One Man's Meat

As the world population balloons blithely towards seven billion people, one of us is missing and presumed eaten. A German tourist (by now a redundant expression like 'round circle') has disappeared in the bush of Nuku Hiva, a large island in the South Pacific archipelagoes. The chap was reported lost by his female traveling companion, taken off on a goat hunt by a resident guide who returned without him, attempted to lure the lady into the brush on a search for her "injured" mate, and then attempted to molest her credulity further by tying her to a tree and making some suggestions which did not invite a broad interpretation.

 The Preprandial Tourist

Searchers have found recently charred human remains, including teeth, bones, jaw and skull fragments and what appear to be melted dental fillings scattered around an extinguished fire. Both local authorities and French police are searching for local tribal people, many of whom had noticeably left before the dessert course. According to one "newsiness" source, "The tribe suspected of killing and eating Mr Ramin had claimed they gave up cannibalism years ago. Local authorities are investigating but it remains unclear if any tribesmen have been held, or even found."

It would naturally be unconvincing to merely deny having enjoyed Mr. Ramin at all (as if they might have stood accused of a mere dietary lapse or a hankering for a seasonal specialty). No, the times demand that the practice itself be soundly repudiated. The current age also demands that French and Nuku Hivan authorities, wherever their personal proclivities may tend, concertedly launch a furious and outraged search for the absconded dinner party.

"Not me, Doc - can't stand tourists."

In this age of "individual rights" it is natural to suppose that we all have the right to travel freely and unmolested wherever the wind or democratic fancy might take us. In our saner moments, we (especially Americans) understand that this isn't the case. But it's easy to think that Siemens and ExxonMobil and Mitsubishi and Tata and Suzlon and Nissan have not only tamed the globe but that they own it and obligingly invite us to burn their gasoline in their automobiles and airplanes to enjoy the usufructs of their civilizing global omnipresence.

Without diminishing the gravity of murdering - or, more charitably, eating - an innocent traveler, the world is not yet like that. It seems to make a difference that the German was probably eaten, but why should it, really? Had this happened in, say, the United States (saving Texas, Utah or Nevada), it would be a clear case of psychotic aberration. But we Amero-European naifs can still stray beyond the pale of "civilized" humanity into old and "unaccustomed" customs, into places of the globe where (unbeknownst to us) we had no business being in the first place - places like Afghanistan where, though we may not be eaten outright, we might be converted to a godless Islam or shot on sight. We know better than to walk through the Hindu Kush these days, but how much else do we know? Dead is dead, whatever the state of the corpus delicti. Other cultures, not so distant from our own, already know this vaguely.

(They can't remember how Captain Cook tasted)

The "global" economy is one of our fondest myths. Even to call the act a murder is to presume that our own "developed" moral code has suffused the globe and made it a finer thing than it was at the creation. Had the poor sod not (by all appearances) been a group barbecue it would have been just the murder or disappearance of a luckless traveller, the usual Muslim terrorist cells would have been under heightened suspicion for a week, a foreign minister would have expressed condolences, and that would have been the end of the affair.

But, presuming he's been eaten, the moral abhorrence is palpable. Whatever for? Most of what human beings have done over the last, say, six or seven or eleven millennia was never dictated by some theory of "free market forces" nor by some Judaeo-Christian proscriptions about what's fit to eat, nor (mirabile dictu) by any "global" economic considerations such as fostering a "robust tourism industry" or "encouraging World Bank participation through the good faith removal of economic barriers." But it's still the case that large cultural tracts on the globe owe Western capitalism no moral debt whatsoever. Quite the contrary.

An ancient culture still rules in many places, mainly because culture is an evolutionary mechanism that still bonds us. Talk about "economic barriers to development." Maybe we still need some faint gasps of cultural individuality (maybe not cannibalism, but . . . ). It once fused us into survival groups (however murderous we were). Granted that survival is, for roughly two-thirds of the globe's population (so far), not an immediate issue; granted that lots of those old cultural adaptations may be a bit outdated or irrelevant to modern survival.

Nonetheless, custom dies hard. Adaptive behavior is not abandoned merely because it is no longer necessary - if that were the case, who in the hell would willingly eat a turkey at Thanksgiving?

(Which ones just smoked some weed before dinner?)

No, much of what humans do and persist in doing beggars the economist, the global market theorist, the theologian, the aid worker and the missionary. Take them all in all, human beings are a tough lot. Too bad more of us aren't a hard sell.

Critic's Notebook: 'The Wrong End of a Woman'

"Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong . . . . Right end of a woman! — I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon!"

    - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XXXII)

In the age of social networks, when women stream live videos of their home deliveries on Facebook, share sonograms, breast feeding tips and cervical dilation data to the millimeter (mm), it's entirely likely that you may happen upon the "wrong end of a woman" while surfing the Internet or the wilderness that is cable. Marni Kotak has just upped the ante for overshare. Kotak is a performance artist who intends to give birth before an audience on the stage of a Brooklyn art museum. 

(Probably should have had it in the woods)

I have no particular difficulties with this intended act of public spawning - after all, it seemed an inevitability, given our cultural impetus towards the sort of personal "transparency" that too often collapses into vapidity. And you can attend or not, depending on your interest and whether the event corresponds with one of the lacunae on your astrological, lunar or standard (Gregorian) social calendar. If it turns out that you can make it, I'm sure it was meant to be.

Her motives, whether narcissistic or gender-empowering, don't pique my interest so much as her rationale for choosing to make the birth a public spectacle. It is, she claims, an artistic moment: “Giving birth is the most direct expression of the creative life force, and, therefore, the highest form of art. By giving birth in public as a work of performance art, I am making the statement that everyday life is art, just as it is.”

These two sentences bear some scrutiny, the first being incomprehensible and the second being just wrongheaded. For starters, the idea of a "creative life force" has the ring of profundity and spiritual gravitas that masks its lack of any sense. It's fun to confer ontological ballast onto our grand words and overheated phrases, but aside from a world of living breathing creatures all capable of doing animal things like procreating, we'd look long and hard for something else besides - a "life force" driving all these acts of creation here in the sublunar dirt. As though one were to watch all the whirls and frolics of a dancing child and then wonder, "But where's its 'dance'?"

Furthermore, "Everyday life" is not art - it's what the garbageman does while riding the garbage truck, what the clerk at the convenience store does while ringing up your corndog, what the janitor does when the office has cleared out for the day. I'm not saying these things can't be done artfully, with a certain individual panache, with a sense of style or flair or joie de vivre or personal elegance, but they're just not art. Even things that can be done artistically, like applying makeup or dressing store windows or hanging draperies, aren't art - to claim that they are is to allow too broadly, to permit that even the cheesy drapings of the workmanlike Christo comprise art, which is plausibly open to dispute.

Art about art

Art, even "realist" art, necessarily involves artifice. It can represent the world as it appears, someone's perception of the world, a sentiment about the world. Art is intentional in the sense that artistic works necessarily have an object (even if no more substantial than a psychic state) - something beyond the artistic object which gets expressed in some act of representation. It's also intentional in the sense that it's deliberate. Giving birth (beyond some indefinite point at which natural process is no longer choice) becomes biological inevitability, neither intentional nor unintentional. (This has no bearing on whether an "artist's intentions" are relevant to judging a work.)

But giving birth in public is just giving birth in public - just that and no more. It isn't the "direct expression" of anything at all - no more than a phallus is a "phallic symbol." It may be wonderful for all concerned, but it isn't a "performance" of something else, it neither expresses nor represents something beyond itself nor transcends everyday living to say anything about anything.

Art about life

In short, everyday living isn't art, and childbirth is part of everyday living for many of us carbon-based types. A counterexample here may be both helpful and fun. Suppose that some "artist," humbly obscure or otherwise, decides that his loo is now his studio, and begins to take commissions on his output. Does that make him an artist? or transform his performance of an everyday and inevitable function, however beneficial to himself or advantageous to the larger society, into "Art"? 

 

The answer by now should be at least as clear as mud.

'Jump (me)', She Said

The Federal Aviation Administration, wielding the truncheon of its air safety mandate, is investigating a porn star and an office receptionist for jumping one another on video while jumping one another from an airplane over the clear California skies. In this radical reinterpretation of "air traffic control," mid-air sexual congress initiated in a light plane may now trump the FAA's broader, more traditional and more costly congressional mandate to insure the safety of large commercial airline traffic.

 "Where, exactly?"

Alex Torres, a French Canadian porn star who goes by the nom de pecquer "Voodoo" and who (until the other day) moonlighted at Skydive Taft as a weekend jump instructor, took off with Taft receptionist Hope Howell for a tandem jump. Evidently the pair were accompanied out the bomb bay and into the empyrean by a videographer, who caught the in-cabin commencement, the in-flight consummation and the post-landing cigarette. (The only other "French Canadian porn star" would be Michael Palin doing the "Lumberjack Song.")

The video went viral until Torres removed it from the Internet, quickly realizing that media saturation could weaken any leverage he might have with "The Howard Stern Show," which was the apparent motive for doing the thing in the first place. (Howard: you can watch it uncensored right here.)

Probably for having attracted FAA scrutiny, Torres was dismissed from his employment, as was Howell who, clearly oblivious of any double entendre in the expression of her sentiments, told a reporter that she "got a phone call saying I was fired, and I feel like that was a stab in my back." I suppose she could have said, though only slightly more felicitously, that she felt let down.

Another blogger has remarked that, "The FAA’s reported involvement is based on the fact that any activity that could potentially distract the plane’s pilot is off-limits. No criminal charges are pending, and there is no suggestion that the pilot actually was distracted."

Arguably, a porn star who can't distract a pilot whilst in flagrante delicto may be on a descending career arc in more than one sense. On the other hand, those pilots have seen pretty much everything.

Poker With Aliens

In a recent New York Times column (The Stone, October 5, 2011), the author wonders whether, on the chance that they should arrive here, "Will the aliens be nice?"  He concludes that the prospect is not a neutral one and that its fascination may well be outweighed by its downside: "[F]or the foreseeable future, contact with [extraterrestrial intelligence] would have to result from their coming here, which would in all likelihood mean that they far surpassed us technologically. They would be able to enslave us, hunt us as prey, torture us as objects of scientific experiments, or even exterminate us and leave no trace of our civilization."

"Can't I just keep one?"

In short, earthlings might realize the worst of possible worlds - the aliens might be just like humans. Which raises the further question whether the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is worthwhile and desirable as scientific inquiry, merely neutral, or entirely imprudent. "Since we have no way of predicting with any certainty the outcome of such contact, it might seem that we have no reason to assume a bad rather than a good result.  From this we might conclude that there is no objection to pursuing SETI, if only to satisfy our curiosity."

The calculation, then, becomes a sort of reverse Pascal's Wager: if some course of action might produce a greater benefit than merely a neutral state of affairs, or (at worst) a sustainable disadvantage, it seems reasonable to pursue that course of action. For example, the invading (visiting?) aliens might bring a peaceful world order, technological wizardry to clean the environment, reverse climate change and prevent thermonuclear holocaust. But "they might . . . give us each thousands of years of excruciatingly painful existence as their slaves. This might not even be due to moral perversity; they might be so beyond us that they were incapable of recognizing us as objects of moral concern." They might, in other words, behave like we would.

Pascal's Wager assumes that there's no downside if you choose the course of action that might (or might not) result in the optimal outcome, while failing to do anything might (or might not) result in the worst possible outcome. It's not a choice in which the consequences are symmetrical. In the case of aliens, however, there will be an outcome whatever we choose to do, and it stands an equal chance of being good or terrible. So any continuing attempt to contact extraterrestrial intelligent life arguably has no benefit for us. Chances are equal that aliens could either save us, annihilate us, or just enslave us. And the choice will be theirs, not ours. Who would stay in the hand and ask for more cards, given those odds?

 

There's another possibility, of course: they might also be cloyingly nice and bring us the best of their advanced civilization, things like small dogs for pets, air freshener, processed "space food" . . .

. . . distributed-risk bundled financial instruments and the One True Religion. Still want to play?

Knucklehead Ranch

Does owning a hunting camp called "Niggerhead Ranch" make you a redneck? Absolutely. A racist? Not necessarily. No more, probably, than climbing Squaw's Tit (Alberta, CA) might qualify you as a groper, or running a jet ski across South Dakota's Squaw Humper Dam or casting a worm into Little Squaw Humper Creek would make you a wenching, antifeminist misogynist (although casting one's worm anywhere these days could . . . never mind).

Owning a scrubgrass rattlesnake ranch called "Niggerhead," however, does make you a . . .

 Knucklehead

. . . unless, of course, you've only ever invited select fellow "lawmakers" to join you there. (Lawmakers are like neighbors who all own barking dogs - none will ever complain about the excesses of the others' dogs.)

A recent article in Slate points out that, "The U.S. Board on Geographic Names . . . issued two blanket rules decades ago to erase racial slurs from federal maps. In 1962, they replaced “Nigger” with “Negro” in the names of at least 174 places. You can still find such locales as Free Negro Point in Louisiana and Little Negro Creek." Of course, one is free to translate into the regional dialect - as you might expect, federal cartographic standards do not always apply locally. And then you can always find those little cartographic obscurae on private property, Rancho Cabo de Negro a case in point.

Some "liberal pundit from Guvuner Perry's home state" (not an oxymoron, apparently) on one of the left-leaning talk shows pointed out, quite reasonably, that there is a good deal of "residual racism" in this country and that a place name for example, particularly of a place that's been in a family for decades, can escape notice as much from familiarity as from insensitivity or racism. I'm guessing that's the case with Guvuner Perry, although the subsequent song-and-dance about the offending piece of rock having been painted over sometime just after the last Ice Age is predictable, lame, and strains credulity. One does not strain to imagine the sort of guest generally in attendance chez Domaine de la Tete Noir . . . 

"Oh, dwat! Pwugged one before Wamadan."

. . . as opposed to others generally pas invitee . . . 

College educated hunting party, Cornell University, 1969

So think of it this way: does owning a hunting camp called "Niggerhead" make you a knucklehead? Well, does naming your first-born "Dalejunior" make you a redneck?  

"Dalejunior"

Does Elmer Fudd have trouble with the letter 'R'?

"Happy Wamadan, Wick!"

Did John Wayne make movies?

Does Herman Cain know who's his Daddy?

Can you see Wasilla all the way from Russia?

So far, not so good. It may take the Supreme Court to bag this election. Guaranteed 5-4, just say the word.

I Left My Schmuck in San Francisco

Sometimes it's hard for a girl to know what to wear. Or how much to wear. Whether it's dressing to stay out of trouble in Salah ud-Din . . .

. . . or to get into it in San Francisco . . .

. . . there can be so many choices to make. Spangles . . . or tassels? Choker . . . or necklace? Fan . . . or lorgnette? And which earrings? Clothing is a luxury for much of the world, worrying about which clothing even more of a luxury.

Except in San Francisco, where horns are locked, swords are drawn, cudgels taken up (all pointy, metaphorical things, of course) in defense of what not to wear. The supreme luxury, in questions sartorial, is that delicate frisson, the pique of feeling put upon when a paternalistic city, like a distant father, dictates that if you're going to go about nude (which is in accordance with municipal law) then you must seat yourself on a towel "or other material" when using public seating. Well really, dear.

A San Francisco city supervisor with the infinitely freighted name of Scott Wiener has proposed a city ordinance forbidding nudity in restaurants and "requir[ing] unclad people to put a towel or other material down before sitting bare-bottomed on benches or other public seats." The response was immediate. The San Francisco Bay Guardian printed a helpful recyclable tear-out in a recent issue to enable easy compliance with the proposed Wiener ordinance (or, "Wiener's proposed ordinance," if you prefer).

San Francisco being a hotbed of militant older men, other responses were more predictable. In the storied Castro District, a smallish crowd of naked protestors shoaled up like a pod of sunburned walruses in a damp autumn fog last Saturday to protest the ordinance, which most considered unnecessary since most already complied with the spirit of the law. The "Nude-In," as one might expect, did not draw the flower of the masculine populace (or would the opposite of "distaff" be "mastiff"? Someone please look it up and let me know.) And for my money, walking around naked in a September fog in San Francisco seems more like a hard-nippled, clasped-arms way of making a point (see photo) than "celebrating the freedom of the body" or whatever similar rationale floated in that rarified, post-D.H. Lawrence coastal air.

One lady who brought some out-of-town visitors for this Only-in-San-Francisco Moment asked the question on everyone's lips, “Where are the supermodel types? We want to know why it’s always the people who should not be naked who get naked.” (Not even to mention what chilly air will do for your shwanz.)

 

"If we're all wearing shoulder bags, does that count as naked?"

I've never actually spent much time in the "City By the Bay," but I'm told that this sort of thing is pretty serious business there. The aristocracy of that city take a pretty hard "Don't Tread On Me" stance when it comes to what they will or won't do - whether in personal fashion, political leanings, religious convictions, window treatments - which I understand all come to pretty much the same thing on the West Coast.

". . . and that goes for my Dorothy Draper chintz valances."

The case could be made that they have a point. It takes only a nominal prudence and foresight to carry something to sit on when in public, considering that it's a good deal simpler to remove, say, a wad of someone else's chewing gum from a towel than it is to ask even the dearest of friends their assistance in divesting your mechanically inaccessible parts of the same.

But the lady asked an important question. Why is it that the only people one ever hears about going stark naked are men in whom all the gristle is gone, men who should probably be wearing something . . .  

I actually have a theory about that. I think it's guys about my age who grew up in those crazy Eisenhower Years. 

"Wanna get naked, kid?"

UPDATE: TROUBLE IN PARADISE   

from The Guardian, November 20, 2012

Nudists vow to defy anti-nudity law in San Francisco

San Francisco nudists said on Monday they would continue to walk the streets naked regardless of a proposed law that would order them to cover up.

City authorities are meeting on Tuesday to decide on a new anti-nudity law that is being supported by residents and business owners in the city’s Castro district.

Nudists (in bathrobes)

The law would make it an offence for anyone over the age of five to “expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza”.

Lloyd Fishbach, left, who was standing naked at the corner of Castro and Market, said it should be his choice to dress as he wants, where he wants.

“There is always someone who is not going to like what you are doing,” he said. “I live in the Castro and I’ve been doing this since first grade. This is just a bunch of uptight Americans. But I’ll still keep doing it and if I see the cops coming I will run and hide.”

'A Kind of Wild Justice'

Like most capital cases, the recent execution of Troy Davis has polarized people along political lines, the liberal left finding reasonable grounds for a stay of the sentence, the hard right suddenly become uncharacteristically sensitive to the emotions of real middle class people - the victim's family - chronicling their horrific "ordeal" and their need for "closure."

A couple of things interest me in the after-chatter about this sad episode. First (and not to minimize the sufferings of the McPhails over more than two decades), the idea that a human being ought to be executed so that a family can have "closure." Closure is available upon the execution of any number of innocent people, so long as the victim's family is convinced the culprit is actually in custody. But the idea that "closure" is somehow a right or a basic human necessity seems wrongheaded.

Closure is one of those 20th-century notions lifted from the psychobabble promoted by the psychotherapy industry as 1) a right or necessity every healthy person must attain following any sort of trauma whatsoever, and 2) a handy notional benchmark whereby the clinical practitioner can demonstrably claim to have earned $175 per hour. "Closure" may have a place in a therapist's womb-like office (you might need to come to terms with the fact that that snazzy used '94 Coupe de Ville you just bought has been repossessed, or your mother-in-law poisoned the family cat, or you didn't get laid on your vacation).

But closure is a psychic luxury. You can pay $175 per hour for it, but it has no corresponding place in the judicial system, particularly when lives hang in the balance and it becomes just one more reason to lethally inject a person who may or may not have done something. Closure, in a court of law, is a pseudo-scientific, basely sentimental pretext for revenge. It is for just this reason that a victim's friends, family members or creditors are not acceptable as members of any jury trying their case.

The second thing I find noteworthy is the religious fealty the right wing blindly places in a governmental justice system - Government, "the Beast," the Great Evil - broken and pernicious in every way except when a state sets its sights on some poor bastard who's become the overnight darling of the liberal left. "Why," asks one blogger, "do liberals have a soft spot for cop killers like Troy Davis?"

"Liberals," he continues, "don’t like the death penalty; so they are desperate to find proof that innocent men have been executed . . . . In truth, even if an innocent man were executed, it wouldn’t change anything. We already have a system that’s slanted in favor of the defendants in criminal trials and heavily against the death penalty." Apparently the rules of evidence are a liberal problem that can be overcome with a central government strong  enough to slant the system so that capital defendants are expeditiously slid off the tilt?

But mark this - "even if an innocent man were executed, it wouldn’t change anything." In fact, notwithstanding the implication to the contrary, innocent people have been executed, will be executed in future, and certainly nothing has changed. Not yet, in any case. Troy Davis's life may be a breach in that particular wall of idiocy.

A blogger on Tea Party Nation testifies his own fervent zeal for government mandated executions: "Troy Davis was on death row for twenty years. He was given a trial by a jury of his peers and then had countless opportunities to relitigate his death penalty. The justice system was not broken."

Ah, not so fast, Bubba: "On second thought, may be it was. For twenty years, he sat on death row while Mark McPhail’s family had to endure all of the appeals. Perhaps the question we should be asking is why does it take twenty years and an untold amount of taxpayer money for justice to be delivered?" So in the end it all comes back to the same old hymn: the government spent "an untold amount of taxpayer money" and very nearly screwed it up.

"The justice system was not broken." That a government has never erred when meting out capital punishment belies a zealous faith in those very circles that decry the ineptitude, the growth, the inefficiency, the corruption, the godless liberal secularism, the constitutional overreaching they see in every aspect of "Government." Due diligence be damned, they tell us, it only costs taxpayers more money and the government will get it right in any case.

But without due diligence about the evidence, all we have is "the need for closure." Without it, there is only revenge, "a kind of wild justice." The purpose of a system of laws is to enact justice, not to offer psychic healing to the bereaved. In all of this sorry episode, the legal fiction of the "reasonable person" has remained just a fiction.

Down Around Our Heads (update)

I was driving through the post-Rapture landscape of western Kansas yesterday along a two-lane blacktop, scarcely another truck passing me for mile upon mile beneath an unblemished sky, lost in the comforting miasma of my own profound thoughts, when off in the blue middle distance beyond my bug-soiled windscreen something brilliant incandesced into the far horizon like a P-51 into a grandstand, trailing an instantaneous silver wake. It flashed and was gone in an instant - an enormous meteor, the Second Coming, a manifestation of the Evil One - I had no clue what I'd just seen. I'd never heard of a meteor sighted in broad daylight but I couldn't think what else it could plausibly be. I like to think I might have been the only person in the world to have seen it. It was brilliant, hot and instantaneous.

No, not like that.

In fact, meteors in broad daylight are occasionally reported, although as this site chronicles daytime sightings in Texas and Kentucky, I would normally be inclined to remain skeptical since the cognoscenti all insist the Rapture will come to Texas first. Then Kentucky, probably.

Jesus: The Tortilla ("Jesus, the tortilla!")

But I saw something on the Kansas horizon yesterday and it seems that the only plausible explanation could be a meteorite. Well, it seemed yesterday the only plausible explanation - until I spotted this headline in the New York Times (my daily paper, as you may have surmised): "Falling Satellite Could Land in U.S."

Even Miguel can put dos y dos together.  Apparently, even after NASA lost most of its funding there are still six tons of malfunctioning NASA hardware loose inside the earth's orbit and on their way down - "Falling Satellite Could End Where It Began, NASA Says," reads the sub-head inside the Times site, proffering a textbook example of retributive justice if ever there were a fair exchange of eyeballs. "Where it began" would be presumably somewhere in Florida. I could probably live with the horrible consequences of that. NASA officials expect "re-entry" late today or early tomorrow. "Re-entry" is another way of saying that "At least 26 pieces, the largest 330 pounds, are expected to survive the plunge and land along a path 500 miles long."

Let's be honest - none of us has a clue as to what the hell is going on in outer space. We have no idea how many people are floating around up there "manning" some contraption or other.

(Has digital images of you in Under Armour.)

We have no idea how many Chinese or American or Pakistani or Iranian space launches have sailed off over our unsuspecting heads, manufactured to less than exacting standards by impoverished workers unprotected by OSHA labor standards under conditions the EPA could never sanction, a payload waiting only to plummet into your basement and destroy your crop of hydroponic medical marijuana ("No! - it's organic arugula.")

 Iranian space probe

Not to mention private companies sending their own junk into space. The Times report concludes that "About one satellite five metric tons or larger re-enters the atmosphere every year. For example, on a test flight of its Falcon 9 rocket (see photo) in June 2010, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation placed the second stage and a prototype capsule into orbit. That object . . . came crashing back to Earth two and a half weeks later without causing a media ripple." 

Corporate returns

Public indifference to a rain of potentially lethal metal on our heads is disturbing. But what other response makes sense under the circumstances? The prospect invites the same sort of fatalism one might expect on learning that the stock exchange has just eaten your retirement fund or the FBI has been intercepting your cell phone calls or you got a computer virus from downloading porn or the Koch Brothers will be mining coal in your back yard. What can you do but shrug, turn up your collar, and mutter self-referentially, "Poor bastard." Not a long term solution, to be sure.

For my own part, I couldn't care less. I've been too busy watching the Republican candidates in foro, debating the finer policy points of the End Time. Some days, the Rapture just can't come soon enough. The Long Term Solution, I like to call it.

"Back from Outer Space"

Update 10/22/2011:  from The Daily Beast 

German Telescope Will Fall to Earth

Didn't we just do this? A two-ton German space telescope will crash back to earth today or tomorrow, but scientists can't determine where it will land. The satellite, launched in 1990, will likely break up into 30 or so pieces as it goes through the atmosphere. The largest single piece, the telescope's mirror, is heat resistant and weighs about 1.7 tons. It comes just weeks after NASA's six-ton UARS satellite crashed back to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean. NASA was unable to predict where UARS would land, but the odds of it hitting a populated area were infinitesimal.

Name It, You Can Have It

[My father's] opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct. . . . How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many. . .who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus’d into nothing?

   - Laurence Sterne, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent." (Bk.I, ch. XIX)

The sports section in yesterday's New York Times features a reflection on Ted Williams's 70-year-old record .406 batting average, a neat tribute to Williams's prowess as "baseball’s greatest hitter." 

The Swing

What caught my attention, however, was this: "His batting average stood at .39955 with a season-finale doubleheader to be played the next day [Sept. 28, 1941] at Shibe Park, home of Connie Mack’s Athletics." That particular sentence stood out because, driving home through Denver a day or so earlier, I passed by Sports Authority Field, formerly Invesco Field, the home stadium of the Denver Broncos. (Sports Authority, since there's no way for most people to know this bit of trivia, is a Denver-based chain of sporting goods stores which purchased the naming rights to the stadium last month in a 25-year deal at $6 million per annum. Obviously, Invesco needed the dough in these troubled economic times.)

Where is this?

Anyway, reading this sentence, the name "Shibe Park" came back through the mists of a half-century, a nerdy kid glued to the radio listening to Yankees or Dodgers or Giants baseball games. Everyone in those palmier days knew where Ebbetts Field or the Polo Grounds were, and which teams played where. Comiskey Park and Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and Forbes Field, Briggs Stadium - the names of the venues went with the names of the teams. Some were obvious - the Indians played in Cleveland Stadium. 

But who on earth plays at Progressive Field? Or MetLife Stadium? The Packers still play at Lambeau Field in Green Bay - but who plays at M&T Bank Stadium? The 49ers play in Candlestick Park. Who plays in Qualcomm Stadium? Even a casual fan can probably tell you who plays at Soldier Field ("da Bears") or Coors Field. But Safeco Field? PETCO Park?

 Soldier Field (with classical neo-fascist facade) 

Admittedly, corporate sponsorship is nothing new. . .

"It's your coliseum, Boss . . . "

But - and not wishing to belabor the point - on the time-honored premise that sport is a metaphor for life, I've come up with a few of my own ideas for naming opportunities. I suspect these have already occurred to someone, but try them on and roll them around on your tongue.

 . . . the Frito Lay/Toys-R-Us 112th Legislative Session of the State of Texas

. . . the Nabisco/Hellman's Real Mayonnaise Presidential Bodyguards

. . . the Budget Rent-a-Car/QuickLube Presidential Motorcade

The high-stakes sponsorships, of course, are already taken.

The Koch Industries/Time-Warner-Disney Supreme Court of the U.S.

 The Cargill/ADM Senate of the United States

The Goldman Sachs Chair of the Federal Reserve

No, I'm not even going to think about it. Could never happen . . . .

Summer in Kansas: Turtles All the Way Down

Consider the humble box turtle, Terrapene ornata ornata, a smallish reptile of the Great American Desert, a hapless creature prone to wander from the concealing roadside grasses onto highways.

Turtles are generally modest creatures, not given to bouts of ill temper, never petulant or neurotic, neither skulkers nor biters, never (like a gang of raccoons) strewing the contents of your trash can across a driveway like an FAA crash team reassembling airliner debris.

For all of these reasons, whenever I spot a box turtle wandering slowly across a stretch of Kansas highway, I pull over, walk back to the spot, remove the turtle to the grassy verges of the road, and aim it into the middle distance before I go on. I've found them, snub noses bloodied from a sidewall but still serviceable, stunned but able to churn their slow way into the neighboring ditch, or nonplussed by the quick whirr of tires around them. But then, turtles always appear haplessly nonplussed, somehow deserving of our basic sympathy and succor.

From 50 feet away at 65 mph, they're hard to spot on the roadway, bearing as they do an unfortunate resemblance to a dislodged chunk of pavement. Which of course reduces their chances of surviving the crossing. So it was, the other afternoon, coming along a country road that I did a U-turn to go back and retrieve one of my fellow creatures from an awful fate. The traffic was uncharacteristically heavy just at the moment and as I stood on the roadside, waiting for the last cars to pass so I could venture over on foot to retrieve the turtle, there was the predictable sound from beneath the final car, like a tire running over a full can of Bud Light. 

The irony of the situation was thick - me standing at the side of the road bent on a quick act of mercy, a whole line of autos save the very last missing the little critter, and in a moment my chances for kharmic enhancement and his chances in general erased before my eyes. In the heat of my chagrin I was perhaps ungenerous - it may not have been a moment of deliberate malevolence. Still, I can only hope that his own terrapine kharma may someday return the selfsame turtle to us as a right honorable Senator.

Terrapene ornata ornata (washingtonensis)

I'm not certain what it means to say that "life is sacred." I don't suppose a turtle's life is any more or less sacred than my own. I think all it can mean is that being human and self aware, we all take a particular interest in our own lives and, by extension, in the lives of those near to us and to all those who resemble us specifically, and perhaps by a further extension (in minds capable of extending themselves) to sentient, living creatures in general. Given a world of flourishing living things, it seems only a natural sentiment to wish them continuance, health, pleasure and a prosperity after their own kind. So long as a deer remains out of my immediate trajectory, or a raccoon out of my garbage can, or a skunk out of my parlor, I can wish them well and am to that extent able to consider their lives sacred.

Turtles, of course, are a special case, holding as they do a special place in our cosmology. The earth, it is thought, rests on the back of a great turtle, who presumably rests on the back of a fellow, and so on ad infinitum or ad absurdum (your choice).

The Infinite Turtle Regress

Hume remarks (somewhere) that this sympathy is based on resemblance - our sympathies are strongest for those of our own kind most familiar to us, related by blood or daily commerce or community; that it dwindles as our relations become more remote, or as our physical resemblance lessens, or in a degree as our species differs. So I may be elated to meet a fellow English speaker in the reaches of Outer Mongolia; and perhaps equally elated to encounter a fellow living creature such as a crustacean, were we both stranded on Mars. (A situation, you may have perceived, not unlike encountering a benign reptile in western Kansas.)

"Whither away shall I today -
Miami, Milwaukee, or Mandalay?"

It is for this reason I can regret the turtle's demise but clean the grasshoppers from my windscreen with resignation rather than regret. Many other creatures could never engage my sympathy - even on Mars. 

 Eric Cantor