Tim Goodman: Miley Cyrus on skin spin:
"Come on, she's not Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or Vanessa Hudgens (yet). It reminds us all that we live in a sublime world. Like when President Bush appeared on 'Deal or No Deal.' We're sure that if given the chance, John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt would have jumped at the chance to appear on a big screen next to Howie Mandel.

-- This is now, officially, the most depressing column ever written about our culture - and it didn't even mention Gary Coleman.

-- Oh, wait. Turns out the 'Diff'rent Strokes' star, now 40, will be appearing on 'Divorce Court' Thursday and Friday with his 22-year-old wife. And no, that's not a joke. And neither is the item about President Bush on 'Deal or No Deal.' In fact, it's all real. You may now go outside and fall on the ground and weep."

Tim Goodman is my favorite TV columnist/critic, and he touches on that supremely surreal Bush appearance on "Deal" and fails to also include his appearance on "Idol" in the same week! I half expected him to start The Siege of Iran last Friday just to see if his approval ratings could get any lower. Instead he moves yet another aircraft carrier into the gulf as "a warning". This is going to happen and nobody is going to lift a finger to stop him. Still! After 8 YEARS of this shit! We're more concerned about Miley's naked back! Sublime world indeed, Tim.

Clinton moves on after Pennsylvania win - Yahoo! News:
"Hillary Clinton beat Democratic rival Barack Obama in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, prolonging an increasingly negative presidential nominating fight and keeping alive her slim White House hopes. Clinton's 10-point win paid immediate dividends in fund-raising for the cash-strapped New York senator and shaved off some of Obama's lead in popular votes and in delegates who select the Democratic nominee at the August convention. Both candidates immediately looked to the next round of contests on May 6 in North Carolina, where Obama is favored, and Indiana, which is considered a toss-up."

ENOUGH! I'm done! I will ignore the entire enterprise until late October. I can't stand it any more.

Praying passenger is removed from San Francisco-bound flight:
"'He doesn't respond to them, but his friends explain that once you start praying you can't stop,' said Brafman, who was seated three rows away.
When the man finally stopped praying, he explained that he couldn't interrupt his religious ritual and wasn't trying to be rude. But the attendants summoned a guard to remove him, said Brafman, a writer who had been visiting New York to talk to publishers."

I wonder if his friends could explain why he has to stand near the lavatories to pray? Why he couldn't have prayed BEFORE boarding? Why he couldn't have gone INTO the lavatory?

Rowling says fan's book could endanger other authors - Yahoo! News:
"'Are we, or are we not, the owners of our own work?' said the author of the seven Harry Potter books that have sold about 400 million copies."

NOW we get to the heart of the matter. And I'm afraid I would have to answer to Ms. Rowling, no, you are not the owner of your work once it has been set free into society. Rowling did not sell 400 million copies to herself. Yes, this new book builds on her work. But that's how culture evolves. Copyright was never intended to stifle that. It was intended to allow authors to earn a living from their work, to encourage them to create. It was society's method of funding and rewarding creativity. It has now been perverted to reward corporations and businesses for precisely STIFLING creativity. In the age of zero cost distribution, copyright must be re-considered as a means to promote creativity. I mean, who profits when a book is copyrighted for 75 years after the authors death? Society doesn't. No, J. K. You want to sell your book to the public? Then you need to allow the public to build on your work as it sees fit. There are other ways to "protect" Harry Potter from errors and mis-interpretations. Everyone knows your name on a book is the official word. YOU are the brand not Harry Potter.

Rowling tells court she's stopped working - Yahoo! News:
"'This is very personal to me,' said Rowling, who wrote the first Potter book as a poverty-stricken single mother and is now estimated by The Sunday Times to be worth about $1 billion. 'I am an author -- 17-years of my work is being exploited here. This is not about money.' Rowling has said she plans to write her own Harry Potter encyclopedia, which would include material that did not make it into the novels, and donate the proceeds to charity."

Now for all intents and purposes, Ms. Rowling appears to be an intelligent and business-savvy woman. But she is missing the point here. Third-party products don't ruin the core product, they enhance it. They cause it to become essential. Yes you could say it "exploits" it but that's technical. Besides, this lexicon is based on a fan site. You do not want to alienate your fans. She needs to relax, take a week off in one of her dozens of posh homes all over the world, have a mojito or two and just chill out.

REM - Accelerate (2008)****
This release reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's latest in that both seem upon first listen to be composed of songs that consciously sound like past successes. But as you keep listening to the songs themselves they reveal themselves to be actually pretty darn good without all the context.

53 million gallons in danger of leaking:
"'We could not tell you that there are no leaks happening today based on the monitoring they have,' said Jane Hedges, the nuclear waste manager for the state Ecology Department, which is responsible for making sure the cleanup is done right....The department believes that current engineering data show that the tanks 'structurally are sound and not in danger of any near-term collapse or failures,' Noyes said."

If they are unable to tell if the tanks are leaking, how do they know they are structurally sound? If it is still standing it is considered sound? WTF is going on here!?

Bush says if younger, he would work in Afghanistan | Politics | Reuters:
"'I must say, I'm a little envious,' Bush said. 'If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks,' Bush said."

Too bad he didn't consider Vietnam very romantic when he was younger. He could have easily, you know, confronted danger, made history, had a fantastic experience.

This is a sick, sick individual.

Stop Hyperventilating: Fallon Fired but Iran War Not Back On - The Washington Note:
"Rumors are running rampant now in the aftermath of Fallon's resignation today that Bush called a war room gathering on Saturday this past weekend -- and launched plans to hatch a strike of some sort on Iran this spring. Internet bulletin boards, listserves, and chatter among many on the left and the right are hyperventilating (and some excited) about the prospects of a hot conflict with Iran. My sources in the intelligence arena, in various command staff operations, near Defense Secretary Gates, and even in the White House tell me that nothing structural has changed in America's stance towards Iran. The US is still engaged in an effort to get Iran to the negotiating table if it stops its nuclear enrichment activities. It is continuing to apply UN sanctions pressure via unanimous consent of the UN Security Council to bring Iran into compliance with international obligations. And as Bush, Gates and others have said -- other options can be on the table."

Someone HAS to stop these people! "Launched plans to hatch a strike of some sort"???? This is mind boggling. You think you've heard it all, you think they can't go any further and they just keep right on going! Isn't anyone of any consequence a little nervous about this? Is there anyone in Washington with at least a modicum of statesmanship? And not the phony "patriotism" crap? I'm afraid to say this is a low point for my country because I now know it can get lower. And fast!

Dean Baker | Media Overlook Fed Bailout In Plain View:
"In response to this situation the Fed today announced that it would lend $200 billion to banks and other financial firms, accepting mortgage backed securities as collateral. This is effectively the same as saying that the Fed is going to lend money to banks and accept the counterfeit currency as collateral, treating it just as though it were real money.

The intended effect of this policy is to convince other investors that the counterfeit currency is in fact real currency, or at the very least that there is a really huge sucker out there (the Fed) which is prepared to treat the counterfeit currency as real currency.

So how does this story play out? Well, insofar as the Fed is successful, the counterfeit currency retains its value for a while longer. This allows Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bears Stearns and the rest of the big boys more time to dump their counterfeit currency on suckers who haven’t figured out how the game is played."

Yep, there is absolutely no way we can afford single payor health coverage for all, nor to "save" Social Security, yet we can throw hundreds of billions at Iraq and we're ready to bail out our rich friends whenever they want it.

The Happiness Project: Why Alicia Silverstone’s “Dumbest Celeb Quote” actually gives profound insight into the nature of happiness.
"One mystery of happiness is why some people choose to be unhappy. One answer: It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. And you don’t get credit for being light. It looks easy and effortless. No one thinks much about you or tries to accommodate you. You get taken for granted."

I think Ms. Rubin is missing the true nature of happiness. It's not something you choose, or something you strive for. In the words of Robertson Davies: "Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

IntLawGrrls: Justice Antonin Scalia on "so-called torture" and rights, if any, of Guantánamo detainees:
"BBC: If you look at countries with a common law tradition, of which we are one, and you are another, but also, lots of other countries around the world, and in the developing world – if they look at decision of the Supreme Court which affirm the death penalty, and which perhaps affirm torture, although that hasn’t happened yet, does that not set a moral tone?
SCALIA: Well, I urge them not to do that. I don’t look to their law. Why should they look to mine? I don’t purport to be prescribing some universal moral law. I am interpreting the meaning of the text of my Constitution, which was adopted at a certain time by my people, and had a meaning to those people at the time. That’s all I’m doing. I’m not charged with, with figuring out the content of the natural law. If you want to look at our decisions, what you could derive from it is what a wonderful Constitution we have. Or, if you don’t like it, you can say what a terrible Constitution we have. But we don’t pretend to be moral, you know, some Western mullahs, who what decide what is right and wrong for the whole world."

So if morality, what is right, what is wrong, has no part in this Supreme Court justice's decisions, and it is only deciding if a certain legal ruling or piece of legislation is in accord with the literal text of a 200+ year old document, does "justice" have any meaning relevant to our lives in the real world? I really do not understand the incredibly smug mindset of people like this. And even worse than Scalia is Thomas. They say these words had a meaning to "those people at the time". But those people who wrote the Constitution had an understanding that natural law, common law, was "self-evident". Scalia is correct, morality is not mentioned specifically in the Constitution. But the writers DIDN'T THINK THEY NEEDED TO! It was SELF-EVIDENT!

Too bad for us that they wrote those words "self evident" down in another document, the Declaration of Independence, which is NOT a part of our Constitution. For justices Scalia and Thomas and many more like them, they have no bearing on anything at all.

Chaos In Food Webs: The Balance Of Nature Concept Takes A Beating | Scientific Blogging:
"The traditional idea of the balance of nature gets quite a beating by a study that appears in the current issue of Nature. Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even under constant conditions, all species in a food web continued to fluctuate in a chaotic fashion. Chaos makes long-term prediction of species abundances impossible. Theoretical ecologists already argued in the 1970s that populations of plants and animals might fluctuate in an unpredictable manner, even without external influences. These predictions, derived from chaos theory, attracted a lot of debate. However, only few scientists believed that species in real ecosystems would truly fluctuate in a chaotic fashion. The common perception was that species fluctuations result from changes in external conditions, driven by climate change or other disturbances of the balance of nature. This classic perspective has been radically changed by new findings of graduate student Elisa Beninc�and Professor Jef Huisman of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in collaboration with colleagues from Wageningen University (The Netherlands), the University of Rostock (Germany), and Cornell University (USA)."

Since the study was done on very small organisms, perhaps as the organism becomes larger and more complex the effect of chaos becomes less powerful because the organisms are more adaptable? And isn't it essential for evolutionary theory that chaos be not just possible but likely?

Vampire Weekend (2008)****
Highly entertaining, smart sounding lyrics, precise production, hook-y melodies and bass lines. At times they sound like a mashup of The Police, The Strokes and Graceland-era Paul Simon but they make it all fit together in unpretentious-sized pop songs.

Tech.view | Hacking the vote | Economist.com:
"Bruce Schneier, a blogger on security technology, argues that the failure of electronic voting stems from the way technology invariably increases the number of steps in any process—with each step bringing yet more scope for errors.

Optical scanners, for instance, have twice as many steps as manual counting, making them at least twice as unreliable. First, the voter reads the ballot paper and fills in the ovals, the optical reader senses the blackened ovals, the scanner passes the vote to a tabulator, the tabulator collects all votes from that machine and then transmits the score to a central totaliser. Each step can have an error of a percentage point or two, giving the system as a whole something like a 5% error. That means one in 20 people using a DRE machine will have his or her vote counted incorrectly."

The article also mentions the New Hampshire primary where 80% of the vote relied on optical scanners and coincidentally had the exact reverse percentage for Obama and Clinton of the votes counted by hand, a HUGE red flag. Stupidly, Newsweek chided Kucinich, who got 2% of the vote, for suing for a recount under the mistaken assumption that Kucinich thought he would benefit from the recount. I guess it never occurred to Newsweek that someone would sue for a principal rather than personal gain. Remember the groundswell of support for Obama following Iowa? And he had a clear lead in the polls in NH. Then the stunning comeback by Clinton. Or was it? I don't think the Clinton campaign was guilty of fraud in this case. But someone wants her to win the nomination very badly. And I think those very same people are kind of leery of Obama. And I think there was some very serious voting fraud perpetrated in NH. And nobody cares, and nobody is going to do anything about it.

49ers hire Mike Martz as offensive coordinator / Can ex-Rams coach work Magic:
"While admitting he wants to be a head coach again, Martz said of his new role in San Francisco, 'I just love what I'm doing. To come into a situation like this, to put this thing together, is a thrill for me. I really do enjoy, particularly the quarterbacks, helping them achieve something they didn't think they could do.'"

Very, very exciting news for those of us in NorCal. We will finally have an interesting NFL team to watch each Sunday. The only downside will be the incessant and relentless sports pundits who will drone on and on about Martz's "huge ego" and nit pick every play call each and every Sunday. Head coach Mike Nolan and Mike Martz coached together under Norv Turner in Washington. Interesting that Nolan was able to hire his former head coach as OC and now Martz. Nolan is an interesting case. A very confident man, very secure in himself, very smart. He knows if Martz does indeed turn the offense around, he has a great chance of winning the division next year and securing his position as head coach. The main problem with the 49ers offense is the quarterback position and there is no doubt that Martz can make something happen there. I would wager that Shaun Hill will be the starter next year unless some free agent is signed. I just don't see Alex Smith working to learn a 200+ item playbook and submitting himself to Martz's often harsh criticisms. Welcome to San Franciso, Mike!

collision detection: Why audiophiles are dying out:
"In fact, I've come to believe that crappy technology -- lousy studios, horrible playback devices -- is a boon to pop music. Because when you strip out the superhigh and superlow frequencies that send audiophiles -- planted with geometric triangulation betwixt their $325,000 Acapella speakers (pictured above!) -- into such supposedly quivering raptures, you're forced to reckon with a music simpler question, which is: Is the song any good? A really terrific pop song can survive almost any acoustic mangling and still be delightful. A mediocre one can't. A mediocre song needs a doubleplusgood sound-system to bring out its half-baked appeal; a truly excellent tune is catchy even when played on a kazoo."

Serious Eats: Michael Pollan's Twelve Commandments for Serious Eaters: Can You Live By Them?:
"7. 'Pay more, eat less.' Easy for him—or anybody else with enough discretionary spending power—to say. Not so easy for the working poor or even middle class folks who have very little extra money for anything.
8. "Eat a wide variety of species." But can't I eat heritage pork products more often than others?
9. "Eat food from animals that eat grass." As long as these animals can occasionally be finished on corn. Sorry, Michael: Beef from cows that eat grass and then corn taste better. "

A fairly snarky post at Serious Eats about Micheal Pollan's latest book. I haven't read the book so I can't comment on how forceful Pollan posits these "commandments" or even if he calls them that. But I think the point of #7 is to rearrange our priorities and change our perception regarding the true cost of our food. We have had artificially cheap food for decades and have gotten to expect it to stay that way forever. You can pay more simply by buying conventional produce rather than processed foods. You don't HAVE to buy organic, hand grown heritage stuff to make a difference. #9's comment that corn fed beef tastes better is ludicrous. Of course it is a matter of personal taste, but grass fed beef is WAY more flavorful than even prime corn fed beef for my money. The #8 comment as well as many others in the article, have to be considered as jokes taking Pollans' words way too literally and seriously. He's not after absolutes here. But much like Jesus' Golden Rule ("do unto others...") that "sums up The Law and The Prophets", Pollan HAS offered a succinct summary of his work: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Tiger attack at SF Zoo latest blow - Yahoo! News:
"The deadly tiger escape at the San Francisco Zoo could prove to be a costly blow to an institution that has come under fire repeatedly in just the past few years over the deaths of two elephants and the mauling of a zookeeper. The zoo could face heavy fines from regulators. It could be stripped of its exhibitor license. Its accreditation could be at risk. It could be hit with a huge lawsuit by the victims or their families. It could even face criminal charges, depending on what the investigation finds.

'All this legal action is likely to impact the financial viability of the zoo,' said Rory Little, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. 'Whether the zoo can stay open is a big question.'"

I have become somewhat ambivalent about zoos. As a kid, I loved them and spent lots of time at the St. Louis Zoo, one of the better zoos in the world. I have been going to the SF Zoo for about 10 years or so. One of the best locations for a zoo, a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean, mild climate, foggy on Summer mornings, wonderful fauna and flora. But precious few animals! It had recently begun a major renovation effort and, while beautifully done, it was not so good for animal watchers. More space, less animals. And come on, I like lemurs as much as the next guy but do we really need one more California zoo to house lemurs? At any rate, should this zoo close I would not be surprised. It is very popular with families, no question about it, but if you want to see animals, exotic animals, go somewhere else.

2007 In Review: Movies:

**** no country for old men
**** darjeeling limited
*** sweeney todd
*** paris, je t'aime
*** ratatouille
** harry potter and the order of the phoenix
** transformers

Yes, I know it's only 7 films; that is all I saw in a theater this year. The films I saw on DVD were not from 2007 so I ignored them. Far and away, I though NCFOM was the best film. Possibly the best film of the 00's. Every scene, every detail, was exquisite. And for such a bleak, relentless subject matter, what a beautiful film. It's like "The Denial of Death" made into a movie. Essential.