It's begun...

Every asshole out there telling you that "Islamofascists" are an existential threat to Civilization is a douchebag. And here's why. These same folks ignore things that are real and true existential threats (as opposed to a a few hundred goat fuckers with a hard-on for the Middle Ages--which actually describes the religious right pretty well, too) like the following, extremely momentous event (from the Independent):

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

It's gone, motherfuckers, gone. That island isn't coming back, and dozens more are next.
The delta where that island was located is one of the most heavily populated parts of the globe, along with the deltas of the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi (and we know what happened a couple years ago to the biggest city on the Mississippi Delta). It was a holy place, a magical place, one of the great centers of human achievement and culture, just like those other river deltas. It's begun, gentle readers, it's begun and I'm sore afraid that we might not be able to stop it. And if the loss of a single Indian island doesn't affect you, doesn't drive it home, then I direct your attention to one of the smaller, least geographically significant, estuaries in the world that could be equally swamped sometime in this new century, the locus where the Hudson River flows into New York Harbor. So if you fret that hordes of swarthy foreigners are a force to be dreaded above all others then I direct your benighted eyes and ears to the old saying: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

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Tom Cruise didn't suck: Once.

I don't like Tom Cruise, and I do like P.T. Anderson. And, son of a bitch, if Magnolia isn't the first Tom Cruise performance I've ever liked. Seriously, dude was shitty in Mission Impossible and sequels, hell, he was the worst thing about Top Gun and everything in between. But Magnolia is a great performance. That might have something to do with the fact that the character he plays kind of sucks as a person, so, y'know, water finds its level. Way to not suck at least once, Tom Cruise, way to not suck at least once.

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He served when called and he served with dignity.

Though I myself am an Ann Arbor liberal, bred and raised with the papers to prove it, and President Gerald Ford was a Grand Rapids conservative, and we are natural enemies like the cobra and the mongoose, well, he was a pretty good guy, and a not bad President. He was pro-choice, and he was pro gay rights, and he was the only President to ever say in his State of the Union that the state of the union was not strong (and by that admission, tell the truth). He was the very picture of decency. R.I.P. Gerry Ford. Go with God Mr. President.

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Merry X-Mas

For my Christmas festivities I'll be eating a whole meatloaf and drinking the better part of the bottle of scotch my brother bought for me. This replaces my usual Christmas Taco Extravaganza. Also, I got a bookshelf. It's pretty sweet.

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Gentlemen! Gentlemen! To order!

War! War, gentlemen and gentlewomen, is a racket! Settle down now, gentlemen. We all know this to be the case. Though it is impolitic to speak it, we are all aware, we are all enlightened here, men and women of the modern age, and we know that war is a racket. Always has been, always will be. The latest entry in the long cannon of great works and scholarship on the subject is here in the Los Angeles Times:

Leopold cleared at least $1.1 billion in today's dollars during the 23 years he controlled Congo, and his businessmen friends made additional huge sums. Much of the money flowed into companies with special royal concession rights to exploit the rain forest. Final question, for extra credit: Do those companies remind you of anything? If you mentioned Halliburton or DynCorp, you're right again.

Order! I call for order! We must face it. We must face up to the truth inside of us. Even the Trojan War was more for gold than Helen. And so all the tragic and "glorious" little wars we fight are a racket, they line pockets and fill coffers greater in volume than even the sum of their wounds and barrels of spilled guts. Twas always so. I recommend we adjourn and consider the racket and What Is To Be Done. Suggested topic for working groups: can we truly be sustained by all the grain of Babylon? Does its measure weighed in the balance make our souls weighty enough to sustain? One doubts.

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Honestly, this is uncanny!

I've never seen more than a minute or two of The Sound of Music in my life, and I'll be damned if while watching it tonight, I somehow know almost all of the songs and most of the plot. Seriously, I'm kind of freaked out. Julie Andrews, get out of my head!.
Well, anyway: so long, fare well, auf wiedersehen, good...son of a bitch!

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the white

It should be here noted, and so should shall be, that Moby Dick is a called a great marble tombstone afloat on the seas and called also the mask behind which all evil plays its part in the drama, an' too, Moby Dick is spotted (in the 1956 motion picture version of the old tale) at the Bikini Atoll, where the atom bomb was tested in the early days of the end of time (being so called because the increase in atmospheric radioactive isotopes means that zero years in carbon dating is at 1952). Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but rather white in the maws of suns and the blinding snows of farthest Antarctic deserts and moonscaped voids and the white of nothing-not-even-darkness-itself.

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Shipping Out

I really, really like old-timey nautical stuff. Seriously. It's a thing. And I can't explain it, because I don't actually want to live on the coast, nor am I particularly fond of the ocean per se. But I can't stop listening to "Shipping Up to Boston" by the Dropkick Murphys (featured in the kick ass new movie The Departed) or "Shanty for the Arethusa" by the Decemberists or "Mrs. McGrath" from the latest Bruce Springsteen album. My favorite book: Moby Dick. Favorite food: fish and chips, followed by clam chowder. I wear a pea-coat in the winter. I think Homer's "Odyssey" explains everything that Moby Dick doesn't. I know a distressing amount about the great maritime empires from the Phoenicians to the British to the Venetians to the Arab trade in the Indian Ocean (go ahead and ask me where the word "dungarees" comes from). I know that their's a church in Detroit consecrated to the shippers on the Great Lakes (The Mariners' Church of Detroit)--I've been there, it's right next to the court house. And I'm endlessly fascinated with whales and dolphins and especially their representation in art--I would buy scrimshaw if I didn't think it probably violates the Endangered Species Act.

I totally just realized all this tonight. I have, in my life lived permanently in Colorado, Arizona, and Michigan. Three better exemplars of every kind of continental interior I defy you to find. And I've been very happy with those choices; hell, I'm kinda scared of the sea. Haven't touched salt water in at least four years despite multiple trips to both coasts since then. What does all this say about me?

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