Sad to say, this earlier post still applies. It’s all I have to say about l’affaire McChrystal et Petraeus.
via à la Rob
29 June 2010
America’s dashboard GPS of war
28 June 2010
Yes, I WILL boycott BP
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about how boycotting BP is an empty gesture that only harms local retailers. Maybe so, but I’m doing it anyway.
Here’s why.
- Knowing what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico, I can no longer buy BP products without feeling like a shmuck.
- Not being a petroleum products distributor myself, either I boycott BP retail outlets or I take no effective action at all.
- It is not my responsibility to ensure the profitability of anyone’s convenience store. There’s this thing called risk. Deal with it.
- I’m told that BP retailers get most of their revenue from drinks, candy, and so on. So fine, if I happen to pass your store on a bike or on foot, I’ll feel free to stop in and buy a coke. But I won’t drive a car in to your lot, much less buy your gas.
- I’ve managed to avoid buying Exxon products since 1989, when the company’s Exxon Valdez tanker dumped up to 32 million gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Failing to boycott BP for a much larger and more serious offense would be inconsistent at best.
- Boycotting Exxon, BP, and Amoco (a BP trademark) is likely to be inconvenient on road trips. This is OK with me. We’re supposed to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, so the least I can do is put up with some inconvenience when it comes to buying gasoline.
You might be able to talk me into boycotting even more gasoline retailers, but you won’t talk me out of boycotting BP.
8 June 2010
The word cloud game
Ran some of my orphan dissertation notes through the word cloud machine:
I guess it’s obvious that I”m writing about the Creek Nation of American Indians.
4 June 2010
Strange are the ways
Strange are the ways of the Internet. Somehow my blog has become the leading global source for pics of sports celebrity Charles Barkley. That fact has artificially inflated the blog’s stats, and it has placed a rather trivial 2008 post about Barkley at the top of my “Busiest posts” list (in the right-hand column, probably invisible to those of you who read the blog with a phone).
What’s funny about this is that the original post was a real snooze, apparently. Only two readers looked at it when I wrote it, then it lay forgotten for an entire year.
In the third week of March 2010, Google Images took notice of the Barkley mug shot I was using. (I suppose it had just disappeared from somewhere else.) The hits started stacking up at my blog. Now they exceed 700 — a large number for a little blog. That’s why Barkley: Politicians have only three jobs remains at the top of the list of busiest posts.
Other posts have drawn a lot of hits that were clearly only image-related, not visits from engaged readers. But nothing else has produced the volume and duration of the Barkley JPEG. I’m tempted to delete it, so my list reflects something like actual reader interest. But then where else would Sir Charles’s fans go for a nice mug shot of their hero?
Images are not the only factor that inflates this blog’s stats. Some Google search strings have plainly brought people to this site under false pretenses. Many of these include the word torture in a pornographic context. Can’t say I’m sorry to disappoint.
Allowing for all the image searches, porn searches, and double hits by (most likely) a single reader, I still seem to get a genuine reader about 12 times a day on average. That seems satisfactory.
30 May 2010
The Injuns are coming (again)
Attention Conservation Notice: This post is about Alabama politics and the use of American Indian imagery to score political points.
Spotted this billboard the other day in East Lake, Birmingham.
The three men on the right are Alabama Governor Bob Riley, John Tyson (current head of the Governor’s Task Force on Illegal Gambling) and David Barber (the first head of the task force). An Indian war bonnet adorns the space above the three mug shots. (more…)
25 May 2010
Paperless milestone
Without really trying to, I just submitted a book review for publication without printing a single sheet of paper during the composition of it. I did all my revisions on the laptop screen.
This is a new experience. The most surprising part is that I didn’t intend to do this; it just happened. I do my writing on a laptop that is only occasionally connected to a printer (and haven’t yet gotten to the point of wirelessly connecting to a printer).
I have yet to decide whether the revisions might have been better if I’d marked up a hard copy instead of revising on screen.
21 May 2010
Learning from writers
In struggling with the Big Writing Project lately, I’ve been getting unexpected sustenance from writers who are not particularly scholarly. It’s not easy to explain how this has worked. For instance, I heard an interview with the Creek Indian poet and musician Joy Harjo, and she said something perfectly ordinary, “be yourself,” in a way that struck deep. (Mvto!)
Barry Lopez
You know, there are certain things that people say you shouldn’t talk about, because it makes people nervous.
The things that make us uncomfortable in public are a person who wishes to speak of what is beautiful. That makes everybody a little bit nervous, because many of us keep this jaded, cynical separateness with the world, because we’re cautious.… You have to be vulnerable in order to achieve this exchange of intimacy. And you can’t be vulnerable unless you can trust the situation. And what we’re learning, many of us, is the world is not trustworthy enough for you to be vulnerable to it and gain that intimacy.
Another thing that makes people nervous is if you speak of faith, because immediately people think, Christian faith? Or Islamic faith? … I’m not talking about any of those. I am talking about the belief in other people.
I haven’t read nearly enough of Barry Lopez’s writing. (more…)
13 May 2010
How Mother Earth immigrated to America
Mother Earth is a woman who needs no introduction.
In the Old World, she’s been written up and talked about for a long, long time. Her stock was probably lowest around the sixteenth century, but since then she has come roaring back. Now pagans, poets, and environmentalists sing her praises, and everyone else has heard of her. (She has her own holiday, although people aren’t clear about which day it should be observed on.)
As best I can tell, though, she never visited the New World until after the Old World colonized it. She’s an immigrant. (more…)
10 May 2010
The oil spill
A few more vignettes from Alabama and the northern Gulf coast:
Tar balls from the Deepwater Horizon spill appeared on the Dauphin Island shore on Saturday. According to the Mobile Press-Register, “about 100 workers in white hazmat suits, yellow boots and black gloves were picking up samples of black-stained sand near the pier, as beachgoers nearby waded in the water, played football and made sandcastles.” (more…)
