archy

Book update

2012-01-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

I've set a deadline for myself to have a book proposal for the mammoth book complete by next week, not counting the perfect polished chapter. This is turning out to be much harder than I thought. I'm terrible at selling myself. However, it has been a very useful exercise to help me clarify the organization of the book in my own mind. Brian Switek of the blogs Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking, has been good enough to give me some very helpful advice. If you aren't reading his blogs, you should, and if you have not yet bought his first book, you should. It's now available as an e-book.

My coming year

2012-01-01T19:24:00.000-08:00

When planning for the coming year, I think it's always safe to say, "this is going to be a weird year." This one, for me, is going to be weirder than usual. It's going to involve some fresh starts with all that that means, for better or worse. I figure I should let you all know what's going on, just case I seem a little bizarre from time to time.

Tessa and I can no longer keep the house. We're fixing it up, getting rid of stuff, and preparing to sell it. After that, we'll each take our share and go our separate ways. Naturally, there is a lot of history going into that decision. We're still very good friends. I'll still be helping with the business (which will be going through its own major changes. More on that in a few days). I hope my friends will remain Tessa's friends and I hope hers will still be mine. This isn't a taking sides sort of break up.

There's a lot of vague and open-ended possibilities there. Meanwhile, a concrete opportunity has come up. Not long after my Scientific American guest piece was published, I heard from an editor who was interested in looking at my mammoth book. No guarantees. But, for a first time author with no credentials in the field, getting any attention from an editor is a big deal. At the same time we're preparing the house to go on the market, I'm going to be putting together a formal book proposal and polishing a sample chapter. Right now I have 60,000+ words written, but they are more in the form of essays and fragments than a coherent book. I had already decided to start editing it together this month when everything got weird. Now, I can't let weird life stand as an excuse to procrastinate. It's finals time (that's an academic metaphor, not a sports metaphor. I don't do sports metaphors).

After Tessa and I sell the house and disentangle our affairs, I'm going to be looking for a place to live. For financial reasons, I'm pretty sure I'll be leaving Seattle. Rent is just too expensive here. My preferences lean towards staying in this general area. I like the culture and politics. I know how to get around. And I'd like to keep helping Tessa with the business. On the other hand, I don't have a job, a career, or any close friends here, and my parents are gone. If something promising showed up somewhere else, this is probably the best time in the last twenty years for me to pick up and move.

I'd like to find a place where I could imagine spending the rest of my life, but maybe that's hoping for too much. At a bare minimum, I need a cheap place where the cat and I can hide out for the Spring while I finish the book. Once I have that ready to shop around, I'll be able to think seriously about a job, a home, and a life.

I don't know what's going to happen. All I know is that my life is going to be completely different by Jan. 1, 2013.

Best science headline of the year

2011-12-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

This belongs on a top ten list.

Boston Charlie

2011-12-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

It wouldn't be Christmas without a rendition of the greatest carol of all time.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie
Lyrics by Walt Kelly, Music by Traditional (whoever he was)

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Duck us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' Polly Voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!

Tickle salty boss anchovie
Wash a wash a wall Anna Kangaroo
Ducky allus bows to Polly,
Prolly Wally would but har'ly do!

Dock us all a bowsprit, Solly --
Golly, Solly's cold and so's ol' Lou!

A holiday warning

2011-12-24T20:25:00.001-08:00

This is a rerun of a post I wrote around this time a few years ago. I think it's still relevant.

*********

The men in black (MIB) entered UFO lore in 1956 in a book entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The author was one Gray Barker who had been a member of one of the first American UFO groups, the rather ambitiously named International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Though Barker's book dealt with a number of paranormal topics, the largest part of it dealt with his former boss, IFSB founder Albert Bender.

In 1953 the IFSB was about two years old with a few hundred dues paying members (called "investigators") who all received the Bureau's newsletter Space Review. The group was doing well enough when, in October 1953, Bender suddenly stopped publication of Space Review, and dissolved the IFSB. The last issue of the news letter gave only this explanation.

STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by order from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.

According to Barker, the reason Bender had so abruptly ended the group was that three mysterious men in black had visited Bender and warned him off. But before they did, the MIBs were good enough to explain at least part of the true secret of the flying saucers. UFOs, they said, actually come from Antarctica. They have bases in both polar regions and regularly fly between them. Bender told a different story in his own book in 1963.

Enough UFO stories end with the craft departing due north or south that Barker's version of Bender's visitors has been adopted by conspiracy theorists who believe in a decidedly terrestrial origin for saucers. My personal favorite version is that saucers and MIBs are Atlanteans from within the hollow earth, but the theory that they are Nazi refugees from super-scientific bases beneath the ice cap has its devotees, too.

The MIBs are the key to the mystery. The most mundane explanation that has been offered is that they work for the American government and that they are trying to hide the truth about the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs. But that could itself be disinformation. No government has the ability to do what the MIBs do. Think for a moment about the men in black. They have appeared all over the world. They have a special interest in unidentified flying objects and in protecting the polar regions. They seem to actually know what is in the minds of the people they visit. Who has the ability to manage an intelligence network like that? Ask yourself: Who has the ability to travel everywhere, at any time, and even seemingly to appear in two places at once? Who has a special interest in protecting the polar regions? Who knows when you are sleeping? Who knows when you are awake? Who knows if you've been good or bad?

I think you know the answer.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and be good for goodness sake.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

2011-12-16T21:44:00.000-08:00

Many of my science blogger / skeptical community friends seem to be sorry that he's gone. If so, I feel for their loss. But I can't forget that, while he was undoubtably one of the greatest critical minds of the last third of a century, brilliant, illuminating to read, and that I usually agreed with him, he was also a drunken lout, a sexist bully, and, as a late convert to neocon-ism, one of the people most responsible for spreading the exceptionally bigoted trope of "Islamo-fascism." To me, Hitchens was always a great mind that disappointed.

This would make the debates worth watching

2011-12-13T09:59:00.000-08:00

Help another blogger

2011-11-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

After you were all so good helping me, I know you're a generous lot and will heed another call from a blogger in need. Rumproast blogger StrangeAppar8us suffered a traumatic brain injury on November 3. The injury required surgery, he is still in the hospital, and will need extensive rehabilitation. The injury also left him blind. The bills for all this are going to be astronomical, far beyond the ability of a church bake sale or bartered chicken to handle. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to defray some of his expenses. His fellow bloggers at Rumproast are taking donations to buy specialized computer equipment so that he can start writing again. They are also setting up a permanent fund to help with his ongoing expenses. If you can, send a few bucks his way and help spread the word. Thanks.

The first trilobite

2011-11-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

Note: This post was selected for last year's The Open Laboratory: The Year's Best Writing on Science Blogs.

In their early days, scientific journals were much more generous than they are today about publishing letters from experimenters and collectors in all walks of life. The hard wall between scientists and amateurs had not yet been built and all literate people were, in theory, entitled to participate in the discussion. One such person was Rev. Edward Lhwyd (or Lhuyd or Lhwid or Lloyd), the illegitimate son of a member of the minor gentry who rose from genteel poverty to become keeper of collections at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (an unpaid position, but important in the community of science). The 1698 volume of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific journal in the English language, contains "Part of a Letter from Mr. Edw. Lhwyd to Dr. Martin Lister, Fell. of the Coll. of Phys. and R. S. Concerning Several Regularly Figured Stones Lately Found by Him." The two-page letter is accompanied by a page of etchings of the figured stones or, as we would call them, fossils.

Lhwyd collected his fossils during a trip to Southwestern Wales. Number fifteen, in his etchings, he found near Llandeilo, probably on the grounds of Lord Dynefor's castle. He wrote of it: "The 15th whereof we found great Plenty, must doubtless be referred to the Sceleton of some flat Fish..." A century and a half after he wrote that, Sir Roderick Murchison would place the Llandeilo rocks in the middle strata of his Ordovician Period. A century after Murchison, scientists would date that strata between 461-63 million years old. That is less than ten million years after the first plants took root on dry land and a hundred million years before cockroaches crawled out of the sea looking for a snack.

Lhwyd's "flatfish." Today we call it Ogygiocarella debuchii (Brongniart).
Lhwyd's identification of number fifteen as a flatfish didn't last very long. Today anyone with even a casual knowledge of fossils will recognise it as a trilobite, something more like a shrimp than a halibut. Lhwyd didn't have our advantage of hundreds of years of fossil studies producing thousands of lavishly illustrated and easily accessible books. It would be almost a century before the word "trilobite" would be coined and into Murchison's time before the scientific world would realize that trilobites were not related to halibut or shrimp (or oysters, another contender) but, rather, something entirely their own. Lhwyd was plunging ahead in the dark trying to make sense of an unfamiliar and mysterious corner of nature.

Lhwyd deserves great credit for deciding his little flatfish was worthy of notice and for sending his drawings to the Royal Society, although, sometimes, he gets a little too much credit. His illustration is the first published scientific illustration of a trilobite that we know of, but he did not "discover" trilobites, as some books will tell you. We should always regard any claim that someone discovered a fossil species with suspicion. Trilobites are extremely common fossils and can be found laying on the surface in many parts of the world. Our ancestors were both aware of fossils and, in many cases, aware that they were the petrified remains of once living things. Usually, what an author means when they declare that this person or that person discovered a fossil is that they were the first to describe the fossil in scientific literature. Lhwyd's illustration certainly counts as a description in that sense, but it is not the first description we know of.

No one can say when people first noticed that fossils were different than other rocks except to say that it was very long ago. The first step in making stone tools is to examine stones very carefully, so it is possible that our ancestors were aware of organic patterns in rocks over a million years ago. For trilobites, specifically, the earliest evidence of humans treating a fossil as something specially comes from a cave near Yonne, France. In the 1880s, when archaeologists were combing the caves of central France looking for artifacts, bones, and paintings, they discovered a much handled trilobite fossil that had been drilled as if to be worn as a pendant. The cave where it was found is now known as Grotte du Trilobite and is also home to paintings of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Because the pendant was handled so much, the exact species of trilobite cannot be determined, however, geologists can say that it was not originally from Yonne. The original owners of the fossil thought enough of it that they carried or traded it from the other side of France. The occupation strata in which the trilobite was found has been dated as fifteen thousand years old.

The oldest known human trilobite artifact from the Grotte du Trilobite.
In the New World, American fossil hunters found plentiful deposits of trilobites in western Utah in the 1860s, but the local Ute Indians had known about them for untold years. In 1931, Frank Beckwith uncovered evidence of the Ute use of trilobites. Travelling through the badlands, he photographed two petroglyphs that most likely represent trilobites. On the same trip he examined a burial, of unknown age, with a drilled trilobite fossil laying in the chest cavity of the interred. He asked Joe Pichyavit, a Ute friend, friend what the elders said about such fossils. Pickyavit replied that trilobite necklaces were worn as protection against disease and bullets. The local Ute name for trilobite fossils translated roughly as "little water bug in stone," indicating that they recognised the organic nature of fossils. Pickyavit then made a necklace for Beckwith in the old style. Since then, trilobite amulets have been found all over the Great Basin, as well as in British Columbia and Australia.

Probable trilobite petroglyph. Beckwith's label reads "A shield (?) shaped like a trilobite."

Joe Pickyavit's trilobite protective necklace made of fossils, clay beads, and horsehair tassels.
Written descriptions of trilobites before Lhywd date possibly from the third century BC and definitely from the fourth century AD. Most ancient literatures include a genre called lapidaries, catalogs of precious stones and minerals along with their practical uses in medicine and magic (often the same thing). Most of the lapidaries included discussions of fossils and one, On Petrifactions by Theophrastus, was entirely about fossils. Sadly, the book has not survived and we know only short quotes from it in the works of later authors. The Spanish geologists Eladio Liñán and Rodolfo Gozalo argue that some of the fossils described in Greek and Latin lapidaries as scorpion stone, beetle stone, and ant stone refer to trilobite fossils. Less ambiguous references to trilobite fossils can be found in Chinese sources. Fossils from the Kushan formation of northeastern China were prized as inkstones and decorative pieces. A dictionary commentary written around 300AD by Guo Pu, refers to these fossils as bat stones because the spines on the pygidium (rear section) resemble the bones of a bat wing. The Khai-Pao Pharmacopoeia, written in 970 refers to the fossils as stone silkworms. Just nine years before Lhywd sent his letter to the Royal Society, Wang Shizhen wrote about the Kushan formation fossils a narrative of his travels in North China.

None of this should diminish Lhywd's place in the history of paleontology. Lhywd's observations were made within the framework of the emerging Western concept of science. The fossils were not interesting oddities that he found in the course of doing something else; they were the object of his outing. Lhywd took an artist along with him on his trip to Wales for the express purpose of preparing scientific illustrations. He communicated his observations to other scientifically interested people with the understanding that they would get further distribution. Finally, Lhywd gathered his fossils and took them back with him to the Ashmolean Museum where others would be able to study them.

As for number fifteen, it's not clear whether the fossil trilobite itself has survived. Modern curators at the Ashmolean have tried to identify Lhwyd's fossils in their collections. They have one old trilobite that approximately matches number fifteen, but they are unable to make a positive identification. The Romantic in me hopes its the one.

Number fifteen?

And now, a word from our sponsor

2011-11-22T11:02:00.001-08:00

The holiday shopping season is upon us. Looking for something elegant, whimsical, and practical to give as a gift? Want to support small businesses? Rather order online and avoid the crowds, parking nightmares, and canned Christmas music? Luckily, there is a solution: Howling Pig Smelly Soaps and Other Stuff! Buy my Clever Wife's hand-made soaps, lotions, and skin-care products. Tessa's scents are unique and wonderful. All of her products are gentle, simple, cruelty free (plant-based ingredients and no animal testing, unless I count), and labeled with an attractive and amusing pig (that I drew). And while you're shopping, don't forget to get soemthing for yourself; you deserve it.

We made the big time

2011-11-22T10:34:00.001-08:00

My latest mammothy post is being published in Scientific American's guest blogger series, today. It's a little mystery story about a small drawing of an elephant on a Renaissance map. It's distantly related to a post from this spring. The connection will become more obvious in a few weeks when I publish my third post on the mammoth-walrus-sea monster confusion. Until then, go over to Scientific American and enjoy their bloggy goodness.

A bold alternative to string theory

2011-11-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

Yarn Theory
It's best described using fuzzy math.

Rerun season

2011-11-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

We might have some sciency visitors today, so I'm going to repeat a few older posts for their enjoyment. I hope you regular readers enjoy them, too.

It's Armistice Day

2011-11-11T00:11:00.001-08:00

Today is 11-11-11. For out friends across the sea that's 11-11-11. On this day in 1918, an armistice between the Germany Empire and the Allied Powers ended hostilities on the Western Front. As Germany was the last of the Central Powers still fighting, this essentially ended the Great War. In many countries, today is a holiday. In the US, we call it Veteran's Day. In most countries, today is the day that they remember those who died in war. In the US, Memorial Day, under various names, was already set aside for that purpose and Armistice Day eventually evolved into a day to recognise the service of living veterans.

Something in the neighborhood of sixty five million people served in the combined militaries of all the countries invoved in World War One. Today, only two are alive. When they are gone, the great War will truely have passed into history. The only vet whose service can be verified by records is Florence Green, who served in the Women's Royal Air Force during the last months of the war. In the US we have Andy Rasch, who claims to have run away at age sixteen and joined the Navy when we entered the war. It would be churlish to deny his his moment, so let's raise a glass to Andy and Florence.

And let's see that our living veterans get a fair shake for their service.

You guys are the best

2011-11-07T20:18:00.001-08:00

I want to thank all of the people who have responded kindly to our plight: the retweeters, the bloggers, Facebookians, new customers, and those who dropped a kind word. It makes things a lot less painful to know that there are people like you out there.

I've just been Borazed

2011-11-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

It's kind of like being Pharangulated, but it doesn't sound quite as dirty.

Welcome everyone.

The silver lining

2011-11-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

An upside to begging is that today has been the blog's best trafficked day in months. And Saturdays are usually the slowest days. I wonder what will happen if I beg again on Monday.

We're broke

2011-11-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to write this, but it is finally time to surrender my pride and start begging.

Tessa and I are unemployed, over 55, and broke. It's been over four years since I had a full-time job and almost three since she has. I had a part time-job for one of those years and we have both had some contract work as writers, but that has been drying up. We've gone through our savings. We've gone through my inheritance. We've gone through my 401k. Now we're only a few months away from finishing off her 401k. Our next step will be selling our house.

About eight years ago, Tessa started making some soaps and balms for her belly dancing friends. I already had a business license under the name Howling Pig, so I drew up a cute logo for her and she used that as her brand name. Tessa's real strength is in blending scents; the soap was just a medium to make the world a better-smelling place. Her friends loved her products and, encouraged, she started making lotions and body sprays and selling them at belly dancing events. We began talking about Howling Pig as something we might develop into a source of supplemental income for our retirement.

By 2008, I only had a part-time, contract job and Tessa was unhappy and feeling trapped in her full time job. We decided to take a shot at turning Howling Pig into something serious. We built a website, bought some equipment, applied to fairs, bought a tent, had cards and a sign printed, and filed the appropriate tax paperwork with the state. We also decided to sell at a weekly farmers' market. Two weeks after our first market, the stock market tanked. Three months after that, Tessa was laid off when her company decided to move their operations to China.

As I mentioned, we have had some writing jobs since then, but our only regular income has been from Howling Pig. And there hasn't been much of that. The Pig brings in about a tenth of what we need to keep going. In 2009, we thought that if we maintained a presence, we would build a customer base and things would be okay when the economy recovered. It actually looked like that was starting to happen during the first half of 2010. April looked good. May was our best month to date. Then June happened. As soon as the Republicans decided on their election strategy of deficit fear, business went flat and then went down hill. Most market vendors and small businesses I know have experienced the same thing. Gifts and small luxuries are an easy thing for the middle class to give up when they are fearing economic Armageddon.

So, here's the deal. I could put up a PayPal button and ask for direct donations--I probably will, soon. But that's only a temporary fix. I'm sure our online friends would help us cover the bills for a month or two, but what we need is a regular income. I need a job. I'm an experienced writer (help files, documentation, light marketing, UI text), but I'm essentially unemployable (over 55, over-educated, unemployed for over four years, and a resume that looks like an explosion at the jigsaw puzzle factory). Still, the best situation would be if I could get a regular job while Tessa gives Howling Pig a little longer. If anyone has connections in Seattle that need a smart guy, who is a fast learner, and has an amazing skill set and broad knowledge base, please point them at me.

There is something else you can do that is good for you and for us. Buy our stuff. Really. Tessa's scents are unique and wonderful. All of her products are gentle, simple, cruelty free (plant-based ingredients and no animal testing, unless I count), and labeled with an attractive and amusing pig. We're into gift season, now. Buy some for your friends. Buy some for your family. Buy some for yourself. You'll get to do a good deed, you'll get something wonderful in return, and we'll get to remain part of the middle class and keep our house.

Please use your Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or blog to point people at the business website. Thanks. I love you all.

I vote for number three

2011-10-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin issued a statement today explaining why the state's strict new voter ID law is no problem.

There are more photo ID’s currently issued than there are registered voters in Wisconsin.

As I see it, this statement can be interpreted several ways:

Walker thinks everyone in Wisconsin already has an ID.
Walker thinks people who don't vote also don't drive.
Walker thinks sixteen year olds can vote.
Walker is dumb as a post and believes all of the above.
Walker believes we're dumb as posts and will believe one of the above.
Walker is play a dog whistle game with the paranoid right and wants them to think Democrats have been stockpiling multiple IDs to commit massive voter fraud.

Obviously, he hates freedom

2011-10-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

Ronald Reagan was once the president of that Screen Actors' Guild, so it is safe to say he's the favorite labor leader of conservative Americans. But if such a thing even exists, who would you say is the conservative movement's second favorite labor leader? Take a minute. I'll give you a clue. Probably only older conservatives will know the name--cold war conservatives. If you said the man who Reagan called "one of the world’s greatest labor leaders," anti-Soviet activist, Solidarność leader, and eventually president of Poland Lech Wałęsa, buy yourself a drink.

Now, of all living labor leaders, who would be the most problematic one to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters? If you said the man who Reagan called "one of the world’s greatest labor leaders," anti-Soviet activist, Solidarność leader, and eventually president of Poland Lech Wałęsa--well, you dont deserve another drink, because it was a gimmee, but put a paper unbrella in that drink because that's who's flying to New York this week.

"How could I not respond," Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. "The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand."

A former shipyard worker who led Poland's successful revolt against Soviet communism, Walesa said "capitalism is in crisis" and not just in America.

"This is a worldwide problem," he told the Lublin-based Dziennik Wschodni newspaper. "The Wall Street protesters have focused a magnifying glass on the problem."

About that King quote

2011-10-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the former IRA supporter whose main claim to fame these days is holding endless hearings to demonize American Muslims, does not like the Occupy Wall Street protesters. That hardly makes him unique among Republicans. GOP presidential contenders, talking heads and members of Congress have been lining up to condemn the protesters. But something King said the other day has me curious. Appearing on Laura Ingraham's radio show, after calling the protesters "anarchists," "anti-American," and a "ragtag mob," King went on to say this:

We have to be careful not to allow this to get any legitimacy. I'm taking this seriously in that I'm old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy. We can't allow that to happen.

That comment has been floating around FaceBook today in poster form. Notice, he's not talking about the culture of sixties protest. He's not upset about drugs, sex, and rock and roll. He's talking about the actual policies that the sixties protesters pushed into the mainstream.

I need to ask you Mr. King, which of those policies do you think were so bad. Was it ending segregation and expanding equality for African Americans? Was it allowing younger people to vote? Maybe it was equal pay for women. Or cleaning up our air and water. Or perhaps it was the demand that we end a pointless war that had already killed and maimed tens of thousands of young Americans and appeared unwinnable. Which of those things do you find so horrible Mr. King?

My wife says--and I agree--that many middle aged conservatives seem to be motivated by nothing more than bitterness over their experiences in the sixties and seventies. They were out of step with the prevailing culture of that time and they want to retroactively take revenge on it by undoing the accomplishments of those years. They pretend that there are principles behind their actions, but it's really just emotional payback for some. In the same interview, King called the protesters "a bunch of angry 1960s do-overs." It looks to me like it is King who wants a do-over on the sixties.

Why would a conservative be against that?

2011-10-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

The often confused Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks President Obama's jobs plan is a secret plot to keep gays from getting married, or something like that.

This may be, uh-uh, something nice he’s throwing out for uh gay folks that are living together so he can tell them actually you’re better off not getting married, uh because there’s a marriage penalty here.

Or maybe it's an attack on straight marriage.

If you’re the head of a single household, you have an exemptions at $225,000. If you're all other cases $200,000. So it really penalizes married individuals ... But if you want to get divorced it is good news for you

No, it's definitely about the gays.

Now, of course, the founders, uh they all understood marriage to be between a man and a woman and um that's the way the history of the country's been.

Or, whatever.

This president, according to the power to, as the old saying goes, the power to tax, the power to destroy, takes a shot at uh conven-- traditional, conventional marriage.

Since Gohmert has so much trouble keeping even one thought clear in his head, I suppose it would be futile to point out that it is congress--specifically, his branch of congress--that has the power to tax (and destroy) and not the president.

Stop the presses!

2011-10-04T11:14:00.001-07:00

OMG! Sudden, breaking, really, really, REALLY important news!! Chris Christie still isn't running for president!!!

We now return you to stuff that matters.

Bloomberg defends the banks

2011-09-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

New York mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg has said some surprisingly sane and occasionally even progressive things over the last couple years. But the Occupy Wall Street protests have brought out his old self. I suppose it's not surprising since he did make most of his fortune from investing. Appearing on a local radio show, he had this to say about the protests:

The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector.

This is a complete mischaracterization of the protests. The protests are not against mid-level employees. They are against bank presidents and top level executives, the ones who make policies for the banks. They are against the biggest people at the investment houses, the ones who make millions from inventing "financial products," irresponsibly throwing millions and billions of our dollars around, and who still get million dollar bonuses when everything goes south. When people say "banker," they do not mean the cashier at their local branch.

We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs.

We need banks. I can agree with that, but I don't think many, if any, of the protesters are saying let's abolish all banks.

I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward.

Why is it that only white collar and well connected criminals get this blanket pardon when they destroy other people's lives? You never hear other crimes treated that way. "I think we spend much too much time worrying about who murdered whom. The important thing is talk about how to prevent murder as we go forward." I have a better idea. Let's investigate. If crimes were committed, we put the criminals on trial and send them to jail. We test out that old deterrent theory of harsh punishment. Saying no one will ever be prosecuted sure hasn't helped prevent crime.

Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Freddie Mac and Frannie Mae and Congress.

Yes, Congress does deserve a lot of the blame for the collapse. But their responsibility lies in deregulating the financial sector and not performing any over site on Wall Street.

There might be some legitimate reasons for criticizing the Wall Street protesters, but their choice of target is not one of them.

It's Banned Book Week

2011-09-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

The First banned book I ever read was Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls a collection of children's poetry edited by William Cole. It showed up in our libray at Temple View Elementry in 1964. It was so popular the librarian would only let us keep it for one day. A few days after I read it, some parents complained and it was pulled from the shelves. I can still recite some of the Shel Silverstein poems from the collection.

Lists of banned books can be found all over the internet. Here are a few of the books that I've read. A longer list of mine would be very heavy on young kids' books. When I worked in bookstores, I often read illustrated kids' books on my breaks. Not all of these books were banned in the US. The Bible, for instance has never been banned in the US, despite what Tea Partiers and religious right fund raisers will tell you.

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Stupids (series), by Harry Allard
Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek
The Bible
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
American Heritage Dictionary
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
Dictionary of American Slang
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
New Class by Milovan Djilas
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
Macbeth by William Shakespeare

What's on your list?