Month: July 2003

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Shipwreck in the Black Sea, discovered by Robert Ballard and dated to the fifth century AD.

If I had to name the person with the most purely fascinating career of the last fifty years, I’d probably flip a coin between Carl Sagan and Robert Ballard. Ballard is most famous for finding shipwrecks, but he has also made great contributions to our understanding of undersea environments and the archeological bounty the seas hold.

The Black Sea is special because there is no free oxygen in its water below 200M, meaning that the wood-eating microorganisms that thus destroy wooden ships that sink in other seas and oceans are not found here; thus, sunken wooden vessels in the Black Sea can last much, much longer — thousands of years, in fact — than they would in any other sea. The Black Sea is also of interest because of its location and the possibility that it may have played a part in what eventually became the legend of Noah’s Flood, as well as the flood legends found in nearly every ancient culture.

Now, what I really want Ballard to find is Flight #19….

Also, Ballard gave CNN interview about the search for ships in the Black Sea.

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This week has seen many screenings of The Little Mermaid in our domicile. It’s decent, although it’s not my favorite Disney movie — to this day, it feels like a dress rehearsal for Beauty and the Beast, which was the next one they made and is still the high-point of Disney’s current “silver age”. The songs are the best thing about it, really. (And to this day I have a creepy association with Ursula the Sea Witch, who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the professors in my college’s music department while I was there.)

That’s all I have to say, really, about The Little Mermaid.

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ESPN’s tour of all the MLB ballparks today hits the granddaddy of the current retro-ballpark craze: Camden Yards.

It’s kind of too bad they’re not doing AAA ballparks as well, because Buffalo’s is a gem, even if it’s on its third name (Dunn Tire Park) since it opened (originally Pilot Field, than North AmeriCare Park).

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Oh, hell, as long as I’m on this big SDB kick, I recall a post of his from a few months back when he made fun of the Germans because they were proposing the taxation of brothels. (To be fair, his post seems more aimed at taxation-minded bureaucrats than at German taxation-minded bureaucrats.) Well, the idea had already come up….in Nevada.

(No, I don’t know why I remember that particular SDB post. It just stuck in my brain, for some reason.)

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While I’m talking about current political memes, there’s another one floating around the right-side of the politico-verse that’s starting to really bug me: it’s the idea that those of us on the left, failing to be properly impressed with the way things are going, are not seeing what’s obviously, objectively, and rationally true, but are instead actively hoping for bad things to happen because we think it will help us get Democrats elected next time out.

This is stupid, asinine, and obnoxious hogwash.

My belief that President Bush’s economic policies are not doing much to alleviate problems in the economy right now, and that they are further likely to cause some serious problems down the road, does not mean that I’m hoping the American economy stays in the toilet. (Yeah, I know, the recession has been declared “officially over” as of eighteen months or so ago. I don’t care. As long as the GDP grows but my own wallet shrinks, my own counsel will I keep on the state of the economy, to paraphrase Yoda.) Believe me, I’ll be happy as a pig in a dunghill if the economy generates nine million new jobs between today and next November.

And ditto on the war. I’m tired of seeing people who don’t think that things are going just swimmingly in Iraq being portrayed as irrational boobs. (SDB is getting pretty obnoxious on this front.) I’m not hoping that this war turns out to be a disaster, and I’m tired of seeing people I agree with being called “irrational”, “illogical”, “out to lunch”, or whatever other euphemism for “stupid” you can think of just because we happen to think that the WMD-rationale, and the lack of actual weapons, is important after all; that the looting of the Iraqi National Museum really did happen; that the continued guerilla actions constitute both a continuation of hostilities (despite what the President may have said in his Busby Berkeley-style photo op two months ago) and and indicative of a curious lack of planning on the part of the people in charge.

Just because I see plenty of potential for bad news does not imply that I want to see bad news, and I’d like it if conservatives would stop acting as though I (and people on my side of the fence) do.

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A common meme in American political discourse is that our country is divided sharply between the liberal, Democratic outposts of the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast, with virtually everything in the middle being solidly conservative Republican. This is commonly demonstrated by simply referring to the electoral map in the 2000 election:

But, the truth — as is always the case — is more complicated than that, and indicates that we’re not as split an electorate as some might insist. The 2002 election results, which resulted in a pretty even split in Congress despite the conventional wisdom that the Democrats suffered a massive bloodbath, bears this out. If you instead combine the percentages of “red” and “blue” — say, assigning 54% red and 46% blue to Ohio, just to make up an example off the top of my head — you end up with what Brad DeLong calls “a purple nation”. Check this out:

And, for Republicans who like to think that all that geographical space in their red area is impressive (or for Democrats who look at their tiny little blue area and suffer some kind of Freudian envy), there’s this map in which state size is represented by the number of electoral votes.

(Crossposted to Collaboratory.)

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Over on Collaboratory, we’ve stolen some game from MeFi or some such place where you simply go into the comments and use the last word of the last post as an anagram for the sentence of your new post. Got it?

Me either….but it makes for some funny-looking sentences. Join the fun. Or not.

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Dominion managed to really get under someone’s skin.

What I found funniest was that the guy who’s goat has been so thoroughly gotten by Dominion* can’t refrain from taking a lame, cheap shot at some hobby of Dominion’s that Dominion has never maintained was anything more than a fun hobby. Hilarious….imagine Howard Dean, debating President Bush in fall of 2004, saying something like, “Mr. Bush’s policies are terrible — and Mr. Bush can’t ride a Segway!” He’d be laughed off the stage.

*This may be the worst clause, in grammatical terms, that I have ever created.

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I recall an episode of MASH in which Klinger described one of his plots to convince the Army that he’s too crazy to stay in Korea: “I tried shooting off my own toe, but my foot won’t stand still.” Well, our civic leaders in Buffalo sure don’t have that problem. Sometimes I wonder if Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello spends his spare time painting bullseyes on his own feet for target practice, or perhaps placing rakes carefully around his home so that he steps on them and thus causes them to swing up and whack him in the nose. It sometimes seems this way.

As I’ve noted before, the Seneca Nation of Indians wants to open a casino in the Buffalo area (they already have on in Niagara Falls, thirty miles north). They were looking for a downtown location, but the one they wanted — Buffalo’s convention center — was taken off the table by the County Executive (Joel Giambra, a guy who vacillates between making really good decisions and really dumb ones), so this week the Senecas announced that they now preferred to put a casino not in downtown Buffalo but in the suburb of Cheektowaga, which happens to be the location of the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. This is a suburban location that actually makes sense, because there’s no way that a casino will spark the kind of economic development that is needed downtown, but it might give a boost to the slumping hotel market around the airport and spark the creation of a Metro-rail line* from downtown to the airport.

Well, Masiello and Giambra are so sold on the idea of a casino sparking development that now they’re suggesting Buffalo’s waterfront as a site.

Yup. That’s exactly what the waterfront needs: a self-contained casino where gamblers need never go outside to eat, drink, or anything else. That’s just the way to take advantage of Buffalo’s proximity to water.

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Many fantasy readers seriously dislike Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This ongoing saga, whose shortest volume is 650 pages, now tips the scales at ten volumes, with no end remotely in sight. I sort of liked the first book, but then I stopped about 150 pages into the second, because I’m not that fast of a reader and I simply didn’t want to invest the time in what I knew to be a gargantuan series.

But this person hates The Wheel of Time. I mean, he really hates it.

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