It’s been a busy but mostly quiet couple of weeks in Pigspittle. There was a fire at the hunting and fishing shop in town. It is located catty-corner to the fire station but I heard on the news that the fire was well underway before the trucks arrived. I haven’t been in town (which, incidentally, is just 1.5 miles away) so I haven’t seen the remains.
We’ve had a rash of credit card thefts that the FBI suspects involves hackers getting into a popular restaurant’s computer. It’s the water-cooler discussion of the week at work. My next-door office neighbor has a stack of the sheriff’s official theft report forms on her desk. Her life has become a form-filling nightmare.
Filed under: Politics
It’s a weighty mantle for anyone to wear but Caroline Kennedy has bestowed it upon Barack Obama in today’s New York Times. Word is out, as well, that Ted Kennedy will announce his support for Obama tomorrow in D.C., standing with niece Caroline. And in yesterday’s NYT, the paper reported that:
In Berlin, newspaper columnists started calling Mr. Obama the “new John F. Kennedy” — no small accolade in a city that reserves a special place for an American leader who, at the height of the cold war, told a divided populace that he, too, was a Berliner. “The black American has become a new Kennedy,” proclaimed the tabloid Bild.
The End of an Epoch? Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth’s history and marked the start of a new one—the Anthropocene. Geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have presented their research in the journal GSA Today.
In it, they suggest humans have so changed the Earth that the Holocene epoch has ended, identifying phenomena such as:
- Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide
- Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature
- Wholesale changes to the world’s plants and animals
- Ocean acidification
Filed under: Science
I’ve been reading The Art of Subtext, a book about fiction and subtext by Charles Baxter. In a passage I read last night, Baxter writes about how much in our lives goes unheard, not deliberately (although there is that too), but out of a need to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by the amount of noise surrounding us every day. We filter the messages we hear out of necessity. This made me think about a woman—a high-functioning autistic—I heard on NPR’s Fresh Air many years ago. She spoke about how rain sounded like a machine gun.
While it is still inconclusive that the climbing incidence of autism is due to anything other than a higher reporting rate and broadening definition for diagnosis, it is curious that in this age of sensory bombardment one of the leading psychiatric disorders among children is related to sensory overload.
Thanks to Barack, Hillary, and John for not taking the bait on questions designed to provoke them into more petty sniping. Last night’s Democratic debate on MSNBC saw moderators persistently egging on the candidates to respond to questions about race, experience, and likability, not from some loftier view of what each means to the presidency but from the gutter of past ad hominem attacks.
By far, the best questions asked last night were those from the public via email and those the candidates asked each other. Following the debate, Chris Matthews dove into commentary as if he was analyzing a boxing match, focusing not on the nuanced substance of the answers but on jabbing style. A hyperventilating Matthews spun Clinton’s focus on the failures of the Bush administration into a declaration that the primaries are over and she’s the winner. Whatever good feeling I had about watching three candidates carefully and thoughtfully define the boundaries of their common ground was instantly punctured by Matthews’ hyperbolic fits. The next time he complains that the candidates aren’t talking about the issues, I hope someone will stick a mirror in his face.
The winner? All three candidates. The loser? MSNBC.
[Note: While the timestamp on this post is January 13, 12:59AM, it was actually posted EST, 11:59PM on January 12. Technically, it is Saturday. Just sayin.]
Mercury Rising NASA returns to Mercury for the first time in more than three decades on Monday. The Messenger spacecraft will do a flyby 124 miles above the planet’s surface. Scientists expect the Messenger will capture images of large, never before seen portions of the Sun’s closest neighbor. According to a press release from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the “encounter will provide a critical gravity assist needed to keep the spacecraft on track for its 2011 orbit insertion around Mercury.”
One of the more entertaining sociological aspects about writing a blog is that you can see the search engine terms that lead people to your site. My friend JP commented on this a while back on his blog but I have to comment on it here because of a term I found this morning: “celebrities taller than my husband.” That search led the wife to this post. I doubt it was what she was looking for.
A wife seeking celebrities taller than her husband is curious enough, but even more so is that you would have to assume that Google knows how tall your husband is in order to return the appropriate links. Or maybe she was just looking for sites dedicated to women who are looking for celebrities taller than their husbands? I entered “celebrities taller than my husband” in Google and the first listing is a self-help group for women who are taller than their husbands. Who knew?
I’ve spent the last decade or more arguing with myself. The disagreement is over the pain in my muscles and the tremor that knocks against my spine. I ask, “What is wrong with my body?” I respond, “You’re a hypochondriac.”
It has kept me from writing this week—the pain, that is. This week it appeared as a spasm in my chest and back muscles; my ribs felt bruised. Sitting in a chair, holding myself upright, is like a weightlifting exercise—”good mornings,” I think they’re called. And then my usual brisk, 20-minute walk took 30-minutes and I started noticing how much harder it was to move my left leg.
But I still walk. I sit, upright, in my chair. I tell myself, “Stop whining. There are others who are far worse off than you.” I have no sympathy for the hypochondriac. I rub my forefinger against my thumb to mimic a tiny violin.
