Month: August 2012

Everyone needs a little Korean hip-hop now and again:

The NYT/CBS/Quinnipiac swing state polls must come as a relief in Chicago. The leads in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania are solid – and very dangerous for Romney. But more salient is the following, it seems to me:

Support for President Obama's proposal to increase taxes on households making more than $250,000 per year is 58 – 37 percent in Florida, 60 – 37 percent in Ohio and 62 – 34 percent in Pennsylvania, the survey by Quinnipiac/CBS/The Times finds.

The key in the debates will be for Obama to focus on shared sacrifice to cut the debt and on Romney's plan to exempt the super-rich from any sacrifice at all, and balance the budget entirely on the backs of the poor and old and sick. The truth is: the Ayn Rand position on the debt is way out of the mainstream and yet Romney is stuck with it. Combined with the Obama camp's successful definition of him as a money-grubbing, penny-pinching one percenter, it could conceivably decide the election – as, of course, it should. The plans of both men to tackle the debt should be front and center – and Obama's is the fairer, more logical, more effective and more conservative of the two.

Meanwhile, revisions to personal income data have bumped Obama up in the 538 forecast. Originally, personal income was measured as increasing 1.3 percent in the first quarter of the year. That has been revised up to 4.6 percent, followed by a second quarter gain of 4.1 percent. Nate notes:

The new data is reasonably strongly correlated with Mr. Obama’s approval ratings — which dipped in the fall of last year (when personal income growth is now reported as having been negative) but recovered in the first few months of this year. Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have not lost much ground since then, despite other economic data series (including the jobs numbers) having been fairly weak.

Way too soon for any complacency – but it's not bad news. Unless the jobs report next Friday is a clunker.

A reader serves it up:

Your Jim Holt post cites Robert Krulwich, asking "which is bigger, your brain or the universe?"  It so happens that Emily Dickinson also gave that question a whirl:

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

(Photo: In its first glimpse of the heavens following the successful December 1999 servicing mission, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a majestic view of a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a dying, Sun-like star. This stellar relic, first spied by William Herschel in 1787, is nicknamed the 'Eskimo' Nebula (NGC 2392) because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka. In this Hubble telescope image, the 'parka' is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. By SSPL/Getty Images)

Unfavorables, that is, when you lessen the smoothing. Not a great July:

That's the highest level of unfavorables Romney has ever garnered. The tax returns and the disastrous foreign tour cannot have helped. Take a look at the last two years and you begin to see how the more Americans get to know Romney the less they like him:

A reader is set off by our Samsara post:

Look, I know you haven't been amused enough by my previous emails re: the seriousness of marijuana abuse to post up my comments, but I've been getting almost daily reminders from your blog that get me more and more pissed about this issue. Your choice of blog entries about pot and your inability to preface any of your arguments for legalization with a reminder that marijuana is NOT a harmless drug has honestly surprised me.  The issue and topic of legalization might be a good fit for your blog, but your uncompromising, fanatical celebration of this drug is a bit awkward. What's with your obsession over pot?

Marijuana is NOT a harmless drug.  And the fact that many writers, bloggers, and columnists such as yourself have been talking about it in such casual, one-sided terms (perhaps in spite of the federal government's unnecessary and stupid enforcement of it) is downright destructive.  

Just as being an "alcoholic" is no laughing matter, being a "stoner" is a serious problem for countless individuals, and casually throwing around the term for your blog posts like its no big deal is irresponsible.  An example: a recent report released last December showed that 1/15 children in high school smoke pot on a daily basis.  I'm curious to know what you'd think of this report if 1/15 kids in high school were alcoholics?  Obviously alcoholism is more addictive and more destructive to the human body than is pot, but to claim that marijuana has absolutely no negative consequences to the body is, aside from being false – particularly when it is smoked DAILY during the most formative years of a person's life – is a gross disservice to the lives our children.  

These kids need to know that although marijuana is a soft drug, even if it doesn't lead to a harder drug down the line, that its abuse can have very real, hard consequences on their lives.  And that's precisely why I think it should be legalized.  Not because I think it's the fucking "wonder drug" that will serve as panacea to all problems in the world (marijuana abusers generally think believe this is the case), but because it may force parents and the rest of us to talk more honestly and openly about the drug's harmful side effects, thus making our audience more likely to listen to our words of wisdom. We may even be able to show the little bastards the right way to smoke (sparingly, usually in the company of good friends, and with plenty of water) and how not to.

I have always maintained that marijuana is not for minors. And if it were legal and regulated, we'd be better able to keep it from them. And for the record, the Dish has posted many times about the harmful effects of marijuana for some people. In fact, an entire chapter of The Cannabis Closet – the print-on-demand collection of Dish posts – is called "Addiction". For a sample of those tales of addiction, go here.

Michael Phelps consumes three fried-egg sandwiches, three chocolate chip pancakes, a five-egg omelette, three sugar-coated slices of French toast, and a bowl of grits (maize porridge) for breakfast as part of his 12,000 calories a day diet. Are carbs that necessary for the normal athlete?

The typical night-before-the-race carbo-load pasta dinner, for instance, makes good biochemical sense for endurance athletes: carbohydrates provide the building blocks for an easily accessible fuel called glycogen. The body stores glycogen in its muscle and liver cells and burns it for energy during high-intensity exercise that lasts more than a minute or two. (Low-intensity workouts tend to burn more fat than glycogen, which is why the “fat burning” setting on the exercise bike is way easier than the “cardio” setting.) This also explains why marathon runners often “hit the wall” around mile 20: this when their muscles and liver run out of glycogen, because their bodies can only store so much. Then they are forced to start burning fat, which is harder to do.

Perhaps Phelps has other substances to thank for his success.

(Image from Buzzfeed's guilty pleasure list, Olympics or Gay Porn? But weren't the Olympics the original gay porn?)

Cortes Island, British Columbia, 2.30 pm

Gregory R. Wilson, of the Xmastime blog, has some fun:

July was the best traffic month for the Dish Xmastime since I finally bought a car September and October 2008, a quarter of the pageviews due to publishing  pretty much the exact same dumb shit as the month before  an email sent to me by an old friend.  8  3.5 million  no, not 8 million, 8  individual people  and Marley  logged onto this page  like it was their toilet  at some point, for a total of close to 11 million pageviews  whatever the hell those are. 20 percent of our traffic came from   squirrelsfisting.com  Facebook and  people who assume any site starting with “X” is porn  social media. Welcome to all the newbies  you know who you are…Tony; big thanks to the loyalty of long-time Dishheads  Xmastime fans, who still can’t be bothered to make me a Wikipedia page but whatevs, like I fucking care, h8rs gon’ h8 . 

More here. Original post here.

For the uninitiated, this long meditation by John Cotter provides both a biographical sketch and a sympathetic reading of Vidal's essays:

He loves books that seduce him, take him to new places (Vidal was an early champion of Italo Calvino and an old fan of Fredric Prokosch). Later, this curiosity about unfamiliar lands leads him deeper into his own country’s past. This love of discovery was also a hatred of boredom, of being told what he already knew he knew. Thanks, perhaps, to his alcoholic mother, Vidal developed a loathing of deliberate liars (as opposed to bullshitters and tale-spinners, like Anthony Burgess and Tennessee Williams, whom he adored for their bald blarney). Vidal’s aesthetic philosophy—to the extent such a thing can be pinned down—is causal: because he is angered by boredom, he finds solace in books that either tell him something new about this world or which sweep him into another. Because he hates lies, he champions that which is precisely observed and truly told.

His interview with The Paris Review, focusing mainly on his fiction, can be read here. Another interview, more about politics and published at The Atlantic, here. For an account of Vidal's limitations, who better to turn to than Hitch, with whom he had a very public falling out? Christopher found Gore's post 9/11 politics particularly nasty, and his public pronouncements especially lacking in grace:

Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. "Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain." One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second. Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? "This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier." Good grief.

Read the aforementioned interview with Johann Hari here. My earlier thoughts on Vidal here.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)