GM

Robert Reich captures my feeling about GM. Well, almost. His second paragraph starts with "What?" Mine is more like "What the hell?" But still:

GM just announced it was laying of 21,000 more of its workers, as a means of assurring the Treasury Department the company is worthy of more bailout money. A Treasury official was quoted as saying approvingly that the goal is a "slimmed-down" GM.

What? Having General Motors or Chrysler cut tens of thousands of jobs in order to be eligible for a government bailout reminds me of "saving" Vietnam by bombing it to smithereens. Aren't we giving these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to save jobs? If not, we're just transferring money from taxpayers to GM and Chrysler bondholders and shareholders....

The purpose of any auto bailout ought to be to help American auto workers keep their jobs, regardless of whether they work for GM or Toyota or anyone else. Or if they lose their jobs, help them get new ones that pay almost as well. Yet we’re doing exactly the opposite: We're paying GM and Chrysler billions of taxpayer dollars to keep them afloat while they cut tens of thousands of American jobs and slash wages.

NPM: Sparrow Hills

Well, I'll end National Poetry Month with this one. It's better in Russian - the translation's mine, and I'm not totally satisfied with it. It's Georgy Adamovich's "Vorobyovy Gory" - "Sparrow Hills".

Боробьевы горы Георгий Адамович

Звенит грамоника. Летят капели.
"Не шей мне, матерь, красный сарафан".
Я не хочу вина. И так я пьян.
Я песню слушаю под тенью ели.

Я вижу город в голубой купели,
Там белый Кремль - замоскщорецкий стан,
Дым, колокольни, стены, царь-Иван,
Да розы и чахотка на панели.

Мне грустно, друг. Поговори со мной.
В твоей России холодно весной,
Твоя лазурь ситрается и вянет.

Лежит Москва. И смертная печаль
Здесь семечки лущит, да песню тянет,
И плечи кутает в цветную шаль.



An accordion plays, children swing in sync:
"Don't sew for me a red dress, please."
I don't want wine - I've had enough to drink.
I listen to the song in the shade of fir trees.

I see the city spread on a blue plate
The white Kremlin there - the Zamoskvoretsky vault,
Smoke, and bell towers, walls, Tsar-Ivan-great
Yes, and roses and disease on the asphalt.

I'm melancholy. Talk with me, my friend.
Your Russian springs are cold. At winter's end
Your blue skies fade and wither before long.

There lies Moscow. Here deathly grief is all:
It shells sunflower seeds, drags out the song,
And wraps up shoulders in a brightly colored shawl.

Half outta three ...

I haven't picked on Alex in a while (and as I've said before, if he didn't get such a kick out of rubbing contestants' faces in their mispronunciations of, especially, French, I wouldn't), but today was a good one. The answer was "Among the Ukrainian rivers that flow into this sea are the Bug, the Dniepr, and the Dniestr". (The question is, of course, "What is the Black Sea?")

Alex said "Boog, Dneeper, and Dneester". If he's pronouncing them like a Russian, he got one right (the Bug) - well, almost. Russian has final devoicing, so it's more like Book (with an oo like fool [buk]. The other two are Dnyehpr [dnʲɛ'pr] and Dnyestr [dnʲɛ'str].

But if he's pronouncing them like a Ukrainian, he blew all three of them. It should be Boo [buɦ], Dneepro [dnʲi'pro], and Dnestro [dnʲi'stro].

(And of course, if he's pronouncing them like an American, it's "bug, dnyeper, and dnester".)

NPM: October

This is Edward Thomas's October, because it's only spring in the Northern Hemisphere...

The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

Sounds the same... not!

Sanjay's Cowbirds in Love has a cute strip today that plays on the difference between homographs and homophones. (Spelled the same, pronounced the same ... when the word is both, it's a homonym.)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Last night at 11:21 the blinds in my bedroom window began rattling like mad. Then the wind came in, much harder than the fan. The heat had broken.

I got up and turned off the fan. Gwen came back in and jumped up on the bed - she hates the fan. (Maybe if I had to use it more than four or five days in a row in spring she'd get used to it, but I don't, so she hasn't.) We lay there, me and the cat, feeling the cool breeze, and then slept.

This morning it's 64F (17C). Projected high: 63 (oops). Like that for the next five days, except Friday when it might get into the high 70s(~25) . After five days of 94 (34), this is soooooo nice.

What a difference a day makes...

Sure, last week Rick Perry was threatening to secede from the evil Federal Government oppressing the great state of Texas. But today he wants aid to fight the swine flu.

(also, just a thought - illegal immigrants aren't spreading this. People who are flying out of Mexico City to New York or New Zealand are.)

Two things...

I don't often watch the local news, but it was on today. Two thing caught my attention.

The first was a poll (it was unclear if this was a national ABC poll or a local one) claiming that only "7% of Americans think schools should close because of swine flu". I don't know what that means: schools with documented cases should stay open? schools with no cases but in a state with cases? schools in states with no cases? I also don't know something else that I think may well play a huge role in such a result: how would people respond if they were told that they could stay home with their kid without losing their job, or even being docked?

The second thing ties into the front page of today's Washington Post, which had a huge story, carrying over inside, about local black churches hoping for the president to join them:

the city's scores of predominantly black churches, which are in the mix for the first time. Their pastors and members are asking: Will Obama choose one of us? Like so many choices the first family is making in this city, the search for a church has spurred discussions about the state of race relations and a hot competition for its mark of approval. Will the Obamas affiliate themselves with a black church, which could signal that they are still comfortable making their spiritual home one that is predominantly African American?

Well, I don't care if he goes to a black church or a white one or a thoroughly integrated one. What I do care about is, will he join a church like "the Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ, a church that is theologically liberal and not opposed to same-sex marriage" or will he join a church led by one of the many black pastors out in force today and all over the evening news, protesting the District's possible decision to recognize the legal marriages of same-sex couples from other states.

That position is mean-spirited and hateful. Pure and simple. If a couple moves here from Iowa or Massachusetts or elsewhere to work in the government, why should they suddenly become somehow unmarried? Nobody is asking those pastors to marry couples in their churches - actually, nobody is, with this motion, asking anybody in DC to marry anybody - and they're also perfectly free to despise and drive out any gay couple foolhardly enough to try to worship their god. What business is it of theirs if the civil government decides that someone they wouldn't marry is, in fact, married? The government does that to churches all the time.

If Obama picks a local black church, I hope he has the sense to steer clear of the hatemongers and choose those who reflect the love of the god they worship.

Now if only Norm gets hit by a lightning bolt...

A fellow blogger said he was glad the Democrats didn't have 60, because he thinks it's important that they be able to win over the rational Republicans instead of having a party-line vote every time. "You ought to be able to convince at least a few of the other side," he said.

I kind of agree with him - though when the "other side" acts like the GOP has been lately, one begins to wonder what the point of bipartisanship is: buying off on crap just to say you got some of them to vote with you?

At any rate, it's about to be moot. Arlen Specter just switched parties.

And you know? With all those blue-dog Democrats around, we are convincing the rational opposition.

(8:30) update: See Paul Krugman for a word:

What strikes me, however, is the extent to which this is a self-inflicted wound. If Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth weren’t so diligent about enforcing supply-side purity; if Republicans hadn’t made Rush Limbaugh the effective head of the party; Specter might still be GOP, and the Obama agenda much more limited.

Instead, though, we have a party that seems to be in a death spiral: the smaller it gets, the more it’s dominated by the hard right, which makes it even smaller. In the long run, this is not good for American democracy– we really do need two major parties in competition. But I’ll settle for getting that back after we get universal health care and cap-and-trade.

Me, too.

NPM: The Blue Jay

Drawing to the end of National Poetry Month... today I offer DH Lawrence (not a man I think of as a poet, usually, but he wrote rather a lot of it).

The blue jay with a crest on his head
Comes round the cabin in the snow.
He runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal,
Turning his back on everything.

From the pine-tree that towers and hisses like a pillar of
      shaggy cloud
Immense above the cabin
Comes a strident laugh as we approach, this little black dog
      and I.
So halts the little black bitch on four spread paws in the snow
And looks up inquiringly into the pillar of cloud,
With a tinge of misgiving.
Ca-a-a! comes the scrape of ridicule out of the tree.

What voice of the Lord is that, from the tree of smoke?

Oh Bibbles, little black bitch in the snow,
With a pinch of snow in the groove of your silly snub nose.
What do you look at me for?
What do you look at me for, with such misgiving?

It's the blue jay laughing at us.
It's the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs.

Every day since the snow is here
The blue jay paces round the cabin, very busy, picking up bits,
Turning his back on us all,
And bobbing his thick dark crest about the snow, as if darkly
      saying:
I ignore those folk who look out.

You acid-blue metallic bird,
You thick bird with a strong crest
Who are you?
Whose boss are you, with all your bully way?
You copper-sulphate blue-bird!

So true

Over at You Don't Say John MacIntyre weighs in on the threat of Twitter, and in his usual sensible manner:

People who waste their time and yours on Twitter would, lacking Twitter, waste their time and yours in some other manner.

NPM: Erthe toc of erthe

This little piece is from the 12th century.

Erthe toc of erthe, erthe wyth woh.
Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh.
Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh.
Tho heuede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

Earth took from earth, earth with woe.
Earth other earth to the earth drove.
Earth laid earth in an earthen trough.
Though earth had earth from earth enough.

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science blogs on how nocturnal mammals see in the dark: Nocturnal animals face an obvious challenge: collecting enough light to see clearly in the dark. We know about many of their tricks. They have bigger eyes and wider pupils. They have a reflective layer behind their retina called the tapetum, which reflects any light that passes through back onto it. Their retinas are loaded with rod cells, which are more light-sensitive than the cone cells that allow for colour vision. But they also have another, far less obvious adaptation - their rod cells pack their DNA in a special way that turns the nucleus of each cell into a light-collecting lens. Their unconventional distribution is shared by the rods of nocturnal mammals from mice to cats. But it's completely opposite to the usual genome packaging in the rods of day-living animals like primates, pigs and squirrels, and indeed, in almost all other eukaryotic cells.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy celebrates Hubble's 19th anniversary: On April 20, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery roared into orbit, carrying with it the most famous observatory of all time: the Hubble Space Telescope. To commemorate this 19th anniversary, the Hubble folks have released this wonderful image of interacting galaxies called Arp 194. There’s quite a bit going on here! First, take a look at the upper spiral galaxy, located 600 million light years from Earth. If you look at the top spiral arm, you’ll see another galaxy nucleus lying along it; it’s the bright orange patch above and to the right of the big spiral’s center. It looks like that’s the remains of a galaxy that is in the process of colliding with the big spiral (the other bright galaxy — the compact spiral directly to the right of the big spiral’s center — appears to be a background galaxy, coincidentally seen nearby).


• Back at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed tells us about a beautiful transitional species, the walking seal: Seals and sea-lions gracefully careen through today's oceans with the help of legs that have become wide, flat flippers. But it was not always this way. Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for. Now, a beautifully new fossil called Puijila illustrates just what such early steps in seal evolution looked like. With four legs and a long tail, it must have resembled a large otter but it was, in fact, a walking seal. Natalia Rybczynski unearthed the new animal at Devon Island, Canada and worked out that it must have swam through the waters of the Arctic circle around 20-24 million years ago. She named it Puijila darwini after an Inuit word referring to a young seal, and some obscure biologist. The skeleton has been beautifully preserved, with over 65% of the animal intact, including its limbs and most of its skull.


• David at Irregular Webcomic! talks about Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley: It was only at Halley's insistence, and ongoing cajoling in the face of repeated attempts to abandon the project, that Newton eventually published what would become perhaps the most important book ever in the entire history of science: The Principia Mathematica. Not only did Halley make sure Newton didn't give up on this project, he paid for the publication out of his own pocket. A world today without Edmond Halley would have been almost the same as a world without Isaac Newton. Only leaving out Halley would have taken away a lot of other stuff too.


• And, on a lighter note, Jessisca from Magma Cum Laude tells us what geologists wear in the field: In the field, "geologists wear gray and khaki." And it's true, as you can see by the lovely photo of my foot in Guatemala. (There are very few photos of me because I wasn't exactly photogenic after the whole food poisoning and not eating for three days episode.) There have been a few field gear posts going around recently, and I thought I'd contribute a few photos of myself in full field attire.
  

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

TV: Scrubs - clearly winding down and tying up loose ends - Janitor marrying, Turk getting chief of surgery, Jordan admitting she loves Perry... Better Off Ted - still very good. The no1 Ladies' Detective Agency - the interplay between the characters is better, and the cases aren't getting wrapped up in one episode - this miniseries is definitely improving as it goes along, and it was very good to start with. Frequency - I don't know how I missed this film (given that Dennis Quaid's in it), but I enjoyed it very much. Unlike the dreadful Premonition, which takes much the same premise but hacks it up horribly. Linda suffers from "the dangers of unbelief"? "Nature abhors a vacuum - even a spiritual one"? And all is well because he changed his mind about cheating and she's pregnant? With a baby that will never know its father? And she caused his death? (If he hadn't pulled into the road to come back, or stopped in the first place, he'd never have been hit by the truck.) Sheesh. At least in Frequency, the protagonists manage to fix the problem - and the fix the next one and the next one. Unless you just can't miss a Sandra Bullock movie, miss this one, with its sappy vague theism and its free-will-is-all-very-well-but-God/Fate-is-stronger + babies-make-everything-good message.

Read: Left Bukhta Radosti at work Friday, so haven't finished it (it's pretty good so far!). A Tale of One Bad Rat, an intense graphic novel people over at slacktivist recommended.

Differences

It's that time of year again. Last week it was 34 (F - 1 C) when I left in the morning, 85 (29) when I got home. You know - if you don't wear a jacket and gloves when you leave, you freeze, but then you have to lug it home 'cause it's too hot to wear it. Saturday, the low was 60 (15). Tonight, 69 (20). It's 92 (33) in the afternoon...

It won't last, we'll be back in the 60s soon, but only for a few weeks. Right now, though, it's miserable. This is the season I hate - this short preview of summer. The days are hot and humid, and the air conditioning isn't on yet - because it won't last. Switching the building's central system over three times in the spring would be far too expensive. And when it gets cold again at night the heat will be needed.

So right now I'm carrying the box fan from the bedroom to the living room and back again and waiting for the heat to break. When it does, we'll have a little while and then they'll come around one day and turn on the air conditioning. Because then summer will set in... and 34 will be a fond memory.

Poor Frank

I'm watching Cash in the Attic, as I sometimes do on Sunday morning, and the 60-year-old widower who wants to take up scuba-diving is being laughed at by the host, expert, and his own daughter, for his affection for a couple of florid hand-painted Staffordshire vases that have been living in his closet. He bought them at auction and loves them, but his wife hated them... While they're bullying him into putting urging him to put them into the auction (I'm seeing a scuba mask!) the host says "They just seem so out of keeping with the rest of the furnishings here."

Frank doesn't respond to that, but I can't help but think: perhaps those gaudy vases are the only thing in the house that actually reflect his taste. He's put a very high reserve on them (three times the estimate!) and I hope they don't sell. He's so very fond of them.

Ha! They doubled their estimate, but didn't make their reserve. "You don't mind taking them home, do you?" says the host. "He wants to take the home!" the daughter accuses. "We should have sold them; sixty-five pounds. We should have sold them."

But Frank's just smiling. "No," he says simply. "I'm glad."

Me, too.

NPM: Herons step with care

Another by ED Blodgett:


Herons step with care
     across the shore: they weave
into the sand their bare
     calligraphy and leave.

How many meteorites?

I recently did a presentation on punctuation. One of the rules was about commas in dates: If there's a comma before the year, there should be one after it, too. For instance, this (from a correspondent at The Loom) is incorrectly punctuated:

On September 28, 2004 our daughter Christina (a.k.a. Pinky) was born.

But why? I mean, it's clear, isn't it? Sure... but how about this, from the same source:

On September 28, 1969 meteorites fell in Murchison, Australia.

Wow. That's a lot of meteorites!

Happy Birthday, Ella

Ella Fitzgerald was born today in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917. Recording more than 200 albums, many still available - or available again on cd - The First Lady of Song was one of the most influential jazz singers ever. Her voice spanned three octaves and she had a legendary purity of tone and phrasing, and a tremendous improvisational ability, especially in scat. I grew up listening to her, and one of my favorite albums is the wonderful Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Ella & Louis, Ella & Louis Again, and Porgy and Bess.

Entire?

I've been seeing commercials for The Prayer Cross - a gaudy bit of crystal and sliver-plating featuring "a special crystal" in the center: "when held up to the light, the entire Lord's Prayer is revealed!"

Except, no. It ends at "deliver us from evil." The Lord's Prayer I grew up reciting ends with a doxology: "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever."

In other words, this is a Roman Catholic cross.

(Or a cross for a genuine Biblical literalist, unlike those guys who claim to be but add the doxology on...)

Anyway, they're still advertising it as of this morning as "a perfect Easter gift". For next year, I guess...

NPM: My Loue in her Attyre

This madrigal was first printed in 1602.

My Loue in her Attyre doth shew her witt,
     It doth so well become her:
For eu'ry season shee hath dressings fitt,
     For Winter, Spring, and Summer.
No Beautie shee doth misse,
     When all her Robes are on:
But Beauties selfe shee is,
     When all her Robes are gone.

Amazing

Spotted this guy on I-95 today. A white-haired old guy (looked like Newt Gingrinch, but wasn't), in a new-looking Lexus "Luxury SUV" with Massachusetts plates. Wonder if he thinks twice about the interstate system, or returns his Social Security checks, or refuses his Medicare benefits? Nah, I don't, really...

How many strings?

This sentence, from Ann Hornaday's review of The Soloist, strikes me as very odd:

Downey plays Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who, always looking to feed the beast that is a regular column, happens upon Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) in downtown Los Angeles's Pershing Square, playing a dilapidated violin missing all but two strings.

I'm just not sure why she phrased it that. Why not "missing two strings"? Or, if she's afraid her readers won't know how many strings a violin has, "with only two strings"?

I don't know. It just strikes me as odd. "All but two" shouldn't be "two". A harp could be missing "all but two strings" - "all but" would be a significant number, 44 in fact. A sitar (with 21-23 strings) could be missing "all but two", or a dulcimer (15) - the "all but" would be much larger than the "two". A normal guitar, with 6 strings, would be oddly described that way; "with only two" would be more usual. And a violin, where "all but two" equals "two"? Just weird.

NPM: Easter 1916

I had a different poem up (I'll repost it tomorrow) but I'd forgotten. Clearly this is the poem for today... William Butler Yeats's Easter 1916

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Spring Means Nests

After the guys do their thing and the birds pair up, it's time to build a nest! (Obviously, this isn't the case where part of "their thing" is showing off the great nest they built.) I caught the motion of her flying into the tree (which I still don't know what it is) and look:



Don't see anything? Look closer (select for larger):



That eye is unmistakable. It's a robin, building her nest. Glad to see those blue plastic bags are being put to good use.

Sky Watch: New Moon and Morning Star

And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
(—"A Midsummer Night's Dream)

more Sky Watchers here

NPM: Feare no more the heate o' th' Sun

For today, his birthday, here's a song by William Shakespeare found in Cymbeline.

Feare no more the heate o' th' Sun,
     Nor the furious Winters rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast don,
     Home art gon, and tane thy wages.
          Golden Lads, and Girles all must,
          As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

Feare no more the frowne o' th' Great,
     Thou art past the Tirants stroake,
Care no more to cloath and eate,
     To thee the Reede is as the Oake:
          The Scepter, Learning, Physicke must,
          All follow this and come to dust.

Feare no more the Lightning flash.
     Nor th' all-dreaded Thunderstone.
Feare not Slander, Censure rash.
     Thou hast finish'd Ioy and mone.
          All Louers young all Louers must,
          Consigne to thee and come to dust.

No Exorcisor harme thee,
     Nor no witch-craft charme thee.
Ghost vnlaid forbeare thee.
     Nothing ill come neere thee.
          Quiet consumation haue,
          And renowned be thy graue.

Happy Birthday, Will

Today (most likely) in 1654 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon was born the Swan of Avon, the Bard, William Shakespeare.

Does anything need to be added to that? How does one choose which poem, which quote?

I can't. (Well, no ... I will for NPM. But it's just one of many.)

Go here to find your own.

Verb coining on Better Off Ted

The HR woman tells Ted, "The system just deleted you."

His response: "Can you relete me?"

NPM: On the Seashore

This poem is by Rabindranath Tagore. I like it very much, though I confess I puzzle over its meaning...

On the Seashore

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless
     water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds
     the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty
     shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and
     smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their
     play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets.
     Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships,
      while children gather pebbles and scatter them again.
     They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not
     how to cast nets.

The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile
     of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless
     ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking
     her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale
     gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
     Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked
     in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.
     On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting
     of children.

Rahm is wrong (and not Rahm alone)

Not about releasing the memos: that was right.

He's wrong when he says: "It's not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back" out of "any sense of anger and retribution," as he did on ABC's "This Week." (source)

He's wrong unless he means that we should go after them out of something other than a "sense of anger and retribution", at any rate. But he doesn't. He - and presumably his boss - are trying to have it both ways. The Bush administration was wrong, but so what? That's in the past. Let the dead bury their dead. Oh, and we're going to keep secrets too, so we don't want to start raking up all that old stuff. Let's just stay cool and look ahead.

Sure, those who get stuck in the past get, well, stuck there. But those who pretend the past never happened get blindsided by it - as Dmitri Volkogonov once said, "The past is not a shadow theatre. What rules there is not the ephemeral, but the irreversible."

And more importantly, Obama ran on setting wrongs right. We can't absolve those who tortured in our name because they're no longer in charge. There's a huge difference between not "looking back" and refusing to see; refusing to deal with the egregious crimes of the Bush administration will not serve any good ends. Rahm and Obama may want to go forward, but sometimes you can't go on until you've gone back and put right what was made wrong. Going on from the wrong place just gets you more wrong.

NPM: Stars

Today's poem is by Marjorie Pickthall

Stars

Now in the West the slender moon lies low,
And now Orion glimmers through the trees,
Clearing the earth with even pace and slow,
And now the stately-moving Pleiades,
In that soft infinite darkness overhead
Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread.

And all the lonelier stars that have their place,
Calm lamps within the distant southern sky,
And planet-dust upon the edge of space,
Look down upon the fretful world, and I
Look up to outer vastness unafraid
And see the stars which sang when earth was made.

For some values of "here" or "not"

Over at the Log, Geoff Pullum complained about the imprecision of the word "consonant" - more accurately, about saying "the two central consonants represented by what sounds like a clearing of the throat" as though the letters were somehow not representing the sound. At any rate, one of his commenters said

There is one and only one application of the knowledge of which letters have been designated "vowels" and which "consonants": to wit, preparation for play on Wheel of Fortune.

And in a perfect display of synchronicity, tonight saw a contestant trying to buy a Y. Then she laughed, Pat laughed, and she bought Os instead. Pat then said, "In real life I guess Y sometimes is a vowel, but not here."

If by "here" he meant "on Wheel of Fortune", then he's right. But if by "here" he meant "in this puzzle," he was wrong. And while the Os were undoubtedly more help with

_ICK_R_   DICK_R_    D_CK     __RKER

than the Y would have been, there is also no doubt that here Y is indeed (representing) a vowel.

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Dr. Isis at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess posts on Cairo, the Pyramids, and air: The first and last stops on our trip were to Cairo and Giza. Cairo is the most populous city in Africa. Including the surrounding metropolitan area, it is home to more that 17 million Egyptians. While tourism is certainly a staple of the local economy, Cairo is also an important manufacturing and financial center. Over the last several decades, population growth in Cairo has far exceeded available resources, a phenomenon known as hyperurbanization. As a result, Cairo is a patchwork of middle to upper middles class neighborhoods and neighborhoods with with no running water or electricity. In some places people have sought shelter in the crypts of local, ancient cemeteries. The people of Cairo generate more than 10,000 tons of trash each day, but only half of it is picked up and disposed of.


• Emily at The Planetary Society has the scoop on those ring shadows: What's that jaggedy dark stuff behind the brightest ringlet in the image? We're only a few months away from Saturn's equinox, the day when the Sun will pass through the plane of Saturn's rings. So to an observer standing on Saturn's rings, the Sun is beginning to set, and casting long shadows. We're seeing shadows cast from structure within Saturn's rings. COOOOOOOL. Once the first shock of amazement has worn off, questions start to arise. What's casting those shadows? Are those moons? Well, the first thing to ask is, how tall are the things that are casting the shadows?


• Ethan at Starts With A Bang blogs on pink galaxies: A number of these galaxies happen to be "face-on" to us, so we can really get a good glimpse of what's going on in their individual spiral arms. Many of them, like the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), are pretty unremarkable, and are just a dusty whitish-blue color. But if we take other, similar galaxies, like NGC 3184, we find something interesting. Specifically, we find a few areas in these spiral arms that are pink.


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology blogs on Asian cattle: Cattle are another of those groups of animals that, while they're familiar and while we take them for granted, are really pretty incredible. The size, power and awesome appearance of many wild cattle never fails to amaze me. Markus Bühler (of Bestiarium) has been good enough to share these photos he took of Banteng Bos javanicus and Gaur B. gaurus at Berlin Zoo.


• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress Related blogs on hot rocks, thermal insulation, and why magma doesn't always act as we expect: The cores of mountain belts formed by continental collisions often contain metamorphic rocks, formed when sediments were buried in the collision and transformed by heat and pressure. But the heat and pressure don't happen simultaneously - rocks can be buried (and increase in pressure) much faster than they can heat up. When the rocks are not allowed to heat up significantly, this process can create blueschists, the high pressure/low temperature metamorphic rocks formed in subduction zones. In continental collisions, subduction stops, and the metamorphic rocks sit around at depth, heating up until a new geothermal gradient forms. When I first read Philip England and Alan Thompson's 1984 paper that modeled the temperature-pressure evolution of rocks in a continental collision, metamorphic rocks suddenly made sense. (And I understood why my interpretation of my senior thesis rocks was simplistic and wrong. Oh, well.)

Enjoy!

NPM: On the Field of Mars

Today's poem is Georgy Adamovich's "On the Field of Mars" (again, my translation)

По Марсову полю (Георгий Адамович)

Сияла ночь. Не будем вспоминать
Звезды, любви, -- всего, что прежде было.
Пылали дымные костры, и гладь
пустого поля искрилась и стыла.

Сияла ночь. Налево над рекой
Остановился мост ракетой белой.
О чем нам говорить? Пойдем со мной,
По рюмке коньяку, да и за дело.

Сияла ночь. А может быть, и день,
И, может быть, февраль был лучше мая,
И заметенная, в снегу; сирень,
Быть может, шелестела, расцветая,

Но было холодно. И лик луны
Насмешливо смотрел и хмурил брови.
"Я вас любил... И как я ждал весны,
И роз, и утешений, и любви!"

Ночь холодней и тише при луне.
"Я вас любил. Любовь еще, быть может..."
--Несчстный друг! Поверьте мне,
Вам только пистолет поможет.


The night gleams. We won't recall
The stars, or love - anything which went before.
Smoking bonfires blaze, and the smooth surface
Of the field sparkles in the hoar.

The night gleams. To the left, above the river,
The bridge ends in a white rocket.
What is there to talk about? Come with me,
There's a flagon of cognac, and then to business.

The night gleams. And too, perhaps, the day;
And maybe February was better than May,
Covered though it was in snow; the lilacs,
Maybe, rustled in the breeze, and bloomed,

But it was cold. And the moon's face
Looked down mockingly and furrowed its brows.
"I loved you... And how I waited for spring,
And for roses, and for comfort, and for love!"

The night is cold and quiet in the moonlight.
"I loved you. And there's love still, may be..."
--O my unfortunate friend! Believe me:
A pistol's all that can help you now.

The Week in Entertainment

TV: House... by the way, contemplating Kutner's suicide, I have decided that (a) it makes no sense and (b) they owed Kal Penn some decent screen time. It's not like they didn't know he was leaving. This week's ep: oh, now they give Cameron and Chase screen time - so Cameron can be an idiot. And I do like the way the digital signal crapped out over and over, and the CW - with no dialog, only the music in the soundtrack - overrode the basic channel for the last fifteen minutes. Sweet digital. I bet all the 24 fans are pissed as hell. So I didn't even actually see the payoff to the oh-so-important Cameron-the-idiot story except apparently she changed her mind, judging by the final montage. At least I didn't miss Hugh Laurie playing the piano and the harmonica. Scrubs - Janitor married Lady! Yay! Better Off Ted - "Do you think wildly erratic mood swings could be a side effect of the energy patch?" "Hard to tell... this is what happens when the company will only pay for testing on drunk frat guys." I hate that this show will probably not be picked up. #1 Ladies' Detective Agency - this was a good episode; darkening just slightly as Precious gets her feet under her and business picks up. Very nice. Ashes to Ashes - still liking it. Next week, finale (ratzafrakin short Brit series!) and I wonder how they'll play it. Appalachia pt 1 - EO Wilson points out a home truth "Ordinarily when we say history we mean the arrival of the first colonists, in the last 1700s for Appalachia, and then, if we're going to be real generous, we try to take into account the Native Americans, who may have arrived as much as 10,000 years ago..." He - and this excellent episode - goes on to point out that the land has a history much older than that. And a wonderful Alan Rickman movie called Blow Dry - don't know how I missed it before! Funny and touching and just hearing Alan Rickman say things like "He could and all".

Read: Birds of Prey by JA Jance - not too bad, really. That finishes up the Jance my friend gave me. Conclusion: pretty good writer, books are intriguing, JP Beaumont is a well-realized character if an occasionally irritating man. Began reading Bukhta radosti (Bay of Joy) by Andrei Dmitriev. I don't read as fast in Russian as in English, so not through with it yet, though it's not by any means a huge tome.

Spring means Color

Male birds put on their breeding plumage and begin singing, claiming territory and attracting mates. In the park, the goldfinch is back (a goldfinch, anyway), his scruffy winter plumage all bright and shiny, so loud and so tiny. Redwing blackbirds, their shoulder patches blazing, congregrate and scuffle - five males ranging over territory one, or maybe two, of them will hold over the summer. And the females come... Cardinals shed their winter gray and flame-red whistle from the branches. Robins, looking much the same as they always do, go berserk, chasing each other, and even chasing mockingbirds, which those gray devils must find a new and strange experience. Grackles also gather and begin pairing off. Finches and song sparrows give it their all, too. Even the geese split off from their flocks... New life, celebrated in new song.

NPM: Where is the soul to find

This koan is by ED Blodgett:

Where is the soul to find
     its truest orient
if not within the mind
     of cats, when they consent?

NL: Starship Troopers

This time we read Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

I'll be honest. I read this, not when it came out (I was only 4!) but in high school. I remember quite liking it. I read it again, some time later, and didn't. Like it, that is (and I was even a sergeant at the time). Oh, it's not the most awful of Heinlein's books - it's not the one that made me stop reading him all together. In fact, like most of his early stuff or his juveniles, it's quite readable.

Oh, if you've read other stuff by him, you can see some of his weird and unattractive ideas hanging around. As is usual for the earlier novels, women are sort of not really there. Sure, there's Johnny's crush, the one that motivates him to join the military in the first place. But she's not a major character, and the whole pedestal/sexual willing submissiveness that poisons later books doesn't show, except for the fact that the combat troops are exclusively male. And there's Johnny's mother, who conveniently dies so that his father can discover his masculinity again. And the obnoxious girl in the civics glass who is there so DuBois can deliver his lectures ("My mother says violence never settles anything!" "Tell that to the city fathers of Carthage." Of course violence settles things; the question is, does it settle them well, considering that it usually settles them permanently?) But they aren't really characters. And Heinlein's desire to limit the franchise is less obnoxious in this book that in the ones where he wants only, say, people who can solve quadratic equations in their heads to be able to vote. Of course, there is that old "flogging is good for kids" and "capital punishment is good for society" thing...

But I'm not going to talk abut Starship Troopers. Instead, I'm going to recommend a book heavily influenced by Heinlein, whose author acknowledges his debt in the afterword even as he offers us something far, far better than anything Heinlein ever wrote.

The book is John Scalzi's Old Man's War. Like Troopers, it's the story of a man who enlists in the army, not knowing exactly what he's in for, and who finds himself fighting in battles across the galaxy to defend humanity from aliens. Like the cap troopers, the combat infantry of the CDF are enhanced - in Troopers by their armor, in Old Man's War by genetic manipulation as well as technology. And in both books, the enemy is alien, allowing their dehumanization to proceed much more easily - and with far different implications. Here, as in everything else, Scalzi's exploration of the theme is deeper and more profound than Heinlein's.

That the soldiers in the CDF are all over 75 means they're much more complex people, with far different reactions to what they encounter than the high school kids of Heinlein's book. (Not to say teenagers aren't complex, but they aren't ... as fully formed; plus Heinlein doesn't want complexity.) Old minds in bodies made young again react differently than young minds do.

Also, women are fully represented in Scalzi's world and in his military. Women fight alongside the men. Interpersonal relationships - sex, love, family - are important John's love for his wife dead Helen and the woman who was given Helen's genes are important elements of the story. (And they never flog their daughter.)

Scalzi is also interested, and deeply, in the politics of the Colonial Union, the organization that runs the CDF, prosecutes the wars, and control's Earth's access to space. Things somewhat unclear in Old Man's War are made clear over the next two books (The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony) and you'll probably want to read them, but the first book stands well on its own; the point of view of a soldier looking up at the government is pretty good, though it's complicated by John's (Scalzi's soldier-hero is named John Perry) Earth-bound complete ignorance of the state of play in the galaxy. His position and Johnny's are similar, and they both progress from private to officer, but their journeys are very different.

The morality of war is explored by both, and you won't be surprised to learn that I think that Scalzi's take is better than Heinlein's. Particularly in the second book, but in this one, too.

If you liked Troopers, I think you'll like Old Man's War - and if something about the former left you uneasy (vaguely or explicitly), I'm quite certain you will find Scalzi's novel(s) far more to your taste.



(next time: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I'm looking forward to this, as I've heard a lot about that book but never read it. Join us, why don't you? Just read, and post something - not necessarily a review, just something inspired by the book - on May 29. Here's the home page of the NL for further info.)

"USA USA USA - Secede NOW!"

Gail Collins asks some pointed questions about Rick Perry and secession:

And what about my country, right or wrong? Weren’t there complaints, some from Texan quarters, during the last election that Barack Obama seemed insufficiently up front about his love of country? Isn’t threatening to dissolve the union over the stimulus package a little less American than failure to wear a flag pin?

Remember the time when Michelle Obama said, in a moment she spent an entire campaign trying to take back, that 2008 was the first time she could remember ever feeling really proud of her country? Can you imagine how the conservative base would have reacted if she said that it was the first time she didn’t feel like renouncing her citizenship?

And how, by the way, can you stand at a rally waving the American flag while yelling “Secede”? ....

Perry, who is the sort of person who calls other guys “dude,” used to be a cotton farmer, a group that seems to have a special talent for combining rugged individualism with intransigent demands for government assistance. Even as we speak, the Obama administration budget-cutters are trying to end a longstanding federal practice of paying the costs of storing the entire national cotton crop every year. No other farmers get this kind of special treatment, and I am sure Perry’s failure to mention it when he calls for an end to corporate bailouts is a terrible oversight that will be corrected immediately.

She does have an answer as to why they're doing it all. Head over and read her whole column.

NPM: This is Darrow

For his birthday, this by Edgar Lee Masters

This is Darrow,
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart,
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox
And his sadness, and kindness,
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

Happy Birthday, Clarence

Clarence Darrow was born today in 1857. The defense attorney for Ossian Sweet & his family, in one of the most racially charged cases (a black doctor moving into a white neighborhood in Detroit finds his house under attack, and someone in the white mob is killed; the whole black family is charged with murder); for Leopold & Loeb (not that they were innocent, but against the death penalty); for several union men in the Haywood trial and other Western Mining Union trials; and of course, in the Scopes Monkey Trial.

There will never be another Darrow. He was, like us all, a product of his times. For him, it was a time of class conflict so intense as to border on class warfare. It was a time during which the Radical Left-- anarchists, socialists, communists-- were at the peak of their influence. It was a time of Jim Crow, of lynchings, a time during which the Klu Klux Klan called the shots in parts of our country. It was a time of unprecedented xenophobia. It was a time of whirl and social change-- a time when the modernist notion of asking whether a behavior pleased one's own intellect began to challenge the Victorian way of asking whether the behavior was approved of by society. Mechanistic thinking was in the air: Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. Darrow was shaped, in both positive and negative ways, by these forces. Invariably, he saw his client's cases as inextricably linked to these large philosophical and social issues. He fought his battles not just for his clients, but also for the hearts and minds of the American people.

There will never be another Darrow. Power has shifted in the American courtroom since he ended his career. It's shifted away from attorneys and juries and to judges. There are more constraints operating on trial lawyers today; trials are more scripted. Few modern judges would let a defense attorney call a prosecutor as a witness; few judges today let attorneys depict their client's cause as bound up in the mechanistic workings of the ambivalent universe; the personal stories, the biting sarcasm, and the everpresent poetry that we find in Darrow's summations would likely be met today with judicial disapprobation.

There will never be another Darrow. In the pre-television, newspaper world of Darrow, words mattered more than images. Oratorical skills were valued; whole speeches were heard and were read-- not just sound bites. The ability to use words well could make one a hero in Darrow's time, a time that was the Age of Heroes (Ruth, Lindbergh). Clarence Darrow was at the same time one of the best loved and most hated men of his time-- it is hard to imagine a trial attorney achieving that status today.

There will never be another Darrow. In his time, there was a general belief that intellectual battles could be won, not just fought. That Science could beat Fundamentalism or that Fundamentalism could beat Science. That Trade Unionism would win, or Trade Unionism would be routed-- there seemed no middle way.

This is from an essay by Prof. Douglas Linder, to be found here

Bulldogs and water

First, yes, I read I has a hotdog and I can has cheezburger. Second, this particular picture caught my eye at once. Not because the caption is particularly funny but because the idea of a life vest for a bulldog is just so freaking brilliant. That other picture - the slightly fuzzy one; hey, it's a snapshot from 1979 - is my late Badger (Arrow Girl). I owned her when I was in the army, stationed in Texas. I remember walking along the banks of the Concho River one spring day. Badger was leaning over to get a drink, and I heard a splash. Who was worried, though? Dogs can swim.

Except that no, bulldogs can't. I stood there startled, watching Badger paddling like crazy and still sinking like a stone. Then I came to and jumped into the river and pulled her out. A couple of weeks later she confidently trotted out onto the lily pads at the park and went down again (though close enough to the bank to scrabble out).

No wonder she generally just paddled around in the shallows...

source

Sky Watch: Mixed Skies

One of the last dawn shots I'll get until fall comes.





more Sky Watchers here

I and the Bird 98

A diverse I and the Bird is up at Biological Ramblings:

Our good Earth is blessed with c. 10,000 species of birds, depending on your taxonomic preferences and definition of a species (Birdlife International checklist - 9,990 species with several hundred taxa under review). This impressive diversity keeps us enthralled, and blogging, with each of us finding our own aspect of bird life to love. One of the things I love is the diversity itself, so I set about in this, the 98th edition of I and the Bird, to quantify just how many avian species and families we can pack into one biweekly blog carnival. And man, you guys did not make mine an easy job! Bird bloggers submitted an impressive total of 190 species of birds spanning 65 families and 142 genera.

Definitely check it out. (And I didn't miss this one! Two of those species are mine! w00t!)

Mental

Roger Shuy posts on syllables at Language Log. It's a rambling and interesting post on what they are (or aren't) and also on vocalic consonants - are they syllables?

But he starts it by wondering why the intro graphic for The Mentalist shows it as men-tə-list when the root is "ment" and the L goes with "al", not "ist".

I think he's confusing "syllables" and "morphemes", myself. Shuy says:

It’s about the way English words are split at the ends of lines in conventional writing. Even though the TV program couched it as the way the word is pronounced, the components simply aren’t oral syllables and it doesn’t seem to matter that they distort historical and morphological meanings.

But I disagree with him. Nobody pronounces it "ment-al-ist"; at least, nobody I know (or quick-surveyed) does. I'd say so over there, but it's a comments-closed post.

NPM: Night

Today's poem (a bit late) is Ночь by Зинаида Гиппиус (Night, by Zinaida Gippius, my translation)

...Не рассветает, не рассветает...
На брюхе плоском она ползет.
И все длиннее; все распухает...
Не рассветает! Не рассветет.

...Day doesn't break, it doesn't break...
On her belly, flat and low, night crawls.
And it all grows ever longer; and it swells...
Day doesn't break! Nor will it.

We've Been Here Before

Over at You Don't Say, John McIntyre contemplates the recent anger on the airwaves:

We’ve been there before. John Adams was a closet monarchist who was going to destroy our freedoms. Thomas Jefferson was going to turn lose the Jacobins and slaughter owners of property.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the Masons were going to take over the country. Then there were the successive bouts of nativist hysteria. If you have in your ancestry anyone of German, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese or Hispanic extraction, you can be assured that your ancestors were denounced as the scum of the earth and the doom of the Republic.

In the early days of the past century, Socialists took over the country with minimum-wage proposals and eight-hour workdays and an end to using children in factories and other outlandish ideas.

Franklin Roosevelt was going to destroy all wealth in the country. Harry Truman was a patsy for the Soviets (and so, depending on which flavor of conspiracy you favored, was Dwight Eisenhower).

Later, Richard Nixon was undermining the Constitution (oh, wait, that one happened), and then Ronald Reagan was going to get us into a nuclear war with Soviet Union and the elder George Bush was a pawn of some secretive internationalist group called the Trilateral Commission that was going to absorb the whole country and, well, you know.

Good stuff.

Freecreditreport.com Jerk

You know that singing guy in the commercials for Free Credit Report dot com? I really hate him.

He says "I married my dream girl" but clearly only so he could escape his crappy job "selling fish to tourists in tee shirts". After all, because his "girl defaulted on some old credit cards" they "can't get a loan for a respectable home" - even in the recent everybody-and-his-brother-gets-a-loan market - and so they're "living in the basement at her mom and dad's", though he'd rather be a "happy bachelor" (undoubtedly with his equally unemployable friends hanging around). Some dream girl, eh?

Moreover, notice that they're living at her mom and dad's, not his. Seems that his blaming "some hacker" might be defensive. I mean, check out that Renaissance Faire gig: that's his mom, right? She too has had to escape to some place where her bad credit didn't matter? And where's dream girl?

No, I don't like him. I was indifferent to him in the first commercial, but each one I see makes me want to smack his grinning face.

NPM: after last night's storm

This is mine...

after last night's storm
water beneath my feet, strewn
with petals and stars

kick in the gut

So, yesterday I got on the bus to go home and pulled out my latest book. It's called Бухта радости (The Bay of Joy), by Андрей Дмитриев (Andrei Dmitriev); it was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize in 2007. It starts quietly, with the protagonist - a young man named Stremukhin, though it's a page into the book before he's called by name instead of "he" - is preparing for a trip to Bukhta Radosti, a popular Moscow recreational area on the far side of the Pirgovo reservoir. He's riding on the ferry across the water when he spots a barge full of scrap iron, and he speculates on its destination and the fate of its cargo. This makes him realize that for the first time in a year his thoughts have gone beyond death - all the way, in fact, to Samara. And he remembers the night he took ill, and the EMT team that came to check him out left, not with him but with his mother.

The next paragraph was like a kick in the gut. I know I'm not the only person - mine's not the only family - to experience this, but I was not ready to read this:

Стремухин бросился на Ленинский. Мать была безмолвна и бездвижна, но жива. Через неделью он забрал ее к себе и был сиделкою при ней полгода.

Он никого с тех пор не видел, кроме матери, кроме ее всегда глядящих мимо и словно бы стеклянных непрозрачных глаз; он нечего не слышал, кроме ее похрапывания, такого ровного, что никогда нельзя было понять, спит она или о чем-то думать. Он так и не узнал, могла ли она думать. Хотелось думать, что могла. Он говорил с ней беспрестанно и убедил себя, что она слышит: он пел ей по утрам репертуар ее любимого Вертинского, потом и Козина, по вечерам он с выражением читал ей, словно возвращая, сказки, которые она читала ему в детстве, ворчал ночами, склоняясь над работой, а днем громко ругался, управляясь с пылесосом....

Все это кончилось в ночи на Рождество с ее последним вздохом.

Stremukhin tore over to the Leninsky hospital. His mother was speechless and motionless, but she was alive. A week later he took her home to his place and was her caregiver for half a year.

In that time he saw no one but his mother, but her gaze always sliding past him, her eyes like opaque glass; he heard nothing but her snoring, and that so even he could never tell whether she was asleep or thinking of something. He didn't even know if she were able to think. He wanted so much to think that she could. He talked to her incessantly and convinced himself that she heard: he sang to her in the mornings from the repertoire of Vertinsky, her favorite, and then Kozin; and in the evenings he read to her, in a lively voice, as if in repayment, the stories she had read to him in his childhood; at night he muttered as he bent over his work and by day he cussed while he ran the vacuum cleaner....

It all came to end on Christmas Eve night with her last breath.

A couple of paragraphs in spare Russian prose, and there I was, sitting on the bus, crying.

It's almost two years since my mother died. She was stricken - like Stremukhin's mother exactly - for four years. When she finally went, there was grief but there was release, too. Almost relief.

I guess I'm not as over it as I had thought...

This ... puzzles me

Mind, I agree it's time - past time in fact - he conceded. But why say "President Obama needs Al Franken in the Senate" in a message ostensibly directed at Norm Coleman? It's not like he wants to give Obama what he wants, after all.

(ps. Could they have a found a picture in which he looks more like a weasel? I don't think so...)

NPM: Madrigal: My Thoughts Hold Mortal Strife

This madrigal is by William Drummond of Hawthornden, who wrote in late 16th-early 17th centuries. I always think of real madrigals as cheerful, but in fact the term refers to the form, not the content. This one? Not so cheery.

Madrigal: My Thoughts Hold Mortal Strife

My thoughts hold mortal strife,
I do detest my life,
And with lamenting cries,
Peace to my soul to bring,
Oft call that prince which here doth monarchize;
But he, grim-grinning king,
Who caitiffs scorns and doth the blest surprise,
     Late having deck'd with beauty's rose his tomb,
     Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come.

Happy Birthday, Leonardo

NPM: Bronzes

Today's is by Carl Sandburg
I
The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln
     Park
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr
     by in long processions going somewhere to keep
     appointment for dinner and matineés and buying and
      selling
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore nearby
I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs
     and guns of the storm.

II
I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is
     falling.
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,
     his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies
     crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser,
     his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city
     at his bronze feet.
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with
     long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they
     hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their
     pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight
     and into the dawn.

Why, yes. Yes, I do

I'm sick of reading things - on blogs, in newspapers (yes, newspapers, the, you know, paper kind) that start out:

Does anybody still [read newspapers / watch commercials / write checks / send letters / read books/ have a landline / ad nauseam ]? I haven't in years - and my child doesn't even know what one is!

It's arrogant and it's pretentious and it's annoying - a hat trick of irritation.

My usual response - how nice for you - is starting to seem inadequate.

Cut it out already.

Why is this here?

Would somebody explain to me what Stephen Hunter's love letter to snipers is doing in the Style section of the Washington Post? I'm not surprised that he would write this:

... we are in the golden age of the sniper. He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.

It's the kind of fetishization of killing in a cool way that I expect from Hunter (read some of his movie reviews - say of The Two Towers, where he wrote:

Jackson's imagination is most vividly provoked by the extreme nature of Bronze Age battle, for the last hour of "The Two Towers" is pure combat and it's mind-blowing. The scene is Helm's Deep, a castle moored against a rock escarpment that takes the full force of the Uruk-hai attack, while our three human heroes and the Rohanites [sic] stand fast. Some won't be able to watch the hackings and gougings, and some (e.g., moi) won't be able to look away.

But underneath it all is the same issue that defined Tolkien's life, the battle between Western democracy and monsters who wanted to destroy it. Read into it what you want, or read nothing into it, but it's really the oldest story of all. It's the one about a band of free men on a hilltop with nothing to get them through the night but their belief in themselves and their cause and the long steel they carry in their scabbards.

But why is this worship of killers in real life presented as if it's a movie review, or a look at a new play or museum? Why isn't it on the op-ed page where it belongs?

NPM: Helen

Today's poem is by H.D.

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Dark-eyed Juncos

Juncos are hard to get pictures of. They're usually too skittish to stay around and even if they do, don't stay still very long. Here are a few shots I got last week.