Elrond Hubbard

Be Careful Out There

2012-01-28T17:01:00.001-05:00

A friend said she cracked a rib by coughing. An X-ray confirms it. She had been sick, and you know how it can be when you're sick. You get good at coughing. You practice that rattling resonance in your throat, and you really get into it. She still has the cough, but because of the pain in the rib, she has to cough very carefully now.

I strained my back from coughing one Saturday morning last December. I had not had enough sleep for many days, and my cough, which had been subsiding after a cold I had thought I was over, was bad again. And my back had been tweaked six days prior while pushing a housemate's van off its long-term parking spot on a bed of pine needles in our front yard. On that Saturday, in the midst of moving equipment from my house to my car, I paused with my hands resting on some cases on the dining room table. I coughed, and I felt that electric coil spiraling up my spine, muscles seizing from the base upward. It had been worse years ago, the first time it ever happened. That time, it happened while I was bending over tying my shoes, and it rendered me completely immobile. Now, maybe my conscious mind sent some ameliorative message down to those muscles as they were seizing: relax guys, it's just a cough, don't go completely on sabbatical on me. The seizing was not as bad as that first time tying my shoes, and I was still able to go to work. I could carry things as long as I kept my back rigidly straight, in good dancer form, using my ab muscles. Funny how back pain like that makes us all in to dancers. But I spent the day wincing. There was so much to lift: C-stands to hold sound blankets, the sound blankets themselves, the sandbags to hold down the C-stands. I went back and forth from the staging area on the porch to the dining room inside, carrying these things. I would be sometimes giving instructions to an assistant while lifting something ("When we roll . . ."), and when I felt a twinge in my back, my voice would become noticeably tight (". . . can you be sure the air system is turned off in the hallways, upstairs and downstairs"). But I would continue speaking right through the pain, and no one asked about it.

And then there's this other guy I heard about who tore a hernia while laughing. He was just leaning back in his office chair and holding a pen in a weird way between his fingers. Someone came in and said something so funny that he was wracked with laughter -- and he was holding that pen weirdly, and his hernia tore and he had to go to the hospital.

The moral of these stories? Be careful out there.

First Visit to an Algae Farm

2011-10-08T14:17:00.000-04:00

Alganomics is a small algae company in Oak Island, NC. Located on the property of the wastewater treatment plant, the algae is grown in plastic tubes using reuse water from the plant. The operation is still in its experimental stage, like most algae operations around the world. I ache to see this industry take off, but I must be patient.

For its next stage, Alganomics will build open ponds in a nearby park. Open ponds are the cheapest way to grow algae, but the drawback is that the particular strain of algae intended to be grown in the pond can find itself competing with less productive strains that invade the pond. To address this problem, Alganomics will use its plastic tubes to grow the desired algae strain in high concentrations. Then it will inoculate the open ponds with this strain, giving it an advantage over other strains.

Extracting the oil is one of the biggest challenges in algae farming. I had not heard of Alganomics’ method before, which is to simply pressurize the solution of algae and water to crack open the algae cells. Whether this is cost effective remains to be seen. (Another interesting method I know of is that of is that of OriginOIl’s, which uses CO2 to lower the pH of the algae/water solution, then adds radiation to crack the cells.)

Alganomics’ extraction compressor is on a trailer. It can travel to natural ponds all over the region and remove the oil from the algae growing in those ponds. I think the intention is not to make a business out of farming algae in natural ponds, but rather to show farmers that they can set up their own algae production facilities, use manure from their farm as fertilizer, and have their oil harvested periodically by the mobile extractor.

This speaks to the local aspect of algae farming, which is like the local food movement. By reusing and recycling pollution (manure and CO2 for instance) locally, communities can produce their own fuel with little outside input. This would be quite a transformation in how we look at energy. But, the economic feasibility of algae farming has yet to be proven.

The leading project in the world to watch for algae feasibility on a large scale is this one in Australia, where MBD Energy and Origin Oil are working to grow algae on the CO2 emissions from a power plant.

A Comment

2011-10-03T13:42:00.000-04:00

When I comment on a Pajamas Media I have to copy the comment on my own blog just to insure that it appears somewhere. It likely will not pass "moderation" on PJ Media. The following comment was made on this article about how the U.S. will be the "Saudi Arabia" of oil by 2017.

The first big question the shale gas drillers need to answer is, where will they get the fresh water required to do this? Each well requires over 3 million gallons of fresh water. Anyone reading his have drought conditions where they live?

Then, there is this study finding a correlation between high methane levels in drinking water and proximity to fracking wells:

Finally, Small Town America is becoming important. The conservative town of Dish, TX has experienced air and water contamination from fracking. If fracking is coming to your town, as the people of Dish learned, don't be too quick to dismiss environmentalists. You might have to become one yourself.

Making Tracks

2011-10-01T16:51:00.000-04:00

Deer appear as if they’ve floated in, like cottonwood seeds. How do such creatures with hooves move so silently? These are not the horses for whom your mother demonstrated her love by mounting and riding them for hours on end. They do not whinny or gallop or become spooked by mere treacherous terrain. They arrive without fanfare, minding their business; and when they are startled, they bound into thickets where lumbering horses could not tread, leaving no trace.

You crack open your door and see one. It’s looking at you, its bay-leaf ears cupped in your direction, judging distance. Take a few steps and it might bolt, and you don’t want that. Rare is the yard, you think, that welcomes deer. So you carefully lower yourself each step down to the walkway, then skirt the yard. You're going to get your day timer from your car. The deer continue grazing, affirming your behavior as non-threatening.

At your car you look back to the yard and see that others have joined the first. A small one with spots has taken the lead into the yard. The medium sized one you saw first is just behind it. The third is bigger still, but does not have antlers. So perhaps the buck is remaining concealed somewhere, watching the others to make sure they are grazing safely.

You retrace your deferential path, still hoping not to startle them. There is not just the distance from yourself to the one. Now there is your distance to the other three, and also their own spacing to each other. They’ve triangulated in your yard, staked boundaries like a surveying crew. It’s nature’s turf, a new order descended without a sound.

Back in your house, you shut the door as quietly as you can and describe the incident to a housemate. Later he goes out and returns to say they had gone, returning your yard to its usual boundaries agreed upon by owner and city.

Conservative Values Trading Cards

2011-09-29T11:15:00.004-04:00

There's a political candidate some are calling "Ol' Tool Shed" because of his TV ad showing him sitting in his tool shed. Apparently, he said at one point that he and his friends get together there to discuss conservative values.

Some liberals and I were thinking, we've probably heard in the news what all these values are. Do those folks at the tool shed really sit around rehashing what's in public discourse? How interesting is that?

I wondered if those folks at the tool shed might have their conservative values on trading cards, and trade them like baseball cards. "I'll trade your tax cuts for 10,000 NPR cuts." You know, that kind of thing.

Then the ideas started flying:

"I'll see your Defense of Marriage and raise you One Immigrant Wall."

"I'll see your Prison Lobby and raise you one American Exceptionalism."

"I'll see your Heartland and raise you one Happy Slave."

Anyone else have suggestions?

Oh, here's one: "I'll see your Joe the Plumber and raise you one Bigger Oil Producer than Saudi Arabia in 2017."

Some Neighbors Might Notice Their Garbage Heavier

2011-07-06T01:40:00.001-04:00

I had moved shelves to the new place but left papers and magazines they had once held strewn about the floors in the old place. H-Town and The Prophet wanted to bag the papers.

"I was just going to take them out when some recycling bin or garbage can became free," I said. Tomorrow was to be garbage day, and then I would be able to refill the containers.

They wanted to bag them now to make it easier to take the stuff out. I didn't think this was necessary, but I said okay.

But then leaving the old house tonight, I saw the neighbors' garbage and recycling containers standing at the curb. Did any of them sleep in the front rooms of their houses? Would any hear a slight rattle of cans?

I went back inside and brought out some recycling bags. The neighbor across the street had filled his recycling bin half way. I filled it the rest of the way, upgrading his waste by adding Outside magazines to his mere beer cans.

A second neighbor had garbage and recycling bins nearly empty. I filled these as well.

From down the street there were gunshots. I figured I'd better move fast lest someone imagine some connection between the shots and the Mad Recycler on their own block.

Returning to a third neighbor with still more bags, I saw the neighbor at the second house actually standing at her recycling bin, looking at the papers I had added to it. This was after midnight.

I whispered loudly, "I'm adding stuff to everyone's recycling bins."

"What?" she said. I repeated myself.

"I wanted to put this in," she said, hefting a cardboard box full of more stuff.

"Well here," I said. I dropped my stuff, went to her, took her box, and dumped it into the third neighbor's bin. I think fast like that sometimes because I play those computer games where you move things around to solve puzzles.

I then dumped my stuff on top of it, swung the lid shut, and said, "That's cool, right?"

"Fine," she said, turning and going back to her house.

Sheesh lady, just trying to spread a little love here.

Good thing I'm leaving.

It's Like The Rapture Up In Here

2011-06-27T11:23:00.001-04:00

They're all gone. The housemates have gotten their acts together and mostly moved their personal stuff out. I've been detained by excess cleaning of filthy appliances, carpets, trash in the basement, none of which was put there by any present housemates, including myself, but for which, having lived here for 17 years, I feel more responsible.

H-Town and Tater-T moved first, carrying out their boxes a few at a time, making many trips in their mini-vans. Now their rooms are empty. This weekend, only The Prophet and I were left, feeling like it was The Rapture, with our comrades now passed on to a better place -- a place, in this case, with air conditioning. Last night The Prophet made dinner here and left his dirty dishes, and went to the new place. Today I woke up alone.

Stopping over at the new place, finding them settling in, it's different. In recent years in the old house, we never had played music in the common spaces. Now, H has set up a small stereo in the living room and was playing the sugary pop of today, which sounds like either Black Eyed Peas or Lady Gaga, depending on whether the singer is Black or White. They asked me where I would put the disturbing art of wood, nails, and glass that dates back to the genesis of our old house, and I said I didn't know -- it is perhaps too heavy to hang on the drywall. The Prophet mentioned the mantle over the fireplace, and H said maybe it could go there. "The art is dark, and might blend in there. I could accept that," he said.

In the old house, the art was grandfathered in. Now, H-Town decides.

Speaking of the mantle, I said I'd like to put that picture of myself with those old housemates from 17 years ago on it.

"No," said The Prophet. "This is a new house."

"I never want to hear about those folks again," said Tater.

We're getting the truck today. We will keep it for 3 days, moving in the evening hours the big furniture, including my bed. Perhaps tonight I, too, will sleep in AC. But I will have much work to do back here before it's all over.

Quite a Statement

2011-06-20T23:54:00.003-04:00

One friend lent me his paper shredder, but another said it sucks and lent me his as well. The second friend said of the first's, "His makes thick strips. Mine makes thing ones."

Like tagliarini vs. fettucini, I figured. Or Burger King fries vs. home style.

As an afterthought before leaving me to feed the machines, the second friend said that his shredder tends to shut off when it overheats. You can't do anything until it cools off.

So I use the second paper shredder until it overheats. Then I set it aside and use the first one. It also overheats. Then both need to cool. I have 17 years of paper statements to go through, and it's not pretty. I had thought about just burning them, but I wanted to be environmentally conscious and shred them for recycling. Now I'm not so sure. Still, to sit and feed these to a fire would take just as much time, maybe.

The shredder can fills quickly with the fluffy strips. While the shredders cool, I take the can to the recycling bin and dump it in. All that paper pasta is filling the bin fast. I scoop it in my hands and turn it over, as if it were compost needing fresh air. I hold it to my nose and smell something comforting in it. What does it remind me of? It takes me several trips to the bin to finally identify it. It is the same smell as the paper in the Hardy Boys books I loved when life was simple, when I was not getting kicked out of my house with nothing to show for it but the joke of having lived here for 17 years with some 50+ different housemates, all of whom the landlord never knew about, paying dirt cheap rent . . . and after all this time, the joke still feels cut short. I had wanted to stay until I could finally buy a house. Now I simply must move, like commonplace people do.

Seventeen years of statements. This is quite a statement.

An Open Letter to Former Housemates

2011-04-19T21:48:00.001-04:00

You dressed mummies in a second floor bedroom . . .

You took calls in a fundraiser for Hell in the dining room lined in plastic . . .

You wired the living room for heart-popping beats when techno was still technical . . .

You were not too proud to sweat with 20 or so others in our rooms of barren plaster and no AC to watch countless season openers and closers of Star Trek . . . or flicks by Pedro Almodovar or Peter Greenaway or Andrei Tarkovsky.

How much would you pay now to own a piece of your post-college past?

It’s not just a piece we’re talking about. It’s the whole place.

Yes, now your old hippie group home can be yours for the ridiculously high price of just 300,000! Hardly a wall has been painted, a floor waxed, a bathroom mildew stain scrubbed since you left. Everything is just as you left it, but multiplied . . . no, exponentiated! A single washer dryer set in the basement has become two; a few unclaimed clothes strewn about have become heaps; that collapsing shed in the back has collapsed further like the body of some decaying animal once bloated by the gasses of bacterial digestion, but now slowly deflating while snakes and maggots scurry around it.

Act now while supplies last!

(Just please don’t kick us out or raise the rent. If 300,000 is too high for you to pay, name your own price. You might get laughed at now, but soon enough they’ll come around. As one housemate said, “We can live here until we die while the price is 300,000.)

A Moonshine Party

2011-04-07T20:51:00.002-04:00

I understand that the Tea Party is a movement desiring small government and low taxes, and that its name references the Boston Tea Party which was a protest against taxation without representation.

But what about the moonshiners? They eschewed not only taxation without representation, but taxation of all kinds. If Tea Partiers are serious, shouldn't they become Moonshine Partiers?

Brownwashing is the New Green?

2011-03-29T15:24:00.001-04:00

I’ve only heard this word "brownwashing" from Riggs Eckelberry of Origin Oil, and it refers to the absorption, by algae, of the CO2 in smokestack emissions from power plants. The algae uses the CO2 to produce oil which can be harvested and re-used as fuel. So, essentially, brownwashing is carbon recycling.

(For a while, some folks thought CO2 from power plants needed to be buried in the ground. But after this farmer in Canada, whose land lies above the world’s biggest carbon sequestration project, found his damp ground and puddles to be bubbling like tonic water, and small animals that live near the ground to be dying, the idea of burying carbon might be defunct.)

Eckelberry and others have been saying for some time that algae, as a fuel source, will first appear in conjunction with some other purpose, and brownwashing is such a purpose.

The first company to make a major attempt to recycle power plant carbon emissions was Greenfuels Technologies. They installed test facilities at Arizona Public Service’s Redhawk natural gas plant, and NRG’s Big Cajun II in Louisiana. But then Greenfuels went out of business. APS seems to be making some attempt to continue the experiment, but no recent news on this can be found.

There are lots of other algae companies around the world working on carbon capture from power plants, but the project that seems to be leading the way is the collaboration between Origin Oil and MBD Energy in Australia.

MBD is a company focused on carbon recycling, while Origin Oil is, for now, focused on extracting oil from algae. Oil extraction has been one of the major obstacles in algae farming, but Origin Oil claims to have cost effective methods. Their Single Step Extraction method is to infuse algae-laden water with extra CO2 to lower its pH; then to use low energy electromagnetic radiation to break the algae cells. They also have Live Extraction which uses electromagnetic pulses to make algae cells leak their oil without killing the cells. The algae can then continue to produce more oil without needing to grow entire new cells.

How cost effective are Origin Oil’s methods? There is no way to tell just from reviewing company press releases. But we can watch what happens in Australia. To my knowledge, this collaboration is the first time an algae-fuel technology has been purchased from a company; and the first phase has been successful, so the next phase, a scaling-up of the operation, is underway.

Explaining Conservatives

2011-03-13T13:59:00.000-04:00

For some years, I've been explaining liberals and conservatives this way: A liberal is someone who wants to control how much money someone else makes; a conservative is someone who wants to control how much sex someone else has.

Neither side exerts any control over itself -- the distinction is in how each side tries to control others.

For example, if liberals really wanted to help the poor, we would spend our own income, privately, to do so. But instead, we want to tax others -- the rich -- to pay for social programs. And, if conservatives really wanted to save lives, then before engaging in war, they would explore all possible alternatives and consider likely undesirable or mixed outcomes that would show the loss of lives and money to be unwise.

Given today's conservatives' general support of our current wars and death penalty, it would be hard to understand their anti-abortion stance if it were not for my original premise. By forcing us all to give birth to, and care for, all the babies we conceive, they think they can reduce how much sex we have. But if we are allowed to abort our babies, then we are getting away with sex and not having to face the consequences. My premise also explains their stance on gay marriage. Opposing it allows them to at least imagine that they are reducing gay sex, which is a subset of all sex.

Recently, a friend postulated a different explanation of what makes a conservative vs. a liberal. He said that it depends on the degree of exploitation on is willing to tolerate. For example, conservatives may oppose unions and civil rights movements because these rally against exploitation. Conservatives may favor business deregulation because it allows businesses to behave more abusively toward the environment and general public.

Now, I counter with yet another explanation about conservatives and liberals. It's not so much about money and sex, or exploitation. It's about authority. Basically, conservatives align themselves with icons and institutions of authority, and liberals align themselves with questioning, opposing, subverting authority.

For instance, why are conservatives so worried now about the Middle East uprisings against totalitarian governments when the Iraq war was justified, in the mid 2000's, on the basis of bringing self-determinism to the Middle East? My answer is that it's about authority -- with the U.S. needing to be, in conservatives' eyes, the highest authority. Mubarak was playing our game by shutting off supplies to Palestinians and keeping control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia was keeping the oil flowing. Gaddafi had renounced WMD's in the early 2000's, which had seemed he was submitting to U.S. authority expressed in our invasion of Iraq. But now these three governments are being removed, questioned, or fought, and conservatives are worried about how the U.S. will maintain its authority in the Middle East.

Opposition to abortion and gay marriage is also related to authority. The process of getting married and having children is traditional, and tradition carries authority. For sex to happen out of wedlock, or for its resultant child to be aborted, or for it to happen between same-sex partners subverts tradition and is thus frowned upon.

"Family Values" is about authority. Opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" is about authority -- indeed, it has been called by conservatives a "slap in the face" for being so close to the World Trade Center site, where it was shown that despite our robust military and authority in the world, we can be penetrated.

Fossil fuels are now a tradition and are associated with big international businesses which have lots of money and carry lots of authority. Nuclear energy and its associated weapons also carry lots of authority. However, wind power, tidal power, algae fuel, and other alternative energy sources carry comparatively little authority.

For what other issues can the conservative vs. liberal stance be explained by positions with respect to authority?

Mating by the Interstate

2011-02-18T17:45:00.001-05:00

An audio experience:

Not The Last Semi-Authoritarian Regime?

2011-02-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

I was going to joke that, with all these Middle East protests, soon only Iraq would have a semi-authoritarian regime. The current government there has been cited as one of the most corrupt in the world, but I have been thinking that most Iraqis are tired of upheaval and would need a few years off before engaging in large-scale political activism. And, as if to forestall protests, Maliki said he would not run for prime minister for a third term.

But now there are small protests in Iraq and efforts to make them large protests. So maybe we will see a larger movement. The problem in Iraq is that it is the Middle Eastern country most fractured along ethnic and sectarian divides. Protests there would not take the form of "people vs. government" so much as "people vs. people vs. government," in violent competition to see what group might prevail. We saw this situation already in the civil war that flared prior to the surge, Awakening Councils, and the near purging of Sunnis from Baghdad. And with some of the U.S. military still there, it would be hard for us to maintain the distance stance we have kept from other protests. After all, this is the country that the U.S. had a direct hand in "liberating." Can we allow it to appear to need to be liberated again?

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to "Hey Mama"

2011-02-09T20:54:00.000-05:00

What are kids today supposed to think? If the music they hear is mostly commercial stuff such as the Black Eyed Peas' Hey Mama or Let's Get It Started, where do they think music comes from? They can see that vocals come from the voice, sure. But the instrumental parts? That appears to emanate from the dancing.

We see instruments in some videos, yes. There's a rock band in the background of "Started" and there's a chamber orchestra in "Shut Up." But the sounds we hear are not what come from these instruments, mostly.

And the stars of the videos are never instrumentalists anyway. If they produce sound from anything other than their voices, it's by manipulating a turntable with a record -- which itself is a recording. So, in the music video, which is how we receive recorded music these days, we watch a guy playing a recording. Isn't this like not watching a basketball game, but instead watching a video in which the Lakers are watching a video of themselves, or someone else even, playing basketball?

When do kids these days become inspired to actually play an instrument?

This Would Have Cut "Black Swan" Short

2011-02-03T21:45:00.002-05:00

When the choreographer was asking his lead if she masturbates, a more world-weary dancer might have said, "Yeah, I masturbate. Is that why you invited me up here? You just wanted to ask me if I masturbate? Shoot. I could be home masturbating right now."

Killing Government Programs

2011-01-13T17:50:00.000-05:00

Representative Gohmert wants to introduce legislation allowing members of Congress to carry concealed weapons to the Capital and around D.C. This is one way to shrink government -- let Congressmen shoot each other.

On the other hand, there is Peter King's move to ban guns within 1000 feet of a government official.

Don't they know that if both laws are passed, they'll need to build a gigantic capital building?

P.S. I'd put this on facebook, but I'm trying not to use violent language in public forums. My public blog, on the other hand, is basically a private forum.

Class Distinction

2010-12-30T15:12:00.001-05:00

It’s a process that few would understand. Certainly not the realtor who sat under the chandelier and proclaimed that the house and property we rent could sell for over $300,000 as it is now (in need of much renovation and central air) if the empty side yard is big enough to build another house on.

Sitting with a more understanding friend under that same chandelier, I explained it thusly: We keep four of the bulbs in it loose enough to not shine, and the fifth tightened until it does shine. That is a bright enough light for that room, though being a point-source, it casts stagey horror-flick shadows. When that light burns out, we tighten another, making it glow until it burns out.

“How many housemates do you have here?” said my friend.

I told him five.

“So each housemate could be responsible for one,” he said.

Yes, I said. And when all five have burned out, then it’s time to change the filter in the Brita pitcher, I said.

It’s a beautiful process. And yet, like the realtor, whatever sucker buys this heap of bricks for $300,000 certainly would not understand.

Why Did She Do It?

2010-12-01T16:17:00.002-05:00

I had simply taken 6 months to complete my registration on Freecycle, a process drawn out partly by the numerous obstacles established by the group’s proprietor, who is quite the net-nanny when it comes to keeping scammers off her site. I swear, you could let your pre-schoolers on there talking about free toilet seats or hernia belts, and they really would be talking about just those exact things, with people not lying about their age or gender.

To register on Freecycle, you have to send an email saying you will follow the rules. And then, to post, you have to follow the rules. Which I didn’t on two attempts each to offer two items, a washer and a dryer, which have been out-of-service for years and probably don’t work. My last rejection was back in May, and I didn’t follow up on it for months. But this past Monday we got the bad news that our landlord was sending a realtor to check out or property with an eye toward deciding whether to sell it in the next year. This means we better be purging. So I took a deep breath and my ADD pills and set out to follow the rules exactly this time.

Within hours of posting, someone responded. She wanted the washer. We worked it out. She would rent a Home Despot pickup truck and come get it after work.

I worried. I had envisioned two guys in overalls from Habitat or something, with ownership of a truck and skills at repair presumed -- not some single woman having to rent a pickup.

I wrote back, “You understand these have not been used for years, right, and might not work?”

She didn’t respond to that, and I thought she might not show up.

I was heading out to clip my nails in the dark front yard around 6pm when a stranger came up the walkway toward me, her feet shushing through the leaves. She was the type who refused to raise her voice, and thus, didn’t respond to my calling out, “Hello?” as she approached. She was in handshaking distance when she said her name. Her truck was down the street -- she was walking house-to-house so she could read numbers.

I directed her to drive around back and I opened the cellar door. Her pickup had come with a handtruck but no straps or ramps. We dusted off the washer, and I said again, “Are you sure you want this,” reminding her that it had not been used for years.

She said she didn’t mind tinkering with it, and did I know what a new washer cost these days?

I reminded myself that these were free. But still, it seemed, since she had paid for truck rental, that she was paying too much.

Housemates came out and gathered ‘round, and we hoisted the washer on to the back of her pickup.

She had not asked about the dryer, but I pointed that out to her. “Sure, I’ll take it,” she said. So we wheeled that out and lifted it onto the truck.

Then we went about the basement gathering up old boxes and styrofoam packing material to put in the spaces in the truck bed to keep the washer and dryer from clanking against each other.

I offered her all the rest of the contents of the basement, but she declined. Indeed, taking the old unused washer and dryer was aid enough for us. We had been talking for years about cleaning out the basement. We had had a yard sale and barely sold anything (and had been unable to sell this washer and dryer); we had talked about taking them to the landfill where we would probably have to pay a fee for dumping them; we had cleaned out a few other things around them. Still, these appliances had remained unyielding in their spots, essentially natural rocky outcroppings, immovable in our basement, a burden persisting.

Now, just because I had managed to send a few emails correctly, someone else had rented a truck and taken them. It’s like a void opened where a bad feeling had been; like being absolved of guilt. Some of our persisting roots have been uprooted. I can see to a day when we might actually float free.

Being Counted

2010-11-14T15:18:00.009-05:00

The podcaster asked me if I thought it was a cluster fuck. I said, to describe it that way would be to disavow our newly cultivated caution against hyperbole. I said, instead, I would just call it . . . crowded.

During the drive up, Svetx had asked what would be most important to me about the rally. I said the important thing was to be counted. I had learned that phrase from a friend who was in a civil rights march one time. She got arrested, and said later that it was important to her to be counted with respect to that issue.

This was my time to be counted. I wanted attendance at this rally to beat that of Glenn Beck’s. On the phone the night before, my step-father had assured me it would NOT surpass the Beck rally, and I needed to prove him wrong.

Svetx said she was going to restore sanity. She said that, in any discourse, that was the first thing that should always be restored.

We woke on Saturday in friend G’s apartment right across the street from the College Park metro station. We took our time and ventured into the chilly morning around 9:30.

At the metro station, the ticket line unfolded before us, laying dismay upon dismay, like some awful vista of a mob trying to fit itself into a few dinghies to escape the land-roving aliens in War of the Worlds. The crowd filled the large sheltered space before the ticket machines; it went 4-persons wide up the steps, around the corner, along the parking lot and into the parking deck. And it was not moving very fast, as if everyone were figuring out the ticket machines for the first time.

I had not prepared properly. I should have had us purchase tickets the night before. This was not sane.

I texted that sentiment to friends who were driving up from NC that morning. They texted back that they were at the station in Springfield and having the same trouble.

One woman in line front of us said the line was worse than the line for Obama’s inauguration. A guy behind us said to bear in mind that this was a college stop and would draw an inordinately large crowd for a Stewart/Colbert event.

This was my second strike. Not only should I have bought Metro tickets the night before, I should have thought that this might be a bad place to board the Metro. Svetx and I talked about driving to another station, or even driving downtown. But we figured, countryfolks like us shouldn’t try to drive in the city on a day like this. We stayed in the line. And, an hour later, we were buying tickets and heading to the platform where, thankfully, the distribution of people allowed us decent positioning to get on the train.

We College Parkers did fill the train though, so that from the next stop onward, virtually no more were able to get on. Crowds on the platforms would look at us in disbelief as our doors opened and our ranks swelled outward a little, taking a breath, before retracting so that the doors could slam again. One rider yelled to waiting passengers, “Go to Greenbelt,” meaning, ride out of town to a station not crowded, then get on an empty train coming in.

We had seen our first sign at College Park. It read, “Fear Through the Ages” and gave examples like “Satan” and “Fallen Women.” On the train we saw a woman with “I Could Be Working.” I was glad I had not executed my own sign idea, “Algae Oil -- The Sanest Transportation Fuel,” because now it seemed bland compared to these others.

Folks pressed against us on the train said we should get off at the Archives. Sailing into that station, we saw hordes of people, shadowy through the train’s tinted glass. We wondered why this platform, the Metro exit point for rally-goers, was even more packed than those we had passed. Then, stepping out, of the train, we saw why. The exit escalator and gates were simply clogged.

But this crowd was moving steadily, if slowly. We would get out. As long as nobody set off a bomb or something and caused a panic.

Ahead someone held a tall sign on a stake, like a military standard, leading the way. The Metro ceiling was high enough to allow this sign to tower above the rest of us, broadcasting its message even to this underground audience before emerging to its intended venue of daylight on the mall.

For the Metro’s part, it doesn’t help that you have to run your ticket as you LEAVE the station, not just as you enter. Why on earth does DC require this?

Upstairs in daylight, everyone walked with long strides on streets, sidewalks, low walls bordering sidewalks, heading south toward sunlight, toward the wide open space lined with grand marble buildings, toward shimmering glints in windows. We ignored regulatory walk signs and simply crossed, giving cars no chance. We passed hucksters selling activist buttons and signs -- the pink booby awareness people, the abortion people, some Guantanamo people -- groups I’ve only seen, heretofore, on TV -- and one guy advertising “Generic Signs” holding my favorite for the day: “My Balls Itch No Matter Who’s In Charge.”

Clearly, this was the big time.

Ahead of us bobbed other signs advancing toward the Mall, including “God Hates Figs: Mark 11:12-14”

We were on 7th, which was supposed to be the back of the Rally. Entering the Mall, though, it seemed the crowd stretched equally far toward the Capitol and toward the Washington Monument.

I’ve been tuned to crowd murmurs since, as a child, my Dad would listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. He once told me that as soon as we heard the crowd noise on the radio broadcast, that would be the top of the hour, and I could set my watch.

I would do this every Saturday. I learned to spot that audience murmur as soon as I heard it. Now, entering the Mall, we became enveloped in a crowd murmur far more substantive. The 200,000+ voices sounded hushed under the big bright sky, with no concert hall to lend its reverberation. But like the South Dakota grass, there was power in the numbers.

And, like the South Dakota grass, there were waves. We would hear a roar coming and, country boy that I am, I would experience slight panic -- was there a terrorist attack going on ahead where we couldn’t see? The roar would come closer and we would hear the strength in those voices, the mid-range growing, alarming; and then there would be the hands in the air and we would raise our hands too, and the wave would pass on.

It probably took us half an hour to cross the Mall on 7th. Then we spent another half-hour crossing back. Like hardening concrete, the mob was getting denser, and we needed to quickly pick the spot we would be cemented to. So we stood at the back of 7th sort of behind and to the side of the TV trucks.

We could barely see a jumbotron and hear a stand of speakers; then an ambulance parked in our line-of-sight, and obscured both of these. We essentially saw and heard nothing through the entire rally.

In front of us, on 7th, the concrete never fully hardened. People oozed past in both directions, pressing each other. And, strangely, immediately to my left, there was a constant single-person thick trickle of people going both in to, and out of, the grass behind us. It was like when you take a decongestant, and you can’t believe how relentlessly your snot flows out. This line of people flowed through the whole rally. A grumpy northeasterner just to the other side of this trickle kept griping at the people. “We’re going to cut this off. There’s no room back there. Why are you heading there?”

Expressing counter sentiment, one passing mom said, “Cut it off after me. My son just went through.”

When the Rally was over, we just stayed where we were. The crowd thinned slowly. A set of signs went by, each held by a different person: “How Do We Get Out Of Here?” “I Don’t Know.” “How ‘Bout That Way?” “Okay.”

Svetx and I laid down in the grass and rested our backs. The late October sun was still bright, but angled low in the sky. It would be a long time before anyone could freely walk wherever one wanted. I later heard that, into the night on blocks surrounding the mall, people could be seen still wandering or just sitting on the sidewalks in their folding lawn chairs, with no idea what to do for the night. Hotels and transportation were probably booked, leaving them with no options.

Text messages had been impossible during the rally, but when they finally started again, friends said that they were at the Archives steps. We met up there, and wandered to view the WWII Memorial.

The WWII Memorial does make great use of spacial divisions, with upper layers of flat pools giving way to waterfalls which spill to lower layers; and curving ramps that draw the visitor down to its bottom layer. But what’s with the columns depicting names of states and territories? Arkansas, Alabama . . . these words alone do not represent soldiers fallen in war. If I had not known this was a WWII memorial, I would have thought it was simply a monument commemorating the states, as stamps and quarters do.

The Vietnam Memorial, on the other hand, is a truer memorial in my view. There is no confusion about what the names listed there mean, and no way not to be conscious of the death. Every visit there, I have seen people making rubbings from the names of the dead, and volunteers helping them and answering questions. This is what a memorial is for -- place to address the pain. I’ve known no one who died in that war, but it is hard even for me to go there without being moved to tears. Svetx’s father was in the war and surely he knows lots of names on the wall. I think about how I’m so glad he survived, and I think about the others coming here who know a name on the wall, and for whom the only explanation I can give is that a president did not want to appear soft on communism.

Friend S pointed out that the list of names for memorial for an Iraq and Afghanistan war would have a distinction from the Vietnam list: Many would be Latin American.

We moved on to the Lincoln Memorial, which now stood on its hill in the setting sun. Inside are the words of a president who served during war and claimed responsibility for his decisions about that war, vocally questioned his own wisdom, and observed the correlation between the slashes of the swords and the lashes of the whips in slavery. How refreshing this is compared to today’s politicians who never seem to question themselves, and never acknowledge how our nations past actions may have contributed to present strife.

The Lincoln Memorial has been the site of past rallies of people who really needed to rally. They were oppressed, or protesting a war, for instance. In my lifetime, I have also seen rallies of laborers, people seeking abortion rights, women’s rights. I have not felt moved to attend any of these. Why, of all rallies, did I come to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear?

Because it struck a chord. Because I get it -- at least, I hope I can claim to be one of the “It Getters” that Colbert identified as the viewers of his first show back in 2005. It was a rally about rallies, with signs mostly mocking or referencing slogans from past rallies, and Stewart invoking the criteria on which past rallies have been judged -- the size and composition of the crowd -- and declaring the rally to have some exaggerated number of people, just as past rally organizers have done.

We were not desperate people fighting for civil rights, as many Americans rightfully have done; and we do not perceive ourselves to be living under a socialist or Muslim president. We are the more middle-ground folks, the “million moderates,” in Stewart’s words.

Probably, we can afford to be moderate because we are just lucky. But surely it is a good sign that our rally was more than double the size of the teabaggers’.

Ideas for Signs for the Rally to Restore Sanity

2010-09-23T00:10:00.006-04:00

Here's all I have so far:

"Hitler . . . Was a 'Ho!"

"Once you steep loose tea, you can't go back to bags."

"Hey Teabaggers, you're not grassroots. Everybody knows Fox News and Dick Armey sencha!"

"The best way to steep tea . . . is in a French press!"

Just Another Farming Industry

2010-09-14T19:40:00.003-04:00

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the way I see it, it’s like this:

If you looked at Iowa in the ’50’s and saw the diverse farms with their cows, pigs, chickens, varied rotating crops, orchards, and someone told you that one day, nearly the entire state would be stripped to nothing except corn (during the growing season) or empty dirt (the rest of the year), you would have thought that to be ridiculous.

If you looked at pigs growing on that farm in the '50's, and someone told you that one day they would be raised in barns with slotted floors so that their urine and feces could mostly drop down into a pool beneath the floor, with maybe 10 hogs to a pen and maybe 100 pens to a barn (a barn can contain 1000 pigs), coexisting with the cloud of ammonia just above the pool of their own excrement, and their skin coated with the excrement that has not been kicked down between the slats, you’d say I was crazy.

If you looked at the cows grazing in the fields, and someone told you that one day they would be raised on feedlots, eating not grass but corn, standing in their own concentrated manure, being administered preemptive antibiotics because of the high likelihood of disease, you’d also say I was crazy.

As Michael Pollan says, the logic of industry has replaced the logic of nature in farming. So I’m telling you now. We might as well let the logic of industry take on algae farming to grow fuel oil. It’s not the strangest thing we’ve done as humans.

Algae Fuel Progress

2010-09-06T15:57:00.003-04:00

For newcomers to the algae biofuel scene, here's the algae pitch in brief: Some strains of algae are the best oil-producing plant. Unlike other biofuel sources, algae does not need to be grown on farm land or use fresh water -- it can be grown on non-arable land in ponds, tanks, vertically hanging sacks in greenhouses, or other apparatuses. Freshwater is not necessarily needed because many strains of algae can grow in salt water. But, regardless of the kind of water used, if the algae growing system is enclosed (not open to air), the water in which the algae grows is not lost to evaporation and can be recycled. Some algae proponents claim that enough fuel oil to power all the United States' transportation needs could be grown in 15,000 square miles, which, if this landmass were a square, would have only 122 miles per side.

Challenges in growing algae are finding or engineering strains that produce the most oil; designing the growing apparatus that uses space and energy most efficiently; and separating the oil from the algae.

While algae biofuel production may sound too strange, or too good, to be true, there are regular advancements that indicate the field is moving forward.

The month of June saw air-show flights of a small twin-engine Diamond DA42NG running on 100% biofuel made from algae oil. There have been past demonstrations of airplanes running on biofuel, but the concentration has not been 100%. That article reports that the fuel burns more cleanly and also more efficiently than standard Jet A-1.

In New Mexico, there is now the world's first fully integrated biofuel refinery. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about CEHMM's large-scale demonstration algae farm, composed of open-air ponds growing a native species of algae in brine water. Now this 501(c)(3) company, located in Carlsbad, NM, has announced completion of companion facilities for oil extraction and conversion to fuel. The operation can produce 1000 gallons of fuel oil per day -- nothing when compared to our nations current fuel needs, but enough perhaps to lead to further upward-scaling of algae production by this company and others. CEHMM's work is also important for drawing attention to the use of salty water and the non-arable land of Southwestern U.S., showing that algae production does not compete with food production for land and fresh water.

While the CEHMM project uses a native species of algae, lots of algae companies view genetic engineering as the key to cost-effective algae fuel production. The leader on this front is Crag Venter of Synthetic Genomics, which has been in partnership with Exxon with nearly a year. (Exxon's $600 million investment in algae makes it the world's largest algae company-- and algae is Exxon's only significant investment in alternative energy.) Before joining with Exxon, Venter had already genetically engineered algae to secrete its oil, thereby circumventing the expensive process of extracting oil from the algae cells. Now he has announced the creation of a fully synthetic living cell. While this synthetic cell is not an algae cell intended for fuel production, he has stated that he will turn his attention toward engineering algae cells optimally suited for producing fuel oil quickly, in high volume. The blogger at Oilgae.com opines on this matter, summarizing the challenges algae oil producers face and speculating on what Venter's work could do for it.

One might be concerned that Exxon will keep its research tightly under wraps and unavailable for public use. But be assured that there are many algae companies vying to be the first to revolutionize the fuel industry. Scroll down the left-side menu column on this page to see a list of such companies. Most of these companies aim to be algae fuel producers -- but one company, OriginOil, intends not to actually produce fuel, but to provide the machinery for algae oil production and be, effectively, the John Deere of algae oil production.

Recently, OriginOil released a new production model for growing algae based on the fact that a single layer of algae, such as what naturally grows on the surface of a pond, uses only a small percent of the sun's energy striking it. This model, called a Multireactor, grows algae in channels arranged in vertically-stacked layers. Between the channels are lenses that collect sunlight and distribute it to the next layer beneath, where more channels contain growing algae, and more lenses further collect and distribute sunlight to the next layer. By efficiently using sunlight in this way, Origin can maximize the algae produced per acre of land used.

Origin has also done extensive work on how to most efficiently deliver CO2 and other nutrients to a growing mass of algae; and, the company claims to have greatly reduced the costs of extracting oil from algae by using low-energy radiation and ultrasound to break algae cells, thereby reducing the need for Craig Venter's algae with pores and giving the Exxon/Venter collaboration a run for its money. Such competition will be crucial in preventing Exxon from withholding its research until the timing suits them. We need algae farming as soon as we can get it.

In its quest to become the John Deere of algae oil production, OriginOil is taking steps to make its products readily demonstrable and deliverable to customers. A miniature, mobile version of its oil extraction apparatus travels the country, visiting prospective investors and algae growers, showing how Origin's technology can benefit them; and its new Multireactor can be shipped in modules in shipping containers for easy scalability on-site. In July of this year, OriginOil shipped a Multireactor to its first paying customer, MBD Energy in Australia, and in September followed-up with a shipment of oil-extraction facilities. MBD is using algae to capture carbon from power plants and convert it to usable fuel oil.

I’ll be watching for news on how Origin Oil’s equipment fares in Australia. Algae enthusiasts have said that algae farming will make its first impact in the realm of carbon capture. If all goes will with MBD Energy in Australia, this could be an important step.

The Grass

2010-07-18T20:41:00.002-04:00

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

It’s like going into one of those specialty stores in New York City that sells only one thing, like candy for instance. You have seen candy throughout your life and never paid it much heed. But here are aisles upon aisles, shelves upon shelves, of candy. Mundane candy even -- regular old Skittles and Reeses and whatnot. Nothing special. But when there is really that much of it, it becomes profound. You can’t believe someone mounted such an effort.

In South Dakota, it’s all about grass. Not even varieties of grass -- pretty much just one kind, I think. And that one kind they do very well. This grass is noble. Several times, glancing at a grass field, I mistook it for young corn. Just like everything else out in South Dakota -- the dandelions, stairwells, hotel rooms, main streets, Mahler symphonies -- the grass has room to be bigger, and it is. It has large blades. It grows tall. And its stems are spaced farther apart so that you can look down between them and see the ground like cracked, white scalp. If you pull too much grass, you’ll leave that scalp unfastened to flake away and start a new patch of Badlands.

The wind causes the grass to shimmer. It chases flashing, silvery patches like speeding dolphins breaching a water’s surface from horizon to horizon, prairie power running wild.

Stürmish Bewegt: A Tornado Story

2010-07-18T01:08:00.005-04:00

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

Blazing across southern South Dakota on I-90, I wanted to summarize, for posterior’s sake on my Tascam audio recorder, our mid-day thoughts on listening to Mahler's 9th -- and Mahler's everything else too. With the Tascam in my one hand, we talked. But there was also this awesome storm ahead. I had already video-recorded, while riding toward Memphis, a lightning bolt on K-Os's flip-cam. So I picked that up in my other hand and started shooting the storm too.

The rain smacked the windshield sharply, startlingly, a sign that hail was mixed in. I checked the windshield for cracks.

In the back seat, Dr. Data observed that in each field we passed, the cows were all clustered against the fence in one corner. They had moved as far as the barbed wire would let them from the oncoming storm. What fear lurks behind their dull eyes when they are unable to flee and take cover according to their instincts' desire? But at least these cows are on large grasslands and not in feed lots where rain no doubt boosts the pestilence festering in the feces in which they spend their lives wading.

I would be foolish to try to reproduce K-Os’s expert technical analysis of Mahler. But his more general observation about the composer’s loose structure is very useful to me. He pointed out that Mahler’s first movements lack a clear sequence of exposition-development-recapitulation. It seems that the main theme often contains a sense of development from its first statement at the beginning; and it reappears many times throughout the movement, alternating with other material, played a differently every time so that you can't tell which time was supposed to be the actual development, and which the recapitulation, if any. It’s as if Mahler doesn’t want the listener to keep track of the structure -- he wants us to instead be lost in his drama, or whimsy.

This sheds some light on why I like Mahler so much, and why some dislike him. His liberal departure from familiar structure deprives his music of succinctness -- and lots of good, honest working folk like succinctness. They don’t have time for a thirty-minute first movement that sounds like three movements, and a second movement that sounds a lot like the first movement. (Indeed, Dr. Data, listening in the back seat most of the trip, could never tell when the movement had changed. And I, familiar with all Mahler’s symphonies, still can’t tell the changes between movements from the 3rd movement to the end in the 2nd symphony.)

But I was never good honest working folk. It’s not that I don’t work hard when I have a job -- it’s that wise choices for a lucrative career have not been my primary guide in my life decision making. When I started listening to Mahler, I had just graduated from college with a B.S. in physics. But I had known for half my college years that I was not cut out for that field. I didn’t want to work in a job that physics might have trained me for and I didn’t want further schooling in it. I was living with K-Os, ShakeThatCat, and some other folks, for $60.00/month plus utilities, in a mildewey basement; working at Kinko’s; and following a whim of trying to get some of the weirdest work I could think of, which was to work in the film and video business.

In the music of Mahler, I identified with the lack of adherence to form, the whimsy, the intrusion of flippancy into profundity. And when I did start to get work in film and video and gave up full-time work, there were lots of idle weekdays providing even more time for Mahler. His long symphonies must have been intended for the un- and under-employed, an alternative to beer or self-help.

We drove through that rain fairly quickly, and then spied what we thought would be a great grass-field shot for our photo essay. We exited the interstate, parked on a side road, and stepped out of the car into the stürmish bewegt. We had not realized how windy it was. Our ears filled with the its rumble; the grass bowed and rippled like hair under a blowdryer. We were still beneath the dark overhang of clouds, and with that wind, it seemed the rain and lightning were not done with us.

We were well rehearsed in our photo process. K-Os and I would grab three lawn chairs from the back of our vehicle and plunk them down in front of our desired background; Dr. Data would plant the camera, level it, then holler instructions to refine the composition. Then he would start the timer and jog to his seat, pushing his hair back to keep it out of his face for the shot.

During this setup, two large Diesel pickups drove past, accelerating with no regard for us. One cut pretty close to Dr. Data while he was still at the camera; the other came after Data had sat, and nearly sideswiped the camera.

We got our grassfield picture. Then I wanted to record my beloved grass blowing in the wind. I’ll write some other time about the grass. At that moment, it sounded like all the NFL cheerleaders' pom-poms in a cardboard box being shaken. I knelt next to it and tried to shield my Tascam from the wind using my body and my hat, but this was futile. The audio has distortion and other afflictions. I’m not proud of it. But you can hear a little if you want.

Our vehicle, Entropy, was parked by an intersection of gravel roads amid the fields. We saw another shot we could take in a different direction from the intersection, so we walked about 20 yards and started setting it up.

A minivan approached us. This was the third vehicle to encounter us, and I was thinking that this time, we’d be asked to leave. Its window came down and a woman called from the drivers’ seat.

“Are you taking pictures of anything particular?” she asked me.

I wondered what secrets this land held that she might not want us to photograph. Signs from aliens hidden in the grass? Minuteman missiles? (I’ll get to those in another entry.) I explained that we were taking pictures of ourselves for a photo series, and we liked the scenery. I was ready to be completely diplomatic if she were to accuse us of trespassing or something.

She looked at Dr. Data and K-Os on the road ahead. She seemed to be thinking over what to say next, as if my response had any authority, any weight worthy of consideration.

“Well . . .” she hesitated, as if I might not want my time wasted by what she had to offer. “There’s a tornado back there.” She pointed back through the intersection toward a hilltop where some other cars were parked, and some people standing around.

Several things went through my head.

1. She doesn’t own this land. She’s just a gawker like me.
2. K-Os once had a close-call with a tornado and might not want to dally with this one.

I looked at Dr. Data and K-Os who were looking at me. Data might have actually said “Tornado?” before I said, “Guys, there’s a --”

3. “TORNADO!!”

K-Os said, “We’re outta here.”

I struggled to voice a thought. Something had been left out of this woman’s information, and I needed to know it. After an agonizing second for formulate my words, I blurted it out.

“Is it going away from us?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Guys, tornadoes have been known to change directions,” said K-Os. Chaotic in nature, he should know.

He and Dr. Data had grabbed the chairs and were walking toward the intersection. I grabbed the tripod and camera and walked just ahead of them. I didn’t know if we were headed toward the car or toward the hilltop where we could see the tornado too. I asked K-Os if I could run while carrying his camera.

“Long as you don’t trip,” he said.

So I jogged up the hill. At its top was a small car with some kids sitting on its back trunk, looking over its roof. Upon my approach, a young mother got out, frowning, and ordered the kids to get inside the car. The father, in the drivers’ seat with his window down, was a dreadlocked white hippy. He pointed across the blowing grass. Beneath much of the cloud was a solid mass of rain, but to the right of the rain I could maybe see some points extending from the cloud to the ground.

“It was touched down, but it’s not right now,” he said. The status of being touched-down or not seemed important throughout the conversation of these native South Dakotans.

I couldn’t tell it was a tornado, really. It was like looking at distant celestial objects through a telescope. I had to take the expert’s word that I was seeing it. But the cloud ceiling between us and the tornado did appear to have concentric “rings,” like overhead ripples, centered on what he was pointing at. Something “circular” was definitely going on. And the wind was unnaturally fierce, whereas, in NC, once a storm has passed, the wind is over.

I think it was Dr. Data who first suggested we take a photo essay picture in front of the tornado.

K-Os spoke against it. “Come on guys. It’s a tornado.”

“It’s a tornado!” said Data. He set down his lawn chair. I gave him the camera and took the other chairs from K-Os and positioned them in the grass. I feared the wind would blow the camera over on the tripod, but it held. Resigned, K-Os took his seat next to me. Data framed up the shot and we got it.

(Days later, on the way home, we looked over our Bison series photos and decided that the tornado photo was not worthy of the series. You can hardly see the tornado, and without that, there’s no apparent point to the picture. Plus, our hat and hair are messed up, and we’re angled funny. K-Os said the photo should never appear anywhere at all, but I insisted that it was valuable as documentation of this tornado experience. So he said I could show it here if I emblazoned on it “Not In Bison Series.”)

We packed our chairs up and headed back to the car. Dr. Data wondered out loud if we should chase the tornado.

"NO," said K-Os. "We're the lawn chair guys. We're not the storm chasing guys."

That night, in our hotel room, K-Os happened to look over the footage I had taken while approaching the storm and talking about Mahler and cows. Centered, in the frame, was the gray mass of rain and cloud where the lightning was; but to the left of this storm center, there were some peculiar conical clouds. In the video, we could hear that he had actually commented on these clouds. The whole scene, with the main gray mass on the right, and the conical clouds on the left, was a mirror-image of what we saw from the hilltop at a greater distance after passing through the storm.

So basically, we had driven straight into a storm that included a tornado, though the tornado was not directly in our path. And I had videotaped the tornado purely by accident, while blithely talking about Mahler and cows and whatnot. At the time of this writing, if we weren’t already safely wrapped in the humidity, allergens, and insect-noise of home, I’d say we’re totally toast out in the Wild West -- we’d step right on a rattlesnake thinking it was a throw rug, or get our heads bitten off by a mountain lion while trying to feed it beef-jerky.

K-Os selected for us the best footage of the tornado. This accidental shooting of it was far better than what we saw from the hilltop. I’m so glad we have it. Honestly, it might be the highlight natural wonder from our whole trip.

Suggestion for Tea Baggers:

2010-06-07T11:55:00.007-04:00

Start your own currency. Call it the Camellia. Create a national directory of businesses and consumers who deal in the Camellia. Buy and sell as much of your goods and services as you can with it. Start your own banks with it. Heck, start a health-care plan with it. Show the rest of us how healthy a back-to-basics economy would be. Best of all, it could not be taxed.

Act fast, or the liberals will beat you to it.

Tchaikovsky Concerto in Chatham

2010-05-24T12:48:00.013-04:00

Last night before the concert, a tall high-school girl in an evening gown spoke to her dad in the front row of the audience, asking him to make sure he would remember to do something. I was sitting in the second row directly behind him, so I could hear her tone. She seemed very even-tempered despite her gown. Maybe there was some of that good-humored concern in her voice, the sort you get from people who have been through some screw-ups and know they'll survive -- like maybe she's experienced her dad not pressing "record" on the camera while she accepted her diploma -- but none of the excited fluttering that goes on with most teenagers in evening gowns. This teenager had more to think about than just getting her picture taken. She had work to do in her gown. Her fingers needed to fly, in tune.

Later in the concert, after the Durham Symphony had played the mutually antagonistic overtures to Nabuco and Rienzi, she walked out, the tallest person on stage, this year's winner of this orchestra's concerto competition, to play Tchaikovsky's violin concerto.

She toyed with the first statement of the first theme in a way I like. The piece soon engulfs the audience in a sweet tidal wave of melody, but at the start, it's appropriate that the soloist just toy with it, as if assembling it by accident, like a little kid pushing matchbox cars around on the rug.

She had that singing quality that shows she is paying attention on a very musical level, not just dealing with the notes. She seemed to purposefully hit some notes a little flat and draw them up to pitch, the way a soulful singer would. She slid around the phrases, making her stringed instrument feel as though it were breathing. Sometimes the technically hard passages had her stiffly sawing through, but mostly, through the difficult stuff, she kept up her expressiveness; and when that first tidal wave of orchestra did hit (a mark of Tchaikovsky that folks could cynically criticize, though we must acknowledge how few composers could rely so extensively on melody), ushered in by her series of arpeggiation gymnastics so impressive live, and framed expertly in the LCD screen of the dad's camera in front of me as if the camera were in its own TV commercial, she took half a step back from her spot on stage and cast her eyes down, hardly in shame, but more to suppress the little smile of satisfaction tweaking her mouth, indicating that she knew she had pretty much banged it.

(In that recording was Pinchas Zuckerman with the Israeli Philharmonic showing a much better side of Israel than settling the West bank)

The soloist with the Durham Symphony in Chatham is a student at Jordan High School and takes lessons from Eric Pritchard. Expect great things to come from her.

Thanks to the Chatham Arts Council for putting on such a great event. In addition to the wonderful Tchaikovsky, the excerpts from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess were a Durham Symphony highlight. According to some, this was the first symphony concert ever in Chatham county. I suppose this could be true if none of the schools in Chatham have student orchestras (just bands instead), and the NC Symphony has never traveled there. As conductor William Henry Curry said to the audience, let's hope this starts an ongoing collaboration, continuing with, perhaps a Christmas concert.

(This blogger thinks maybe the world does not need yet another Christmas concert. But he understands that the Durham Symphony can only learn so much music; and if their fall rehearsals are focusing on the holidays, then that's the kind of music they'll be able to play next fall.)

One problem is the acoustics in the concert hall at Northwoods High School. When a musical group plays on stage, much sound is lost among the curtains hanging overhead in the small flyway. On the other hand, there is a wide "pit" in front of the first audience row which is large enough for a small orchestra, and is not really a pit at all since the floor is on level with the audience floor. So why not put the orchestra there, where more of its sound will reach the audience directly? And if the pit is not big enough for the orchestra, then some orchestra members could sit on the front portion of the stage. This would bring the whole orchestra forward, out from under the flyway, and probably improve acoustics for orchestra concerts.

It's Too Bad . . .

2010-05-18T11:42:00.004-04:00

. . . that the bastion of morals, the Catholic Church, has done so much to protect the pedophiles in its ranks.

. . . that while we were supposed to be experiencing the economic growth that comes from cutting taxes on the rich, we have an economic collapse caused, in part, by the rich who most directly benefitted from the tax cuts.

. . . that just two years after Republicans at their convention chanted "Drill Baby Drill" in support of offshore drilling, an offshore oil rig explodes and creates one of our nations worst environmental disasters.

It's not that we should wholly condemn the Catholic church or never cut taxes or never drill for oil offshore. It's that we should give up mantras and lines of absolute thinking. Wise regulation on all fronts would be good. Of course, a politician can never campaign on a platform of "wise regulation."

A Brunch Crunch

2010-05-15T20:10:00.004-04:00

What is the deal with Foster’s Market? Parking is like perpetual festival parking, the sort of parking you do twice a year at Shakori or the county fair -- but here it’s every day. At least the festivals have volunteers with colored arrows and vests to help you make your way. There is no such service here. You just have to make your own space in the dust and gravel. And the people leaving Fosters don’t go straight back to their cars and vacate their spots. They linger, talking, finishing up that conversation about how Republicans are selling our country out to big business and big oil, all the while clogging the lot and hindering us new customers trying to come to this small business, our engines burning fuel, our turn signals desperately flashing our intent to use their parking spaces until the filaments go numb.

Inside, there’s a line of people waiting to order. Except they are not really waiting to order, they are just waiting to get to where they can see to figure out how to order. From this line you can’t see the chalk-written menus; you can’t see the process whereby you order hot food from the workers and forage on your own baked food and drink. In order to learn this, you have to take a chance and leave your place in line to go around to the front of the counter. This requires pushing yourself through thickets of wandering customers all holding small plates and saucers with teacups at about the eye level of a short person. These folks don’t know how hungry you are. They don’t understand your need for certain information to connect you with your food. What is with their soulless gazes, their needing to be told several times “Excuse me please” before they shuffle a little to the side?

At Moe’s Southwest Grill, you can view the menu while you wait in line, and all your food is ordered in the same place at the end of that line. Now, isn’t that a grand idea?

You steal a glance at the menu and rush back to the line before you lose much ground. Now you have to remember what you saw on the menu. If you do forget, you can’t see it until you are about to order at the head of the line. At that moment, faced with a clerk ready to take your order, you have mere seconds to tilt your head way back and re-read the menu and make your decision. But you realize that now, and during your previous glance, you only saw the breakfast menu. There is a lunch menu hanging a few feet away -- but you can’t read that now because of the glare. So you have to leave your front place in line and go look at that, then come back and make an instant decision, all the while holding up the whole line behind you.

The workers there should be commended for their patience with beleaguered customers. They take your order as if nothing’s wrong, and you feel a little chilled out, even when they tell you there will be a 20 minute wait on “all breakfast orders.”

Umm, okay. 20 minute wait. Now what? There is only one thing to do. Join the ranks of the soulless wanderers you had to push through earlier. You’re in limbo with them now, walking the rough-hewn creaky wooden floor back in forth in front of the counter, getting in the way of those other customers who, like you once did, sought direction and sense in their quest to order food.

This is a health-conscious grocery store, you think. Shouldn’t there be high quality coffee and tea somewhere? You spy it way back in a corner, and you get some. There is juice in a fridge case next to it, so you get one of those too. Now you’ve got a cup and saucer in one hand, and a bottle in the other, and you’re holding them at the eye level of short people.

You overhear a father bringing tea to his family at a table. “Took me a while to get this,” he said, and you’re glad someone else has given voice to the disorder.

You wander back along the counter area because you think you saw muffins somewhere. You had not thought you’d get one, but now, with this wait, you figure, you might as well spend the extra money to have something to nibble on. But you realize the muffins are behind glass and you need to signal counter help to get them -- and the counter help is busy dealing with the folks in line. To get someone's attention you would have to holler as if you were at a crowded bar, and you hate doing that. So you stay mired in your limbo, and Foster’s loses a small sale. How many times a day does this happen? You turn to head back across the counter area again, and nearly bump into an old guy behind you.

“I’m following you,” he says. Which is sad for him, given all you’ve accomplished here.

At Bruegger’s, all the food is in on place. You get it in a single line as your bagel is prepared. You pay and you are free to go.

You have a ticket that was stuck in your hand when you ordered that breakfast. The clerk told you they would bring it to you. You figure, you might as well sit down. You don’t know how they are going to find you, but somehow, there must be a reasonable end to all this. So you get in the cash register line. Now, finally, there is some sense of progress. You pay for the items in your hands -- the tea and the juice, and for what is on the ticket which will be brought to you later. You wish you had it all with you now, but whatever. At least you get to sit down.

Behind you in the register line, a teenager needs to worm her way up past people to get to some chocolate on the shelf. “Excuse me,” she says repeatedly. She snags the chocolate and retreats, only to rejoin the line later and pass the chocolate shelf again on her way to check out.

Customers sit at picnic tables distributed through several interior rooms, a porch, and the lawn. When your food is ready, the counter workers have to go all through the place calling out your name until you raise your hand. You can hardly hear what they are saying. Surely this wears on the nerves of the poor staff. And how many people wander off the street, sit down, and just raise their hands when a clerk is passing with an order?

One member of your party of friends had arranged for you all to meet at Foster’s this Sunday. You had warned them, saying, “It’s like a chaotic web page where you can’t figure out where to log in.” Another friend says, “I hate this place.” None of you will be coming back.

Algae Wastewater Treatment Development

2010-02-18T17:05:00.005-05:00

Half a year ago I was looking around for larger projects making fuel oil from algae. As you can see from reading my entries on energy, there are plenty of small-scale demonstration facilities, but none big enough to show that algae can really make an impact on the world's fuel supply,

But here is another step toward practical utilization of algae for fuel. The city of Hopewell, VA has started cleaning nitrogen from its wastewater using algae in a demonstration facility. Formerly, nitrogen had not been targeted by the town's wastewater treatment, and the Chesapeake Bay, into which drains the wastewater from Hopewell and the rest of the greater Richmond area, has been notorious for its algae blooms. If this test, which is planned to run through September, is successful, then Hopewell hopes to enlarge the facility and sell the fuel oil grown in the algae. This project was made possible, in part, by stimulus package money.

Watching the video of the project, I see a lot of churning of water in open ponds. Origin Oil says that stirring the water causes the algae to grow more slowly; and in open ponds, specialized genetic strains that produce oil the fastest may not survive. So, I'm not sure Hopewell has implemented the best algae growing facility here. But, what they have implemented might be viewed as an inexpensive first-step. Perhaps they can install better facilities if they scale up. I think they should enter a partnership with Origin Oil, which has publicized an algae wastewater treatment model (that's a pdf).

I suppose the biggest source of algae in the Chesapeake Bay is agricultural runoff, and this would not be treated by any municipal wastewater treatment facility. But still, if the cities can remove their own contribution of nitrogen to the bay while offsetting costs by selling the fuel, then what's not to like?

There Goes By the Neighborhood

2010-02-06T18:03:00.000-05:00

Once it was about pot. People were out for their routine walks on the streets or the forest trail, and when they would meet, they would exchange the information like ants transferring food: someone had some really good pot down by the river. The news worked its way off the streets and into people’s homes, and as the afternoon wore on and people finished chores, they came out as if answering a summons. The random walking of earlier in the day became a coherent migration toward the river, toward that set of rocks where the good pot was said to be.

This time it was about ice. Svetx and I met Debbie on the river and she told us. She had seen Jack that morning hurtling past her house on the street at 90 mph, his boot heel dug in and his gloved hand dragging, trying to turn that toboggan in the curve before smacking the curb. After the curb it was Larry’s truck, parked on the street because his drive was impassable, that had to be avoided -- but Jack missed this and managed a sharp turn the other direction, onto the access road for one final plunge before the long flat coast on the parking lot for the old mill. Later, Micah had gone under Larry’s truck and hit the curb, but apparently she was okay -- she was back sledding a few minutes later. Anyway, everyone would be at it again that night, because the temperature was going to drop again to 19 degrees. Black Ice Sliding. 8 pm. The winter answer to summer’s Full Moon Tubing.

Svetx and I had missed the day’s sliding, but this would be our chance. We took a nap. We made sure we started on dinner early enough to eat it in time. We drank coconut rum to help conceal the potential pain. We had no toboggan, but we were hoping for a loaner.

Soon after 8 pm we heard screams of delight, so we put on the boots again and walked to the sliding party. People we had seen in daytime now had faces in shadow under hats and hoods. Others came up from the dark run and dropped plastic toboggans onto the ice and said, breathlessly, “Who’s next?”

It was us. I climbed in, and the toboggan wanted to start its slide before Svetx could get in between my legs. Then we were off with the barest shove. Good speed came right away, the gouged ice beneath us giving a hard Moroccan massage to our butts.

Passing the first house on each side, already, it felt too fast. I tried to jam my outstretched heels into the ice, but they hardly made a difference. It would be a brake early, brake often situation.

We passed the house where once lived May who worked at a biodiesel plant but told me that a huge room full of algae would only generate a teaspoon of oil in a day. I told her it depends on the strain of algae and the growing conditions, but she didn’t seem to believe me.

The road steepened and I felt, for the first time, that I should not be dong this. We had angled toward the curb, too, and my heels weren’t helping. I leaned to the right, and that helped a little. I told Svetx to lean right, and this did turn us better. “Straight,” I said, trying not to turn us past center toward the other curb.

We passed the tiny house on stilts, hardly bigger than a deer blind, half of it a screened porch, the other half probably one room, which was built by the artist who lives in it and whom nobody ever sees. It’s high up the bank from the river so I don’t know why it’s on stilts, unless she was worried about snakes getting in, a concern I would have too.

Then was the house where lives the woman who has a PhD. in carnivorous cats and says that the ones at the Carnivore Preservation Land Trust could easily climb the fences and get out, but stay in because they don’t know this. Her husband had tried to get his Scion out earlier that day, but once it left the bare patch of gravel where it had been parked, it’s front drive wheels could not climb up onto the top of the ice layer. So he drove it back to the bare patch and declared he wasn’t going to work the next day.

We were veering too far right, so I had us lean left briefly. We passed close to cars parked along the right, and we were set up poorly for the coming curve. I jammed both heels down harder, thinking again that we should not be doing this.

There came the house Svetx used to live in, with its mildew which activates and blossoms, invisibly, all summer, in closets, behind walls, in shoes; and where, this time of year, the tiny wood stove must be run nearly constantly to barely keep one room warm. Svetx, working late hours, would come home and head directly for the electric blanket, hardly bothering to heat the house. The current residents stay home all day and keep that stove fed.

There came the area of road where we had seen Rascal tearing up a fresh, glistening carcass earlier that day. The frozen remains could have been one of the myriad of bumps rubbing our butts.

The curve was approaching, with the next neighbor laughing from the safety of her dark front porch. Earlier that day she had gouged a bare patch in the ice just in front of her front walkway, nonsensically. This was next to the curb, not really a hindrance to sledders, but still, why had she bothered?

We were close to the right and would be inside on the curve. I would have preferred to have been on the left and then aim for the inside as we entered it, but this was not to happen. A dark wall of trees loomed ahead on the outside of the curve, with that hard curb somewhere at its base. I thought again that I should not be doing this. I could break my arm, and then I would not be able to work. To avoid crashing, we would need to lean hard, but without knowing how much the toboggan would skid, how would we know when exactly?

Just lean. We did, sideways, all the way, with our shoulders dragging ice, practically bailed out of the toboggan altogether. We slowed a lot, more than I wanted, but coming up straight again, we had made the curve and just missed a truck parked on the right. (Later a member of the Paperhand Puppet Intervention complimented us on making a graceful turn. Coming from one of those folks, that means a lot.) We leaned again, straightened, bottomed-out, and did not try to turn into the access road to the mill parking lot. Instead we coasted up toward the left and crunched to a stop behind another pickup truck there. Our blood recollected itself toward our heads because we were reclined backwards now, and as long as the folks on the next run had enough control to not crash into us, it would be easiest to simply lie back the rest of the way and stay for a while.

This Gives me Peace

2010-01-16T16:37:00.014-05:00

I think about this past slow year and I panic. Going into it, I knew I would not be making much money, and I accept that. The problem is, I fear I have not developed myself enough personally in the extra leisure time. Sure, I write, but I know I could be doing more and better stuff, and I don’t focus nearly as well as I should; and even if I do think I make momentary accomplishments in writing, overall, that endeavor will remain a daunting, yawning pit for my time and self-esteem.

In ballroom, my partner and I have received some valuable coaching which has really opened us up to more intensive, better-styled moving; but dancing feels like a side-show in my life, something I can progress fairly well in, but which is not so distinctive to me.

Then I remember this other thing I’ve done this year, and I feel some peace. Southland of the Heart.

This independent feature movie was made piecemeal on weekends, about half of all weekend days since August; was captured mostly on my Sanken CS-1, run through cables in my hands and under pots beneath my fingers, stored on flash memory in the camera along with Ken’s footage, which always blows me away when I get a chance to see it long after it's been shot. I learned the dialogue and swung the boom with it, kneeling on gravel or standing on two desks if I had to, dodging the curveballs of accidental and intentional improvisation as best I could, and getting burned occasionally. I griped about background noises, I asked diner owners to shut down their giant freezers and their computers, I bitched about electrical cables running through doors from the outside and necessitating letting noise in. Sometimes I held up production to find a better mic position, or asked for another (and another) take to have a chance to boom boom it better. Sometimes they gave it to me, and sometimes they said “tough shit.” But the director and actors have been genuinely appreciative and complimentary of the audio. This strokes my ego. I need a community of people stroking my ego from time to time. This is what gives me peace.

And the movie is coming out pretty well, if I may say so.

I had known Southland’s director Todd since January of 2008 when he shot another director’s, Nic’s, Nightlife, for which I did the audio. (On Vimeo, the video has a sound/video synch problem which seems to be the fault of the website). Both Todd and Nic make several movies a year on weekends, and they are getting good at it. Over a year later, in April of 2009 I had purchased my own sound equipment package and was not working enough to really break it in -- or to break myself in on it, as they say. So one day I happened to be in the car with Todd while driving to work at a conference for this conservative think-tank, and I asked him if he had any projects coming up. He said yes, in two weeks, he would be shooting a short, Mary and Jennifer, which is currently not available for viewing.

While shooting that short, there was a moment when, kneeling on the tile floor of the kitchen, I noticed the hard set of Jennifer's face in my peripheral vision past the tip of the microphone, and I thought, “damn, she’s on time.”

In the following weeks I was thinking Todd could do a lot more with those characters. And I was thinking that I liked his style of directing, in which he would go to the actors and have a short conversation in a low voice, like, “You know how when you’ve had an argument and you’re close to apologizing, but you still are holding back, not giving it up yet . . . .” He would speak quietly with them, then go back behind camera and leave the actors to make it sing.

In June of this recession year, he called me and told me what I was thinking he should do. He was going to make a feature movie with the two characters, and asked if I could work on it for no pay. I had few prospects for paying audio engagement, so I said I certainly could, as long as I could dump him at the last minute if paying work were to come up.

It only came up on two days, and one of those days, I raced back from shooting an ACC PSA with the basketball coaches in Greensboro to work late into the night on Southland.

Now it’s January 2010, and people keep asking me, “Isn’t that free movie done yet?” I say it’s the never-ending story. No, it’s still not quite done. We have a couple serious dialogue scenes to do, and this coming Monday, MLK day, we are doing a light-dialogue day. But it will get there. And it will be good, if I may say so.

I hope I will always be able to experience times when the actors really nail it -- when they cry and act like they are experiencing the biggest kick in the gut of their life, and they pretty much convince me of this -- and I have the mic right in position, not a little off-axis but right in there, to not just hear it well but make a little extra tickle of immediacy in my headphones -- and the noise from outside is at a lull, and nobody’s stomach growls, and I look over at the director and assistant director and gaffer standing at the monitor and see tears brimming in their eyes too, and know that a lot of things are working out at once -- and feel peace.

Toward a Better District 10

2010-01-04T05:00:00.009-05:00

Avatar might be the movie James Cameron has wanted to make since he was a boy, but District 9 is the sci-fi movie I have wanted to see since I was disappointed by E.T. when I was 14. District follows the notion presented in Philip K. Dick’s statement, paraphrased here (I can’t find it online right now): You could be broke, and your wife could leave you, and still . . . aliens could come through the roof and get you. In a general sense, I take this to mean that aliens can come and become part of the messy milieu of life. They don’t have to be lithe, exotic creatures in silver suits. They don’t have to have a meaningful message for humanity. They don’t have to be here to conquer. Maybe we don’t even have to know why they are here. And what happens between the humans and aliens can be just as ordinarily degenerate as what happens between humans.

In District 9, aliens have come to earth -- Johannesburg, South Africa to be exact -- and become part of the social problems that plague this and many other parts of the world: overcrowding, slums, refugees, crime. The aliens are the new base on the pecking order of racism, with all races of humans speaking against the alien presence, using arguments we’ve heard and still hear from separatists -- that “It is for their own good,” that “they don’t belong here.”

The South African government wants to move the aliens from their current shanty town in Soweto to a refugee camp farther outside the city. The movie focuses on one obsequious bureaucrat, Wikus van de Merwe, who heads the process of going door-to-door and serving the aliens their notices.

What I see as the power of this movie is its raw and “realistic” presentation. Living in the shanty town, aliens are repeatedly shown digging through garbage, hacking animals to pieces for food, drinking and eating out of discarded containers. There are language and cultural barriers (though, remarkably, Wikus and some humans understand the aliens, and vice-versa) and misunderstandings ensue that lead to violence. When aliens don’t comply immediately with the humans’ demands, they are forced to their knees with hands behind their heads, forced to sign documents acquiescing to their eviction; and, when an alien does sometimes retaliate and throw a human aside, that alien gets blown away by the humans. One can not help but sense the parallels to our door-to-door operations early in the Iraq war; and a friend commented that these scenes from District 9 looked like a documentary he had seen on vigilante groups that patrol our border with Mexico and harass Latin Americans, apparently trying to provoke reactions against which the vigilantes can retaliate.

One wonders why the aliens let themselves get pushed around as much as they do, and this leads to some of the deeper issues in the movie. The aliens do have, after all, powerful weapons. Why not use them against the humans, when clearly their own self-defense is justified?

What the aliens do use the weapons for is currency. With their weapons, they buy, on a black market set up by a Nigerian criminal gang, cat food. The aliens are addicted to this cat food and hand over weapons readily in exchange for it while the humans are fascinated with the weapons and acquire them greedily.

We all know humans love weapons. Weapons provide the quickest way to power here on Earth. But the aliens loving cat food? This is incredible to me. Does this mean the aliens are not power-hungry? Is it that weapons are so commonplace for them, and easy to build, that they view them as a basic commodity, as we view the cat food that we trade to them?

(The aliens may feel safe selling the weapons to the humans since the humans can’t use the weapons. Governments and corporations and the Nigerian gang all hope for the day when they can make the weapons work; but for now, all they can do is acquire them and study them.)

Through the entire movie, nothing more than a desire for cat food is revealed of the alien population’s motives. We never learn why they came or if they even want to leave. I question whether they even know they are living in a slum. I mean, if they don’t know that weapons are awesome, and that cat food is nothing special, would they even know to prefer Spoleto to Soweto?

(Svetx suggests that the aliens were lost on the way to Spoleto and ended up in Soweto. Maybe they typed it into their Garmin wrong.)

Since I saw District 9 last spring, I have held it in nearly the highest esteem I have for any movie. I raved about it to my friend who, just the other night, called us over to watch it on Blu-Ray, the second viewing for myself and Svetx.

Here’s a bit of advice: If you love a movie, maybe you don’t want to hear the director’s commentary. We only listened to part of it, but in his commentary, director Neill Blomkamp reveals the insensitive way he constructed the Nigerian gang.

On my first viewing, I could have deemed the portrayal of the Nigerians as racist. But given the level of detail throughout the movie, and given the fact that all the humans in the movie are self-centered opportunists -- not even our accidental hero Wikus is admirable -- I accepted the Nigerians as a reasonably accurate portrayal of an aspect of human condition that would occur in an alien slum.

Lots of people do think the portrayal of the Nigerians is racist, as a quick Google search will tell you. In the movie, the Nigerians believe in witchcraft and eat aliens’ bodies on the presumption that this will enable them to use the aliens’ weapons. There is also mention that they run a prostitution operation for the aliens. This is definitely a negative image of the Nigerians. But the white South African government officials and their business and science cohorts are essentially doing the same thing -- using and abusing the aliens to get command of their weapons. I say this could be one of the valuable themes in the movie.

But then there’s this: in his commentary, the director admits that he could find no Nigerian actors to play those roles. And, he says, none of the non-Nigerians playing Nigerians could speak a Nigerian language. So, the gang leader, the witch doctor, and other gang members are all speaking whatever native African languages those actors know, and they are not actually understanding each other. Subtitles solve the problem for the viewer, telling us whatever the director actually wants us to hear. I’ll guess that most people in the world watching the movie can not tell the difference. But as my friend who bought the Blu-Ray said, “Surely they could have found some Nigerians to portray the Nigerians.” And then, as Svetx said, “Then they would have had someone who knows the culture and what it’s really like.”

In a movie that I want to celebrate for its “realistic” portrayal of race and alien relations, and human motives, this sloppy treatment of the Nigerians is a serious disappointment.

So how could the director have done better, or do better when the time comes to make District 10?

First, the prostitution could easily have been tossed out of the movie. This was, as I said, a brief mention; and given the vast differences between human and alien anatomy, I doubt that there would be enough interest to keep a prostitution racket going.

Second, the witchcraft was not even necessary for the plot. As it stands, the Nigerians capture Wikus, who is growing an alien arm because of an accidental encounter with alien DNA, and attempt to eat his alien arm. This drives Wikus to escape using the fancy alien weapons that only he among humans can use. Essentially the same scenario could have been achieved if the Nigerians, instead of trying to eat him, were to confine him and force him with torture to use the weapons on their behalf. (Torture is still a negative portrayal, you say? Sure, but in this scenario they’d be on par with the United States of America.)

In his director’s commentary, Neill Blomkamp says that he portrayed the Nigerians this way as a joke, and he apologizes to them (all Nigerians?) and anyone else who is offended by it.

Here is what I say. Neill, meet me at camera three. For District 10, there’s no need to joke like this. We are all humans together in your story. Your movie is not afraid to show us humans the bad news about ourselves. We are all power-hungry, lying, cowardly bitches -- with aliens thrown in. So, show us like we are, and be reasonably authentic, so that if anyone complains that you show Nigerians or anyone else as crooks at all, you can more honestly say that you are holding up the mirror, and it’s up to us what gets reflected in it.

I’ll finish off with a little more praise for your movie.

I love the faux documentary style. I love how the camera floats like my uncle shot it, and the acting is largely improvised (as you explain in your commentary), and somehow you “painted” in alien creatures while keeping it all spontaneous.

I love how you portray many layers of character in some of the interviews. Wikus wife, for instance, shows us a little bowl he had made for her. She says she sat on it (implying some disregard for Wikus’ feelings) and then says that all Wikus’ presents for her were taken away for the investigation . . . but then she made them bring them back (meaning she may have newfound respect for her husband given what she suspects he is going through).

I love that we never learn what the aliens were doing here. I love that, when the humans first blowtorched their way into the alien spaceship, the aliens were huddled in there, covered with feces perhaps, striking a parallel to factory farm animals.

Basically, I love your movie, But you can, and should, be more thorough, when you are trying to portray serious subject matter and make serious points.

My Kid Could Have Written That

2009-12-30T16:41:00.004-05:00

How many pairs of glasses does it take to watch a movie these days, anyway? Going in, I hoped previews would still be playing, because we were late. But when I saw the intentionally blurred double-vision images on the screen, I knew we were in to it already. I tried to watch without the glasses, but that was impossible. I had to keep them on and cope with the artificial feeling of paper cutouts set at varying distances in front of me, like the layered images in a Viewmaster or targets at the shooting range. You could tell that everything in the frame had a discrete distance classification: there would be the foreground image, like maybe some seed pods lazily floating; then the middle-ground images, like maybe the characters in the scene; and then the background, which was usually a single flat plane like a normal movie. I would have preferred the whole movie to be on a single plane so that I would not have been thinking about the 3-D effect. When someone in the seats ahead of us got up to go to the bathroom, he looked like he, too, was a part of the movie. Indeed, some objects in the movie looked closer than the real people in front of me, and this makes me think of combining live-action with 3-D cinema. Let’s remake Rocky Horror so that it blends better with its simultaneous re-enactors.

I heard that this is the movie James Cameron had wanted to make since he was 14. I believe it. With a planet called “Pandora” and the precious metal called “unobtainium,” it seems like he wrote it more like when he was 4 and did not revise it since. The alien Na’vi are portrayed with the same lack of nuance, with obvious elements of African and Native American hunting, dance, spirituality, and medicine mixed to achieve generic foreign-ness. If you wondered where banal world music comes from, it is probably James Cameron’s Pandora.

A friend said it would have helped to see some kind of exchange in the alien society -- a place where they are gambling, or paying taxes. “Like the cantina in Star Wars!” Svetx said. Indeed. The basic grit and grind of life. As it stands, you think the Na’vi do nothing but pay homage to nature and hunt, hardly a believable or even interesting existence.

People are marveling at the special effects, but wasn’t the flying more exciting in the Superman movies of the ’70’s? The battle more exciting at the end of Star Wars episode IV? Who can forget the quick character development of showing each fighter pilot in his cockpit talking on his intercom?

In more recent history, I remember almost being moved to tears by two awesome movie battles: The battle on the fields of Pelennor in Return of the King, for all its orchestration couched in desperation and forboding; and the middle of The Incredibles where it showed the family working together with all its awesome powers unleashed. There was nothing so satisfying in Avatar.

There is one thing I do admire about this movie, and that is it’s own paradoxical nature. It is the feel-good blockbuster of this holiday season. But what we feel good about is the pagan nature-creatures triumphing over a U.S. military that is essentially working for a large corporation. Anyone who has looked at a newspaper headline in recent years surely can’t miss the parallel to U.S. involvement in the Middle East. I expect this movie to draw fire from war supporters as well as fundamentalist Christians. Looking on the Internet now though, I can’t find scathing reviews from a Christian website. If anyone finds one, please let me know. If there really are none, then maybe the Christian Right does not notice the connections to our foreign policy, or doesn’t think this is what our foreign policy amounts to. In that case, in a seasonal action blockbuster, what’s not to like?

The Bible Does Not Mention Sex Videos Either

2009-11-13T10:43:00.003-05:00

Carrie Prejean is saying thatbreast implants are not un-Christian because the Bible does not mention them at all, and thus, they are not forbidden.

Now, I don't claim to be a Christian. And I'm no Bible expert. But I think it's safe to say that another thing the Bible does not mention is sex videos. So why is Prejean claiming she made her sex video before her conversion to Christianity? (Her then-boyfriend counters that it was made after her conversion.) If it's not mentioned in the Bible, then, like implants, it's not forbidden. And it's not like God isn't watching anyway, sex video or not!

But back to those implants. While the Bible does not mention them specifically, Timothy 2:9 - 2:11 from Bible Wiki says "In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection." I would not call breast implants modest or associate them with shamefacedness; and with a price of $4000 to $10,000, I would call them "costly array." On the other hand, the next passage in Timothy says, "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve." This could be taken to mean that, since beauty pageant officials forced Prejean to get the implants, that she was obeying this authority of a man.

Interpretations aside, I think we all know exactly what breast implants are for: enhancement of sex appeal for personal gain. While some Christians claim that another aspect of sexuality, homosexuality, is a choice, I think we can all agree that breast implants are a choice. In fact, Prejean says it's a personal choice. So I say to Prejean: St. Anthony the Abbot gave up all his personal possessions; for you, the path to wisdom lies in giving up your breast implants.

The Ocean

2009-11-12T18:08:00.003-05:00

Sit back and relax. Here is one big 8 minute wild track of the ocean, composed of several smaller clips recorded for possible use in Todd Tinkham's Southland of the Heart.

Choppers!

2009-11-12T17:49:00.006-05:00

Two Blackhawk helicopters fly over the beach during shooting of the final scenes of Todd Tinkham's Southland of the Heart.

Three Relations

2009-11-05T22:53:00.005-05:00

There were the big grocery stores, like Harris-Teeter, with all their food (except for produce) in packages. Then came Whole Foods where bulk food is in bins and you package it yourself. Then came Trader Joe's which is like the bulk food aisle at Whole Foods, but the food is pre-packaged for you.

There was classic literature where morals and basic tenets espousing God and patriotism were expressed; then there was modernism where long-held beliefs did not necessarily prevail, and post-modernism which broke structures into pieces and played with them. Then there came Stephen Colbert who uses the elements of post-modernism to reconstruct a classical character espousing God, morals, and patriotism again.

There was art that depicted, as drawing or painting on flat surfaces, 3-dimensional images; and there were 3-dimensional sculptures made of flat paper. Then there was Picasso whose work looks like he took pieces of paper from 3-D sculptures and glued them back onto a single plane, bringing renewed flatness to what had once been 3-dimensional.

Did you hear about Sarah Palin's new treatise on values?

2009-11-04T10:09:00.001-05:00

It's called "Gouging Roe." Honk!

To the Guy on Facebook Worried about Islamofascism:

2009-10-29T10:48:00.004-04:00

Your rant was right out of the playbook for right-wing demagoguery. I had not known a Facebook wall comment could run so long. I can scroll my screen for several pages before reaching its end. Here's just a sample:

. . . Political "solutions" are only temporary and only give the jihadis time to regroup for another attack. 1400 years of islamic history prove this. The koran tells them it is acceptable under islamic law to break treaties when to their advantage. The command to spread islam by all means, including murder trumps all in islamic law and thought.

So the only choices we have are to keep trying to help those in Afghanistan who say they want a reformation for the purpose of instilling western democratic values in hopes that our values will change the thought patterns of those muslims, and maybe even have them reject islam, or pull all our people out and bomb every islamofascist base that shows up on our radar. If the liberal "infidels" we protect by doing this don't understand the need for such bombings, tell them to shut up and be glad we are protecting them. . . .

I spent enough time on my facebook response to you that I'm putting it here too:

On the other hand, our very presence in Afghanistan brings some monetary flow to the Taliban:

http://enduringamerica.com/2009/10/07/afghanistan-as-us-increases-troops-pentagon-aid-flows-to-taliban/

And a bridge we have built aids the opium trade:

http://www.newser.com/story/63045/us-built-bridge-supports-afghan-drug-trade.html

I know that bridge and business building in Afghanistan are very well intended, but my point is, we don't foresee unintended consequences.

Also consider, as Steve said, leaders of two factions of Taliban, Hekmatyar and Haqqani, were once allies of the CIA in fighting communism. During Charlie Wilson's war, the U.S. also fomented fundamentalism in the Middle East because religion was seen as a deterrent to communism. Nowadays, we borrow from a communist country, China, which, in fact, fought against us by proxy in Vietnam, in order to fight jihadism. Does that make sense?

Continuing the cycle of aiding, now, our future enemies, it is suspected (and likely true to some extent, I say) that Taliban fighters have gone through military training provided for Afghan forces by the U.S. and Nato:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175116

I sincerely thank David's cousins for doing the hardest and most risky work of serving in our military. My criticism is for our policy makers who are certainly not working as hard as our soldiers, but should be. After fighting two wars in the Middle East for longer than we fought in WWII, the only thing that is certain is that you and I will have to pay for it.

This Came Out Pretty Well

2009-10-13T20:53:00.005-04:00

I dig working with the coaches. Bobby Bowden's voice alone makes me want to take up football so I can play for him, and Coach Cutcliff is very amiable and natural on camera.

Attack of the Blurry Cell Phone Pictures

2009-10-13T14:26:00.011-04:00

Over a year ago Svetx and I walked on the Brooklyn Bridge at night. I had just gotten my first cell phone with a camera, so I went nuts. Now the memory allocated by Alltel for my pictures is nearly full, so I have to put them somewhere. So, I give you, the Brooklyn Bridge by Night.

My Critique by a Moore

2009-10-13T12:56:00.004-04:00

Back on 2005, I attended an artists' colony, the Vermont Studio Center, for a month. They have their regular residents like me, most of whom pay all or 2/3 of their way; and featured residents who are paid by the colony to critique the regulars' work and give talks and hold conferences. As I described in two earlier posts, I was there while Lorrie Moore was there. This post is a self-indulgent description of what happened in my one-on-one critiquing session with Moore. I had sent this only to family when it happened, but now, with readership of my blog at a low ebb, partly because of my lack of posting lately, I figure it's okay to toot my horn a little. I'm putting up these three posts about Moore on the occasion of her release of her newest novel, A Gate at the Stairs.

Visiting writers here meet with us residents in the living room of what they call Mason House, the domain for the writers, though it is not where most of us live or work. The living room is filled with bookshelves and books I have not read, surroundings I found rather daunting until I happened to spot the Philip K. Dick title in the ranks. Still, it was a Dick I have not read.

I went into the foyer and heard the prior person’s conference still in progress, so I went back out to the porch and waited like the piano students on our front porch when I was a kid, and my mom was teaching lessons in our living room.

The writer before me came out, and I went in. Lorrie Moore was sitting at the end of the long conference table gleaming with reflected light from the window behind her. The papers in front of her I recognized as the copy of "Back to the Old Ladies" I had sent in late May. I had not even sat down when she said, “This is a real story, and you are a real writer.”

I said, “Well thank you!” I sat.

“The only thing is . . .” she said. She said the beginning was confusing. Where was Roxanne? In her hotel room or in the desert? I should clear that up. And when did the narrator meet Roxanne’s mother? The same night he danced with her the first time?

“You may have to be flatfooted with the facts. Don’t be afraid to state them plainly,” Moore said.

Then came a harder issue.

“The narrator is in love with Roxanne,” she said. “There has to be more to her to warrant his attentions. More than just her dance moves and her tush, which are beautifully described. She needs to say a little more . . .”

This will be hard to deal with. I have no idea what Roxanne has to say other than what she's already said in the story.

“Do you do this?” she said. “This dance stuff? I was reading, and these details were so alive, I said ‘Wow, he must really do this. . .’”

I said I do.

“This is almost there,” she said. “Almost ready for publication.”

It is revision number 10! How far do I have to go? But alright.

She asked me what I do. Am I in school? So I told her the quick spiel: Audio for video . . . have done substitute teaching, do teach at a community college . . . Durham . . . physics . . . stubborn . . . Duke . . . Batman . . . screenplays . . . short stories . . . present day. (“Batman has a special place in my heart,” I told her. “Really?” she said, smiling.)

“Well, you really understand the form,” she said. “And who are you reading?”

I said that for the past year, I have been reading a lot of, well, um, her. “You,” I said.

She looked away. She had also not really relished someone’s bringing up her collection “Self-Help” as a “must read” for writers, during the group craft talk she gave last Friday. In response, she had said, “No, not Self-Help.”

I named Bernard Malamud as someone whose stories I’m reading now. And Larry Brown, whom I always have to mention, to see what sort of reaction I get.

“Oh, poor guy, he just died too!” she said.

Yes, around Thanksgiving last year.

“He wasn’t old?” she said. No. I said he probably had high blood pressure though. She said she had met him and found him to be a really nice guy. I said I had met him too, and also found him really nice.

I asked if she had read Brown’s stuff, and she said, only a little. I said I liked these fairly straightforward writers like Malamud, Brown, Chekhov. They state things fairly plainly. I said I had tried to write a poetic story this past year, and it had not come together yet, and was also not very well written. Brown was really encouraging to me because, when I would be hung up trying to say something in an impressive way, I would tell myself, “Just tell the damn story,” which I think is what Brown pretty much did too.

She nodded.

She suggested I read Updike’s collected stories, but not the novels, and Alice Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women.”

I said, “I don’t know what to say about these people who have collections of, like, 200 stories. I’m lucky if I can write one per year, and at that, it still may not come out right.”

She said Updike has not had anything else to do all his life. She said he keeps writing about his childhood and certain recurring subjects. But the good thing about that, for him, is that he is able to perfect stories about his subjects. “I might be reading, say, the fourth story about this, but I say, ‘this one is perfect.’”

She said quality is more important that quantity. She didn’t seem worried about my slow pace.

She asked what I’m working on now, and I said I was doing a totally new story, plus there was always the one from this past year which I might be salvageable, who knows.

We were together only 20 minutes or so, and our conversation seemed to be coming to a close. She put her incognito celebrity sunglasses on and we stood.

She asked what I had studied in college.

“Wow, physics,” she said. “I don’t meet many physics majors who are writers. A few, but not that many.”

I said, I think we are concerned with mysticism and how the world works. These are similar traits in writing and physics.

Heading out the door into the sunny, crystal clear day, she said her father had studied chemistry and dropped out in grad school. “He had to get a job and went into corporate America,” she said. “He told me once that he had gone into chemistry because his sister had married a chemist, and his grandmother (or mother? Or Moore’s grandmother? I forget) had loved this son-in-law so much, and kept talking about how he was a chemist. So her father had gone into chemistry himself “to win his mother’s(?) love,” Moore said, making a sweeping gesture.

She was heading up the hill. I asked her if she would sign books at the reading, and she said, “Sure, sure.” I told her, thanks for the writing she was doing. “You’re really funny,” I said. She gave a dismissive wave and turned away. “And really dark,” I said. “As you know.” She glanced back one more time, and was gone.

Watching for Big Algae Oil Production

2009-10-13T11:05:00.006-04:00

This past summer there were announcements of expected large-scale algae oil production. I'm watching for follow-up to see if any of these companies are actually making their predicted flow. So far, no confirmation.

One announcement was from CEHMM, a New Mexico non-profit research firm, that planned to have a "large scale demonstration algae farm" in full operation by September 1. No news on whether this is actually happening.

Solix Biofuels has also begun a large-scale demonstration algae farm in Colorado in cooperation with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. This was expected to be fully operating by late summer. There is no further news on this. One intriguing thing about algae farming is that it can (and should) be done on non-arable land such as the bad land that tends to compose Native American reservations. If Native Americans can create jobs and make profits selling fuel, as they might demonstrate they can in this endeavor, then this would be a healthy turn for them and the rest of our country.

There was also the agreement between SunEco Energy and J.B. Hunt Transportation (a large trucking company whose name you see often on the panels of 18-wheelers) for SunEco to provide algae-grown fuel oil to blend with petroleum Diesel for us in trucks. SunEco claims to be already producing "barrels," rather than "beakers" of algae oil each day. Let's hope this contract comes to fruition.

All three of the above algae companies use open-air ponds for algae production. This is generally the cheapest kind of algae farm to build, but it is likely to have the lowest yield of oil per acre, in part because of the inefficient use of space and the inability to use genetically designed algae. Only native algae can be used in the open ponds.

The U.S. Air Force and Navy have expressed interest in biofuels grown in the U.S. because of the promise of a secure energy supply. They don't want their planes and ships grounded if the Middle East decides not to sell us fuel for plans and ships to use in bombing the Middle East. Toward this end, the Navy has purhcased 20,000 gallons of algae-derived Diesel fuel (and 40,000 gallons of fuel made from camelina weeds) from Solazyme, an algae company that has not fully explained its process, but is known to grow its algae in closed containers using starchy bio-waste to feed the algae.

My current favorite algae company, Origin Oil, has released production models for growing algae oil using its technology (press release here, pdf of presentation here). Like Solazyme, Origin Oil grows algae in closed containers, but Origin claims to have made some creative advances. Their process of quantum fracturing creates tiny bubbles of CO2 and other nutrients to facilitate delivery to the algae cells; also, this quantum fracturing of CO2 aids in cracking the algae cells open to release the oil. According to the company, this method of getting the oil out of the algae greatly cheapens the otherwise very expensive process of getting oil out of algae by pressing it.

Origin Oil's presentation has two proposals: one just for growing algae oil, and another for growing oil while simultaneously using the algae to treat wastewater. The first model shows little profit and, thus, is probably not feasible at this time. The second model shows a more favorable 20% profit. Also note the need for "free energy" in both models in the form of heat. This energy could come along with concentrated CO2 in the form of power plant emissions. So, look for Origin Oil's technology to be first used in cleaning smokestack emissions and/or wastewater, and producing oil as a by-product.

The Craft Talk

2009-09-11T09:43:00.002-04:00

This post and the previous one are old emails I sent out in the summer of 2005 when I was at an art colony, and writer Lorrie Moore was also there. The colony organized a "craft talk" with us writers and Moore, in the dining room of one of the houses there, with all of us at the long table.

On the subject of writing about one’s family members, but being worried about what they might think, Moore said that she was recently at a conference with lots of other famous writers, including David Sedaris and Rick Moody, and they all said that none of their family members read their stuff -- not their siblings, or parents, and certainly not their children. “Children, thank goodness, are never interested in what a parent is writing.”

Someone in our group asked, “What about spouses?”

Moore said, “Hmm, well. I guess I didn’t include spouses as family.”

Frank asked her if the Center director had picked her up from the airport on his bicycle the night before.

“No,” she said, “But I think I offended him. He was telling me about these famous quotes that he has put up around his office -- things from Kant, and Thoreau, and so on like that, and I said, ‘What, no Judy Garland?’ I think he took offense at that. I was just trying to make a joke.”

I was waiting for Frank to try to embarrass me. At one point, our group sort of broke up in laughter, and Frank joined in with an artificial “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Moore noticed this. “Oh, that,” she said, looking straight at him through the commotion. “Well, that was more of a scream,” she said, very seriously.

Frank said, “No, I was saying that, because it follows from something he said.” He pointed at me.

But by then, we had all moved on.

Humor in writing had to come up. Someone asked her how to include humor in work. Moore said that some people have spent their lives looking at things a funny way, and in their writing, they find they can make connections like that as well. “But I have a problem with being silly,” she said. “I have to work to keep that in check.”

Really? So what we get in her published work is silliness in check?

What writers does she recommend that we read? Alice Munro, among others. There is a strong Grace Paley contingent here, and someone in the room named her, but Moore said, “Oh, maybe. I used to be, really. But not as much any more.”

It's Like I Remembered It

2009-09-10T23:44:00.006-04:00

We knew to look for humor and darkness all at once, and it was there in the first sentence. "Winter came early, catching the songbirds off guard." Since Lorrie Moore's reading in 2005 at the Vermont Studio Center where I spent a month, I've been quoting that first line to people. If I recall correctly, her new novel was past deadline then. Now it's over four years later than that, and finally it has come out. I've read some portions on Amazon and found the first sentence to be the same. And the business about 9/11 in the first chapter, which was not mentioned by the NPR reviewer (making me fear it had been taken out) was still there. So it is as I remembered it . . . the part she read, at least.

I was funny back at art colony. I hung with the abstract painters on the porch of the Wolf Kahn building, and they called me a writer. Fours years later I'm still working on the same story I was working on then. I've lost inspiration for it. I just need to get past it to do something else. I do some other random writing and the occasional blog entry and I have this sci-fi idea for something else I'd like to write, but I know that I run out of gas pretty quickly in sci-fi so I have not started.

I was in touch back then. I, and others, ate meals with Lorrie Moore. I have a story that she critiqued, with her notes in the margins. She said it was a real story and it was "almost ready" (to publish). I still don't know what to do with it to make it completely ready. I just don't know.

I like thinking about that summer. On the occasion of her new novel coming out, I'm reprinting an email I sent to friends about the first night Moore showed up at art colony.

The painters and sculptors are wondering what the big deal is. All the writers are leaning close to each other and talking about her. “I went through a phase where I was like, ‘Lorrie Moore, Loorie Moore,’”one says, waving her hands as if in Pentecostal prayer. “And then I was like, ‘Oh, she’s clever, she’s just so clever.’ But then I’ve been reading her again, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is good. This is fantastic.’”

“She’s really a dark writer,” says a tall, skinheaded Jewish writer from Boston, the first deep Lorrie Moore fan I really talked to here.

Yes, indeed. One of the very darkest.

“That story with that word repeated for three pages? What is it? ‘Stop’?” he said.

I reminded him that the word is “Ha!” and the story is “Real Estate.”

He went on, “In that story, the guy who lives in the attic, who’s not supposed to be there? His name is Tod. Which is German for death. Death has moved into the house with them.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Frank is a gray-bearded writer, a teacher at a prep school in Connecticut. He always sits at the head of a long table at meal times and holds court. As you carry your tray in, you can see him there and decide whether you want to sit near him for that meal, or far from him. He actually is not much of a Lorrie Moore fan. It’s not that he’s uptight -- he could qualify as “hippie,” in my estimation. It’s just that she is, well, post-hippie -- the generation wallowing in the hippies’ wake, “masturbating and doomed like outlaws,” as she put it.

Frank can’t remember the name of the Moore collection he started reading and did not finish, and he makes fun of my infatuation.

“Are you stalking her?” he said. “I’m going to come to your studio. And if you have enlarged pictures of her tacked up all over, I’m going to be very worried.”

I said I have copies of her books all over my studio which is, by my request, also my bedroom.

“That’s even stranger,” said Frank.

(Lots of the writers here have their studios as their bedrooms. But more than half, by their request, are corralled in little offices surrounding a central room with a laser printer.)

This morning, at breakfast, Frank said to me, “I heard the weatherman on the radio today. He said Lorrie Moore’s sleigh was sighted flying over the Midwest. Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho.”

I said, “No, it’s Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! . . . .”

Frank said, “When she’s around, [Elrond] will have to wear his Depends.”

At mid-afternoon, I was alone in the dining room getting tea. Frank wandered in. “Is she here yet?” he said, looking around.

As some of you know, they have no trays here, so you have to get your plate with your entree, and maybe your drink, set that down, and then go to the salad bar and get that and go back to your seat. And about half the time, the salad bar is more substantial than the gourmet, often vegetarian, entree. (I have done something I never do. I have bought potato chips and onion dip for my room, for Chrissakes) So, at dinner, I was in the stage of fetching my salad, when I saw a newcomer just then taking her seat. There are lots of newcomers each mealtime. Staff members come back from vacations, other residents arrive late. As my gaze passed by this one, I felt a sting like a knife stabbing up my ass. Jesus Lord Mercy. Finish taking that step, yes, that’s right, now take another and continue on your way.

I went back to my seat, which, by chance, was at the head of the long table parallel to Frank’s. So he and I were looking down our respective tables. And directly in my line of sight, facing me at the next table, was this particular newcomer.

I ducked so that another diner was between me and her, and whispered to Courtney “See Lorrie Moore over there? Don’t look.” Courtney was craning her neck all around. She saw, and ducked suddenly, putting her hand over her mouth.

“I have to tell somebody,” she said. “Where’s Elisa?”

Elisa is about half my age and has a published short story collection and a novel contract with Simon and Schuster. I learned this from her, without probing, in the first 4 minutes of knowing her. Later that day, my very cool housemate Daniel said to me, “I met someone with a published short story collection and a novel contract-”

“Elisa” I said, cutting him off. “I know.”

Anyway, Elisa gets kudos for knowing her Lorrie Moore stuff deeply. But she was not in the room right then. I said to Courtney, “You can tell Frank.”

So she got up and went and told Frank. He rose slightly to look over the heads down his table. Courtney and I redoubled our ducking as if to compensate for his indiscretion.

Frank looked at me and nodded, giving somber approval.

Word got around the room. One writer after another was twisting in their chair, looking. We all wanted to talk to her, and nobody did. Courtney, all during the meal, was breathing deeply and fanning herself. She’s dramatic like that.

Elisa finally came in. I wanted us to watch her and see how long it took her to notice. But Courtney went to her, and they were gabbing right behind Lorrie Moore’s back.

Meanwhile, what’s up with the real Lorrie Moore these days?

Her hair is not black, as it appears to be in the black and white photo, but brown. Or maybe it’s colored nowadays. It still swings gayly from the central part, just like in the black and white photo. Her eyes seem bigger in real life, but still slant downward ,sympathetically, toward their outer corners, as if even the most scathing critique she could deliver would not really be so bad. Her eyebrows are thicker than in the photo, “a holdover from the fur trade,” as she wrote of her first person narrator in “Frog Hospital.”

She is older than in the photo, sure, but to use her own words, “In this neck of the woods, she is still the neck of the woods.” She smiled at her tablemates the whole meal, or at least, all the few seconds total I allowed myself to look directly at her. She had the Center director on one side, wearing his bicycle outfit.

“Do you think he came in all sweaty, in his bicycle outfit, on purpose?” said Courtney.

Frank said the same thing later. Later still, we were to learn from her some of what was said at the table. The Center director was telling her about his collection, in his office, of framed quotes from famous people.

"What," Moore said. "No Judy Garland?"

Just as if she were one of us, Moore bussed her own dishes.

More to follow in the blog . . .

Seriously? O'Reilly Autoparts?

2009-08-18T20:55:00.004-04:00

So a new autoparts store has come from the heartland to compete with our "Advance" i.e. "Progressive."

Do they ever expect liberals to shop there? I hear O'Reilly fuses don't fit in the usual sockets because they are too SHORT. Honk! And their radiator fluid needs to be changed more frequently because of the SETTLEMENT! And you have to be extra careful not to overinflate your tires so they don't BLOVIATE. And they don't believe in lithium. Those fruity, psychiatrist-prescribed batteries have nothing on good ol' lead acid discipline.

Neither Victory Nor Defeat

2009-08-14T10:27:00.006-04:00

Just danger and damage are what bomb specialists experience in The Hurt Locker. It's like video production in the sense that you go somewhere with a certain amount of equipment packed into a van, you don't know what you are going to face, and the job might turn out to be a lot crazier than you thought. And when it's over, normal life seems relatively pointless. Of course, in war, the danger, adrenaline rush, need to release anxiety later, and disassociation from normal American life are a million times greater.

While Svetx disliked the use of slow-mo in one shot at the end, I welcomed the movie's tendency toward understatement in several respects. Like Full Metal Jacket, it kept a detached distance from characters and concentrated on circumstances instead of emotions. Like a good European movie, it did not try to tell the audience what to think. Each scene did not lead to the next in the literal sense of Hollywood flicks where it's too clear what is going to happen. Instead we get what I think are very realistic portrayals of aspects of a soldier's life: giddy optimism in approaching a new bomb to be diffused; raw acknowledgment that in the next instant, he could be toast; and the rough carousing later in the barracks. (I've never been in a war nor even in the military, so you could question my judgment on this.) In the end, what each soldier has is a personal experience. He goes over there, survives or dies, and comes home. There is neither victory parade nor shameful defeat.

Next time some politician starts saying we need to go to war in another country, the real question is, do we want to engage in a counterinsurgency lasting many years and leading to the establishment of a government that is what its own people make it, not what we dream of for them, and likely not worth our money and lives?

The Housemate Sessions go Mellow

2009-07-31T00:27:00.005-04:00

I edited four more of Housemate D's songs today. They are very mellow. I'll just put up two of them here.

For other installments in The Housemate Sessions, click my Music subject.

First Instance of "Large-Scale" Algae Farm

2009-07-23T18:42:00.005-04:00

Solix Biofuels, a long time member of my algae watchlist, inoculated their newly-completed algae ponds with microalgae on July 16. Production of algae oil should be in full-swing by the end of summer. They predict they will produce 3,000 gallons of oil per acre by the end of this year. This is the first time I know of that the phrase "large scale" has been applied to an algae farm demonstration.

Another company, the non-profit CEHMM in New Mexico, plans to start selling algae oil off its own open-air pond on September 1.

These developments, along with recent advances by Origin Oil and Exxon's announcement of their $600 million investment in algae farming in partnership with geneticist Craig Venter of Synthetic Genomics means things are moving along for this source of second-generation biofuel. Stay tuned!

This Takes All The Fun Out Of It

2009-07-15T10:08:00.009-04:00

. . . but also saps credibility of Exxon-funded climate change deniers.

Though they have worked through the American Enterprise Institute to fund global warming doubters, spent $16 million between 1998 and 2005 at the AEI and other organizations on such propaganda (see previous link), and still fund global warming doubters after stating in 2008 that they would cut such funding, these goons have now announced that they will sink $600 million into algae research for growing fuel oil. Apparently, they have been investigating alternative energy in private for years. After considering many possibilities, they have decided that algae is the best course to pursue. And this $600 million commitment, if it is true, sure does outweigh their denials of the need for alternative fuels.

Update: Business Week has an article describing Exxon's attitude on this.

Maybe it was this pressure from the Rockefellers and other shareholders that caused Exxon to change its tack.

In this new venture, Exxon is working with Craig Venter who genetically engineers algae for optimal oil production, and has even created algae that secretes its oil so that the oil does not need to be harvested from the cells.

So I guess I gotta add Exxon to my algae watchlist. The climate is changing indeed!

Palin Reality TV: I Called It!

2009-07-10T10:59:00.006-04:00

I first suggested a Palin reality TV show back on 11/17/08 in a comment on this post at the former Mudflats location. Now Levi Johnston has mentioned it. You know it would be huge. It's all she ever wanted anyway. And I called it. Most of politics is thinly veiled reality TV, attracting narcissists with no shame. The veil is thinnest of all with Palin.

So how about some show title suggestions:

Trailin' Palin
Much Ado about the Shrew
No Taxes, Just Taxidermy
Tantrums and Tangents: The Calculus of Raising Trig
Speaking in Tongues
The Maverick Matriarch

China Could Kick Our Butts in Algae

2009-07-08T11:16:00.006-04:00

. . . if we don't get our act together. China is investing heavily in algae farms, powered by wind, to sequestrate their voluminous CO2 emissions. I was just saying the other day that wind could power algae farms in southwestern United States. I've also said that I think a lot of the elements for successful algae farming do exist -- someone just needs to bring them together for the right kind of farm. If China beats us on this thing, I'm gonna be seriously pissed.

Like nearly all algae ventures, China's is in development stages and is a few years away from commercial production. So they are not necessarily way ahead of us.

Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill from the last entry wants to make sure his own government is not funding algae farming. I'm gonna guess he doesn't mind his government having funded installing the third most corrupt government in the world in Iraq because that's serious patriotic wartime freedom stuff. So maybe he won't mind if our own Pentagon gets into algae farming. After all, tanks and jets need fuel too!

The closest thing our country has to a commercially operating algae farm, that I know of, is this farm run by the state-funded Center for Excellence in Hazardous Materials Management in New Mexico. They bill this as a commercial demonstration farm. I presume this means that, while every algae company has a small bioreactor that demonstrates their process, this farm will demonstrate it on a larger, more commercial scale. It's due to start production in September, and I'm looking forward to it.

Algae Exec Stuffs Fox News' Willard

2009-07-08T09:57:00.009-04:00

I have not been following Cody Willard, but he looks to me like another failed attempt, like Tucker Carlson, to make conservatism look youthful and cool while actually being just a whining chump.

So here's this short segment from Fox News' Happy Hour (also viewable off this page) where they introduce algae, "that same stuff you try to keep off the inside of your fish tank," as some funky new kind of energy source -- as if they have not already had a bald algae executive on their show.

There is a lot in the video. The CEO of Origin Oil, Riggs Eckelberry, says that getting oil out of algae is ten times more expensive than getting it out of a seed. I had not known of this drastic discrepancy. It is probably a big reason why algae is not already a source of fuel oil. But Eckelberry claims that his company has found a new way to extract oil that cuts this cost significantly.

Then, instead of asking how this relates to the "food vs. fuel" problem with biofuels, or energy security, or global warming, Cody Willard (you wonder if his name was derived from William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody to evoke connotations of the wild west and Ronald Reagan in the susceptible minds of conservatives) wants to make sure he's not paying for it with his taxes.

Eckelberry says his company is not government subsidized. It is just a technology company that wants to sell products to algae growers. It's the algae growers that can and do receive some government subsidies. Willard balks at this, and Eckelberry reminds him that traditional oil companies have received government subsidies too. Willard balks at this too. (And I balk at this, but do any of us really know what the world would look like if there were no government subsidies for anything? Ideologue's projections are always over simplified.)

Wild Bill Cody says, "Google didn't need help. Twitter didn't need help."

Eckelberry shuts him down with, "Who created the Internet?"

Ka-blam.

Also, twice in the segment, Willard says, "It's penny stock. Don't buy it just because you saw it on our show." I can understand not wanting to buy in to the algae sector just yet. But I'm not sure that penny stock in a company with possibly one of the major keys to success for this industry deserves such an emphatic "don't buy" statement either.

And then Willard asks if he can cook with the oil from algae. As if this has not been brought up before in every algae discussion . . . as if people are not already stealing used cooking oil from restaurants to turn into biofuel . . . what a doof.

Night, On our Porch

2009-07-07T23:27:00.005-04:00

At night the insects are like maracas intent on torture, and the sound of traffic looms close, as if the interstate has sidled up the hill like a snake. You can hear frogs too, and at least one quick owl's shriek.

First, the Bad News

2009-07-03T13:23:00.004-04:00

Greenfuels Technologies is the first algae company I've been following to bite the dust. They had been running some promising demonstrations at fossil fuel burning power plants, including the Redhawk plant in Arizona and Big Cajun II in Louisiana, showing how CO2 emissions can be diverted through algae incubators and recycled into oil which could be made into transportation fuels.

This letter from their then-CEO describes some of the problems they were facing in 2007. The algae incubators at the Redhawk plant produced algae more quickly than expected, and the algae was not harvested fast enough. This lead to overpopulation of algae which cut off sunlight in the incubator and killed the algae. The incubator was shut down for retooling. Another technical problem was that their new harvesting technology was found to be twice as expensive as initially projected.

It now looks like Arizona Public Service, which owns the Redhawk plant, will continue its own efforts to recycle CO2 using algae.

Greenfuels had also been working on an algae incubator to recycle gases from a cement-making plant in Spain.

The troubles at Greenfuels are probably just a hint of the challenges being faced by many algae startups around the world. Algae evangelists like me (evalgelists?) make blog postings that celebrate algae as the cure for the world's energy problems. But if algae is so great, then what's the holdup? Or is it too good to be true?

For one thing, algae is not attracting venture capital yet. This article recognizes the potential in algae but says that algae growing technology does not promise to yield profits soon enough to warrant venture capital investment at this time.

This report from the Algae Biofuels World Summit touches on many other difficulties involved in growing algae, removing water from it, and extracting oil. There is the debate of whether to grow it in open ponds or in enclosed incubators -- one speaker favors open ponds because he says none of the prototype enclosed incubators run by the various algae startups would work on a commercial scale. But, with open ponds, there is the problem of water evaporation, and the report goes on to say that this, rather than land availability, is the most limiting factor in large-scale algae production.

Other challenges facing the algae industry are genetically engineering algae strains that produce optimal yield; working with the government to develop means of regulating this hybrid industrial and agricultural business; and finding the best ways to separate algae from water and oil from algae in the harvesting stage.

And while one might think the current economic stimulus package might benefit the algae industry, the problem is that there are no shovel-ready algae projects. So this round of stimulus might contribute nothing to algae.

The good news is that algae research is indeed progressing. Origin Oil claims to have a very efficient way to distribute nutrients to algae in the growing stage without agitating the algae (agitation apparently slows algae growth), and an inexpensive way to extract oil in the harvesting stage using electromagnetic waves and pH adjustment of the water. The algae cells are cracked open and their oil floats to the top of a settling chamber, water remains in the middle, and broken algae mass collects at the bottom.

And, in New Mexico, the Center of Excellence for Hazardous Materials Management expects to be producing algae oil commercially, on a small scale, by September 1. They will be growing their algae in open ponds and hope to produce 5,000 gallons of oil per acre per year. One quote in the article says that, on 5,000 acres, the 25 million gallons produced could provide half of the Diesel fuel needed by that state in one year. Probably these optimistic projections will not be reached, but if the project can demonstrate feasibility in algae farming, that will mean a lot. It will also create 165 well-paying high-tech jobs. This is the only algae project I know of expecting to produce oil for sale regularly in the near future.

I Said It First

2009-06-25T18:36:00.005-04:00

Paul Krugman cites Barney Frank identifying Weaponized Keynesianism. But at the end of this post back in February, I had the idea before either of them.

Will Physics Ever Leave Me Alone?

2009-06-17T00:00:00.004-04:00

I did magnetic resonance imaging as part of my advanced lab course twenty years ago. I remember having a terrible time with the math, but everything else about the experiment I had forgotten. So I’ve had to check on Wikipedia to remind myself of the basics.

Protons are little electric charges, and they are spinning. This spinning is like electric current moving in a loop of wire. We probably all played with electromagnets in elementary school and saw that an electric current in a wire produces a magnetic field around the wire. So, like a loop of wire, a proton is a tiny electromagnet.

In an MRI machine, a magnetic field is applied to a person’s body. As we know from playing with magnets, when one magnet comes near another, it can cause the other magnet to move and align itself a certain way. So, the protons in the body align themselves with the constant magnetic field. Think of them as lining up like soldiers in perfect formation.

Then, additional magnetic fields are applied to the body. This changes the orientation of the protons (or makes some of the soldiers move out of place a little bit). When these additional magnetic fields are switched off, the protons realign themselves according to the constant magnetic field (like soldiers scrambling to get back into proper place again). As they realign themselves, they release electromagnetic radiation that can be measured by the machine. Protons of different tissues take different amounts of time to realign, so by measuring how long the realignment takes in different places, a picture of varying types of tissue can be formed.

I had only a vague idea of how this would work when the doctor sent me for an MRI as a last ditch effort to find the cause of my symptoms. A distant softly shifting curtain had hung in the background of my head all my life. Sometimes it would be closer, but never was bothersome. But recently I’ve become surrounded by a field of insects. At worst, it’s high summer activity; at best, it’s warm mid-September when there’s just one or two left in the grass, the last holdouts for mating before winter.

My Dad had an MRI recently. He talked about it like it was a landmark for old age. The machine broke on his first time in, and he joked that his brainscans had broken it. When good scans were made at a later date, they told him he had the brain of a young person. Who knew someone that irascible could have such a young brain? Seriously, we think it’s all the balance exercising he gets from bike riding and skiing, but who knows. We in our family are lucky in that we preserve pretty well.

The MRI people called to tell me my insurance would not cover it because of my high deductible. I would have to pay the whole $1023. I canceled the appointment and called the doctor back to see if this was really worth it. His nurse said it was his recommendation, but it was up to me. I paced and thought about it. Really, it had been my choice to have a high deductible. It has saved, in the long run, on premiums over the years. I didn’t want to afford this, but I could. I called the MRI people and set up the appointment again.

I had found one first-hand description of an MRI online that said that the machine was loud, so I took earplugs. At the desk, the receptionist asked how much I would like to pay now. I hate spending money -- I’ve joked that I’m no good at making it, but I’m a fiend at saving it. But when I’ve made a decision and it seems there’s no turning back, I feel rather carefree. “The whole snert,” I said. Really, it was less than half of a new wireless system.

Backstage, one nurse stood by while I put my things in a locker. “All I’ve got now is the metal zipper,” I said. The writer of the online description had said that she had disrobed completely, but this nurse said my metal zipper would be fine. I imagined it catching fire, as if in a microwave oven, spontaneous combustion from the crotch.

I moved on wearing still my T-shirt and shorts and Birkenstocks.

There was to be an IV. Uh oh, I had not been prepared for this. Jangle my nuclei all you want, but I’m not cool with needles that stick and then stay there.

The nurse giving the IV said I had good veins and asked if I drink a lot of water.

I thanked her for the compliment and said I needed to keep hearing those right now.

I averted my gaze as the needle went in. But this time, unlike the yearly blood test I get to check TSH levels, the needle stayed. She put in some saline solution, and the point of entry felt eerily cool on the inside, black ink ejected into already murky water by a fleeing octopus. I waited anxiously for the feeling to go away, and it did after a few seconds, but still, something foreign was inside me now.

She said she would leave the IV connector in my arm, and they would use it to add contrast later.

My non IV-ed right hand got my right earplug in fine, but it could hardly get the left one in. I feared my left ear would be unprotected. There I would be, stuck in the machine, making worse the symptoms that got me here. The nurse said I could use my left hand, and the IV did not hurt when bent my arm. I squeezed and rolled the earplug and tried to stick it in correctly before it swelled again, but I kept hitting the wrong angle. I have this problem before going to clubs too. I felt like I was holding things up. Finally the nurse got me a fresh earplug and put it in herself, and it felt pretty good.

I set the locker key on the windowsill and kicked off my Birkenstocks and sat on the table. The nurse who had given me the IV and helped with the earplug now said that I smelled good. “What is that?” she asked.

”Regular Speed Stick,” I said.

“I thought it was cologne,” she said.

“I like those compliments. Keep ‘em coming,” I said.

I lay back and my head fit into a soft wedge in the table. They added some pads on the sides to help keep my head still. Then, from somewhere, a little cage was swung into position over my head, and with a loss of perspective like happened in La Femme Nikita when Nikita jumped down the garbage shoot to escape the rocket and up became sideways, and I saw the nurse’s glasses and smile where there should have been just the tube interior. It was a mirror now positioned over my eyes, so that I could see out of the machine once I was slid in.

A little squeeze bulb went into one hand. I would squeeze this when I couldn’t stand it anymore, as when Christopher Hitchens dropped the metal rods, or Mancow his cow.

They put a pillow under my legs and a blanket over them and slid me in. People talk about the claustrophobia, but the mirror, which gave me sight of the opening and the room beyond, helped greatly. I could see the nurses in the control room.

Then the noises started. I was grateful for the earplugs. There were brief spurts of fierce vibrations of the sort that, if made by your lawn mower, would convince you that something horrible was wrong. There were a few softer squirting sounds. A nurse, speaking through an intercom, announced the length of each test, which was typically 5 to 10 minutes. When the test proper started, the sound would be a constant

DO DO DO DO DO DO DO DO DO DO DO

with no variation, for the duration. I imagined my protons snapping to attention and going at-ease, alternately. I wondered when they would start turning into adamantium.

The earplugs kept the noise at bay. I was a little tired because I had not slept well the night before, so lying still was not a problem. And I was no drain on the medical system, for I had paid the old-fashioned way -- with a debit card. Why not enjoy it? I let my mind wander. The symptoms that had lead me there swam around me. Urges to move developed like cumulus clouds in my bones but I let them pass through me. I seemed to lose connection with my limbs. I imagined Svetx beside me as if in a double-MRI-sleeping bag, and it was easy to lie there.

I noticed that the edge of the mirror closer to my forehead was farther from me than the edge closer to my chin. This meant that it was not a mirror, but a prism. I studied its image of the windowsill across the room where I had put my locker key. The position of the box of sanitary wipes on the sill was not reversed, so indeed, this was not a mirror. A mirror would have sufficed, right? So why a prism, which is probably more expensive?

About 2/3 through, they slid me out and put the contrast into my vein. Now, I imagined, I would stand out more clearly in poor light. Take my picture, before it wears off! Or would I appear only in black and white?

I was really very comfortable the whole time. Life outside the MRI machine . . . that was hard. When I was done, I would have to go back to my own freedom of underemployment, which is a molasses of indecision in which I must constantly wade.

The nurses were pleased. I had not moved at all for the whole half hour. They helped me upright and, thinking of my Grandpa who used to say of nurses “Always leave them laughing,” I asked, “Do I have mutant powers now?”

Afterwards, I treated myself to the full buffet at Golden Corrall. If the MRI doesn’t give me mutant powers, surely Golden Corral will.

Snubbed Again

2009-06-15T12:03:00.005-04:00

The Neoneocon rejected one of my comments again, so I am forced to reproduce it from memory on my own site, where it will have far fewer readers.

She was going on about how Iran's current reelection of a hardliner should not be a surprise to anyone and is a slap in the face for Obama's idealistic administration. I wrote back, "Indeed, an antagonistic blowhard being elected president twice in a row is not a surprise at all." Was that offensive? Only if she recognizes Bush in that description, right?

Then I noted that Iran had had two reformist presidents before Ahmadinejad: Rafsanjani and Khatami. (Here Juan Cole gives a brief history of the election of those two, the reformist voters becoming disillusioned and staying home when Ahmadinejad was elected the first time, and now coming out in droves again for this election, which was probably rigged.) I said that Iran electing a reformist is not unlikely at all.

Then I reminded the neoneocon that while she's claiming the present Iranian election is a blow to Obama's idealism, wasn't it neocon idealism that said our invasion of Iraq would spread Western style democracy in the Middle East? And isn't it a blow to their ideology that while reformist presidents had been elected in Iran before our invasion, a hardliner has been elected twice since?

What is with these people.

The TV Rapture

2009-06-14T21:03:00.010-04:00

It’s true. It really happened. It was not like judgment day, or the rapture, which never really happen. Analog TV was actually turned off on the announced date, and now, all TV broadcasts will be digital.

Anticipation of this had caused concern for audio people like me. Our wireless systems share the same spectrum of airwaves as TV, and since digital channels use their bands more thoroughly than analog, we expected there to be fewer “cracks” for us to slip in a wireless signal.

Our wireless systems come in “blocks,” with each block being a certain range of frequencies. The range of frequencies for a block overlaps the bands of about 4 TV channels. For a given city, some TV channels will have a broadcast on them, and some will be empty. So, when ordering a new wireless system, the buyer or helpful dealer needs to research what blocks have the fewest TV stations broadcasting in the city where the wireless system will be used. In our area, block 28 of Lectrosonics brand wirelesses used to be the best. But in recent years, more TV stations were put in 28, and 22 became the best, followed by 24, then 27, then 29.

You can use a wireless receiver to scan within its block and show you where the TV broadcasts are. Then, you can set your system to use a frequency that is not already used by a TV station.

Problems arise if you already own wirelesses on a certain block and new TV stations start broadcasting on that block. Your available frequencies are reduced. Also, when traveling to another city, you have to check where that city’s TV stations are and see if your block will work there, or if you need to rent systems on other blocks.

In the all-analog days, even if a block was mostly filled with TV channels, there would be a few empty frequencies at the bottom and top edges of a channel’s range. These were called “guard bands.” An audio recordist forced to use a wireless system on an already crowded block could probably find some open frequencies in these guard bands.

But digital TV uses all the frequencies within its band and leaves no guard bands. We were afraid that the conversion to all-digital would crowd the ariwaves more and leave us fewer options.

But in the past year, as the big analog cut-off approached, people started to realize that when all the analog stations went away, they would not necessarily all be replaced by digital stations. This would mean a net decrease in the number of TV stations we have to compete with. This likelihood was enhanced by the fact that one digital “channel” can carry more than one TV program. So if a station could broadcast 4 programs in the band formerly of 1, then it would do that rather than buy 4 whole different bands. Furthermore, it's a lousy economy anyway where advertising can hardly be sold on the broadcasts that do exist.

On the big cut-off day, June 9, I was reading facebook when one friend announced that her analog TV had gone away, right in the middle of Sarah Palin’s interview with Matt Lauer. It was a shame to her that this was the last thing her TV was ever able to show, but I find it symbolically appropriate.

I wondered, “Are the airwaves clearer on my blocks?” I went to my audio bag and set the receivers to scan, and sure enough, the block 24’s, which had once shown the fully-used bands of at least 2 TV channels, now showed only a few weak spikes. And the block 27’s, which had shown a single TV channel, were empty. Nothing was on them, except for maybe one tiny little weak signal at one end. It was very strange looking at the empty scan. It was like the end of the world, perhaps the rapture after all, with human activity suddenly squelched. Alone at home on a street where everyone else was at work, I could have been the last person on earth.

Now, unless TV networks find a reason to create so many new digital channels that they need to buy up the vacated analog channels, it should actually be easier for audio recordists to find emtpy frequencies.

Happy Memorial Day

2009-05-24T14:30:00.005-04:00

Our housemate sessions produced a song about one Memorial Day. Here it is as composed and performed by Housemate D

And here's another, sort of a gritty ballad

My Torture Memo

2009-05-22T12:10:00.009-04:00

I once worked on a video about an elderly woman known for her civil rights activism. Her husband had been a town mayor and also an activist, but she said that his head was in it more than his heart. He was more of a pragmatist striving for even-handed governance and justice rather than a crusader for a moral cause.

I won't claim to be any kind of effective activist or pragmatist, but I do at least share with the woman's husband a desire to be pragmatic. So, with respect to torture, I'm less interested in the moral issues than the question of whether it gains us more usable information than non-tortuous techniques.

All I can do is stack up the case made by one camp against the case made by the other. There is the claim by Marc Thiessen, for instance, that the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles was foiled because of information gained through torture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But this article by Timothy Noah cites a fact sheet provided by the Bush White House in 2002 saying the Library Tower plot had been discovered and broken up, and this was before KSM's capture in March of 2003.

Thiessen and Dick Cheney (for example, in his speech yesterday) say the recently released torture memos only tell part of the story, that they don't tell of the useful information that was gained form torture. Maybe, in time, more information shedding light on this will be declassified. But until then, we are lacking specifics.

Meanwhile, there is this detailed account of how Zubaidah gave little information . . . until he was tortured, at which point he provided awealth of information that sent CIA agents scrambling all over the globe spending millions of dollars chasing false leads. And there is this account by Ali Soufan stating that much useful information was gained by traditional interrogations of Zubaidah, while the torture used later backfired in events that are still part of that still classified information Cheney is referring to. Soufan also cites a chronological problem with a torture-defenders' argument: that torture of Zubaidah lead to the capture of Jose Padilla. And yet, Padilla was captured before the torture was approved in August of 2002.

Can the torture defenders make arguments that are not so easily debunked?

Consider also, besides Zubaidah's, the false leads produced by torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Torture of al-Libi yielded much valuable information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. al-Libi's testimony was inserted into Colin Powell's fateful speech by al-Libby, and the U.S. saddled itself with a six-year-and-counting insurgency consisting of Iraqis who had not been our enemies before that invasion.

So, really, Dick Cheney? Torture has saved hundreds of thousands of lives?

To really determine whether torture works, we would need to see all information gained from torture and determine what percentage was helpful; and compare this to all the information gained from non-torturous techniques and the percentage of that which was helpful. I doubt we'll ever have access to all that information.

With the evidence we do have tilted toward showing torture does not work, why not then err on the side of morality and forbid torture?

5/24 Update: What is a Mancow anyway . . . a giant man-boob? Apparently so. Also, the results of Zubaidah's torture interrogations are more clear than I had thought. Here is Marcy Wheeler explaining what the 9/11 Commission reported of information gained by Zubaidah's torture. In summary, 10 pieces of not-very-useful information were learned from 83 sessions of waterboarding.

I just saw Meghan McCain on Colbert . . .

2009-05-19T00:49:00.004-04:00

. . . and did so many spit takes I drank my chocolate milk twice. I have decided that she, rather than her sister Bridget, would have been a better subject of that year 2000 smear campaign before the South Carolina primary, for the purpose of denying McCain Republican votes.

I think of the prudish Republicans I know, and I'm sure they're about to bust a gasket over the Republican being the "Party of the Pro-Sex Woman." With such talk coming from a candidate's daughter, there is no need to invent a story about his siring illegitimate black children.

McCain's campaign manager from 2000, Richard Davis, in the above article, says there is no response to a personal smear campaign like that. To respond is to be defeated, he says. However, I believe I have just thought of a suitable response: "Sure I sired illegitimate black children. It makes me more Jeffersonian!" Turn the issue right back on those Constitution beaters.

Incidentally, that link about Jefferson having Black descendants is to a book written by a TV producer I worked for on this project about a local architect.

But, getting back to the Pro-Sex Party with it's allegiance to the founding fathers. If Jefferson was so busy siring children by his slave(s), then would he say the government needs to uphold the sanctity of marriage? Or would he be more open to variants on the institution, such as gay marriage?

The Housemate Sessions Vol. II

2009-05-13T22:16:00.019-04:00

You might recall from a previous post that Housemate D effing rocks. Now I bring you the results of our second session, held a year and a half after that first one.

This time, instead of the dining room, it was in Elrond Hubbard World Headquarters (i.e. my bedroom); instead of being spontaneous, we had a few weeks of yelling back and forth through the house, "When you wanna do this recording / I don't know, maybe next Tuesday . . ." which afforded some time for practice and planning; and instead of using rented equipment home for just one night before doing this shoot the following day, it was my own equipment, purchased in February and still hardly used because this year has been so slow.

Though April was moderately busy -- with a shoot for the crime show, a week doing promos for a local TV station, two days doing interviews for John Deere, and a day each on an instructional video, a testimonial from this Olympic athlete, a conference hosted by this local think tank -- mostly I used the gear owned by the people hiring me. But that athlete testimonial did use my gear, and the tiny Countryman mic performed beautifully. It even sounded better on the indoor interview than the Sanken CS-3e mini shotgun boom mic. This boom mic is supposed to handle reverberating interiors better than a Sennheiser 416, but it did pick up some funny reverb in that little room in the track building. This reverb I didn't even notice until I got home and played back some of the backup recordings. It's a hazard of listening to one mic in each ear on set. You don't necessarily hear either one in much detail.

Speaking of reverb, I with I could add a little to the voice in these recordings. My free software, Audacity, is pretty cool, but has no reverb effect. When I get real audio software someday, I will go back and add reverb to the voice.

For making backup recordings on set, I have a Zaxcom ZFR100. It is small and seems very durable, and it can jam timecode from cameras and other recorders. Its connectors are positioned in a weird way on it though, so despite being small, it is very awkward in the bag.

I used the Zaxcom for backing up these recordings, but for the primary recording I used my Sound Devices USBPre. I recommend this for anyone who wants to record just 1 or 2 tracks of audio in the computer. It is a wonderful analog/digital converter. When I play CD's in the computer and run the audio through it, it sounds better than my expensive stereo system purchased 20 years ago.

For the instrumental recordings you are hearing, I put two mics on the guitar: the Sanken CS-3e, and my Sanken CS-1, a secret weapon purchased on ebay for indoor booming when there's time to switch out from the CS-3e mini shotgun. Using the two mics gives sort of a fake stereo effect.

But when there's singing, I had to put the CS-3e on the voice, while leaving the CS-1 on the guitar. This rendered two fairly flat sounding mono tracks. However, what you are hearing is a little more lively than two mono tracks. Getting this slight liveliness into the recording took lots of experimenting. Much of the past few weeks of sitting at home not working has been spent fussing with equalization and compression (both of which I don't know much about but I'm learning), going on the theory that if I could make the guitar and voice sound a little different in each ear, then overall it would sound sort of stereo-ish.

In fact, here's what a portion of the next clip sounds like as recorded, with each mic relegated just to one speaker.

And here it is with the fake stereo treatment I finally settled on. Can you guess what the treatment is?

I love how Housemate D just jumps into improvisations like the instrumentals on here. I swear, all but one of these recordings is the first and only take. Only this song you just heard required several takes; and at that, what you hear is a single take, not something edited together. He just sits in his room and plays these things, but he doesn't practice much -- maybe just 15 minutes here and there before heading out to the library. He doesn't have time for serious guitar playing and he has nearly no formal training. He was a star law student and argued a case before Justice Anton Scalia in a mock court a few months ago, for chrissakes. And yet, listen to how he varies his chords and uses inner (instrumental) voices on all these songs. This is not your average strum-and-humdrum at the local cafe. This is more like Strum und Drang.

I knew the instrumentals were improvised, but in the midst of making these recordings I asked where he had gotten the songs. "I just made them up," he said.

When? I had never heard these songs coming from his room. But when the mics were on, he had them ready, enough to fill an audio CD. And then, two weeks after that, we did another session where he laid down a whole nother CD's worth. I have not started editing them yet. That is my next task, and there is some more seriously interesting stuff there.

Coming Around on the Carbon Regulation Thing

2009-05-04T22:25:00.004-04:00

Just as Mowgli was raised by wolves, I was raised by Republicans, and the vestiges of their teachings still resound within my pained and indecisive heart. So, despite my well documented love of algae farming as a prospective alternative oil source, I've been filled with enough free-market claptrap to have my doubts about carbon caps, credits, and regulations. I have stated that I fear the creation of a new market overlaying the existing one -- that such an artificial construct will not last.

But it has come to me like this. Any time a lobbyist has influence in government, this is also not a free market force . . . correct? So there goes Exxon spending 9.32 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 in attempts to get its way with environmental regulations, drilling rights (on federal land), and tax breaks.

And there went the corn ethanol lobby trying to prevent Schwarzenegger from passing California's plan to cut carbon emissions by gas and Diesel producers by 15% over the next 11 years.. The lobbyists were worried that the corn ethanol industry would be harmed. But their very existence seems to me the result of governmental forces in the form of subsidies. From 2006 to 2011, the corn ethanol industry will receive 5.7 billion in federal tax cuts. Who knows where these large corporate bastions of capitalism would be if they really had to compete in a truly free market, without government intervention?

So given that so much non-market governmental influence has steered the course of our private sector anyway, I've decided I will no longer express doubts about reasonable and gradual enforced reductions in carbon emissions, or about carbon caps and trading. It seems to me to amount to the government helping one industry or another, but not necessarily an overall increase in government influence.

California passed that regulation. This has eliminated that state as a market for corn ethanol. Obama wants to set similar regulations to a national level. I say, bring it. And if this helps the algae to flow as a very low carbon-footprint product, then that's all the better.

Blog Friends, AKM of "The Mudflats" Needs Our Support

2009-03-29T12:09:00.006-04:00

I've been saying to myself for a while that the best way to get news these days is to read a blog by someone who knows what they are talking about. I was just reading today another post saying the same thing -- that good, insightful blogs are written by people with particular interest and knowledge in the subject matter; their statements can easily be backed up with links; and comments provide immediate feedback and support or critique. The excellent news blogs that I read are Informed Comment about the Middle East by Juan Cole, who has lately been touring the talk shows; Small Wars Journal about U.S. military operations, contributed to by John Nagl, David Kilcullen, and others who have been on NPR (and I hope other large media venues) talking about our revised approach to Afghanistan; Paul Krugman on economics; and, since the nomination of Sarah Palin as Republican VP candidate, The Mudflats by anonymous blogger AKM.

AKM writes about Alaska politics. AKM is funny and very knowledgeable and clearly puts much time into blogging. The blog has a tremendous following as indicated by the well over 150 comments it gets on each post. And, I'd say the comments are some of the most entertaining on the 'Net, as comments go.

Lots of politicians up there take criticism from AKM. For a while, one state legislator, Mike Doogan, has been trying to find out who AKM really is. Progressive Alaska wrote about his exchange with Doogan, with Doogan asking for AKM's identity. Doogan eventually did find out who AKM is and outed him/her on Friday in an apparent attempt to intimidate AKM.

There have always been anonymous writers. Daily Kos notes that Mark Twain and George Orwell, both pseudonums, wrote political and social commentary. Ben Franklin had several pseudonyms. Doogan said that he supports freedom of speech as long as the speaker makes his/her true identity known. I don't know the legalities of all this, but Kos and others are talking about everyone's right to remain anonymous if we choose. Kos notes several statements by the Supreme Court upholding the right to "pamphleteer" anonymously. Reasons for remaining anonymous are personal -- a person could be afraid of repercussions from an employer with conflicting views, for instance. This is one big reason why voting is anonymous in our country as well.

Strangely, Doogan is a Democrat (the party AKM is generally aligned with) who was openly critical of Sarah Palin when she was made the VP candidate. He used to be a journalist who did not hesitate to skewer politicians and make enemies. As far as I know, the worst thing AKM said about Doogan was justifiably criticize his email etiquette in responding to emails from concerned citizens. But reading Doogan's emails cited by AKM shows that me might be "losing it." His obsession with AKM could be another sign of this.

Since being outed, The Mudflats has experienced a swell in traffic compounding the swell a few months ago when Palin hit the national stage and everyone needed a blogger who had been on the case of Alaska politics for a while -- except that The Mudflats had only been around since May of 08. It's rise to fame so soon is lucky and also warranted. This surge in popularity will benefit The Mudflats and backfire upon Doogan. Meanwhile, The Mudflats is happy to hear from supporters, including anonymous bloggers. Stay tuned over there for indications of how The Mudflats and its followers, Mudpuppies, rally and will not be intimidated.

These Were All Really Nice Folks

2009-03-12T21:21:00.008-04:00

The appearance on the Internet of this picture, taken in fall of '07, means the show Casting Call is coming to the airwaves. It's a reality TV show about casting for a small part in the movie Spring Break '83 which, apparently, is also nearing completion.

This job had the hardest audio routing I've ever had to do, though in retrospect I guess it wasn't that bad; and in some types of audio work, they do it all the time. Four microphones had to be distributed to 8 tracks on 4 cameras, isolated and mixed according to certain specifications. Then all camera headphone outputs (8 more audio feeds) had to be returned to the mixer and fed back through subgroups so I could monitor them; and the gain at every point had to be calibrated so that the levels of outgoing audio in the mixer, levels in the cameras, and levels of headphone return audio in the mixer all were the same.

I can think of a few readers who might be able to name all three of the people sitting down. You know who you are.

Tree Frogs

2009-03-09T23:51:00.003-04:00

I'm gonna get arrested doing this someday. This was recorded in a neighborhood on the way home from dance practice tonight. I took the segments with the least traffic, but you can still hear some.

Here's a fun thing to do on a slow Saturday night. Play one of these tracks and a river track from the previous entry at the same time. Voila, noisy frogs by the riverside! Add some nighttime insects from this entry (load in a different tab or window) and play all three simultaneously for true audio wackiness!

River Recordings

2009-03-08T00:39:00.005-05:00

Live Blogging the Arrival

2009-03-03T09:13:00.012-05:00

8:15 PM: Look at it all pure, wrapped tightly in its placenta. Once I cut the cellophane, it will start the long path to deterioration. It should last over 10 years though. It's the best mixer of its kind.

7:08 PM: I force myself to go exercise in the yard for 1/2 hour. It's cold. I should have done this in the sun earlier, but I was obsessed with cleaning.

4:56 PM: I activate the insurance policy.

4:54 PM: It's here!!!!!

4:00 PM: I'm propping edges of the futon up on a tool box so I can vacuum the floor right where it normally rests. This definitely needed to be done. I wonder if I can alleviate some of this dust with an air cleaner? Better check Consumer Reports.

3:00 PM: While taking paperbacks off shelves to dust them and the shelves, I find a stash of little black pellets. It's either mouse droppings or maybe roach droppings? We do have the occasional roach here in the upstairs, and the books are not torn up, so it's probably not mice. I spray the shelf with Lysol and wipe it down, but a few books have the edges of their pages stained with the stuff. This is a bummer.

2:00 PM: How interesting that I would find a 15-year-old 45 rpm record while waiting for audio equipment intended for digital recording to arrive. This was made by friends back in the early '90's as a demo album for their band, "Grimace Jr." Their drummer lived in the house I still live in. He now plays for Veronique Diabolique.

This is a reminder that even when we were a few years out of college, bands put their demos on records. When I worked on a movie set as cableperson on '92, the recordist there was using analog 1/4" tape. The boom operator asked him, on the prep day, if he had thought about going digital. "When the wind is blowing, and trucks are going by, and the actor can't remember his lines and it's take 92 and I have to pee, digital doesn't matter."

Soon thereafter, digital audio tape came in. Its recorders and players were very temperamental. They would go down if it was too cold; they were susceptible to humidity. I recently got a call from a young filmmaker trying to prepare a budget for a low-budget movie. He asked what we would record audio on. DAT?

"Noooo!" I said. Any DAT machine around now is several years old, and who knows when it was last maintained. For serious work, they were replaced by hard drive recorders. And now those are being replaced by flash memory recorders, though in the large film/video production world, there are few recorders that use flash memory only. Most have internal hard drives and backup to flash memory or DVD RAM.

********************

10:07 AM: Fed Ex just drove by. Hey, hey, over here! Oh wait. It's UPS that I'm waiting for.

Damn this house is cold. Last week I could warm it up by opening windows. Today is sunny, and also has reflected fill-light from the melting snow. It's so bright I want to open a window, but I doubt it would help.

I'm reading Obamanomics by John Talbot. It talks about how people, when they get to choose a career, choose something more in line with what they want to do rather than what makes the most money. This is part of his argument that a healthy economy depends on a vibrant middle class rather than a coddled upper class. The upper class, after all, doesn't start that many new businesses. It just squirrels its money away for the future. And, I'll add the observation, the upper class doesn't necessarily hire people to do what they want or are good at anyway. They just hire people to do what the company needs, and often people working on companies feel that they are part of a dysfunctional system.

Anyway. Here I am making my first serious step toward having a career, at the age of 40. It's certainly not for the purpose of making good money. It's not commensurate with the stature of my college or the esotericism of my degree. It's nothing I ever stated that I want to do -- everything that I have stated like this has not worked out. It's what, at one time, I ended up doing. As a PA on local video productions, sometimes they would hand me the headphones. I had to use their crappy wirelesses, their single boom mic intended for outdoor use both indoors and outdoors. Their old mixers with scratchy pots and sticky VU meters. Eventually, I was being hired more to "do sound" than be a PA. But I still didn't really like the work or the constant question of where my next paycheck would come from. So I left the production business and went to work for a friend in his company on the Internets. For one year, I was happy. I could go to work and the office was there; I didn't have to load the car every morning, or drive around town picking up gear. For the second year, things started to look kind of dull. Then came the summer when all Internet employees everywhere were laid off.

Then I applied to MFA writing programs. Then I substitute taught in the notorious local school system which, after a year, didn't look all that notorious to me, though my expectations of the work were low, and I didn't accept long-term subbing gigs, because I didn't want to prepare lessons or grade tests.

Then one old client started calling me again. And I was offered a job teaching this crazy trade that I had hardly worked in for 3 years. Word got out that I was available, and work started to ooze back in.

I had a terrible experience working on the most popular show, a reality show, one fall. The wireless systems simply would not behave, and I could not understand why; nobody I was working with understood why (and I was supposed to be the one who understood anyway); and the rental company did not explain it when I called them. Months after that gig I happened to read the answer on the trade newsgroup. I realized the local company that hired me did not have the right wirelesses for the level of difficulty of a show like that. Not all wireless systems were the same -- and most were not intended to work in conjunction with more than 1 other system.

The following spring, another large wireless job came up. I came close to buying my own gear for that job. I had a preliminary conversation with an awesome dealer in Connecticut. But some folks talked me out of it, mostly because one thing I wanted to buy was a fancy new hard-drive recorder. "It will never be used," they said, meaning, most jobs just send audio to the camera and don't want it recorded separately; certainly not on a $5000 machine costing the client $100 a day. "You'll have a nice pet recorder sitting on the shelf," they said. They were right. I called the dealer and said I wouldn't be getting that gear this time. Instead, to get equipment up to that job, I had to rent from Nashville, TN. (Atlanta or New York would have worked also.)

More years went by. I kept telling the local client hiring me on reality shows that we did not have gear up to the task. Finally, with a large MTV job pending, he asked what we would need. I made up the list and made the arrangements with that awesome dealer in Connecticut. This time the deal went through. The gear arrived on the day before we needed it, a day on which I had work on a different job. So I put the new gear in my car, went to the other job and used other gear, then stayed up that night assembling the new gear for the bigger job the next day.

I loved that new gear. We used it to finish a large documentary that got some critical acclaim last year. We used it exclusively on another documentary which was destined to be fantastic until its producer changed everything.

Now that client who owns that gear spends most of his time trying to scare up fancy new documentary work. He has not hired me much recently. Other folks are using that gear and returning it in a jumbled state, with wireless receivers lying loose and sideways in the bag, not securely strapped upright like I always keep them. A DC power cable went bad on one guy and he neglected to inform anyone until I almost got screwed by it, but we were able to get a new cable in on short notice. (This cable had a connector that you can't get around here, so we didn't think we could repair it ourselves. And there probably wasn't time to repair it anyway.)

And I'm tired of going to Raleigh to pick up that gear; or tired or renting from another company in Chapel Hill.

So last December I started buying used wirlesses and a boom mic on ebay. In early February, I ordered a new boom mic and backup flash recorder with timecode from the guy in Connecticut. (I've spent a total of an hour on the phone with him, literally. We talk about each item, and he really makes sure it's what I need, based on what I'm going to use it for. The details go down to such matters as exactly what kind of shockmount I need, or how waterproof I need my lavalieres to be.) Last week I ordered the rest of the stuff; the mixer, the Loon boom, the bag, the power system, the batteries and charger, the cables and connectors which I will have to make myself over the next few days. It's 53 pounds and it's arriving today.

********************

9:00 AM. It's quiet here, and I can hear trucks rev blocks away. Every time, I think UPS is coming. They will arrive, today, sometime between 9am and 7pm.

It is making me grow up. It's like expecting a baby. I've been reading instructions online; I've spent the better part of two days cleaning Elrond Hubbard World Headquarters, and it will need cleaning for a good part of today as well. Last week I could smell the dust in here. It was making me sneeze. I can still smell it a little, but it is better. Here is what I've been up against in my cleaning -- what it has looked like for most of the recent years:

Sights and smells of dust are worse in the halls and rooms outside my own. I will swiff these too. Housemates are supposed to do that, but they're a little slack. We need a cleaning stimulus bill.

I need it clean so that the electronics will feel welcome. And you may ask, what about the humidity when summer arrives? Well, I've got giant Ziplock bags and I will get some powerful desiccant.

Isn't Pork Stimulating Too?

2009-02-27T09:51:00.006-05:00

Republicans are grousing about pork in the stimulus package. Normally, I would grouse too, but this time, I wonder if we should. Isn't pork stimulating?

The WSJ listed its gripes in this article which, being a month old now, might not be addressing the current version of the stimulus bill. But this is one of the few articles in a mainstream newspaper that lists pork in the package, so I'll use its examples.

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

Maybe this is pork. But won't all these projects create jobs? Some opponents will say that they don't create ongoing jobs, just temporary ones. But my layperson's understanding is that we need to get people working and spending again, and this will provide further stimulus to the economy which, ideally, will bring back to health business, which is where more sustained employment can be found. Sure, it's a trickle effect, but what Republican doesn't like a trickle effect?

And the WSJ implies that these projects are the means for liberals to have their way with taxpayers' money. Rahm Emmanuel is quoted saying, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

Good point, WSJ. We don't want ideologues taking advantage of public fear or anxiety to further their own schemes. Let's keep a sharp eye out for that. At least these are investments in our own country; not donations that end up feathering the nests of tribal leaders and corrupt politicians and military officers.

And while we don't know exactly how these projects will be implemented, at first glance I see them more as good investments than pork anyway. If Amtrak can be made to provide better service, surely that will improve energy efficiency and facilitate commerce in the areas it serves; money for childcare helps create or sustain jobs, and facilitates parents going to work; global warming and carbon capture research would create or sustain good jobs in the science and technology sectors and would also help us deal with an ongoing crisis.

The WSJ makes its snide remark about the NEA too. But as Svetx says, arts are a crucial part of a healthy economy. Consider what she and I did last night. We went to a concert by the North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra (NCJRO or N.C.J-Ro!) in a nearby town. They are amazing, by the way. Before the concert, we had dinner at a restaurant, and while at dinner our waiter informed us about a an awesome Paperhand Puppet Theater show coming to town. Svetx had seen the show in another town and she said it was awesome, so we will be going to that too. Then, after seeing NC J-Ro, we had dessert at another place that tries so hard to have fancy desserts they don't have basic milkshakes or chocolate syrup.

The point is, we participated in the economy because of the NC J-Ro. Consider that art is one of the few reasons people come to a city center after business hours and on weekends. Sure, bars and clubs are another reason; but the bars and clubs, and the city overall, benefit from having folks interested in art come downtown to spend money.

The NC J-Ro receives support from the NC Arts Council which is in partnership with the NEA.

I come from a pretty much neoconservative family that supports preemptive war and is deeply concerned about government waste. And yet, my stepmom enrolls in art classes from time to time in Richmond, VA which is a 1.5 hour drive away from her and my Dad's home. They drive to Richmond to see shows that she participates in, and to see other concert and theater events. I bet a lot of performers and artists they appreciate receive some support, at least indirectly, from the NEA. Republicans might want to consider what would be left if there were no government support for the arts.

I could list the rest of the examples of pork cited by the WSJ, but I have similar responses to them too.

Nonetheless, Republicans will complain. This is all just a New Deal redux, they say. Government spending didn't end the Great Depression; World War II did! (Apparently they don't think the government paid for WWII. After all, for all of the Bush administration, the government didn't pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either.)

On the other hand, liberals say it's time to revisit the theories of Keynes, who is reputed to have said that in times of recession, the government should pay people to dig holes and fill them back up again (I can't find the original source of that quote though). The natural response to this is to suggest that the government pay people to do jobs that would be more beneficial, and this brings us back to the stimulus package and its elements that conservatives consider to be pork.

Fine. So conservatives don't want pork but do favor war spending, and liberals want Keynes. Here's my compromise: have the government pay people to build war machinery and then destroy it. We could stage demolition derbies with tanks. Because, that's basically what happens to tanks and jeeps and everything. They go to desert environments and get blown up all at once, or sand-blasted over time. But we don't want to start a new war, because our current wars indicate that we won't find in modern wars that definitive ending that makes WWII such a subject of nostalgia.

Tanks for the conservatives, Keynes for the liberals. That's our answer.

An Outsider Goes In

2009-02-22T17:53:00.008-05:00

Former housemate Brooks is going places.

You could have called us losers. While pouring beans out of a can into a pot once, he asked me, “What’s your favorite bean?”

“Black. But when I get tired of that, I change it up with some pintos.”

After his first year of living with me and attending business school, he spent the summer doing internships in San Francisco and D.C. When he was due to return for his second year of school, he asked if, instead of moving back into his old room, he could rent the crumbling shed behind our house for a measly $10.00 a month. He would take showers and use the bathroom indoors, but sleep out there.

I knew he would do it too. Over the summer he had emailed me descriptions of sitting on the floors of subway stations of San Francisco, his back against the tile wall, reading about African population and disease statistics. Once a bum had come and sat next to him and talked gibberish, then tilted over and fallen asleep on his leg. Brooks just kept reading.

At the end of that internship, he delivered a presentation about how that foundation’s disease prevention efforts were not as effective as they could be, and he recommended some new approaches.

“No,” I said, “You may not live in the crumbling shack. If you live on the premises, you man-up and carry your weight -- $250.00 per month share for rent plus utilities like the rest of us pay.” I mean, it’s not like I was asking him to live according to middle class values or anything. We are not air conditioned; a family of birds nests in our chimney every summer. Anyway, I knew that, if he were to move into the shed, I’d be out there on the cold nights insisting that he come indoors.

Instead, for that fall, he found a long-term housesitting gig in town. For his final semester the following spring, he doubled up on schoolwork by beginning a public health program in Baltimore and dividing his time between here and there. Then he enrolled in a PhD program for agricultural engineering in Baltimore, and used his grad school stipend not to live on, but to start a non-profit company that experiments with growing meat as tissue culture. The plan is to one day replace factory farms with incubators that grow only muscle, not entire animals.

Now he speaks at international conferences dealing with food production. His ex-girlfriend from here told me that his research compelled him to compile a list of the greatest risks our country faces. I don’t know what they are, but guess what -- it’s not Iran’s 3.49% concentrated uranium. He submitted this list to some pentagon official, and was invited in for some conference there.

When he lived with me, I had lost a job and was sleeping late most days, and applying to graduate schools in creative writing. We all know what happened with that. I eventually found my way back into the field I had worked in previously. But now that field is slackening off, what with the economy and all. I’m sleeping late a lot of days. And taking naps. I wake up not knowing whether it’s time for breakfast or dinner; the room is dark either way.

Usually I don’t know what to do upon waking, so I check email. And one evening, while doing this, still groggy, the phone vibrated. It was an investigator calling to ask about Brooks.

When did I know him, and in what capacity?

Housemates, I said. How much would this guy want to know?

I did not say that I had met Brooks when he called one August Friday morning when I was in the final days of that job I lost. He wanted to see the house that day and have us make the decision right then on whether he could move in. I said that usually we take a few days after the interview to check references. He offered to give me the references so I could check them during that day, from work, before we met. Then, if I liked him and had found the references favorable, I could then make the decision right there.

I was feeling a little pushed into this, but I said I’d check the references. They were two or three guys spread all around the country, and all had those non-violent vegetarian tenor voices like you hear on This American Life. They said that Brooks was great -- that he would “invent something for us, like a better way to dry clothes on the line,” that he would refinish the floors.

Brooks showed up and liked the downstairs room, somewhat separate from the rest of the rooms upstairs. He said all he would have would be a sleeping bag and a bicycle. His dad was with him and sat out on the front walkway while Brooks and I talked. I liked him and said he could move in. His dad wrote the first check. Two weeks later Brooks came back with his stuff.

A bicycle, sleeping bag, backpacks and books. The smell of musty camping gear emanated from his room and filled the stairwell to the upstairs hall. He had nothing to sleep on besides his sleeping bag. I insisted that he add the guest mattress to his accouterments. It had been our guest accommodations for years. We would get it out from the attic and slide down the stairs on it, crashing into the hall closet door on the first floor. We slid it down for the last time for Brooks, and on it he slept and studied that whole year, reading by the stark light of the single bare lightbulb in the ceiling six feet above his head, his back against the plaster wall.

He rode that old beat-up three-speed bike to class and back. He said he didn’t even want a 10-speed, because he could fix the 3-speed himself. And he never wanted to drive a car because he never wanted to kill anyone on the highway.

He was a student at one of the most prestigious business schools in the country.

The investigator said that it was customary for students at this school to do a lot of their work online and cut classes. He asked if Brooks did this. I admitted that he had. (I didn’t say that he had even skipped one class so much that that professor put his picture from the class roster on the overhead projector and asked the class who he was. Near the end of the semester, Brooks needed to attend that class to take a test. His classmates warned him that the professor had recognized his absence. So Brooks went in disguise. He wore Groucho Marx glasses and moustache, and a baseball cap.)

What was he doing when cutting class?

Mostly he studied for other things, I said. (He sat in on extra ethics classes that he was not officially enrolled in, because he felt he needed an antidote to business school. He stated that he wanted to date a “vegan ethicist,” and another housemate found him one. Her favorite word was “aricea,” Greek for knowing what is the right thing to do and not doing it.)

One night at the semester’s end I found Brooks at the dining room table with books and printouts spread all out. I asked what he was studying for, and he told me he was boning up on certain writings on Utilitarianism, which had been a focus of his undergraduate studies. I said that didn’t sound like a business school class. He said it wasn’t -- he was having a date with that girlfriend the next day, and she had said she wanted to ask him some questions about this branch of philosophy.

So he was studying for his date. During the semester’s end exam period. I figured there was no way I could describe all this to the investigator. But I did say that Brooks was the most ascetic person I know -- the person who most lives according to his values. He’s not just talking the talk.

Did he have any hobbies?

Not really. (Unless you want to talk about “The Big Lebowski,” which we watched over and over again in 10 minute intervals while eating oatmeal in the morning, Raman noodles in the afternoon, beans and rice in the evening. When we would reach the end, we would start it over. This went on for months. Our conversations came to consist mostly of quotes from that movie. “It’s a nice drive to Winston-Salem . . . well, parts at least.”)

Would I trust him with national secrets?

I would trust him as much as anyone I know with such secrets. He takes things very seriously.

Has he ever been a part of subversive or terrorist organizations?

No. (But he would take vegetables out of the compost bin behind the food coop and bring them home and cook them. I went with him one night. We stepped over a chain barring the alley, took the lid off the compost garbage cans, and right there was some only slightly un-fresh broccoli. We took it home and steamed it up with some lemon juice.)

Funny, I was thinking. Once upon a time, the word “terrorist” would have been instead “communist.” I should have said, “No sir. But there were these communists . . . ”

I wrote to Brooks and asked him what he was going to be doing. He said it would be working to forestall the attack by killer robots. Had I seen the Sarah Connor Chronicles? Scary, Dude.

This Whole Media Thing is Getting Out of Hand

2009-02-21T16:42:00.004-05:00

It's gotten so any loser can record himself and post it on the 'net. I recently purchased these cool mics for my work, and a housemate went and used them to record himself on some creaky out-of-tune piano where his girlfriend is house sitting. Took him like an hour of egregiously missing notes to finally get this overly cautious rendition out, and it's still ragged and misses notes. Well. There's probably a better playing of the piano solo in one of the takes, but who wants to dig through an hour of media to find it.

Oh, and this is Elton John's "Rock Me When He's Gone," in case anyone cares about hearing it played well.

New Ice Cream Flavors

2009-02-15T00:06:00.004-05:00

Ben & Jerry's flavors honoring George W. Bush are listed here. My suggestion is "Dubya Dip Credit Crunch."

Flavors honoring Sarah Palin are here. My suggestion is "Trackolate Pipermint Wanillow Bristol Trigonometric Swirl."

Meanwhile, there are rumors of more unplanned parenthood in the family of this family values politician. I honestly hope it's not true. The pro-life family values camp will deny its significance, and anyway, the world does not need two more fatherless children.

Sarah Palin is So Dumb . . .

2009-02-02T23:49:00.006-05:00

. . . She ran for governor because she heard it was "in Juneau" and she had always wanted to be a French actress.

Honk!

In other news, it looks like she lied to the RNC, telling them that she could not attend their winter retreat because she had important work in Alaska that same weekend. Then, on the Friday of that weekend, she was seen at a GOP fundraiser in DC (the same town as the retreat, and not the same as any town in Alaska) and the following night she was at the Alfalfa Club dinner, also in DC. I can attest to that. Here's a lousy cell phone picture I took of her entering the ballroom at the Capital Hilton. She's the blur in front of the window. But even in the blur, her Pentecostal hair is distinct as a Miss America crown.

Oh, and apparently, Alaska receives $1.87 for every dollar it pays out in federal taxes. It is the second largest welfare state after New Mexico.

Hmm. New Mexico keeps coming up as one of the best states to put our nation's algae farms for growing oil for Diesel and jet fuel. Hey New Mexico -- wanna bring in some cash?

"I Will Skate Through You."

2009-01-28T20:30:00.013-05:00

This time we noticed more interplay. Blockers reached back to haul forward their own jammers, human batons making their own way in the relay. Jammers grabbed the hips of their blockers and pulled them into opponents’ paths, boosting themselves in the process. It’s all relative motion, rotating reference frames, celestial mechanics -- Saturn slinging the Cassini; or asteroids in their orbital belt, curving to the left always, colliding and tumbling. It’s our solar system against theirs, and only the heartiest can prevail in these ravages of Space.

Holly Wanna Crack-Ya always heads straight for the densest cluster. As with last time, I couldn’t see what she was doing. She’d go in the back, come out the front, and go back around for more, practically running on the straightaways, pausing with feet spread in fighting stance to round the corners, then running again.

This bout was rougher, with Roxy Rockett in particular (in the green helmet), spreading her arms wide in indignation over uncalled fouls. It seems to be part of the game, though, that the multiple refs monitoring that short track don’t see everything. The lab-coated scorers look like they’re out of B-grade sci-fi, conducting a taste test, noting reactions, tallying results.

Right in front of us, one of the opposing Naptown Tornado Sirens, on her way to the penalty box, crouched like a speed skater and stuck her arm between a ref’s legs as she went by. The ref went down. Surely, in a more mainstream sport, this would have lead to a major penalty. But not here. The ref got up, shrugged it off, and said something I could not make out to the spectators behind her. Maybe she and that player go way back, with a long history of such take-outs.

There was an interesting situation, if I understood it correctly, where a Carolina jammer was sent to the penalty box. The jam was completed without her, meaning Carolina lost points. Then the next jam started with that one jammer still in the penalty box -- Carolina could not field another. This could have lead to a bunch of free points for the Sirens, but the Carolina blockers held the Siren’s jammer back for several laps, and once Carolina’s jammer could leave the penalty box she tore through the pack to the front and became the lead jammer. I wish I knew who exactly this Carolina jammer was that did this.

After the bout, Svetx and I had to go and meet Holly, who jams the most and earns the team the bulk of its 100-point leads. She was out on the floor greeting fans. I told her I was that blogger who wrote about her back in December, and commented that she seems to always go straight into the storm, never around it.

“I will skate through you,” she said, and it sounded like her mantra, maybe even a rallying statement for the whole team. She stepped back and did a little lunge, leading with a shoulder and twisting, to show how she digs her way past opposing blockers. “A jammer really is a blocker,” she said.

But when she’s out there doing it, it hardly seems to disturb the general flow. Yes, in the course of play, skaters go down routinely, tucking in their arms to shield themselves and keep their fingers from being skated-over. But I don’t think I see this happening as a result of Holly’s work. She’s gets her points, and that’s all she needs.

She signed my program. Svetx said she had noticed the teamwork this time, the blockers’ positioning, the reaching out to pull a teammate along.

“We know each other really well,” Holly said.

Saturn photo from NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The First Actual Sales of Algae for Fuel

2009-01-24T12:23:00.005-05:00

. . . that I know of. This is big, y'all. I need to do a bigger post rounding up recent algae insights and developments, but I just wanted to get this up in a hurry 'cause it's so exciting!

Cyanotech and Mera Pharmaceuticals are two companies in Hawaii that make nutritional supplements from algae. I have read that the cosmetic and food supplement markets are a lot more lucrative than the fuel market, and there is nothing new about growing algae for these non-fuel purposes. But these companies are now generating as much revenue by sales of raw algae to biodiesel refineries as they are from their own products. Part of these sales were the 600 gallons of algae oil grown by Cyanotech and sold to Sapphire Energy of Seattle which made the first algae-derived jet fuel used in a commercial airplane, in a test flight by Continental Airlines recently.

"There have been no attacks on our nation since 9/11"

2009-01-17T23:01:00.006-05:00

Lots of folks are using this statement as basis for saying that history will judge Bush more favorably than we may think.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose this is sound logic -- that since there were no further attacks on American soil after 9/11, history will judge Bush favorably.

But the thing is, there was 9/11 itself. That happened on the Bush watch. It ranks with Pearl Harbor as one of the most devastating attacks by a foreign enemy on American soil. So if it is so great for the Bush legacy that there were no attacks since 9/11, then isn't it a terrible blight on the Bush presidency that there was 9/11 itself? After all, most American presidencies saw no foreign attacks on American soil. By the logic of the original quoted statement, all these other presidents will be judged more favorably than Bush. So, once again, Bush comes in at or near the bottom.

Saying that no further attacks after 9/11 on American soil is a sign of quality in Bush is like saying that God is with you if a tornado strikes your town but leaves a few buildings unscathed. It's just rhetoric.

Here's a secret message from one Republican to all others: stop treating me like I'm stupid. I can tell a lousy argument when I see one. Get your act together and lay some policy groundwork that makes sense. Then I might bring my vote back to you. Maybe. But I'm pretty pissed off right now.

What if Israel Had Used Petraeus’ Strategy in Gaza?

2009-01-15T10:40:00.002-05:00

This might be impossible now. But as long as I’m just another anonymous blogger to whom nobody pays attention, I’ll go ahead and wonder.

Suppose we could roll back time to when some ceasefire was implemented, like maybe the 2008 ceasefire. At such a time, both sides may have felt more inclined to talk and work out disagreements than now.

Israel would have had to insure that no more rockets would be launched at them by militant elements of Palestinian society. What if they had addressed this threat as Petraeus did in Iraq?

In this plan, Israel would have sent in troops with an aim toward rebuilding Palestinian society. They would have had to fund building projects, but surely that would not have been as expensive as war, and probably many portions of the world would have been glad to help. They would have had to reach out to the Palestinian leaders more inclined to talk, and build their trust. Through them, perhaps they could have built more communication channels to other leaders who had initially been less willing to talk. And through these connections, perhaps they could have worked to ferret out the “rogue elements” intent on firing missiles. Surely there would be fights as well, but with the right combination of “hard and soft power,” as is said of Petraeus’ strategy, over many years a better state of being might have been achieved.

My problem with Petraeus strategy in Iraq is that who knows what will happen when the U.S. army leaves. A stable democracy will only be left behind if the mindset of the Iraqi people supports it, and we have yet to see if this will be the case.

But Israelis and Palestinians live right next to each other, so this strategy would have been worth Israel’s investment. They would not be deploying their soldiers halfway around the world where, ultimately, they would have little sway.

You might say the hard-liners would not like handling Palestine this way. But hard-liners in the U.S. applaud Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq and blame Rumsfeld and company, their own hard-line representatives in government, for screwing things up initially.

Aww, never mind. In any case, such constructive relationships will be harder than ever to build now. I do seriously wonder if this attack on Gaza is meant to foul any plans Obama may have for reconciliations. For example, if things in Iraq deteriorate as a backlash from this Gaza war, it might be harder to remove our troops. So far though, I'm not aware of this happening and that is good.

Review of No Country for Old Men

2009-01-10T13:55:00.003-05:00

Huh? There are tons of movies about that subject that are way better. Good style though -- like Brian Eno producing U2.

Gosh Darn those Anonymous Bloggers!

2009-01-08T17:54:00.004-05:00

Note to videographers: watch out for “crossing the line.” It is disconcerting that the over-the-shoulder shot from behind the interviewer is from one side of the line between him and Palin, and the closeup is from the other side of this line.

Note to editors: it doesn’t help to keep showing essentially the same soundbyte over and over — whether within in the same video clip, or from the same person who’s been rambling on like this for months.

If you’re not careful, this documentary will be as successful as a future Palin bid for office; or as successful as FahrenHype 9/11, that conservative response to Michael Moore.

But good luck with the project, and I do hope Palin runs for president in 2012.

Thanks to The Mudflats for keeping us updated on this and all other Palin developments.

The Air of Authority

2008-12-30T13:23:00.009-05:00

It’s a sub-audible buzzing, like the electromagnetic field given off by a malfunctioning motor that isn’t turning. It’s a warning that lives in the air.

Don’t talk about politics.

But Dad and stepmom had Fox News on. They were making supper and I was sitting at the table. I said, “Shhh, listen to what Fred Barnes is saying.”

In unison, they said they don’t like Fred Barnes.

“You don’t like Fred Barnes? He’s William Kristol’s sidekick at The Weekly Standard.” What Bushie doesn’t like The Weekly Standard?

Dad said “Fred Barnes is a traitor,” and I remembered how Barnes and Kristol and just about all the analysts at Fox News had been pretty soft on Obama, from what I could tell watching the debates. In my circle of friends, I had insisted that we watch the debates on Fox News, because all TV news is lame, and you might as well watch the lamest and know what the enemy knows. I call it “having access to his intelligence.”

After each debate, I thought that either side could make the case that they had won. But the Fox analysts never gave it to McCain. I remember them saying once, “McCain had to make a knockout punch tonight, and he just didn’t.” I was like, “Huh? Who cares if he did or didn’t. Just declare it. He did it! Yes you can, too!”

I mean, Fox News had no trouble declaring Florida a victory for Bush in 2000, right? And Republicans’ beacon for the future seems to have declared a victory in Iraq. Why not just say, “McCain has the experience and clearly looks like he’s in control. He doesn’t deliver a knockout punch because he doesn’t have to. Everyone knows, it’s the quiet guys who are the strongest.”

I mean, if I can write that, so can they. It was like they weren’t even trying any more.

“We like Charles Krauthammer,” my dad and stepmom said, enthusiastically. “You know he’s paralyzed,” they said, with the same reverence they have for McCain’s handicap.

Krauthammer talked about how the surge was heroic and successful for reducing violence. I kept my mouth shut on this one. I have read much (this entry cites useful references) about the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad being the deeper cause for relative peace in that city; and the paying of our former insurgent enemies, who used to be in the Iraqi army that we disbanded, to stop being insurgents and start cooperating with the Iraqi army, as mostly causing the relative peace in Anbar and other Sunni provinces.

I didn’t launch this Iraq 101 lecture, because I’m still a little rattled from my dad yelling at me on the beach this summer, “Do you think Osama bin Laden wanted to spend his life in a cave? We have to teach him a lesson. We have to make it really expensive for him to attack us.” (As if Bin Laden had not chosen in the 80's his life as a rebel; as if he didn't intend to lure us into undecisive wars in the Middle East; as if it's more expensive for him to attack us than for us to retaliate against someone besides him.) Dad had not really yelled at me much all my life because I was a very tame (depressed) kid. So it’s maybe harder for me to take in adulthood than for other adult children who are accustomed to being yelled at by their dads.

As for my stepmom, while she does read fairly deeply about lots of things, there are certain modes of thought she won’t give up. Apparently, the basic unsubstantiated pro-Iraq war stance still appeals to her.

Many topics are fair game. One afternoon Dad and I talked about the origins of life. He painted for me a picture of a gradual continuum in which, at first, there were only elements and compounds scattered around our planet; then, because of erosion of rocks and churning of seas and formation of tide pools and lightning striking, some chemicals would come together in certain ways and eventually form viruses; and lipids (which he said would exist without life, and would be floating around) would bond and actually make a “container” sort of like a cell membrane. Eventually proteins would come together as DNA, find their way into one of these lipid cases, and start replicating. And then you’re off and running. He says, “You’re damn right there’s life on other planets.” And he reminded me of a problem in detecting it -- we can only view the electromagnetic radiation from a planet (its light and TV or radio signals, or whatever they emit) from many years in the past -- the number of light years that planet is away from us. So, life could be there now but not be evident in the information coming from that planet. Or, we could detect life in what we see, but that life might not be there any more. Life has only been on earth for a tiny fraction of the time of existence of the earth, and it’s likely anyone looking for its signs here would miss them. It could be the speed of light that indeed isolates us.

(A quick look on the Planet Quest Atlas shows three terrestrial exoplanets under 100 light years away; one 1000 light years away; two others at least 9000 light years away.)

I can’t sit around keeping all my political thoughts to myself. I have to put a little of my camp into things. Since Stephen Colbert attended our small college for two years, he is not a totally off-limits topic. In the course of talking about energy and algae farming, I told them about Colbert’s Formidable Opponent sketch about offshore drilling vs. alternative fuels. When I was done, Dad said that that was pretty funny. But an awkward silence fell. How can such an awkward silence come to 3 people who really all know each other pretty well -- who are basically pretty sensitive and smart?

Or consider the conversation where they told me about the show Ice Road Truckers. I said The Daily Show had made a joke about it. My stepmom said, “They would. It’s sort of a redneck show, the kind of thing the elite like to joke about.” So there you have it -- she has absorbed and replicated the Republican line that moderate or liberal entertainment is elite.

They also didn’t seem to want to talk about oil speculators. I think oil speculators are fascinating. It’s a whole market in which oil contracts are traded, not actual oil. And some say this is causing large fluctuations in oil prices, while others say the speculators are not that big a deal. Dad insisted that mostly, it’s just supply and demand affecting oil prices. I suppose this issue could be the subject of legitimate debate, but Dad and stepmom seemed to want to avoid the subject altogether.

So what’s this palpable aversion to certain subjects? I think I’ve arrived at the answer, though it does not seem like much of a revelation. It’s that they believe in authority, a basic moral decency, a just cause for our nations actions. They are not comfortable with anything that subverts this notion. So if I talk about the Iraq war, that subverts their idea of the just cause for it; if The Daily Show makes fun of Ice Truckers, that detracts from the classic struggle of Man against Nature; if I talk about oil speculators, this implies that there are participants in our free market that are making money at the expense of the rest of us in the free market -- a “no honor among merchants” analog to the mantra about thieves (though again, reasonable people are saying speculators are not the biggest influence on oil prices).

On the other hand, I love subversion, as long as it is exposing that someone in authority does not know what they are talking about. And maybe in general we can say that conservatives like the authoritative establishment and liberals like a more rebellious stance.

Our best illustration of this divide between myself and my family came when Dad, my stepmom, and me were sitting in the Belgian bakery in town. My stepmom was telling me about Elsa’s business. Elsa is her daughter-in-law who is the iciest neocon of them all. “She has a room full of failed marketing projects,” my stepmom said. “[Elsa’s daughter] had to learn her catechisms, and Elsa made these cards with catechisms printed over images from the Book of Kells. She had 3000 of these made in India, got them shipped to her, and now they’re sitting in the guest room. She sold a few on Amazon, but only a handful.”

I had learned about the Book of Kells somewhere, but had to be reminded. My stepmom explained it’s an Irish book of scripture.

Apparently it’s in the public domain now.

I said, “She should market to Evangelicals -- make some cards that would sell in megachurches. I bet there’s money there, if she’s willing to step it down from Catholicism. Evangelicals don’t care about no Kells though. That's too heavy, like ancient grains. They like their religion simpler, like white rice.”

My stepmom said that Catholics are not a shrinking population, with the influx of Hispanics.

“Okay,” I said. “But they don’t care about Kells either. So tell your Irish-Catholic daughter-in-law to get those Hindu and Muslim Indians to print up some cards in Spanish, with the Virgin of Guacamole on them, or whatever it’s called. That’ll sell like hotcakes.”

More awkward silence.

Unto Us a Child is Born

2008-12-29T22:45:00.004-05:00

'Tis the season for miracles, and as Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston enters the world, just as his grandmother faces drug charges, the secret of naming kids in his family is revealed. Actually, it was friend SH-L who hit on this, but she doesn't have a blog so I can't link to her and give her proper credit.

The key is to go straight for the nickname. Don't give your son a formal name like "Murray" and sit around hoping his friends will happen to give him the nickname you want for him. The friends don't know. The boy could grow up to be really big and his friends might innocently call him The Refrigerator. Or he might fart a lot and be called Turd Blossom. All this time you might have wanted him to be known for his ability to follow the footprints of a moose and sneak up on it. You may harbor all your life the unfulfilled dream of his being called "Tracker" and then Track.

Well, fulfillment is now yours. Tripp's other grandmother, the one not facing drug charges, taught us that anyone could be president; now, we learn that anyone can give their kids the nickname they want for them. Just do it. Get it in writing, on the birth certificate, so there's no question. Though, I guess in the case of Trig, there still is question about that birth certificate. But never mind that.

This time, maybe there were not two Easton Mitchell Johnston's already in the family to provide proper prerequisite for this newborn being a "III," which would readily grant him the pass to being nicknamed "Trip(p)." But they really wanted to have a "Tripp" around. So they went for it.

Also note, Easton is a manufacturer of hockey equipment. This we learn from a commenter on The Mudflats, your source for all breaking news of this family.

Shouldn't Someone ask These Questions?

2008-12-27T00:28:00.003-05:00

1. When automobile factories mechanized, they laid off a lot of workers. Did they perhaps lay off more then than they have yet to lay off if they shut down completely? In other words, have we already seen the worst of auto industry layoffs?

2. If we do bail out car manufacturers, what will keep them from just opening plants in China and not hiring American workers anyway?

3. How much expense and trouble is retooling to make fuel efficient cars compared to the retooling they've already undergone to mechanize?

4. I hear that banks are not really using their bailout money for lending. So, why not force car makers to get their loans from banks, instead of handing them government money directly? Or would that interfere with our "freedoms"?

5. I understand that we are talking about more than just auto workers' jobs here. We are concerned about jobs in related industries too. But Americans will always need cars, right? So if we just buy Hondas and Toyotas and not American cars (like all my friends are doing anyway) won't we still need all those related industries to support them?

Michael Moore, we need you back to help with all this. A new guy is playing James Bond, so people won't get your name mixed up if you make another "Roger and Me."

Mine's a Size 12 -- with Stiffening Orthotics

2008-12-15T23:47:00.015-05:00

It was like when Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face. I thought it was fake news. Then, to be honest, I thought it was funny. Then I had to remember how I'd feel if the shoes were thrown at Obama. And something like that is likely to happen. Eggs might be thrown at his limousine during the inaugural parade. It happened to Bush in 2000, after all.

Here's the first BBC video of the shoes being thrown at Bush. What this video has that no others I've seen have is Bush's reaction -- his quipping that it was a size 10, that the thrower was trying to get attention, that it's like being heckled at a campaign rally; and his recapitulation of Rumsfeld's excuse that this is the sort of thing that happens in a free society.

Some folks are indignant about the shoe throwing, but I say, look on the bright side. Five and a half years after Rumsfeld's comment, Iraq is still free!

At this historic juncture of the shoe hitting the wall (and remember, Clara throws her shoe at Mouse King . . . so, 'tis the season), I'd like to cite some recent articles that may help illustrate the situation in Iraq. On the other hand, maybe it's ridiculous to even pretend to size things up. I do this, I think, mostly to organize my own thinking. The benefit to readers would largely be following the links to more substantial writings.

I was really worried back in August about al-Maliki taking an antagonistic stance toward the tribal militias that the U.S. army had been paying to become our allies in a move hailed by the pro-war camp as a sign of progress. These three posts talk about that and cite news articles.

Since then, the Iraqi government has said that it will continue to support the 99,000 militia members and integrate them in to mainstream society, incorporating 20,000 into the Iraqi military and giving other types of jobs to the others. There are doubts that the militia members will accept either giving up their identity as members of independent militias or ceasing to be fighters at all. Tribal leaders in the Anbar province did not want to have their support transferred from the U.S. to the Iraqi government this soon because of friction between them (with their Sunni identity) and the mostly Shiite government. Further dissatisfaction may arise because the government will cut militia members' salaries. But the U.S. military seemed confident that this transfer of authority over the militias would go well, and has reported that the handover is indeed progressing.

But get this. Al-Maliki is forming his own tribal militias called "Support Councils" in territory where Arabs and Kurds are vying for control. He cites U.S. support for such militias as precedent. Juan Cole provided a translation of a Kurdish newspaper report which expresses great concern about this new independent militia.

I ask, doesn't the reliance on local militias rather than the national one, by the U.S. army and now Maliki, indicate that these local allegiances are more significant to Iraqis than their national identity?

Meanwhile, it seems the Kurds are operating fairly autonomously. The New York Times a year ago reported on their moving ahead with their own deals with foreign oil companies while the Iraqi government was busy not passing its oil bill. To my knowledge, as of now, the central government still does not have an oil bill. The oil bill would officially determine how oil profits would be distributed to Iraq's different regions. In my understanding, in a unified Iraq, Kurds should play nice and allow profits from any oil pumped out of their ground to be apportioned like all other Iraqi oil profits. Making separate deals undermines the central government authority -- except that, without a national oil law, there is not a central authority with respect to oil sales. Meanwhile, among the oil companies skirting Iraqi authority and dealing directly with the Kurds is Hunt Oil out of Texas, whose CEO is a friend of George W. Bush and served on Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. And the former first administrator of post-Saddam Iraq, the predecessor to Paul Bremer III, Jay Garner, is helping Canadian oil companies make their own deals with the Kurds. Mother Jones reports on Hunt Oil and Jay Garner.

In my recollection from reading George Packer's The Assassin's Gate over a year ago, Garner was a feisty guy whose bluntness about the lack of planning for post-war Iraq caused the Bush administration some discomfort. Personally, I wonder if his aiding Canadian oil companies now is a way of giving the finger to the Bush administration.

Kurdistan also recently received three planeloads of arms as part of another deal it made independently of the central government.

The first major foreign oil deal that the Iraqi government has made is with China. Another is with Shell oil. This past summer, there was talk of other major oil companies making no-bid contracts to explore Iraq's oil fields, but these contracts were apparently scuttled because of criticism from U.S. senators. Instead, the companies were offered a chance to bid on contracts, and Shell is the only one, as far as I know, to make a deal.

I've mentioned the Sunnis in the middle of Iraq with their tribal militias, the Kurds in the north moving forward with their oil deals; what about the southern Basra region, also very oil rich?

As far as I can tell, there are two movements associated with southern Iraq, and both want to garner some autonomy for that region. One movement, associated with the Fadila party, wants to transform Basra into a federal region with legal status similar to that of Kurdistan. Progress on this movement can be found at that link's parent blog Histories of Political Imagining which in general addresses world political events, and currently is looking at southern Iraq.

Another movement is being lead by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq. He wants to create a large "federal" southern area encompassing the nine provinces from Basra to Baghdad, though he also claims that he supports the sovereignty of Iraq and that such an area would not be completely independent. This is explained in this article from 2006 by Juan Cole. Though it's an old article in terms of Iraq's quickly moving history, the goals of the SICI remain the same today. And note how the plans of the Kurds and the SICI to create their own autonomy in the north and south have echoed by American politicians, namely Joe Biden, who spoke of partitioning Iraq into 3 large areas. The Bush administration initially dismissed this proposal, and now whether Iraq is partitioned or not is out of our hands. But the country does seem to be partitioning itself. In my perception, among America's prominent politicians, it happens to be Obama and Biden who do seem to understand Iraq the best.

And while Baghdad was about 50/50 Sunni/Shiite before the invasion, it is now about 75% Shiite. Juan Cole talks about the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad in his Social History of the Surge, and Derek Gregory goes into greater detail, saying that much of this cleansing continued during the American troop surge and lead, eventually, to decreased violence in Baghdad once the cleansing had run its course.

Corruption, and loss of American money, plays a large role in Iraq. It is hard to figure out if each new report of a sum of money lost in Iraq should be added to the running total, or is itself a new cumulative total. The first such report I know of was of the over $12 billion lost by the CPA under Paul Bremer. Note that the guy in charge of handing out money in Iraq's "Free Fraud Zone" was Reuben Jeffrey III, the same guy now handing out funds to banks in the current financial bailout.

This past September, there was this article telling of $13 billion lost or stolen in Iraq. The whistle-blower on that is an Iraqi investigator who has fled the country because of a death threat. Thirty-two of his colleagues, also investigators, have been killed. And this article says that al-Maliki has started firing auditors placed in his government at the request of the United States to help stop corruption. And then there's this recent nightmarish report of over $100 billion lost and unaccounted for in Iraq, $50 billion of which was taxpayer money.

Pro-war advocates say that Saddam's siphoning of money of the Oil for Food program had to be stopped. But what Saddam siphoned was only about $10 billion. Neocons can always paint a noble picture of reasons for getting into this war. But like all idealogues, they overlook evidence that their efforts have made things worse, or at least not better -- and at great expense to their country.

And what about oil revenues? Oil smuggling is a problem -- in some cases, smuggling occurs along routes established by Saddam. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty says that $40 million per month is lost because of smuggling from the southern reaches of Iraq. And while there has been talk of that expected $79 billion dollar budget by year's end, the new low in oil prices is causing the Iraqi government to reduce reconstruction efforts and may cause it to reduce food rationing and to lay off civil servants.

So what does all this mean with respect to victory or defeat? I love what Chuck Hagel said to Joe Lieberman on Meet the Press: The future of Iraq lies in the hands of the Iraqi people. The main problem there is tribal/sectarian friction.

John McCain said he would bring our troops home with victory. Sarah Palin said that the troop surge brought us victory in Iraq. I say that there is nothing for us to have victory over or suffer defeat from. With respect to a major military presence, the question is simply whether we stay or leave.

The Sniper Waits

2008-12-09T01:18:00.008-05:00

I’ve seen too many plum deals get sniped out from under me. I’d be the winning bidder for days, and then someone else would outbid me within minutes of the auction’s closing. So tonight, I’ve run home from a friend’s house. This time, I’m the one glued to my computer screen. I’m refreshing the page. I’m watching for the slightest sign of being outbid -- that being a red “X” and a note, “You’ve been outbid.”

There are 6 minutes and 35 seconds remaining until this auction closes. I’ve got this little Sound Devices preamp, built like a tank, right in my crosshairs. It sells new for over $650, and right now someone else has the winning bid at $355.

I would not use it as my main preamp-mixer, but it would help in specialty situations, like maybe if I have to use a stereo mic and record that separately from other mics; or if I have to run mic cables next to power cables for a hundred feet, and I’d like to boost the mic signal to line level at the start of this run to reduce chances of picking up induced interference. It would have helped on this job.

To get in the game here in the final minutes, I enter a bid of $375. Now I’ve got the green checkmark and the note, “You’re the winning bidder.”

ebay is a little different from a live auction. Live, you raise your hand to accept the current price announced, which is raised gradually by the auctioneer. But on ebay, you’re not going to sit there for the entire auction (lasting several days) bidding and re-bidding on items as prices rise. Instead, every bid is understood to be a maximum price that you are willing to pay for an item. This way, you can enter your max price, walk away, and at the auction’s end, if your bid is the highest, you win.

But people are logging in right before the auction’s end and entering their bid then to catch the rest of us off-guard. We don’t have a chance to change our minds and raise our bids. I’ve lost several Sennheiser 416 microphones that way.

This past Sunday, one such auction on a Sennheiser 416 was ending, and I was determined not to let it be sniped away from me, as long as it remained in my price range. That microphone goes for maybe $1100 or so new. I had been winning the bidding at $600, and it was described as being in good condition by a seller with a good reputation. He said he had hardly used it. So, this was a great deal. I was willing to go up to $700 just to be sure I got it, but much higher than that I might as well buy the item new.

I thought the auction was ending at 2pm, and at about 1:55 Svetx said, “You’d better get that microphone.” I checked, and the auction had ended about 5 minutes prior. And the winner had gotten the mic for $615, just over my bid of $600. He had entered his bid a few hours before, so I could have easily sniped him, if his bid was not higher than the $700 I was willing to go.

See, you never know what someone else’s bid actually is. And they don’t know yours. Even sellers don’t know what buyers’ bid are. Everyone only knows what the current price of the item is, and that price behaves as follows:

If you enter a bid that is higher than anyone else’s, then the current price of the item rises until it is a little higher than whatever the previous highest bid was, and you become the winning bidder. If you remain the winning bidder until the auction’s end, then you get the item for that price of just above the next-lowest bid -- not for your bid.

If someone else enters a bid higher than yours, then the price rises to just above your bid and you are no longer the winning bidder.

If you enter a bid that is still lower than the existing highest bid (which, remember, is only known by its bidder), then the price of the item rises until it’s just above your bid, and you are informed that you have been out-bid. When I was new to ebay (a few weeks ago), I thought being outbid in this manner meant that someone was sitting at their computer waiting for a bid to be entered, and then actively outbidding it. But no, it’s just ebay automatically raising the price to just above my bid because someone else has already entered a higher bid.

Only two people have ever bid on this preamp -- myself, and someone else. I had been the first bidder, but for the past few days, I was letting the other person have the lead -- letting her think no one else was interested, that there was no competition. I became the winning bidder again only a few minutes ago with my $375 bid. The current price on the item is $360.

Now there is 1 minute and 40 seconds left. At this point, what are the chances of a new person entering the auction? If the other bidder doesn’t check in, I’ll probably get it.

Maybe the other bidder is an audio recordist for film/video production like me. Maybe she’s out on a job and can’t check in. She’s tramping through the cold with a camera crew while I’m sitting here indoors, in slightly less cold, my scope trained on the preamp that she wants.

But in the time remaining, someone could easily place a bid over mine and get it for $380 or so.

45 seconds are left. I think, really, I’d be willing to pay $400 for this thing which is over $650 new. And remember, if no one else bids on it in this last minute, I’ll still get it for its current price of $360.

But I shouldn’t bid an even $400. I figure, I should bid some odd value above that, in case some other last-second sniper is counting on the highest bid being $400 and enters $405. In that case, he would be told he was outbid, but at the last second he would not have time to enter a new bid.

7 seconds are left. I enter a new bid of $413. I confirm the bid. It tells me I've been outbid.

Shit! A sniper! I quickly enter $425, press “Enter,” see the screen asking for confirmation, click “Confirm" . . . and time has run out.

That other sniper got it for $418. It was a third bidder, someone who had not bid until then on the item.

Water Damage, "Said Cellophane Crap," and the Thermodynamics of our Situation

2008-12-04T00:39:00.007-05:00

Dear Housemates,

I’ve been putting off writing an email about some house matters that have come up since our last house meeting just because I’m a bad procrastinator, which is part of one of our problems, which is that, as I write this, water is dripping down from the ceiling of the first floor bathroom.

First, an update: A month or two ago, I was freaking out over the new stain that had appeared on that ceiling. I opened up the panels in "C's" closet, but you can’t see where that dripping would be occurring from where the panels provide access. So, that yielded nothing. However, since the stains sort of have a bluish color, without doing any further scientific investigation, I decided that maybe it was caused by overzealous mopping in the upstairs bathroom. So I modified my cleaning habits. Now I merely spray a mixture of bleach and water lightly on the floor, and mop that up. Before, I was dipping a sponge in a bucket, wringing it out, and mopping, and this was putting more water on the floor.

With my new method, water damage did not increase until now.

Earlier this week, I saw that the white towel on the upstairs bathroom floor had been moved to the area between the floor and the tub. I figured, “Cool, someone mopped up some water there.” Then tonight I saw the drips coming down from the first floor bathroom ceiling. I went upstairs and checked the floor at the white towel, and found it still very wet. Very Very wet there. So, someone got it wet, dropped the towel there, and went on without really mopping it up.

This would be the fourth time I’ve seen that downstairs bath ceiling fall apart because of water damage since I’ve lived here.

Attached are pictures of the damage taken just now. You can see a closeup of a mound of plaster growing down from the ceiling, and a drop of water on the tip of the mound. That mound might be full of water. I’m afraid to touch it. In another picture, you can see the new “mound” damage next to the older “stain” damage.

Help me out here. Is it the toile leaking? We should be vigilant. Or are we dripping water when we get out of the shower? We should not do that. Keep your towel nearby. I hang mine on the cabinet right outside the shower. Dry off while you’re standing in the shower.

Is water spraying out of the side of the shower head because it’s not tightened well on the pipe? Sometimes this is happening. I have hand tightened it, but it may need more tightening than that. I have not thought it was that much water doing this, but maybe it is.

Is water leaking out from the sides of the tub where the shower curtain is not flush with the tiles? Maybe. Try to press it against the walls when you shower. But here’s where my procrastination really kicks in. Months ago I bought those plastic flanges that you put on the corners of the top edge of the tub to prevent some of this water sloshing out from the shower. I need to put those in. I think I mentioned them in another email.

I welcome anyone’s insight on the water damage situation. If we can stop it now, we can probably live with the current level of damage. But if we keep getting water on the upstairs bathroom floor in large quantities, then we’ll eventually have a hole in the downstairs bathroom ceiling, and there will be plumbers and plasterers tracking through the house; and I always fear that “this time” we’ll be charged by the landlord.

Also, tell the girlfriends and anyone else who may be showering. I have not told my girlfriend. They make water too, and I don’t just mean pee pee. Tell them to keep their dang washing water off the bathroom floor just like we have to. It doesn’t matter if it’s been sweetened by contact with there femininely pheromonal corpi. It does the same damage to plaster once it drips through the floor.

Sometimes I see the shower curtain pulled toward the cabinets, as if someone got out on the tub side. No doubt this is because some folks used to live in houses where you got out on that side. But in our house, try to get out onto the bathmat which is shoved up against the outside edge of the tub, instead of onto the tile beside the toilet. There’s not much space by the toilet anyway.

In other bathroom news, I bought a replacement toilet seat for 19.00. It’s leaning on the table outside the bathroom. How do we want to handle that?

On to another matter: “Said Cellophane Crap,” as it was called by "C" in his email response to my first email mention of it.

A few emails ago I mentioned the Cellophane stuff we put on the windows and shrink with the hairdryer. Actually, last year I blew off (pun intended) the hair dryer and just attached the Cellophane, left it slack, and called it art.

This week I’ve made two trips to Home Despot and they have been out of the stuff. But they keep saying it will be there. It will be on aisle 11, way down, on the left, at floor level. I’ll keep checking.

When I get it, we’ll be applying it to most downstairs windows except the kitchen one because we need that to be openable in case of emergencies like the other night when the burner was left on under the frying pan filled with oil, and the kitchen was filled with smoke.

And, use it in your rooms. Some housemates think it does not help. What it does is prevents convection from facilitating the loss of heat through he windows. We still lose it by radiation, but since the air does not contact the window directly, it does not feed heat to the window by contact, and therefore is not so readily cooled, and therefore does not sink downward and draw new warmer air into contact with the window to be further cooled in its turn. At least, that’s what I think.

News of the presence of this stuff in the house will be forthcoming.

Also, some of you may need to burp your radiators. See me about that. I know who you are. It’s always the same radiators that need burping. Don’t be like past housemates who go all winter saying, “Dag, my radiator always feel cold!”

But these recent days, all our radiators are fairly cold. As is the house. I can explain why the house is so cold. Really. It’s because, when it’s not exceedingly cold outside — like, when it’s maybe 30 at night, but not 10 — the house does not cool down as fast from the daytime. This means that the thermostat is not triggered to run the hot water in the radiators as much. So, the whole house suffers. When it gets exceedingly cold outside, heat runs out faster, the thermostat is triggered more, and the radiators are filled with hot water more frequently.

Just think, one day we’ll all look back on this and laugh. We may own our own houses. And at that time, when we’re putting the Gol-dang Cellophane on the windows and standing around with the hair dryer feeling stupid because our half-assed single panes with leaky seams are basically entropy-vents to the black sky of the universe, at least we’ll be putting the Gol-dang Cellophane on our OWN windows and standing around with the hair dryer feeling stupid because our OWN half-assed single panes with leaky seams are basically entropy-vents to the black sky of the universe.

Always understand the thermodynamics of your situation. That’s what I say.

Here’s a bonus question. When you wake up on a winter morning and the windows have condensation on them, and the condensation is on the outside, should you A) open all the windows in the house or B) keep the house closed?

Introducing Svetx Ground

2008-11-30T19:14:00.003-05:00

We Thought It Was a Potroast is up and running on Wordpress, and I’m already jealous of her style and wit. I feel like Compay Segundo in Buena Vista Social Club who told the audience, "I’m going to have to work a lot harder with Ry Cooder next to me," at 2:48 in this clip.

The blog world may feel it has not known what it has lacked until now. Blog on, Svetx. Keep us informed of happenings in your subconscious and that mill town. We understand it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Whupping Ass and Names for the Taking

2008-11-25T01:43:00.018-05:00

Holly Wanna Crack-Ya can tunnel like an elementary particle. You can’t tell how she gets past the guards. She’ll skate up behind two of them and just keep pace, right on their tails, until, perhaps from the natural sashaying that comes from pushing with alternating feet, a space opens between them and then sftt she’s through them and in front. There’s never a tussle, never a tumbling out of bounds like often happens to other jammers.

She gets way out ahead of the pack, and then there’s a lap or two where she’s alone. Her legs and feet brace firmly to carve turns, but her upper body slouches, her arms wheel as if barely keeping her upright, and her head stays down as if raising it and taking in her surroundings would finally unbalance her. But she knows who’s watching. When she doesn’t need her arms for stabilization, she pumps her fingers above her head, and the audience recognizes her “jazz hands” and goes wild.

Few rollergirls keep their midriffs bare, but Holly does, showing its tanned, tapering sides and an abdomen not of washboard texture, but twin stout cords. She is tight like a sound booth, devoid of fatty reverberation, when she smacks her belly with both hands to signal the end of a jam (her prerogative as lead jammer) while skidding out of bounds directly in front of us amid a protective cluster of teammates.

That’s her in the picture there, in the front row, the leftmost fully visible person, all smiles and autographs when it’s finally over. Forget soccer or baseball -- at this sport, you can easily take your kids to meet the players when it’s over.

Some other rollergirls take turns in the role of jammer, and the mini-skirted Mini Mauser has a saucy smile while rounding the curves and looking back across the track at the guards she has passed. But she and the others are not nearly as wiley as Holly, and the team keeps putting Holly back in to run up the points and finally win by about 50.

Penelope Bruz and Heavy Flo were my favorite names until Svetx said there used to be a Sylvia Wrath who has retired.

Miss Treat and Killy Wabbit need some help with their names, so in the spirit of Rocktoberizing the year and dreaming up fresh racehorse names for the parlance of our times, here some suggestions from the blogger-king of silly names:

Anna Creamin-ya

Christina Strangulera

Conk-n-squeeze-ya Rice

Mary Magdelinquent

Liz Claymore

Pillory Clinton

Christiane Right

Molly Flintlock

Tess of the Butcherkills

Mary Elizabeth Mashyournoseandtoes

Mary Please Harder

Mary McPummel

Killary Duff

Sarah Impalin’

Moll Slammers

Michelle O’Bomb-ya

Christine Todt Whippin’em

Maggie Kill’em-all

Tina Slay

Flo the Pummeler

Sarah Disembowel

Posh Slice

Obama "Kicking Opponents Off the Ballot"

2008-11-20T14:59:00.007-05:00

Neocon and other anti-Obama bloggers are raving about a Zogby survey of Obama voters showing that many don't know certain facts about Obama that his opposition thinks are alarming.

The only question I did not know was that Obama had "kicked opponents off the ballot" in his first campaign for Illinois senate. I looked into this and here's what I found.

This article at the Chicago Tribune says that what Obama did was challenge, in court, signatures on the other candidate's petitions to be on the ballot. Many of these signatures were gathered scant days before the deadline; some were gathered by kids. Enough signatures were found to be insubstantial to have the candidates removed from the ballots.

In my opinion, it does seem to be fairly dirty politics. But nothing was illegal. And while I would prefer my president-elect not to have done this, I know that we would not have fared better in this respect with any candidate whose campaign was run by Karl Rove or Steve Schmidt, the guy who smeared McCain in 2000 in South Carolina. That was far more dirty -- it was dishonest and not conducted in a court of law.

And what about those questionable voter registrations gathered by ACORN? Obama's challenging of signatures on petitions for candidacy seems to be in the same vein as the challenges to ACORN's for voter registration, and Obama's opponents don't seem to be complaining about that.

ADDENDUM: The first comment on this posting gives better insight into the ACORN signatures vs. ballot petition signatures issue.