Surrounded as I am by family and friends while on holiday, I continue to find time alone for writing to be in short supply. But here’s a gem for the “Shameless Filler” category: the “Old Perfesser” himself, the great Casey Stengel, testifying on July 8th, 1958 at the Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee Hearings. This is priceless.
Perhaps best of all: Mickey Mantle’s opening remark (last line of the transcript).
Here’s the latest in lethal technology: the wasp knife.
A quiet, lazy midday having presented me with an opportunity to switch on my laptop, I thought I might, at the very least, offer those readers who’ve made the effort to stop by (and I think them for doing so) a tidbit or two.
There seems to be little doubt that the world’s oceans are in trouble. Here in Cape Cod, which was named for shoals of fish once so numerous that you could “walk across the water on their backs”, the fishing industry is all but gone, the result of near-total depletion of a fishery that once seemed limitless. It now appears, as we read here, that fertilizer runoff is leading to algal blooms that cause oxygen-deprived “dead zones”, and in this article we read about the “rise of slime”:
Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.
A reader calls our attention to an item that is making the rounds today: in a startling breakthrough, researchers have found that when we drink alcohol, it can make others appear more attractive!
This astonishing result may even just be the tip of the iceberg: apparently booze can even make things just generally seem more beautiful.
Once the word gets out, of course, drinking alcohol might catch on to the point that it actually becomes a popular activity: why, I could even imagine that there might be some business opportunities here. If the idea really takes off, there might be money to be made manufacturing beverages that contain alcohol, or even selling the stuff to adventurous sorts on a per-drink basis.
As for me, I might have to stop drinking for a few hours to see if what they are saying is really true. I’ve been thinking the world was a beautiful place all along, but now I’m not so sure.
I am eager to pick up our discussion of meaning and morality where it left off a week or so ago. It paused on what I thought was a promising note: a comment by Peter Lupu that aptly summarized the tasks a naturalist account must accomplish.
Reader J. Kapok, knowing that I have been out of touch the past few days, and concerned that I not overdo it so soon after my recent misadventures, has kindly sent some blog fodder my way: items that he knows would have attracted my attention had I not been distracted by larger and more clamant issues of human frailty (mine). Both are from the New York Times.
Well, it’s Friday afternoon, I’m back home, and it appears that I might not be “falling off the branch” just yet after all.
In the comment thread in the previous post I mentioned that I felt unwell enough to visit the hospital on Tuesday. I haven’t left yet. Here’s the story.
There seems to be something going round the blogosphere lately; a number of folks seem recently to be afflicted by a debilitating malaise, an enervating ennui, that has made it hard for them to carry out their duties. Dennis Mangan is on open-ended leave; Deogolwulf has expressed his own weariness with the undertaking; Bill Vallicella recently decided to lay off for a month — and here I am, missing several days in a row.
What begins with optimistic fanfare and a sense of novelty and excitement can often begin to feel routine, and while we bloggers all know that we are under no contractual obligation to keep generating “content”, we also know that steady output is essential for maintaining a connection with one’s hard-won readership. But there seems to be a hump to get over at about the four-year mark, and it is interesting to note how many of us seem to be flagging just a bit.
But for all that, there’s nothing like writing down one’s thoughts for getting them in order, and nothing like airing them in public for finding out how sound they are. So blog we must, and blog we will (well, most of us, anyway). Bill V. explains nicely here.
After all, how are we supposed to know what we think unless we see what we say?
I’ve been very busy with work and travel, so I might have scant time for attending to my duties here for the next few days (though I will as time permits). I have also been given plenty to mull over in our ongoing meaning-of-life dust-up.
Back by Monday or so, if not sooner.
Meanwhile, the estimable Deogolwulf has weighed in on physicalism with a meaty post of his own — one that will, I think, need responding to. Have a look here.
If, against all odds, I make it to the age of 80, I might have quite a birthday. A smallish asteroid called 99942 Apophis (which will also be making a close flyby the day I turn 73, on Friday, April 13th, 2029), might be blowing out my candles for me.
Have a look here, and for far more detailed information, here.
It’s too late for a serious effort here tonight: the memsahib and I spent the evening in Prospect Park, enjoying the New York Philharmonic’s annual outdoor concert.
It was a splendid event, and well worth the arduous half-block trek to the park. The weather, by some freak accident, was delightful, with balmy breezes and a spectacular sunset, and the program could hardly have been better: Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Sibelius’s Finlandia, with the rousing overture from Carmen as an encore, and an exuberant fireworks display to cap off the show.
The Bach in particular, played just as the sun sank below the horizon, was so very beautiful. It would be easy, in the presence of such sublime genius, such staggering artistic splendor, such incomparable musicianship, to imagine that such gifts must be a clear sign of a transcendent and loving Mind from which such blessings flow, that they simply must come to us from some higher source than the coarse material processes of the natural world.
Naaaaaaaaah.
This afternoon the lovely Nina and I, realizing that today was our last chance, took in the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum, which is just a short stroll from our home. If you aren’t familiar with Murakami’s oeuvre, it is both lighthearted and disturbing, playful and serious, and squashes high and low art, fine art and pop culture, and the sublime and the commercial into a single genre he calls “Superflat”. Some of the works are enormous graphic panels featuring a profusion of laughing daisies and psychedelic, multi-eyed mushrooms; others are anime-styled plastic scuptures, still others are Luis Vuitton bags (for sale). In one room little children say in the floor happily sketching a gigantic, happy panel of his trademark polyocular fungi; in the next was a lifesize plastic statue of a laughing, golden-haired masturbator playfully twirling a lariat of his own making.
Murakami’s skill and creativity are enormous; no less so, apparently, is his business acumen: more adeptly than any artist since Walt Disney, he has made not just a name for himself, but also a brand.
If you’d like to see some of his work online, the simplest thing would probably just to do a Google image search under his name. In fact, don’t bother: here, I’ve done it for you.
There’s so much to talk about: politics, moral responsibility, and even the meaning of life. But these holiday weekends are so full of amusing diversions and distractions that it’s hard to get down to business — which, I suppose, is really not such a bad thing at all.
So for now I’ll just wish you a happy Independence Day, from lovely Wellfleet, MA, where we had a whale of a 4th.
Tonight, so soon after the death of Tim Russert, we must sadly note the death of another nimble and influential mind: George Carlin. He was only 71.
Being rather worn out tonight, I shall refrain from posting another political screed; I also have a busy day at work tomorrow, and shall have no time for responding to the inevitable reactionary hagiographies of whatever Progressivist huckster I might have chosen to poniard. I do feel the need, however, to take a moment to explain once again that my political views, despite whatever some of you might think, are all over the map on an issue-by-issue basis, and that for every smug and patronizing trust-us-we-know-whats-good-for-you Wilsonian statist windbag on the Left, there is some folksy, Bible-thumping, creationist intellectual midget on the Right that bothers me every bit as much. Really, I can’t stand any of them.
So for tonight, something completely different: some very engaging reading — and plenty of it — from the prodigious Eliazar Yudkowsky. I won’t even categorize it; just go and have a look.
We’re back in Gotham after a splendid visit to San Francisco (and a long break from blogging). The cool and breezy weather was a delightful respite for a thermophobe like me, and each day the lovely Nina and I walked for miles, hammering in pitons as needed, and rappelling down the steeper blocks.
One of the highlights of the trip was a dinner in Berkeley on Saturday at Alice Waters’ celebrated restaurant Chez Panisse. I don’t often discuss food in these pages — in fact I can’t recall ever having done so before — but this was too remarkable a meal to pass over in silence.
We’re off duty for the next couple of days: the lovely Nina and I are enjoying a brief visit to San Francisco (look below the fold for a view of Nob Hill, with fog rolling in, as seen from the 12th floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel).
But I did want to take time out from our romantic interlude to join the chorus lamenting the startling death of Tim Russert, whose keen mind and extraordinary gifts will be missed by all. He was one of the greatest journalists, interviewers, and political analysts of my lifetime, and I am shocked by his untimely death.
Off to the West Coast for a few days.
It is hard to write at the moment; all of us here in Gotham have been reduced to shambling, gibbering zombies by recent meteorological events. Just a few days ago — though it might as well have been decades, so utterly has the recent catastrophe effaced any lucid memory of happier times — all seemed roughly normal, or at least as “normal” as life can ever be here in this enormous and hyperkinetic city, the crossroads of the world. But some time in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 7th, it all came to a sudden and startling end, as tragic and precipitous as a carload of promgoers swerving into a tree. The Hell-mouth is open.
Well, we’re back. Our latest “Service Notice” post generated a reasonable question from reader Charles L., namely: why do I bother announcing that I won’t be posting? After all, it’s not as if the trains won’t be running, or the beer will stop flowing, and I realize it must seem a bit presumptuous to imagine that anyone would even care. But as I said to Charles, having established a pattern of daily blogging, I see missing a post as a lapse of discipline, and I suppose I feel obligated to own up to it.
Sorry - between work, travel, and social obligations, there’ll be nothing new here until Sunday or Monday, most likely. Apologies as always.
After months of training and preparation, our friend Kevin Kim is now beginning his transcontinental walk, whose theme is interreligious dialogue. He’ll be starting his journey in British Columbia, and heading east. We can follow his progress at his website, Kevin’s Walk.
This should be interesting.
Well, perhaps “nothing here until Friday at the soonest” was overly pessimistic; I’ll squeeze in one brief item. Following on our post about the pros and cons of conversing with one’s enemies, here is a relevant item from the opinion page of today’s Times, about JFK’s unwisdom in agreeing to the Vienna summit of 1961, a decision that arguably led to the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis.
Due to a particularly grueling schedule Wednesday and Thursday, we’ll have nothing here, I’m afraid, until Friday at the soonest. I realize this has been happening more often of late, but there it is. At least there’s still no talk of a rate increase.
We’ll most likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
From our old friend Dave Pauley comes a link to some extraordinary photos of the Chaitén volcanic eruption in Chile. As Dave points out in his note to me, a local villager could understandably think there were more than “merely” natural forces at work here. Have a look.
One of the main reasons that the USA, despite its ethnic diversity, has held itself together as well as it has (well, aside from that little scuffle back in the mid-1800’s) is that we all speak the same English language. But that’s only in the most general sense; American English takes a lush and delightful profusion of regional forms, and nowhere is this more evident to a flinty old Yankee like me than in the folksy and playful argot of the South.
Sadly, today seems to have been entirely consumed by worldly distractions, and with a busy weekend coming up, we’ll likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
Our commenter Jeanie Oliver has asked why the overwhelming majority of comments at this website are from men, and I’ve often wondered the same thing. I know that there are more than a few female readers out there, and if you are one of them I just want to make it clear to you that you are most welcome. As I mentioned in reply to Jeanie’s remark, my fondest wish for this website is that it be a salon, not a soapbox; my goal in scribbling these posts is not publicity, but conversation, and this place can feel rather like a boys’ boarding-school dormitory at times. I certainly have plenty of opinions about things, but many of them are almost certainly wrong, and my only hope of making any progress in the time I have left is to have intelligent people, of both sexes, to talk about them with.
…but not forthcoming, I am afraid. Worn out and feeling a little under the weather, I am neglecting my duties here for at least another day. Apologies to all.
As suddenly and astoundingly as ever, it is Spring again in New York. The weather these past few days has been simple perfection, and the trees and flowers, having awakened in a celebratory mood, are getting about their morning’s work with extravagant exuberance. But not all is renewed, and even as the living world stirs and quickens, we must pause to mark two sad events.
Having toiled at my Midtown office until 3:15 a.m. last night — and with a joint-locking seminar to attend this evening at the kwoon, and a long mixing session coming up on Saturday — published content may be rather thin these next few days. I apologize: in particular, I owe the estimable Deogolwulf a better explanation of why our lack of free will, as traditionally (and implausibly) imagined, isn’t such a big deal — but there are only so many hours in the day.
What is strange to me now, after 15 years of steady Internet use — during which time an truly ungraspable immensity of information has become available to all — is when there is something I can’t get hold of online. Sometimes it is a particularly obscure quotation, or passage from a book that I would rather paste than transcribe. At other times it is a person I would like to track down, or of whom I want to see a picture. Tonight it’s a band by the name of Baxter’s Glass Eye.
If you’re like me, you like nothing better than tucking into a heaping plate of short-snouted seahorses. Problem is, they’ve become annoyingly rare. Well, I’ve got good news! Story here.
As a paternalistic and morally deficient bigot, I of course have a collegial interest in the ideological shortcomings of others — an interest that is not limited to my own species. So I was gratified when a recent item over at Dennis Mangan’s place led me to an engaging and informative piece about the extent to which my own failings of social conscience are replicated throughout the animal kingdom. Have a look here.
In a recent post, Silence!, we remarked upon the indictment of an Austrian politician, Susanne Winter, for her having suggested that there might have been a whiff of sexual impropriety in the Prophet Mohammed’s taking of the six-year-old Aisha as his wife (though to his credit, he did not consummate the marriage until she was nine). We first learned of the story by way of the website Gates of Vienna, which exists for the purpose of reporting on the current phase of the “very old war” between Islam and the West.
My friend Salim Ismail, with whom I have just enjoyed a delightful lunch, has introduced me to a marvellous website that I must share with you all. It’s called Idle Words, and features the writings of one Maciej Ceglowski, who seems to get around a bit. You can find it here, or from today forward, on our sidebar as well.
One of the little advantages of living in the pre-Internet world was that it was far easier to flatter myself, in my cleverer moments, that I’d had an original idea. It now requires only a trivial exertion to confirm that I haven’t.
Like may others I am an admirer of Winston Churchill, and have lately been reading an excellent book by the managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. It’s called Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and as you can imagine from the title, it chronicles the enormously important friendship between Churchill and FDR during a critical passage in the history of the civilized world.
The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his short film Fitna, which is harshly critical of Islam. If you are interested you can watch it online here.
From our friend Jess Kaplan comes news of a new breed of bank robber. Story here.
This just in from The Borowitz Report:
Amid calls for him to resign, embattled New York Governor Eliot Spitzer held a hastily-scheduled press conference in Albany today.
“After much deliberation, I have decided to resign my membership in the Emperors VIP Club, effective immediately,” Mr. Spitzer said. “I hope that in doing so, I will allow the healing to begin.”
Mr. Spitzer expressed his regret over the recent sex scandal, telling reporters, “I have let down my fellow Emperors and VIPs, whose privacy has been unfortunately violated.”
Under a transition plan worked out with the Emperors VIP Club, Customer Number Ten would immediately succeed Governor Spitzer and become Customer Number Nine.
Mr. Spitzer confirmed that he had already handed over his key to room number 871 in the Mayflower Hotel to his successor.
Our friend, the inquisitive and irrepressible blogger and author Kevin Kim, is an American expat who has been living and teaching in Seoul for years. Now he is planning to return to the US for an ambitious project: a transcontinental walk to foster interreligious dialogue. He’s started a new website exclusively for this project: Kevin’s Walk. Go and have a look.
The conservative commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks offers us a remembrance of his mentor, the great William F. Buckley.
Here.
I’ve just learned that William F. Buckley has died. Story here.
Here’s something useful, just sent to me by the lovely Mrs. Pollack: a website that lists hundreds of companies, with instructions on how to navigate through their automated telephone menus to get through to a real live human being. (How to get through to an intelligent human being, or one that cares whether you live or die, is presumably still under investigation.)
Here.
After exhausting the subject in the comment thread of yesterday’s post, I’m not about to comment on the admittedly remote possibility of there being any whiff of political bias in the front-page, above-the-fold “human-interest story” about John McCain in today’s Times. (We’ll leave that to every other blogger and pundit west of the Azores.)
So instead, here’s a cute little robot.
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