Thursday, May 08, 2008

NOTHING'S AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS. Okay. So this is interesting. From a lot of different angles.


Let me count the problems with this bohunkus analysis of cosmology. I'm not just having fun here. I'm demonstrating some of the principal problems with official science the way it's practiced in academe. The official logic is silly but important.

Let's start with the most disingenuous part of the story: "Previous models are founded on the rationale that intelligent life on Earth emerged from a sequence of unlikely 'critical steps'" [Italics added] The word 'rationale' is in this case a synonym for 'assumption.' An assumption that's suspect on several counts.

First, the universe is immensely vast, which means that even the unlikeliest events are, in sum, inevitable. Eventually, somebody does win the Powerball Lottery. All it takes is enough trials. Our universe provides an almost infinite number of trials. Which means there's a pretty big population of Powerball winners when you start multiplying billion-to-one odds by umpty-quintillion ticket buyers.

No matter what the odds are against life on earth, there are probably billions of planets where similarly 'unlikely' events have taken place.

Second, the assumption implies that the vastness of space somehow matters in terms of ET contact. There are two reasons to doubt this. There's Arthur C. Clarke's admonition that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Which scientists routinely discount in every specific question they look at. Why? Because they can't conceive that someone out there could be smarter than they are. Not possible. They sort of insist that everyone else would apply their logic to any situation they can imagine. The fact is, we have no way of knowing the process or technology by which a vastly superior civilization might discover that we exist and come for a visit.

The other reason is that there's something unique about earth we already know about, something that sets us dramatically apart from 99+ percent of other planets. The moon. (Despite science's insistence that it understands everything important about the universe, it still can't explain definitively where the moon came from.) It is a stabilizing factor in our planetary orbit and rotation. It keeps us from flipping and rolling and having the high old time we'd no doubt prefer if we were the planetary teenagers Carl Sagan warned us not to be. Without the moon, and its exact size, rotation, and periodicity, there's no chance there'd be life on earth. The nature of the moon's relationship to the earth, and the sun, makes us a glowing signal to anyone out there looking for advanced life in the universe. We're a kind of neon sign to anyone who has the 'magical' technology to sift through galaxies in search of likely loci of life.

Beyond this, the root assumption still sucks. The four 'unlikely' phases of the development of life on earth have the flavor of Zeno's Arrow. In a proper logical context, life seems incredibly unlikely to the believers of neo-Darwinian evolution. Four big steps are required, each of which is prohibitively improbable. Provided you think it's all caused by mutation and adaptation. With no intelligence involved.

Uh oh. Intelligent design. The great non-theory of the non-scientific. Fuck off. If intelligence is possible as an attribute of organic life forms, it's also a pre-existing potentiality -- call it a built-in property of the universe itself, like leaf shapes and cranial brain location -- and maybe it drives relentlessly toward manifesting itself. If so, that would change the odds the Brit scientist is "rationalizing." No more Zeno. In this case, the universe is teeming with intelligent life and the odds are very different from what the experts would have us believe. Change the assumption, change the odds.

Why are they so resistant? The scientists, I mean. They're not behaving rationally at all. On the one hand, they chafe at the idea that a change in a few constants of physics would result in no universe at all. They tell us the fortunate circumstances that underlie this universe mean only that that all other combinations of physical laws are also being tried out in universes unseen. On the other hand, they insist that conscious intelligence is a freak by-product of an entirely accidental process and means nothing, while they simultaneously argue that it just might be the rarest thing in the universe. What happened to the infinity of everything being tried?

I think it's called having your cake and eating it too. Their very particular arrangement of probabilities makes them (purely by coincidence, mind) the smartest beings in the universe. Hmmmm.

Not buying it. Too many credible stories about UFOs and USOs. If any of them are true, the scientists are full of shit. Which isn't that much of a reach. Let's face it.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

YTW. No, we're not going to keep talking about Hillary and Obama. YouTube Wednesday is about distractions, not current events. Although we couldn't resist this one, which will be ancient history by tomorrow, so we have to do it today.


That's it. Done with the candidates. Honest. For example, how could one get more high-toned and above it all than promoting some Physics Phun?


Oh. You prefer no-toned and below it all? We got that covered too.


Okay. That was kind of ucky. We admit it. Makes us want to take a bath. You know. Get really clean. That's what the "Devil's Pool" is all about. If you're evil enough, you can paddle around inches away from the tallest waterfall in the world. InstaPunk contributors spend every single day of summer there every year.


Too sinister? For good people, maybe. That's probably why our genius American environmentalists are fully prepared to ban water altogether.


They might even get away with it. Unless Bengal cats find out about it.


You don't know about Bengals? Get with it, folks. Most of the cats you're seeing these days in cat food commercials are Bengals. They're, uh, intensely interactive with every environment. Camera show-offs too. And kind of scary. Like seven pound leopards.


But clumsy. For some reason, they just don't care about heights. When they fall, they don't even land on their feet. That would be caring. About heights.


Actually, you can keep YouTube Wednesday going indefinitely if you just follow the Bengals...

Now, isn't that better than all the political harping and carping you're getting everywhere else today? You know it is. Bengals make lots of speeches. But they absolutely never make any promises and they never ask for your vote. They pretty much do whatever they want to. Follow their example as long as you can. You've got till maybe January or February to squeeze it all in.

Get busy.

P.S. Couldn't resist. One more. It's kind of like peanuts. Hard to stop.


But we're GOING to stop. Right now.

MORNING. It's clear that CountryPunk and, obviously, TruePunk overreacted to last night's election results. As to their gratuitous slamming of McCain, I can only assure you that I have sent them both stern emails reminding them of the unfailing admiration we have always had here for the Republican presidential nominee:

Time Out
Ear to the Ground
InstaPunk Is Always Right
Where's the Dark Matter?
The Superior Conservative
McCain for President
Pressing the Point
A Surge McCain Doesn't Support
No Republicans Left in the Race
Six Is a State of Mind
McCain Reacts Angrily to NYT

Well, there's more, but you can see that we've been in the bag for McCain from the very beginning. Sort of like Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett were for Mitt Romney. But that doesn't mean we're incapable of being objective. We love the guy to death, but we can still speak from a certain distance. Just like Hugh and Dean said they could.

It's all going to be okay, people. Truly. It's absolutely not the case that Mr. McCain is some kind of loose cannon, egomaniacal, rude, arrogant, just-plain-nasty closet liberal control freak who thinks government should be limited except when people behave in ways he doesn't approve of. That's not who he is at all. He would absolutely talk to Rush Limbaugh if he didn't already know that Limbaugh is a treacherous, uneducated, and largely malicious distraction from the, well, sanctity of the ongoing dialogue between the American people and the mainstream press, which has always been so supportive of patriots like, uh John McCain.

I know from some of your emails that you're concerned I might be withdrawing my declaration of support for the Arizona senator's bid for the presidency. Not a chance. I understand the objections. CountryPunk has a parochial view. TruePunk is just crazy. But we all always knew that.

Why would anyone think it's reasonable to expect a Republican nominee to subscribe to all Republican positions? Isn't it enough to be vaguely pro-life? Why can't a Republican kinda sorta believe in Global Warming and the need to pulverize the entire global economic system to make it one percent cooler? Who wouldn't want to turn the American southwest over to an ethnic minority that would rather be Spanish than Indian if it means laying a more persuasive legal claim to lucrative lands developed by Anglos? And is it really so bad to have spent seven years undermining and sniping at a president who dared to undertake an attack on enemies who'd been bombing us for a decade before he took office? Of course not. That's just understandable maverickousness, common in Washington as a head cold.

I really want to be clear about this. Especially now that we know Obama will be the Democratic nominee. How should I put it? I want to be precise. Here's my best attempt:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! WE CAN'T ELECT OBAMA. WE JUST CAN'T.

Does that clarify matters for you?

I thought it would.

DONE AND DONE. I don't know how CountryPunk knew the race was over before the first votes were reported, but he did. Now I have two tasks. One, to acknowledge that Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, and two, to renounce any possibility of my support for John McCain.

America wants to reap the whirlwind. So be it. You want an angry young man for president? Have him. Just be aware that the best way to judge a man is to know his wife. Michelle Obama is no Jackie Kennedy. She's a good looking woman to be sure, but she's also a bitter, whining harridan who probably makes her husband as miserable as he will make us. I cringe at the thought of her being the hostess of state dinners. But we survived Rosalynn Carter and we'll survive the pissed-off, victimized Princetonian, too.

Now for McCain. My fleeting hope was that he was actually a politician. He isn't. He's just an arrogant asshole. His decision to speak to La Raza -- in clear defiance of the conservative base of his party, which believes in the rule of law and disdains race-based extortion -- is both unconscionable and incredibly stupid.

It's the last part that's so dismaying. Politicians routinely do unconscionable things. But they normally do them to satisfy the people who have worked and sacrificed and gone the extra mile to get them elected. John McCain is yet another of the new breed of western Americans who are willing to betray their country for the sake of Spanish architecture, Mexican food, and cheap gardeners. Only it's not that cheap. It's that the braggart of the Straight Talk Express is actually in the pocket of all the special interests who are willing to do anything to keep the flow of illegal low-cost labor flowing into the United States, law and cultural integrity be damned.

Forget the hero of the Hanoi Hilton. The John McCain of 2008 is corrupt. So corrupt that his debts to the illegal immigration promoters outweigh even his desire to be president of the United States. That's a big fucking debt.

We're all on our own now. Do whatever you want. The United States is lost. Run a third-party ticket for Ron Paul. Run a fourth-party ticket for Mike Huckabee. Stay at home and give Obama the biggest congressional majority any president ever had. The Democrats will have their day now.

And I have just stopped caring. Go to hell. All of you. Pretend that the Islamists don't want to kill you. Maybe they'll relent and give your wife and daughters an anesthetic before they cut off their clitorises. Pretend that Iran doesn't really plan to nuke Israel. Just remember to act surprised when it happens and Obama initiates a new round of talks to deal with the implications. Pretend that the Iraq War is nothing but a drain on American resources and explore the cornucopia of consequences when we abandon them for the tenth time in twenty years.

I. DON'T. CARE.

Me? I love Obama. He's so coolly eloquent. Isn't that the height of statecraft? Sure it is.

Whatever. I don't know anything. I thought the Republican Party would have the balls to defend their own president, who accomplished an absolute goddam miracle -- preventing another major domestic terrorist attack for more than seven years. But no. They don't even want to appear on the same podium with him. Fuck them. They don't deserve anybody's vote. Give the damn Democrats every single seat in the House and Senate and then see how quickly you want to throw them out of office. HINT: When they decide all your paychecks should go directly to them first, so they can decide how much you're not allowed to spend on Big Macs, spinner wheels, rodeo tickets, smokes, hookers, tattoos, cheesy lingerie, Southern Comfort, ten-gauge ammunition, and RVs. That'll settle your hash. Oh. Excuse me. No, it won't. You'll happily trade all that for FREE healthcare.

Assholes.

Thanks a lot, John McCain. There's more than one kind of traitor. There's the kind who talks when he shouldn't. And there's the kind who sells out the whole damn country because he's too smug and rich to remember what his country is even about.

And thanks, Obama. We need you. In a strange, fucked up way, we need you. We really do. Let's just hope the lesson you're there to teach us doesn't kill us. It probably won't. But not because you won't be trying.

Have at it, weed.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

HOPE VS. REALITY. Led by Rush Limbaugh and other inveterate optimists, Republicans are starting to believe they might actually win the 2008 presidential election. The increasingly dirty infighting between the Clinton and Obama campaigns reminds them of 1968, when the Dems ripped their own party apart at the Chicago convention and couldn't heal the divide in time to beat Richard Nixon. Perversely, the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party is bolstering the analogy by promising to "Recreate '68" at the 2008 Denver convention.

But sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel really is an oncoming train. That's very probably the case this time. It's a terrible year to be a Republican, "maverick" or not. What the Republicans should remember about 1968 is just how close the Democrats came to winning -- even though they were the incumbent party of the White House and both houses of Congress, who had presided over an incredibly unpopular war, huge budget deficits, escalating inflation, and an ugly generational confrontation that seemed at times on the verge of armed civil war. Yet the FDR coalition of big government petitioners and identity panderers fell only a couple hundred thousand votes short of electing a sitting Vice President who was inextricably linked to every policy that had engendered such national chaos. The lesson to remember? Republicans aren't Democrats. If they fail to make or keep popular promises, they get fired. Think Ford and Bush 41. When Democrats fail to perform (always) -- and even when they spend months sawing at each others' throats -- they can still unify a lot of voting blocs on a single Tuesday in November.

The Democrats will come back together by November, regardless of how intramurally bellicose they sound right now. And it's highly likely that they will defeat McCain in the general election. But not for the reasons most of the pundits are citing. The analogy year, if you must have one, is 1976. The candidate who is closest to Obama in recent American history is Jimmy Carter, a total outsider who capitalized on the nationwide -- and utter -- disgust with the entire Washington, DC, establishment to seek the presidency based on nothing but vague promises that we could trust him to make everything better. So we elected the first engineer president since Herbert Hoover, with remarkably similar results.

Call it what you will. Denial. Flight from reality. Romantic fantasy. It all amounts to the same thing, an election that is decided on almost deliberately superficial terms. Carter had that impossibly wide and friendly smile. Nobody noticed the hard little eyes of a martinet micro-manager. Obama has his rhetorical style, so empty that it's majestically weightless in the heights it attains. Nobody wants to notice the Carterlike solitude of the man within, a remoteness we confuse with greatness, the untouchability we'd all feel in retrospect for the persons of Lincoln and Washington. And JFK. Which is who so many Americans want him to be. So desperately that they're willing to make up all the points of similarity out of whole cloth. Never mind that he hasn't the wit, the indescribable common touch, the gift for self-deprecating humor, or the steely inner confidence to surround himself with better brains than his own. We want another JFK -- the one of our myths and imaginings -- and we're sick to death of DC mediocrities and the messiness of the world and the complications of being the most powerful nation on earth when all we really want is a pleasant weekend with no one bugging us. For a change.

And there's another thing. We're completely spoiled. Since Ronald Reagan somehow solved the unsolvable economic woes of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter years, we've had a quarter century of very nearly unbroken prosperity, punctuated by the merest handful of mild recessions. All politics aside, the difference between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy has been mostly the media coverage. But now we've had our first real oil shock since Carter, and we're not going to stand for it, dammit. Make it stop. All the youthful voters everyone's so happy to have join the electorate have never known real privation of any kind. Why are they so energized? They're bored with the mundane dreariness of prosperity as usual. Bored. They have the most dangerous form of nostalgia -- ignorant yearning for a glamorous time they've heard about but never experienced. They think they'd have been heroes of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, the unofficial coup by rock and roll that's fueled all their hero worship of dead and decaying rock stars. They want to have that glorious feeling of being excited. About something. Anything.

That's what McCain is competing with. Despite his energy, he's an old man. His time has passed. The stars are aligned for one of America's periodic irrational outbursts, the election of a president whose only real qualification is that he's different from the norm. And that would be Obama. All hail the comforting illusion.

Conservatives have carped a lot about McCain as the Republican nominee. Threatened to stay home because it would be better to have all the liberal foolishness enacted by (and blamed on) a Democrat than a renegade liberal Republican. Fine. All I'll point out is that when the November tantrum occurs and the Republicans are crushed in Congress and the presidential election, where will you stand on the blame game then? Would you be happier to have the slaughter blamed on a genuine conservative (if you could actually find one) or a truculent old bastard who split with his own party faithful on at least three of their top ten issues? What candidate would better enable the Republicans to rediscover their core identity, principles, and balls as a party when Carter, er, Obama, comes up for reelection in 2012? Conversely, what candidate offers us a better chance in 2008 to prevent the election of another Jimmy Carter? Is there something better than a cantankerous old real-world survivor to run against a chimera? You tell me.

To answer these questions honestly, though, you'd have to admit that Republicans really are staring at catastrophic defeat in the fall, barring some miracle nobody could reasonably foresee. Can you do that?

Monday, May 05, 2008

CINCO DE MAYO! It used to be the most cynically patronizing holiday on the American calendar. Now it's like another St. Patrick's Day, only without all the class and solemn dignity of March 17 to get in the way of the drinking. Sigh.

I'm not the first to notice this: If things are so bad in your country that you have to look for work in a different country, you might want to temper that expatriated national pride a smidge.

Unless you want to argue that America took all the parts of Mexico with good jobs. That economic success is primarily a function of geography rather than society. That's too dumb to state outright, but if you only allude to it, never getting more specific than a hinted-at accusation that America took something from Mexcio, you're in business. You'll know you've gotten away with it when your audience at the reconquista rally gives you the slow, thoughtful "how true" nods.

So cynical, Brizoni. And so out of the blue. For heaven's sake, why?

Clearly, I'm not in the Cinco de Mayo spirit. The phone card/money wiring kiosk (which I like because everyone in there is honest enough to not even pretend to care about speaking English) was out of giant Virgin Mary tapestries. How am I supposed to celebrate this High Holy Day without one? And I just found out Corona beer isn't even Mexican. Did you know that? It's bottled in Minnesota or Whitesylvania or thereabouts. Weak. Who wants American worms wriggling around in their booze? And they have this new variety called "Corona Extra"? Extra what? "Extra" lack of melanin at the brewery? "Extra" Lawrence Welk played over the intercom?

I'm just feeling, like, disillusioned with the whole enterprise, man. Maybe my own celebratory setbacks are why I'm all existential about today. Independence sounds fine and good for any country, so I guess I'm happy for Mexico. But... you know... I hesitate to even think it... look what they've done with it. They've made kind of a... you know... a corrupt little cesspool of misery for themselves down there, haven't they? I don't see what there is to celebrate.

I guess it makes sense that their Independence Day has only the vaguest lip-service to freedom and all the other important nation stuff. In its place, you get ranchero music (known by the state of California to cause birth defects and reproductive harm) loud enough to blow out the part of the brain that feels shame at being from Mexico.

Sorry. I'm just cranky. Which of course means there no truth to be found in any of this slander. Enjoy your cerveza, esse! Arriba! Santa Anna! Cesar Chavez! All that.

UPDATE: Looks like my last column from the road got lost in the, um, mail. It's a thermodynamic miracle of wrong guess after wrong guess. Each of them was shown to be exactly wrong, mere days after I wrote. You'll see it tomorrow.

AN OLD FAVORITE. Good old Pat Buchanan, so beloved by cro-magnon conservatives, has suddenly tumbled to the alarm raised long ago by Mark Steyn's America Alone. In a column called "The Way Our World Ends," Pat says:


Geez. Pat seems disturbed all of a sudden. The Aryans are going away. What does it all mean? I admit I haven't read Steyn's response to Buchanan, so I'm probably risking a repeat of his points, but I'll chance it anyway. Because the meaning is incredibly important, and it's something all you damn imbecile Paulistas (and you know who you are) should pay attention to along with the cro-magnon Republicans.

What it means is this: Thank God for the British Empire and the aggressive American interventionism of the twentieth century. That's right. In the scenario being described by Buchanan, the only chance the world has to avoid a thousand-year dark age is whatever the newly ascendant populations can remember and imitate of what they learned from their experience of western colonialism and imperialism. For example, India has a shot at holding together as a society and an economy in this scenario because of the Raj, which embedded law very deeply into their culture. So might some of the middle eastern muslims -- if they can prevent their homegrown religion from requiring them to behead each other into bedouin medievalism.

The disappearance of Europeans and their American descendants will threaten a lot of things: Christianity's openness to science and its ongoing contribution to individual consciousness and personal responsibility, the liberal political tradition of republics and democracies, the systems of capitalist economics, and the concept of art as a cultural force independent of politics and religion, endowed with a mission to criticize both. If any of these traditions survive, which is debatable, it will be because the survivors remember and honor what they learned from those who have departed, regardless of how traumatically they learned it.

Without the survival of these traditions, the world will be plunged into unutterable chaos and violence. Nuclear weapons will be used until there are no more weapons. Tribes will turn upon one another, totalitarian systems will devour and exterminate the tribes who undermine order, and the population figures will change dramatically again, but always lower. And there will be no more Jews to push science, law, business, art, and entertainment forward. The slippery slope will be an accelerating backward slide into irreparable misery.

So. Pat. Now that you understand the "new population bomb," do you still think it would have been best for America to sit smugly at home while the dark side of European intellectualism essayed its first attempted suicide of full human consciousness? Or was it perhaps better somehow that before we sailed to the Grey Havens we did as much as we could for a full century to share our vision of a world in which all men and women could be free to pursue happiness as they conceived it?

I don't like the thought of my own traditions and ancestry passing away from the earth. But I do believe we made a contribution. It will be up to the survivors to determine whether that contribution was a footnote or a legacy. I'm also glad that we made a worldwide effort to achieve the latter.

Pat? He's probably grimly hoping for the former. It's called vengeance. Something a son of Nixon (i.e., elves bred down to orcs) would know more about than anybody else.


I'll be thinking other thoughts during the final recessional hymn.

Elbereth, Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel...

Sunday, May 04, 2008

NOD TO THE PAST. The criteria for Philadelphia's Liberty Medal sound lofty:


Yeah, they gave it to Nelson Mandela once. But last year they gave it to Bono. They've also given it to Sandra Day O'Connor and Kofi Annan. There seems to be some latitude here, some give and take in what constitutes courage, conviction, and the blessings of liberty. Which is as it should be. Sandra Day O'Connor never stood in front of a tank. Kofi Annan never served a day as a political prisoner and has probably eaten in more four-star restaurants over the years than Frank Sinatra.

Which brings me to my point. Why can't the Liberty Medal be granted, for once, to an actual Philadelphian who has performed a huge service in communicating the blessings of liberty to the city where constitutionally guaranteed liberty began in the first place?

It's a truism of art and writing and music that "before you can be universal, you must be local."

I'd be willing to bet there are thousands if not millions of people like me, who grew up listening with their parents to "Friday with Frank" and "Sunday with Sinatra," hosted by Sid Mark on WWDB (and now WPHT) in Philadelphia (and syndicated to other stations throughout the country). What did we learn? That there was a special poignancy to the lives of the World War II generation, which garnered Tom Brokaw waves of acclaim when he acknowledged it belatedly, but which we children of that generation learned firsthand by hearing Sid Mark respond week after week to Sinatra classics with an impeccable sense of how every song sounded when it was released and what chord it touched in its audience. The Brokaws somehow seem to forget that the Greatest Generation also came home after the war and rebuilt the world even though they were in all probability suffering from what is today called Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.

My dad was. He endured nightmares for years. But Friday night was a ritual. We gathered in the den and turned on the FM radio. It was Sid Mark time. The songs Sid played spanned 20 years, from the pre-war Tommy Dorsey era to the beginnings of the Rat Pack and beyond. It was a time machine that helped us youngsters learn what our parents had been through. Both my parents adopted, at one time or another, the pose that Sinatra wasn't even the best Big Band singer, despite all the screaming bobby-soxers. I heard both my parents seriously argue that Dick Haymes was a better vocalist than Sinatra and that Sinatra's career should have ended after this disastrous recording of Ol' Man River.

But it was Friday night, and Sid was playing the songs, and my sister and I were little and full of questions -- besides being intoxicated by the sound of Sinatra -- and so this family time also became a history lesson. My prejudiced father hauled out his Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Teddy Wilson, and Coleman Hawkins LPs to prove to us that Sid Mark's description of America as one vast Sinatra audience was incorrect. The very first time I fell in love was at the age of six when I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing "The Man I Love," and the very first time I knew there was a racial divide in my country was when my Dad showed me the Ella/Gershwin album cover -- Ella was not white, slim, or gorgeous the way women who can sing like that automatically are to little boys who have beautiful blonde mothers. "Forget the picture," my dad said. "Just listen to the way she sings. That's music. Sinatra is an ugly little guy too. And you like him."

I did. Me and how many countless others who learned about him from Sid Mark. More than my parents did. In fact. my first rebellion was realizing that Sinatra was better than Dick Haymes and every other Big Band singer. I realized that he was singing my own parents' lives, the parts they couldn't admit, the pain and wistfulness and sorrow they could never acknowledge, along with the upbeat determination that kept them going, and dancing, even when they must have wondered what the hell was going on. It was as if the real appeal of Sinatra to adults was a secret -- they pretended he wasn't an arterial necessity; he was just historical and because he was connected to every successful jazz musician, composer, and arranger, he was safe. When he let loose with his "three o'clock in the morning," "when I was seventeen," or "strangers in the night" bits, the parents mixed another cocktail and fell silent.

Truth is, what I learned from Sid Mark and his Sinatra shows was that my parents and their generation had real and incredibly deep passions in their lives. That was the knowledge that enabled me to bridge the Generation Gap of the sixties. I understood that mine wasn't the first generation to have been powerfully motivated and transformed by music. A tenuous bridge was constructed which survives to this day. Yeah, my dad couldn't get the heroin jazz, or the rock and roll, or even the bee-bop. But long after the war that forced and anguished his character, he HAD to listen to the one man who ensured continuity and whose genius phrasing somehow contained an entire generation of experience.

Without Sid Mark, my parents would have been a blank to me, the way so many parents are a blank to their kids today. Thanks to Sid, there were moments in my childhood when I felt at a cellular level what it was to be my parents when they were young, in danger, and fighting like hell for their lives. I'm absolutely damn sure I'm not alone in that. Is this a service which helps to "secure the blessings of liberty"? Yup. And then there was "Watertown." Which only Sid ever promoted and proved to me that Sinatra AND Sid were eternal. Sid Mark is a national treasure.

I think that. But then I'm not a Philadelphia politician.

P.S. The audio file has been Sid Mark's close to every Sinatra broadcast for 50 years. It's burned into my soul. My Catholic friends who confidently expect me to confess the one true faith at the last second had better bring this recording with them to my deathbed.

Friday, May 02, 2008

TGIF. I found this via Jonah Goldberg at NRO, who got it from 'Debby, the Odd Link Gal,' who found it here. The thumbnail description is this:

"Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression."

The site also contains a complete synopsis and spoilers. Decide for yourselves if you want to experience with or without a full briefing.

I think it's fun to just watch it and guess what's going on. But that's me. And, yeah, I know, a couple parts are in dubious taste, but it's Friday. Lighten up.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

ELECTION STUFF. It's fine to be old. I've got no problem with that. Old is cool. Very old is very cool. But what's the deal with being a truly ancient U.S. Senator running for reelection? Running. Ha. Ha ha.

This weekend, we in the Delaware Valley started getting campaign commercials for the reelection bid of Frank Lautenberg for one of the two U.S. Senate seats in New Jersey. Yeah, I know every state gets two U.S. Senate seats, but New Jersey ain't Montana or West Virginia. We have a bigger population than Israel and you know how much trouble they are on the world stage. Is it really possible that the public service orientaton of the Democratic Party in the Garden State is so incredibly pure and altruistic that the leadership is willing to make a laughingstock of itself by insisting that the very best candidate available is an 84-year-old man who was happily retired until he got drafted from his comfy screened-in porch to bail the Dems out of an ugly political scandal five years ago?

It's a scenario that suggests several unwelcome thoughts. First, obviously, that incumbency is such a potent political weapon in these democratic United States that the parties who declare themselves to be committed to our interest would be willing to run a large zucchini for public office if they thought they could re-elect it. Second, that being a United States Senator must be a remarkably easy job, something like being a cigar store Indian at a hick tourist trap -- just being there is absolutely and perfectly sufficient. (How else could anyone characterize the contributions of Robert Byrd (D-WV), Strom Thurmond (R-NC), or Ted Stevens (R-AL)? And why else would a decently honorable old man consent to it? If it weren't a total cinch, why wouldn't he prefer to spend his decliningsurplus years dandling grandkids on his knee rather than drooling into microphones at endless subcommittee hearings? Or is an octogenarian politician really an avaricious alien satyr instead of a normal human being? Is his last remaining aspiration in life stealing another million from the public treasury and copping one more feel from his most nubile young staffer? If so, I don't want to know. GO HOME. And that includes mere septuagenarian congressmen like John Murtha, too. (What really does bother me is this: if being a U.S. Senator is so effortless, what does it mean that all the remaining presidential candidates have exactly this same do-nothing job?)

Third, if we really are prepared to elect and re-elect and re-elect (etc, etc) virtual dead men to public office under the delusion that they actually care about us and can do a competent job of protecting our interests, what does that say about us? Doesn't it say that we deserve every vile, corrupt perversion of office these Struldbruggs wreak upon us?

Come up with your own answers. I don't care. But I will share with you my write-in candidate for Lautenberg's New Jersey Senate seat. He's much more accomplished than old Frank. And almost certainly smarter. Even now.


Not to mention better looking. I'm pretty sure he would have liked Jersey. And he still looks alert enough to grab the earmarks we're all counting on. The carpetbagger thing doesn't bother me so much since Hillary got elected Senator from New York.

Capiche?

FORGETTING THE VERITIES. I don't watch baseball for politics. I don't need the play-by-play interrupted (as it was) by some front-office goof blathering about how worried we all are about Global Warming. The Phillies front office isn't even good at finding a few quality free agents to beef up a team that's been hovering on the edge of being really good without ever seeming to get there. So why would anyone want to hear their thoughts on a subject they know even less about than assembling a decent pitching staff?

I hate to say it but I'm glad they lost. The only real science of baseball is superstition, and now the players know that wearing those godawful green caps isn't good luck.

Is it really all that unreasonable to ask that professional sports be about sports? If somebody's got some cause to promote, let them do it in a public service announcement during commercial breaks or, better yet, dream up their own special sporting event. Organize a marathon or a bike race or something. Something where participation is voluntary. We average joes do not need our professional teams, which are supposed to be an entertaining diversion from real-world cares for everyone in a given geographic area, to become billboards for any particular point of view, even if it's done with the best of intentions. We don't need the Phillies wearing pink hats for breast cancer awareness, blue hats for prostate cancer or thyroid disease awareness, yellow hats for hostages somebody's holding somewhere, or even amber hats for a missing child. It's not about not caring about those things. It's about not needing to care about them during a major league baseball game. Or an NFL game. Or an NHL or NBA game.

Too much to ask? Apparently so. This is one case where the slippery slope argument was valid. We let them get away with naming all our sports stadiums and arenas after corporations. Now we're stuck with the slow transformation of the teams themselves into hideously expensive public relations vehicles for the cynical good citizenship charades of banks and insurance companies.

Keep it up. Eventually, there will be a backlash. Do you know what I'm going to do after I post this? I'm going to go put some empty plastic soda bottles into the regular trash. In honor of the damn "Green" Phillies. How do you like them apples?

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