The average male model in this country is between 5 foot 11 and 6 foot 2 and weighs 140-165 pounds. That gives him a body mass index (BMI) of about 20, right in the middle of the normal range (18.5�24.9). Most tall, fit men fall into this range. An attractive man is a healthy man.
I knew that wasn't true for women, but I didn't realize how bad things have gotten until I did some figuring myself. Keep in mind that a BMI of less than 18.5 means you're undernourished, according to the World Health Organization:
- Average American woman: 26.5
- Average Playboy centerfold (1990s): 18.2
- Thinnest Miss America (1986): 16.9
- Average female model: 16.8
(I couldn't calculate a BMI for Barbie, since she's made of plastic, but if she were as tall as the average American woman she'd have an 18-inch waist and DDD breasts. To pull that off I think you'd have to be made of plastic.)
This is not just unreasonable, it's downright crazy. Evolutionary biologists would say that men are looking for signs of health and reproductive fitness; obviously a starving woman has neither of those. But the trend is continuing: Miss Americas have been getting steadily skinnier since 1922. Where's it gonna end?
|W|P|110173156241018892|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDeaths of selected Burmese kings:
- Uzana (1254): Trampled to death by an elephant
- Minrekyawswa (1417): Crushed to death by an elephant
- Razadarit (1423): Died while lassoing elephants
- Tabinshweti (1551): Beheaded while searching for an elephant
Draw your own conclusions.
|W|P|110086808687457887|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSomeone's started a Wikinews demo. Full points for effort, but I think Wikipedia's current events page might have a more manageable scope.
|W|P|110176142984896769|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The weakest part of any comedian's act is the first 10 seconds. "Hey, how's everybody doing? It's great to be back in New York. Man, I'm so mad at my girlfriend ..." Wait a minute, who are you and why are you talking to me?
The basic trouble is that comedy works only when it appears spontaneous. Standup comedy is basically good-natured complaining, so the comic has to pretend a familiar relationship with the audience, even though he doesn't have one.
That's a problem both onstage and off. In addition to performing, a working comic has to do media appearances—radio shows and newspaper interviews—and he has to appear funny in the moment. He can't just say, "Look, I'm not a good improviser, but I've written a really strong set and I've refined the performance on the road. Audiences really like the act." Any musician could say that and be taken seriously, but a comic would look bad or unprofessional.
So, desperate to appear witty, a lot of comics revert to old material, trying to pass off stage-tested material as offhand banter. Here's Patton Oswalt doing an old bit about zombies while promoting his upcoming special on Comedy Central. It's funny, but he's forced into pretending it's spontaneous, and that bothers me. It's a shame, and ironic, because his actual delivery onstage is beautifully genuine.
Anyway, watch the special, December 5 at 10. He's worth it.
|W|P|110166414641826090|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: 'Macintosh—We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'"—Douglas Adams
|W|P|110169775548460387|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," said Woody Allen. "I want to achieve it through not dying."
Yesterday I tried out four different life expectancy calculators—from a life insurance company (Northwestern Mutual), a state pension bureau (Minnesota), Microsoft's Money site, and a study of centenarians (Boston University).
My results ranged from 77 to 95, averaging 87. Generally I'm in good shape: I don't drink, smoke or do drugs; I eat right and exercise; and I chose the right parents. But I learned some interesting things:
- The pension bureau actually penalizes you for making money and getting a lot of sleep. If you make $60,000 a year, you'll die 2 years ahead of schedule. And if you get more than 10 hours of sleep a night, you'll lose 4 years of life.
- All these calculators ask about driving habits—moving violations, DWI, and seat belts. Auto accidents are the top cause of death for Americans ages 6-27.
- Also, apparently you shouldn't eat charred foods (carcinogens) or live alone—a lot of people who reach the century mark have had lots of contact with extended family.
Overall, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the top three causes of death in 2001 were heart disease, cancer, and stroke, and I've pretty much minimized my chance of any of those. At this point, the single most effective thing I could do is become a woman—that alone would give me another 10 years. I just don't think I could walk in heels.
|W|P|110149105948961482|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA samurai once asked Zen master Hakuin where he would go after he died. Hakuin answered, "How am I supposed to know?"
"How do you know? You're a Zen master!" exclaimed the samurai.
"Yes, but not a dead one," Hakuin answered.
|W|P|110161305803684981|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEBay may be America's garage sale, but parts of it are creepier than your Uncle Lester's basement. In the past month, people have offered:
- a squirrel skeleton ("not gross or smelly or wet in any way")
- a "silicone gel breast implant paperweight"
- a Mr. Spock hand-painted toilet seat
- a George Bush garden gnome
- a 50-year-old pack of chewing gum
These are dragged into the daylight and arranged in a disturbing new site called Who Would Buy That?
Apparently Lester's had trouble moving that collection of fox faces "for all your Native American and mountain-man-style crafting projects." "These are premium select faces, best of the best!" reads the sales copy. "Price is per face."
|W|P|110143634864580724|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Newspapers are dying. Between 2001 and 2002, average daily circulation dropped by 391,889, and in the following year, 1,457 papers folded. Newsday and the Chicago Sun-Times both recently admitted to padding their circulation numbers.
Particularly hard hit is The Washington Post, which has lost 6 percent of its young readers. According to the Washington City Paper, the Post organized several focus groups in September to ask young Washington newbies why they weren't subscribing.
What they found was eye-opening. Some of the participants treated the physical paper like a foreign object, asking, "Why is it so big?" They expressed concerns about old papers piling up around the house. They worried about recycling and the environment. Some said they wouldn't accept even a complimentary subscription to the newspaper.
The Post was learning a recent truism the hard way: Young people look to the Internet for their news, and they expect it to be free. (WashingtonPost.com gets 14 million pageviews a month, second only to NYTimes.com.)
"The good news is they're extremely familiar with the paper," one Post source told Wired. "The bad news is that they don't want to buy it. News is like air, and we've taught them that."
A September study by the Online Publishers Association (pdf) bears this out, finding that young people show a clear preference for the Internet as a source of news. It found that 83.4 percent of males ages 18-24 have Internet access, and they cite the Internet as their top media choice (over TV, radio, books, newspapers, even games). The Internet is the only medium that people are spending more time with, and this is happening across all age groups. Respondents said they look to the net for information, and to TV for entertainment and relaxation. Only 17 percent of those 18-24 agreed that "reading the newspaper is an important part of my day," where 38 percent of those 35-54 did.
Oddly, the survey showed that attitudes toward magazines showed the fewest differences among age groups. I suppose that might be because magazines are so design-heavy that the print product is more appealing, and the experience is harder to reproduce online. But I wonder how long that difference will last.
|W|P|110057263533318931|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWow, check this out: George Plimpton's Paris Review is putting some 300 of its famous author interviews online in free downloadable PDFs. Here's Dorothy Parker from 1956:
Interviewer: It's a popular supposition that there was much more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example.
Parker: I wasn't there very often—it cost too much. ... [New Yorker editor Harold Ross] was a professional lunatic, but I don't know if he was a great man. He had a profound ignorance. On one of Mr. Benchley's manuscripts he wrote in the margin opposite "Andromache," "Who he?" Mr. Benchley wrote back, "You keep out of this."
Of her verses ("I cannot say poems"), she says, "Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers."
|W|P|110061008930869666|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBest entries in The Canonical List of Weird Band Names:
- Alcoholocaust
- Apocalypse Hoboken
- The Ass Baboons of Venus
- The Couch Slugs
- The Dancing French Liberals of 1848
- Dick Duck and the Dorks
- Ed's Redeeming Qualities
- Ethyl Meatplow
- Hell Camino
- Individual Fruit Pie
- Lavay Smith and The Red Hot Skillet Lickers
- Lawnsmell
- Mussolini Headkick
- Rash of Stabbings
- Stukas Over Bedrock
- Technosquid Eats Parliament
A few are designed to look good on a marquee, like FREE BEER AND CHICKEN and HORNETS ATTACK VICTOR MATURE.
|W|P|110009913784097444|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head."—G.K. Chesterton
"I guess the real question is what is funny to me. Well, that's easy. Jesus is funny to me. Why? Because He died for my sins and He didn't even know me. Man, what a retard."—Louis C.K.
|W|P|109994570469999936|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe BBC is reporting that mother, passion, smile, love, and eternity are the most beautiful words in the the English language, according to a survey of 40,000 non-English speakers in 40 countries conducted by the British Council.
By "non-English speakers" I think they must mean "speakers of English who are not British." Otherwise it's hard to explain why the top picks were all strong, positive words. The respondents seem to be evaluating the words by their meanings, rather than purely by their sound, or euphony.
That can be telling. In Max: A Biography, David Cecil relates an exchange between Max Beerbohm and Robert Hichens:
One day Beerbohm said to Hichens, "Do you think, Crotchet, that a word can be beautiful, just one word?"
"Yes," Hichens said, "I can think of several words that seem to me beautiful."
"Ah?"
A pause.
"Then tell me, do you think the word ermine is a beautiful word?"
"Yes," Hichens said, "I like the sound of it very much."
"Ah?"
Another pause.
"And do you think vermin is a beautiful word?"
By the way, the word father didn't even make the British Council's list.
|W|P|110138856996506526|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Thanksgiving brings in the Christmas season, and with it a new travesty of Dickens, this one with Kelsey Grammer and Jason Alexander. Reminds me of Scrooged, where Bill Murray produced a similar TV special starring John Houseman, Buddy Hackett and the Solid Gold Dancers. ("Yule Love It!")
Well, humbug. I don't celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas—or, lately, any anniversary holiday. There are two reasons for that. The first is that yearly celebrations seem arbitrary: "The earth has gone around the sun again—I got you some fuzzy socks!"
The other is that formal holidays never quite work out. They're always stagy and self-conscious, and the expectations are too high. People worry too much about meeting some Norman Rockwell standard, and pleasing each other, when they should be just relaxing and celebrating each other's company.
My answer is to express those sentiments, in a smaller way, all year. I tell my wife I love her every day, but we skip a formal anniversary every year. And I hope I'm a good friend, son, and brother, authentically, in June as well as December.
But you can keep the socks.
|W|P|110057268464283364|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A man who would letterspace lowercase text would steal sheep."—Frederic Goudy
|W|P|110086780547550835|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPen Island sounds like a great name for a pen store, until you see the URL:
http://www.penisland.net/
I'll bet they get a lot of hits anyway.
|W|P|110099308312269187|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere are three things that happened in 1993:
- Intel shipped the first Pentium chips.
- The space shuttle Endeavour fixed an optical flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
- The Vatican recognized the validity of Galileo's work.
Hmmm, that last one is a tad late, isn't it? And what about the Inquisition and the trial ... ?
In his apology, Pope John Paul II wrote, "Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions."
Oh, so that's what happened.
|W|P|110089208776940456|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"How quickly can you find out what is unusual about this paragraph? It looks so ordinary that you would think that nothing was wrong with it at all and, in fact, nothing is. But it is unusual. Why? If you study it and think about it you may find out, but I am not going to assist you in any way. You must do it without coaching. No doubt, if you work at it for long, it will dawn on you. Who knows? Go to work and try your skill. Par is about half an hour."
The Grey Labyrinth has been posting award-winning brainteasers since 1996. (The solution to the puzzle above is here.)
|W|P|110087371378339750|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOrnithological nouns of assemblage:
- a murmuration of starlings
- a desert of lapwing
- a parliament of owls
- a gulp of cormorants
- a siege of cranes
- a pitying of doves
- a murder of crows
- an exaltation of larks
- a charm of finches
- a stand of flamingoes
- a watch of nightingales
- a rafter of turkeys
- a committee of vultures
- a descent of woodpeckers
- an unkindness of ravens
- a convocation of eagles
Who comes up with these? They're wonderfully poetic. Also: a sleuth of bears, a shrewdness of apes, a flutter of butterflies, an intrusion of cockroaches, a bask of crocodiles, a skulk of foxes, a smack of jellyfish, a leap of leopards, a crash of rhinoceroses, a scurry of squirrels, a streak of tigers, a shiver of sharks.
|W|P|110093886440307299|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Opte Project knows where all the Internet's users are, but Global Reach knows what language they speak. And that's probably more important: "People speaking the same language form their own online community no matter what country they happen to live in."
English is still the top language online, but English speakers make up only 35.2 percent of all users. The second most popular language is Chinese—not surprising, since Mandarin speakers outnumber us 5 to 2 in meatspace.
|W|P|109966670873757631|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCountries with compulsory voting:
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Fiji, Greece, Honduras, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mexico, Nauru, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela
|W|P|110086746119011361|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Robots have trouble with poker. They've outdone humans in chess, checkers and Othello, where they have perfect information and can seek a move that's objectively best. But humans still have the edge in poker, where a good player needs to assess risk, account for bluffs, and judge his opponents' strategies. He also has to bluff carefully himself, playing slowly and raising judiciously to commit his opponent. That's both harder and more "human" than calculating chess moves. Charles Lamb wrote, "Cards are war, in disguise of a sport."
The machine players are gaining ground largely thanks to University of Alberta computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer, who came to poker after working on computer strategies in those "easier" games. He led the team that wrote Chinook, the world's strongest checkers player, and he expects to "solve" that game completely within a few years. For poker, Schaeffer has help from grad student Darse Billings, who actually played professionally for a few years before signing on to the program.
They have their work cut out for them. In addition to its subjectivity, poker is a big game—a two-player game of Texas Hold'em has more than a quintillion states. But Schaeffer found a way to approximate a big solution from more manageable small games of "only" 30 million states. The result, Poki, can hold its own against the world's strongest players.
That's big news. Designing card-playing robots may sound like a frivolous endeavor, but there's a lot riding on these algorithms. Game theory has become a window into economics, evolution, auctions—a thousand real-world situations where opponents must devise good strategies using imperfect information. If it plays its cards right, Poki may someday be running Wall Street.
|W|P|110057265226852187|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNurse: Is anything bothering you?
Buddy Rich: Yes ... country music!
His last words, according to Wikipedia.
|W|P|110055403939851035|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay, you're a chef. Which of these trays was requested for a singer's dressing room, and which is the last meal of a Texas death-row inmate?
1. BBQ chicken wings, chips, fruit, ginger ale
2. 1 apple, 1 orange, 1 banana, coconut, peaches
3. One pot of coffee
4. Enchiladas, burritos, chocolate ice cream, cantaloupe (whole, split in half)
5. Chinese takeout, coffee
6. 1 bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers
7. Baked salmon, french fries, fruit platter, salad, soda
8. Nothing
9. Thirty jumbo shrimp, cocktail sauce, baked potato, French fries, ketchup, butter, one T-bone steak, one chocolate malt, one gallon of vanilla ice cream, and three cans of Big Red
A. Neil Diamond ("Love on the Rocks")
B. Nelly ("Hot in Herre")
C. Smokey Robinson ("Tears of a Clown")
D. B.B. King ("The Thrill Is Gone")
E. Cornelius Goss (beat a Dallas homeowner to death with a board)
F. Gerald Mitchell (shotgunned two customers during a Houston drug deal)
G. James Collier (shot two Wichita Falls residents while stalking his daughter)
H. James Powell (raped and murdered a 10-year-old in Beaumont)
I. Paul Nuncio (strangled a 61-year-old in Plainview)
Answers: 1-C, 2-E, 3-H, 4-I, 5-A, 6-F, 7-B, 8-D, 9-G
|W|P|110005244636189488|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThere is some justice: Bill Gates gets 4 million spam messages a day, making him the most spammed person in the universe.
|W|P|110087133181871611|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."—George Orwell, "Why I Write" (1946)
|W|P|110003263568128386|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I haven't commented on the Republican reshufflings, because it's still halftime and because others have noted the essential points. Because the White House is run on ideology and faith, no one's looking at actual policy. And because of Bush's weird preoccupation with loyalty, the new assignments are mostly designed to get rid of dissenters (Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage) and to reward unquestioning "advisers" (Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez).
So everyone falls into line behind a leader who doesn't read newspapers, makes impulsive decisions based on "instinct," and is generally in bed by ten.
Well, the University of Michigan has just released a new study showing that this is precisely the worst way to solve problems.
"If the best problem solvers tend to think about a problem similarly, then it stands to reason that as a group, they may not be very effective," said Scott Page, a UM professor of science, economics and complex systems.
The paper appears in this month's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By diversity Page doesn't mean race, gender, age, etc., he means approaches to problem-solving. And it's precisely diversity in problem-solving that Bush is trying to stamp out.
In his course material, Page writes:
To really understand something, we need to interpret it from multiple perspectives. ... Understand requires embracing all (or almost all) interpretations. ... The best among many outperforms the best among few. Therefore, even though there is an incentive to create multiple perspectives, once the best has been located it should be exploited. That is, of course, until it is no longer the best, and the only way that this can be tested is by constantly considering alternatives. This simple distinction may explain why people more concerned with "progress" appear to care less about preserving multiple perspectives than people concerned with history. (emphasis mine)
This is practically guaranteed to get us into trouble, though it's too early to see exactly how. Consider this my generic I-told-you-so post; I'll link back to it when the wheels come off.
|W|P|110057255253784486|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comCelebrities saved by the Heimlich maneuver:
- Ronald Reagan
- Ed Koch
- Elizabeth Taylor
- Goldie Hawn
- Cher
- Walter Matthau
- Carrie Fisher
- Dick Vitale
- John Chancellor
- Jack Lemmon
Since 1974, it's saved 50,000 lives, according to the Heimlich Institute.
That's great, but why should we care more about celebrities than ordinary people? The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed 25 million people; it's thought that we don't remember it today because none of the victims were famous. Weird. I guess humans are wired to find personalities especially memorable.
|W|P|110005100205213596|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe best of the community weblogs, MetaFilter, began accepting new users today, for the first time in two years. It's been an interesting little petri dish—because the doors were closed so early, it was populated largely by early adopters, who tend to be knowledgeable, literate and thoughtful. But the quality took a sharp dip during the election, and last night someone posted an ad for plush toys, a new low.
Hopefully this new blood will do it good. The newbies who have introduced themselves so far seem like a responsible group. Still, I'll wait a bit before I spend my five bucks. The level of discourse could go up ... or down.
|W|P|110078395649098272|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing."—Samuel Johnson
|W|P|109996549666201190|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I have only one credit card. It's nothing special; I got it because it's accepted everywhere and because it periodically refunds 1 percent of my total charges. I pay it off in full each month to avoid finance charges.
The industry has a term for that: freeloading.
Because 75 percent of their revenues come from finance charges, credit card companies are actually beginning to punish fiscal responsibility. If you have a GE Rewards MasterCard and pay off your balance in full, you'll be fined $25 a year. I suppose it's only a matter of time before my card follows suit.
This is only the culmination of a long trend. Credit cards have become banking's most profitable business segment, so today issuers send out more than 5 billion solicitations a year, offering rates as high as 41 percent that can be used by customers as young as 13. The average graduating college senior already owes $3,000.
As a result, the average American has eight cards—20 percent are maxed out—and carries $8,400 in credit card debt. Only 36 percent pay their whole balance each month, like me, so the average household pays $1,000 a year in finance charges.
As a nation we passed an ominous watershed last year. According to a BusinessWeek report, total household debt—including car loans, mortgage, and student loans—finally topped 100 percent of disposable annual income. Collectively, we're broke. But even though 1.3 million credit card holders declared bankruptcy last year, the lending industry still deems 78 percent of U.S. households to be creditworthy—fair game for further solicitations.
Where it will end, I don't know, but I'd be fairly happy going back to cash.
|W|P|110057251342540493|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Have no news at all. My story 'House of Flowers' won an O. Henry prize." That's from a 1951 letter by Truman Capote, collected in Gerald Clarke's new book, Too Brief a Treat. Capote is disappointingly close-mouthed about his craft, but he dishes endless dirt about the glitterati of the '50s, who streamed through his life like a receiving line. Here's a paragraph from a 1953 letter to Andrew Lyndon, written from the Italian Riviera, where Capote was on retreat composing In Cold Blood:
I've liked it here and have done a lot of work, but in August everything became too social—and I do mean social—the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan) the Oliviers (they let her out) Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time—the Doctors say no more),—then Cecil and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez's yacht—whence I've just come back. Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward—he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. For a town with a population of less than a thousand, Portofino has been quite a place.
"Her" is Vivien Leigh. Daisy Fellowes is an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, and Jack is Jack Dunphy, Capote's companion and lover. It's kind of reassuring to see the beautiful people behave so abominably, like a high-toned episode of COPS. At one party Dylan Thomas kicks his wife in the stomach until she passes out, then asks the crowd for cabfare. I've never done that.
One last surprise: Capote is the basis for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird—he and Harper Lee were lifelong friends since their childhood in Alabama. That was news to me.
|W|P|110038424182704938|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTemperature palindromes:
16° Celsius ≈ 61° Fahrenheit
28° Celsius ≈ 82° Fahrenheit
Another great screenwriter to watch—Ted Griffin:
Reuben: Look, we all go way back, and I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place, and I'll never forget it.
Danny: That was our pleasure.
Rusty: I'd never been to Belize.
That's from the 2001 remake of Ocean's Eleven. Griffin's got a pretty short resume so far, though he collaborated on Matchstick Men. ("You're not a bad guy, you know. You're just not a very good one.") I'll keep my eyes open.
|W|P|109992889832460731|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
How smart is Dick Cheney? Many who know him have been impressed: Donald Rumsfeld says Cheney struck him immediately as "intelligent, purposeful, laid-back." Sen. Alan Simpson says, "You could tell right away he was a smart cookie." Even John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, "With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I've ever met."
Clearly Cheney likes to be thought of as the Wizard of Oz, a brilliant mastermind who stays out of the limelight. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he once asked. "It's a nice way to operate, actually."
Well, it is if you're actually a genius. But I'm reading an increasing number of reports that paint him as far less than that.
"Cheney's manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities," Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush I, told T.D. Allman in a revealing Rolling Stone piece.
"Dick always had this very calm way of talking," former Yale roommate Jacob Plotkin agreed. "His thoughtful manner impressed people." Cheney flunked out of Yale twice. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material." "Dick never had the experience of learning from his mistakes," classmate Tom Fake told Allman.
Writing more plainly, in the Boston Phoenix, writer Dan Kennedy described Cheney as "a lifelong screw-up, a mediocre functionary with a mediocre mind."
It seems Cheney's ambition outstrips his ability, a circumstance that has landed him repeatedly in hot water. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, told Buzzflash:
His failures of judgment are legendary—steering Gerald Ford so far to the right that the 1976 presidential election was lost, voting against resolutions urging the release of Nelson Mandela in the 1980s, hatching unworkable plans for invading Iraq in the first Gulf War and, of course, arguing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist networks before, during and after the start of the 2003 invasion and occupation of that country. Cheney's career has been characterized by missteps, mistakes and misdeeds, and as he has gotten more powerful those missteps, mistakes and misdeeds have become more epic in nature.
Nichols writes in Dick: The Man Who Is President:
Cheney did not rise on the basis of his competence, as the official spin would have it. His career has been characterized by dashed hopes, damaging missteps, and dubious achievements. No, it was not competence; rather, Cheney has climbed the ladder of success because of his willingness, proven again and again, to sacrifice principle and the public good in the service of his own ambition and of those who might advance it.
That's one thing everyone seems to agree on: Cheney has a Grinch's heart. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says Barlow. Billings agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic." That in itself is pretty scary.
|W|P|110005122316672169|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSix appalling facts about Jack Lalanne:
- At age 40, he did 100 handstand push-ups in under six minutes and 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes.
- In the same year he swam between Alcatraz Island and Fisherman's Wharf while handcuffed, and swam underwater the length of the Golden Gate Bridge with air tanks but no fins, towing a 2,000-pound boat. Seriously.
- In his sixties, he began to swim with shackles as well as handcuffs. For the bicentennial he towed 13 boats across a Southern California bay, and in the year he qualified for Social Security he towed 6,500 pounds of wood pulp across a Japanese lake.
- At age 69, his chest still measured 47 inches, his waist 27 inches.
- At 70, he towed 70 boats across Long Beach Harbor.
- LaLanne is now 90 years old, but he still gets up at 5:30 every morning to spend two hours working out in the weight room and the pool.
I'm not 40 yet, so I don't have to feel insecure about this.
|W|P|109917786384979669|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEight Degrees of Drunkenness
- The Ape-drunk, who leaps and sings and hollers
- The Lion-drunk, who is quarrelsome and rude
- The Swine-drunk, who is sleepy and lumpish
- The Sheep-drunk, wise in his own conceit, but unable to speak
- The Maudlin-drunk, who declares he loves all mankind
- The Martin-drunk, who drinks himself sober again
- The Goat-drunk, who is lascivious
- The Fox-drunk, who is crafty, like the Dutch, who bargain when drunk
—Thomas Nash, 1592
|W|P|109996572174514608|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBest spam subject line I've seen in a long time:
Various Pills, worldwide delivery!|W|P|110000788834557728|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"The Bible is the inerrant word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc."—Jerry Falwell
"I could not believe that anyone who had read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly uninformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?"—Bishop John Shelby Spong
|W|P|109994617112021527|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe readers of Physics World have voted Euler's identity the "greatest equation ever":
eiπ + 1 = 0
Like every "greatest" poll, this one is dubious because no one stopped to define "greatest." But this is still a pretty astonishing equation. Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics," and the Physics World respondents called it "the most profound mathematical statement ever written"; "uncanny and sublime"; "filled with cosmic beauty"; and "mind-blowing." One asked: "What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?"
SUNY philosopher Robert Crease, who proposed the survey, notes that "the equation contains nine basic concepts of mathematics—once and only once—in a single expression. These are: e (the base of natural logarithms); the exponent operation; π; plus (or minus, depending on how you write it); multiplication; imaginary numbers; equals; one; and zero."
I like it because it's a mathematical sphinx. After deriving it for his Harvard students, Benjamin Peirce said, "Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore, we know it must be the truth."
|W|P|109966655525139009|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comB.B. King is an overrated guitarist and an underrated singer.
There, I said it.
|W|P|109926310904798377|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is being paid $20 million for remaking one of my favorite movies, King Kong. That's the highest salary ever paid to a film director in advance of production.
I'm hoping it doesn't suck. The 1933 film is almost a perfect adventure movie—the pacing and atmosphere are just right, and Willis O'Brien's stop-motion Kong is a fully realized character, and a better actor than most of the cast.
I'm worried for two reasons. First, he's using A-list actors now (Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody), rather than relative unknowns, as in LOTR, and that makes it harder for the audience to suspend disbelief, even if he uses unfamiliar New Zealand locations for Skull Island.
The other problem is that the original was honestly pretty corny, and a strictly faithful remake today would come off as self-parody. Here's a line from the original Kong:
Carl Denham: Some big hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang—he cracks up and goes sappy.
Can you imagine Jack Black delivering that with a straight face? This means Jackson's writers will have to depart from their LOTR strategy and write original dialogue. And that's a risk, particularly in a remake of a classic film. Here's a line from an early 1996 draft of the remake:
Carl Denham: Hooters, Mr Ginting. There's nothing the public like to see more than native hooters.
They are keeping a lot of the original dialogue. Before she died, Jackson reportedly wanted to get Fay Wray to deliver the famous final line, "Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast." We'll see.
|W|P|109814280459640815|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPixar director Brad Bird on the perception that animation is for kids:
That's a long-held bias that I don't happen to agree with. I can't name another art form on the face of the earth that limits its audience by saying it's aimed at one age group. I mean, you don't say, "Opera, it's only aimed at 35- to 60-year-olds."
I have people asking me what it's like to be working in the animation genre. It's not a genre. It's an art form that can do any genre, and it's been limited by people's perceptions. I think it can tell any story there is.|W|P|109941763305326597|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Okay, obviously I'm not happy that Bush got back in. I keep telling myself that we just have to hold our breath for four more years, and in 2008 we can get a new, reasonable administration to repair the damage. Iraq, Social Security, North Korea, the economy, stem cells—four years is a long time to wait, but it's doable, right? After all, we just did it. There's just one thing I can't get out of my mind.
The Supreme Court.
The current court is split 5-4, but all the justices except Clarence Thomas are more than 65 years old. O'Connor, 74, and Ginsburg, 71, have had cancer, and now Rehnquist, 80, joins them. The most liberal justice, Stevens, is 84. Bush could name as many as four new justices this term.
Who might they be? During the 2000 campaign, Bush said that the justices he admired most were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. A court in their mold could endanger family and medical leave, gay rights, equal voting rights, the environment, campaign finance rules, the rights of inmates, the fundamental separation of church and state, and, most signally, abortion rights. If Roe v. Wade falls, 30 states could outlaw abortions within a year, some (Ohio) within weeks.
Do you remember the political issues of 1989? Probably not. But, on average, a justice appointed in that year would still be serving today. When we've largely forgotten about Iraq, the deficit and health-care reform, Bush's court appointments will still be influencing American life every day.
|W|P|109953014447589784|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI have not heard a single American news source accurately summarize this weekend's video message from Osama Bin Laden. A number have called it taunting, or conciliatory, or threatening, and it's none of those things.
This is appalling, especially as it comes now, during a national election that turns principally on Bin Laden's actions. Almost no one in this country seems really to want to understand why the 9/11 attacks were made; we just mutter to each other that we must unite against the evil terrorists, who "hate freedom." We may as well be ostriches; Bin Laden himself says, "I am amazed at you."
If you read the whole transcript, you see that Bin Laden is trying to reason with us, and he bends over backward to do it. In order to cite an objective Western source, he appeals to an interview he gave to the Independent's Robert Fisk in Sudan in 1996. He calls Fisk "one of your compatriots and co-religionists, and I consider him to be neutral." Okay? If you read that interview, here's what you'll learn.
Bin Laden's followers essentially want a Muslim state governed by sharia, the religious law of Islam. They regard Western influences as corrupting. In Bin Laden's mind this goes all the way back to the founding of the Saudi state in 1932—he felt the Saudi regime abandoned Islamic law for family interests and oil—but it really accelerated when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. The Saudis invited American forces into their country, where they remained despite promises to leave. Bin Laden now calls Saudi Arabia an American colony and an "insult" to the Saudi people.
Bin Laden fought in Afghanistan and then moved to Sudan, watching Muslim resentment spread regarding corrupt secular governments. He compares their feelings to the European resistance to German occupation in World War II, saying that the death of 60 Israelis raises more global outrage than the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did under the U.N. sanctions.
The actual inspiration for 9/11, he says, came with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. "As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind, and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted, and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."
So, yeah, he's a religious extremist, but he's sane and intelligent, and he's trying to explain himself. We don't have to agree with him, but shouldn't we at least listen? Of the Fisk interview, Bin Laden says, "So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?" No. And why not?
|W|P|109939953095520488|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom the Beastie Boys' "Rhyme the Rhyme Well":
'Cause I'm a craftsman who ain't fastin'
I'll take you to task everyone of ya'll draftsman
I'm rehearsin' and ain't maskin'
Bringin' the beat back and keepin' it lastin'
Keepin' it top-notch, beyond passing
Simmer in the pan 'cause I ain't flashin'
I'm party crashin' so you better batten
Down those hatches stop procrastin-
I count eight misses and one hit, for an average of .111. Maybe they should have called it "Painful Lack of Irony."
|W|P|109909464393956067|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com