Month: August 2012

Because it has a huge story on its hands – an insight into ugly racism among the GOP base, when two delegates (or merely attendees) threw nuts at a black camerawoman, saying "This is how we treat animals!" – and it offered the following statement:

CNN can confirm there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.

If I were the camerawoman involved, this would not be enough. CNN has now run a small story on the incident but doesn't seem to be pushing it. Why? Because this awful notion of balance – which requires journalists to be lobotomized when assessing reality – is "on-brand". Oy.

A reader writes:

You wrote, "So far no readers have found a precedent for someone with that high a religious office running for president as the nominee of a major party." James Garfield was a minister for the Disciples of Christ, which I believe is a more significant role than "high priest" in the Mormon church.

More on his religious service here. The other major example from readers:

William Jennings Bryan (Democratic nominee 1896 and 1900) was an elder of the Presbyterian Church and an active preacher for much of his life. After his presidential runs, he sought to become Moderator of the General Assembly (the highest position in the Presbyterian Church), but he narrowly lost.

More background on Bryan here.

Blame Canada.

Oliver Morton considers the earth as "a massive conduit of power, with energy flowing into the system in the form of sunlight, flowing out of it as infrared." He puts this flow of 120,000 terawatts of power in awe-inspiring perspective:

Picture Horseshoe Falls, the most familiar, forceful and dramatic cataract in Niagara Falls, in full spate. Now increase the height of the falls by a factor of 20; a kilometre of falling water, a cascade higher even than Angel Falls in Venezuela. Now increase the flow by a factor of 10. Instead of 30 tonnes of water falling over each metre of the lip of the falls every second, allow 300 tonnes of water per metre. Finally, widen the falls. Stretch them until they span a continent, with billions of tonnes of water falling over them every second. And don’t stop there. Go on widening them until they stretch all around the equator: a kilometre-high wall of water thundering down incessantly, cutting the world in half, deafening leviathan in the abyss.

That is what 120,000 terawatts looks like. That is what drives the world in which you live.

(Light Topography by Janne Parviainen via Colossal, courtesy of the artist)

Bill Nye's dressing down of creationists (above) has become a viral sensation. The most provocative quote from the video:

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can — we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.

Maria Bustillos pens an appreciation for music critic Lester Bangs and his eclectic literary tastes:

Every reader, starting from childhood, draws his own map of the world of letters. There is liable to be some outside guidance here and there, naturally. Certain landmarks are supplied to us, say in English class. But teachers aren’t found only in school. As a kid, my chief literary mentor was the rock critic Lester Bangs, who wrote for Creem magazine and The Village Voice in the seventies and early eighties. He shaped my nascent taste, and taught me to read much the way I still read now. And as much as I relied on his irresistible humor and wisdom for advice on how best to blow my birthday money at the Licorice Pizza record store, I sought him out still more to learn about books, in particular the forbidden and arcane books no conventional teacher would ever mention.

Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He was fat, sweaty, unkempt—an out-of-control alcoholic in torn jeans and a too-small black leather jacket; crocked to the gills on the Romilar cough syrup he swigged down by the bottle. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation, uneven and erratic as it was.

Paul Rozin argues that we need to overcome our disgust with recycled water. He offers Singapore's NEWater as an example of effective marketing:

Four treatment plants throughout the country take sewage, filter it through several membranes, and expose it to ultraviolet light to make it safe to drink. Now 30 percent of the country’s total water demand is met using reclaimed (i.e., recycled) sewage. The program’s success was due in part to a dedicated communications team that conducted a massive public education campaign, which included a TV documentary. But Singapore also made the decision to release the cleaned-up wastewater into reservoirs, where it got re-treated along with regular tap water. This extra step was hygienically redundant but psychologically vital in helping Singaporeans accept NEWater as a fact of life.

The above animation was created by primary school students in Singapore.

Teju Cole reflects on a sudden bout of near blindness:

As I had eaten nothing all day, I went into a diner. It wasn’t particularly full but I sat at the counter because it was near the door, and I was given a menu that I couldn’t read. I blinked and squinted, but the words refused to resolve in the meaningless hieroglyphics of my right eye and in the total darkness of the left. As I handed the menu back to the waitress, explaining to her that my pupils were dilated, I was ambushed by a sudden shame: that she would think me illiterate and a liar. The thought, foolish as it was, caught me by surprise.

Frank Jacobs laments the fact that the Disney ride, It’s a Small World After All (IaSWAA), teaches some pretty dismal geography:

Exiting IaSWAA, impressionable young minds have learnt a thing or two about the wide, wonderful world we live in: it is replete with a small selection of stereotypes, in three categories: architectural (France equals Eiffel Tower, no Egypt without pyramids), musical (the Spanish love flamenco dancing, bagpipes are typically Scottish), and natural (India is filled with tigers, Holland with tulips); music is the universal language; and beneath their exotic veneer, people (or at least Disney’s mechanical dolls) are really just all the same.

Oh, and Australia borders Hawaii, Holland is next to Spain, and Thailand is just across the water from Japan…

Update from a reader:

First of all, thanks a lot – now the song is stuck in my head. Secondly: Lighten up!

Of course the geography is all fucked up, but I think even small children can glean that they are viewing a "mash-up" of cultures and locations. I know I knew that, even as a kid. And it's charming that way, because anyone who knows anything about Disneyland knows that ride has been there forever and represents an idealized mid-century mindset.

But there's another thing: as I'm walking around my kitchen this morning humming that goddamned song, I'm actually getting kind of choked up. As a kid in Southern California, I'm certain the song influenced the world view of a budding liberal like me. I really did come away from the ride with the belief that, underneath it all, we are all the same, with the same hopes and dreams. And, frankly, I still believe that. Maybe that's one reason I still love Disneyland, hokey as it might be.