Happy Birthday, Sam... Mark!

Today in Florida, Mississippi, 1835 Mark Twain was born.

How to sum up this man in the few words of a birthday post? I don't think it can be done. Check the link for a bio and works. Go here for Boondocks' Twain site. And here are just a few quotes ... I could go on and on.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Phillippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

I can't wait for March!

And not because of March Madness, either! No: Elton John's Birthday! Hooray!

Barry is a genius. This is an idea whose time has most definitely come!

Happy Birthday, Louisa!

Louisa May Alcott was born today in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832). As The Writers Almanac says,

She had started out writing sensational stories about duels and suicides, opium addiction, mind control, bigamy and murder. She called it "blood and thunder" literature. But in 1867, an editor suggested that she try writing what he called "a girl's book," and she said she'd try. The result was Little Women (1868), and it was a huge success. She was obligated to keep writing more books in the same vein, which distressed her, but she did it anyway.

You know, I've read a couple of those "blood and thunder" books - they're not bad at all. But I admit that when I was in junior high, I loved Eight Cousins... the sequel wasn't as good, though.

That editor was obviously the model for that horrible professor in Little Women ...

Daphnis

In this picture from last month, Daphnis drifts through the Keeler gap, at the center of its entourage of waves.

The little moon (7 kilometers, or 4.3 miles across) draws material in the Keeler gap (42 kilometers, or 26 miles wide) into these now familiar edge waves as it orbits Saturn.

(You can compare this with Pan in the Encke gap - Pan is 16 miles in diameter and the Encke gap is 200 miles wide, so Pan doesn't cause waves as it orbits.)

Both Keeler and Encke gaps are in the A Ring. Go here for a good overview of all the rings and gaps.

America - it's still possible

This is a must-read post about how Captain America can teach us an important truth:

to pin all one’s hopes to an inspiring leader, to hope too hard for a hero, is a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take an inspiring leader if we can get one, and I’ll let you know when my attempts to clone FDR bear fruit. But in the meantime, simply voting for the people less likely to betray America’s fundamental principles and to make the world a much worse place to live is not just enough: it’s enough to get excited about.

(tip o' the hat to Pharyngula)

Happy Birthday, James

Author of several classics, including Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (pictures by Walker Evans). The ground-breaking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men chronicled the pair's journey through the rural South during the Great Depression - words by Agee, photos by Evans, presenting a stark yet deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. The pairing of the anguished dissonance of Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans's photographs of sharecroppers makes this book a powerful, wrenching experience. Agee also wrote the screenplay for The African Queen and the powerfully affecting A Death in the Family.

Jack Neely, in his book Knoxville's Secret History, tells a story of attending a class at university where they were discussing Agee - including his short story about a cat who is run over on a hot day and dies slowly, squished into the soft asphalt of Asylum Avenue. The professor and the student were speculating on the possible deep significance of that street name, but Neely knew better. "Why did he say it was called Asylum Avenue? Because it was." You can still see that old name on the viaduct the man and the boy walked under in Agee's masterpiece, the viaduct that marked the boundary between the two worlds, though it's been renamed Western Avenue by city fathers with an eye to prettifying the past.

The deaf and dumb asylum was deaf and dumb, his father observed very quietly, as if he were careful not to wake it, as he always did on these evenings; its windows showed black in its pale brick, as the nursing woman's eyes, and it stood deep and silent among the light shadows of its trees. Ahead, Asylum Avenue lay bleak beneath its lamps. Latticed in pawnshop iron, an old saber caught the glint of a street lamp, a mandolin's belly glowed. In a closed drug store stood Venus de Milo, her golden body laced in elastic straps. The stained glass of the L&N Depot smoldered like an exhausted butterfly, and at the middle of the viaduct they paused to inhale the burst of smoke from a switch engine which passed under; Rufus, lifted, the cinders stinging his face, was grateful no longer to feel fear at this suspension over the tracks and the powerful locomotives. Far down the yard, a red light flicked to green; a moment later, they heard the thrilling click. It was ten-seven by the depot clock. They went on, more idly than before.

The young leaves of Forest Avenue wavered against street lamps and they approached their corner.

It was a vacant lot, part rubbed bare clay, part over-grown with weeds, rising a little from the sidewalk. A few feet in from the sidewalk there was a medium-sized tree and, near enough to be within its shade in daytime, an outcrop of limestone like a great bundle of dirty laundry. If you sat on a certain part of it the trunk of the tree shut off the weak street lamp a block away, and it seemed very dark. Whenever they walked downtown and walked back home, in the evenings, they always began to walk more slowly, from about the middle of the viaduct, and as they came near this corner they walked more slowly still, but with purpose; and paused a moment, at the edge of the sidewalk; then, without speaking, stepped into the dark lot and sat down on the rock, looking out over the steep face of the hill and at the lights of North Knoxville. Deep in the valley an engine coughed and browsed; couplings settled their long chains, and the empty cars sounded like broken drums. A man came up the far side of the street, walking neither slow nor fast, not turning his head, as he paused, and quite surely not noticing them; they watched him until he was out of sight, and Rufus felt, and was sure that his father felt, that though there was no harm in the man and he had as good a right as they did to be there, minding his own business, their journey was interrupted from the moment they first saw him until they saw him out of sight. Once he was out of sight they realized more pleasure in their privacy than before; they really relaxed in it. They looked across the darkness of the lights of North Knoxville. They were aware of the quiet leaves above them, and looked into them and through them. They looked between the leaves into the stars. Usually on these evening waits, or a few minutes before going on home, Rufus' father smoked a cigarette through, and when it was finished, it was time to get up and go on home. But this time he did not smoke. Up to recently he had always said something about Rufus' being tired, when they were still about a block away from the corner; but lately he had not done so, and Rufus realized that his father stopped as much because he wanted to, as on Rufus' account. He was just not in a hurry to get home, Rufus realized; and, far more important, it was clear that he liked to spend these few minutes with Rufus. Rufus had come recently to feel a quiet kind of anticipation of the corner, from the moment they finished crossing the viaduct; and, during the ten to twenty minutes they sat on the rock, a particular kind of contentment, unlike any other that he knew. He did not know what this was, in words or ideas, or what the reason was; it was simply all that he saw and felt. It was, mainly, knowing that his father, too, felt a particular kind of contentment, here, unlike any other, and that their kinds of contentment were much alike, and depended on each other. Rufus seldom had at all sharply the feeling that he and his father were estranged, yet they must have been, and he must have felt it, for always during these quiet moments on the rock a part of his sense of complete contentment lay in the feeling that they were reconciled, that there was really no division, no estrangement, or none so strong, anyhow, that it could mean much, by comparison with the unity that was so firm and assured, here. He felt that although his father loved their home and loved all of them, he was more lonely than the contentment of this family love could help; that it even increased his loneliness, or made it hard for him not to be lonely. He felt that sitting out here, he was not lonely; or if he was, that he felt on good terms with the loneliness; that he was a homesick man, and that here on the rock, though he might be more homesick than ever, he was well. He knew that a very important part of his well-being came of staying a few minutes away from home, very quietly, in the dark, listening to the leaves if they moved, and looking at the stars; and that his own, Rufus' own presence, was fully as indispensable to this well-being. He knew that each of them knew of the other's well-being, and of the reasons for it, and knew how each depended on the other, how each meant more to the other, in this most important of all ways, than anyone or anything else in the world; and that the best of this well-being lay in this mutual knowledge, which was neither concealed nor revealed. He knew these things very distinctly, but not, of course, in any such way as we have of suggesting them in words. There were no words, or even ideas, or formed emotions, of the kind that have been suggested here, no more in the man than in the boy child. These realizations moved clearly through the senses, the memory, the feelings, the mere feeling of the place they paused at, about a quarter of a mile from home, on a rock under a stray tree that had grown in the city, their feet on undomesticated clay, facing north through the night over the Southern Railway tracks and over North Knoxville, towards the deeply folded small mountains and the Powell River Valley, and above them, the trembling lanterns of the universe, seeming so near, so intimate, that when air stirred the leaves and their hair, it seemed to be the breathing, the whispering of the stars.

This Week in Entertainment

(Oops. The holiday distracted me - this post is backdated.)

DVD: Over the Hedge - which was quite cute and funny, actually.

TV: The usual - Heroes (I'm sorry, we didn't get the promise 'how they got their powers', we just saw them, well some of them, using them for the first time. But Sylar's crazy, isn't he?) and Veronica Mars (she's going to break Logan's poor heart again - as Couch Baron says: "Logan looks like his heart is breaking into teeny-tiny pieces. At some point, they're going to get too small to reconstitute.")

Read: The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - atmospheric, idiosyncratic, with well-drawn main characters, but ultimately, I felt, not satisfying; the killer's motive was a cop-out and the resolution quite ... well, not as bad as "Holmes woke up and lo, it had all been a dream" but almost that bad. Also Mrs Malory and a Death in the Family, a solid entry in this slight but well-written series; Who's Sorry Now?, the least satisfactory so far in this generally entertaining but slight series; and The Shapeshifter, not Hillerman's best but engaging nonetheless. Also, finished Trinities which is simply lovely.

Happy Birthday, Charles

Schulz, of course - creator of Peanuts.

Born this day in 1922.

Four things to be thankful for

Via Barry over at Staring at Empty Pages is this Robert Elisberg piece which I, too, agree with completely:Four Quiet Things to Be Thankful For

Pretty much how we all feel, I imagine

I don't inflict my cat on you, but this afternoon she was on the sofa here and it struck me how perfectly she reflected what I wished I was doing, post-Thanksgiving:

Pan in the gap

Sweet.

Pan in the Encke gap - Pan's 16 miles (26km) in diameter, and the gap is 200 miles (325 km) wide. This shot shows hints of detail on the moon's dark side, which is lit by saturnshine -- sunlight reflected off Saturn.

Thankful - but not complacent

Okay. The feared voting machine debacle didn't happen. At least, not most places.

In Florida's 13th district (the one awarded to Katharine Harris for her role in making the current president into the current president) however, things look extremely fishy. As Paul Krugman says in the NY Times today:

the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.

The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines — supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr. Buchanan won a recount — that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record — means nothing.

Although state officials have certified Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they’ve promised an audit of the voting machines. But don’t get your hopes up: as in 2000, state election officials aren’t even trying to look impartial. To oversee the audit, the state has chosen as its “independent” expert Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University — a Republican partisan who made an appearance on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court during the 2000 recount battle wearing a “Bush Won” sign.

One single district may not mean much. But as a bellwether of next time - with the White House on the line - it's ominous.

Krugman concludes:

As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn’t become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we’re in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?

Boy, I hope not.

Possession in context (like everything else): transitive nouns

Something I've been thinking about...

What does the 's mean, in English? It's the possessive, right? But what is the relationship between the word marked as possessive and the other word in the phrase - the possessor and the thing possessed?

If you're wondering what I'm getting at, you've probably never thought much about it. It's not straightforward.

The 's (and other possessives, like the pronouns - which, after all, function like the nouns they replace [mostly]) takes its actual meaning - that relationship - from the context. From the meaning(s) of the other word(s) in the phrase.

For instance, take the clause "The Union defeated the Confederacy". If you want to create a somewhat more complex sentence, you can essentially turn that clause into a noun phrase (nominalize the verb and show subject with a by and object with an of prepositional phrase) and then plug it in as the subject or complement inside a larger clause, such as

The defeat of the Confederacy by the Union was followed by years of reconstruction.

You can also, however, use the possessive to replace one of the prepositional phrases, producing either

The Union's defeat of the Confederacy ...

or

The Confederacy's defeat by the Union ...

They're the same thing, right?

Except that the possessive is on the subject of the original clause in one, and the object in the other. Which is which is clear, as long as you keep those little prepositional phrases in there. Now (just as in passives) you can lose the original subject (the actor) and things remain clear:

The Confederacy's defeat was followed by years of reconstruction.

But how about this one?

The Union's defeat was followed by years of reconstruction.

It doesn't work. Oh, it's grammatical enough, but it's not true. For some reason, you can drop the by phrase but not the of one.

That reason has to do with the transitivity of the noun. Yes, the noun.

The default meaning of that 's (same with with possessive pronouns: I defeated him, his defeat by me, my defeat of him... his defeat - yes; my defeat - no) is to mark the object of the verb the noun has been created from (defeat). This remains true with nouns more removed from the verb, such as "destruction":

The enemy destroyed the city and its inhabitants were forced to flee.

The city's destruction by the enemy forced its inhabitants to flee
The enemy's destruction of the city ...
The city's destruction ...

But not

The enemy's destruction ....

So, in some way, the noun is filed in your brain as transitive - taking its object with "of" or with the possessive if "of" is not present.

Let's check that by looking at an intransitive, where the complement of the verb is made with a prepostion. Remaining with our rather bellicose theme,

Zendia triumped over its foes, and that was cause for much rejoicing.

The triumph of Zendia over its foes ...
Zendia's triumph over its foes ...

Yes, here we can use both of and the 's possessive marker, but in both cases it's clearly the subject of the original verb being marked. You can't wangle its foes into either. You can leave it out entirely, as above, but this doesn't affect which slot Zendia can occupy:

The triumph of Zendia...
Zendia's triumph ...

Both are acceptable.

And all this means that somehow that native speakers of English have filed in their brain the transitivity of nouns. "The Union's defeat in the Civil War" is a perfectly grammatical phrase, and apparently derived from "The Union's defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War", and yet we know it's wrong, and different from "The Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War". And in the same way, if we hear "Zendia's defeat in the late 19th century led the way to more warfare in the 20th", we know, without a doubt, that Zendia was defeated. In short, that "Zendia's defeat", with no by phrase supplied, is passive. But "Zendia's triumph in the late 20th century" cannot be passive, for triumph is an intransitive verb, and thus we know that Zendia has now won. And this though we know nothing of Zendia and its history.

[For that matter, in all of these you can take away both the subject and complement of the original, essentially, reducing a clause with subject-verb-complement to a single noun phrase consisting of a nominalization of the verb.

The defeat was followed by years of reconstruction.
The destruction caused the inhabitants to flee.
The triumph was cause for much rejoicing.

]

Happy Birthday, Laurence

Laurence Sterne, author of the revolutionary novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, was born today in 1713.

Pandora, the other shepherd

Prometheus is the shepherd moon that orbits right up against the F ring (see previous posts Prometheus pulling streamers and especially inside the rings and the movie post.

But Prometheus has a companion that helps confine and shape the F Ring: Pandora. She's a bit further away and much less intrusive than her sibling, but her influence is no less important. And now Cassini sends us a lovely picture of her, too.

Headlines

The Globe and Mail has this headline and teaser in their newsletter:

Patients wait as PET scans used in animal experiments

'This is absolutely the world upside down,' doctor says

Wow. Sounds terrible. Must read article, find out where animal experiments (and what kind?) are making patients wait for PET scan diagnoses.

Oh.

It's the governmental restrictions on who can and can't get a PET scan that are leaving the machines idle, so they're being pressed into use, instead.

In Canada, in fact, no other technology promises cancer patients such inequitable access as PET scanners, and, among provinces that have them, Ontario is the most restrictive of all. Its use of the scanners is so tightly controlled that when London doctors have been unable to fill their half of the PET/CT slots with cancer patients, researchers used the empty spaces to do experiments on laboratory-bred animals.

There is, of course, nothing untrue about the headline - but the implication is clear: animals - and animal experiments at that - are being given preference over people. And instead, the animal use is incidental. The headline could have read

Patients wait as PET scanners stand idle

which wouldn't have had quite the same impact.

It's all about selling the papers, after all.

An offer we couldn't refuse

At the airport this evening the TSA guy was warning everyone in the security line to make sure all their liguids, gels, lip balm, etc., was displayed in a quart-sized ziploc bag. "Chapstick? Really?" someone asked, and "Just to be safe," he replied and handed over a bag. Then he turned back to his post near the head of the line and sang out this somehow attractive yet amusing call:

If you have liquids or gels, and yet have no quart-sized ziploc bag, ask me for one, for I have many, and they are free.

Heading out

Blogging may be light over the holiday; I'll have access but I don't know about time.







Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers and happy weekend to the rest of you!

BFF

Okay, lots of people are posting pictures of the world leaders in Vietnamese national dress and making fun of the "Hogwarts" look.

I'm not making fun of the look.

I want to know what is this fascination that Bad Vlad has for our president. Back in June of 2001, when they first met, W had this to say:

And I look forward to my next meeting with President Putin in July. I very much enjoyed our time together. He's an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable leader. ...I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. There was no kind of diplomatic chit-chat, trying to throw each other off balance. There was a straightforward dialogue. And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship. I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch if I didn't trust him.

Just look at that picture. Just look at W's expression.

What is this fatal attraction?

Goodby, Robert

Robert Altman was born February 20, 1925 and died today. He was certainly one of the most influential directors in American film. Gosford Park, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, M*A*S*H ... and others not quite so good, like, say, Popeye. I'm glad I saw his last film in the theaters; minor Altman it may be, but it's excellent minor Altman.

A man at work had this to say:

I presume the funeral will be mainly small groups of his friends and coworkers, holding barely audible conversations we never get to hear the end of.

RIP, Robert. You made your mark.

Tales from Mesopotamia

Thanks to a commenter over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, here's a post from Treasures of Baghdad which ought to be required reading for all Americans.

Eleven posts from Iraqis, people, caught up in the mess we made trying to do whatever it was this administration thought they were about.

Check out the blogs, the ones Treasure quotes from and the ones in his blogroll.

Quite silly, really

From The Times Online (London):

A SPICY sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.

The sausages will now have to be labelled Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages to avoid any confusion among customers.

Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat. He said: “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages.”

Duh. I sincerely doubt anyone was in the least misled. Sometimes I despair of the silliness of my species.

Happy Birthday, François-Marie!

François-Marie Arouet was born this day in Paris, in 1694. Who, you may ask? He wrote under a pen-name - Voltaire.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

God is always on the side of the big battalions.

Love truth, and pardon error.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

And this, one of the most famous spurious quotations of all times:

The men who had hated "De l'Esprit", and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now [that the government had banned and burned his book]. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. 'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,' was his attitude now. -- The Friends of Voltaire (1906), by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym S[tephen] G. Tallentyre.

Houston Janitors Win!

Striking Houston janitors (see my post below) reached an agreement today! The Houston Chronicle reports:

Houston janitors ended a month-long strike today against the city's five major cleaning companies after reaching a tentative agreement that will guarantee higher wages, more work hours and medical benefits.

The settlement was hailed as a major victory for the 5,300 janitors who last year organized under the Service Employees International Union. It is the first citywide union contract since janitors formed a union last November.

"We're very happy, and our members are ecstatic," SEIU spokeswoman Lynda Tran said. "It's an incredible, incredible day and this is a major victory."

Under today's agreement, the SEIU janitors will get a 50.5 percent pay raise over the two-year contract. On January 1, pay will increase to $6.25 an hour, a 21 percent increase over current wage of $5.15 an hour. That will go up to $7.25 an hour on January 1, 2008, and $7.75 on January 1, 2009.

"I consider this a milestone in the city of Houston," Mayor Bill White told reporters. "And more importantly, something that will lift the lives of hard-working residents trying to get by each day."

The new contract also guarantees more hours of work for janitors, many of whom are currently limited to 4 hours of work a night. The settlement calls for that to go up to six hours a night within the next two years. Janitors will also receive health insurance starting January 1, 2009. Individual health insurance will cost $20 a month, while family insurance will be available for a cost of $175 a month.

If they worked full-time - that is 8 hours a day - that would be$16,120 instead of the $5,512 (or $11,138 if they were among the few actually allowed to work full-time) they're making now at 4 hours a night for $5.30. Even at 6 hours at the new salary rate they'll be making over $12,000 a year, depending on how many nights a week they work.

This is a triumph for labor, working folks, and America.

Haiku

I get a haiku every day from tiny words ... today's is particularly nice, I think:

thunderstorm -
inside the deserted temple
two stray dogs

--Vishnu P Kapoor

(I should perhaps point out that translated haikus often don't have the right syllable count. They're still quite often very lovely.)

Improper Elision

I'm feeling annoyed by the Lions' win, so I'm posting this, though I've let it go in the past.

"It" is the common warning spoken in all these prescription drug commercials, like the one Dr Robert Jarvik was just this moment in for Lipitor, which

is not for everyone. It's not for women who are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant.

Are nursing. Check.

Are pregnant. Check.

Are may become pregnant? Not quite.

This needs to be fixed by saying either "are pregnant" or "who may become" - the way it stands now, it's an infelicitous error that mildly annoys me every time I hear it.

Dr Jarvik, blame Paul McCallum.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Happy Feet. This movie is beautifully done - the animation is gorgeous. Antartica never looked so beautiful. The seals are incredible. I don't quite get the mix of accents amongst the Emperors, from Memphis's Elvis drawl to Noah's Scots (Hugh Jackman and Hugo Weaving, respectively), but the singing and dancing is infectious. The story line a bit darker than most animated movies, with a hopeful ending not, perhaps, entirely rooted in reality - but then, neither is a tap-dancing penguin, right?

DVD: Series 3 of The Irish RM, andThe Island. As I say below, that was a summer movie treatment of a very interesting, even powerful, notion - but Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson make anything worth watching, in my opinion.

TV: Heroes ... Oh, man. I have this awful feeling that Hiro has basically managed to frame himself for Charlie's murder, not to mention poor Ando, hanging around the diner where they'd told the cops they'd never been before, except there's Hiro's picture on the bulletain board from a while back and Hiro's gone... Oh, dear. Veronica Mars - an episode where she was wrong about a lot of people, again - but another really tense, well-done one. Two in a row!

Read: Oooooo, heaven. My copy of Analysing English Grammar by Klammer, Schulz, and Della Volpe arrived. Bliss... Finished The God Delusion, excellent (as always). Dabbled some in Trinities by Aidan Charles, of The Examining Room over at Science Blogs - he's such a lyrical writer, and these short pieces are beautiful. Also read a couple of old Doc Savages ... gosh, aren't they badly written? And I loved Doc announcing that there would be no explosion when atoms were split "because scientists have discovered it takes as much energy to split one as is released when it is split." Ah well... Brave New Fictional Worlds...

Grey Cup

Passion. Pouvoir. Fierté. Nos Alouettes!

Pride. Passion. Power. Our Alouettes!


The temperature is hovering around the freezing mark in Winnipeg on a clear night with little wind.

6:30. The first points of the 94th Grey Cup are on the board as Paul McCallum's 34-yard field goal has the B.C. Lions leading the the Montreal Alouettes 3-0 in the first quarter.

6:38. Another McCallum field goal. Now 6-0, still first quarter.

6:45 Another McCallum field goal. Cripes, somebody stop the man! Now 9-0.

6:57. The Lions are having the Alouettes for dinner. Ian Smart ran for a 25-yard touchdown and McCallum made the point: 16-0, second quarter.

7:20. Whew. At least the Als won't get skunked. Damon Duval just made a 43-yard field goal. 16-3, second quarter.

7:30. Argh. Will somebody please do something about McCallum??? Yet another 30+ yard field goal ... 19-3.



Second half underway.

8:09. Ah, this is more like it. A safety for the Alouettes - McCallum (that man!) concedes in the end zone. 19-5.

8:28. Closing the gap! Robert Edwards runs it in for Montreal, and Duval made the kick. Go Als! 19-12.

8:48. That McCallum man again! Another field goal. 22-12, in the fourth quarter.

9:00. Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Yet another field goal by McCallum (47 yards, no less). 25-12.

9:17. Another Montreal safety, but much too little much too late, I'm afraid. 25-14 with under 2 minutes to play.



9:28. Congrats to the Lions. They outplayed the Als from the beginning.

Paul McCallum tied a Grey Cup record with six field goals as BC went on to win their 5th Grey Cup in the team's 52-year history.

The Als struggled offensively, with fumbles and interceptions by Calvillo, and although they held the Lions to one touchdown, McCallum's golden night was too much.

Ah, well... Next year.

Pelosi: smarter than they're giving her credit for

Tip o' the hat to Coturnix for pointing me at this post from Mary Beth at Wampum with a reasoned look at Pelosi's support of Murtha and why it doesn't mean she's going down in flames, no matter how much the MSM and GOP want to think it does.

Luch

I got a fortune cookie at supper Friday night (it was my favorite Chinese restaurant). Now, of late fortune cookies are no such thing - they're aphorism cookies at best and vague descriptives usually...

Which reminds me - the small child at the table next to mine got this 'fortune': There is a strong executive streak in your makeup. "What's that mean?" she asked her father, who had read it to her. "You're bossy," he replied. "You'll be a CEO someday," interpolated her mother. Perhaps they're both right.

But back to my cookie. It was an actual fortune. I just don't know what it means.

You will be showered with good luch.

Better than bad, I suppose.

Connecting, W-style

David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper write in today's NY Times, describing another one of Bush's flying visits to a foreign country:

On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

“If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”

Ah, yes - they waved at each other, he in a car driving past them behind barricades watching his car drive past. The sad thing is, for Bush, that may be "connecting".

This is a president who goes through the world in blinders, seeing only what he chooses - or his handlers permit him - to see. I'm reminded of the way they wanted to keep protesting British away from anyplace Bush might see them, and how startled he was to hear disapprovement in Australia. It's the same as his only appearing in this country at carefully chosen Red venues with carefully vetted Red audiences, who cheer madly at his lines (in Singapore, the reporters say, "the response was tepid — the invited audience somehow missed several of built-in applause lines), and all those who disagree are kept a mile away. It's on a par with his famous declaration that he doesn't read newspapers. It's no wonder he's out of touch - no wonder he was surprised at the "thumpin'" his party just got.

Of course, this isolation makes it much easier for him to blindly, stubbornly insist on the correctness - the rightness of his chosen courses of action. It also probably accounts for his insisting over and over that those who disagree with him are traitors - to him and thus to the country. He doesn't see them, the disagreeing ones, even as closely as he saw the Vietnamese.

Luck?

I have to say, I don't quite know what questions about daily routine or controling your emotions measures how lucky you are, but then again, this is just another silly internet quiz, isn't it?

Your Luck Quotient: 50%

You have an average luck quotient. There's been times when you've been extremely lucky... but also times when you've been very unlucky. You probably know that you can make your own luck in life, if you're open to it. So listen to your intuition as much as you can. It's right more often than you might expect.

How Lucky Are You?

Insultingly Stupid, perhaps, but Refreshingly Honest

On the DVD of The Island, in the featurette, one of the special effects guys just told us how they were going to replace the expensive physical jet-bike with CG... because

That way we don't have to worry about safety, or physics, interfering with the action.

Can't say he doesn't admit it.

First the men on horses, then the judges...

Remember those scenes in movies like Fiddler on the Roof or Gandhi or others when a mob of Cossacks or cops or soldiers run people down in the streets? Hold that in mind for a moment while you contemplate a simple little figure.

$5.35 an hour.

That's an annual wage - working full time - of $11,138. (Not that most of these janitors actually work full time; most are only allowed to work 4 hours a night. Which means they make $5,512 - which is too criminal a wage to talk about. So let's pretend they're full-time workers.)

I dare you to try to raise a family in a major US city on less than $12,000 a year. Houston has an 8.25% sales tax - at least they don't tax food and medicine like Tennessee does - and an average house price of over $186,000. The cost of living is a little lower than average, but do you think it's low enough that $11,138 a year is enough to live on? Especially with no medical coverage?

But when a janitors' union holds a peaceful demonstration, this is how the police department handled it. And then the legal system contined the assault by setting the janitors bail of $888,888 each. That is not a typo. Their bail is more than they would make in 79 years. Meanwhile, people accused of murder are out on $30,000.

Wages for the working poor are a moral disgrace in this country. Houston's just added another layer.

And they keep on coming ... ba-ding!

No Blood for Hubris has a nice collection of political jokes. Several good chuckles, at the very least.

Sigh....

Just saw a commercial on BBC America for some concert by Robbie Williams - Britain's biggest musical event, they said. "Let him entertain you!" they shouted.

But most of the visuals were of the dozen or so nearly naked (strategically so) women who were doing highly choreographed lesbian-S&M flavored dance routines.

Who's entertaining? And whom?

Just wondering, since I won't be watching.

Happy Birthday, Margaret

Today in 1939, in Ottawa, Margaret Atwood was born.






Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descent,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to wher eyour body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

It's for science!

Bob Park has a comment on the news re red wine:

RED WINE: GOOD NEWS IF YOU RUN MARATHONS, AND YOU'RE A MOUSE.
Resveratrol, already shown to reverse the effects of obesity in
mice, as we reported on 3 Nov 06 , has also been shown to
increase their stamina. However, researchers say it's impossible
to drink that much wine. We can but try.

On so many levels

I have a new shirt. I love it. (I have the green one, but I'm showing you the red-on-white 'cause it shows up better. Yeah, it comes in many many colors and styles.)

It works on so many levels! It's Cornelius!! It's Che! It's Cornelius dressed like Che!!!! It's Roddy McDowall (okay, maybe that level is just for me)! It's evolution! It's a pun - it's a pun in a foreign language that's still a pun when it's translated! (How cool is that? Very cool.) It's cultural warfare on at least two levels just by itself. And it's well made, too!

This shirt rocks. Or rules. Or whatever the kids are saying now...

(And thanks, Bad Astronomer!)

No big point ... just - praising the ordinary?

Maybe it's just me.

A building in NYC caught fire, and a woman inside the building saved four of her children and almost died with the fifth, whom she apparently refused to leave behind. (They were both saved by the FDNY in the end.)

The Times says:

[The husband] praised his wife's bravery. "Every mother has the same nature," he said. "They save their babies first. They don't care about their lives."

Praise? Yes, okay. Even if the implication is that she couldn't help it, which makes it not so much bravery as instinct. But praise of his wife's bravery?

No. Either it's not praise at all, or it's praise of mothers' bravery, all mothers. (Which, by the way, is what I'm sure he meant - something like "Only a mother would do something that brave; the rest of us would get out of a burning building so fast...")

No huge point here; just that the Times might watch its verbs.

Not hungry, just not secure

Okay, nobody's measuring "hunger". We're measuring "food insecurity."

Maybe they have a point. Maybe we don't know if people who can't afford to put food on the table aren't really hungry - maybe they're eating out of trash cans or something. Maybe people who don't know where their next meal is coming from miraculously manage to find that meal anyway.

But maybe instead of "low food security" and "very low food security" - which, frankly, sanitize the problem into something we can ignore - we should label the categories "can't afford to buy food all the time" and "can't afford to buy food at all." Seems to me that solves the problem of "but are they really hungry" without denying the scariness of the problem. Not to mention hinting at how to solve it.

I mean - not everything is a security problem, guys.

The Spell Against Spelling

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

(tip o' the hat to The Language Log and Sarah Bagby)

Hubble keeps on earning its upkeep

The Hubble site puts it like this:

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that dark energy is not a new constituent of space, but rather has been present for most of the universe's history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Investigators used Hubble to find that dark energy was already boosting the expansion rate of the universe as long as nine billion years ago. This picture of dark energy is consistent with Albert Einstein's prediction of nearly a century ago that a repulsive form of gravity emanates from empty space. Data from Hubble provides supporting evidence to help astrophysicists to understand the nature of dark energy. This will allow them to begin ruling out some competing explanations that predict that the strength of dark energy changes over time.

Researchers also have found that the class of ancient exploding stars, or supernov used to measure the expansion of space today look remarkably similar to those ae,that exploded nine billion years ago and are just now being seen by Hubble. This important finding gives additional credibility to the use of these supernovae for tracking the cosmic expansion over most of the universe's lifetime. Supernovae provide reliable measurements because their intrinsic brightness is well understood. They are therefore reliable distance markers, allowing astronomers to determine how far away they are from Earth. These snapshots, taken by Hubble reveal five supernovae and their host galaxies. The arrows in the top row of images point to the supernovae. The bottom row shows the host galaxies before or after the stars exploded. The supernovae exploded between 3.5 and 10 billion years ago.

The AP's Matt Crenson wrote yesterday:

The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history.

This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday.

"This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute.

He and several colleagues used the Hubble to observe 23 supernovae _ exploding white dwarf stars _ so distant that their light took more than half the history of the universe to reach the orbiting telescope. That means the supernovae existed when the universe was less than half its current age of approximately 13.7 billion years.

Because the physics of supernova explosions is extremely well-known, it is possible for the astronomers to gauge not just their distance, but how fast the universe was expanding at the time they went off.

"This finding continues to validate the use of these supernovae as cosmic probes," Riess said.

Friedman

Milton Friedman is dead. He was a giant, who almost single-handedly undid Keynes's economic theories and ushered in the free-market laissez-faire capitalism modern conservatives love (though not necessarily those who are in charge of things just now, the "don't tax and spend like crazy" gang in Washington).

But his worldview was not all wine and roses, or beer and skittles, either.

He validated Maggie Thatcher's destruction of Britain. As Richard Parker points out, his "passionate calls for financial and securities market deregulation played no small role in ushering in the half-trillion dollar S&L fiasco of the 1980s and the deeply corrupt Wall Street stock market boom of the 1990s. His tax-reduction-at-all-costs policies helped lead to the nation's yawning budget deficits."

On the long list of things he abominated: rent controls; legal minimum wage rates; detailed regulation of industries such as banking or transportation; Social Security; licensing restrictions on any enterprise, occupation or profession; public housing programs; the military draft; publicly owned and operated toll roads.

So, yes. He was a giant. But his theories, put into practice, did more harm to more people than good.

WTF, pt 2

From the White House Photo Op, the current president to Prime Minister Olmert:

You might realize the opposition party won, won the Senate and the House. And what's interesting is, is that they're beginning to understand that with victory comes responsibilities.

Beginning to understand?

Well, hey, it's a start. You never made it that far.

WTF?

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said during an Oval Office photo op on Monday:

We in the Middle East have followed the American policy in Iraq for a long time, and we are very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East. We pray and hope that this policy will be fully successful so that this stability which was created for all the moderate countries in the Middle East will continue.

Pray and hope? That sounds about right... but what is this "stability in the Middle East" of which he speaks?

Here are a couple of pictures of the rings, taken by Cassini on November 13 and 15 - the F ring at the farthest edge, and then the A ring with the narrow Encke gap in it. (If the naming of the rings confuses you, check this Cassini/Huygens ring guide at the JPL page.

In these shots the F ring has some streamers (pulled out of the ring by the shepherd moon Prometheus as it passes) and kinky, narrow ringlets can be see in the Encke gap - the rings are dynamic, changing as the moons pass by. Select the image for a closer look at a larger shot.

Words to remember

To bereave a man of life... or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.

—Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers No. 84

Gays: Uniters not dividers!

Reporting on the gay pride parade celebration confined inside a stadium in Jerusalem, Jon Stewart pointed out that the top Muslim cleric in Palestine supports the Orthodox Jewish clergy who are protesting, and added:

Oh gays... Is there anything hating you can't solve?

Kilauea Nights

Over at the Questionable Authority is a lovely picture Mike took while doing some field work in Hawaii: Kilauea Nights - definitely worth a moment of your time to take a look at it.

(updated to fix the spelling, which was right there in front of my nose in the link the whole dang time....)

South African Stunner

Wow. I can't quite believe what the BBC just told me.

South Africa has made gay marriage legal.

The ruling African National Congress ordered all MPs to turn up and vote for the bill, despite the opposition of church and traditional leaders.

The bill provides for the "voluntary union of two persons, which is solemnised and registered by either a marriage or civil union".

During the debate before the vote, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told MPs: "In breaking with our past... we need to fight and resist all forms of discrimination and prejudice, including homophobia."

Last year, the Constitutional Court gave the government until 1 December 2006 to legalise same-sex weddings, after gay rights activists took the issue to court.

The ruling was based on the constitution, which was the first in the world specifically to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual preference.

South Africa.

Who'd have thought it?

Happy Birthday, Claude

Today in 1840 Claude Monet was born. One of the first Impressionists, Monet painted many series of paintings - the same subject from the same place under all different light and weather. Here for instance are two from the Houses of Parliament series (above) and two from the Poplars on the Epte series (below).

This year in Montreal! Cette année à Montréal!

My football team (gone North but not forgotten...)

All right, Als! 33-24 over the Argonauts! Whoo Hoo!

By the way ... the Alouettes used to play in Baltimore (where they were the Stallions), and they played for the Grey Cup in '94, and won it in '95 ... before the NFL drove the CFL back north of the border with its expansion/movements and the Ravens came to Baltimore. I had tickets to the Stallions - and I remember how people swore they'd never bow to the NFL, after that whole Cardinals fiasco. But it didn't take much tempt the city back to the NFL, and the Stallions went away...

But the Alouettes (and that's a meaner bird than the Raven) are a great team still.

Bill Beacon (CP) writes:

It's their fifth trip to the Grey Cup in seven years. That their only win so far in that span was in 2002 is what has kept a consistently strong Montreal team from being considered a dynasty and seeded doubts about the team's and quarterback Anthony Calvillo's ability to win the big games.

"We're excited, but man, I'm tired of losing them," said Calvillo, who has started at quarterback in all the preceding games. "I'm going to stress that. I'm going to go out and win because I remember 2002 - that parade and that feeling. The last two times we lost it wasn't a good feeling. We've been here so many dang times it shouldn't bother us anymore. That's how I'm going to approach it."

They'll meet the B.C. Lions (who beat the Rough Riders 30-21 in their final) in Winnipeg on Sunday the 19th for the Cup. It'll be a tough game: the Lions have 26 points to the Alouettes 20, with three more wins. But the Als can pull it off!

A few other notes:

Guard Scott Flory was again selected to the CFL All-Star Team. The 2003, 2005 and 2006 East Division Most Outstanding Lineman, Scott Flory has become the leader of Montreal’s offensive line. Flory was previously a CFL All-Star in 2002, 2003 and 2005, and an East Division All-Star in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

Als' quarterback Anthony Calvillo earned his fifth East Division All-Star selection this season, passing for 4,714 yards and 20 touchdowns.

Seven other Als made the East All-Stars, too:

Running back Robert Edwards (also in 2005)
239 carries, 1155 yards (3rd CFL), (4.8 avg), 17 touchdowns (1st CFL)

Slotback Ben Cahoon (also in 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)
99 receptions (2nd CFL), 1,190 yards (5th CFL), 4 touchdowns

Wide receiver Kerry Watkins (also in 2005)
86 receptions (3rd CFL), 1,153 yards (7th CFL), 5 touchdowns

Centre Bryan Chiu (also in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)

Defensive tackle Ed Philion (also in 2003, 2004, 2005)
14 defensive tackles, 2 sacks, 2 knockdowns, 1 forced fumble

Linebacker Timothy Strickland (also in 2003, 2004)
56 defensive tackles, 7 sacks, one interception, one fumble recovery, one forced fumble

Kicker Damon Duval
Field goals: 51/59 (86,4% - 1st CFL), 201 points (2nd CFL)

Passion. Pouvoir. Fierté. Nos Alouettes!

Pride. Passion. Power. Our Alouettes!

This year in Montreal! Cette année à Montréal!

Five years and counting...

The BBC is doing a story on British troops in Afghanistan, where "five years ago today the Taliban was driven from the Afghan capital and people were cheering. Today, it's a very different story."

"A resurgent Taliban takes on British soldiers..." It's a bleak story, despite the hopeful words from some of the soldiers. What the bloody hell are they - or we - still doing fighting the Taliban? How did we get sidetracked into Iraq before we finished the job against those who harbored those who actually had attacked us? Did we think it was easy, over so quickly?

Or was the current president never focussed on bin Ladin and the Taliban? Did he have other things on him mind? Was he telling us the truth when he said Osama bin Laden was "not that important", "not our priority", and that he was "truly not that concerned about him"?

Will he ever apologize to everyone who has died in the past five years in Afghanistan, back-burnered into an ellipsis of history by his Saddam obsession?

Will the Democrats ask for - and insist on - answers?

Or will we continue to ignore the War on Terror's first front - and those still fighting, and dying, and trying to win there?

Webster's Daily: Found Poetry

I found (well, had it pointed out to me) a new blog. It's called Webster's Daily, and its owner describes it as "Found poetry from the first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)." He promises us a "new definition every day."

An example? Sure:

Blink of ice, is the dazzling whiteness about the horizon, occasioned by the reflection of light from fields of ice at sea.

Or this one:

Hope, n.

A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.]

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: started to watch Spiral and discovered that the boxed set has no disc 2 - only two disc 4s! Grrrr. Also watched some Danger Mouse. And! all four seasons (but they're British seasons, so they're short, sob) of A Bit of Fry & Laurie - just plain hysterical.

TV: Veronica Mars; the Elections!!! on Comedy Central, of course; Richard Dawkins on CSPAN; MidSomer Murders; Dr Who

Read: Volume 1 of Planetes, and started The God Delusion

Dawkins in Lynchburg

I watched Richard Dawkins on CSPAN - his talk at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg. And yes, Lynchburg means there was a busload of guys from Liberty University - Jerry Falwell's place. Their professor asked a very basic question after identifying himself and saying he'd brought his students so they could "understand the atheistic mind" and not "created atheistic straw men"; the students kept filing up with pre-prepared questions (one guy even said, "in continuation of the other guy's question") and thought they could stump him. Some hope. I'm not Dawkins, and I didn't hear a question I haven't heard before.

These are just a few of them:

One Liberty guy said he had a two-part question. Part one was "Do you draw a distinction between blind faith and reasonable faith?"

Dawkins' answer: "Do I draw a distinction between blind faith and reasonable faith? No."

The guy then tried to claim that thinking a ball will fall the next time you drop it is just reasonable faith and there is no proof. Dawkins then told him that they seemed to have a terminology difference: that is reason based on evidence, not faith.

"Okay, then (you could hear it in his voice, the gotcha!) don't you know that based on our evidence of cause and effect there has to be a cause to the Universe!"

Like Dawkins has never heard that one before. He demolished it, talking about the Darwinian explanation for how complex entities come from simple beginnings - which are "a whole lot easier to accept than complicated things. Complicated things come into the universe late." Postulating God - "who if he exists must be very complicated indeed" - as the first thing in the universe is "shooting yourself in the conceptual foot".

Then a young woman from Liberty asked, somewhat belligerently: "How can you believe in extraterrestrials as higher beings and not believe in God?"

He started to repeat it, puzzlement in his voice, and she repeated it for him. "I understand the words of your question," Dawkins said, and then gave it a shot. "An extraterrestrial being, if it is an advanced being, came into being through slow, gradual degrees. That's a very sensible explanation. God isn't like that. That's a crucial difference. They didn't just happen."

"But God's outside of nature!" was the next attempt.

"Isn't that just too easy? You exempt yourself from having to explain anything. If you're satisfied with that sort of reasoning, you're welcome to it," Dawkins said, and turned to the next question.

Which was a RMWC student wondering what you do if you're in a religious family and community and want to leave but it's not really possible yet. Dawkins addressed that with empathy, concern, and some sorrow because he had to admit that he didn't know what the answer was. He talked about the gains that gays have made, and expressed his hopes that someday this "academic matter," "this cosmological viewpoint" would be relegated to the background. She then asked him if "anger was a common symptom in people" going through the deconversion process. He was startled at the notion and asked the audience if it was common - they let him know it was.

And then a Liberty guy asked about the fossils at Liberty that are 3,000 years old - maybe 5,000. He wanted to know what Liberty could do to prove to a scientist that that's how old they are, and also how long is cosmological time? Dawkins replied that if anyone believed dinosaurs were 3,000 years old and the earth 6,000, then they were out by "a factor of a million. Which is not a trivial error." It is like believing the distance between San Francisco and New York is 28 feet. He then answered the question about proof: find the rocks and date them by several different forms of radioactive dating. He added that this wouldn't happen, of course, and was very angry that an actual university could say something like that; "that is an educational disgrace, and is debuauching the very idea of a university education," and then advised all Liberty students to find a "proper university".

The repeated question (I believe he thought he'd answered it with the 28 feet bit) about cosmological time and ID allowed him to talk about how Darwinian evolution is non-random and how enormously deep in time just the existence of life goes, let alone "cosmological time".

In all, Dawkins was collected, acerbic, eloquent, and unflustered. I don't know if anyone from Liberty was convinced - you have to be pretty deeply mired in the mindset to be a Liberty student, let alone one brought by a Liberty professor to hear the enemy talk - but the RMWC students appreciated him.

New Template

I have switched over to the Blogger Beta - and just spent way too much time going through and tagging (they call it 'labelling') all the posts, and figuring out how to put the label list into the sidebar. I didn't go to the new Layout, because I've got way too much in my sidebars to mess with that!

Anyway, I hope the new system, with the labels, works out.

Carnival of the Godless

The Carnival of the Godless is up over at Debunking Christianity. My post The Identity of the One Ring was submitted but not chosen - don't know why (now I do, check the comments if you care, it's quite a reasonable reason); you might want to read it anyway - but that won't stop me from recommending the posts that were chosen, particularly

• Hell's Handmaidens's post on Faith: Evidence of things unseen?,
• Dr Biobrain's look at the concept of 'plyaing dirty for God',
• Daniel from GBLogBB's look at evangelicals against the religious right, and
• Daniel Dennett's wonderful "Thank Goodness", meditation on whether life-threatening illness brings you to God.

It's a good selection - check it out this (rainy) Sunday.

Which is this Day: Armistice or Veterans?

It's called "Veterans Day" here in the States - we renamed it, I guess, when it became clear that the War to End War hadn't and wouldn't. So it's Veterans Day, now - not Memorial Day, for the dead, that's in May, in the spring... Is that a bit perverse of us? Memory of the dead in the spring, when the earth is throwing out new life as fast as it can, tossing pastel branches of fruit trees and new green grass and birds and young beasts in field and wood... then we remember the dead. This day, the fall - the end of fall, hard on winter already, sometimes even snow (maybe always snow by now depending on where you live, but here only a year in a dozen) - now, when the earth prepares for the long sleep of winter, leaves red and orange like funeral pyres or bare limbs and yellowed grass, now we remember the living.

At least, we say we do. Well, I'm a veteran. I don't want just another day off work with no commitment behind it to actually give a damn about the veterans, especially those who come home from these modern wars all torn up, because medicine can save their bodies, only to find that no one in the government intends to take care of them. Veterans Day is nothing more than automobile sales, and servicemen get a 5% discount!, and wear your uniform, get in free! It's not go to a hospital and see what the price really is; it's not lobby the congress to restore the benefits cut in 1995; it's not give them their meds and counseling on time and affordably; it's not tell the VA to actively take care of vets instead of waiting for them to find out on their own what they're eligible for. And it's most certainly not the government actually giving a damn.

We don't need Veterans Day. We don't need people paying lip service to vets while ignoring them in the VA hospitals or on the street corners. We don't need to mythologize veterans, turn them into some great symbol of our nation's righteous aggression while we forget their humanity. We don't need a holiday that glorifies war by glorifying soldiers.

Armistice Day all too quickly became a symbol of a failed hope - a hope that we could learn to live with each other. But that hope is worthy of more honor than the cynical ploy of talking about how we honor the veterans while ignoring their needs and plotting to make more of them.

Armistice Day is usually marked by the simple and lyrical "In Flanders Fields". I know you know it - I used to post it every year on my division's internal web site, back when I maintained that at work. I wouldn't this year... I just reread the poem over on Orac's site and I was immediately struck by how passionately the narrator wanted the war to go on. "Take up our quarrel with the foe," he says, and "if ye break faith with us who die." It's quite beautiful, perhaps, but I don't think I know any longer what that poem is really about. Anyhow, it's more a Memorial Day poem, I think. It's about the dead.

Here's my poem for Veterans Day - or Armistice Day, if you prefer:


1916 seen from 1921
by Edmund Blunden

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I,
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none's at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary'’s shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

Not my job

My father just sent me this. Too funny:

A nice summary

I just got this from the state Democratic Party chairman (emphasis mine):

Republicans and some in the media will blame Bush and Iraq for GOP losses in Maryland and across the nation. What that argument is designed to hide is this: Iraq, Katrina, the culture of corruption, deception and hyper-partisanship is who the Republicans are and what they try to do. These were not mistakes. They are the result of being and implementing what it means to be Republican.

The voters rejected those values.

Sums it up pretty neatly.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Carl!

Carl Sagan was born today (well, no - he was born on November 9th, 1934, in Brooklyn.

I'm sure I don't have to say anything about him, but if I did, I'd mention his insistence on putting cameras on space probes. Imagine Cassini without cameras...

He was a national treasure, no, a global - no, a specific treasure and he's missed.

Veterans Day reading

Veterans Day doesn't get a lot of respect in this country. I'll look at that later, but for now, here are a few posts to hold you.

Effect Measure has a short meditation, and Edna St Vincent Millay's great poem which begins

I shall die
but that is all
I shall do for Death

Orac has a post as well, a video and Flanders Fields.

Updated at 4;17 to add

Olvlzl has a very short but heartfelt post at Echidne's place.

And here are two pieces from My Left Wing, Betsy's Dear America: Letters Home, and it's simple IF you ignore the complexity's Sabbath Time #66 - Victories and Losses

And again at 7:15 for this
A great Daily Kos diary entry on Canada in WWI.

And from Thought from Kansas, Woodrow Wilson's last Armistice Day speech

Read them and remember.

Inclusive religion, Fry & Laurie style

My complete collection of "A Bit of Fry & Laurie" came Thursday, and I was watching it this morning, and they did this funny sketch about religion in schools (British schools have mandatory religious lessons, or at least they did - and there are still a lot of faith schools*, with the nod to minorities being that they can have their very own faith schools):

Tony Radcliffe is headmaster of Lanark Primary School in Thurloe. The school has 84 pupils of mixed race, religion, gender and shoe size. So how does he deal with religious instruction at the school's morning assembly?

And then we see the kids singing their morning hymn:

We worship you, o god or gods,
Whoever you may be.
We realise that you operate
Supernaturally.
We thank you for the birds and bees,
For creatures live or dead.
But if you actually don't exist,
Then ignore what we've just said.
A-ah.

Lovely.

The skit moved on to say that Radcliffe had decided he needed to meet the needs of all his pupils, that "any religious package that we offer must take account of all those differences under a basic overarching umbrella... What we've done is to sweep away all these old divisions and basically invent an entirely new religion. A kind of religious Esperanto, if you like."

This being Fry & Laurie, of course it develops that the kids have already developed heresies...

But the basic idea is pretty useful for those who want to sneak religion into the classroom.

* I recently read in the Guardian that there is a problem with people trying to get their kids into C of E schools to avoid the inner-city community schools. People are the same all over...

a beauty from Hubble

M51 was cataloged in 1773 by Charles Messier (in his famous 'things that shouldn't be mistaken for new comets' list - number 51, hence the name), and later, in 1845 when telescopes were more advanced, it was drawn by Lord Rosse in wonderful detail considering the times.


And in 2005 Hubble took this photograph, the most detailed yet of NGC1594 (M51) and its companion NGC1595 (which Messier considered part of M51:

I and the Bird

I and the Bird #36 is up at Words and Pictures. The presentation's lovely and the posts are engaging. Check it out.

This is funny

I can't help it - this just makes me laugh: despite what everyone (yes, Speaker Pelosi, this means you) said, everyone that Stephen Colbert interviewed as part of his "Better Know a District" series - every one of them, including the challenger who came when the actual Representative wouldn't - every one of them won.

Every one of the 28 won.

That really is funny.

The Governor Wins

Lots of people have been trash-talking Howard Dean for the past few years, ridiculing his "50 States" strategy and his reaching out to the grass roots - and net roots - of the party.

Guess what?

He did it. It worked.

Democrats fielded contenders everywhere and won seats no one thought they'd win - and lost not one House seat. Spreading the money into states where Democrats had conceded in the past - Missouri, Florida, Kentucky - Dean's strategy energized local races and won a decisive majority of both governorships and state legislatures.

Good work, Governor.

And let's give him more to work with in 2008 - contribute to the DNC.