Thursday, September 23, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Some Random Thoughts That Happen To Coincide With The First Day Of Autumn
Is there anything sadder than a backyard garden that is played out at season's end? The greens have turned to brown, the corn stalks bowed before the autumn breezes, tomato plants collapsed in their cages, and the woodchuck bewildered that his cafeteria has closed for the year.* * * * *It has become obvious in this political season of our discontent that the greatest threat to national security is not terrorists but what we are capable of doing to ourselves.* * * * *The two sports teams that I follow closely -- the Philadelphia Phillies and University of Delaware football team -- are on a roll. The Phillies are perfectly positioned for the fourth straight year for a post-season run and shot at a third World series in as many years with the best front-end pitching trio in baseball that has combined to go 12-0 since September 1. Meanwhile, Delaware is 3-0, has a sensational true freshman running back who has piled up nearly 500 yards to date, and a defense that is the stingiest nationally in UD's division. Life is good.
* * * * *Perhaps the biggest mistake that a candidate can make is putting oneself in a position where the focus is on you and not the issues. At this Tea Party darling Christine "It's Only Witchcraft" O'Donnell is proving herself to be a master . . . er, mistress, most recently denouncing the witchcraft that she acknowledged dabbling in as a teenager, which of course angered witches.* * * * *Why is it that toilet paper rolls keep getting narrower as our backsides get wider?
* * * * *A consequence of our supposed Internet Age literacy is that old-fashioned literacy -- being able to read and write longhand -- is slowly being strangled. I work at a rare book and manuscript library where many of our holdings are correspondence, play scripts and such written in longhand, and with every passing academic year more and more students have trouble deciphering these materials.* * * * *I am fond of saying that a public opinion poll is nothing more than a snapshot in time, and that is being proven with considerable regularity in the run-up to the November elections. Take the Gallup generic-ballot tracking poll. Please! The poll showed a huge Republican gain two weeks ago which the news media quickly termed a Democratic Armageddon, but since then the poll has swung back to the Democrats (twice) and now shows a statistically insignificant Republican lead.* * * * *Is there a term for the residue that builds up on the desktop contact points of a computer mouse? I suppose that it falls under the category of schmutz, but it seems like a new term is in order. Mouse droppings, perhaps?* * * * *Try telling 15 million unemployed Americans that the recession "officially" ended in June 2009.
* * * * *An otherwise magnificent day down the shore -- brilliantly summer skies, a slight sea breeze to keep the bugs away and dolphins aplenty frolicking out beyond the breakers -- was marred by jammed traffic and too many fender benders to count on the northward trek back home. The big reason was obvious: Many if not most drivers were blabbing on their cell phones or text messaging. What kind of a disaster is it going to take to stop this insanity?IMAGE: "The Corn Harvest" (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Selling Media Access To Her Children . . .
. . . doesn't seem to have worked out very well for Nadya "Octomom" Sulyman, who like many other flash-in-the-pan celebs has learned the hard way that stretching her allotted 15 minutes of fame is an uphill climb, or that there are no second acts in America, or . . . pick your own cliche.
Anyhow, Octomom has fallen 7 grand behind on her mortgage payments and may have to go on welfare to keep her octuplets and six over kids in Cap'n Crunch since efforts to sell a reality show and other entrepreneurial outreaches have flopped.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Naughty Kentucky Wildcats & The Ongoing Rot In Major College Sports
Kentucky's hallowed basketball program seems to be on the verge of self-immolation. Again.
People with long memories will recall that the Wildcats were sanctioned in 1988 because of 17 NCAA violations, the most serious of which was that basketball recruit Eric Manuel received help on a college entrance examand another recruit got $1,000 under the table from an assistant coach.
Fast forward to the here and now and two developments:
* Prized recruit Enes Kanter (right), a 6-foot-11, 272-pound freshman from Turkey, played pro ball for a number of European teams. An NCAA rule grants eligibility to pros who have not received "more than actual and necessary expenses," but The New York Times reports that he received over $100,000 in cash and benefits from one of the teams.
* Star forward Eric Bledsoe (below, left), who led the Wildcats to the Elite Eight in last year's NCAA tournament , took Algebra 3 in night school as a high school senior and needed and apparently got an A to make him eligible to play at Kentucky. Oops! Transcripts show that he actually received a low C. Oh, and never took Algebra 2.
Kentucky Coach John Calipari, who like several of his predecessors seems to be "willing to flirt too closely with the line of impropriety," as an ESPN commentator politely put it, is acting shocked and alarumed over both the Kanter and Bledsoe revelations, but in neither case did the university's athletic compliance department do their jobs. Nor Calipari his.
Kentucky has plenty of company when it comes to playing fast and loose with the rules.
A number of other major college sports programs have been investigated and sanctioned or are currently under investigation by the NCAA, including the University of Southern California football program. This big-time embarrassment prompted Reggie Bush (above, right) to return his 2005 Heisman Trophy last week.
This Post Is Not About Maureen Dowd
But like the New York Times columnist, Lindsay Lohan is washed up and, as is noted here, it's only a matter of timebefore this strumpet packs her nose or crashes her car one time too many.
That day of reckoning is probably a ways off since LiLo's latest escapade is almost certain to result in her returning to the big house.
No mention of what drug she was doing when she peed in a court-ordered bottle, but she claims to have weaned herself off all of her meds, which included Dilaudid, Ambien, Adderall, Zoloft, Trazodone and Nexium.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Sarah Palin's Poetic Something Or Other
American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.~ CHRISTINE O'DONNELLI have found myself in recent months semi-subconsciously posting Sarah Palin soap opera episodes on Saturdays because they're low traffic days in the blogosphere and I have had a difficult time taking the Killa from Wasilla seriously. But when someone like David Frum says that she's running for president, it's time to clench the old sphincter and take notice. Hence a Monday post.
Frum, who was banished from the Republican temple earlier this year because herefused to bend to the purity tests of Palin and other right-wingers, writes that if Palin is indeed the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination, as many pundits have been saying, then "that 1964 feeling is settling upon the GOP."
That, of course, was the election year President Johnson kicked Barry Goldwater's ass from Maine to Montana, taking 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 of the 538 Electoral College votes. Goldwater, a conservative who by today's GOP standards would be a flaming liberal, took only five Deep South states and his native Arizona.* * * * *There is a poetic something or another in a Palin presidential run, but I can't quite put my finger onwhat it is although I do know it has to do with the fact that Palin is the trailblazer for a new kind of candidate.
That candidate is always disparaging of government, has a platform that is a crazy quit of grievances, doesn't have a clue about the real-world consequences of what she proposes, is disparaging of smart people, people of color and people who are not heterosexual or share their ideological purity, and treats the news media as if it was an invasion-of-privacy machine and not a way to connect with voters.
There are, of course, already several Palin knockoffs. These include Sharron Angle, who seemed a sure bet to win Harry Reid's Senate seat in Nevada but looks to go down in flames; Christine O'Donnell, who thumped a career GOP moderate in Delaware, thereby handing a sure Republican gain inthe Senate to the Democrats; and New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who all but guarantees that Democrat Andrew Cuomo will win.
The reasons for the likely loses are the same reason that Palin, should she get the nomination, will crash and burn:
Yes, voters are in an angry mood these days, but they're not going to vote for candidates like Angel, O'Donnell and Paladino in sufficient numbers because they're only good at pouring gasoline on the national fire, not finding ways to put it out.
Somehow, A Duck Is Watching You
I guess I have lived a sheltered life because it wasn't until yesterday -- some six decades on -- that I learned about a psychological condition known as anatidaephobia. More here.Image by Kaana Moonshadow
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Science Sunday: It's Too Darned Hot
Why would you want to build a spacecraft good for only one mission and that mission is terminated when the spacecraft melts under intense heat?
Well, meet the Solar Probe Plus, which NASA hopes to crash into the Sun -- or get as far into the sun's atmosphere as possible -- sometime before 2018.
The car-sized $180 million SPP is likely to be destroyed by temperatures exceeding 2,550F before actually reaching the Sun, but will have obtained valuable data about our parent star.To withstand the temperatures and radiation, the instruments will be protected by a huge carbon-composite heat shield that still needs to be built.
Surprisingly, the Sun is one of the few places people have not yet sent a spacecraft.
"Trying to understand how the Sun influences the Earth is quite a big thing these days," Richard Harrison, a solar physicist from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, told BBC News. "The one thing we've never done is actually go there. You think of a spacecraft flying past Mars or Venus, but with the Sun, it is a little bit different."
Lika Guhathakurta, a Solar Probe Plus program scientist, said that "for the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our Sun."The spacecraft will be equipped with various instruments, among them a solar wind particle detector, a 3D camera, and a device to measure the magnetic field.
Harrison said that to many people, it might seem strange that the Sun actually has an atmosphere.But it does, he explained: "It's this million-degree plasma [that consists of] charged particles, trapped in magnetic loops, sort of super-magnetic fields."
One of the aims of the SPP mission is to understand the nature of the "solar wind," the mass of charged particles that billows away from the Sun into space.
"The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics: why is the Sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the Sun's visible surface, and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our Solar System," said Dick Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics.
"We've been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers."
The SPP is not the only project underway to get close to the Sun. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are working on another mission called Solar Orbiter, a satellite that may go to the star at the end of this decade.
But Professor Harrison said that the SPP has far more ambitious goals.
"The Solar Probe will literally slice through a bit of the Sun's atmosphere, and that's never been done before," he said. "The real challenge will be making the measurements - you don't want to just measure the effects that you've driven on the atmosphere [by the spacecraft].
"It's a bit like if you're pushing a boat through a river and measuring something about the surface - you don't want to measure the ripples from the boat. It's a real challenge, but it's something that is do-able."
Saturday, September 18, 2010
In Which One Of My Idols Debuts A New Song About The Hero Of My Book
THE BOTTOM OF THE FOXL'Esprit d' Joubert
Words and Music by BOB DOROUGH
Copyright (c) 2010 Aral Music Co.
At the Bottom of the Fox
It was dark, there where the
Cellar steps descended into a warp
And the Indian spirits clank and carp --
Oo-we-ow, Oo-we-ow, Oo-we-ow
One dark night, when the light was right,
We lost a happy soul due to a strange
Concatenation there of greed, avarice, envy,
Dread and fight.
And the blight began when he went down,
This happy man, this magic town,
Oh, how very strange, this subtle change inDelaware Water Gap, Delaware Water Gap,
Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania.But now, let me tell you 'bout him, the spirit of Eddie,
L'Esprit d' Joubert . . .He was a friendly man, he was a busy man,
He ran the Fox, he shook the Gap,
He made it work. He took no crap.
He made you work, he made it hap.
I remember once, with Joubert,
He could be a lazy Pooh bear,
Or he could make it happen like that,
Make it happen right from under his hat.Fix that floor, move that wall!
The neighbor complained -- She say the
Music's too loud.
It's a rowdy crowd, but we'll do her proud.
Egg crates on the ceiling,
Stifle that wheelin' and dealin'.
Ranting, chanting, raucous heroes,
Blowin' off their steam and neurose
At the Bottom of the Fox, that crazy clientele.Ah, that clientele -- at the Bottom of the Fox -- the clientele?A mixture of the best and worst,
The lowest, the highest, the last, the first,
From all the land around the Gap:
Painters, musicians, farmers, 'lectricians,
Roofers, goofers, hikers, biker,
Geeks and freaks, went on for weeks.
A beer, a smoke, a joint, a joke,
A line of jive, another poke,
A line of jook -- (I saw a spook) -- We saw it all, we had a
ball . . . Golly, how I miss those guys.At the Bottom of the FoxThere was that magic night,
Where's the light?
The switch was broken by -- that devil out of sight.
And they say that devil had an axe --
Ow-we-woe, Ow-we-woe, Ow-we-woe . . .
Now it's done, and the sands have run,
And so we say goodbye to one who left us with a
Legacy of fun. Didn't he man, he was the one --
Eddie Joubert . . .
After hours, oh, so quiet,
In the still, Eddie and Rick and Phil,
Havin' some beers and smokes,
Sharin' the pokes and tradin' the jokes,
Suddenly Eddie spoke, right off the top of his heart,
"Let's do it right here." (Huh?) (What?)
"Right here in the Gap, a little jazz festival of our own.
I'll build a stage 'n' we'll put out a flyer 'n' a map,
And some chairs and blankets and all the artists
Can bring their paintings and maybe some food and the
People will come and we'll see how it goes -- Huh?
(Yeah) -- (Right On!) "Let's get it done!"
"So, you get your horn and you get the charts,"
And there it was born -- The Celebration of the Arts.
In Delaware Water Gap, Delaware Water Gap,
Pennsylvania.
Bob Dorough, backed by his Ambassadorial Trio and The Bottom of the Fox Horns, debuted "The Bottom of the Fox" on September 11, 2010 at the 33rd annual Delaware Water Gap Celebration of the Arts. Dorough is a jazz legend and has woven his vocal and piano magic over seven decades. He plans to record the song on future album. Photo of Dorough debuting the song by Bud Nealy.
Friday, September 17, 2010
My Dinner With Andre . . . Er, Joe
NEWARK, Delaware -- One of the weirder aspects of the hyperwired age in which we live is having relationships with people you've never actually met. This, of course, is facilitated by Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Internet message boards and text messaging, media that collectively have sounded the death knell for the quaint practice of letter writing. Typical of this phenomenon is that while I've made some good friends in my five-plus years of blogging, I've only met three of them in person.
The most recent is the estimable Joe Gandelman, full-time editor-in-chief of The Moderate Voice and part-time ventriloquist, with whom I had a delightful dinner thisweek at a brewpub in the small Delaware university town where I have a pied-Ã -terre, which for those of you not conversant in French is a term for a rat hole where I live when not luxuriating at the DF&C's mountain hideaway.
Joe is an abstraction for the vast majority of the many people who have read his political and social commentaries and a distraction for the many people on the left and right whose heads explode over his determinedly moderate tack in these vitriolic times.
Anyhow, few of us have ever seen or met Joe. That is unless they happened to be watching CNN during one of his talking-head appearances or stumbled on one of the state fairs, carnivals, shows for earthquake and wildfire victims or other events where he plies his part-time trade with a wisecracking dummy whom he never quite succeeds in hypnotizing, an elephant with a squirting trunk, a dragon who breathes smoke, a lovable shark, three kinds of dogs and a genie's head in a box.
(For the lowdown on this Shadow Joe, read "7 Weeks, 7 Fairs & A Van Full of Dummies" by Yours Truly. And weep.)
Anyhow, Joe has an uncanny resemblance to Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre, and it was only amatter of time before the brewpub's hostesses, waitstaff, sous chef . . . oh, and a homeless guy with wraparound sunglasses who collects aluminum cans in a shopping cart, lined up for his autograph. I felt a little left out, perhaps because I look nothing like Andre Gregory, Shawn's co-star in the 1981 Louis Malle-directed classic.
This brings up an aspect of Joe that shines through in his writing and many good works: He's got an enormous heart, which was further confirmed the other evening when he tried to convince me that I may not look like Gregory with my a bald pate and gray beard, but am almost as handsome. Almost, he said. Almost. (The nerve.)* * * * *I'm not big on rules, typically observing them in the breech, but I do have a rule regarding discussions in brewpubs and other places that serve alcohol: Never talk about religion, politics or whether O.J. Simpson was guilty.
But because it was Joe, I didn't object when he steered the conservation to Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell's upset victory over gadzillion-term Congressman Mike Castle right here in teensy weensy Delaware, which is not a suburb of Philadelphia as even smart people oftenbelieve.
For those of you who have spent the last few days in a cave or a coma, practically overnight O'Donnell has become even bigger than even Snooki on Jersey Shore.
This, Joe and I agreed, is an astonishing accomplishment for someone who is utterly unsuitable for public office, is a tax deadbeat who used campaign cash for her condo rent and personal expenses, lies and then lies about her lies like a certain former half-term Alaska governor, has morphed from being "loose" while in college to having very strict views on what even consenting adults should not do in the privacy of their bedrooms, is virulently anti-gay (her sister is a lesbian), and in short makes Jerry Falwell seem like a flaming liberal.
O'Donnell, like Snooki, is a cutie pie. (Or not. I'll let you be the judge.) And also like Snooki has been on the wrong side of the law.
But unlike Snooki, whose defense for her recent arrest for being a nuisance on the beach (I'm not making that up) was a thought-provoking "I'm too pretty to be in jail," O'Donnell has lashed out at her accusers. And while Snooki revels in the media glare, harsh or otherwise, O'Donnell flees from it, especially when uppity reporters have the temerity to do theirjobs by asking her to explain all the nutty stuff she says.
Joe and I both ordered the fish and chips platter, and Joe drowned his platter in an ocean of Heinz ketchup, which I presume is a habit gleaned when he was a foreign correspondent in India, where his good friend Swaraaj and others of course drown everything in Heinz ketchup. I had a couple glasses of the brewpub's IPA, while Joe sipped on a single cask-conditioned raspberry ale, which he barely half finished but did leave a cute foam moustache on his upper lip.
Perhaps Joe wanted to be on his best behavior because the homeless guy with the shades was really Christine O'Donnell, who was watching him because he's an undocumented alien hereabouts and therefore ripe for a citizen's arrest. But it is more likely that he needed to be clear headed for the next leg of his thousands-mile-long trek, which eventually will take him back to the relative sanity of Southern California.
Always thinking, that Joe, always thinking.
Execrable Turdblossom Strikes Again
Aside from wresting a sure-win Senate seat from the Democrats and gifting them a sure-win Senate seat, the other bit of joy in Christine O'Donnell's upset victory over Mike Castle this week in the Delaware primary was Karl Rove's smackdown of the deadbeat wingnut, who he correctly portrayed as having character problems.
But Rove, Dubya's political mentor and longtime consigliere, to use the Italian term, has never had what those people call cojones, and so it only took a few hours of bashing by Faux News mouthpieces before he was drinking the O'Donnell Kool-Aid . . . on Faux News, of course.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Republican Party Plants Ice, Harvests Wind As The Tea Party's Candidates Roll
Perhaps, this autumn, [Christine O'Donnell] will tell swing voters that she can see God from her condo window.~ DICK POLMANI have watched the ongoing immolation of the Republican Party establishment with a combination of awe, schadenfreude and dread.
Awe because rather than heed the wake-up call the 2008 elections provided, the establishment tacked to the right as it wandered deeper into the wilderness, further diminishing its shrinking base. Schadenfreude because these establishmentarians got their just deserts. And dread because the Rightward Ho! tack did not fool a bevy of Tea Party-backed candidates with extremist views who have bumped off one GOP establishment candidate after another in primaries and have a fighting chance to actually win a Senate seat or three in November.
The conventional wisdom is that wingnuts like tax deadbeat and serial liar Christine O'Donnell can upset longtime incumbent and Delaware fave Mike Castle, who had won 12 elections over four decades, because Americans are angry over big government and big taxes.
That is true, but there is another explanation that is getting lost in the cable news noise machine:
The Republican establishment has sewed the seeds of a disaster that could result in, yes, a few Tea Partiers being elected but more Democrats being elected to once-safe Republican seats because these GOP candidates populate the lunatic fringe.
Little Delaware is a big case in point.
This is because O'Donnell has enormous unfavorables. Okay, not as large as Sarah Palin, who endorsed her. She couldn't carry the most populous of the state's three counties, winning only in the more conservative lower counties, and is almost sure to lose in November to Chris Coons, a Democrat who actually has government experience and already is being backed by 25 percent of Republicans in a very blue state with a 70-30 Democratic registered voter edge.
The bottom line is that O'Donnell's victory, coming on the heels of victories by Tea Party stalwarts Sharron Angel in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Marco Rubio in Florida and Joe Miller in Alaska, actually further reduces the chances of Republicans recapturing the Senate, while they will have a barely functional majority at best if they take back the House.* * * * *The first eight years of the decade past were a golden age for Republican establishmentarians, but they blew an opportunity to shore up the party's base because they . . . well, acted like Democrats.
They passed lavish spending bills, supported tax cuts for the rich, further bloated an already ginormous federal bureaucracy, said they'd never let their states take federal stimulus money and then showed up at every groundbreaking and ribbon cutting for stimulus-funded projects, paid lip service to Family Values issues and repeatedly got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, wearing diapers while consorting with hookers or doing toe-tapping dances in airport men's room toilet stalls.
These self-inflicted wounds will take at least a couple more election cycles to heal, if then, but in all likelihood not until Palin, Beck and Limbaugh are no longer calling the shots. In the meantime, Karl Rove is so yesterday, isn't he?
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