Hospital 101

While we're at it, why not?
This guy can write. I hope he lives.

Even the light slanting in through the windows seems wan, drained of all radiance, as if it had undergone a bloodletting measured in lumens. 

Journalism 101

All the Very Serious People probably know who Moe Tkacik is, but I didn't until I ran across a link to her scathing piece about The Atlantic inside a Metafilter comment.
As a friend once said about me (not my writing), "difficult but worth it." (Thanks, friend. I cherish that.)
But back to Moe.

I did not really identify with the cool-hunting, brand-building, sneaker-collecting generation of professional consumers I worked over for trend-story ideas, but neither did my colleagues in the bureau seem to identify with the megalomaniacal talent agents and casino magnates or the disgruntled aerospace engineers and short sellers they talked to all day.

My Penguin, My Love

I know it's so 2005 or something but still, I'd like to wake up to this face every day. I would be laughing every morning. And stinking of fish.

I Am Incognito

UPDATE: Facebook friends to the rescue. I have never been exactly what you'd call grateful for FB before. It's an odd feeling.

I have screwed up my email and can't seem to access my gmail account either. Aargh! I think I will have to pay for help. F****!

'Bugs Bunny Is My Muse'

As good as any, Billy.

'The Bank Doesn't Want Your House'

That's the conventional wisdom. I've been hearing it for four years. And finally, the bank made me a deal, made possible by a federal program, not its own deep aversion to taking back the property.
But consider this:

There are close to 650,000 foreclosed properties sitting on the books of lenders, according to RealtyTrac, a data provider. An additional 710,000 are in the foreclosure process, and according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, about 3.25 million borrowers are delinquent on their loans and in danger of losing their homes.

Now, it seems, the bank has more reasons than ever to want your house.

Not My Art

So far, thanks to the generous welcome of a terrific group of women and a few men in Kitsap County, I have learned that some visual arts require meticulous, painstaking attention to detail. Not to mention a steady hand.

Cannot draw a straight line if my life depended on it. Nice colors, though.

So far, I'm better off doing larger, less precise things. I'm not a printmaker, for sure. Nor am I likely to become a successful decorator of miniatures through the medium of wax on eggs. It was fun though. And exhausting.

Cooking Tip #101

Do not allow the cockatiel near the chocolate fountain.

All Hail, Crankocracy

Krugman makes a good point this morning (gleaned from elsewhere and he notes that).

...at least so far, the most visible effect of the Citizens United decision has been not so much a flood of corporate cash into politics as a flood of cash from billionaire cranks into politics. 

From Wiki, just to refresh your memory:

David Koch " is skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming, and thinks a warmer planet would be good because "[t]he Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food...dislikes President Obama's policies. "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation... and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had."^[15] Koch believes that Obama's father's economic socialism explains what Koch views as Obama's belief in "antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences."^[15] Koch believes Obama himself is a "hardcore socialist" who is "marvelous at pretending to be something other than that." 

Sheldon Adelson owns and publishes  "a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left.^[7] The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007.According to Target Group Index(TGI) survey published in July 2011, Israel HaYom, which unlike all other Israeli newspapers is distributed for free, became the number one daily newspaper (on weekdays) four years after its inception."

Just sayin'.

Modernity: Can I Handle It?

Ran across the name Atossa Araxia Abrahamian today and decided to finally go ahead and keep track of all the exotic, fantastic names I run across on a regular basis on teh intertubes.
Atossa, or Abrahamian if you prefer, is author of Fact Check!, a pretty good survey of trends especially in light of the recent Mike-Daisey-makes-up-China kerfluffle. She is an editor at something called The New Inquiry, which seems to be staffed with a lot of young people who would qualify for the term hipster if that term meant anything at all.
They are young, they are hip or something, they are highly educated, broadly aware, hypercritical and probably mostly come from wealth, but who knows. The sort of people I imagined I must have wanted to be at some time, maybe about age 15, before I realized they really didn't exist. J.D. Salinger's children or something.
Anyhoo, while perusing The New Inquiry, I also ran across one Christopher Chitty, who is "pursuing a PhD in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. He writes on the antinomies in the historiography of homosexual thought."
And I thought, "I just bet he does."
I am old. I am not prepared.
Did I mention these people are smart? I had to tear myself away from a story that begins with the bewitching fact that the Occupy movement in NYC was lead by a former Israeli settlement activist.
Also, they have another writer named Kevin Breathnatch. Gotta love it.

As Important As Einstein, A Woman?

Come now, how could that be?

Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. 

One of my favorite NYT science writers, Natalie Angier, explains.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

"In 1908, an unheralded and at the time unappreciated would-be astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was employed as a 'computer' at the Harvard College Observatory. ('Computers' were women brought in to catalogue the brightness of stars recorded on the observatory's photographic plates; women were not allowed to use the observatory telescopes at the time.) Daughter of a Congregational minister and a descendant of the Pilgrims, Leavitt made an astounding discovery, which she further illuminated in 1912: she noticed that there was a regular relationship between the brightness of Cepheid stars and the period of their varieation. Therefore, if one could determine the distance to a single Cepheid of a known period (subsequently determined in 1913), then measuring the brightness of other Cepheids of the same period would allow one to determine the distance to these other stars!...Leavitt's discovery revolutionized the field. (Hubble himself, who was snubbed for the Nobel Prize, often said Leavitt's work deserved the prize, although he was sufficiently self-serving that he might have suggested it only because he would have been a natural contender to share the prize with her for his later work.) Paperwork had actually begun in the Royal Swedish Academy to nominate Leavitt for the Nobel in 1924 when it was learned that she had died of cancer three years earlier. By dint of his force of personality, knack for self-promotion, and skill as an observer, Hubble would become a household name, while Leavitt, alas, is known only to aficiaonados of the field."

Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing

Corn's New Book

and Corn himself has a bit of a different view.

Plouffe Better Get It Right This Time

is all I can say. Judging from what appears to be a new Democratic feistiness, I sort of hope he is. But then, I want to believe.
Krugman reminds me not to be too sanguine.

I have to say that the various accounts of what went wrong are converging on a very depressing picture, in which White House political “experts” actually believed that trying to please the Washington Post editorial page was a winning political move.

From an earlier column on "most voters," vs. the Very Serious People:

What I learn from political scientists is that this is all fantasy — albeit a kind of fantasy beloved of political pundits, who love to imagine that complicated psychodramas are playing out in the minds of voters. Well, here’s a little secret: most voters don’t sit around reading Clive Crook columns or debating the Bowles-Simpson plan. They have a gut sense — things are getting better or they’re getting worse — and mainly vote on that basis. They’re not paying attention at all to this stuff. 

You Could Hear A Pin Drop

if we weren't in a field.
Ah, Guiness. Brain food.

'Between 50 And Death'

"Up to 80, you lie. After 80, you brag."

The Big U

"from an infrared perspective."
Um, okay.


Guess it's a good thing my copy of Krauss's Universe From Nothing is sitting on the kitchen counter. Remember, you are stardust.

'The President Likes Salted Caramel'

So do I. I heard about this dinner on the radio last night and wanted some of that bison Wellington right away. But no, just ham and eggs here.
Okay, why am I putting this up? Just for giggles. I ran across it while searching for and successfully finding the great Q&A between Obama and the Congressional Republicans at their annual conference two years ago. (Q&A starts at about 19:17) Storing up ammunition for the war to come, that one for the expected teleprompter skirmish.


Bonus: Colbert on the long, drawn-out Republican primaries.
"This is great. The Democrats had the same situation when they won last time in 2008. Now, Republicans get that Hilary vs. Obama magic, minus any women or black people. Or magic."

HCs, Every One

Thirteen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign scientists, all of whom skate for the Twin City Derby Girls.
Top row, left to right: Therafist, clinical psychologist; Anthrobrawlogist, biological anthropologist; Snarker Posey, legal information scientist; Doc Dementer, educational psychologist; Oh No Bobo, veterinarian; Killy Love-less, social scientist; MRSA, microbiologist.
Bottom row, left to right: Jo Holley, evolutionary ecologist; Gaya Jenda, family scientist; Mrs. T, educational psychologist; F1, developmental psychologist; Punchwrap Supreme, reproductive toxicologist; Polly Nator, evolutionary biologist.

This entry courtesy of Anthrobrawlogist.

Is That You, Bill?

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

- Bernard Levin, quoted in The Story of English