History doesn't repeat

The Tigers lost the World Series to the underdog Cardinals tonight; as their great manager, Jim 'Classy' Leyland said afterwards after first congratulating the Cardinals, the young Tigers made too many mistakes to win a series, let alone the World Series.

Congrats St. Louis, well-known for having the best fans in baseball (they cheer even cheer good plays by the visiting team). Detroit will be back!

In the meantime, courtesy of Sports Illustrated, selected excerpts from their republished look at the last time the Cardinals and Tigers met in the World Series, in 1968.

It's amazing how different the game and sports writing, not to mention the country, was back then....

The Tigers See Too Much Red

Game 1

[Bob] Gibson's performance was magnificent, considering the muggy day in St. Louis and the fact that he had to use 144 pitches. Remarkably, he was strong at the end. He took care of Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Jim Northrup, Horton and Freehan 12 times, and when he got Horton to end the game the crowd stood and roared its approval, almost as much at the excellence he had somehow sustained through the season as at the new record. There must be something about Gibson's habits that differs from those of mere mortal pitchers.

Q. What did you eat for breakfast?

A. I didn't want to eat. I drove to the park and had coffee and doughnuts. During the game I ate a few candy bars.

Q. Did you get extra sleep?

A. No. I woke up seven or eight times during the night.

Q. What time did you go to bed?

A. About midnight. My 11-year-old daughter came in from Omaha to see the game and we talked.

Q. Was she excited about the game, interested in it?

A. She seemed mostly interested in her dress.


Game 2

As Albert William Kaline, for 16 years a great and injury-prone player for the Detroit Tigers, reached the dugout before taking batting practice for the first game of the Series, he looked out at the red, white and blue bunting and the schools of newsmen darting around the batting cage. Long ago Kaline, now 33, had promised himself that he would never go to a World Series game until he played in one. He sat on the dugout bench and again and again adjusted the stirrups on his socks and the flaps on his spiked shoes that identify him in black ink not by name but simply by the number "Six."

Whenever some Tiger players talked of him they would say, "Six had a real good night," or, "You should have seen the play Six made in Fenway." (In the opening game of the Series, Kaline doubled in four tries against Gibson but freely admitted that on his first time at bat he was extremely nervous. Even during batting practice before that game the Tigers were overswinging. They knocked very few balls into home run areas in Busch Stadium.) Kaline had been the reason why Tiger Manager Mayo Smith made the "great experiment" of moving Mickey Stanley, a fine centerfielder, to shortstop, though Stanley had played only six games at the position. By hitting hard and often late in the season after earlier injuries, Kaline had forced his way back into the lineup, and somehow a Tiger team in a World Series without Kaline would be no Tiger team at all. Realistically, though, the decision was based to a great extent on sentiment.

After the first game Kaline and his longtime friend Norm Cash concluded that the Tigers were swinging too hard and that the Detroit team had enough power to generate home runs merely by swinging naturally. Prior to the start of Game Two they moved among the players, telling them to swing as they had during the regular season and to forget trying to hit everything over St. Louis' Gateway Arch.

With Gibson's excellent performance behind them and some ragged play by the Tigers still in their minds, the Cardinals started off as though they intended to end the Series in four straight. But with two on and one out in the first inning, Cepeda hit a high foul toward the seats deep in right field. Everyone assumed that it would drop among the customers. Not Six, however. He was off when he saw the ball come away from Cepeda's bat and he kept racing on recklessly, heading right at a wire gate in foul territory. At the last instant he caught the ball, plunged through the gate, which for some reason had been left unlocked, then spun and threw to third. Javier, rightfully respecting Kaline's arm, stayed put at second.

Game 3

At the end of the third game one amazing statistic stood out: the first three hitters in the Cardinal lineup had been on base 21 times in 39 at bats.

Joe Hoerner came in for Washburn in the sixth inning and got the Cardinals out of a jam, giving up only a single and a walk to the next 13 batters he faced. Hoerner, a 31 year old relief man, had appeared in three Series games before this one and had been bad in each. Back in 1958 he had a heart attack. Because one of the muscles around his heart was weak, he was told he could never pitch overhand again. In consequence, Hoerner developed his curious style of throwing somewhere between sidearmed and underhanded. "It's about time," said Hoerner, "that I did something in a Series besides hit fungoes and give up a lot of runs."

Much of the joy seemed to go out of the city of Detroit after the third game, but the next day McLain would be meeting Gibson again.

Game 4

This one must have been invented for people who had never been to the Twilight Zone. All morning menacing clouds hung over Tiger Stadium, and more than an hour before gametime heavy rains started, keeping some people pent up in their automobiles in the $8 parking lots nearby while others hung papers over their heads, lifted umbrellas and marched into the 57-year-old ballpark to gather in restless clumps under the stands. Tiger fans realized that, with their team down two games to one, McLain would have to be at his very best because the man he was facing, Gibson, is the finest pressure pitcher in baseball today. But the second Gibson-McLain duel turned out to be another mismatch. ...

Then McLain himself failed to hold a throw at first base on a tough-hop bouncer by Mans, who went on to score on successive singles by McCarver and Shannon. Two runs for Gibson seem like six for almost anybody else. Through most of this year the Cardinals had not scored for him, a fact that bothered them almost as much as it did him. Although he won 22 games and lost only nine, during those nine losses his team scored a mere 12 runs. Once, needling the Cardinals, he said, "I might just as well go out there alone, because you guys make me feel that way anyway." ...

But now St. Louis got Gibson two more runs in the top of the third when Flood singled, McCarver hit a ball into the gap in left center and Horton, the Tiger leftfielder, played it off the wall like a bear handling a ginger snap. Shannon doubled, and everything was over except for the business of the rain. It was still driving straight down, and Tiger fans in the centerfield bleachers, hoping for a postponement, began to chant, "Rain, rain, rain." The umpires, confirmed by baseball Commissioner William Eckert, halted the game with the Cardinals still threatening. The tarp went down over the infield, and everybody settled down to wait. The Tigers, equipped with a weather forecast predicting that a heavy rainstorm was on its way, hoped the wait would be till Monday: The Cardinals, with Gibson in front 4-0, were looking for a legal (five inning) conclusion. After a holdup of one hour and 14 minutes, the teams came back on the field and prepared to resume play.

During the delay McLain asked not to pitch again because he could not raise his arm above his head.

Game 5

In the seventh, when it did come, it happened in the strangest way with a one out bloop hit by Lolich, who in this Series suddenly found a batting eye. Hoerner, who had stopped the Tigers so successfully in the third game, was summoned to relieve Briles. The Tigers tore Hoerner apart. McAuliffe singled sharply past first and Stanley, walked. The scene was set for Kaline. The big crowd stood when he entered the batter's box. "I was looking for a fastball," said Kaline, "because that's the way Hoerner pitched me before." Kaline got his fastball and hit it into short center field to bring home the tying and eventual winning runs. Cash's second hit brought home the fifth run.

The crowd stood again as Kaline took his place in right field at the end of the inning. He tipped his cap. "Somehow," said Kaline, "I enjoy hitting with men on base. I just, don't seem to get the same incentive when they're not there. When I saw all those people standing I got goose bumps. It's hard to describe the way you feel. You try to pay them back because they've been good fans and I wanted so much to have them see us win one game here after the way they had treated us all season."

No Game 6 recap

Game 7

"I heard Norm Cash and Dick McAuliffe both yelling to me at the same time," Lolich said. "I didn't know whether they were telling me to 'step off' or 'throw over,' but I decided I'd better throw over to first." When Lolich made his move Brock bolted for second base, a play he had worked successfully against Lolich in the second game. However, Cash relayed the ball to shortstop Mickey Stanley, covering second, and Brock was out just barely. Then, a few minutes later, Lolich picked Curt Flood off first base and the Cardinals began to die. "I can't remember picking off two men in one game, let alone one inning," Lolich said later.

In the seventh game came Brock's second -- and probably most costly -- stumble. There still was no score when Brock started the Cardinal sixth with a single to left field. In the second game of the Series he had stolen second twice on Lolich. Now he took an enormous lead -- at least 20 feet. "Before a game I always make an indention someplace -- in the dirt, in the grass -- that automatically tells me how far I can lead away and not worry about getting picked off," he had said earlier in the week. This time he exceeded his own safety limits.

AP photo of MVP David Eckstein leaping into the arms of Scott Spiezio after Game 5 by Charles Krupa via Yahoo News.

Uncredited 1968 photo of World Series MVP Mickey Lolich leaping into the arms of catcher Bill Freehan after Game 7 found online.

Scarlet murder

Want a definition of suburban arrogance?

That evangelical-infused egoism that leads people to believe the world revolves around them and their kids--that terrorists and molesters spend all their time plotting to get them in particular and that in response no distortion of public policy or values is too great?

The belief that all actions are justified if in their amateur judgment their family is at risk? The philosophy that allows for multiple-SUV garages and category-defying consumption of energy? A lifestyle that holds personal whims above others' evidence?

A world view that thinks the babblings of a two-year old girl justifies taking the life of a man?

Girl Was Not Molested by Neighbor Her Angry Father Killed, Police Say

The Times: The police in Fairfield said on Thursday that they had concluded that a 2-year-old girl had not been molested by a next-door neighbor who they say was stabbed to death by her father after he was told she had been abused.

The father, Jonathon Edington, 29, a Fairfield patent lawyer, broke into the home of his neighbor, Barry James, on Aug. 28 and repeatedly stabbed him, just minutes after his wife told him that Mr. James had molested their daughter, according to the police.

But on Thursday, police Capt. Gary MacNamara said: “We are confident in our investigation that Mr. Edington did in fact kill Mr. James. We’re confident that Mr. James did not molest the Edingtons’ daughter. We’ve concluded that no molestation occurred.” ...

Mr. Edington, 29, who is free on $1 million bond, has been charged with murder and burglary in the attack. He has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Mr. James, 59, worked part time at a funeral home and lived with his elderly parents. The family urged the police to examine Mr. James’s personal effects to rule out any suspicions, said Richard T. Meehan Jr., a lawyer representing Mr. James’s family.

AP photo of Jonathon Edington, left, arriving at Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn., Sept. 12, 2006, with attorney Andrew Bowman by Bob Child.

Not so smart

From my third-favorite sports website (after ESPN.com and CNNSI.com), Deadspin:

The legend of the scrappy, hustling, get-yer-uniform-dirty utility player holds a special place in baseball lore, probably because no sport more values its ... well, no sport has more white people. It's a sacred role on a team: White guy who's not that skilled but is popular because he's "gritty." It's one of baseball's uglier underbellys; David Ecksteins will always be more popular than Ronnie Belliards. It's wrong, but it is.

But just because it exists doesn't mean you have to make an award for it. Sure enough, though, Holiday Inn -- the hotel chain that has decided you can inspire people to rent rooms with you by showing a bunch of idiots harassing Joe Buck -- is sponsoring the Look Again Player Of The Year Award, which goes to "the role players who sacrifice for their team in often unrecognized effort."

Each team has a nominee -- the Cardinals', obviously, is Eckstein -- and when you look at the nominees, it's kind of shocking how blatant they really are. Every single one of them is a white guy. (You could make an exception for Jose Valentin, but we think the mustache makes up for it.) Seriously: It is, without question, a poll to choose your favorite white guy. Scott Proctor is a role player? Woody Williams?

We can't believe they went through with this. We're hoping for another poll, later this week, where fans can vote on their favorite lethargic Latino player, their favorite math-problem-solving Asian player and their favorite disinterested black player.

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/fan_forum/holiday_inn/lapy/index.jsp

Funny that none of the suits at Holiday Inn noticed. Or maybe it just didn't register.

One of the comments on Deadspin's story read "Cracker Barrel probably should have sponsored this award instead."

Or, Adams Mark.

Photo of baseball 'trophy' from an online retailer.

Blinded by the bling

A line in Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye's piece about this year's magazine cover awards, New Yorker Wins Best Cover of the Year, caught my eye.

Referring to a cover that was the co-winner in the celebrity category:

The Vibe cover showed Busta Rhymes with a piece of duct tape over his mouth, a reference to his supposed withholding of information regarding the murder of his bodyguard. The panel lauded him for being willing to poke fun at himself.

There's a clear linkage between hip hop and violent crimes; and the NYPD has said time and again its efforts to investigate murders are hamstrung because many witnesses refuse to talk. There's nothing funny about what Rhymes, who's been in trouble with the law on multiple other occasions, is doing.

It's weird; whenever a celebrity is involved in something, the story always seems to center around the celebrity--they're who we identify with, after all, since by definition they're the ones always in the news. We blur the lines between their lives and their movies/music/etc.; it's almost like just exist as characters, no more real than Prospero and Caliban.

The name of Busta's bodyguard was Israel Ramirez. He was 29 when he died of a single shot to his chest, during the filming of a music video. Police believe Busta knows something that could help them solve the murder, but he's refusing to talk.

Someone should explain to Ramirez's young son what's so funny about that.

Getty photo of Trevor Smith aka Busta Rhymes and Schwartz photo of Israel Ramirez and his son, also named Israel, with mom, Alexa Medina, via the Daily News.

Turning the tide

It now seems likely that the Democrats will take control of the House come November, with control of the Senate a possibility.

If this Democratic tide turns into a surge, I nominate this as the key moment.

Pat Tillman's brother Kevin speaks out against war

AP: The brother of an NFL player who was killed in Afghanistan after quitting the team to join the U.S. Army Rangers has broken his silence.
The brothers, both Arizona State University graduates, joined the Army in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. They served together as Rangers with the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

Pat Tillman, who played defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, was killed by friendly fire near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in April 2004. The Defense Department is investigating allegations of a cover-up, including failure by the U.S. Army to tell Tillman's family for several weeks that he had been killed by gunfire from his fellow Army Rangers -- not by enemy fire, as they initially were told.

Kevin Tillman has not spoken publicly about the war or his brother's death since his discharge from the Army. But in Truthdig.com, Kevin wrote openly about the war and the American response to it.

"Somehow, the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country. Somehow, this is tolerated. Somehow, nobody is accountable for this."

Kevin Tillman, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with his older brother, Pat Tillman, has remained silent since his brother's death in 2004. But this week, he wrote a scathing indictment of the war in Iraq, the Bush administration and American apathy.

"Somehow, the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes," Kevin wrote on Truthdig.com, which purchased his work.

Photo of Pat and Kevin Tillman from a MySpace user's profile.

No European vacation

At some point, non-Muslims in France, like other Europeans, are going to have to come to grips with the fact that Muslims aren't an alien presence in their nation, but are an integral and at times defining part of the national fabric.

There are about as many Muslims in France as there are in the U.S., around 5 to 6 million. But Muslims make up a much larger percentage of the population in France, around 10-12%.

That's roughly equivalent to the percentage of African Americans in the U.S. Are there things about blacks that make white Americans uncomfortable? Sure--but in this country, we're as likely to see that as whitey's problem as anything else.

Wonder how long it'll take for the non-Muslim French to realize sometimes they're the ones with the problem. That their norms are not the gold standard; that the definition of France isn't frozen in the 19th century; that some Frenchmen and Frenchwomen may prefer tabouleh to escargot.

And that there's nothing wrong with visting family in Karachi, anymore than there is in visting family in Alsace-Lorraine.

Muslim staff in Paris airport row

BBC: Four Muslim baggage handlers are appealing against a decision to bar them from working at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
They say that the local government's decision to revoke their security passes is evidence of anti-Muslim discrimination.

A local government spokesman says the decision was based on an assessment of the terrorist risk.

He denied the move was linked to the men's religion.

Passes withdrawn

Lawyers acting for the four men say that dozens of other Muslims who work at the airport have also been stripped of their security passes, leaving them unable to work. ...

The head of a local government office, Jacques Lebrot, said the ban had nothing to do with religion.

"For us, someone who goes on holiday to Pakistan several times raises questions," he told Reuters News Agency.

AP photo of women wearing head scarves in the French flag's colors at a protest of a ban on religious attire in French schools by Laurent Rebours.

Velvet protest

Some anti-war songs that aren't so obvious if you just heard them on the radio, mostly drawn from the communal consciousness that is YouTube and Wikipedia. And also, I'm amazed at the depth of some of the discussions on SongMeanings. Pretty respectful and insightful, for the most part.

99 Luftballons, Nena

Ninety nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
And focusing it on the sky
The ninety nine red balloons go by

Catchy (West) German cold war protest song; according to '80s Music Lyrics it ends with the mistaken destruction of a German city.... The industrial-looking and towards the end almost-cheesy German music video version makes explicit the song's point; Nena Kerner's voice and the German language give it all a driving insistence. But it's the great melody that sticks in your head afterwards (especially if you don't speak German).

Goldfinger's (mostly) English-language version is far less powerful, and really is all about the band. It's a prime example of overkill--there's no anti-war message here, just punking out. Nena's soft-hard contrast that's at the heart of the song is ripped out.

There's a good comparison of the English vs. German lyrics of the song, at Inthe80s.com.

A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Like most of Bob Dylan's songs, there's just something about the words--they speak even if you don't think about or know the meaning, just the sounds, the rhythmns work. It really is like reading Shakespeare (or Sondheim). The clip's from George Harrison's seminal Concert For Bangladesh.

Pretty much any Dylan song had at its heart the issues of war and peace that dominate the 60s and 70s. A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall is an interesting one; the song's Wikipedia entry says, "The surrealistic lyrics of this song are usually construed as referring to the aftermath of a nuclear war." But, as the entry also notes, Dylan has said the song's not as literal as you might think; "It's not atomic rain, it's not fallout rain... I [just] mean some sort of end that's just got to happen."

That's the beauty of his songs--again, like Shakespeare, you can 'get' it and it makes sense in its cursory or first-level meaning; but over time or via knowledge, you find there's always more there.

Scarborough Fair, Simon and Garfunkel

Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

I've listened to this song a million times and had no idea of how Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel melded this most traditional of English songs with an anti-war version.

Apparently Simon wrote the counterpoint lyrics, and Garfunkel did the melody. You can hear the counterpoint on the song, but it kindof just blends in, and is less distinct than the traditional words.

So the 'full song' for the lyrics following the above was:

Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
(War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Generals order their soldiers to kill)
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
(And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten)
Then she'll be a true love of mine

Maybe because it's such a soothing song.... If I spent any time wondering about the song, it centered on why parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme?

There's a good discussion on the anti-war meaning (and the herbs) on Songfacts, among other places. It really makes you wonder how much else you miss going through life.

The video's from their Central Park reunion and is ethereal, even if at this point you can see the strings (Paul more than Art for some reason). It doesn't include the Canticle counterpoint. You can hear it by going to Napster and typing in Scarborough Canticle (or picking up the CD that's probably on your shelf).

It's odd, after hearing the full version, the stripped-down version on YouTube sounds hollow.

And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, mp3

And the band played "Waltzing Matilda,"
As the ship pulled away from the quay,
And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears,
We sailed off for Gallipoli.

Australian Eric Bogle (who was actually born and raised in Scotland) wrote this song, set during the WWI slaughter of the invading Australian troops by the Turks (Winston Churchill resigned as head of the British Navy after the disastrous failure of his plan--this was the battle where the British ships showed up on the beachfront with the ammunition stowed in the bottom).

The Wikipedia entry, in noting the song's popularity among anti-Vietnam War protestors, has this interesting line: "American Vietnam veteran and Medal of Honor winner Senator Bob Kerrey sang the song to his supporters at the end of his Presidential campaign in 1988, and borrowed the first line for the title of his autobiography, When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir."

Ranting Isiah

Wanna know how much pressure Isiah Thomas, he of the one-year contract to coach the Knicks (and sexual harassment defendant), is under this year? Just check out how he went off on ESPN analyst Greg Anthony, as reported by CNNSI.com's Marty Burns.

The surprising play of rookie forward Renaldo Balkman this preseason has Knicks GM/coach Isiah Thomas feeling good. And he's letting ESPN analyst Greg Anthony, a former Knick, hear about it.

Still upset over Anthony's draft night criticism after the Knicks selected the unheralded Balkman with the No. 20 pick, Thomas ripped his fellow former point guard Wednesday.

"This so-called former Knick, on draft night with millions of people watching, had the audacity to take me to task on a player that I'm pretty sure he had never seen before in his life," Thomas said. "But he stands on national television and talks about a kid he has absolutely no idea about. I'm just glad that all of New York doesn't think like Greg Anthony."

Thomas went on to question Anthony's credentials as a TV commentator, and even took a slap at his 12-year NBA playing career.

"Greg Anthony should never ever be in a position to question myself on anything about basketball," Thomas said. "I do remember the kind of player he was. I'll leave it at that. ...

With Balkman off to a good start, Thomas felt free to vent some of his pent-up anger.

"This is between Greg and I," Thomas said in a lengthy diatribe about Anthony to the media after the Knicks practice. "The things he said on draft night ... after all the good solid work we had done in the draft ... for him to take that position he took ... I thought he was way way way out of bounds." ...

Thomas went on to refer to Anthony several more times during the remainder of the 15-minute session with reporters, sometimes even on unrelated questions.

When asked whether he could see Balkman someday defending LeBron James or Tracy McGrady, Thomas replied, "Wait a minute, hold on now ... you can run him out there but he'll probably get stepped on a little bit ... Unlike Greg Anthony, I do have respect for others."

When asked about the Knicks' dismal season a year ago, and what role all the injuries played, Thomas said, "We all were in a funk last year ... Greg Anthony was in a funk."

Later, when talking about Balkman's ability to handle the ball, a reporter jokingly asked if he had a better handle than Greg Anthony. "Most definitely," Thomas said. "Greg could only go left."

Anthony declined to comment through an ESPN spokesman.

Uncredited AP photo of Isiah Thomas via CNNSI.com.

Eternal life

There's a USA Today article, They were never born, but they'll live forever, about the 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. The list is from a book by three guys from Jersey, one of whom told the paper "the point of the book is to entertain." And provoke discussion; here's the list:

1. The Marlboro Man
2. Big Brother
3. King Arthur
4. Santa Claus (St. Nick)
5. Hamlet
6. Dr. Frankenstein's Monster
7. Siegfried
8. Sherlock Holmes
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
11. Uncle Tom
12. Robin Hood
13. Jim Crow
14. Oedipus
15. Lady Chatterly
16. Ebenezer Scrooge
17. Don Quixote
18. Mickey Mouse
19. The American Cowboy
20. Prince Charming
21. Smokey Bear
22. Robinson Crusoe
23. Apollo and Dionysus
24. Odysseus
25. Nora Helmer
26. Cinderella
27. Shylock
28. Rosie the Riveter
29. Midas
30. Hester Prynne
31. The Little Engine That Could
32. Archie Bunker
33. Dracula
34. Alice in Wonderland
35. Citizen Kane
36. Faust
37. Figaro
38. Godzilla
39. Mary Richards
40. Don Juan
41. Bambi
42. William Tell
43. Barbie
44. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
45. Venus and Cupid
46. Prometheus
47. Pandora
48. G.I. Joe
49. Tarzan
50. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
51. James Bond
52. Hansel and Gretel
53. Captain Ahab
54. Richard Blaine
55. The Ugly Duckling
56. Loch Ness Monster (Nessie)
57. Atticus Finch
58. Saint Valentine
59. Helen of Troy
60. Batman
61. Uncle Sam
62. Nancy Drew
63. J.R. Ewing
64. Superman
65. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
66. HAL 9000
67. Kermit the Frog
68. Sam Spade
69. The Pied Piper
70. Peter Pan
71. Hiawatha
72. Othello
73. The Little Tramp
74. King Kong
75. Norman Bates
76. Hercules (Herakles)
77. Dick Tracy
78. Joe Camel
79. The Cat in the Hat
80. Icarus
81. Mammy
82. Sindbad
83. Amos 'n' Andy
84. Buck Rogers
85. Luke Skywalker
86. Perry Mason
87. Dr. Strangelove
88. Pygmalion
89. Madame Butterfly
90. Hans Beckert
91. Dorothy Gale
92. The Wandering Jew
93. The Great Gatsby
94. Buck (Jack London, The Call of the Wild)
95. Willy Loman
96. Betty Boop
97. Ivanhoe
98. Elmer Gantry
99. Lilith
100. John Doe
101. Paul Bunyan

Their top choice struck me as ridiculous, until I read their explanation, "The most famous killer of the last two hundred years."

Yeah, that does make sense--a fictional character that helped cut short God knows how many lives, thus keeping unfathomable numbers of ideas and products from coming to fruition is pretty influential, even in an entirely negative way.

It's actually a pretty classic list (assuming #7 indeed isn't Roy's partner; it's funny how they wrote the Greek spelling for #76).

Next, let's make a list of people who may have existed but whose influence rests on outsized myths.

Uncredited image of Wayne McLaren as the Marlboro Man in various places online.

Not quite red, not quite blue

Jennifer Steinhauer has a funny article in Sunday's Times, Twins, Not Really. But Not Far Off., in which she points out the interesting similiarities between the dimunitive Michael Bloomberg and the once-pumped Arnold Schwarzenegger. She notes:

Both men are moderate centrists, estranged from their party’s mainstream, who first ran for office on what seemed like a lark. After making a slew of goofy comments and odd policy pronouncements, they both found themselves, shockingly, in their first political jobs.

Both watched their popularity sink mid-term to embarrassing levels. Mr. Bloomberg came back to beat handily — and greatly outspend — a Democratic machine politician whose attempts to claw away at the mayor and paint him as the president’s buddy flopped.

Mr. Schwarzenegger’s re-election bid does not end until next month, but his campaign has uncannily mirrored Mr. Bloomberg’s 2005 race. Like the mayor, he distanced himself from his party, cut deals with lawmakers, and outspent his opponent while also more or less ignoring him. The outcome, polls show, is likely to be the same.

Each had two careers that made him buckets of money before settling into a $1-a-year job as a high-profile public servant, their old lives informing how they govern. ...

And they like each other. Mr. Bloomberg is hosting a fund-raiser for the governor in his home on Monday; the mayor’s recent visit here to promote environmental legislation was like one big buddy movie. During one news conference, Mr. Schwarzenegger announced that the mayor was, “My soul mate. He’s the man.”

It is not terribly surprising that the re-election campaigns of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Schwarzenegger are so similar. The week after Mr. Bloomberg won reelection last year, Maria Shriver, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s wife, called Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign manager, and said that she wanted her husband’s re-election campaign to be just like the mayor’s.

Makes you wonder how much of Shriver's Kennedy shrewdness is behind Arnold's success.

I like both men, although I disagree with a lot of Schwarzenegger's policies, and think Bloomberg post-transit strike and landslide re-election has become increasingly petty and at times surly.

I like them because they're not afraid to think big, and refuse to be held hostage to 'that's the way it's done.' I also like them because they understand the importance of, and seem to enjoy acting like, leaders--making speeches, using the bully pulpit, cajoling and even threatening.

A lot of who they are, and why they could be considered soulmates, is due to both being self-made, highly successful men. Unlike a lot of other politicians, when stacked up against businessmen they seem to suffer neither envy nor harbor an inferiority complex. As Steinhauer notes,

Mr. Bloomberg, who is sometimes mentioned as a 2008 presidential candidate, and Mr. Schwarzenegger, who by law cannot be, both see themselves as the answer to gridlock. “Perhaps fame and money sets them free to set their own course,” said Bruce E. Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “Maybe plutocracy is the answer to our partisan problems.”

Together, they promote causes (like environmental programs), raise cash (for the governor) and offer moral support in a political arena with few natural allies. “The Republican Party does not really meet either of their needs,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. “They learn from each other’s mistakes.”

Not only do they learn from mistakes, but because they're not really bound to any party they can act on them too. They speak plainly, expect their staffs to deliver measureable results, and see government as about fixing fixable problems.

Neither of them, of course, will be president; Arnold because he wasn't born here, Bloomberg because of bad timing--at 64 he'll be too old after the 2008 election, which already has three New Yorkers who've been running for a long time.

But Barack Obama will. He's Colin Powell before Powell joined the second Bush administration, the perfect way for America in 2016, when he'll be 55, to vote for hope, for history, for competence over ideology.

And for one of their own--immigrants are already 12.4% of the total population, toss in the sons and daughters of immigrants and a sizeable chunk of America will directly relate to Obama, whose father came from Kenya.

Like Schwarzenegger and Blomberg, Obama has the basic likeability that John Kerry will tell you is critical in presidential candidates. He comes across as real, as sincere and as highly competent. [I've written before about why he shouldn't run in 2008, though.]

The Times' famously tough Michiko Kakutani touches upon all of these traits in her laudatory (but poorly-headline) review of Obama's The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon :

... But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life. ...

Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”

I think he gets this just about right--so much of the political fights of the last two decades have been about rehashing Vietnam, a last shot at framing the arguments for the history books, an effort to shoehorn old wines into new bottles.

The baby boomers will, I think, go down as a maddening generation, capable of great idealistic good, but also oh-so-petty and selfish behavior. It's definitely time enough for them to retire--for new leaders, either too young or too newly-arrived to have been tainted by the scorched earth legacy of recent years--to sprout forth.

Getty Images pool photo of Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg at an environmental meeting in NYC by Susan Watts.

Uncredited photo of Obama posing in front of the Superman Statue in downtown Metropolis, Illinois from Obama's website.

Known for

Do we recognize greatness when we see it? I thought about this recently when I heard that Orhan Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I saw him speak earlier this year, and wrote in part:

Turk Orhan Pamuk, the famous novelist and now political figure, looking suave and distinguished--not at all like his goofy picture. Also a bit nervous, I think, he kindof wasn't paying attention when the others were reading, like a kid anxious to get his turn over with. He apparently lives and writes in the same building that he grew up in; he read an excerpt from a memoir, Istanbul, that was essentially one long, amazing sentence, very Walt Whitman-esque in that it was just one phrase and image after another, each preceded by 'Of', describing his beloved Istanbul. My favorite was: "of everything being broken, worn-out, past its prime." He started out wanting to be an artist and photographer, can totally tell, each phrase was like a little photograph.

He also said he thought a word that summed up the Turkish people was their equivalent of the word 'melancholy', but the Turkish word apparently connotes also a 'nobility of failure' meaning, essentially the entire country was living in the ruins of an empire, but it was somehow okay, not to be celebrated, but nothing to be ashamed of, either, just sad.

Pamuk was one of five wonderful novelists on a panel devoted to 'The Global City.' He read an excerpt from his memoir, Istanbul; answered a few questions, and that was about it.

If you had asked me at the time, of these five, which one is most likely to win a Nobel, I may have picked Pamuk--but only because of what I knew of his career, of the raves his works draw, of his interesting role as a bridge between East and West in this post-9/11 era.

But on this panel, he was truly one among peers; pretty much everyone was, at a glance, thoughtful, warm, brilliant yet gentle. I've only read the opening chapter of one of his novels--it didn't suck me in, the words swirled too much for what I was in the mood for, so I left it on the shelf, to be picked up again, soon.

[Incidentally, I'd put Pamuk's Turkey on the short list of countries most likely to play an outsized role in the world in the coming decades. Israel, Iran and North Korea would be there too, for pretty different reasons; you can't really put the U.S. on the list because the word 'outsized' doesn't really apply to us. Ditto for China and India, both of whom have long punched below their weight.]

Here are the last 33 years of Pamuk's fellow winners:

2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V.S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo José Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
1981 - Elias Canetti
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
1976 - Saul Bellow
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

You're struck, of course, by the geographical diversity of winners. Wikipedia's version of this list comes with helpful little flags--a glance shows the UK, Austria, South Africa, Hungary, Trinidad & Tobago, China, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Poland as the countries of origin of the prior 10 winners.

It makes you wonder where's the U.S., particularly since we dominate many of the other Nobel prize categories. Toni Morrison is the only American to win the award in recent tyears--you have to go all the way back to John Steinbeck in 1962 to find another one who's not a bi-national (although I always thought of Saul Bellow as an American, turns out he's originally Canadian).

What gives? Well, there's the oft-repeated criticism that politics plays a big role in the selection of winners, that the Nobel isn't an accurate barometer of literary merit since so many obvious worthies have never won--Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, John Updike among those still living so therefore theoretically eligible.

In an article headlined The Nobel as a mysterious joke, Susan Salter Reynolds of the San Francisco Chronicle puts together this list of authors who died Nobel-less:

Critics point to the glaring omissions of Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, among others (but then again, Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, so maybe there's some kind of freakish reverse psychology thing happening).

It's a pretty damning list, to which I'd add Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, any author's club without these guys is not really one worth getting into (in part because it'd be pretty dull).

But you could also say there aren't more Americans on the discredited-or-not Nobel list because in this day and age determining someone's nationality can be a tricky thing.

I'd wager half of the more recent winners have spent significant time in the U.S. during their adult careers, either teaching/lecturing, or else living in New York City.

For reasons of convenience if nothing else, most of what they read is probably in English; and I'd guess that America in general and American letters in particular is for almost all of them a major force shaping their worldview, even if in opposition.

We were never all really Berliners, but it's not that wrong to say in this world, for a certain type of people, we're all Americans.

Or, at least, we'd like to think so when it comes to explaining why the lack of American Nobel winners isn't an indictment of what we think of as our leading, even guiding, role in world literature.

Incidentally, alt.Muslim makes the interesting point that Pamuk's win and Muhammad Yunnis'Peace Prize means two Muslims have won Nobels this year.

Oddly enough, I've yet to see anywhere the headline Muslims Commit Great Acts of World Renown....

Uncredited photo of Pamuk found in various places online.

Dream life

Flickr has a feature where you can see "random selection of some of the interesting things discovered on Flickr within the last 7 days."

There are a lot of talented people out there, many busy shooting travel, kids, animals, nature, architecture photos. Generally with great color and lighting; mostly 'obvious' yet well-composed shots.

Sometimes startling beautiful.

Nomads child, by Mielna

Round house, by hyperfocusing

Thousand by thousand

What is it about men that makes them make lists? Especially lists of the best--usually without qualification. I guess to name, to enumerate, to define, to exclude is to assert power; and guys tend to go for that kind of thing.

I was pointed to Piero Scaruffi's site by a Times article on him and it, The Greatest Web Site of All Time (I mean, how can you resist a headline like that, if only to scoff when it doesn't go here?!

It turns out Scaruffi and his self-titled site consist mainly of a very large collection of lists--primarily focused on music, but not exclusively. I shudder at how much time Scaruffi must have put into the site....

Since I know very little about music, I looked first at his Rock section, at the list of Best Rock Albums of All Time:

1. Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica
2. Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom
3. Faust: Faust I
4. Velvet Underground: & Nico
5. Doors: The Doors

Uh, okay--I mean why not, I really don't know that much about rock, and sure it's weird that no other similar list I've ever seen has even listed 1-4, but maybe I haven't come across the lists of true rock afficienados like Scaruffi.

Besides which, of all the arts music is probably the most intensely personal--it's in some ways the most accessible art form, with lower barriers to entry than the others (all you really need is ears, hence every 14-year-old can style himself somesortof expert on some genre), so I'm willing to accept Scaruffi's list as being valid, even if I have some doubts.

But then I took a look at his list of The 1,000 Best Films of all Times (copyrighted, like all his other lists), and found:

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
Alfred Hitchcock: North By Northwest (1959)
Orson Welles: Touch Of Evil (1958)
Roman Polanski: Chinatown (1974)
Robert Altman: Nashville (1975)
Sam Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Part II (1974)
Elia Kazan: Splendor In The Grass (1961)
John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Lars von Trier: Riget/ Kingdom (1995)

Now I know a fair amount about cinema, and have seen most of the films on this list, so two things struck me right away: 1) Scaruffi's list is absolutely generic; 2) he has pretty pedestrian taste.

You have to go to #39 on his list to find a single film by a non-Western director (any guesses as to which director, which film?!); indeed, of his top 100 films, exactly 5 are from non-Western directors.

Having seen all five of his films, I can tell you they're the most accessible of the non-Western works that usually appear on film lists; the two Kurosawa films and the Ozu work usually appear much higher on serious film lists than they do on Scaruffi's. And the other two films, while interesting, are also the kind of films that people who think they're cinema insiders cite when asked for their 'sleeper' great films picks.

At least he qualifies his The best novels of all times list with 'in the English language.' This list is better than his cinema list, but even so it's the type of list an English major might pull together after his freshman year:

Henry James (USA, 1843): "The Golden Bowl"
James Joyce (Ireland, 1882): "Ulysses"
Emily Bronte (Britain, 1818): "Wuthering Heights"
Vladimir Nabokov (Russia, 1899): "Ada"
Thomas Pynchon (USA, 1937): "Gravity's Rainbow"
William Faulkner (USA, 1897): "Light in August"
Virginia Woolf (Britain, 1882): "To the Lighthouse"
William Gaddis (USA, 1922): "The Recognitions"
Joseph Conrad (Poland, 1857): "Nostromo"
John Barth (USA, 1930): "Giles Goat Boy"

Salman Rushdie is the only non-white author on his ranked list of 35, with no non-Western authors in translation represented among the first few hundred selections that I could see.

As for his section on politics... his 'analysis' pieces on the News of 2006 are little more than sophisticated twaddle--they have the rhythmn and sound of serious op-eds that you might read in the Times or the Post, but he both gets little facts wrong and piles up nutty conclusions. Plus the writing style is painfully convoluted and has that strident tone common to oblivious political dilettantes. A little knowledge, indeed....

Based on the Times piece, Scaruffi seems like quite an interesting guy. But if his website is any indication, he's less than the sum of his knowledge. You wonder if you'd even get a word in edgewise with him.

Uncredited photo of Piero Scaruffi from his website.

Mine. All mine.

Best of the Best Cali, short hair manx, 4, of Trenton, N.J., is seen with her medal at the 2006 Cat Fanciers' Association-Iams Cat Championship at Madison Square Garden, Sunday, October 15, 2006 in New York. Three hundred pedigreed cats representing 41 recognized breeds competed in the show. AP caption and photo by Shiho Fukada.

Leave it

The great thing about having a worldview is it allows you to quickly and generally effectively synthesize new data. You don't have to invent the wheel from scratch everytime--you simply relate something new to what you already think, figure out how well it matches, and depending on the degree and importance of the overlap either square it with your beliefs, or else put it aside as something the needs further thought.

The problem with having a worldview is it makes you predictable; and it's not always easily recognizable when new thought is required. As armies always fight the last war unless explicitly prodded otherwise, likewise humans tend to keep thinking the way they always have, especially if your worldview has always been to your benefit.

Republicans in this country tend to have a worldview that came of age in the post-WWII era, where White Male Americans staved off the Nazis and the Japanese, saving Western civilization in the process. This actually happened; although women and the Brits et al certainly played their part, WMAs provided the key muscle that knocked out Hitler and Tojo.

Once they got home, however, WMAs found a country that had changed in their absence. Women and minorities had, by necessity, gone to work in factories and had their own taste of leadership, with good results. They weren't willing to go back on the farm.

WMAs reacted poorly to this. They were used to being kings in their own castle; they felt they deserved more than gratitude for dying in Europe and the Pacific and for forging a world where America was supreme, at least in the non-Soviet sphere.

Naturally, the 'children' rebelled; the Civil Rights and later Women's Rights movement, coupled with Vietnam and actually Watergate shook WMAs' confidence in themselves. For a while, it seemed as if they might be pushed off or abdicate their top-down model (bye-bye Archie, hello Alan Alda).

But the fall of Communism and, more recently, the threat of terrorism has WMAs feeling vindicated, with many of them thinking they've been called back into the saddle.

Shows like '24' and 'House' and movies like 'Superman Returns' overtly play into WMAs' need to see a world as in peril, relying and awaiting their strong hand.

We're not. This new world is inherently changeable and diverse in all senses of the world. One worldview ain't gonna cut it anymore; we need lots of different types of people, with varied life and cultural experiences who aren't just there for window-dressing.

In this environment, the WMAs organizational chart approach to the world is outmoded. Or, in more personal terms, father doesn't always know best, and non-WMAs aren't children anyway.

George Lakoff's book Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea seems to touch on this line of thought. I haven't read it yet, but Tobin Harshaw's brief review of it in the Times concludes this way:

Lakoff uses a parenting metaphor to explain the worldviews that produce these anathematic ideas of liberty: progressive thought stems from the “nurturant parent family” model (based on “empathy and responsibility”), while the conservative outlook is shaped by the “strict father family” model (in which the “moral authority . . . of the father must not be seriously challenged”). In case you’re wondering which household is more promising for the family politic, Lakoff helpfully informs us (without statistical attribution) that “strict father families have high rates of spousal and child abuse and divorce.”

So how does the strict father morality devolve into a political agenda? According to Lakoff, conservatives believe that “fundamental” freedoms to be cherished include “freedom from coercion by the state or by the liberal elite”; “the freedom to use any kind of vehicle anywhere”; “the freedom to hunt — regardless of whether I am hunting an endangered species.” After they get back from riding snowmobiles over northern spotted owls, these troglodytes apparently have bigger game in mind: “What they want to conserve is, in most cases, the situation prior to the expansion of traditional American ideas of freedom: before the great expansion of voting rights . . . before Social Security and Medicare.”

O.K., we can stipulate that conservatives share a distrust of government and would love to slash programs that have improved the nation over the years (as well as, perhaps, some that haven’t). But does anybody not wearing a tinfoil hat believe that Republicans really want to take the vote away from women, blacks and non-landowners? Or that President Bush’s poorly managed Medicare prescription-drug expansion was a clever ruse to destroy the program?

Of course, the GOP doesn't want to literally repeal the 14th Amendment; that'd be too messy and politically infeasible. But their emperical efforts to supress voter turnout makes that pro forma move unnecessary.

If you believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that WMAs are either biblically or culturally the natural leaders of the world, but are also open to the reality that demographically WMAs are an ever-shrinking proportion of the American electorate, the only viable solution is to try and dilute the influence of non-WMAs. Why wouldn't you, if this is the worldview you grew up on and the only one that you know?

So you take actions, coordinated or not, conscious or not, consistently or not, but all cumulatively acting to lessen and denigrate the participation of non-WMAs in the electoral system.

Or, you act to co-op non-WMAs to support the leadership of WMAs. For example, evangelical Christians opt for the latter by emphasizing the 'helpmate' role of women, in some cases barring women from teaching Sunday School to boys.

It's all in vain; the WMA backlash we're currently experience may stave off change for a while, but in the end the world changes and WMAs will have to adapt. If your worldview is built on sexist and racist foundations and brute force is slipping away, you have to be effective to maintain your grip.

But the WMA worldview no longer functions well--if it ever did in the pre-communications age--as exemplified with Bush et al having become the worldwide poster child for incompetence.

In our world today, the Allies are gonna look a lot less like Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin; and more like Gandhi, King and Chavez... and even Rodham Clinton.

Uncredited 'Leave it to Beaver' photo found in various places online.

Nightfall for the wasps

What makes the Times great? Certainly the big things, like great reporters, editors and news judgment.

But also little things, like keeping editorial calendars where they make sure to follow up on their own stories.

Nine months ago, the Times' Sam Roberts wrote a story that started:

If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.

That day, apparently, has come. And, like clockwork, Sam's back with
The 300 Millionth Footprint on U.S. Soil:

By one count, more than half of all the people who have ever lived in the United States are living today. And their ranks are expanding. On any given day, 11,000 babies are born and 3,000 immigrants arrive, outnumbering the people who die or emigrate.

At the current rate, the person who tips the population past 300 million will emerge in a week or so.

The recent surge of immigrants actually makes America’s diversity closer to what it was in 1915, when the 100 millionth arrived, than in 1967, when the 200 millionth was born (chances are nearly even that a baby born today will be Hispanic). At all three milestones, the nation was either on the verge of war or already in one.

This second story is shorter than the first, but its accompanying charts are well worth checking out.

That first story inspired a post, One day 1/5th the Size of China, about the 200th million American, an Asian American according to Life magazine in 1967.

Too bad a magazine of Life's stature isn't around today to annoint the 300th millionth American. Whoever he or she is, it's a fair bet that they'll grow up speaking more than one language--maybe Spanish, or one day Chinese.

To again quote what might well be the unofficial anthem of our epoch, the times indeed are a changing. As the Times found out shortly after the first piece ran--an appended correction online reads:

A front-page article on Jan. 13 about the expectation that the United States population would reach 300 million in October misstated the proportion of Americans who are Anglo-Saxon Protestants. According to current surveys, about 40 percent of the population is white Protestant. Anglo-Saxon Protestants, therefore, do not account for "most Americans."

Photo of non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant baby found online.

In harmony

Vienna Teng is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. I first heard her at a convention, of all places. Afterwards I waited in a long line to buy her CD and get her autograph (I've learned the hard way not to pass up a chance for some personal contact with someone whose work you like; likewise, don't miss out on buying a piece of original artwork that catches your eye (regardless of its bulk)).

She's got a great, mellow yet intelligent sound--you just want to keep listening to her (she's compelling, and not always quietly), and the words and melody chase themselves around in your head afterwards. They're the kind of songs that draw out whatever emotion's inside of you at the moment--and somehow, even when it's sadness, it's all good.

Teng doesn't have the standard musician's background, nor seemingly the personality. And she has an interesting 'scrapbook'/blog up, and you can also listen to songs via a jukebox at her website.

Boy, whatever did rising musicians--and erstwhile fans--do before the Web?!

Uncredited photo of Vienna Teng from her website.

Best words, best place?

The latest entry in the ongoing harshest (yet possibly entirely justified) letter to the New York Times Book Review. How do you recover from opening up the paper and reading something like this?

To the Editor:

With regard to your review of Charles Wright’s new volume of poems, “Scar Tissue” (Sept. 17): I cannot bring myself to believe that I am the only serious follower of contemporary poetry who is getting sick of reading reviews by young literary nonentities posing as Randall Jarrell, and with cheap and superficial sarcasm standing in for genuine wit quoting out of context and generally manipulating the work of a master like Wright for the purpose of proving some artistic or prosodic theory of their own, usually one that has little or nothing to do with the book under discussion.

Wright is one of a very small handful of poets widely considered to have made, over decades, a significant contribution to the body of American literature in our time, and he long ago earned the right — regardless of any particular reviewer’s aesthetics — to be discussed, even to be disliked, with some degree of thoughtful reverence, as opposed to the still stylishly ironical and arrogant condescension to which even The New York Times Book Review unfortunately remains far too hospitable. Taking up space in a relatively brief discussion of a serious book to speculate, for example, on the state of the author’s keyboard (“I picture his comma key worn down to a nub and the period filmed with dust”) is simply pathetic, and makes me wish I could take that sharp stick the reviewer fantasizes poking Charles Wright with and giving him a good spanking — proof, perhaps, that stupid writing produces a stupid state of mind, in this reader and I suspect in others, just as surely as fair and profound writing tends to produce a serious and objective one.

I have a suggestion: Why not assign beginners to review other beginners, and when dealing with the work of proven contemporary masters like Wright, take the trouble to enlist the mind of someone capable of writing intelligent prose?

Franz Wright

Waltham, Mass.

The writer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2004.

Uncredited photo of Franz Wright via New York State Writer's Institute, SUNY. Uncredited photo of review writer Joel Brower via Saint Lawrence College.

What we remember

It seems you can no longer skip reading the Times' Sunday magazine--every issue has at least one article that sticks with me, that helps me think about things in a different way; even the rotating serial cartoons are interesting.

This week's wow! piece is Charles Siebert's unfortunately-headlined An Elephant Crackup?. The article's about how scientists are applying to elephants techniques and lessons learned from treating post-traumatic stress syndrome in soldiers, refugees and other victims of extreme trauma.

It's not at all one of those touchy-feely, naval-gazing dog whisperer pieces. It's very much rooted in reality; as Siebert notes,

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks. ...

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in ‘‘Elephant Breakdown,’’ a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.

There are many interesting moments like this in the piece; I had no idea, for example, of how dependant elephants are on living with other elephants.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network, while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before coming back into the fold as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances — in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member — they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.

I mean, how can anyone support keeping elephants in zoos and circuses after reading this piece?!

Interlaced throughout Siebert's article are the parallels between the de facto elephant genocide going on in the wild and the mass slaughter of humans in Africa. The same forces that throw handgrenades at elephants to get at their ivory think nothing of killing parents in front of their children, and then forcing the orphans to join their 'army.'

But I wonder how many people will remember only the elephant part of the piece, long-ago having become desensitized to the constant drumbeat of war/famine/death/suffering we associate with that so-far-away part of the world.

Maybe if we frame the problem in terms of what can be done to save these majestic animals, it'll be easier to break through the clutter and we can wind up saving our fellow humans, and ourselves--and we won't wind up having to explain to our children why elephants went extinct on our watch and how Africa left the civilized world. It is all, as Siebert makes clear, interlinked.

The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension, ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as a new ‘‘trans-species psyche,’’ a commitment to move beyond an anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be elephants. Two years ago, Bradshaw wrote a paper for the journal Society and Animals, focusing on the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, a sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants — more or less the wilderness-based complement to Carol Buckley’s trauma therapy at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. The trust’s human caregivers essentially serve as surrogate mothers to young orphan elephants, gradually restoring their psychological and emotional well being to the point at which they can be reintroduced into existing wild herds. The human ‘‘allomothers’’ stay by their adopted young orphans’ sides, even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caretakers make sure, however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans grow fond of all the keepers. Otherwise an elephant would form such a strong bond with one keeper that whenever he or she was absent, that elephant would grieve as if over the loss of another family member, often becoming physically ill itself.

To date, the Sheldrick Trust has successfully rehabilitated more than 60 elephants and reintroduced them into wild herds. A number of them have periodically returned to the sanctuary with their own wild-born calves in order to reunite with their human allomothers and to introduce their offspring to what — out on this uncharted frontier of the new ‘‘trans-species psyche’’ — is now being recognized, at least by the elephants, it seems, as a whole new subspecies: the human allograndmother. ...

I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it.

Even as we’re forcing them out, it seems, the elephants are going out of their way to put us, the keepers, in an ever more discomfiting place, challenging us to preserve someplace for them, the ones who in many ways seem to regard the matter of life and death more devoutly than we. In fact, elephant culture could be considered the precursor of our own, the first permanent human settlements having sprung up around the desire of wandering tribes to stay by the graves of their dead. ‘‘The city of the dead,’’ as Lewis Mumford once wrote, ‘‘antedates the city of the living.’’

When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for his family’s funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the elephant’s collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.

Uncredited elephant image via Puzzlehouse.

Falling far from the tree

R.W. Apple, the legendary New York Times political reporter, died October 4th at the age of 71. Although I knew he's lionized as the best print political reporter of his generation, I remember him mainly for his wonderful food articles the last few years, filed from all over the world and always including a mention of "my wife Betsey."

Todd Purdum's aptly-headlined Times obituary, R. W. Apple Jr., Globe-Trotter for The Times and a Journalist in Full, Dies at 71, opens with:

With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

Apple, with his searching intelligence, limitless ego, tireless work ethic, and at-times bullying personality, seems to me the epitome of a famed journalist. He never won the Pulitzer, although as Purdum notes:

Mr. Apple enjoyed a career like no other in the modern era of The Times. He was the paper’s bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London and Washington. He covered 10 presidential elections and more than 20 national nominating conventions. He led The Times’s coverage of the Vietnam War for two and a half years in the 1960’s and of the Persian Gulf war a generation later, chronicling the Iranian revolution in between. ...

In later years, he turned the same searching, childlike curiosity to writing about food, architecture and travel from around the globe.

The Times obit led me to a long but worthwhile Calvin Trillin profile of Apple that appeared in the New Yorker a few years back. There's Trillin's usual mix of sly observation and telling anecdote; you understand Apple's burning ambition, his desire to make something of himself in the world and then to get all that he was entitled to once he did. Including this doozy:

I once suggested to Apple that he bequeath his expense accounts to the Smithsonian Institution. “But the Times has them,” he said. “I turned them in.” He sounded a bit regretful, it seemed to me, that he was not in a position to give posterity an opportunity to inspect some of his more stunning creations. At the Times, the various departments have what is called a cost center—what amounts to a budget line. The foreign desk has a cost center. The editorial board has a cost center. R. W. Apple, Jr., has a cost center. “It’s been my fate and privilege over the years to sit next to various people who were approving Apple’s expense accounts,” Al Siegal says. “There were hoots, and once in a while you’d look up and the person—these were various assistant managing editors—was shaking his head and reading off ‘Wine from my cellars . . .’ ” Siegal, who is a great admirer of R. W. Apple, Jr., thinks that, all in all, the Times has received good value.

Asked about having his own cost center, Apple is suddenly overcome with modesty. “It’s because I write for all these different parts of the paper,” he told me.

Too many of today's journalists, I think, hunger for Apple's expense account without possessing anywhere near what it takes to deserve it.

The last article of his I read before his death, Singapore: A Repressed City-State? Not in Its Kitchens, seemed to me a great example of travel and food writing as journalism. The last article that he wrote, originally slated to be published later this fall, was The Global Gourmet.

It centers around "10 restaurants abroad that would be worth boarding a plane to visit, even in these fraught days," and since he knew he was near death contains the line, "What will you order for your last meal on earth?” The places listed are nearly all in the West; but unlike many of his fellow reporters, Apple consciuosly acknowledges his tastes and recognizes them as limiting even if authentic.

Apple's words always prompted hunger in me, and I usually felt he knew what he was talking about even as I marveled at the vast scope of his canvas. The Times has put online an archive of Apple's articles. There are 1,753 of them.

Of course, this being the modern Times, the web version of Apple's obit ends with this appended.

Correction: An obituary yesterday about R.W. Apple Jr., a correspondent and editor at The New York Times, omitted the city of residence of one survivor and omitted the surname of another. Mr. Apple’s stepson, John Brown, lives in Alexandria, Va., and Mr. Apple’s sister is Barbara Pittman.

Photo of Apple dining at Galatoire's Restaurant in New Orleans in April 2006 by Ozier Muhammad.

There's no Nobel for war

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize went today to Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi who came up with the idea of lending tiny amounts of money to poor women who wanted to become entrepreneurs.

This 'microlending' by Yunus' Grameen Bank let families buy truly simple things like cows or cell phones that often were the only things they needed to pull themselves out of systemic poverty. Sums as low as $10 allowed them to start selling milk or find out how much their crops were really worth--and, since the vast majority of the bank's 6.6 million lenders since 1983 have been women, Yunus has profoundly changed society in his Muslim homeland.

I saw Yunus speak one night four years ago; I'd gone to a work-related event mainly for the chance to meet Walter Cronkite, but came away marveling that everyone didn't know Yunus' name.

He struck me as singularly modest but highly intelligent; someone who just went about directly helping people the way he best knew how, and who because of his startling effectiveness now found himself traveling in circles entirely foreign--but because of his charisma and the strength of his passion Yunus was able to interest pretty much everyone he met in his world.

It's a world that post-9/11 most Westerners know in only cartoon terms. Yunus' successes, as detailed below in the Times article, makes you realize how much better off we'd all be if instead of spending $200 million a day on the war in Iraq, with a total economic cost estimated at $1 trillion (!), we simply gave it all to Yunus to distribute to Muslim women all over the world.

Microloan Pioneer and His Bank Win Nobel Peace Prize

Anand Giridharadas and Keith Bradsher in the Times: ... Since its creation in 1983, Grameen has made a total of $5.72 billion in such small loans, and has turned a profit in all but three years, including $15 million in 2005. ...

Dr. Yunus reacted joyously to the news of the prize, The Associated Press reported. “I am so, so happy,” he said in a telephone interview from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, shortly after the prize was announced. “It’s really great news for the whole nation.”

The son of a prosperous goldsmith, Dr. Yunus has said that his mother’s generosity to the poor instilled in him from a young age a sense of duty to the poor. ...

The inspiration for Grameen Bank came to Dr. Yunus during a trip to the village of Jobra in Bangladesh during the devastating famine of 1976. He met a woman who was struggling to make ends meet as a weaver of bamboo stools. She needed to borrow to buy materials, but because she was poor and had no assets, conventional banks shunned her, and she had to turn instead to local moneylenders whose extortionate rates of interest consumed nearly all her profits.

Dr. Yunus, then a professor of rural economics at Chittagong University, gave the woman and several of her neighbors loans totalling $27 from his own pocket. To his surprise, the borrowers paid him back in full and on time. So he started traveling from village to village, offering more tiny loans and cutting out the middlemen. Dr. Yunus was determined to prove that lending to the poor was not an “impossible proposition,” as he put it.

When he later formalized the loan-making arrangement as the Grameen Bank in 1983, the bank adopted its signature innovation: making borrowers take out loans in groups of five, with each borrower guaranteeing the others’ debts. Thus, in place of the hold banks have on wealthier borrowers who do not pay their debts — foreclosure and a low credit rating — Grameen depends on an incentive at least as powerful for poor villagers, the threat of being shamed before neighbors and relatives.

The bank’s 6.6 million borrowers so far have paid back 98.5 percent of their loans.

Photo of Yunus from Libertad Digital's Ideas.

Thin air in Washington

Another piece of evidence that NBA players are the nuttiest of athletes, and quite possibly pound for pound the weirdest collection of people in the world.

Or maybe it's just all that money frees them up.

Arenas sorry for Team USA vent; thins air in house

The Associated Press: ... Take a deep breath, and get ready for the latest in Gilbertology: Washington Wizards point guard Gilbert Arenas is thinning the air in his house.

"I had my house converted to the Colorado altitude, so I am always above sea level," Arenas said Monday at the Wizards annual pre-training camp media day.

Say what? He's going to live at high altitude in the nation's capital?

"You know, that's kind of weird," Arenas said.

He'll get plenty of nods with that statement, but, yep, he's really doing it. Instead of going to the mountains to train -- as some endurance athletes do -- Arenas has hired a company to simulate those conditions in a home environment.

"I had to put a tent in one room, and then they are going to come during training camp and fix the whole house," Arenas said. "Then I have a portable tent I'm taking on the road."

Arenas hopes the living arrangement will give him more energy in the fourth quarter of NBA games, when everyone else is getting tired from breathing the same old heavy air.

"How I start the game is how I finish the game," he said.

There's always something up with Arenas, whether it was his revelation last year that he played online poker during halftimes, or the multitude of ways he finds to keep chips on his shoulders. No wonder coach Eddie Jordan said last week that he hadn't spoken much to Arenas this summer because he could stand only so much "Gilbertology."

Despite the extra-curriculars -- or maybe because of them -- Arenas is one of the best in the game. He was fourth in league in scoring last season, averaging 29.3 points, and made his second consecutive All-Star team.

Even so, there's a feeling he's never really been given his due. That's why he wears the No. 0 -- he was supposed to get zero minutes at the University of Arizona. Yes, he was an All-Star last season, but only as a late replacement for an injured player.

Fuel was added to the fire this summer, when Arenas was among the final cuts for the U.S. world championship team. The convenient excuse was that he had a strained groin, but Arenas said he essentially withdrew after learning that he probably wasn't going to make the team anyway.

Shortly afterward, Arenas vented his frustration, telling The Washington Post that he was going to exact revenge on Team USA assistant coaches Nate McMillan and Mike D'Antoni by scoring 100 points each on their respective teams, Portland and Phoenix.

On Monday, Arenas apologized -- not a bad idea if he wants to make the Olympic team in two years.

"I said some things, and I vented out against Phoenix and Portland, but those teams actually had nothing to do with anything," Arenas said. "That was wrong of me. I really want to say sorry for it and I want to say sorry to Mike D'Antoni. That was the immature Gilbert two months ago. I'm growing as a person, and I'm ready to be a leader for the Washington Wizards."

Uncredited photo of Arenas via the Washington Post.