Month: May 2011

"Self-Portrait At 28" by David Berman:

There are things I've given up on
like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
and the human race as a group
has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now.

It's just that our advances are irrepressible.
Nowadays little kids can't even set up lemonade stands.
It makes people too self-conscious about the past,
though try explaining that to a kid.

I'm not saying it should be this way.

All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous
and split in two.

We will travel to Mars
even as folks on Earth
are still ripping open potato chip
bags with their teeth.

Continued here.

(Image: Minuscule by Maite Guerrero)

Can you blame him? I've been told for months now that Huckabee won't be running and I tend to take such rumors with a shovel-full of skepticism. But now it's official that he likes his TV gig (badly enough to force you to watch the whole thing till the end last night), enjoys his new home, and has insufficient egomania to drag himself and everyone he loves through a brutalizing process toward a likely defeat. What segment of the vote does he leave to others? Well, he is an arch social-conservative; and has a record of tax hikes and clemency for prisoners; he's an evangelical fave; a Greater Israel fanatic; and a folksy, genial bass-player.

The answer is: no one. But if you ask yourself who has his kind of populist appeal with evangelical Christianists … the answer becomes clearer. Santorum has all the stern fanaticism of the Catholic far right but none of the star quality. Barbour's gone. Romney's just too slick for the base culture warriors. Johnson and Paul cannot stir the religious vote and that goes for Huntsman and Daniels.

I'm left with Bachmann and Palin. It's their game of chicken now.

(Photo: Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee talks about his new book, 'A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion that We Don't!),' at the National Press Club February 24, 2011 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

“[A]s a matter of personal ethics you really shouldn’t run around punching random dudes in the back of the head irrespective of the prevailing level of population density or policing,” – Matt Yglesias, victim of an assault and run in DC last night. I’m relieved he’s okay.

Favorite reader comment: “Put some ice on it, and don’t become a conservative.”

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright can't reconcile Osama's murder with Christianity:

[W]hat has any of this to do with something most Americans also believe, that the God of ultimate justice and truth was fully and finally revealed in the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, who taught people to love their enemies, and warned that those who take the sword will perish by the sword?

Pete Wehner draws a distinction:

[T]he moral duties placed on persons are, in important respects, different from those placed on the state. … By the logic of Wright’s argument—Jesus told us to love our enemies and those who take up the sword will perish by the sword—we should never retaliate under any circumstances: not against bin Laden, Mugabe, Pol Pot, Saddam, Hirohito, Hitler, or anyone. Proportionate and discriminate force would never be justified. What kind of moral world does Bishop Wright conclude would emerge from his political theology?

"In the end, like in Stardust Memories, we all get flushed. The beautiful ones, the accomplished ones, the Einsteins, the Shakespeares, the homeless guys in the street with the wine bottles, all end up in the same grave. So, I have a very dim view of things, but I think about them, and I do feel that I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day," – Woody Allen.

(Video by Peter Lowey)

The architect for the 9/11 memorial chose not to list the names of the dead alphabetically. Instead Michael Arad solicited “meaningful adjacencies” from the families. Nick Paumgarten appraises the algorithms used:

“It was a computer-science problem, but it was also a big, crazy typography problem,” [media designer Jake] Barton said last week. As a spatial puzzle, it also owed a little bit to the so-called “knapsack problem” in mathematics, which involves trying to optimize the fit of irregularly shaped or weighted objects in a backpack.

Their solution was really a combination of algorithms, which they called the Names Arrangement. A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else of the total absence of one.

Kirksville, Missouri, 6 am

Graeme Wood looks at the much larger picture:

Humans have been interested in the future for millennia, mostly as a subject for theologians. But theologians were, along with everyone else, thinking small. Most humans who have ever lived have died in conditions almost exactly like the ones into which they were born, and without written history had no way to grasp that the future might be different at all. Only now have we gained the scientific knowledge necessary to appreciate how exactly how deep a rabbit-hole the future really is: not just long enough to see empires rise and crumble, but long enough to make all human history so far seem like a sneeze of the gods.

Erica Grieder prognosticates:

[I]n forecasting the human future the fundamental questions are about worth, rather than abilities. That's a standard we don't apply to other species—we want to save the tigers, for example, because we believe they have intrinsic value—and an appropriate one. So one of my predictions for the future is that as the futurological concerns become more vivid, it will lead to a rise in the prominence and relevance of moral reasoning and argumentation.

Krulwich laments the fate of the last E. woodii, a cycad tree currently residing in London:

Researchers have wandered the Ngoya forest and other woods of Africa, looking for an E. woodii that could pair with the one in London. They haven't found a single other specimen. They're still searching. Unless a female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never mate with one of its own. It can be cloned. It can have the occasional fling with a closely related species. Hybrid cycads are sold at plant stores, but those plants aren't the real deal. The tree that sits in London can't produce a true offspring. It sits there, the last in its long line, waiting for a companion that may no longer exist.

(Image: An 1857 illustration of Encephalartos woodii from the Library of Congress)

Tracy Clark-Flory distrusts them:

Are you a prude or a slut? You know what, I'm neither. I understand the concept of re-appropriating slurs, and that many people find it freeing and empowering. Also, political discourse doesn't exactly lend itself to nuance and subtlety, so shocking slogans can be tremendously effective. On a personal level, though, this kind of reactive language can feel awfully limiting. I'm not a political caricature, and neither is my sexuality.