So, Stephen King told a reporter that someone in the Bush family, e.g., Jenna, should be waterboarded so she could tell the president [Ed: lower case intentional] whether or not waterboarding constituted “torture.”

That’s just plain silly. If you asked George if his daughter could be waterboarded, he would answer, “No need. She already knows how. She took lessons on a beach in Maui.”

This is my first, and though things could change, very possibly only ever, post under both categories of Beer and Belief Systems. The web page Top Ten Reasons Beer is Better than Jesus covers both areas and as you can see by visiting the page, does indeed have a few good reasons.

My favorites are numbers 3 and 2: There are laws saying Beer labels can’t lie to you and You can prove you have a Beer.

That’s pretty much it.

Great concert last night by They Might Be Giants at the Michigan Theater. Best of all being guests of drummer Marty Beller’s. John (or was it John?) got the crowd to come to its feet  and move towards the stage before the first tune where it stayed throughout. Playing a theater, with those darn seats interfering with movement and energy, is different from playing a club. For an Ann Arbor crowd, it was pretty animated though, according to John (or was it John?) not nearly as wild as the crowd at the gig the night before. In Grand Rapids of all places.

Ann Arbor sure ain’t what it used to be, if Grand Rapids can out wild it. But I digress. Thanks to TMBG. Thanks to Marty.

Back in my Russian Club days at Rutgers University, after a bit too much kvas, someone taught me the following, irreverent and hilarious juxtaposition. Irreverent because this is a beautifully layered and perfectly constructed poem, one of Aleksandr Pushkin’s most famous.

So, If you happen to speak Russian and know the tune to Londonderry Air, try singing the following to that tune. Danny Boy never sounded so … interesting.

Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.

Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.

It seems, in retrospect, we were lambs to the slaughter: all of us who gathered in the theater I was in last night to watch Lions for Lambs by Robert Redford. It’s been over 10 years since I had a violent urge to walk out of a movie, but this one gave me that urge. I always try my best to give a film another few minutes to redeem itself, just another few. It’ll pull it out somehow. And having gone with a couple of other people, there was extra inertia not to bail. I wish I had, I wasted 90 minutes of my life. The only moment reaching 3 on a scale of 1 to 10 was a part of the scene in which Meryl Streep talks to her boss.

However, about 15 minutes in, it was clear there was nothing going to save this one. Confused, preachy and smarmy. And trying so hard to be relevant and clever and smart and failing, failing, failing. The government lied. The media fell down on its job. We can’t trust the government on any new “strategy”. We can’t trust the media since it keeps bringing us Britney news. We get all this. And we get that the rest of us are complacent, unconcerned with doing something about it all. But, OMG, is this the best Hollywood can do? Intellectual doggerel.

I understand that Americans are dumber and shallower than I could ever imagine. Perhaps doggerel is the only thing that Americans understand (they did re-elect Bush and Cheney after all), but this can’t be expected to convince Americans to get involved.

We are doomed.

In cleaning my office, I came upon the business card of Antonio Balsemin, a card he handed me after he gave my son and me a ride in his taxi during our late summer 2001 stay in Rome. It was a very enjoyable taxi ride. He is outgoing, talkative and clearly a man of many interests. I let him do the majority of the talking since my Italian is passable but has no depth.

Though he happens to drive to be a Roman tassista, really he’s a writer. His passion in life is writing in his native dialect from the Veneto region of Italy. One gets the sense that it is partly to preserve his own past, but it also has a larger purpose.

He realizes as many people do, that in the past hundred or so years, the diversity of local cultures is disappearing as individual cultures and languages die. However, he does something about it. By writing in his own language he keeps one tree alive as the larger cultural deforestation goes on.

Check him out at: http://www.antoniobalsemin.it and check out an article written about him the same month he gave us a cab ride and a fascinating conversation.

Congratulations to Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw for earning Bon Appetit‘s Lifetime Achievment Award. Cool.

So, Rudy Giuliani has gotten the kiss of death, an endorsement from Pat Robertson who overlooked Rudy’s stance on abortion. Good to know that Pat is not a one-issue voter. He’s also thrown the baby Jesus out with the bathwater. Remember him agreeing with Jerry Falwell when he said that the abortionists, among others, helped bring 911 on the US? (see below) Remember who was mayor during that time?

Let me get this straight: Pat is not only saying that Giuliani, who by virtue of being pro-choice, helped bring God’s wrath down on the very city he was mayor of, but is also saying that he approves of him. Doesn’t that, in Pat’s own eyes, make him accessory after the fact to the the murder of 3000 Americans?

JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, yes.

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Color me disappointed. I’ve usually liked what I’ve read of Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But I followed this link:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/209/story_20904_1.html

a back and forth between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, author of The End of Reason.

and after reading the entire exchange (I can’t believe I read the whole thing…), I will in the future have to try very hard to keep Sullivan’s words separate from his blind Catholicism and demonstrated inability or unwillingness to confront Harris’ questions and points.

Admittedly, I start in Harris’ camp when it comes to religion, and while we’re at it, I basically agree with his position on the danger of religious “moderates”. But for someone as intelligent and articulate as Sullivan to step fully, and it seems unknowingly, into every last bear-trap of irrational argument in trying to explain why reason doesn’t hold; why various positions along a spectrum of irrationality are implausible, save his; why all religions’ views, each of which denies the others, all of which are as unjustifiable as his, save his, are wrong, is unfathomable.

There are other manifestations of the unfathomable in there and it’s an interesting read if you have the time.

I know that Mr. Sullivan writes well and writes good things but, as I read them and agree with nearly all of them, I’ll be shaking my head.

A recent exchange with Language Hat, a great blog on language issues had us update links: this blog to Language Hat and an old post on Language Hat that points to an article I once wrote for the Vocabula Review, the online newsletter fighting the unjustifiable fight for linguistic prescriptivism.

I must say that the editor there was kind and open enough to request and publish my article, one which argues forcefully against everything the newsletter stands for. Nevertheless, prescriptivism in English was once based merely on an inferiority complex when comparing English to the “perfect” and, because it’s dead, unchanging Latin, but is now just another excuse for  sky-is-falling-things-aren’t-like-they-used-to-be bigotry. But I digress.

Visit Language Hat.

A recent email from my second cousin in California about her childhood visits to the family ranch (la Atropellada) northwest of Buenos Aires. It has since become a dude ranch of sorts, or at least a resort.

Hola Alan,

Acá va información en “La Atropellada”.

Originalmente eran 4000 hectareas que Luis compró antes que yo naciera (o sea más de 60 años). Marcos era el que las administraba y vivía en el campo.

Muere Luis, pasa a suceción, muere Marcos y le quedan 600 hectareas y el casco a Lucila. Ella lo abre a turismo y de ahí esta página web.

Pero es original de la familia. Ahí yo pasaba mis tres meses de verano andando a caballo, nadando en el tanque australiano, yendo al arroyo en sulky, y mientras te lo cuento huelo los eucaliptos al mediodía, escucho el arrullo de las palomas a la hora de la ignomiosa siesta forzada y recuerdo el cielo
tachonado de mil estrellas mientras corríamos y agarrabamos las luciernagas para ponerlas en frascos
junto con ranitas chiqutitas atraídas por la luz de la galería.

Lamento que todo esto pertenezca al pasado, tal vez la única manera sea escribirlo, pero a quién le interesaría este esfuerzo?

Alicia

The Guardian, October 22, tells of a report about oil running out by 2030 and the several nasty problems that will lead to.

And just yesterday, I heard a report on NPR’s Marketplace, very upbeat, about the amazing strides being made to genetically engineer algae to manufacture biodiesel, gasoline, jet fuel and such. The ideas mentioned included keeping Pentagon costs down (they said a $1/barrel increase leads to an annual increase of $120 million in the Pentagon budget…), avoiding the tradeoff between ethanol and food production. An idea not explicitly mentioned was oil independence. Wonderful.

But the thing that was not at all mentioned was that just as Mother Nature is giving us a deadline for fossil fuel consumption to help us avoid a more drastic Dead-line of global warming (2030 is a bit late, but nevermind), we’re busy devising ways of getting around that too. Cool. Ain’t nothin’ gonna get in our way.