I Know Who I Am

So I’m reading The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb (ISBN 039332365X), which is a good book and I recommend it.
Here is his description of Epicureans (presented in opposition to the sternness and self-sacrifice typical of Stoics):

...men of easy tempers and of amiable disposition. Gentle, benevolent, and pliant; cordial friends and forgiving enemies; selfish at heart, yet ever ready when it is possible to unite their gratifications with those of others; averse to all enthusiasm, mysticism, utopias and superstition; with little depth of character or capacity for self-sacrifice, but admirably fitted to impart and receive enjoyment, and to render the course of life easy and harmonious.

My friends, can there be any doubt whatsoever that I am a born Epicurean? I should make a quiz out of this.

Of the Awesome Machinery of Nature

I think this is the best thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I absolutely love it. Many thanks to Jackie for sending it to me.



Best use of Auto-Tune ever. Transcript of the lyrics:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange-sounding ideas

How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

ssssssnake

I had not realized it until just this very minute, but a sexy Romanian talking science definitely ranks among my favorite things.

Three Feet. Nine Years.

Those of you who have only known me since I moved to Huntington don’t think of me as a football fan, I expect. I’ve only watched a few games since I moved here. The last one, I think, was the Super Bowl a few years ago between Pittsburgh and Seattle; my brother is a big Steelers fan, so I went and got drunk and cheered them on with him. I’ve watched probably a total of four or five games in the last several years, just because they happened to be on in the bar. I don't care about the game.
Before I moved here, though, I was really into football. I had an encyclopedic knowledge of players and stats going back to the forties, knew all the coaches, all the strategies. I was a fan of the Cleveland/Los Angeles/St. Louis Rams. In the seventies and eighties that was a pretty good life. We were always competitive, even though we didn’t win any titles, and there were always players to get excited about. I still have fond memories of Jack Youngblood and Eric Dickerson, Henry Ellard and Nolan Cromwell, Jerry Gray and Jackie Slater.
Then came the nineties, and suddenly we couldn’t win to save our lives. The whole decade, we were the worst team in football, a league-wide joke. They called us the “Lambs.” By 1999, I was mostly scar tissue from all the losing. Even the Bengals were better than us.
But then, in 1999, something magical happened. We drafted Tory Holt at WR to put across from Isaac Bruce, our lone All-Star who had suffered through some of the leanest years in pro football history. We traded for Marshall Faulk, the league’s smartest player and most dangerous runner. Our starting QB was lost for the year before the season even started, and our backup jumped into the starting lineup. His name was Kurt Warner, a nobody who had been bagging groceries in Iowa a few months before, and he began what looks like a Hall of Fame career. We cruised through the regular season with the most prolific and explosive offense the NFL had ever seen, and finally won our first championship since my father was in diapers. It was the greatest turnaround in pro sports history.
And, see, that’s why I stopped watching football. Nothing could ever be that good again. I tried to stay into it for a year or two, but it wasn’t sweet anymore. I had lost my dream, not by giving up on it, but by getting what I had wanted.
So, that night, January 30, 2000, was the last night I really enjoyed a football game. And what a game it was! We were playing the Tennessee Titans, the only team that had really beaten us all year long (we lost our last two regular season games while resting our starters, having already secured the home field). They, too, were a turnaround team, though they had never been as bad as us. They won on the strength of a tremendous defense and a piledriver of a runner named Eddie George, but they had something else. They had a kid at quarterback, like Warner in his first season as a starter. He was untested, rough, but supremely talented. His name was Steve McNair.
For three quarters we dominated the Titans, driving up and down the field, but they managed to keep us out of the end zone, and after three field goals we led only 9-0, despite having something like a 5-to-1 advantage in yards gained. Finally we broke through with a touchdown late in the third to make it 16-0, and the Titans finally abandoned their conservative game plan and turned McNair loose.
He was unstoppable. In my memory every play is the same; McNair drops back to pass, but our pash rush (the league’s best that season) would instantly collapse the pocket. Any other quarterback would be crushed under a pile of blue-clad bodies, but McNair would just step casually outside the rush. He was as untouchable as a ghost, and Ram after Ram flew past him grasping at empty air. Occasionally one would get to him, but McNair, as big and strong as any linebacker, would casually shrug him off like he was removing a raincoat and get back to business. He looked like a man among children. Sometimes he would scramble for a first down, sometimes he’d throw impossible, scrambling passes across his body to the other sideline, sometimes he’d find a man open far downfield. In this way he led them to two touchdowns (one with a missed conversion attempt) and a field goal to tie the game at 16.
But the league’s top offense had one more trick up its sleeve. On the very first play of our next drive, Warner, the nobody from Iowa, hit long-suffering Isaac Bruce for a lightning-bolt 73-yard touchdown, making the score 23-16. And so McNair walked onto the field one last time, two minutes to play and the whole season hanging in the balance.
So what did he do? The same thing he’d been doing, rolling out, scrambling, staying alive ‘til he could find the open man. He drove the Titans right down the field, with me screaming at my television “Jesus Christ, somebody tackle that man!” On the last play of the game, McNair hit Kevin Dyson on a crossing route inside the five, but linebacker Mike Davis made a miraculous tackle at the one as time ran out, and the Rams were (barely) world champions. Best Super Bowl ever.
I was elated, of course, but mostly relieved. It was very, very clear to me how lucky we were that football games are only 60 minutes long. That kid walked off the field without a trophy, without a ring, but he’d taken everything we could throw at him and just shouldered it aside, and had ended up a mere 36 inches from a title. We had won, but it was like they used to say about Bobby Layne, the great Detroit QB: he was never beaten, he just occasionally ran out of time.
Like I say, after that I never really enjoyed football again, and eventually stopped watching altogether, and so when I read this morning that McNair was murdered by his girlfriend this weekend, I was surprised at how moved I was by the news. I haven’t followed the game for years. I don’t know which team has his contract right now, or even whether he’s still on a roster anywhere in the league. At first glance it doesn’t make sense that this should affect me.
But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. It’s a shock, because it can’t be possible that anything could have killed him. That game, that last great game, is frozen in time for me. It was my last football game, and he was the hero of the story even in defeat. When I hear his name, I don’t think of whoever he has become over the last nine years. In my mind he is still that indestructible kid, powerful, unbowed, fearless. In my memory, forever, nobody can lay a hand on him.

Step Back for a Moment

Lemme start by saying that I strongly dislike Mark Sanford. I think he’s a demagogue, an opportunist who is happy to sacrifice the welfare of the people of his state (particularly schoolchildren) to his own ambition. I find him extraordinarily cynical and willing to use specious reasoning and historical revisionism to get his way. In short, he strikes me as a bad governor and a bad man.
And, you know, the runup to Sanford’s confession was bizarre, and I followed it with some interest (though these days I can spare little attention for anything besides Iran). It was funny, the whole “he’s missing/he’s off writing/he’s in Atlanta/he’s hiking the Appalachian Trail/he’s in Argentina” thing. It was very off-the-wall, as is the man himself, and when I heard yesterday morning that the truth was coming out, that he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina (?!?), it promised to be the sort of entertaining news story that makes news-watching fun.
I’ve always felt that the personal lives of politicians should be considered separately from their work, the same as I feel about writers or musicians. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Sanford without digging into his relationships. But this story was just so odd, so over-the-top, that I confess to feeling a little charge of interest and even pleasure yesterday.
That changed when I started paying attention to the coverage. I don’t like the glee with which newspeople are springing on him right now. I don’t like that his hometown paper printed the e-mails Sanford sent to his lover, which are nobody’s business but theirs and should never have been published. I especially dislike the reading of these e-mails that Keith Olbermann gave on last night’s Countdown, in a voice that suggested he was auditioning to be Danielle Steele’s official audiobook narrator. I ended up fast-forwarding past them but saw enough to be very disappointed in Olbermann. I wanted to say to him, “Keith, have you never been in love?” I can’t imagine that any man of conscience (as KO seems to be) would air this and make light of it if he had ever felt this way himself.
More than that, I was impressed by Sanford’s press conference. Not “impressed” in the way people usually mean that word, but in the sense that it changed the way I looked at the whole thing. I mean, it was meandering and crazy, of course. Did anyone understand that whole “self” thing? It was so convoluted I can’t even quote it. But it was also very genuine, very honest, I thought, from a man not known for his honesty. I am not arguing that he deserves credit for being honest, and it doesn’t in any way absolve him. Still, he spoke extemporaneously, from the heart (unless he’s both far smarter and a better actor than I’ve previously given him credit for), and it meant something to me as I watched it. Compared to, say, John Ensign or Elliot Spitzer, he sounded human. He sounded lost.
Anyway, the point is this: I still dislike him just as much as I did yesterday, but what I saw up there was…well, a man in crisis, a man who doesn’t know where to turn or what to do, and it might sound dumb, but I’m just not comfortable laughing at a man in that position.
He’s lost his position with the RGA. He isn’t going to be President, or at least no time soon. He might even step down as Governor. And of course it goes without saying that his private life is in shambles. All of that is perfectly proper, and doesn’t cause me sorrow. Also, Sanford’s hypocrisy isn’t lost on me, and I understand the schadenfreude everyone’s feeling. It’s just that yesterday we all thought this was really funny. Today most still do, but me, I just don’t anymore.

Missouri?

So Eric Cantor is a Virginian. He is one of the Congressional representatives from the Commonwealth. More than that, he represents the city of Richmond itself (well, part of it, anyway). As a result of this, I usually cut him a little more slack than I do most politicians. And his party certainly needs rebuilt, and it seems to me that the GOP could do a lot worse as far as young leadership goes. I definitely approve of this new “listening tour” he’s been going around on, though I don’t approve of some of the folks he’s bringing along.
Rush Limbaugh does NOT approve of this listening tour. He came on the radio and said that the GOP doesn’t need a listening tour, it needs a teaching tour. This is, of course, because the American people don’t actually know what’s good for them; they need Rush to tell them what to think.
That’s fine. I expect no better from Rush, and a week without him saying something stupid is like a week without a paycheck. What I was not prepared for, though, was that Cantor, upon hearing about Rush’s ludicrous but totally in-character statement, rushed to change his mind and point out that his traveling road show is not, in fact, a listening tour. I am outraged.
Mr. Cantor, you are a Virginian, representing our proud Commonwealth before the nation. Virginians do not take orders from, nor are we cowed by, people from inferior states. The last outsider to successfully knock us down was Ulysses S. Grant, and he had to bring three million friends to back him up. How dare you back down in the face of a fat-assed knuckleheaded blowhard from Missouri? Missouri, of all places! Where are your balls? Stonewall Jackson would have gutted the freak and got the hell on with business. I suggest you take a lesson from him.

Seven words. Seven Stresses. Seven Meanings.

I’ve just been told that there are seven different ways to interpret the sentence “I never said she stole my money,” depending on which of the seven words is stressed. I thought it would make an interesting late-night intellectual exercise:

I never said she stole my money—I never said that, but other folks did, and I’m not saying they’re wrong.

I never said she stole my money—I have not accused her, but I might at any time in the future, depending on how contrite she is and how much I’ve had to drink. However, if she accuses me of not trusting her, I have an out.

I never said she stole my money—I am too much of a gentleman to accuse her of this. I think she did, but I would never say it out loud in the presence of the press (this is off the record, right?).

I never said she stole my money—My money was totally stolen, but that doesn’t mean she stole it. Coulda been that ugly dude and his pet monkey.

I never said she stole my money—She might have been just borrowing it. This is a deeply personal problem within our relationship that we’re gonna have to discuss, preferably in the absence of police.

I never said she stole my money—Maybe she stole some money, but it was somebody else’s.

I never said she stole my money—She stole my heart, my soul, my drugs, and my love of living, but not my money.

Any alternate explanations out there? Let’s hear ‘em!

Day Of

April Fourth is kind of a big day in world history. I mean, look at all the important birthdays that fall on this day: baseball greats Tris Speaker and Gil Hodges; Poet Laureate Maya Angelou; newsman John Cameron Swayze (who hosted the first-ever television coverage of the presidential National Conventions in 1948); directors Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky; actors Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Perkins (which makes watching Psycho part of the ritual of the day), Chloris Leachman, Hugo Weaving, and Heath Ledger; 80s hair-band dude Mick Mars (don’t laugh—he was actually a very talented guitarist); and legendary bluesman Muddy Waters. Also celebrating birthdays of a sort today are the City of Los Angeles (incorporated 4/4/1850) and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Martin Luther King Jr. died on this day, which is always the big news each year. So did Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick the Great. The layout of the American flag that we use (13 stripes representing the original colonies, and one star for each state, which meant twenty stars at the time) was formalized on this day. The U.S. Senate declared war on the Central Powers in WWI. The treaty that formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed on this day. Hungary was liberated from the Nazis on this day, as was Addis Ababa (one of the coolest city names ever). Martin Luther (the original) was ordained a priest on 4/4/1507. 180 years later, also on this day, James II of England would formally declare freedom of worship in England. The Rhodes Scholarship was founded. “Dixie,” the marching song of the Confederate Army, was first played publicly. Sir Francis Drake landed safely after circumnavigating the globe. Ugly old Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia was opened on this day, but it has since been demolished, and I doubt anyone misses it. The World Trade Center was opened, too, a fact which is not as much fun as it used to be.
April 4th is kind of a big day in the continuing battle for equality in this country. The first female mayor in American history (Susanna Salter) took office in some Kansas backwater. The first Hispanic mayor also took office on this day (Henry Cisneros in San Antonio). And Sally Ride became the first woman in space.
In sports, well, Hank Aaron hit his 714th home run, but this time of year is for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Because of the way the schedule works, frequently either the Final or the semifinals are played on this day, so there’s been a lot of great basketball on April 4th over the years; the most notable moment is probably North Carolina State’s miraculous last-second victory over Houston, 4/4/1983.
Sticking with basketball history: Allan Houston, the slender, cerebral ballplayer who would star for the University of Tennessee and the Detroit Pistons before becoming one of the game’s best shooters (an incredible .402 career average on 3-pointers) while manning the 2-guard spot for my beloved New York Knicks and leading them into the Finals in 1999, was born on April 4th, 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky. And, many miles east of Louisville, at the Medical College of Virginia, I was born at about the same time. So, happy birthday to Allan Houston and to everyone else named above, and happy birthday to me, as well.

The Supreme Court wipes its ass with the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, which has been responsible for many truly terrible decisions, has just handed down one of its worst, and stupidest, in the case of Pleasant Grove v. Summum.
It all started with the Summum, a Gnostic Christian sect which believes (among other things) that Moses came down off the mountain not with Ten Commandments, but with Seven Aphorisms; it was these that Moses broke, and the Commandments replaced them because “Man was not yet ready for the aphorisms.” Why one of these things is considered less likely than the other is a question I’m not going to ask at the moment.
Anyway, back in 1971, the Fraternal Order of Eagles donated a granite monument of the Ten Commandments to the city of Pleasant Grove, Utah. The city decided to display the monument in a park. And then, in 2003, the Summum tried to donate a similar monument of their Seven Aphorisms to the city to sit next to the earlier monument. The city said, “Thanks but no thanks.” So the Summum sued, saying that if the city was going to display the Ten Commandments they had to also display the Seven Aphorisms.
It’s a good argument, a sound logical argument, but as the WSJ LawBlog says, there was no way the Supreme Court was going to rule in their favor and “embrace a doctrine that says that any crackpot who shows up with a slab of granite and a pickup truck can demand that a monument get installed on, say, the National Mall.” Deciding to allow truly free and inclusive permanent religious expression in the park would put a tremendous strain on public lands all across the country. So the obvious solution is the preferable one (both practically and constitutionally) that religious monuments not be allowed on public land at all.
The Court, though, didn’t go for this. They (unanimously!?!) upheld the right of the city to display ONLY the Ten Commandments if they so chose. They couldn’t rule along the lines of the original decision by the city, that the older monument was simply the city permitting the free speech of the donor, because then they would be suppressing the free speech of the Summum. So they went off in a different, frightening direction.
Their logic, as summed up by Samuel Alito, is that the Government has the right to free speech, just like you have, and that in choosing the mainstream Christian monument over the Summum’s alternative, the local government was excercising that right. He wrote: “The placement of a permanent monument in a public park is best viewed as a form of government speech and is therefore not subject to scrutiny under the free speech clause.”
Tell me that I am not the only one who is horrified by this. Tell me I am not the only one who realizes that only the people have the right to free speech. Freedom of speech does not have be to protected for the government, it has to be protected from the government, right?
Let me put it this way: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is perfectly within his rights to say that all non-Christians are gonna burn in Hell forever. He’s wrong and offensive, but you’ll never hear me say that he doesn’t have the right. However, even if all of his colleagues agreed with him, they wouldn’t have the right to say this collectively. They don’t have the right to publish it as an official Senate resolution, or to make it law. If the government has the right to freedom of speech, how can we restrain them from suppressing everyone else’s?
This isn’t a right/left issue, and it isn’t a religious issue. This is a basic assault on our civil rights. Get angry, folks! Make some noise!

All I Really Want

You know what I wanna do? I want to open a movie theater, but I only want to show classic movies. You can go anywhere to watch Slumdog Millionaire or whatever, and that’s fine. I am not in any way trying to put down modern films, but the classics are crying out to be shown the way they were originally intended.
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock belong in a theater, not on a 16-inch TV screen. I think it’s really too bad that we don’t get to watch the classics on the big screen anymore (well, those of us who live in little nothing towns don’t, anyway). I want to see To Have and Have Not on the big screen. People debate how much “chemistry” modern screen couples have, but nobody had chemistry like Bogart and Bacall. I bet they set a movie theater on fire. I want to watch Bride of Frankenstein on the big screen, with the great Karloff in his signature role and Ernest Thesiger as the greatest Mad Scientist ever. I want The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, because if you haven’t seen Leone’s magnificent vision on the big screen, you haven’t seen it at all. I want Night of the Living Dead, and The Road Warrior, and Shaft.
And I want it to be like the Cinema & Drafthouse back home, where you could order a pitcher of beer or a glass of scotch, and maybe some potato skins, and you could smoke while you watched the movie. If you can watch To Have and Have Not without needing a smoke, I don’t want to know you.
We’ll have classics every day: Sunset Boulevard, All Quiet on the Western Front, Out of the Past, ...and God Created Woman. We’ll have a matinee and an evening show, an hour or so apart. They’ll be two different movies, in case folks want to make a day of it, and in between we’ll show shorts from Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry, as God-that-ain’t clearly intended. Friday latenights would be our Trash Classics double feature, and Saturday latenights would be our classic horror double feature. And every Sunday there would be a brunch/matinee with real food (as opposed to bar food) and light comedy, mostly Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Brothers, maybe the occasional Carole Lombard or W.C. Fields for variety.
Of course, to do this, I would have to be fairly wealthy, because there’s a good chance that the business would never turn a profit, so I’d have to be able to absorb the loss year after year. And that means that I’ll never get to do it, ‘cause I’ll never be wealthy. But still, that’s what I want. Isn’t my reach supposed to exceed my grasp?

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Every news report I read or listen to talks about the “war” in Gaza. I have a semantic complaint here, which is that this is not a war.
“War” is when two groups of people fight and kill each other. In Gaza, what’s happening is that a bunch of people have been crammed into a tiny strip of land, defenseless. They’ve been surrounded by a 25-foot-high wall so they can’t escape. And now a much more numerous and powerful group of people outside the wall has started killing them indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Minister threatens a “shoah” against the Palestinians. “Shoah” is the Hebrew for “holocaust,” a word I don’t imagine the Israelis use lightly.
There are a lot of ugly words for what’s happening right now in Gaza. “Murder” is one. “Extermination” is another. “War,” though, that one doesn’t fit.

Ghost Story

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was kinda drizzling. Sure was dark, though.
I had been out at Mama’s and was driving home down the river road. It was quiet and deserted, no streetlights nor other cars, nothing but my highbeams and what little moonlight gets through the clouds, reflecting off the Ohio River. I wasn’t driving so fast as I usually do, ‘cause the roads were a bit slick, but regardless of conditions there’s a limit to how slow I’m gonna drive through there, alone on the road with Rosie and Social Distortion’s “When the Angels Sing”:

love and death don't mean a thing
'til the angels sing

Suddenly, coming ‘round a big turn just before the railroad tracks, a spectre appeared before me. It took the shape of a man bundled up tight in dark clothes, riding on a motorbike of some kind. The bike had no headlights, no reflectors, and was traveling right down the middle of the road. Brights and all, I didn’t see him ‘til we were thirty or forty feet apart, and even then it was more an impression of movement rather than me really seeing anything. I braked and swerved over to the right far as I could without going swimming, and the apparition passed within a few feet. Didn’t even glance at me as he went by, like he was in a different world, and when I looked in my mirror he was invisible again.
I’ve never heard any legends about the Ghost Biker of Route Two, but I’m gonna look into it, see if there’s maybe some sort of tragic history there that I don’t know about. I’m paranoid when I drive, seeing threats everywhere, and I don’t believe anyone could get that close to me without me seeing him unless he sprang from under the cold ground or materialized from the wet, heavy air. I don’t know how it could be possible.
I do know this, though: if he wasn’t a ghost when I saw him tonight, he’s gonna be one soon.

I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring baby when you're sane

SCENE: Quiet neighborhood, late at night. ROSIE, a little red pickup truck, passes slowly along sleepy streets. A man (HE) and woman (SHE) are in the cab. As the truck turns from one street to the next, he speaks.

HE: Oh, I forgot to say hello to my street.
SHE: "Say hello to your street?"
HE: Yeah, the last street we crossed has the same name as me, so every time I pass it, I say hello. But I forgot just now, 'cause we were talking. (looks up the block) It comes out again up there. We could just go around and see it again. (thinks for a moment). No, no, driving completely around the block just to talk to a street would be...it would be...excessively eccentric.
SHE: Hmmm...it's interesting where you draw the line with that.

NEWS OF THE AWESOME: New Planets!!!

Oh, this is exciting!
For as long as we’ve realized that the stars were just other suns, much farther away, people have wondered if there are planets orbiting those stars. It seemed logical; we have no reason to believe that there is anything special or unique about our solar system, so why couldn’t an untold number of them have formed in more or less the same way, all across the universe?
But realizing that something is logically true and knowing it to actually be true are two different things. And unlike stars, planets don’t give off light, which makes them really hard to spot at the kind of distances we’re talking about when discussing even our own arm of the Milky Way.
A few years ago astronomers were able to determine that several nearby stars did have planets orbiting them, by measuring the way the stars wobbled as the gravity of the moving planets pulled them back and forth, but we still couldn’t see them. It was comforting to know for sure that they were there, but rather unsatisfying.
Well, brothers and sisters, 2008 can now be remembered for (among many other reasons) being the year that we first saw, actually saw and photographed, an extra-Solar planet. More than one, actually. Christian Marois and a team from British Columbia found three planets around one of the stars in the constellation Pegasus, called HR 8799, about 130 light years away.
130 light years is pretty serious business on a human scale, but cosmically speaking this star is right down the street. But even better, there’s a star named Formalhaut which is only 25 light years away from us; in galactic terms, we’re practically roommates. Formalhaut is sleeping on our sofa, basically. It is a very young star, still surrounded by the cloud that planets form out of. And in May, Paul Kalas and a team of astronomers from UC-Berkeley found a planet floating in that cloud.
The new planet is about three times the size of Jupiter, and it’s close enough to Earth that our radio signals have been reaching it for nearly a century. Unfortunately, we can be pretty sure there isn’t any intelligent life there (the system is only about 60 million years old; when Earth was that old it still didn’t even have a solid crust), but it’s pretty awesomely cool anyway.
In fact, I’d like to suggest a name for as-yet-unnamed planet: Coolestthingevertopia. Or how about Terra Fabulousica?  I wonder who you submit ideas like that to.  To all readers:  submit your choice of name now, and we’ll send them all in together.

Obama, NO. McCain, NO. Mercer, YES!

Okay, I know you’re all stressed about the election, just dying for some news, ANY news, to see what direction the country’s gonna be going in for the next few years. Well, I’m here to save the day.
Not by giving you news, of course. I don’t have much yet, either. Instead, I’m gonna give you a quick break from having to take this election seriously, just for a few minutes. Go read this story about the man who SHOULD have become our first African-American President (although he claims he would only have been the second), and laugh your asses off. I’ve been saving it since February, just for you guys, just for tonight. Enjoy yourselves, and report back here later.

Somewhat hopeful...

Okay, I know not everyone agrees with me on this, but I love the Friday the 13th film series. They’re just a big messy glorious pile of dumb, and they make me happy, which is why I own nine of the ten films on DVD (does someone wanna get me F13-9: Jason Goes To Hell for Bogey Day?).
So part of me is a little bit pissed-off and horrified that they’re doing a Rob Zombie-style reboot of the series rather than just making F13-11 (and also that Michael Bay is apparently involved). But another part of me is kinda fascinated by it. And today I ran across the new teaser trailer online, and I gotta say, it’s pretty effective:
Friday The 13th in HD

So, yeah. That right there pretty much guarantees that I’ll be in the theater on 2/13/9 catching the new film. I like that they’ve returned to a more active Jason, like in the early films. I mean, he never became the shambling revenant that Michael Myers was, but he definitely slowed down a bit towards the end of the series. That bit at the end of the trailer where he charges…I found that unsettling, in a very satisfying way.
I did notice that the voiceover for the trailer was clearly taken from Betsy Palmer’s dialog from the original movie. I know that they hired Nana Visitor to play Pamela Voorhees for this version (a nice little bit of Star Trek weirdness for the new film), but I’d heard that her scenes had been cut. This would seem to confirm that, which depresses me; if Mama Voorhees isn’t gonna be in it, that’ll hurt the film a lot, in my opinion.
On the other hand, check out this picture of the kid they got to play young Jason. Goodness gracious. Look at how far apart his eyes are, and how his head is just waaaaay too big for his body, and how his face doesn’t take up as much of it as it should. And dig those ears, so far down the side of his head! I mean, he’s not a terribly ugly kid or anything, but you can definitely see a bit of Jason in him even without makeup. Once they’ve got him in costume, that’s gonna be a creepy little bastard, huh?
So, on balance, and against my better judgment, I’m pretty excited about the new film. Who’s going to see it with me?
 

Two points of irritation for the day

First, I’m handing out propers to Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida. The state has a law restricting polling places during early voting to being open only eight hours per day. This, of course, is stupid; people with regular nine-to-five jobs couldn’t get there for that, which defeats the purpose of early voting. So Crist did a little executive order thing, extending those hours to twelve per day (7-7). This was absolutely the right thing to do.
Many members of his own party hated it. They are afraid that more voters means a McCain loss in the state. It seems to me that if more people voting means your party will lose, you need to change your party, not the voting procedures. But it isn’t the GOP I’m angry with over this; I don’t expect much from them anyway, and they’re in full “the sky is falling” mode at this point. My problem is on the other side.
While most Democrats have been just happy with these developments, a few are running all over the place telling anyone who will listen that Crist did it to revenge himself upon the McCain campaign for picking Sarah Palin to be VP instead of him or whatever. Basically, they’re saying that he knows McCain is going to lose anyway, and he’s doing this for selfish reasons to make himself look good.
You know what? What Crist did was right. And he did make himself look good, and it’s fine that he looks good, because when you do the right thing you should look good. I don’t care what his rationale was. We want people to do the right thing, and you don’t have to be a member of a particular party, or subscribe to a particular political philosophy, to do that. We should be applauding him for actually protecting the rights of the people of his state; there has to be a reward for serving the public interest, or people will stop doing it. So, if you’re one of those on the left who has been questioning his motives today, shut up. You’re part of the problem.

Second, there’s Rashid Khalidi.  The Palin, who still lacks both the competence and the vision to make the case for her own ticket, has been trying to scare people by talking him up (though she has not yet mastered the pronunciation of his name) and now the knuckleheads have taken up the chant that he’s some sort of radical anti-Semite.
Now, I’m not going to defend Khalidi. I don’t know much about him. He might well be anti-Zionist, which is a perfectly respectable political position to take. He might also be anti-Jew, which is not at all respectable. I have no idea. But he is NOT an anti-Semite. Khalidi is Palestinian, which of course makes him an Arab. That means, for the benefit of all the half-witted right-wing talking heads out there, that HE IS SEMITIC HIMSELF. To save them the trouble of looking up the word (a skill which they appear to lack) I offer this quick definition:
SEMITE—a member of any of various ancient and modern peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.
The name Semite actually comes from the language group common in this part of the world (the Semitic languages), which includes both Hebrew and Arabic. It is regional, not ethnic. Yes, people in this country frequently use the word to mean anti-Jewish, but that isn’t its actual definition. I usually let it slide when someone is talking about, say, Pat Robertson, because it still basically makes sense in those circumstances.  However, it absolutely does not make sense when you’re talking about an Arab.
What I’m saying is that Rashid Khalidi can no more be anti-Semitic than fire can be anti-heat, or I can be anti-cool. If the closed minds out there absolutely must use fancy words, they should at least take the trouble to find out what those words mean first.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Leith

Today, brothers and sisters, is Virginia Leith’s birthday. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.
Wait, what’s that? You don’t know who she is? Well, lemme tell ya about a little movie called The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Or, possibly, The Head That Wouldn’t Die (it’s listed as the former in the opening credits, but the latter in the closing credits…surprisingly, they don’t seem to have put very much thought into this movie).
This is one of the real Trash Classics. There’s actually a sort of plodding, grotesque grandeur to it, and though it isn’t majestically awful on the same level as “Manos” The Hands of Fate, it is one of those that I felt compelled to actually own on DVD. Not the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, either. The actual, unedited, original film. It’s terribly delightful.
It’s a pretty simple movie. I won’t go into too much detail (you really should see it for yourselves), but here’s a quick synopsis: A brilliant young surgeon, Dr. Bill Cortner, has developed a revolutionary new technique for transplanting organs and limbs and generally working medical miracles, but the scientific community looks down upon his work for some reason never fully explained (his own father, also a doctor, tells him in one memorable scene, “You shouldn’t experiment until you KNOW the results!” which, as MST3K pointed out, indicates that Dad isn’t too clear on the meaning of the word “experiment”). So he works at his country house, conducting his experiments in the basement along with his assistant, Kurt (who works for Dr. Bill in hopes that his shriveled arm can be healed). Pretty standard mid-century mad-scientist set-up, really.
Just as Dr. Bill is about to go away for a romantic weekend with his nurse/girlfriend, Jan Compton, he gets a panicked phone call from Kurt that something has gone terribly wrong. So he and Jan race out to the country house. Problem is, Dr. Bill is a less than perfectly skillful driver, and in one of the worst celluloid imitations of a car crash ever, he loses control and sends the car rolling down a hill. Tragically, Jan is killed in the crash, though Dr. Bill is thrown clear and escapes injury.
The car is on fire and Dr. Bill can’t save Jan…entirely. So, he cuts off her head and takes it with him. Hey, don’t judge the man ‘til you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, okay?
Next thing we know, he’s keeping Jan’s head alive until he can find a body for it. He does this by leaving it propped up in a saucer of dark liquid with lots of tubes running in and out. And for the rest of the movie she just sits there, whispering (no lungs, you see) in a vaguely threatening way at poor Kurt and repeatedly (and famously) pleading, “Let me die.”
Meanwhile, the search for a new body for the love of his life inevitably leads Dr. Bill to a strip club (well, a burlesque hall...it WAS 1962, after all). ‘Cause, I mean, where else would you go, right? Two of the dancers get into a catfight over him, which scene is probably the whole reason they made the movie, so he leaves and instead chooses a nude model that he used to know years ago in some way the movie is far too lazy to make clear. They head back to the summer house, and of course hilarity bone-chilling terror ensues.
The movie is notable for two reasons. First (SPOILER ALERT as if anyone cared) it has probably the greatest death scene in the entire history of motion pictures. When Kurt’s arm is ripped off by the monster in the basement closet (the result of the spectacular failure of an earlier experiment), he takes a full five minutes to die (trust me, it seems longer). He staggers around the basement, spraying and smearing blood everywhere and moaning. Then he wanders upstairs into the living room, staggering and moaning but inexplicably leaving no blood (a few minutes later, when Dr. Bill and his chosen victim show up, she sits in the chair Kurt had recently collapsed into and doesn’t realize anything is up). Then he goes back into the basement, staggers around a little bit more, slumps into a corner, moans for another minute or so, and finally dies. And while all this is happening, of course, his arm is clearly visible tucked inside his lab coat. Words can’t do this scene justice; you have to see it (it is inexplicably not up on YouTube, but if I can figure out how, I’m gonna fix that).
The scene is legendary, and has had homage paid to it by many filmmakers since, including Joss Whedon himself in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is impossible that the filmmakers didn’t realize how ridiculous this scene is. They must have decided, “Well, we wanted to make a good movie whose popularity would last for decades, but we clearly haven’t managed that, so let’s just put in a death scene at once so mind-numblingly tedious and jaw-droppingly bizarre that we’ll be remembered for that instead!”
Worked.
The other thing that makes this movie notable, though, is Jan herself. She’s become a Trash Classics icon, known as “Jan in the Pan” thanks to the riffing of the MST3K boys (and this film, the first of the Mike Nelson era, provided one of the best episodes ever; if you have Netflix, I urge, nay, beg you to rent it here). She is equal to Ed Wood’s Criswell or the inestimable Torgo. Her face (and only her face) is on T-shirts and posters, her name is a running joke among a certain subsection of our society, and the actress has drawn adoring crowds at horror conventions across the country.
That actress, of course, is Virginia Leith, and as I said at the beginning of this entry, today is her birthday (where else but here could you get information like this?). She’s 76 and still plugging away, so raise a glass to her tonight for the forty-plus years of joy she’s provided bad movie fans everywhere. Happy birthday, Virginia. I hope your next 76 years are as good as the first 76.

Bartlet for America

I can’t believe I didn’t remember this before. This is what I get for going so long without watching my beloved West Wing.
Do you remember, waaaaaay back in the first season, that President Bartlet had a Navy major as his personal physician? He died not too far into the series, but before he did, he and Bartlet had some excellent conversations. A lot of it was the non-soldier Bartlet trying to seem cool and tough before the military man, and one exchange in particular seems relevant right now, for reasons that might possibly suggest themselves to you:

Bartlet: It’s not like I’m totally without experience. You’re talking to a former governor. I was the Commander-in-Chief of the New Hampshire National Guard.
Morris Tolliver: You guys get into a lot of tough scrapes, did ya?
Bartlet: We didn’t have to. We’d just stand on the border and stare you down. Then we’d all go for pancakes.

Allegory

So, as you all know, I moved recently. My new building has a laundry room. It’s good to have it, but I haven’t done anything with it yet. I go out to Mama’s every weekend to do my laundry. It’s a reason to spend a little time with her and the biscuits, and an excuse to drive a good distance at a time when gas prices have made driving for pleasure a luxury beyond my means.
The Palin, as governor of Alaska, was technically Commander-in-Chief of the Alaska National Guard. The GOP is pushing this as further proof that she’s ready to be VP and possibly President, if the need arises. They say she has experience as CIC, even though she never once in her 18 months on the job gave the Guard a single order.
Still, it’s technically true she has experience of being CIC, in the same sense that I have experience of the washer and dryer in my building: I’ve never actually used them, don’t really know how they work or how much they cost, but I’ve seen them, and it’s nice to know they’re there, I guess.

Working to make the world a better place=stupid

This is the thing about Republicans: they appeal to the worst bits of us. They appeal to everything that’s ugly in us, and we just keep going for it.
It 2000, Dubya ran on the “dumbass frat boy” platform. His whole campaign was based on being the smirking guy in the back of the class who didn’t get it, but made himself feel better by making fun of the kids who did.
Now there’s Sarah Palin and her big laugh line about a small-town mayor being like a community organizer, only with “actual responsibilities.” She used it at the convention, of course, and now she’s using it in her stump speeches. The Palin wants to make fun of community organizers who, among their many accomplishments, are the only reason she has the right to fucking vote.
Barack Obama got his start as a community organizer, of course, which is why she targets them. She doesn’t want to admit that these people do good work, because if she did, she’d be forced to face the fact that, while she was off winning beauty pageants, Obama was working hard on the Southside of Chicago, helping working people (those same working people that some inexplicably believe he’s “afraid” of) who had been ruined by the failed steel industry to salvage something and rebuild their lives.
But there is another reason for this line of attack.  See, there are still community organizers (of every political stripe) all across the country trying to do what politicians only pretend to do, which is to change the world and make it a better place. These are the people The Palin wants to turn into a national joke. Of course she does. She doesn’t want you to organize, because organized people rock the boat. She doesn’t want the boat rocked. She wants you to spend money and do what you’re told.
Dubya spent the 2000 campaign laughing at his intellectual superiors, and America laughed along, and he won (sorta). He proved that we’re stupid. Now The Palin is laughing at her moral superiors. She wants to prove that we’re not only stupid, but mean. Are you gonna laugh along?

Worst Warning Sign Ever

Sign outside a local contruction site: CAUTION—LASER IN USE
Shouldn’t a warning sign make you not want to go in? ‘Cause I saw that, and I started looking for an open door. I wanna see that goddamned laser. Who wouldn’t?
I wonder what other, equally ineffective, signs they had up. Maybe a WATCH FOR FALLING BEER sign, or one that reads WARNING: BOOBIES.
 

UPDATE (11/10): Heh. Got drunk last night, memory is a bit hazy. Woke up this morning to find the sign on my wall. Must've gone out and stolen it in the middle of the night. Ah, I feel like a kid again.

He was a baaad mother-(shut your mouth)

Augh! Isaac Hayes just died. What? How the hell did that happen?
That means that pretty much all the cool in the world (except, you know, for what resides in my own body) is gone.
Wasn’t Isaac Hayes too cool to die? I mean, seriously, you’d think Death would walk in and Isaac would go, “Hey, baby, don’t wreck the groove, dig?”
“But I’ve come to take you to the other side,” Death would say, somewhat nonplussed by his total lack of fear.
“Just have a seat while I dim the lights, baby. Care for a drink?”
“I really shouldn’t…” but Isaac would put Hot Buttered Soul on his record player, and the cool would overwhelm it, “well, okay…maybe just one…”
And a couple hours later, Death would walk out of the house empty-handed with a big smile. Death’s driver would say, “Ummm…so where’s this guy we came for?”
“Whoah,” Death would say, “step off a brother, a’ight? He’s cool.” And then Death would go off to bother, say, Andy Dick.
The man has great personal significance for me beyond just being super-cool. He was a huge part of my courtship with Rhonda. She had never listened to him before. At the time, she was a big fan of Stealing Beauty, which has one of the best soundtracks ever, and we used to listen to it while we were out driving. It features a song called “2-Wicky” by a band named Hoover, which samples “Walk On By” very heavily. I told her the origin of the sample, and later played Hot Buttered Soul for her, and she loved the record, and...well, let’s just say that LOTS of sex was had with that record playing in the background, okay? So, everybody thinks of sex when they listen to Isaac Hayes, but maybe I think of a little more sex than most.
Speakin’ of which, I’m gonna put Hot Buttered Soul on right now, and when that’s over, I’m gonna watch Shaft (which, of course, I own on DVD...I mean, come on). And maybe later I’ll go hang out with Mama’s cat, who is pretty much Hayes’ avatar amongst the common folk.

Walk on by, walk on by,
Make believe that you don’t see the tears
Just let me grieve in private
‘Cause each time I see you
I break down and cry
And walk on by

I just can’t get over losing you
So if I seem broken and blue
Walk on by

 So long, brother.

Oh How I Hate

I’m still adjusting to having to drive to work every day. I’m used to waking up at Time X, spending Time Y getting ready, and then leaving at Time Z. Everything has to happen a little earlier now. Only about five minutes earlier, but for a creature of habit like myself, those are five big minutes, and I’ve been late a couple of times since the move because of them.
I was a few minutes late today, but not because of this. No, today I left the house on time. Unfortunately, the streets were full of Ohio drivers this morning. I had to wait forever while the first one worked up the courage to turn left across Eighth Street. Then I got stuck behind one on Seventh Avenue, stridently driving five mph below an already unreasonably low speed limit. I cut over onto Sixth Avenue to get away from him, only to find a third Ohio driver waiting for me there, who managed to make us miss a makeable light at Sixteenth Street. Then there was a fourth ahead of me at the light on Twentieth Street and Fifth Avenue, who apparently either didn’t realize that the light had changed, or saw it but wasn’t sure what the significance of a green light where a red light had been moments before might be.
I try not to have too much hate in my heart, brothers and sisters, because it isn’t good for me; but I can’t not hate Ohio drivers. It is beyond my strength. Ohio drivers are the worst drivers in the whole country, and I say this as a person who has wide experience of driving styles from across our great nation.
I’ve been saying this for years, ever since I actually lived in Ohio in the late 90s. Some Ohio drivers are better than others, but even those are still just the best of a bad lot, and when they cross state lines they automatically become the worst drivers on the road. People from Ohio (especially men) tend to take offense when this fact is brought up, which I guess should surprise no one. Every man wants to believe that he’s a good driver, just like he wants to believe that he’s a competent lover, or that he has an engaging sense of humor. He continues to believe these things about himself in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary. And since some of my readers are from Ohio, let me apologize for my frankness right now and offer some constructive criticism.
“Well, Rick,” you may be saying, “I’m from Ohio, but I would like to develop the skills required to not make other drivers crazy in neighboring states. I would like someday to be welcome in another state.  Any other state, anywhere, ever. Can you give me some tips on areas I should be trying to improve?” Well, if you’ve got an Ohio driver’s license, then you have two principal problems while driving:
First, you do everything wrong.
Second, you do it verrrrrrrrry slowly.
But, the first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem. Good luck! If there’s anything else I can do to help, just let me know.
 

Done. Gone.

Well, this is it. My last-ever post from 1324. Everything is packed up except for a very few things in my closet, most of which will be thrown away, and my posters. So I’ll be back once more tonight, but I’m taking the computer now.
I’m gonna kind of miss this little place. I mean, the windows don’t open, and there are no drawers in the kitchen, and the kitchen itself is too small to cook anything fancier than macaroni and cheese in, and it’s drafty and cold as hell in winter, and it’s too close to Frat Row, and the bathroom floor is collapsing. It has its problems, is what I’m saying..
But it’s got a nice front porch, great for sitting and reading on, or holding court.  It’s close to most of the places I like to go, and it’s completely sheltered by the surrounding buildings so that it’s always in shade and doesn’t get very hot in summer. Even right here in 4 ½ Alley, downtown and two blocks from campus, it’s isolated and peaceful.  And it’s tiny, but I liked that it was tiny. I don’t have much in the way of possessions, and I’m not claustrophobic. In fact, I’m a claustrophile, or whatever the opposite of a claustrophobe is. When I was little I used to sleep under my bed rather than in it. I liked the enclosed space. If I could afford it, I’d buy a coffin to sleep in, and I would sleep with the lid closed. A cramped apartment suits me, as long as it has a decent kitchen.
And I’ve got lots of good memories of the place. I mean, I’ve lived here longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere in my entire life, and the memories are thick and far-reaching at 1324. Amy and Gerlach and Mrs. D have spent a lot of time here, of course, and they’ll be around for new memories over at 704. But there are memories of folks who’ve gone away, like Katy and my Dooleys, and other folks that I don’t know any more, like Christy and Sheila; those memories had substance here, but in the new place they won’t even be ghosts. It’s too bad.
I like the new place a lot. I’ve stayed there the past two nights, and it’s pretty awesome (except that I haven’t yet figured out how the shower works). I got my first piece of mail over there today (an MST3K episode from Netflix). I think I’m gonna be happy there. I’m not sad, really. It isn’t hard to walk away. But I am kinda gonna miss this cheap, dirty, silly, crappy place. It was a good home.