Haunting the Web Since 1999
The 2007 Pulitzers are announced: Cormac McCarthy wins the fiction prize for The Road; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 takes non-fiction; Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff win the history prize for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, and Debby Applegate’s biography The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher wins in that category. Congrats to all.
“Two and a half years ago, John McCain swallowed his pride and hitched his ambitions to two stars — George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. Both have since imploded. And so, as his campaign faces the purple dusk of twilight time, the man who might once have been an honorable president slips and slides on the stardust.” Based on a recent NYT interview with the Mythical Maverick, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan argues that John McCain’s Straight Talk Express is now effectively dismantled for good.
“How could any pilot shoot a missile into a 2 meter-wide exhaust port, let alone a pilot with no formal training, whose only claim to fame was his ability to ‘bullseye womprats’ on Tatooine? This shot, according to one pilot, would be ‘impossible, even for a computer.’ Yet, according to additional evidence, the pilot who allegedly fired the missile turned off his targeting computer when he was supposedly firing the shot that destroyed the Death Star. Why have these discrepancies never been investigated, let alone explained?” By way of Triptych Cryptic, Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job? True, it’s not as devastatingly on point as The Onion‘s recent Bush Refuses to Set Timetable for Withdrawal of Head from White House Banister (“I am going to finish what I set out to accomplish here, no matter how unpopular my decision may be, or how much my head hurts while stuck between these immovable stairway posts.“) Still, decently amusing nonetheless…I was sold on it by the pic of Palpatine reading My Pet Bantha.
As closure to the Indy 4 casting rumors posted a few weeks ago: It turns out that Shia La Boeuf is in fact in for Dr. Jones’ fourth adventure (as is Cate Blanchett and Ray Winstone, but sadly, no Sallah), likely as the prodigal son. La Boeuf seems like a solid actor, all in all, but as I said before, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
In the deadliest act of school violence in American history, at least 33 people lie dead at Virginia Tech after what was presumably a jilted student’s bloody shooting rampage.”‘It is difficult to comprehend senseless violence on this scale,’ said Virginia’s Governor Timothy M. Kaine in a statement.“
And, as details from this story emerge, I’ve been catching up over at Medley on the recent nightmare befalling blogger Kathy Sierra, who’s been the recipient of sexually repugnant death threats as a result of her posting on, of all things, tech issues. (Not to say that posting on anything else would justify the depraved sexist bile thrown her way, but I’ve sadly come to half-expect that sort of vileness from Freepers, the uglier elements of dKos, and the like.) I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised by the disgusting misogyny pervading this latter incident — it’s sorta like people acting surprised that we’ve found a racist in our midst in Don Imus, as if bigoted old white guys in positions of power were a dwindling species or something. And, true, these two events have little or nothing to do with each other, except that I’m finding out about them at the same time. Still, I have to say, sometimes all the rage, ugliness, and despair that seems to lurk just under the brittle crust of our society is overwhelmingly disheartening. Let’s get it together, people. To go back to Auden again, we must love one another or die.
Update: Exhibit C in today’s litany of horrors, this ghastly assault on a Columbia Journalism grad student, which occurred not more than twenty blocks from here over the weekend. Sweet merciful Jesus, this is a sick, sick world sometimes. Update 2: They got him.
“‘You can’t erase e-mails, not today,’ Leahy said in an angry speech on the Senate floor. “They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there — they just don’t want to produce them. It’s like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.‘” Breaking last Friday: Just as the persecuted prosecutors case boils to a head, four years of Karl Rove’s e-mail go conveniently missing from the RNC archives. And, also developing on the prosecutorial front, another subpoenaed Justice official, Michael Battle, has contradicted Gonzales’ earlier professions of ignorance on the subject, setting up the Attorney General for a raucous time during his hearings tomorrow: “Gonzales…has been preparing for a pivotal appearance on Tuesday before the committee, including mock testimony sessions lasting up to five hours a day, officials said. Better get that story straight, Al.
As noted here last September, Christopher Tolkien has completed one of his father’s earliest works, The Children of Hurin, for publication — It comes out tomorrow. “Already told in fragmentary form in ‘The Silmarillion,’ which appeared in 1977, the new book is darker than ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ for which Tolkien is best known…The story is set long before ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in a part of Middle-earth that was drowned before Hobbits ever appeared, and tells the tragic tale of Turin and his sister Nienor who are cursed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord.“
Update: “I came away from ‘The Children of Hurin’ with a renewed appreciation for the fact that Tolkien’s overarching narrative is much more ambiguous in tone than is generally noticed…What sits in the foreground is that persistent Tolkienian sense that good and evil are locked in an unresolved Manichaean struggle with amorphous boundaries, and that the world is a place of sadness and loss, whose human inhabitants are most often the agents of their own destruction.” Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir favorably reviews Tolkien’s dark new tome.
A faraway Jupiter-like gas planet, HD 209458b, is found (by some) to have water in its atmosphere. I saw this on Blivet on Friday and spent the weekend dreaming about it: If my sleeping brain can be trusted, HD 209458b has winged, eel-like space reptiles cavorting amidst the gaseous clouds there. Alas, my subconscious makes for a lousy exobiologist: “[A] Jupiter-like gaseous planet such as this one, as opposed to a rocky one like Earth, is highly unlikely to harbour any kind of life.” Well, damn.
Some more fallout (and, in my opinion, auspicious signs) from the first money primary held recently: Hillary Clinton may have more in the bank, but Barack Obama raised more money, has more cap room to spare, so to speak, and has been peeling off some top Clinton donors to back his own efforts. “A list of Mr. Obama’s top fund-raisers released Sunday showed the extent to which the Democratic Party establishment, once presumed to back Mrs. Clinton, has become more fragmented and drifted into her rival’s camp, lending the early stages of the Democratic primary campaign the feeling of a family feud.” Update: In related news, a new poll shows the race tightening on both sides. Clinton’s up only eight on Obama, Giuliani has six on McCain (pending GOP reinforcements such as Fred Thompson.)
By way of Quiddity, Matthew Perpetua of the always enticing (and mp3-stacked) Fluxblog has dedicated himself to writing on every R.E.M. song over at Pop Songs ’07. I’ll definitely be checking it out, even if I think he’s way off on “Saturn Return”…(it made #15 on my own list awhile back, and is still up there in my esteem.)
