We’re in our third week of visiting the grandkids (along with their outstanding parents) in Massachusetts and I’m starting to feel media deprived. I’m a news/information junkie, I cheerfully admit, and every time I’m in the US I start going into withdrawal. If it weren’t for the Internet, lord knows what sort of shape I’d be in. First, there’s television. The only thing we’ve watched has been the World Cup, usually on Univision because the guys on ABC wouldn’t shut up. When the Univision guys wouldn’t shut up, at least they wouldn’t shut up in Spanish, so it was pretty much white noise. And that’s it. We gave up on US television news around 2002, when everyone kept shouting at us “Countdown to Iraq!” with multiple exclamation points, in between all the pharmaceutical ads for something that would make me feel better if I asked my doctor about it. Why were they constantly shouting? Maybe they thought I was deaf, or didn’t understand how important it was to invade Iraq, or something. The one or two times we’ve sampled the news since then, they’re still shouting. And what did Katie Couric do to herself, anyway?
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So, I had been aggressively not following Mel Gibson’s latest spewfest. The truth is, I’ve known what I needed to know about him for some time, and worrying about the particulars of each new episode would be pointless celebrity-mongering.

Then, of course, somebody insisted that I listen to the actual audio. I came away thinking, wait, did he just say “if you get raped by a bunch of niggers it’ll be your fault”? Damn – that’s out there even by Mel’s psycho-nutbag standards.

Then I tripped across this from Whoopi Goldberg:

I know Mel, and I know he’s not a racist. I have had a long friendship with Mel. You can say he’s being a bonehead, but I can’t sit and say that he’s a racist having spent time with him in my house with my kids. I don’t like what he’s done, make no mistake. Full story »

George Steinbrenner is dead.

Let me begin by saying that I’m a Red Sox fan and a lifelong Yankee-hater who loathed Steinbrenner from shortly after I first heard his name. Let me further note that for the better part of the last three decades I have argued, passionately and to anyone who’d listen, that there were precisely three things wrong with Major League Baseball: domes, turf and George Steinbrenner. He was, in a nutshell, the Donald Trump of the National Pastime, and anyone who knows me even a little bit realizes that I don’t mean that in a good way.

Much has been said about Darth George and the Evil Pinstriped Empire, and much more will be said before the week is out, as the first shots are fired in the war for the man’s eternal legacy. Some of it will be positive, perhaps even worshipful. Some of it … not so much. Full story »

The Texas GOP platform for 2010 has been out for a while now. From my casual skimming of reviews and analyses, the general sense and direction of the party line didn’t seem to have changed much; and so, in a shameful victory of sloth over principle, I absolved myself of reading the actual document and went to the pool. Or the river, or the grocery store, or the dentist – anywhere, in fact, rather than a quiet place in which I could closely read for myself the principles of the majority political party of the state in which I was born, raised and once again live.

But if my conscience sleeps soundly, my curiosity has a terminal case of insomnia, and last week I holed up at La Taza, fortified my flagging resolution with a large latte and two palmiers and began to read.  And read. And at last I understand, both intellectually and at a gut level, the hopes, fears and way of life of the Texas Republican. The platform is more than a statement of beliefs. It’s a signpost, a guide to the kind of life an honorable, principled Republican aspires to lead and the vices he struggles to avoid – because of course, no decent human being would hypocritically urge his beliefs upon society without striving to live them himself. The following is a small sampling of what I learned about the private lives of my neighbors of the GOP persuasion.

1. No blowjobs. Full story »

Oh, dear. This is so wrong.

I’m on a mission to get suntan lotion. The strip of stores along the lakeshore seem to offer everything but.

We’re at Geneva-on-the-Lake, a chintzy little resort town along Lake Erie in eastern Ohio that looks like it has aspirations to be Coney Island. The hyphenated name is, perhaps, an attempt to give the town added ritz, but not even hyphens can dress this place up. It’s as if this is the place that carnies come after they retire: they cash in their life savings, leftover game tokens, and unused ride tickets so they can set up shop.

We’re in Geneva-on-the-Lake for the water slides. My mother, who lives not far from here, has brought my son and his buddy over to spend a couple hours staying cool and having fun, and I’m along for the ride. Only after we arrived did we discover that we’d all forgotten to bring the sunscreen even though we all reminded each other to grab it. I head off to find some while my mother supervises the boys, who’ve already grabbed inflatable tubes and made a dash for the long flight of wooden stairs that leads to the top.

The strip feels like a boardwalk without the boardwalk or the ocean. Or the fun. Full story »

Worldcon, the annual science fiction convention for fans and writers, is taking place in Australia this year, at Aussiecon. As usual, the major interest will be in the best novel category, and it’s a pretty good list this year, although there have been some complaints. Well, SF fans tend to be a passionate bunch, so this is not surprising. I’m not certain this criticism is justified—for my money, this is one of the better line-ups of the past several years. The six novels nominated by fans for the Hugo as best novel are Boneshaker by Cherie Priest; The City & The City by China Miéville; Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson; Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente; Wake by Robert J. Sawyer; and The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is actually a pretty wide-ranging bunch, including several future and/or alternative histories, and an intriguing Internet consciousness novel. There’s something of a steampunk motif for at least half of them as well. We’ll be reviewing them all over the next several weeks.
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I quite enjoyed today’s match between Germany and Uruguay. It was entertaining and exciting enough to be a pretty good final, and had all the ingredients—flashy play, lots of goals, persistent and dogged offense, defense that is best characterized as “relaxed,” a bare minimum of unnecessary fouls, and, natch, an unnecessary free kick as time expired. Of course, if Diego Forlan had made the shot (it bounced off the crossbar), we would have had another 30 minutes of entertaining football, so I have a teeny bit of ambivalence about it. But Germany deserved to win, even if only for third place. And Uruguay showed they could play football too—a far cry from that embarrassing opener with France. Not at all bad for a country of 3.5 million people, who were the most fouled against of the tournament, and who had a number of key players sitting out today (and Forlan played injured). And Uruguay is now ranked as a better football team than Brazil or Argentina, which will undoubtedly make the rest of the continent feel better.
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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Since the end of the Cold War, the circumstances under which a U.S. president might authorize the launch of nuclear weapons have changed. First, it bears mentioning that, even though he or she is always accompanied by the “nuclear football,”* a president’s ability to exercise complete command over the response to a nuclear attack has long been overrated. Back in 2004, Global Zero Co-Coordinator and President of the World Security Institute Bruce Blair wrote:

. . . the president’s supporting command system is not actually geared to withhold retaliation in the event of enemy missile attack, real or apparent. [Nuclear commanders] knew full well that the U.S. nuclear command system would collapse under the weight of . . . a Soviet first strike, and that their ability to [retaliate depended] on not waiting more than a few minutes before initiating a large-scale counterattack. [Thus the] bias in favor of launch on electronic warning is so powerful that it would take enormously more presidential will to withhold an attack than to authorize it. Full story »

Firefly fans rejoice – they finally got the opening credits right!

Thx to Lara Amber for the link.

My parents were big on church attendance. Not theirs, ours. I went to Sunday School and church services on Sunday mornings, choir practice and more services on Sunday night, Bible study and still more services on Wednesday evenings, and Vacation Bible School for most of June. Then there was the occasional revival, a week of night services where we were warned of the eternal consequences of dancing, women, rock and roll music, and the Communist Party. To all this, add after-school Bible readings held in Mrs. Holloway’s house whenever she returned from Memphis. Whatever sins Mrs. Holloway enjoyed in Memphis that required such absolution, I never discovered, but it was a source of much giggling and speculation among my sisters and their friends. I think it involved Elvis. Full story »

Let’s say you’re a guy and you’ve been involved with a woman. Long-term, committed, exclusive relationship. Several years together. You loved her dearly through the years and she’s simply gaga over you, for reasons none of your friends fully understand. But now, now you’ve realized that it isn’t going to work any longer. Maybe you have different priorities. Maybe you want kids and she doesn’t. Maybe the fire has died in the bedroom. Maybe you’ve grown apart and your life together just doesn’t satisfy you anymore.

Whatever the reason, you realize that the relationship has to end. For better or worse you have a right to be happy and she shouldn’t have to live with a guy who sees her as something he’s settling for. You have all kinds of misgivings, but you’ve thought about it long and hard and, while it’s going to hurt like hell, it’s the right thing to do.

Now you have to figure out the best way to break up. You know that face-to-face is what she deserves. But a telephone call would be easier on you, providing you with some distance from the pain. An e-mail would be easier still. And you know that sometimes kids even break up with a text message.

Finally, you figure out what to do. “Honey, flip on Lifetime at 9pm Eastern. I have something I want to tell you.” Full story »

Well, the “suspense” is over.  LeBron is joining the international party circuit in Miami.

I, for one, am glad it’s over.  I’m not glad LeBron’s leaving, but the hoopla was getting to be a bit much.

For those of you not in Cleveland, you may have missed the Cleveland Orchestra concert on Public Square last Thursday, July 1.  The evening is always capped by fireworks.  Terminal Tower is lighted appropriately.  This year, lighted windows spelling “HOME” became part of the “Keep LeBron” circus.

There was an article sometime within the past month or so (since we lost the playoffs) that made the point that Cleveland just wouldn’t be the same if we won a championship.

Maybe not, but I’d like to find out. Full story »

What do the following things all have in common: tobacco safety and the dangers of secondhand smoke, the Strategic Defense Initiative, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and the recent attacks on Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring)? According to the new book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, they were all manipulated by a very small group of once well respected scientists whose radical free-market and anti-communist ideologies corrupted them to the point of attacking scientists, scientific organizations, and ultimately the process of science itself.

Merchants of Doubt focuses on seven different areas that are presented roughly how they’ve occurred chronologically, starting with the safety of tobacco in the 1950s, proceeding through nuclear war and the misguided defense of SDI, the opposition to regulation of both acid rain and CFCs, and finishing up with the recent attacks on global warming and attempts at historical revisionism with respect to Rachel Carson and the regulation of DDT. But through all of these areas, the main cast of characters barely changes, the methods used to attack scientific conclusions remain remarkably consistent, and the goals of the attacks become clearer and clearer. Full story »

Brian noted last week that a Penn State investigation had cleared Dr. Michael Mann of any wrongdoing in the “Climategate” noise-up, which involved as-yet-unidentified criminals stealing private property and attempting to turn it into evidence of a vast climate disruption conspiracy on the part of greedy liberal scientists.

Apparently the conspiracy runs deeper than anyone could have imagined. Dozens, if not hundreds of presumably reputable news agencies have now joined in the whitewash. For example, there’s:

• Business Week
• BBC Full story »

The Financial Times carried a long review by Energy Editor Ed Crooks about a week ago on a number of recent novels about climate change. It’s a good review of some interesting looking books—check it out. Crooks is clearly a good one to take this on—he knows his climate change and energy stuff, and looks like a pretty good judge of books as well. But, as always, I was surprised to see so little reference to the stuff that science fiction writers have been putting out. Of course, it’s science fiction, so who cares? It’s worse than that, though. Here we have Ian McEwan, who has just written Solar, a novel about climate change (let’s hope it’s better than Saturday) actually saying recently that he was surprised there weren’t more novels about climate change, given what a good subject it made.
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The first trace of dawn appears as a soft blue glow just before 3:25, catching me quite by surprise. The “official” time for sunrise isn’t supposed to come until 4:45, and although I knew the sky would begin to lighten before then, I didn’t realize it would start to glow quite so soon.

I’ve come to Quoddy Head State Park, just south of Lubec, Maine, to watch the day break. Quoddy Head, with its tall cliffs and rugged rocky coastline, is the easternmost point in the United States. The new day will greet me here sooner than it will greet anyone else in America.

A splash of color appears just above the horizon, orange that’s really pink that’s really orange that’s really pink. As the sky continues its shift to light blue, the wilder colors settle into a soft, soft pastel line brushed just above the faint outline of Grand Manan Island, which begins to materialize out of the dark indigo sea. Full story »

I gather that W.S. Merwin is going to be the new US poet laureate. This is such an excellent choice on so many levels it seems churlish to add that I’m also happy it pisses the wingnuts off–it’s like bonus points. No matter. He’s a superb poet, and, remarkably, an equally superb essayist and writer about place. Plus he’s into deep ecology. Among numerous awards, he received the 1971 and 2009 Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and the 1979 Bollingen Prize.

Where to start? Really, if you haven’t read him before, pick up Selected Poems, from 1988, which includes some thirty-odd years of poems. But any of it, really, particularly The Lice. Essays? The Miner’s Pale Children was his first collection, and still reads well—and The Ends of the Earth. Full story »

…brought to you from Quoddy Head State Park, the easternmost point in the United States, near Lubec, Maine.

We’ll bring you more from America’s eastern edge later today….