Space, The Final Frontier

From the New York Times:

“If we fire at the satellite,” he said, “the worst is that we miss. And then we have a known situation, which is where we are today. If we graze the satellite, we’re still better off, because likely we’ll still bring it down sooner, and therefore more predictably. If we hit the hydrazine tank, then we’ve improved our potential to mitigate that threat. So the regret factor of not acting clearly outweighed the regret factors of acting.”

Some time in the next two weeks the U.S. is going to try to intercept a misbehaving spy satellite with a missile fired from a ship stationed in the North Pacific and smithereen the thing before it falls to earth. Doing so will represent a field test of the U.S.'s anti-ballistic missile system.

The Chinese will be watching. Like the United States, China is gung-ho on militarizing space. It shot down a satellite last year without feeling the need to give the test of its ballistic missile capabilities the humanitarian spin the United States seems to feel so necessary as it goes forward with its own forthcoming test. The implied position of the United States is that it is doing the world a favor by attempting to rid it of the danger posed by the satellite, destroying it there before it destroys us here, which is a known inclination of its foreign policy lofted up to space in this instance.

The rationale for shooting at the satellite instead of letting it descend to earth on its own inevitable path trades on the supposed danger of allowing the fuel tank, full of hydrazine, to crash to earth unimpeded. Hydrazine is a colorless toxic liquid with basic properties similar to those of ammonia, though 15 times weaker. In nature hydrazine is ready to do chemical business at a moment's notice with a wide range of commonly available elements, recombining rapidly in air and water with other loose molecules to form a characteristic batch of less toxic compounds and give off a lot of energy to boot. Well, it's an explosive. Prolonged exposure to hydrazine is bad. Acute exposure to a bunch of it is definitely not recommended.

Those of us who remember the equanimity with which the United States greeted the anticipated reentry of the 83 tons of Skylab back to earth in 1979 will appreciate the marked shift in official U.S. policy represented by this new approach. Back in the day, technology and the ABM treaty did not allow for the deployment of missile systems capable of blasting satellites out of the sky. But Ronald Reagan gave the giddyapp to the technology by his Star Wars initiative, and George Bush removed the United States from the ABM Treaty in 2002, so that now, fruit of all that effort, the United States is going to give itself a few tries at plinking the satellite as it passes overhead, a defining moment in its march to space.

In the Times article, David C. Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists allows as how the proposed missile strike could create 100,000 pieces of debris, some "small as a marble but still dangerous to vehicles in space." It's unquestionable that if the satellite is destroyed by a ballistic missile strike, some of its debris will be propelled into higher orbit around the earth, though presumably not into the path of working satellites up there (speed up an object in space and it assumes a higher orbit. Slow the thing down and it goes to ground. This rule of thumb is repeated over and over again in some novel or other of Heinlein's). Should the test succeed it remains to be seen how long it will take for the sky to rid itself of these 100,000 or so pieces, which will presumably slow and fall to earth of their own accord sooner or later, creating in the meantime their own little region of danger for any object that might care to cross it, a new neighborhood of space populated by small marbles of material traveling in some alternate direction at relatively great speed. Travel is likely to be harmful in that neighborhood for some time.

The worst case of course would be for the ballistic missile to merely wound the tank of hydrazine, causing it to spit its load of caustic liquid in a fine mist onto the ozone layer below, although I'd be willing to be told that this is chemically and indeed astronomically impossible.

Another Year, Dear, Same Valentine…

A Glade in a Gleam of Light

A discussion of the photos of Rarindra Prakarsa at Metafilter leads to this linked article by Mark Hobson at The Landscapist.

I'm not enough of a photographer to know how K manages to acheive the effects visible in his idylic images of children poised in their customary frolics. The golden shafts of light, yes, I can see that happening in an air full of dusts, although I don't live in land that sees much of that kind of weather. But there's the chance, implicit in comments by some of the Mefites, that the photographer has postprocessed the image to bring out an unnatural amount of goldenness in his images, a rejected Thomas Kinkaid level of painter of light romanticism that the landscape never really owned in the first place, for whatever reason.

So, over at the Landscapist, the host hosts a couple of K's shots, and the comments there tend off in the same critical direction (comments at Metafilter being comparatively brusque, as fits the established rhetoric there, but similarly inclined), suspecting that these images, however capably produced, are in a word, aesthetically speaking, corny.

So the Landscapist posts a few pictures of the sorry land around Jakarta, a peopled urban midden of the sort that is the handmaiden of massive urban environments everywhere around the globe.

And a couple of the commenters bite. Oh, yah, that's more like it. See, this is Indonesia here.

And then a communication comes from a fellow in Indonesia, expressing as best he can in English the immensity of the place, the vast variety of scene and experience embodied there, how a person in Indonesia can see the urban desolation but cannot deny the children and goats and lanes and ponds and trees breaking all the light to little golden bits as it refracts off of countless leaves, that exist there at the heart of Indonesia as well.

Me and my generation still struggle to fix poverty in this country. But hence..there's a lot of time when we were felt very sad about what happened in our country. Mad And loose the spirit to change the way our goverment rule. Tired on corruption and lazy people.

When that times come, looking in some Rarindra's photograph give us good feeling.

Still. Rarindra may dont have any clue about what he has done. I think he's just want to make a beatifull portrait of Indonesia and represent it in dreamy way. The reality sure is not good as the photo. But looking at his portofolio give me sense of pride. We love this country. And will do something to make it remain loved.

Call it third world fake realism. But for me it worth something.

I admire Rarindra Prakarsa for being able to retain the color of objects in the foreground of his images. Because I can't do that I wonder how he does. When I shoot directly into a light source, objects in the foreground take on a heavy shadow not visible to the naked eye. This image of the sky above Hetch-Hetchy has that in spades:



The solitary tree and the abrupt cliff on the side of the road were swathed in midday light when I took the photo, but the camera, given the settings I inflicted on it I suppose, winced at all the brightness overhead, and the tree and cliff are left in darkness in the image as recorded, as is the telephone pole to the right. I don't know how to avoid that, but Rarindra Prakarsa does, I'll give him that. Maybe it's some f-stop thing, or an adjustment of the ISO speed or white balance or something or other that if I knew my camera better I'd be able to allow for. Or, maybe it's something that's best left to Photoshop, selecting and enhancing from the shadows of the image the colors masked in shadow but retrievable by that powerful program's intervention.

When I first looked look at Rarindra Prakarsa's photos I was immediately immersed in questions I have about technical aspects of picture taking without any regard whatsoever to the corniness so many find there.

I see by his photos Rarindra Prakarsa has found some satisfactory solution to the problem I have with shadow-filled foregrounds. I like that.

Update

I guess it's time to see about those Zogby numbers.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points to Zogby's mixed success on Super Tuesday. Missouri, yeah, he got that one. It was close, just as he said it should be. But in California, whew…

15 G's

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg

Surging Continues Apace On the Eve of Super Tuesday

A few weeks ago the United States military dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the Arab Jabour region south of Baghdad: 100,000 pounds. 50 tons.

Tom Englehardt outlines the other terrorism in Iraq at TomDispatch.

Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

Don't hold your breath, Mr. Englehardt. Artists are exhausting themselves in other pursuits, and journalists and bloggers have a presidential horse race to follow.

From The Who'da Thunk It File

The game tasted like one of Sophocles’ better tragedies; divine gifts made too much of, then hubris brought low. That’s coming [at] it a bit high... but a few of those football plays managed to wrench the audience’s attention away from good company and doggie antics and really outstanding food. Which is all Sophocles ever asked of his plays, I bet.

— Tim Bray at ongoing

My own Super Bowl prediction fell equally flat. Up by just thirty at game's end, and then hand after hand of unplayable cards. Two hours worth of feeding antes into the pot and in return cards not even good enough to lose with. Ante and fold, ante and fold. Meh. Admittedly I wasn't 18-0 going into the game, but still.

Zogby Numbers

Does anyone else share the impression that Zogby's numbers are often the crazy outliers of numbers distributed by the good graces of the science of statistical sampling when the mood of the public is being tested before an upcoming election? Are Zogby numbers ever really that close to the results they attempt to foresee in retrospect? Or are they useful because they are so predictably off? Maybe I'm ignoring all the good work Zogby numbers do at other times and places I'm not aware of, I don't know. I do recall what seems a pretty long list of tallied returns that delivered a good crumpling to the Zogby numbers that foreshadowed them.

The season of the horse race is upon us, at least according to Zogby the pollster, whose numbers show "Clinton, Obama Neck-and-Neck in Key Super Tuesday States."

We'll see shortly.

[via…]

This Year's Super Bowl Prediction

I predict that while playing poker during tomorrow's Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, I will win more than two hundred dollars American from people whose efforts to guard against just that eventuality… will be to no avail!!

February Is Black History Month

Once dead last among the listed months of the Roman calendar, February was relegated to second place in the early reshuffling of the calendar's values by command of Numa, fabled second king of the many, many kings of earliest Rome.

Abrupt, brief thing, February.

The word February is rooted in the original formal tendency of the Latins to end the calendar year with a brisk period of review devoted to the expiation of that forgone thing, the past year. Such expectably dour ceremonies as were thought necessary to get the job done drew an uncomfortable crowd no doubt, and thus understandably came to be replaced to the relief of discomfitted Latins by the more mirthfully disposed inclinations embedded in the newer calendar said to have been made by Numa, second king in the fabulous pack of kings of the Latins, who proposed a space at end–year called Saturnalia where all manner of communal merriment could see the old year off and the new one in instead.

Numa decreed December last and January first from that day forward, and joined them in Saturnalia, moving February and its ceremonial expiations to the second month of the Roman calendar from its culminating position of before.

In passing through February such Latins as might be inclined would naturally continue to endeavor in the course of that brief second month, time permitting, to assay the duncity, destructiveness and depravity that was the honest Roman share in the recently completed year past, should any decent memory of it linger in the saturnalian fizz of merry January's wake.

The other, alternate, calendar supplanted by Numa's took the month of the spring equinox as the firstmonth of its year, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February for the purposes of expiation) was the last month of any fully seasoned calendar. This widely understood calendar, with its ultimate month meaningfully reserved for expiations, came to be supplanted, as did so many other local customs, when the Romans took Numa's calendar on the road.

By moving truncated little February to second place, the subtle hand (suggested to be Numa's) lifted up the period of expiation and transferred it as compactly as possible to second place as well, while moving it not at all with respect to the seasons, cleverly synchronizing the timing of its dutiful reflections, and thus the whole Roman calendar, with the other alternate supplanted calendar known by the wide range of people to Rome's north and west for example, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February again), last month of the cycled seasons, continued to be the reserved space it was meant to be for the judgment and summary enactment of hopefully corrected coursings all along.

Overall it was a downgrade for February's rectifying expiations. February, once the fraught conclusive month of judgment and compensation at year's end, became the stuff of second thoughts in the calendar's second month of the now comfortably inhabited new year of Numa's Roman calendar. Judgments which were February's preserve were mooted by the prior festive accommodations of January. And as for compensation, the rectifying gesture, the corrected course, the learned use of the unmade misstep in future, all of which are entailed by the judgments left to February, oh, yes, of course. All well and good. But secondary to the concerns of the calendar of Numa, which is already well on its way before it gets around to that.

Groundhog Day is Back!

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, which would make him 126 years old today and just about finished fiddling with his next big book, not doubt, had he lived.

One day, the Spanish painter César Abin came to do a sketch of Joyce for transition, Eugene Jolas's journal which was publishing portions of "Work in Progress". Abin drew a conventional man of letters, sitting on front of his books, with his pen in his hand, his eyes visionary. It was a tolerable if awkward likeness. The books, the pen, the entire drawing seemed to Joyce too solemn, too simple. He began telling Abin what to draw, and presently he was involved in a collaboration. At Joyce's instruction a different picture was drawn: Joyce was shown in a large semicircle as if he were doubled up by cramps, with his feet dangling among wisps of cloud. His body ended up shaped like a question mark the eternal enigma he regarded himself to be and was to himself as well as his audience. His blinker-like spectacles were on his nose and the tip of his nose collided with a star. Under Joyce's dangling feet Abin drew a terrestial globe labeled "Ireland". The globe was made to become the large dot completing the question mark. On the head of this free-floating Irishman among the clouds, suspended over Ireland and a large Dublin drawn as Ireland's heartland, was placed a battered cobwebbed Irish derby. There were cobwebs in the hollow of Joyce's chest that is, near the region of his heart. Shoved into the left pocket was some sheet music. The title printed on it was "Let Me Like a Soldier Fall." There were patches at the knees and a patch on the sleeve. Joyce's mouth is turned down. Stuck into the front of the bowler is the portentious figure 13.

— Leon Edel, "Psychopathology of Shem," pp 112-115, Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology, 1982, as quoted here at Finnegans Web

For Your Reading Pleasure

The Editors at the Poor Man Institute have a new book out, their first, called "Liberal Fascism."

Parts of it are shrill. The ending, with Broderella looking up from the floor of the bowling alley to announce, "I am finished," is handled masterfully.



Download it, or have a printed copy made through Lulu.

House at Pooneil Corners

I don't know if this bit of civic exuberance go the band in any serious long term trouble, but I do know that no one inhabited the glorious portentiousness of psychedelic music any better than Jefferson Airplane. From a rooftop in 1968:

[…]
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivors my friend.

Suddenly everyone will look surprised
Stars spinning wheels in the skies
Sun is scrambled in their eyes
While the moon circles like a vulture.

Someone stood at the window and cried
"One tear and I thought that would stop the war,
But someone is killing me. Killing me."
And that's the last hour to think anymore.
Jelly and juice and bubbles - bubbles on the floor.

Castles on cliffs vanish
Cliffs like heaps of rubbish
Seen from the stars hour by hour
As splintered scraps and black powder.

From here to heaven is a scar
Dead center - deep as death
All the idiots have left
[…]

The 2007 Periodic Table Of The Elements Printmaking Project

No element escaped 2007 unprinted.

[via MeFi…]

Bobby Fischer, dead today in Iceland at age 64

Here's what came to be called back then The Game of the Century, the famous meeting of 13-year old Fischer and Donald Byrne played in New York City on October 17, 1956. If you go to Alexandra Kosteniuk's site and paste the moves of the game into the text field there you can use her nice player to watch the thing unfold.

1.Nf3 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.d4 0-0 5.Bf4 d5 6.Qb3 dxc4 7.Qxc4 c6 8.e4 Nbd7 9.Rd1 Nb6 10.Qc5 Bg4 11.Bg5 Na4 12.Qa3 Nxc3 13.bxc3 Nxe4 14.Bxe7 Qb6 15.Bc4 Nxc3 16.Bc5 Rfe8+ 17.Kf1 Be6 18.Bxb6 Bxc4+ 19.Kg1 Ne2+ 20.Kf1 Nxd4+ 21.Kg1 Ne2+ 22.Kf1 Nc3+ 23.Kg1 axb6 24.Qb4 Ra4 25.Qxb6 Nxd1 26.h3 Rxa2 27.Kh2 Nxf2 28.Re1 Rxe1 29.Qd8+ Bf8 30.Nxe1 Bd5 31.Nf3 Ne4 32.Qb8 b5 33.h4 h5 34.Ne5 Kg7 35.Kg1 Bc5+ 36.Kf1 Ng3+ 37.Ke1 Bb4+ 38.Kd1 Bb3+ 39.Kc1 Ne2+ 40.Kb1 Nc3+ 41.Kc1 Rc2+

The Song of Jonah, or, Merit Meets Its Match

You know what glib means. Unquestionably you've been subjected to its uses.

If Jonah Goldberg is a glibertarian, if William Kristol or John Podhoretz can be justly called that, then glibertarians include those who can and do in practice willingly talk just the sort of talk and walk just the sort of walk in public that libertarians recommend we all do for our own good, and make out just fine doing so, if libertarianism can be reduced to the rewarding politics of mining proven reserves of self-interest for a living.

With all of libertarianism's considerable nonsense about the free agency of the political monad of the individual filling their sails, glibertarians, to suit their purposes, uniformly support the selective dismantling of the state on the one hand and, at the same time, while presumably holding the state at an ironic distance with the other hand, but as long as they have the ear of who's in charge of it, publicly encourage the state's most autocratic uses as well. What the hell, it's a career. Say what works and move on up the ladder of success.

Jonah Goldberg has written a much-anticipated book called Liberal Fascism. It was already the fabled thing when first announced what seems like years ago, when the wags first lined up to bray about what turned out to be its long delayed arrival, and much hilarity ensued in the intervening months before publication as various sources took their turns swatting at the inviting piñata of Goldberg's conceit.

All during Liberal Fascism's gestation, Goldberg promised he was really going to bear down this time, to come up with a good one, to redeem in effect the glib in glibertarian by some studious research and solid argument.

Such a promise was never within his power to keep, apparently. Instead, the book is a standing appointment with all that is glib in the rhetoric of glibertarianism, the squaring of the Liberal Fascist circle in the Hitler Smiley Face on its cover the cleverest bit of glib in fact, the rest of it falling to the settled standard of Goldbergian glib familiar from his previously expressed views. I say that with confidence, having never read the book, but merely as a result of having witnessed Goldberg now loosed on the book tour supporting the thing, as in the edited interview with John Stewart found here.

John Bolton Visits The Daily Show

John Bolton is taking a breather from the government work to do a book and tour. Last night he appeared on The Daily Show [Part 1.] [Part 2.].

Bolton's expressed policies have tended toward the utterly confrontational in every important public post he's occupied. Previously, Bolton confronted the threat of the UN as Bush's Ambassador to that body, and before that he confronted the threat of North Korea as chief instrument of Bush policy toward that squirrelly, pugnacious government that led directly to the resumption of its nuclear weapons program in response.

In the first part of the Daily Show video, Bolton namechecks Iran as the current big threat facing the United States. Oh, he'd wave a brisk policy or two at Iran if he had the levers of government again, no doubt, doubling down on the catastrophe his unleashed policies have contributed so far. Sure it's all in the book, from what I gather.

CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA

In The Decline of Classical Languages Bill Posner at Language log quotes Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link (pp. 418-419):

These words were chiseled into the granite below.

CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA

"Prudence is the guardian of things," he said, translating, but his Greek was good enough to know that the first word could also be read as "wisdom". Either way, the message seemed clear.

Admittedly I don't know what CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA means. I do get that it's Latin and not Greek, because I know rerum is the Latin thing. I have that much Latin, and also guess English prudence may genuflect toward prudentia in some way. Custos, though, at first glance I'm not sure what it leads to in meaningful English, or even what that sentence would make of itself if my first guess were substituted, leaving me with the phrase C[custom]R[thing]P[prudence] to puzzle over. "Custom thing prudence" is not immediately a sensible sentence in English, and whatever its meaning, CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA was put there to make some sense to passersby by its makers, having taken the trouble to engage the chislers' craft to spell all the words right and line them up there just so on the rock.

In the other book I look to see if CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA is a common Latin phrase, and find that custos is guardian or watchman, a word in Latin whose sound heads for custom in English, but is in fact the name for the other thing entirely. My surmise about custom was wrong, and I can discard all the bother about trying to make sense of what "Custom thing prudence" might entail in English.

But still, that leaves C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudence], and "Watchman thing prudence" doesn't offer up much of a sentence to my kind of English either.

When I first looked at CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA I had zero confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word custos, and, say, 95% confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word rerum, and as for prudentia, well, I have to admit it's a coinflip between prudence and prudent, the noun of the quality or its readily applicable adjective for all I know, leaving me with at most middling confidence that my initial substitution was appropriate. I went with the noun prudence for no good reason. But if prudentia shades toward prudent then C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudent] says "Watchman thing prudent," and that, if spoken in the stiff-voiced phrasings of Frankenstein's monster, which for all I know was the Roman way as well, would be a readily understood if admittedly gothic way of warning the public to keep an eye out in English.

My confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of custos is way up, having found a quick fact about it, athough my confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of rerum is greater still, having here and there seen the confirmed thing in rerum this and rerum that many times over the decades. As for prudentia, I'll admit to the sort of equivocation in my confidence that only further study might resolve, not that I will.

Santa Cruz Standard Time

Our conception of what makes night is the precisely the same as theirs, as is our conception of what makes day. From that persective it would seem we might work to reach fundamental agreement on the issue, accomodating our differences into one harmonious truth. And yet in the East they say, "It is night," just when we in the West say, "It is day." We are bound to our experience, not to our helpfully accommodating conceptions. It is day. So there.

Sometimes a River Storms Through It

This picture of the San Lorenzo River passing through Santa Cruz was taken in the aftermath of a particularly dramatic storm that battered Northern California last Friday.

The San Lorenzo feeds enough water into the Pacific at Santa Cruz on a yearly basis to earn the name "river," but typically packs all its credentials into a few dramatic episodes each year. In the drier months between late April and late October less water flows in the San Lorenzo than in the average self-respecting creek. In those months its riverbed in Santa Cruz is a protobog of tule and willow and scruffy brush and lounging herons ankledeep in its midriver shallows, through which a narrow course of water meanders in the laziest possible way to exhaust itself against a sandbar that annually blocks the mouth of the river from contact with Monterey Bay.

But commonly in winter storms descend on Santa Cruz from the great weathermaking waters of the the Gulf of Alaska, enormous energetic things gusting with the rain that's the year-round lot of the continent's coast from Juneau to Mendocino, but which in winter pulse vigorously south to engulf as well the coast and inland parts of California during its customary rainy season, whose middle innings reach from November to March.

There's a ridge in the distance in the picture above, and a high point on the ridge from which it drops off to the right. That's the western side of the notch in the mountains through which the San Lorenzo River pours its waters onto the floodplain where Santa Cruz is built. The green berm in the picture on the far side of the river is one of the levees over which the San Lorenzo will manage to flow some day, so prodigious at times is the volume of water transferred from from cloud to watershed north of Santa Cruz in the healthiest of winter storms. Prior to the existence of Santa Cruz the San Lorenzo would just sort of blurt out all the water rushing from that notch in the mountains onto the mile or so of floodplain and let it seek its own sweet way to the ocean, from storm to storm rushing in whatever arbitrary direction it might so incline to reach the beach here or there in any given year.

This is fundamentally uncivil behavior from the point of view of a city which insists on inhabiting the river's floodplain, which is the longstanding and often enough inundated plan of the makers of the city of Santa Cruz.

Fifty years ago a previous version of the plan failed to prevent the San Lorenzo from inundating downtown, much of which, fronting the river, was scraped away and replaced with parking lots and newer buildings in that flood's aftermath. It was determined that what Santa Cruz needed was a storm drain instead of a river running through it, a storm drain of the sort championed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in those days, and so it was built, a modern-made channel for the San Lorenzo. Twenty-five years ago that plan failed and the San Lorenzo flooded Santa Cruz again. The railing in the foreground, the levees on either side of the river, the new bridge connecting Laurel Street downtown to Broadway on the eastern side of the city, all of these are features of the newest plan.

A brief politics

Personally I'd prefer the politics of the magic sky fairy sprinkling the sparkling dust on everyone that calls all to a more commonly humane sort of humanity, a politics of instantaneous solutions to all the human bother in this world. That would be my preference, something quick and utterly agreeable. Ah, well.

In the realm of the politics of likelihoods, John Holbo at Crooked Timber asks if Hillary Clinton would be a suitable running mate for Barack Obama, and receives a largely negative response in comments, ranging from the mild demurrer to the thunderous denunciation of the idea.

It's early January, and in less than a month the Democratic Party's nominee will have been decided, the person chosen to replace George Bush as President of the United States. An inordinate number of states have decided for some obscure reason to push their primaries forward this election year, front-loading the primary season and making it likely that a pretty decisive number of delegates will be in the hand of one of the candidate months and months before the Democratic Convention, let alone the election in November.

After February 5, the balance of the primary season up until the Democratic Convention will reveal the play of the real and actual politics of the momentous transfer of power the United States is bent on this year.

House For Sale

Sculptor David Ireland's house is for sale.

Ben Backwell photographed a room of David Ireland's house for sfgate.com., the San Francisco Chronicle's website.

Oakland Museum once staged a major retrospective of David Ireland's work [Real Media steaming video from an episode of KQED's program "Spark" which aired in 2004. It features a few shots of the house in question].

Belittling the Obvious Point

Obvious point: there’s a hell of a lot more kids listening to 40-year old music today than there were in 1967…

posted by tom hurka in a conversation at Crooked Timber

The point made by tom hurka is obviously mistaken.

Well, if he means by "music" only that subset of it which includes the permanent performances of pieces of music massaged onto some sort of easily replicable medium from which that particular performance can be retrieved and heard over and over again, then yes, as he says, many more kids are seeking out and listening to the Beatles today than listened to recorded performances of Rudy Vallee in 1967. I don't know how many kids were listening to recordings of Rudy Vallee in 1967. If I ever met any at the time, they were discrete about it.

I suspect, though, that Rudee Valee took a turn at most of the following songs and song just like them during his career in popular music, songs in every case overly familiar to anyone alive in America in 1967, songs for the most part 50 years old and more. I chose these titles as arbitrarily as possible from the index at Parlorsong.com, and I claim not only that they were universally known to kids in in 1967, but that they represent just a tiny fraction of commonly known popular songs at least 40 years old that kids had not only heard, but heard reworked and overworked and parodized to a faretheewell, all inflicted on their ears as their fair share of the burden of American Popular Music, howevermuch they may have preferred, times being what they were, to stick to the White Album (whatever tom hurka's current objections to it might be).

After The Ball
1892

Alexander's Ragtime Band
1911

All Alone
1911

The Band Played On
1895

Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?
1902

Shine On Harvest Moon
1918

Sidewalks Of New York
1894

The Sheik of Araby
1921

Let Me Call You Sweetheart
1910

Aba Daba Honeymoon
1914

Rockaby Your Baby With A Dixie Melody
1918

Best Of, Slough Of Melancholy Division

In the early '70's Jackson Browne's Saturate Before Using traded in an exquistely fashioned melancholia of the kind explored around the same time so successfully by Steely Dan on its first album, melancholia of the kind so utterly attractive to people of a certain age just past their earliest thirst for the simply glorious rhythms of rock n' roll, who find in this sort of music rock n' roll's acute and beautiful expression of their own discomfitted sadness, which sadness, not to go all Young Werther about it, is common enough affliction at that age.

There is nothing that pleases a musician's desire to be heard more than an audience wanting music, and there is no want of an audience for a good sad song, its air identical to the freshly felt melancholia that tugs at the common many of them.

These days we have Nick Cave and Radiohead (from what I hear) and Wilco and for all I Know Arcade Fire and all the others from the unexhausted list of musicians attending to this recognizably inexhaustible willingness of people to hear out the good sad song. At Acephalous, SEK links to an album by The National called "Boxer," which is heavily invested in fashioning music out of just this subset of sadness.

I'm not convinced it's the best album of 2007, as SEK claims, although I don't pay enough attention to pop music these days in all its variety to say if this is or isn't the best thing coughed up in the past year. There may not be all that much to chose from. Romantic melancholy itself may have had no better expression, but I'd have to listen a to a lot more of 2007's crop of it than I'm likely to get around to to make up my mind about that. I'm still working on what the best album of 1965 was, myself.

Anyway, if prefer your sad song neat, your man the Irishman is your musician for that. Here's a distraught one linked to recently by Thers at Atrios's Eschaton:

Keep the Car Running

Good advice to start the New Year, I'm thinking.