying less than he knew to be true, but conforming his remarks to some urevealed verifiable something or other, not publicly contradicting that withheld yet verifiable something, or affirming some something that could not be found anywhere at all among the said and unsaid facts of the matter.
Mr. Blair's public statements surfed along on a forceful wave of potentially false but for the moment unprovably false rhetoric, stealing along on the imaginary axis bound by the magnitude of the existential threat posed to, e.g., oh, let's say Cyprus, by an arsenal of inexistent, potent chemical and biological and intercontinental weapons of destruction said to belong to evil Sadaam Hussein by Mr. Blair.
Mr. Blair willingly suggested many many things during the runup to the invasion of Iraq based on facts not in evidence, which, had they been true facts, rather than false suppositions, might have been used plausibly enough to justify the increasing militancy of his rhetoric, but which, being only potentially verifiably true or false as he spoke of them (and in the event proven thoroughly false), did nothing to advance the argument that it was ever truly a good idea to invade Iraq, however much his words advanced the actual invasion itself, which of course was the admitted reason for his rhetoric in the first place.
I'm pretty sure Mr. Major's statements, however circumspect at the time, were all in for the Gulf War. Functionally, they served precisely the same end as Mr. Blair's; each committed Britain to enlist in a major Middle Eastern military action being shopped by the US, delivering Britain's congenitally far-flung military into action when time came to war in the gulf or invade Iraq with that same famous verve, professionalism and alacrity recognized as hallmarks of British military adventurism down the ages.
January 20, 2010
Heavy Weather
National Weather Service Alert For Santa Cruz County, 2p.m. Jan. 20, 2010:
TORNADO WARNING:
"IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS."
I was planning on doing that anyhow after the Mass. Senate result.
January 19, 2010
Hot Stove
A few years years ago the members of a House Periodic Committee on High Dudgeon chaired by Tom Davis (R-Va.) called ballplayers and executives of Major League Baseball before it to go over all the accumulating evidence that ballplayers had been for some time freely conditioning themselves for the season-long rigors of baseball at the highest level with really sophisticated chemical concoctions, concoctions whose dissemination, for their recognized ill effects, had long been legally constrained by hopeful laws strictly regulating their handling, laws passed by that very house of congress!
!
In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.
"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."
"[sputter] Yes you are!"
"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."
"You are too!"
"Nope."
"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"
McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.
The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.
In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.
Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.
Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.
!
In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.
"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."
"[sputter] Yes you are!"
"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."
"You are too!"
"Nope."
"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"
McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.
The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.
In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.
Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.
Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.
January 18, 2010
January 17, 2010
On the uncredited claim of the wangus from Wikipedia
The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed]
Claiming the wangus capable of cutting down an oak is one of the oldest tropes of civil discourse. Sure it must have traveled to the Baltic ear frequently enough back in the times, this sort of boast, whether pronounced concisely "wangus" or gone on about at such greater length as might be deemed suitable to the characteristic path of just that sort of talk when engrossed in the occasion which requires it.
[There's no citation for the word wangus in the given dictionary around here, bedraggled bearer of the burden of the 200,000 or so words most commonly taken to be English back when it was first bound — a large, somewhat dated sample of the language, in other words: hardly the whole of it by now. There's just no citeable basis for talk of wangus there. That will have to come from somewhere else: the actually rather than potentially self-correcting part of the internet, justifying what in other respects is the very model of the marvelous sentence from Wikipedia. This is not to say that I don't see the utility of Goths or anyone else forbidding the arbitrary logging of oaks in their area in an effort to preserve the bounty of freely available acorns, and can easily imagine a history in which a whole bunch of sloganeering to that effect boiled down to shouting "wangus" across the political divide.]
January 04, 2010
January 03, 2010
Twenty-Ten
Implacably reliable sources reveal that the new year is to be referred to as Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten, as some might have it. It's not too early to fall in with the crowd on this, is what I'm saying.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)