HP Lovecraft meets Charles Schultz [via the null device]

A reprise of my Halloween post of last year:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Friday Sunday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Who knows the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from last year [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Halloween?”, argues as I do that reverence for Halowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Halloween certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Halloween errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

In any case: trick or treat!

This is doing the rounds as an email chain letter and is being posted to many places on the web. It is supposedly a plea to vote for Kerry from a “very conservative” Orlando Sentinel columnist. The email I got says,

“He’s a Conservative Republican who is anti-abortion, anti-tax-and-spend, loudly critical of legislation by the judiciary, doesn’t think much of ulticulturalism or secularism, has suggested Clinton “turned the Oval Office into a whorehouse,” thinks Ronald Reagan is the greatest thing to come down the pike since canned beer, and voted for Bush in the last election.”

Reese’s ‘column’ begins,

“Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush’s re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a front man, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.”

The only problem is I cannot find anything like this piece, or anything by or about Charlie Reese, by searching the Orlando Sentinel site. Much as I would love to believe in this religious conversion from the dark side, it sounds to me like a spam troll by an anonymous Kerry supporter to get conservatives to give the Democratic candidate another look. Snopes, my favorite debunking site for the abuse of the credulous (like myself!), has nothing about “Charlie Reese.” Does anybody know any more?

Addendum: It turns out I couldn’t find anything because it is “Charley Reese”, not “Charlie…” (Thanks to the comment from reader NWD). Reese was with the Sentinel until 2001 but has posted his columns on lewrockwell.com since then. Here is a link to “Vote for a Puppet, Not a Man.” Here is a more accurate capsule biography of Reese:

“Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969–71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column which is carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.”

I apologize for my initial skepticism.

“In the long run, is it sometimes better for a party to lose an election than to win?” (Boston Globe)

This is where I grew up in the ’60’s.

“A British stockbroker in jail in the United States has been lifting the lid on a controversial prison regime through a compelling weblog.” (BBC)

“A pair of Mississippi women challenge the army brass on behalf of their soldier-husbands in Iraq” (Village Voice)

“A brief history of the ultimate pop faux pas” (Village Voice). And also see the story below, also about lip-synching:

“Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president’s bulge was not caused by wrinkled clothing.” (Salon) I don’t think you actually need the Photoshop enhancement techniques to tell that he is wearing a wire. It is even evident on the original (left) photo.

The article goes on to detail Bunning’s history of bizarre and erratic behavior behind Democratic innuendoes that he is demented (in the clinical sense; not just name-calling). Republicans counter with homophobic smears about his Democratic challenger.

With our Byzantine electoral college system, it is actually possible that John McCain will end up inaugurated as the next president in January. Here’s how. (Tech Central Station)

Bush’s One-Finger Victory Salute

Australia requires citizens to vote. Should the U.S.? — Eric Weiner (Slate)

Related:

“A tiny conical tooth embedded in a pterosaur neck bone is all that remains of a 100-million-year-old battle between a flying reptile with a 12-foot wingspan and a 26-foot-long crocodile-snouted spinosaur.” (Discover)

A recent New York Times article said that prominent webloggers, including Kevin Drum and Glenn Reynolds, have increasingly moved to a ‘feline Friday’ model of weblogging in which Friday is given over to posting pictures of their cats. Now we are cat lovers; we have two at home (as well as our dog) but I have never thought they are very blogworthy. This, however, is a cat-related item interesting enough to post:

“GeorgeWBush.org (a Democratic parody site) recently noticed that its mail server had been quietly gathering erroneously addressed Bush campaign e-mails for several months. The letters are now viewable on their site. Some were used by Greg Palast in his Oct. 26 BBC Newsnight investigation on Republican plans to obstruct voting…” [via Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list]

FmH readers — do me the courtesy, at least, of sending me an anonymous email telling me you when have turned me in to the secret police service, okay?

“The hard-drive technique is simple. TiVo enthusiasts have developed computer programs that can initialize a hard drive so it will be recognized by the device. Hook the drive up to your computer, run the program, connect the hard drive to the TiVo and you’re basically done.” [more…] (Tech News World)

My earlier post on the Red Sox World Series victory did not deserve to go up without mention of Victoria Snelgrove’s killing by the Boston Police during the post-pennant celebration. Here is a belated commentary on her death from Russ Stein, a Boston paralegal, at Lew Rockwell’s libertarian site.

This certainly should not be swept under the rug as it appears to be, especially given that no one wants any inconvenient interference with their celebration of the subsequent World Series win.

New York Times overview of the Identity Theft Epidemic

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick reviews MMR: Science and Fiction: Exploring the Vaccine Crisis by Richard Horton:

Abu Ghraib was assuredly not the only place military abuses of Iraqi detainees occurred; rather, it was only the place it happened to come to light. Similarly, it is a no-brainer that al Qaqaa was not the only place the US failed to secure weaponry and explosives which have been looted and used in the insurgency. What distinguishes al Qaqaa is simply that the deficits had to be reported to the IAEA and came to light.

The issue to grapple with is what impact the new bin Laden tape will have on the election — both what bin Laden might intend and what unintended consequences it might have. Both campaigns produced dignified resolute responses affirming a commitment to prosecute the War on Terror with maximal effectiveness, but both were scrambling to figure out how to position themselves (Washington Post ) after this bombshell, as was the press (Slate ). Certainly, Daniel Schorr’s analysis this morning on NPR, that (paraphrased) “any mention of Iraq helps Kerry and any mention of the war on terror helps Bush”, is reductionist and pat. (I think it is becoming evident that Schorr, one of my favorite commentators in days of yore, has long passed his prime.) William Rivers Pitt’s reflections at TruthOut grapple with the issues in more detail. Certainly, it appears that bin Laden is alive and, as Pitt observes, “tanned, ready and rested”, in no way on the run. It appears that will reinforce concerns about Bush’s failure to capture him. Pitt, of course, reminds us in this context of Bush’s resurrected March 2002 comment about just not being that concerned about bin Laden anymore. And Pitt argues that the Bush administration must have worried about the impact of the tape, given that the US ambassador to Qatar reportedly tried to prevent al Jazeera from broadcasting it.

Bin Laden tells us that our security depends on not threatening Muslim security, in essence to stop prosecuting the War on Terror. And, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his New York Times op-ed piece today, Bush knows it:

“I often criticize statements by President Bush, so today let me praise some of his real wisdom:

” Oct. 11, 2000: “If we’re an arrogant nation, [foreigners] will resent us. If we’re a humble nation but strong, they’ll welcome us. … We’ve got to be humble.”

It’s a good thing Mr. Bush tried to be humble, or the U.S. would have an approval rating even lower than 5 percent in Jordan, and Osama bin Laden’s approval rating in Pakistan would be higher than 65 percent.”

But is bin Laden really hoping that the American electorate, to whom his message is addressed directly, are receptive and informed people who will understand that they ought to turn Bush out of office to prevent another 9/11? Does he think anyone will actually believe this, in the fear-ridden fall of 2004? In essence, will the voters be more pissed off at Bush or at bin Laden, as Tom Grieve put it in Salon? Will the tape make it easier or harder for those who voted for Bush in 2000 to look back and admit they were wrong? (And don’t forget that this is an American electorate roughly half of which still believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the WTC attack, that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with al Qaeda and that it has improved their security in the world.)

Or does he hope to sway a segment of the public into the Bush fold by stimulating their jingoistic anger and fear? It has been argued that bin Laden’s aims are facilitated by polarization and having a belllicose, ignorant Bush administration in power. In this vein, William Gibson argues that Bush and bin Laden are symbiotic, and that bin Laden knew full well that the tape would nudge the voters toward the man who “has always proven so wonderously adept at doing everything (ObL)’d most want him to do.”

In fact, could that misadministration’s frantic efforts to suppress the tape be little more than a charade? The embassy in Qatar might have been directed to attempt to prevent the airing of the tape even in the face of certainty it would be useless. It is not reasonable to think we could stop al Jazeera from broadcasting it once it had been received; I doubt al Jazeera gave the US embassy a courtesy call alerting them to the arrival of the tape before the news was in the broader grapevine, and it is not as if we have any special cachet with al Jazeera.

This appears to be bin Laden’s October surprise (BBC ). The pundits are saying (Guardian.UK) that it comes in place of the terrorist attack they expected to disrupt the election process — the threat of which I have thought arises not so much from intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans as the fear-mainpulating agenda of the RNC. Bin Laden may have diminished capacity to mount further massive attacks, and may be resorting to a propaganda battle instead out of necessity. Billmon (welcome back!) agrees with me, calling this “virtual terrorism” on bin Laden’s part, and smarter than an actual attack would have been.

Those who grow frustrated with seemingly outlandish conspiracy theories can stop reading here (although, with the Bush cabal, truth can certainly be stranger than fiction…); I speculate that the bin Laden tape could also be be the rumored October surprise we have been waiting for from the Bush administration as well. Karl Rove told Hannity the other day, asked about an October surprise, that he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. You know it. FBI analysts have assessed the tape as probably genuine and probably recent; should we take this at face value? (If bin Laden, savvy as he is, is aware of continued doubts about whether he is still alive, and interested in establishing that he is, why doesn’t he hold up something like a recent New York Times front page in his tape, by the way?) The tape was reportedly dropped off anonymously at al Jazeera’s Islamabad offices. Isn’t it even remotely possible — — that it is a sophisticated counterfeit planted by the Bush administration themselves? [Is anyone else discussing this possibility on the web? — FmH. Addendum: Yes, he is.] Given the administration’s failure to deliver bin Laden to the voters dead or alive and, indeed, its failure to prevent Bush from being caught in that embarrassing lie about his March ’02 comments, could they be calculating that the next best thing is to use a bin Laden ‘campaign appearance for Kerry’ to tip the remaining undecided’s back into the fold? The conventional wisdom is that the cowboy-in-chief is vulnerable around not having brought bin Laden to ground, but the Bush campaign may actually be ecstatic that he is still out there, or that the public can be convinced that he is.

Whether or not it is a Bush cabal production, as Billmon puts it the tape “allows the GOP to turn every remaining campaign event into a bin Laden hate rally”. After all, the basis of the Republican campaign strategy has come down to manipulating the voters’ fear quotient and little more, and Tom Ridge’s shenanigans with various coloring-book alerts have long since stopped being credible. In the process, the bin Laden tape also serves another Republican purpose by bumping the issue of the missing explosives off the front page. Watch how they spin.

It is also important to realize that bin Laden, in sharing with us that the genesis of the 2001 attack lay as far back as his 1982 thinking, is warning us how longrange his thinking is, no matter how next week’s election and the next four years go. And, while a particular contempt is reserved for Bush, whom he teases for his indecisive paralysis in the classroom after learning of the WTC attack and whom he lumps in with other corrupt regimes (“half of which are governed by the military and the other half of which are governed by the sons of kings and presidents… in both categories, you find many who are characterised by hubris, arrogance, greed, and unlawful acquisition of money”), he warns the American voters that Kerry’s views on security are not that much better. “Your security does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.”

“Republicans have long insinuated, and occasionally asserted, that bin Laden favors Kerry’s election, so it must have come as a relief to Kerry’s campaign that bin Laden ended his denunciation of Bush with a dismissal of the Democrat as well.” (Washington Post)

Whoever wins next week (or whenever the post-campaign litigation is finally settled), bin Laden may be correct that it is up to right-thinking people to reject the misguided and dangerous premises of the permanent WoT®…and the sooner the better for the peace and security of both the US and the entire world.

Bin Laden is not the real top terrorist that the Bush administration let walk. (Slate)

“NAACP head Julian Bond says the GOP is going all out to suppress the black vote. Can his ‘Election Protection’ offensive stop them?” (Salon)

Give Bush enough rope, and he hangs himself every time. Forget the verbal gaffes and malapropisms; the man obviously cannot think through theconceptual implications of what he says. Bush on Wednesday accused Kerry of opportunism, saying:

‘A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as commander-in-chief.’

(Reuters)

Bad break, Mr. Cheney. It happened on your watch, despite your your best effort to sow seeds of doubt about Kerry’s “wild charges.”

…but here at the Gelwan household, half a mile from Fenway Park, it’s a different matter altogether! Those of you who have gotten to know me from my weblog might puzzle over the idea of my being a baseball fan — or a sports fan of any sort — never having seen any sports references in five years’ worth of FmH posts. And you would be largely correct. But — and it is probably difficult for those of you outside of New England to grasp this — it has been almost impossible to avoid getting swept up in the fever for the past two weeks here in Red Sox nation. Watching eleven ball games in a row has been more than I have seen in the past ten years (as someone who never watches baseball on television during the regular season and goes to, at most, one or two games at Fenway some years). There has been a certain ease and relief, especially in what otherwise seems such a contentious divided society, of being part of a ubiquitous shared experience of tension and release, hope and ultimately jubilation for a change. And of sleep deprivation. It may have been my imagination, but the bleary-eyed glances of passersby on the streets, the caffeine-craving impatience of those waiting on the lengthened lines at my favorite café, and the yawns of drivers stopped next to me at the traffic lights seemed to be ties that bind.

Sharing in the Red Sox’ drama and triumph was even a resonance between me and my patients at the psychiatric unit. Normal bedtimes on the unit were suspended so that the patients could stay up and watch the games, and bonds grew even among patients who would otherwise be utterly withdrawn, struggling with the inner demons that had brought them in for admission. A patient who had known me for a long time, through a number of admissions, and had never known me to be interested in spectator sports, would ask me each morning in the psychotherapy group whether I had stayed up to watch the game the night before and, when I indicated each morning that I had, tease me for being a “fair-weather fan.” I actually think a number of my psychotic patients have been recovering more quickly from their episodes this time knowing that they share the experience of rooting for the Sox with one another and with their treatment team members.

The fact that this pennant season was a suspension of my usual disbelief will give me some distance from which to observe something I suspect will happen in the months to come to many for whom being a Red Sox fan is a way of life . Momentous events are stressors, even if they are happy events. The end of the curse will change everything for some Sox fans. No longer will they have easy recourse to the reflexive, philosophical “wait ’til next year” as a template for dealing with disappointed hopes. Perhaps losing will no longer come as easy. There is already alot of caution in the wind lest we become what we detest — like Yankees fans, thinking that we are entitled to win. Not likely, given the indications that the Red Sox management is going to exercise some fiscal restraint and that their salary budget is not the bottomless well Steinbrenner’s is. And also not likely because this Red Sox team is not by any stretch the debut of a dynasty but a snapshot in time, the chemistry not likely to repeat itself even as soon as next year given the number of pivotal players becoming free agents and not likely to be signed to new Red Sox contracts despite the fans’ magical wish to freeze the action. Come to think of it, that might be a good thing for the psychological health of the Red Sox fans. Commentators are already predicting that the fans will have none of the usual preoccupations to talk about through the winter. But they will probably be replaced by ample opportuinities to obsess about the future configuration of the team and — as always — how the rivalry with the Yankees will go next year. The one thing I dread, which might be too painful to bear (especially after Roger Clemens), is if the Red Sox face Pedro Martinez on the mound in pinstripes next season.

The radio dial today, savoring the victory, nevertheless had room for the bittersweet. Time and again, I tuned in to someone talking about how sad they were not to have been able to share their victory celebration with a departed parent who had instilled their love of the sport and the team but had not lived long enough to see this culmination. There’s that Nike ad they kept showing in which we view a Sox fan in the stands as the decades tick away from 1918 to 2004 and he ages from a little boy to an old man, with the loved ones with whom he takes in the games. Cheap sentimentality, perhaps, although still poignant. But for me the poignancy of the moment is abit different. My father, who died in 1991, was a lifelong baseball fan whose two sons, neither of whom was a passionate sports fan, never connected with him on that level. He would have been delighted to see my family pouring ourselves unabashedly into the postseason fever this year. In a sense, I feel cheated that I never let myself get into it while he was around to share it with. In another sense, I feel more complete in a way, connecting with something I was denying in myself, something of him in me, a coming home. And, in turn, grateful for the last two weeks of my wife and I sitting in front of the games with our son and daughter in a way whose memory they may cherish long after we are gone, whenever something the Red Sox do recalls this magical season.

Probably, no one has been able to access FmH since sometime Tuesday. Several city blocks here in Brookline, including that housing The World (Software Tool & Die), the web server hosting this weblog, were hit with a power failure sometime on Tuesday. Attempts to power up with a generator resulted in a power surge, according to the tech support folks at The World with whom I finally spoke this evening, which bagged some of The World’s hardware.

Back up now, I hope for good. Sorry for the prevention of timely access. I hope it isn’t just from reading about it here that you learned of the lunar eclipse this evening (see below), because by the time the page was back up you would have already missed it…

“…Don’t Read It Alone…”

Scientists Find Prehistoric Dwarf Skeleton. “In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.” (Associated Press)

Coming on the heels of the Iraqi administration letting the cat out of the bag last week about the missing explosives, one has to wonder about the impact of Allawi’s seeming disaffection with the US. This could be yet another blow to Bush’s reelection effort (if the American public is listening). US officials reportedly could not believe Allawi would be critical at first, and thought there had been a mistranslation of his remarks. (Wake up and smell the coffee…) It is a sort of fitting symmetry that, having turned on the man the misadministration originally built up to run the post-invasion Iraqi puppet regime, Ahmed Chalabi, his successor Allawi turns on them.

Addendum: Kevin Drum asks,

No, you’re not alone, Kevin. Great minds think alike, I guess.

Also: Drum has what is probably the definitive post about the ludicrous Republican efforts to squirm out of the implications of the missing 380 tons. Ah, schadenfreude is sweet.

“Laboratory tests found that regular cups of green and black tea inhibit the activity of certain enzymes in the brain which bring on Alzheimer’s, a form of generative dementia that affects an estimated 10 million people worldwide.” (Yahoo! News) Essentially, tea is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, acting in the same way as (albeit more weakly than) the anti-Alzheimer’s prescription drugs donepezil (Aricept), rivastigmine (Exelon) and galantamine (Reminyl). It is abit inaccurate to say that the enzyme they inhibit, acetylcholinesterase (ACh-ase), brings on Alzheimer’s disease. It degrades the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, and Alzheimer’s is characterized by a drop in brain acetylcholine, but this is not thought to be due to abnormal activity of the enzyme. Nevertheless, inhibiting ACh-ase can compensate for some of the effects of the illness.

The rise of the right-wing film festival. (The New York Times Magazine)

I have always been drawn to songs of anger and contempt; not subtle, of course, but an often overpowering statement from an artist. Idiot Wind is the archetype of songs that grab me that way. A few things from Elvis Costello, notably Tramp the Dirt Down and I’m Not Angry, are right up there too.

If we were pulling together a mixtape of rage, what other songs would you add?

“…Shomei Tomatsu’s astonishing retrospective at the Japan Society …should come as a revelation to many people. Japan’s pre-eminent photographer of the postwar era, Mr. Tomatsu is a master of a kind of redolent ambiguity that speaks both to his subject, which is life in Japan, and also to the nature of photography, which always shows tantalizingly more than it can explain. As photographers like William Klein, Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank defined their era in America, Mr. Tomatsu has defined his in Japan, but the work does something more than that, too.” (New York Times)

As a physician, I am thinking very hard about how to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem. Psychiatry, my field, is plagued by sloppy diagnosis, polypharmacy, the more-is-better and newer-is-better styles of prescribing, and lack of clarity in planning the mix of acute treatment and prophylactic medicating. Educating consumers is important, but more important is countering the effects of sloppy prescribing by unthoughtful clinicians out there.

“A band’s greatest hit often becomes their least favourite song …Pop music has often been described as a disposable commodity, yet the music industry’s relentless repackaging of the past tends to ensure that pop songs are for life and not just for three minutes. But what happens when the artists themselves cannot but cringe at the enduring success of their more pathetic efforts?” (Telegraph.UK)

Washington Post music critic reviews “one of the worst performances of any opera I’ve ever seen… I pity the person who sees this ‘Trovatore’ as his or her first opera: Dumb, strained, pompous, old-fashioned and supremely illogical, it will serve to confirm every negative (and usually misleading) stereotype about the genre.”

“the equivalent of tens of thousands of years’ worth of extinctions in just a century”. 32% of all amphibian species face extinction. (Washington Post)

I am quite enjoying this recent New York Times series of columns by medical professionals called ‘Cases’. This one is a depiction of quaint medical ingenuity, 1956-style. Of course, for my money, it does not hold a candle to the best stories of medical ingenuity, Burton Roueché’s Annals of Medical Detection from the New Yorker of decades past. I was surprised to learn that one of the most memorable of Roueché’s stories, “Eleven Blue Men” had been resurrected (poorly) as the basis for that new medical investigation series CSI clone on network television (I didn’t watch it…).

“If you thought that quantum entanglement – the weird effect that allows two particles to behave as one, no matter how far apart they are – is too subtle to affect your daily life, think again. The phenomenon could be responsible for something as significant as the mass of everyday objects, yourself included, and could finally explain why the fundamental particles of matter have the mass they do.” (New Scientist)

“Whatever the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, there are bound to be unforeseen consequences…” — Alex Beam (Boston Globe)

And, on a more serious note: What if Bush Wins, a forum by 16 ‘experts’ (David Greenberg, James K. Galbraith, Grover Norquist, Kevin Drum, Gideon Rose, Cass R. Sunstein, Paul Begala, Mickey Edwards & Nancy Sinnott Dwight, Todd Gitlin, Sebastian Mallaby, Gregg Easterbrook, Christopher Buckley, Elaine Kamarck, E.J. Dionne and Jeff Greenfield). (Washington Monthly)

the first editorial position it has taken on a presidential race in its 80-year history. This is a wide-ranging and breathtaking indictment of the Bush record and a sober appraisal of the hopes invested in Kerry.

Any thinking person who reads this could only vote one way. A pity many aren’t, and won’t.

“This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.” [quoted in Talking Points Memo] Marshall quite rightly points out that this story perfectly weds the misadministrations incompetence and its dishonesty; the Americans have known for the year-and-a-half since the occupation that this enormous amount of high-potency explosives had gone missing and had not revealed it, and took great pains that the story not emerge after supposedly ceding power back to the Iraqi transional authority. But what I am dying to hear more about, and what Marshall does not discuss, is how the Bush cabal lost control of this desperately necessary coverup at just the wrong time. Whoever in the Iraqi regime reported the theft to the IAEA just two weeks before Nov. 2 obviously knew the potential implications it would have for the Bush reelection re-defeat effort.

U.S. Chief Justice Undergoes Surgery for Thyroid Cancer (New York Times ). The Court is aging; only one justice is under 65 years of age. (Unfortunately, the youngest justice with the likely longest Supreme Court career ahead of him is the worst, Clarence Thomas, at 56, but what will he do after Rehnquist is no longer on the Bench, since he seems to ape Rehnquist’s position in the preponderance of cases?) There has not been a new appointment to the Bench in ten years. It is serendipitous that the news about Rehnquist breaks now, in the final run-up to the election, alerting the electorate as it does to the expected opportunity for one or more likely several appointments to the Court during the administration of whoever wins next week. Arguably, the upcoming Supreme Court appointments will be the most lasting legacy of the next president. That alone is reason to defeat the smirking chimp.

Rehnquist’s cancer appears to be advanced, to judge from the fact that he had a tracheostomy. Yet the Chief Justice says he will continue to work. There would be nothing to be gained from his resignation now even if he does want to hand an appointment to Bush before he leaves. A lame duck Bush appointment would be blocked by outraged Senate Democrats… one would hope.

7 Bush Cousins Launch Pro-Kerry Web Site (Associated Press)

“Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible.” (In other words, after the Singularity, no one can hear you scream.) Largely focused on Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, with nods toward Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge. (Popular Science via Charlie’s Diary [Stross])

“Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible.” (In other words, after the Singularity, no one can hear you scream.) Largely focused on Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, with nods toward Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge. (Popular Science via Charlie’s Diary [Stross])

Freak accident kills filmmaker. Jack and his partner, painter and journalist Yvonne Baginsky, have been my close friends and hosts during my frequent trips to Scotland going back more than twenty years. Jack was a mercurial and passionate filmmaker and as gifted and gentle soul as I have ever met. I am going to miss the quiet glint in his eye and the impish grin across the kitchen table where on any given night he and Yvonne hosted a motley assortment of their transatlantic friends, many of them artists and musicians. I wish Yvonne and their daughters the strength to go on and, one day, thrive without this larger-than-life companion.

Jack’s recently completed film, Who Owns Jack Kerouac?, details the ugly contest over Kerouac’s literary estate; Jack had been unable to find a distributor for this film. And I am sorry I’ll never get to see what he would have made of the Khumb Mela footage he was editing at the time of his death.