B12 Solipsism

Some additional reading December 4th from 18:17 to 21:21:

• Day 18 - "My job is crazy. I mean looney tunes. I wish everybody in America could come to my school tomorrow and just hang out with me for 20 minutes. How long would everybody in America last in that building? If everybody in America really knew what it was like the problem would get fixed tomorrow. This shit is unConstitutional. Nobody should have to go to school under these circumstances, and I include faculty under the umbrella "nobody." Nobody in the world should ever have to send their kids into a public school system this fucked up, and we mandate it by law that parents do just that. "
• Amanda Palmer Too Gorgeous For Her Own Record Label | Blowfish Blog - I've never heard of this chick, but by no meaning of the word is she fat.
  "Incredibly cool and beautiful singer Amanda Palmer (of Dresden Dolls fame) has been forced to search for a new record label after Roadrunner refused to promote her latest single, video and album. Why? Because she refused to let them remove shots of her “fat” belly from the video for Leeds United (see above), and is therefore “uncommercial”.

  Check out the video. She’s insanely hot."

• MenuPages Blog :: Boston: Down By The Shipyard - my photo used here

  "Unless you live or work down that way, do you often trek to Charlestown? But what's stopping you? While it may seem a little out of the way, parking sucks, and parts can be overrun with tourists and their fanny packs, taking photos of the harbor, there's one solid reason to visit: Navy Yard."

The Great Influenza

I haven’t quite finished John Barry’s history of the deadly flu epidemic of 1918, but it is a fascinating book.
Karen Brudney, M.D. writes:

The connection among public health, epidemic disease, and politics can be seen throughout history, from the responses to the Black Death in Italian cities in 1348 to the response — or lack thereof — to the resurgence of tuberculosis on the part of the New York City Department of Health in the 1980s. John M. Barry spells out this connection in fascinating detail in The Great Influenza. In his meticulous description of the dire consequences that resulted when short-term political expediency trumped the health of the public during the 1918 influenza pandemic, Barry reminds his readers that the government response to an epidemic is all too often colored by the politics of the moment. Barry is neither a scientist nor a professional historian, and some of the details he gives on virology and immunology are clearly targeted at a nonmedical audience, but physicians and scientists will find this book engrossing nonetheless. The influenza pandemic of 1918, the worst pandemic in history, killed more people than died in World War I and more than the tens of millions who have died, to date, in the AIDS pandemic.

Barry focuses only on what was occurring in the United States at the time, and he tries to place this unprecedented human disaster both against the background of American history and within the context of the history of medicine. He is right to try to acquaint the reader with the state of American medicine at the turn of the last century, focusing on the dismal status of medical education and laboratory research, particularly as compared with that in Europe at the same time. Much of his discussion centers on “great men” (and an occasional great woman), however, and the picture given of their lives and professional careers is superficial and occasionally repetitious, and it distracts from the main events. His point, presumably, is to convey the futility of all the efforts of these brilliant minds, and he begins and ends the book with anecdotes about Paul Lewis, a scientist who had helped to prove that poliomyelitis is caused by a virus and then developed a highly effective simian vaccine. Lewis is the symbol of the best and the brightest of the scientific establishment, and we follow him as he weaves in and out of the story. He, like all scientists of his time, failed to grasp the fact that influenza was caused by a virus, believing it to be caused by Pfeiffer’s bacillus, and he was therefore unable to develop a successful vaccine or to halt the devastation. The book becomes riveting once Barry begins to describe the origins and early weeks of the epidemic.

The fact that it was wartime and that hundreds of thousands of men were being called up, placed in overcrowded camps, and packed like sardines into ships to be delivered as efficiently as possible to Europe enabled influenza to spread rapidly among recruits. From the military camps, the virus spread into the civilian population in the United States and from the United States to France. Barry describes the first catastrophe at Camp Devens, in Massachusetts, in the late summer of 1918, where thousands of previously healthy men in their prime suddenly became critically ill, overwhelming the inadequate camp hospital, infecting the medical staff, and dying by the hundreds, apparently with acute respiratory distress syndrome. The smartest and most hardworking scientists, physicians, and nurses, both military and civilian, were stunned by the rapidity of the disease progression and the inexplicable death toll among the youngest and strongest. (Figure) Barry provides a fascinating picture of the response of the government — both federal and local. The former was sluggish at best and secretive and dishonest at worst, desperate to keep the war effort going and the public calm and to minimize the severity of the disease. In one of the more gripping chapters, Barry focuses on Philadelphia and tells us of the backwardness of its social infrastructure, the lack of a functioning health department, and the power of the local political machine.

Dr. Wilmer Krusen, a political appointee who was the director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Charities, deliberately ignored warnings against allowing a Liberty Loan parade to proceed, even though influenza had devastated the local Navy Yard and begun to spread into the civilian population. Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled. Within 10 days the epidemic exploded from a few hundred civilian cases to hundreds of thousands and from a daily rate of one or two deaths to hundreds. The horror is most vivid in the dilemma surrounding the disposal of bodies. The city morgue had hundreds of bodies stacked up, which produced an unbearable stench, and undertakers rapidly ran out of coffins. Hundreds of bodies lay in homes exactly where they had been at the time of death; burial quickly became impossible, since there were not enough people to dig graves. Whether anything might have been done differently, and if it had, whether this would have made a difference, are questions that Barry leaves unanswered. His tone is often irritatingly and unnecessarily sensationalist. But his indictment of the public authorities for their dishonesty and deliberate minimization of the damage and dangers is particularly chilling in today’s climate of bioterrorism, in the midst of a war whose damages and dangers have been similarly minimized. Barry makes it all too easy to imagine a similarly devastating epidemic with a similarly inadequate response. I highly recommend this book to all.

I wouldn’t read too much into this decision, but still an encouraging step.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a landmark decision today in which California state courts found that its medical marijuana law was not preempted by federal law. The state appellate court decision from November 28, 2007, ruled that “it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws.” The case, involving Felix Kha, a medical marijuana patient from Garden Grove, was the result of a wrongful seizure of medical marijuana by local police in June 2005. Medical marijuana advocates hailed today’s decision as a huge victory in clarifying law enforcement’s obligation to uphold state law. Advocates assert that better adherence to state medical marijuana laws by local police will result in fewer needless arrests and seizures. In turn, this will allow for better implementation of medical marijuana laws not only in California, but in all states that have adopted such laws.

“It’s now settled that state law enforcement officers cannot arrest medical marijuana patients or seize their medicine simply because they prefer the contrary federal law,” said Joe Elford, Chief Counsel with Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the medical marijuana advocacy organization that represented the defendant Felix Kha in a case that the City of Garden Grove appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Perhaps, in the future local government will think twice about expending significant time and resources to defy a law that is overwhelmingly supported by the people of our state.”

[From ASA : U.S. Supreme Court: State Medical Marijuana Laws Not Preempted by Federal Law]

The Republican hatred for States rights - solely when applied to marijuana - is hypocrisy without even a pretense of rationality. From my perspective, the pendulum is swinging towards a liberalization of drug laws. US prisons are too full of non-violent drug offenders, costing cash-strapped state governments real dollars to house and feed them. Many states are using ballot initiatives to enact medical marijuana laws that politicians are too cowardly to initiate themselves, I have a sliver of hope things might be getting better. Of course, Biden is a hardened drug warrior, but perhaps he’s had an awakening of sorts as well.

“Essential Art House - 50 Years of Janus Films” (Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrzej Wajda, Anthony Asquith, Benjamin Christensen)

or a smaller sub-set for $90:

“Essential Art House, Vol. 1″ (Ingmar Bergman;Peter Brook;Jean Cocteau)

Currently listed at $650 for 50 films: $13 a film.

Janus Films opened American viewers’ eyes to the pleasures of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut at the height of their artistic powers. Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this world-renowned distribution company with Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, an expansive collectors’ box set featuring fifty classic films on DVD and a lavishly illustrated hardcover book that tells the story of Janus Films through an essay by film historian Peter Cowie, a tribute from Martin Scorsese, and extensive, all-new notes on all fifty films, plus cast and credit listings and U.S. premiere information.

[From The Criterion Collection]

The box set versions don’t have much in the way of bonus features (usually included on a second disc), but these are the films included:

ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)
ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958)
L’AVVENTURA (1960)
BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959)
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946)
BLACK ORPHEUS (1959)
BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945)
THE FALLEN IDOL (1948)
FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)
FISTS IN THE POCKET (1965)
FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952)
THE 400 BLOWS (1959)
GRAND ILLUSION (1937)
HÄXAN (1922)
IKIRU (1952)
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952)
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II (1958)
LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939)
JULES AND JIM (1962)
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)
KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962)
THE LADY VANISHES (1938)
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943)
LOVES OF A BLONDE (1965)
M (1931)
M. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953)
MISS JULIE (1951)
PANDORA’S BOX (1929)
PÉPÉ LE MOKO (1937)
IL POSTO (1961)
PYGMALION (1938)
RASHOMON (1950)
RICHARD III (1955)
THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)
SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973)
LA STRADA (1954)
SUMMERTIME (1955)
THE THIRD MAN (1949)
THE 39 STEPS (1935)
UGETSU (1953)
UMBERTO D. (1952)
THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)
VIRIDIANA (1961)
THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953)
THE WHITE SHEIK (1952)
WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)
THREE DOCUMENTARIES BY SAUL J. TURELL

I don’t know, sounds very tempting, albeit more money than I want to spend on DVDs. I’ve seen several of these films, and already own a few, but still…Could write off the expense against our still-unfinished and moderately neglected screen play. Hmmm.

Mondays are a mess, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Alley, Rapid City, South Dakota

[view large on black: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=163 ]

A few interesting links for December 3rd through December 4th:

• T.R.O.Y.: On Your Marks, It's Funk Marathon Stage 1 - "This is volume one from a six part series. I put these together years ago. The material is mostly 70's funk, with a few exceptions here and there. You'll recognize some well known samples, but there is also a fair amount of obscure music too. The idea with these long-play funk mixes was to fit as many dope tracks as I could onto a 700 megabyte cdr. I wanted all day compilations for driving, working and generally just grooving. There are distinct sections in each volume, so check them out thoroughly."
• ODETTA RIP - "Her 1965 album "Odetta Sings Dylan" included such standards as "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Masters of War" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

  In a 1978 Playboy interview, Dylan said, "the first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta." He said he found "just something vital and personal" when he heard an early album of hers in a record store as a teenager. "Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar," he said."

• Ethiopian music legend convicted of manslaughter - "Afro first made his name on the Ethiopian music scene in 2001 with his mix of reggae and east African pop. He became renowned for songs paying tribute to the late Emperor Haile Selassie as well as athletics heroes Kenenisa Bekele and Haile Gebrselassie.

  His third album, Yasteseryal, was released in 2005, the year of disputed national elections that saw mass anti-government protests quashed violently by the state. One of Afro's songs accused the government of failing to deliver on promises of change, and his music became the unofficial soundtrack of the opposition struggle.

  Afro was detained shortly after the hit-and-run incident in 2006, and released on bail. He was the biggest local star of Ethiopia's millennium celebrations in 2007, before being arrested again and charged in April, leading Ethiopian bloggers to question why it took the authorities 18 months to decide to put him on trial. A least two journalists were arrested for writing articles seen as siding with Afro."

• Hi, How Are You? | MetaFilter - Austin music scene ~1990-1995 (an unscientific survey)

  Boy, I saw a lot of these bands, even knew several band members. Ahhh, youth.

From Snapshots from a Flounder

Wetland Trail That Way, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

At one of my favorite spots in Chicago, the North Park Village Nature Center
( bit.ly/liO2 )

The other sign reads, "Main Loop".

[view large on black: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=162 ]

Seth circa 1995, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

your humble narrator, from a print on Seattle Filmworks stock, circa June 1995.

I remember the jacket - a thrift store special which I wore a lot. Looks like we were in an airport, or other public space.

I’m assuming that Deanna Miesch took the photo using my camera.

In spirit, if not directly

More than 35 years after he left office in disgrace, a stash of recordings has been made public confirming the popular view of Richard Nixon as a lying, venal, foul-mouthed, paranoid conspirator.

In the 198 hours of recordings and 90,000 pages of documents released by the Nixon Presidential Library, the late president discusses his 1972 election landslide, the Vietnam peace talks and “Christmas bombing” campaign. But mostly he urges staff to use all means necessary to discredit opponents.

“Never forget,” he tells national security advisers Henry Kissinger, above, and Alexander Haig in a conversation on December 14 1972, “the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.”

[Click to read more of Recordings reveal Richard Nixon's obsession with predecessors guardian.co.uk ]

and I wonder if Still-President Bush defaced the photographs of Clinton? Nixon was a lot more insecure than GWB though, despite being a much more intelligent and accomplished man.

Nixon was also obsessed with his predecessors, instructing his chief of staff Bob Haldeman in July 1971 to organise a covert raid of a Washington thinktank to uncover information it might have about John F Kennedy.

“I want a son-of-a-bitch. I want someone just as tough as I am [to carry out the raid] … I want it done. I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame.”

Documents released alongside the recordings detail the progress made by his staff in carrying out a presidential order to remove all pictures of past presidents from the White House.

An office belonging to a junior civil servant in which he had seen two photographs of Kennedy, one bearing a personal inscription, particularly offended Nixon. “On January 14,” wrote White House staffer Alexander Butterfield in a 1970 memo, “the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph.”

“The Big Lebowski - 10th Anniversary Edition” (Universal Studios)

Can’t say I’m a fan of the drink, just of the film that inspired the revival.

AMONG the significant dates in the history of Kahlúa, the Mexican coffee liqueur, surely March 6, 1998, rates a mention.

That was the release date of “The Big Lebowski,” the Coen Brothers movie about an aging slacker who calls himself the Dude, and who, after a thug urinates on his prized rug, becomes caught up in a Chandleresque mystery.

Played with slouchy brio by Jeff Bridges, the Dude’s chief pursuits involve bowling, avoiding work and drinking White Russians, the sweet cocktail made with vodka, Kahlúa and cream or milk.

The movie was a flop when it was released, but in the decade since, “The Big Lebowski” has attracted a cult following, and as the film’s renown has grown, so has the renown of the White Russian, or, as the Dude calls them, “Caucasians.” The drink is the subject of experimentation at cutting-edge bars like Tailor, in SoHo, which serves a crunchy dehydrated version — a sort of White Russian cereal. The British electro-pop band Hot Chip, meanwhile, recently invented a variation named the Black Tarantula. Not long ago, the cocktail was considered passé and often likened, in its original formula, to an alcoholic milkshake.

…

Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”

As it happens, this was the period when Jeff Dowd was living in Seattle, driving a taxi and doing a lot of “heavy hanging,” as he put it. Mr. Dowd, 59, an independent film producer and producers representative, is the inspiration for the Dude — a character Joel and Ethan Coen created by taking what Mr. Dowd was like back then and exaggerating a bit, although the White Russians preference is spot on.

“There was a woman I lived with named Connie,” Mr. Dowd said, by phone from his office in Santa Monica, Calif., beginning a rambling oration that was highly Dude-like. “She and her boyfriend, Jamie, were mixologists. We were hanging out and drinking at that time. We went from White Russians to Dirty Mothers, a darker version of a White Russian. It was a very hedonistic period.”

Mr. Dowd moved on from White Russians years ago, but has started drinking them again, mainly so as not to disappoint fans. “When I first met Cheech at the Sundance Film Festival,” he said, referring to Cheech Marin of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, “the first thing we all wanted to do is smoke a joint with him so we could tell our grandchildren, ‘Hey, I smoked a joint with Cheech.’ Well, people want to say they had a White Russian with the Dude. I don’t want to turn them down, which has added a little extra tonnage to me.”

[Click to continue reading A Revival for the White Russian - NYTimes.com]

Boy, does watching this video take me back. I saw the Horsies a few times that year. Not the best sound quality, but good enough to groove too.

The Horsies recorded live in Austin, Texas - January 18th, 1993

A bunch more related videos from the so-called Austin Slacker years are linked to at Metafilter. Missing a couple of favorites (2 Nice Girls, for instance), but a pretty representative sample.

Some additional reading December 3rd from 18:27 to 18:42:

• Dan Shanoff: My Sportsman of the Year: Barack Obama - "The DanShanoff.com Sportsman of the Year is Barack Obama.

  Much as he will be named regular ol' "Person of the Year" in a consensus probably not seen in the history of "Person of the Year" award-giving, he similarly deserves Sportsman of the Year.

  Here is the case for Barack Obama as Sportsman of the Year:"

• Media Matters - We're in the money … - "Regarding the McCaffrey/NBC affair: I find it appalling that the main argument from NBC and McCaffrey himself to justify this utter lack of professionalism is that McCaffrey was wounded in action; ergo he is a man of integrity. It's as if they are implying that one shouldn't question the ethics of anyone who has been wounded in the line of duty. Apparently NBC does not remember Benedict Arnold, a general wounded severely fighting the British at the Battle of Saratoga. Three years later he became America's most notorious sell-out. "

Intricate Symbolism, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Morton Arboretum

[view large on black: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=161 ]

Some additional reading December 2nd from 21:14 to 21:14:

• Vice President For SUPERTRAIN - “China invests 7-9 percent of its GDP in infrastructure projects. We invest just 1 percent. There’s a reason they have a mag-lev train that can go over 200 miles per hour.I may have a bit of a pro-rail bias, but think of the jobs we could create – in both construction and innovation – if we made similarly bold investments here.

  We should fast-track funding for the thousands of ready-to-go projects across the country that can quickly put people back to work and lay the foundation for long-term growth.

  In the longer term, we are calling for the creation of a new National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will help us make the investments we need to build a 21st century transportation system – while creating jobs and taking the politics out of infrastructure spending. And it has the added benefit of making American business more competitive in the world. “

Some additional reading November 19th from 09:12 to 09:12:

• FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: An Interview with John Ziegler on the Zogby “Push Poll” - Republican mind-set, encapsulated. Wow, just wow.
  “Ziegler was responsible for commissioning a Zogby International survey of Barack Obama supporters, which took the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a “fact” to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applied to. Because I believe that many of the statements on the survey are questionable or false but are misleadingly presented as factual to the respondent, I characterized the survey as a “push poll” in an article posted early this morning.” 

  You should read this transcript if you are up for a good laugh. The RNC pays this guy Ziegler?