Posts from — November 2008

Interesting images captured by Cassini show us the sky over Saturn’s north pole, spanned by a hexagon of clouds in fixed rotation with the gas giant.  The scientists at NASA aren’t quite sure what is causing this phenomenon, unknown on any other planet in our solar system.   Still, doesn’t it make you wonder what the connection is between Saturn’s north pole and the hexagonal walls of a honeycomb?

What beauty is contrived by Nature when left to its own devices!  And why must humans always infer the hand of a higher being in the cosmic beauty all around us?  Isn’t it enough to simply accept reality as a mind-bending matrix of symmetry, of consciousness, of amazement?   What do we gain from dogmatic demands on our perceptions, after all.   Not much.  Unbidden neuroses and unnecessary fears.

What those self-righteous idiots – the self-proclaimed believers –  have done to our planet Earth is an atrocity.   Because they are the chosen people and because they will live forever in their bogus Eternity, they see no problem in laying our entire reality to waste.  In my opinion we should throw off the atavistic dogmas of the past and save our own planet, so that visitors observing us will see more than the deadly spume of pollution that we have made of our own atmosphere.

Yes, Virginia, we have visuals of extra-solar planets!   Of course, this is nothing new to astronomers…  Since Gallileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter we knew they were out there, spinning in their orbits several light years across the black pond.  But all the same, there is a moment to savor when the dust clouds of Fomalhaut revealed the visual track of her three planets!   Somewhat bigger than a breadbox, and yet smaller than 10 Jupiters, the planets take their lazy time circling Fomalhaut in orbits of 100 to 185 years.  So, distant partners in space time, what sort of mischeivous life-forms are you hatching?   Hordes of jolly little Fomalhautians?  Well, join the club, and be seeing you as soon as I can get this dang-blasted space-drive to start again.

Along with the landslide victory for Obama, mystery waves were thrashing the shore of southeastern Maine on Tuesday afternoon.    The Boston Globe reports that the water level suddenly rose 12 feet in a matter of minutes, and then drained away in a series of unusual whirlpools.    Storm surge, undersea landslide, sudden release of benthic gas?   Or just the usual shenanigans of the U.S. Navy and alien engineers from Planet Xabulon?

Of course, these rogue waves brought to mind John Creasey’s novel, The Depths, in which Dr, Palfrey, (the enigmatic leader of a global allied intelligence service,) tangles with a mad scientist who has harnessed the power of the sea.  The mad doctor sends gigantic tsunamis onto coastlines with the flip of a switch, part of his eugenics scheme to create a perfect race of humans under the oceans, far away from the dog-eat-dog world of surface dwelling scum.  Somehow the appearance of monster waves on election day sparked off random thoughts on the schemes of madmen.  Such as those of our current Vice President, which seem to a have sinister parallel to the downunder community called Topeka in the film adaption of Harlan Ellison’s Boy and His Dog;  as well as the farcical undersea missions of Hagbard Celine and his Golden Submarine fighting the ghost armies of the Third Reich.

Rogue waves or not, there are stormy waters ahead.  Let us hope they float all boats!

After a terrible ordeal of being stuck in some sort of collective nightmare, Americans have somehow managed to bring themselves to back to planet Earth:  we have elected Barack Obama to be President of the United States!  It’s been a long haul, but somehow the momentum did not fade away.   While Republicans managed to drag themselves down into the gutter, then the sewer, only to spend their final hours screaming to themselves inside of a septic tank, the rest of us kept striding forward into the future.  Let’s face it, when you are forced to choose between Jim Crow and Barack Obama, only a knuckle-dragging troglodyte could still vote a straight GOP ticket…    Thank goodness we have busted through that atavistic nightmare!   It is time for generational change!   It is time for Camelot!

We need a Camelot, and the world needs a Camelot, so let us celebrate and dream for a glorious moment!  Then let us get our feet back on the ground and realize that even Camelot is built on the torture dungeons of evil madmen.   We need to inject some realism into our progress, and ultimately to reject the notion of castles, of kings, and of peons.   If this election teaches us anything, it is that only a union of free individuals can defeat tyranny.  So let us stop thinking about top down solutions, and let us start to NETWORK!

Another legend is lost!  Only days after Studs Terkel, the mysterious singer Yma Sumac, self-described descendent of an Inca emperor, has passed away.   As described by Los Angeles Times music critic Don Heckman, she was “a living, breathing, Technicolor musical fantasy — a kaleidoscopic illusion of MGM exotica come to life in an era of practicality.”

Sumac’s absolutely unforgettable face, with a sort of smoldering sexuality, was matched only by her utterly bizarre vocal range, from growling jungle beast to piercing soprano, which she effortlessly projected into cheesey mambo arrangements.  The result is a sort of high-cheekboned Screaming Jay Hawkins shining down on us from a secret golden temple on Macchu Picchu.   Well, enjoy for yourselves a couple of tunes to remember the one and only Yma Sumac:

Goomba Boomba

Gopher

Studs Terkel, the great American historian, radio host, and defender of civil liberties, has died. His radio spot lasted 45 years, the entire second half of the 20th Century. His books gave voice to the voiceless, and he wrote the history of the lives that get lost between the lines of the rich and famous…the history of real people who work and struggle to makes ends meet. Terkel was as much a product of Chicago as Nelson Algren, and yet his works span the continent, embracing the breadth and width of the American Experience.

I actually had no idea who Terkel was until one day that I met him by accident at La Guardia Airport in New York City in the Winter of 1979. I was waiting for a flight to Albuquerque on a cold dark evening in December, typing up some notes on my old glass-keyed Royal portable typewriter. Studs came walking along the terminal and asked where I was going. I explained that I was going to visit my father during the winter break from college. After a few more words of idle chit-chat, Studs put down his bulging, beat up leather briefcase and asked me to watch it for him while he went to get a cup of hot tea. I said sure thing and after about fifteen minutes he came wandering back, blowing his nose in a handkerchief and breathing steam rising from a styrofoam cup. “Thanks a lot, kid,” Terkel said. “Terrible cold I got this trip.” I asked him where he was going back to, and he said Chicago. I told him I was from Chicago too, after which he introduced himself and we had a rambling conversation. When he got up to go to his gate, he said, “By the way, this bag you were watching has the manuscript of the new book I’m working on.” Then he thanked me again and went on his way. I sat back and thought, what an amazing man! He trusts his current book with a total stranger! And remember, this was back in 1979, when manuscripts were reams of paper, painstakingly typed, whited out, blue-penciled and stet-marked. But there it is…

Later on, I found out that the book he left with me was the draft copy of American Dreams: Lost and Found. And that’s how I got introduced to both the man and his work. Studs Terkel knew what it means to struggle and dream, and he trusted his fellow men and women to be able to comprehend their situation, to describe it in their own words, and to transcend their problems. Studs Terkel knew the meaning of trust, which is why we could always trust him to tell the truth.

Our first halloween in the new apartment passed quietly, with our household demon getting into the spirit of things by gritting a mini-Butterfinger bar in his pointy teeth. It sure is nice to be in Arlington, where we now walk to the station and see gorgeous foliage, like this tree near Alewife.

It is a great change from the increasingly noisy and idiotic event that has become halloween in Salem, where crowds numbering in the tens of thousands take over the downtown area and have a group “episode.” I knew that it was time to leave when the historic ambience of Salem, the classic architecture, the historic witchcraft trials, slowly morphed into a shlock horror carnival. How the hysteria surrounding false accusations got conflated with vampires, zombies, ghouls, slasher films, and black magic seems to be symptomatic of American culture. But it really goes too far when somebody felt compelled to open a Lizzie Borden Museum Store in Salem. Yes, at this fine emporium you can feed your prurient curiosity by purchasing framed portraits of the Borden family. Not your ordinary portraits, but ones that change from actual photographs to ghoulish skulls depending on the angle from which they are seen. Charming.   And what does the infamous axe murder case that took place in Fall River in 1892 have to do with Salem?  Hmm, gore, murder…and they are both in the same state, after all!   Well, adios Salem crowds…