fun book meme! yay!

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your blog. (Or post a comment here)
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Mine:
It is also easy to see why only persons of means could patronize a temple involving sixty-four or more divinities.

Indeed. from Desire and Devotion: Art from India, Nepal, and Tibet, the catalog for the Walters Art Museum South Asia collection. There's a pretty picture of a goddess on p. 57. I get to look at pretty pictures for a living. hee hee

aur aap?
amdana ti?
und Sie?

surviving the recession I: vegetarianism

meat is lovely. it's easy to cook (flame!), provides tons of calories and protein, and tastes yummy. And yet it is also expensive. Like insane-o expensive. because cheap meat tastes terrible. so either you fork out the cash or you go veg.

one aspect of our reentry culture shock has been the difficulty with internalizing food prices. ya leave a country for three years, the world goes into a recession, and whammo, suddenly milk and eggs are out of budget range and meat is an unaffordable luxury.

In other words: we were paying a lot for food in the UK. Because it was the UK. we are, shockingly, paying much the same for food here. so it's back to basics: root vegetables and dried legumes. in honor of the coming food-fest of Turkeyday, I offer my pretty root veggie dish:

slice into 1/4-inch rounds:

three beets
four parsnips
two medium sweet potatoes
(note: I scrub and leave the skins on. this saves time and retains nutrients. also, buy a decent knife. life is too short for crappy knives. and you just need one good one.)

Layer in a casserole dish, alternating (pretty colors!) layers for each veg.
in between each layer drizzle some peanut oil (cheaper and takes heat better than olive) and grind some pepper.
after three layers, put some home-grown rosemary. Or similarly earthy/piney seasoning of your choice.

cover with tin foil and roast in oven at 375ish for an hour-ish, depending on how deep you've layered.

Yummy with yogurt, sour cream, or as is. goes well with dal--another cheapie for another day. we can eat meat again after the recession. mm. bacon.

indictment of the MSM, from 1927

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver of a slaughtered calf. Odd indeed!

(Hesse, Steppenwolf, p. 39)

exactly. precisely. this must be why I've been craving organ meat. ah the slaughtered calf. we are all anemic.

snowy thursday

actually, it's friday. But the first day of real snow will always and forever be snowy thursday, in honor of the main day of snow we had in Swansea our first year there. the snow today didn't stick, but it floated in the air like fluff, resembling nothing so much as movie snow. ah, when reality matches representation.

I finished Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume yesterday, a party gift from my sister's wedding earlier this month. the happy couple put books from their own collection about on the tables and guests, as a result, enjoyed fighting over and claiming various texts as the evening wore on. because readers know readers, and this means that your wedding guests know books. and so. the choices spoke volumes about the choosers. we scored three books: Robbins, Hesse's Steppenwolf, and a book about latitude. or longitude.


Robbins' book is about perfume, immortality, and beets. after a traumatic tooth-breakage in my childhood after which the dentist told me I could not eat anything that stained (blueberries, cherries, beets) I failed to explore the glory of this particular root until a trip to Australia when I was 18, when I ordered a ham sandwich "with salad." the last bit translates from Australian to American as: "with cold beet slice." This is not a good introduction to beets. While in Swansea we were reintroduced to beets through two avenues: Paris and the organic veg delivery. The latter involved a huge paper sack of various veggies, most of the time (for we were in Britain) various unidentifiable root vegetables. when beets came in the bag, they usually were accompanied by their greens--beautiful dark green leaves with blood red veins that stained everything in sight when cooked. And the beets were fabulous. Nothing tops roasted beets, parsnips and leeks. Nothing. Okay, maybe like two things top it. okay three. Paris because we discovered already cooked, prepared whole beets at the markets there. chop, add pepper, and eat with plain yogurt. could not be more fabulous.

turns out my tooth has not been overly stained, and my happiness has improved with the beets. I therefore recommend both Robbins' book and beets. good luck, and wear an apron.

down the squirrel path

The upside of living in a wealthy community planned in the first decades of the 20th century is the attention to space--public space integrated with private. Throughout our neighborhood, we have pathways that run between houses, marked sometimes with discreet signs, but othertimes just turning off from the sidewalk and going seemingly nowhere. Exploring them is an exercise in trust, as is all exploring--trust that they will lead you somewhere, trust that you'll be able to find your way back, trust that you aren't inadvertently trespassing and, if you are, that the person whose land you have "violated" fails to own a gun. Little things.

Luke and I discovered the Squirrel Path a few weeks after arriving--it leads off from the end of a cul-de-sac through hedges down to a choice of steps wending their way down the hill. There are indeed squirrels, and leaves, and views of the sunset at the right time of day. And very few people tend to use these paths, at least not when Luke and I explore them. Perhaps no time for exploration. Perhaps these are known territories for many long-time residents. Perhaps steps are too 20th century for folks.

A word of thanks to those elite planners, putting together this suburb, who felt that pathways to nowhere were important. That climbing up and down stairs on foot might take precedent over climbing into the SUV (they also didn't allow garages when the community was built--there were shared stables which could accommodate your fancy horseless carriage if you had one). Here's to walking, to watching the leaves change, to the surprise of the first snow in the air.

I call this philosophy not the Middle Way, but the Squirrel Path.

Barack Obama is NOT today's most articulate African American Politician

Has everyone else out there noticed Cory Booker showing up all over the place? I think I saw him first on election night coverage and I thought he was great, but then he was on Rachel Maddow's show and he was just unbelievably impressive. So I had already become a fan when I caught the Bill Maher from last week and he exceeded my already high expectations. Don't get me wrong, the guy has no shot at national office, and I'll tell you why: 1) he refers to Pericles and 2) he uses Latin.

Check it out:

I Voted!

Last time, in central PA, we waited 2 hours in a retirement home to vote, in a precinct that overcame its previous record for numbers of voters at about 10 am.

This time, in Baltimore, we waited for 5 minutes in the basement of a church (address number? 4700. Love it). I had three books in my backpack just in case. So much for optimism. While waiting in the short line, a woman left the polling area with tears in her eyes. "Big election" she explained.

Yep. Didn't know what she meant really until I was tapping the touchscreen to vote for Obama/Biden. Something about the ritual of it. Millions of people doing this same thing, today, all over the country. The buzz of excitement in the room. The nervous energy. The historic stuff about voting for a black man, too. Almost two years of watching the campaign, debating, cheering him on, and it's not really real until just then. Brings a tear to the eye.

And now the wait begins.

The S-word

We have been watching Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart, and somewhat frantically/fanatically reading blogs, news sites, and viewing YouTube vids to keep up with the election stuff, but also to follow in an anthropological sort of way how the discourse is turning. To see if you can see the contours of it, even this close, even without historical perspective to speak of. Well, one should have perspective of history (eg er, not inadvertently calling for a new McCarthyesque study of members of congress and their Anti Americanness.)

So in light of this, and in light of the "S" word being thrown around (Salsa dancing?) and in light of the "positive" McCain ad last week that still managed to zing a couple of negative bits at the Dems (Taxes are patriotic)--I found the following advert in the Economic and Political Weekly, an Indian publication that is quite good--sort of a slightly more scholarly Economist for South Asia and surrounding regions, with many top scholars publishing intellectually engaged, well-researched pieces on history, culture, economics, and politics. I recommend checking it out--the latest issue is usually free. Link.

As part of a piece I'm writing on architecture, modernity, and how architecture responds to/traces out the contours of the "New India" I was doing a little EPW reading, you know, from January 1980 (as you do). One of the pages of the article had this lovely advert on it:



Lil bit Socialist, no? Well, yes. India continued on a relatively socialist vein until about 1980, when liberalization started, and then in 1991 the government took an about-face on four decades of 5-year plans and started to embrace globalization. Ambassador cars to Honda SUVs. Thumbs up cola to Seven Up. Bisleri bottled water to Dasani. Sigh. I'm all about the responsibility to pay taxes. And part of me kind of wishes that the US was a wee bit socialist. We need some good slogans these days--drill baby drill doesn't cut it.

Pay Taxes Right
Build Nation's Might

Nailed it!

If anything, this advert, a reminder of a time just before India started to liberalize, not at all at the height of its socialism, and certainly not parallel in intensity to sloganeering in either China or the USSR, shows us how completely un-socialist the US is. How, aside from discussions of nationalizing the banks etc. blah blah, we have no frame for cultural socialism, for putting the nation/community/state up a notch on the priority list from "must by Cheetos for game tonight."

And paying your taxes early does allow you to avoid tension and anxiety (how nice of them to think of me!) and I am a good citizen! And I want to mobilze nation building! Huzzah!

Truth Force, Obama, and keeping it cool

In the immediate aftermath of the debate last night one media read on Obama's performance was how he kept cool, how he was "sticking with what had worked" and not getting angry. Some have rightly read this as an excellent move throughout the campaign as one wrong move in the angry direction and suddenly the "angry black man" stereotype can raise its ugly head, destroying any chances of Obama success.

I think, though, that there's an additional positive dimension to these moves. It's not just to avoid "angry black man" and it's not just because this has "worked in the past." Watching the debate last night made me realize why the British were driven half crazy by Gandhi, the "half-naked fakir" who fought for self-rule by practicing self-rule (rule over the self): self-control such that his calmness was his strength, and he didn't just follow the truth but practiced and lived it.

Now, Obama's no Gandhi. And while some may suggest that indeed we need to throw off the yoke of years of mis-rule, that's not the same really as fighting against a colonial government. But I think it's valid to push what we're seeing with Obama's approach in the debates and in the wider campaign beyond cool, calm, collected, and beyond a defensive maneuver against the possibility of racist stereotyping. His ability to answer questions, even those posed in heated tones and with aggressive anger and frustration, even those that repeat falsehoods that have been debunked for weeks, and to do so in a calm, collected manner--that is the truth force Gandhi and his followers employed on a much larger scale to help convince the British to leave, and then subsequently to help convince Indians to stop killing one another during Partition. One could argue that it this political approach that has in part incited the frustration and anger. Perhaps there's some greek rhetorical mode that fits Obama's approach as well. But for me, satyagraha fits: we are seeing an active political campaign that, while occasionally dipping into the muck, at least in its leader finds a space where calm is not weakness, and where cool isn't about him reminding us of Cary Grant. It is a little piece of satyagraha we are looking at, I think. That's what's winning the election for Obama.

A Difficult Read That's Worth It

I always promise my students that I will never assign them difficult readings that don't 'pay off'. That is, if the writing seems 'hard' then that's because the thought is itself complex, or otherwise attempting to reveal something about the world that's not just obvious. (Side note: because of my fidelity to this law, I have never assigned Sedgwick.)

So here's a piece I recommend everyone read, but first let me tell you what the payoff is:

1. Restores some faith in the news media – there still is rigorous investigative journalism alive in this country (you just have to go to local City Papers to find it).

2. Helps explain the Real Estate bubble, and shows why its bursting is still going to be really messy.

3. Demonstrates in powerful terms that bailing out bad mortgages does NOT necessarily mean helping out 'average Americans'. And shows that the housing crisis has not emerged simply because of predatory lenders (and surely not because of lending to poor people!)

Here you go

Facebook status update

It's all I can do to update my facebook profile these days. The weight of the horror watching the people at rallies shouting terrorist and Muslim (as if the latter was an insult, which it really shouldn't be, right? Right? RIGHT??). Very very scary. The founding fathers were right to be a wee bit suspicious of them there masses.

Please can we elect a leader who is intelligent? Please?

under the table and dreaming

Ah blogging. Not so much the last few weeks. Been investigating the possibilities of hiding under the bed for the forseeable future should the Republicans win the White House. Wondering if we should get our money out of the banks and put it in a shoe box underneath same bed. Pondering investing in a bed that has more room underneath it for the two of us, the dog, and the cash. On top of all of this, the season of Burn Notice has ended and thus I am lost without the comforting voiceovers of the main character, instructing me the best way to shake a tail, the best way to fake C4 using flour paste, and other equally helpful things that make me feel safer and happier knowing that such certainty exists in the world.

blogging has been difficult because there is too much to say. I am pondering blog-koans.

Example:

Do her glasses lack rims to reassure us of transparency? Or to convince us of a lack of substance?

Ideologies 101

Most readers of this blog (any good writer should know his audience and this is much easier with an audience in the single digits) would probably already agree with the following thought experiment. If we all took or taught an introductory survey of political ideologies, and in it we went through the fundamental tenets of conservatism, and then we compared the policy positions, legislation passed, party platform, and even the rhetoric of the American Republican party, we would find very, very little in the way of connections between that party and that ideology. Indeed, Bill Clinton is probably the most 'conservative' in terms of political ideology of any US president in the last few decades.

Some might wish to argue that this is because today's Republicans are 'neo-conservatives'. Fair enough, but this doesn't really help their case. Generalizing broadly, the neo-con ideology = crazy Wolfowitz foreign policy + neo-liberal domestic policy. In other words:

1. there's nothing inherently conservative about Bush foreign policy and that wasn't even the policy of the Republicans during Clinton's presidency
   
2. on economic issues neo-conservativism simply IS neo-liberalism, and therefore it's not very conservative

I bring all this up as I think it's related to a couple of political moments from this week. First up is something that Andrew Sullivan said on last week's Real Time. (Talk about a guy that will make your head spin when it comes to the label 'conservative'; Sullivan is a gay, moralizing, libertarian who hates Bush.) In the process of blaming the current economic crisis on stupid people who took out stupid mortgages, thereby perverting the triumphant march of pure capitalism, Sullivan went off on a side-tirade against US tax law for its distortion of economic interests – skewing them toward buying homes rather than renting (the libertarian individual in a capitalist system, says Sullivan, should be completely free to buy her shelter in any form she wishes). But here's the thing: within a genuinely conservative worldview, it makes perfect sense to encourage home ownership. Home owners protect and preserve their property. There's less crime in places where people own their homes. Home ownership encourages individual saving through home equity; it's an act of indvidual responsibility. And one could even go on to argue that home-owners make better parents (though I wouldn't go there myself). Indeed, overall, I like the tax code the way it is, for precisely some of these very much conservative reasons – and this despite the fact that I'm not receiving the benefit of the tax break at the moment.

But the problem isn't with the general preference for home ownership, and this current crisis has nothing to do with that. Conservatism isn't to blame; neo-liberalism is. It was the effort to turn the bursting tech bubble into a newly-emerging housing bubble through deregulation, fancy new investment techniques and schemes, etc. etc., that led to the housing bubble. It has nothing to do with home ownership per se; it has to do with buying 4 homes in 5 years, and all the while remortgaging like mad (the housing bloggers consistently refer to this as treating the house as an ATM). Here I refer to individual behavior, but it's painfully obvious to most people (Sullivan exempted) that the real thieves in this process were the folks generating huge profits on each and every transaction. And let's be honest: there was some serious manipulation and deception going on in the mortgage industry. One potential reader of this blog may recall a 2 hour phone call in which I called on all my powers of persuasion to talk her OUT of that interest-only ARM that she did not in any way need or want, but which the broker swore to her was her best choice. 

Something similar can be said (this was the second example) about the 'who to blame' game vis-a-vis the crisis. There are some great videos and blog posts on these here interwebs trying to lay it all at Carter and Clinton's feet. That's largely rubbish, but there's a shred of truth in it. While the Bush administration surely went way too far, and surely did so more explicitly for corporate profit, the whole thing is the continuation and maximization of neo-liberal logic. Defend Clinton all you wish; he was a much better neo-liberal than Bush, but he was still a neo-liberal. And it's not clear that we wouldn't have ended up here anyway. After all, the UK is very close to the same precipice, and they were led there by just one political party.

Capitalism

Thanks to Frances for this very informative post on the perilous situation Congress now faces. I could have used it last night when I was trying to explain to my father what a bind Congress is now in over the bailout legislation. 

He, quite reasonably, wants to be able to say, buck fush, don't give the corporations billions of taxpayers dollars, but instead let them all lose as much money as is humanly conceivable. It's an appealing sentiment, but, alas, capitalism doesn't work that way, because it's not an "opt-in" system. Very very few of us can find a way to get outside of it, and thus when the corporations lose most of what they have, a lot of people making very little money could lose everything (house, job, retirement - in economic terms, that's pretty much everything). 

In other words, we DO have a "trickle down" economic system. This is a lesson I learned at a very early age from my father's wisdom. It's the two rules of plumbing: 1) payday is on Friday, 2) shit runs downhill.

I grow increasingly convinced that today capitalism simply IS  a pyramid scheme, but with one crucial twist. In a standard pyramid scheme, the creators of the scheme convince a lot of people to start signing up to it. The creators get rich, the very early adapters may make money, and the late entrants all get screwed. But in today's cowboy capitalism, you are either rigging the game or your are conscripted into it. There's really no way to stand outside of it and laugh at the idiots who thought this sort of thing could go on forever. Because knowing it will collapse isn't really very funny. When it collapses for them, it takes those laughing down as well. Worse still, the rich will lose millions in the collapse, but they will still have a few million left. Those who didn't start with millions could be in big trouble. 

Hmm...almost makes you wonder if there's not another option to rigged corporate capitalism. ...Oh, sorry, I forgot, 1989 proved beyond all doubt that there are NO OTHER options. Too bad about that.

Big City Service Review: Peapods

You know you live in a city when....

the local grocer carries more than one type of olive oil. Or carries olive oil at all. Or, let's face it (and sadly), you have a local grocer instead of a super WalMart.

One of the big things I was dreading upon moving back to the US was the lack of delivery for groceries. Going to multiple stores for the food that we eat was one of the things I did not miss at all, nor did I miss driving an hour (F'Burg to Richmond) to buy an organic vegetable, when we lived in the mid-Atlantic last time. Moving to the UK and discovering grocery delivery rocked. It meant not driving at all, ever. It meant spending 10-15 minutes on-line putting stuff in the cart instead of an hour in the store squinting at labels and inspecting veggies. It meant no distractions, no parking, no struggle to remember what we had last time that was good, fewer choices. We like fewer choices. I blogged about this before.

When we moved to Baltimore I did not assume that the same service would be available. Folks in Seattle and SF and NYC might get delivery, but they are the privileged few, and this would not occur second-tier big cities. I am so so happy to be wrong. We had our first batch of Peapod-delivered Giant groceries this past Wednesday. Stoked!

Ease of on-line GUI: 3.5 out of 5. I will update this rating upon our second delivery, when the interface will have a history of what I've ordered before. Navigation through the virtual shelves was good. Searching was occasionally problematic, returning a shelf rather than an object, trying to guess the brand I want when I'm not interested in brands, I'm interested in the food type and whether it can be had in an organic variety. So the lean towards the brands was a bit, er, American for my taste. But you can select "natural and organic" on the top level, which then means all of your subsequent navigations hit the org stuff first. Not sure what "natural" means, but...

You can pick your delivery slot after shopping, which isn't the case for some of the UK versions. This I like. And the page doesn't reload when you add to your cart, which is good--you don't have to wait, just click and then scroll on down. Also nice: all objects from a shelf/search are displayed in one page, so no clicking through to multiple pages. Anyone buying groceries on-line will most likely have a better-than-dialup connection and thus long lists of items works just fine. Good information about the products as well.

Delivery options and cost: full disclosure here--my threshold for cost of grocery delivery is quite high. Peapod reduces your cost the more you buy. Over $100 it's $6.95 plus a fuel surcharge of $1 and change. (What is it with US nickel and diming? Just charge $8 already. Anyway...). This is comparable to the UK delivery charge (£2.50-£6). You can book a 2-hour window, which isn't as good as Sainsbury's (1 hour) but equals Tesco. Or if you know you're home all morning or all afternoon, you can select that option (7:30-1) and save $2. All of this is well within my threshold. How much would you pay someone to go to the store for you, select the food you want, pay for the gas, save you the hassle of unloading the cart, bagging, loading the stuff in your cart then into your car, then carrying it into your house? That's worth a lot more than $8. They'd have to charge me $15 before I'd start hesitating. And I'd still pay it. Oh, and I ordered Tuesday evening around 4 pm for a delivery slot of Wednesday morning. Had my groceries by 11:30.

Delivery itself: The driver had my number and so could call for directions/instructions. He was very courteous and helpful. the food came in heavy-duty cardboard boxes which we will give them back next time. I tipped him--one doesn't do this in the UK, so I was a bit concerned it was the wrong thing to do, but then I realized I was in the US, and thus...The only option not available (yet?) with Peapod is one involving less plastic. Tesco offers a 'green' option in which they show up with plastic bins with your groceries loose--they wait as you unload it, so it takes a bit longer. Peapod could do this easily with their nice boxes--I'd even pay a deposit for the boxes if necessary to reduce the packaging.

Food quality: excellent. This is the one where friends say: but I want to pick my own eggplant/peaches/lettuce! What if it's rotten? What if it's about to expire? It is in the interest of the store and the delivery service to give you the absolute best, most beautiful, fabulous, without blemish produce you have ever seen. It is also in their interest to provide food that expires at least a few days in the future, but ideally at least a week out. I find food that expires further out than that to be suspect on a number of levels, but that's me (I finally threw out the half and half we bought when we first arrived (August 15) this week, even though it was ostensibly still fine--it's not fine. it's not okay. milk should go bad within a week of opening. moving on.) I am impressed with the quality of the food we got from Peapod/Giant, especially since I wasn't so much trusting Giant on this. But they completely overwhelmed with the freshness of the produce and the beauty of the lettuce. The only problem with ordering produce on line is that sometimes it's not the size you're envisioning (esp. for organic veg which tends to be smaller). This you figure out with time. No surprises with Pea/Giant.

Overall: Great, positive experience. We'll see how it develops as the usage increases. Hopefully it will maintain its high quality and be able to add in some of the small things I'd like--mostly the low-plastic/packaging options.

McCain is not the only who doesn't get it

I missed all the fun around here and over at Ffb, and I also missed most of the Democratic convention, because I was at a convention of my own - listening to a lot of political scientists talk.

Unsurprisingly, election politics didn't come up very often at panels, but the last paper on one panel I went to was a reading of Obama, particularly through the lens of The Audacity of Hope (be on the lookout to see the written version of this paper appear in Harpers in a few weeks). It did surprise me a bit that after this paper was given the entire discussion focused directly on Obama.

It was mostly critical (but more in the 'we're worried he'll lose' mood than the, 'we don't like him' kind) and it was almost entirely centered on Obama the person, Obama the politician, Obama the democratic nominee.

This discussion was carried out after Obama gave his speech. The speech was on Tivo waiting for me, but I hadn't seen it yet. So I sat in the room listening to everyone talk, repeatedly thinking: 'they really don't get it, do they; it's not about Obama in this way'. It's about (the possibility of) a new political moment. It's about all those new participants in the process. It's about the demos, not Obama.

Last night I watched the speech, and, of course, as you all know, Obama spelled it out by saying, literally, 'it's not about me'. And the scene of almost 80,000 people, some moved to tears and all jubilant and energized to a degree that I have simply never seen in my lifetime - this scene made that point for Obama.

More striking was the post-speech commentary on MSNBC. First Keith Olbermann described the power and historical importance of the speech in a way that only Olbermann can. Then Chris Matthews came on and sounded like he was just a few degrees away from tears. Later, Pat Buchanan had to be cut off becuase he was gushing so much about the speech. Throughout, the commentators kept going to the text and reading quotes and citing things, like they were academics or something. And the entire discourse was about the nation, about political action, about choices and possibilities; almost none of it was about political baseball.

Even if Obama loses, I'll never forget how the power of his words forced even the pundits to think about politics as something more than petty games of power and influence and to recognise a possibility for a democratic movement, for collective action, for what political theorists often like to call 'the political'.

How is it then that the day after this speech was given a bunch of political theorists sat around and talked about 'Obama' as if all that mattered was his political calculations? How is it Pat Buchanan and Chris Mathews cared about the words in the speech and some of the most important thinkers of the political did not?

Palin, children, and the man upstairs

I was chatting about the recent political events with a lovely member of my family yesterday who largely sits on the other side of the ideological fence and, like me, has lived and worked with Catholics for many many years, so, like me, has a realistic, respectful, and sometimes (politely) sardonic view of various religious backgrounds. We wondered aloud to each other what religion Palin is--which variety of Christian?

We pondered (without doing research), based largely on the children factor. Basically the number of children she has spread out over the number of years, plus her stand on abortion, means Catholicism is in the picture. Except that Catholics tend not to proselytize in this way--they know they are right, so why bother trying to convince others? There's a respect for other beliefs with most Catholics, and the aborted babies are innocents, so they get to heaven (I think limbo has been eliminated recently? different dinner conversation from the other night...) and while they see abortion as wrong/murder, the Catholics tend to take the long-term view that includes the afterlife that, well, they also believe in.

upon reading the post about Down Syndrome over at FFB this morning, I did a quick search on Palin's religion to find that others had also been musing on this. Seems she was baptized Catholic (ding!) and now attends a 'non-denominational Bible church'. Link

All of this is intriguing. But perhaps the most intriguing part of this is the level of religion discourse in both campaigns. Some places claim it's been high, but I didn't sense much at the Dem's convention, and since the blow-ups about the ministers/spiritual advisers to each of the candidates earlier in the campaign, there hasn't been much with the God going on. Or I should say, the candidates seem not to be talking about their faith as they did (were forced to) in earlier campaigns. My British colleague, who was watching the Obama speech live (at 3 am) with me over video iChat (I heart Apple), asked mid-way through: where's the God? Has America changed? Or is it just a moment where that's not what we talk about--politics is okay, religion and money still taboo...thoughts?

The Reality Show

Is this not completely cool? First we have 10 days of Olympics, covered quite well I thought by NBC. I found their coverage interesting, not too cloying, only very slightly off-topic some of the time, and in general quite good. The diving commentator Cynthia Potter was great--as a teacher, she just nailed it. We learned a lot about diving, a good dive, and how the judges were scoring such that we could spot things we'd never noticed before by the end of the competition. Tim Daggett for gymnastics was not quite as good on the teaching bit as Cynthia--I really wanted him to narrate a bit in the floor, like they do for the ice skating--in this next pass she'll try the triple, but she fell in practice--that sort of thing. He was strident in his assertion about the bias of the judges, which got him some bad bloggy press, but I found his commentary helpful, insightful, and in the end if you're watching US coverage of the olympics, you've signed on for a bit of jingoism my friends. And the beach volleyball was fabulous to watch, particularly the after-match interviews with the Americans May and Walsh--Kerri Walsh is about as type-A as you can get and she just makes you want to get out there and do something great! Great! GREAT!

I also thought the China culture segments were interesting (if at times a wee bit stereotypical--calligraphy, kites, kung fu, and fried scorpion??) but I was happily surprised by the rhetoric of 'we heart China' coming out of the NBC studios and various athletes paying tribute to China's hospitality.

Bottom line: Well done. Fun, watchable reality TV.

Followed by fun watchable reality TV II: the Democrats in Denver!

A caveat here--we are still reentering the US and so the cable news channels are the danger zone. Indeed, news of any kind here, aside from that gleaned from international sources, is a recipe for hyperventilation and hiding under the bed. So the first night we watched CNN's coverage which was farcical to the point of trying to beat the Daily Show at its own game. I suppose that's why the Daily Show is so good. I just don't want to know how close it is to those stations that claim to be delivering 'real' news.

Day two we discovered MSNBC. I heart Rachel Maddow. This was the first time I'd seen her at all--I had to look up her name on-line (they assume we already know everyone? where did the space for labeling the talking heads go?) but I just thought she was on the button in every one of her responses, rarely providing canned soundbite analysis and always showing us a different way to look at what had just happened. We'll see if she can carry her own show, but so far count me impressed. And let me add here: thank your chosen goddess that she doesn't look like the typical newswoman. I know that looks don't tell us what's inside the ol' brain, sure. But coming back to the US it's completely bizarre how many barbie dolls there are delivering 'serious news' with $400/tube lipstick next to aging 'distinguished' men (who, like their cohosts have also had botox, but that's another issue).

Either sex up the men or get some more intelligent women. Go Maddox go!

Up next: fun watchable reality TV III! GOP in MSP--our Return of the Jedi. Hm. who are the ewoks in this scenario?

a little moment of hedge-filled zen

Not much time to post this last week. we are 'borrowing' wireless from a lovely unknown neighbor who has their network open. bless you bless you dlink person! So a quick post from me, with a picture from the garden at the Olympics in Beijing. Tea + Shrubbery + Fabulous =



How do they get it to steam??

In-transit: Books Read in Limbo

I'm still working through Moby Dick, about which I can currently say the following:

• It turns out that this Melville guy writes extremely well. Fascinating.
  
• Moby Dick is a laugh riot. Seriously. LOL.

More on Ishmael later.

But as I work through the dense and rewarding Moby Dick (I must be weird because I really like the chapters where he narrates encyclopedia entries--oo! Cuvier! Love it!) I am reading other things along the way. Plane flights and the seven-hour-long wait for the movers (no joke) helped in this. (I would be blogging about that but I'm not yet in a place to do so. Grr.)

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne
I would not have found this book were it not for my friendship in Swansea with the author's parents, and I'm glad that they told me about it because it's a wonderful read, tightly written, and perfectly captures what living in Swansea near the Gower feels like. The protagonist is a mid-teen boy who psychoanalyses his parents and is worried they are headed for divorce (he attempts to take action to avert this in his own hilarious and awkward way). Meanwhile his own life is taking new directions, as it does in the mid-teen years. To call it a coming of age novel would be to over-genrefy it (not a word) and therefore to miss the subtlety, cynicism, and wit that Dunthorne puts into the character and his parents. Featuring Rhossili and Llangennith, as well as Walter Road and other locales, so for Swanseaites, or those who for some reason (!) visited Swansea and also read this blog (why would that be?) a good read. [side note: Joe's mother was careful to point out that the novel is not (NOT!) autobiographical.]

A Dog Year by Jon Katz
Our old friends from F'burg, now living in DC (well, MD, but close enough), with whom we would trade dog-sitting duties and walks to the dog park, recommended this one, not because it is high literature but because it fundamentally gets the relationship we have with our dog and they had with theirs (Molly, sadly, passed on to glory two years ago). They also gave it to their vet when she failed in every way to get that relationship as they were making the difficult decision to put Molly down. A great plane read. Takes about an hour, and if you love dogs, this is it. Bonus: may explain a lot about the authors of this blog to those who do not get dog people.

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
We picked this up on our recent trip to bookstoreville (aka PDX), where the used selection and the manageable store size at the Hawthorne Powells can't really be beat. Stephenson writes well--his Snow Crash rocked. This one is less good, but is interesting on a number of levels. Writing is still tight. The main character is a bit of an ass, but not so much that you hate him, so that works. And it's written in a particular moment in the history of the US environmental movement (mid/late 80s) when ecowarrior didn't mean an SUV-driving mountain-climbing organic-food-buying consumer but meant, well, a warrior who fought for enviro causes (I'm not angry, I'm just sayin'). Post-hippie, but still enough of that to give the book flavor. Set in Boston and featuring evil corporations, debates over whether simply exposing them does any good at all, and a thriller-type storyline that's pretty fun to follow. Bonus: protagonist is a chemist! cool! After you've read it we can discuss the rest of my review--no spoilers...

There may be more but I can't remember them at this stage (not a good sign). Three for now is enough. Back to the high seas and the search for the great white one...