Urgh. Here I am enjoying a nice, quiet Friday evening when PZ tells me about the geysers of blood shooting out of Minneapolis sewers. I’m both disgusted and a little confused. Doesn’t this sort of thing usually happen in St. Paul?
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week.
Harold Meyerson had a perceptive op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post about how the Bush administration still hasn’t gotten the memo about last fall’s election results. The two big scandals currently sucking all the air out of Washington–the U.S. attorney purge and the GSA “team building exercise”–both developed well after the election. Republicans in Congress seem entirely incapable of dragging the president and his inner circle into the living room for an intervention. They realize that Bush is no longer their messiah, but hero worship is a difficult habit to break.
By the way, you really should watch the testimony of GSA chief Lurita Doan. The poor woman appears to have some sort of affliction that has seriously compromised her memory.
The self-help industry provides incontrovertible evidence that the world is full of an alarming number of people who will believe anything you tell them. How else to explain the success of something like The Secret? The Secret (although it appears not to be much of a secret anymore) is the weird bastard offspring of an unholy union between trippy New Age philosophy and infomercial marketing. Its pitch is essentially this: wishes do come true. Whatever it is want in life–money, success, that hottie in the cubicle across from yours–will be given to you by the universe if you want it badly enough. Those who don’t get their heart’s desires are simply not fervent enough in their wishing. But the fact that I do not yet have a supremely competent nurse named Kandi who has the measurements of a porn starlet, a talent for giving great back rubs, and a deep inability to respect boundaries is reason enough to suspect this theory’s validity.
And then there’s the Thank God I…[insert your personal tragedy or crisis here] series of books. These books are meant to be inspirational and with titles like Thank God I Was Physically Abused and Thank God I Was Raped, it’s hard not to feel that Someone Up There loves you. Future titles include Thank God I Had That Female Circumcision and Thank God I Discovered Heroin.
I understand the seduction of anything that promises to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent world, but it’s a little troubling that so many people are compelled to ascribe reasons to life’s tragedies and disappointments. And they’re willing to hand over their hard-earned money to purveyors of cheap bromides and empty promises.
It looks like The Onion is trying to get in on some of the Daily Show’s action. My first impression: nice try, but it needs some work. The piece on immigration was clever, but other bits fell flat (can’t the writers come up with something a little less lame than Civil War reenactors going to Iraq?). The Daily Show works because so much of its humor is grounded in the absurdities of politics and real people. The Onion News Network feels like it’s broadcast from some weird parallel universe real people don’t exist, only caricatures.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Crippletron:
Because sometimes the only thing the able-bodied world understands is brute force. The next time the Supreme Court issues an opinion that spouts some Federalist Society crap about the Eleventh Amendment trumping the ADA, I’m forming my own Crippletron with some of my fellow gimps-in-arms. We’re gonna traipse over to Washington, DC, rip the roof of the Supreme Court building, pluck Scalia out by his ankles, and use him as a human hackeysack until he sees reason.
I suppose this posting will go into my FBI file. Hope you got a good chuckle from this, Agent Gordon.
I’ve spent part of today experimenting with Pandora, a streaming music service. The interface is simple enough; you enter a favorite artist or song and Pandora creates a “radio station” that plays other artists that share similar musical characteristics. There’s a subscription-based version that plays the music without any interruptions, but the free version is more than tolerable. I have a feeling I’ll be making quite a few iTunes purchases because of this.
And after you check out Pandora and like it as much as I do, sign this petition to show your support for webcasting. A recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board could dramatically increase the royalties that both small and large webcasters have to pay to labels, which could force many services like Pandora out of business. Commercial over-the-air radio is a wasteland of generic playlists and endless advertising; internet radio offers almost infinite choice and many of the webcasters are truly passionate about music. They deserve our support.
An MSN article discusses the persistent stigma that the movie industry continues to attach to the label science fiction, with the most recent example being Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men (one of the most brilliant movies of the last year), and his refusal to utter the phrase “science fiction” when discussing his film. The article’s author points the finger at George Lucas for juvenilizing the form and emphasizing spectacle over substance. While geeks love to make sport of trashing Lucas, I don’t think it’s fair to place all the blame on his shoulders. SF has always occupied a cultural ghetto associated with pimply adolescent boys. And Spielberg’s Jaws did just as much to convince Hollywood that special effects will sell more tickets. But I continue to be confident that the promise of DVD sales will persuade the occasional studio to take a chance on more films like Cuaron’s.
Speaking of, I need to head over to Amazon to pre-order my copy of Children.
This is what I’ve been listening to lately during my blogging sessions:
The disability hierarchy gets another look in this study, which finds that people with disabilities view deafness as the most desirable impairment and schizophrenia the least. It got me thinking. In some ways, the disability community resembles a dusty, impoverished country tucked away in some isolated corner of the globe. We’ll call it the Democratic Republic of Gimpistan. The rest of the world doesn’t give much thought to Gimpistan; most people have never even met a Gimpistani. This state of affairs doesn’t sit too well with most Gimpistanis and they often think that perhaps they should raise some sort of fuss to force people to notice them, but the Gimpistanis are a deeply tribal people. They tend to be clannish and they typically congregate only with others in their own tribe. An astonishing number of Gimpistanis won’t even consider other Gimpistanis as potential mates and instead choose to trawl dating websites for attractive foreigners.
And so Gimpistan remains an obscure, forgotten place. It doesn’t even have a proper flag because its inhabitants can’t stop bickering about the design and appropriate symbols to be included in said flag. Fun Fact: Gimpistan has 311 ambassadors to the United Nations.
I told a friend over dinner recently that the two most transformative forces that will substantially reshape human civilization over the next couple decades are:
If you want to see an example of how our growing understanding of genetics affects everyday people, read the excellent Sunday feature on Katharine Moser that recently ran in the NY Times. Genetic testing revealed to Ms. Moser that she carries the gene for Huntington’s disease. The article goes on to describe how Ms. Moser–still in her mid-twenties–has chosen to live her life after learning that the onset of her symptoms may begin in as little as twelve years.
Our grasp of human genetics allows us to do little more than take a peek into our individualized biological futures. That will change eventually, but in the meantime, people like Katherine Moser are leading us into in era that will offer many of us stark choices between living in blissful ignorance or taking a more deliberate path in the shadow of a terrible certainty.