Ray of hope

I've been seriously thinking of moving back to Canada. Or fleeing further.... like Thailand.
On the other hand... go see the movie "Ray", about the life of Ray Charles. It puts things in perspective a little bit... on the bright side, 40 years ago black men in the south were called "boy" and unless you were a white male you were utterly screwed in American society. So things are better than they were.
On the down side, the assholes who brought us 100 years of misogyny and racism are now in charge of the Republican party.
But I walked out of "Ray" thinking that no matter how shitty it is at the moment, they're fighting against the tide of history, and in four years we'll take it all back.

Take Me To The River

Another classic clip...

By Jeremy Bloom
(Originally appeared in Capital magazine)

"Go, go, go!"

We hoist up our 15-foot rubber raft and march out into the frigid river. As my booted, wet- suited foot enters the water, I feel... nothing. No cold, no damp, just a slight pressure as the water closes around my calf. "Hey," I think, "these things really work."

We clamber aboard our craft and swiftly, albeit clumsily at first, paddle out into the current. Behind us, the next of several hundred rafts is already being man-handled down the bank.

We have entered the Indian River, a major tributary of the Hudson, a few hundred yards down from the dam that regulates its flow out of Lake Abanakee. During the summer, the Indian is a tranquil stream.

But that was months ago.

Now, the melting snows of Bullhead, Horseshoe, Little Panther and Bad Luck mountains have swollen Lake Abanakee with cold, clear water. We can see it cascading over the dam, exploding down a narrow channel before spreading and running swiftly but calmly past our embarkation point. We join the flow.

After bumping over a few small waves, we get a chance to look around. Clusters of fiddleheads - the tightly curled shoots of ferns that resemble the scrolls of violins - are poking up through the newly-thawed earth. Here, the river flows along the narrow defile it has carved among the peaks, overseen by the evergreens clinging to the slopes which angle up from the banks.

Interspersed among the deep green boughs are bare, silver-gray aspens, their slim branches only just beginning to break out in golden buds, an impossible dazzle of color in the bright morning sunlight.

Rounding a bend, we hear thunder. No more time for surveying the shore. The bed here is full o f glacial detritus, from gravel to boulders the size of buses, which whip the water into peaks and valleys, fountains of spray and standing waves that slam our raft - wash! wash! wash! - one after the other, tossing and twisting us and splashing over the gunwales into our faces as we whoop in part laughter, part terror.

We emerge spluttering from our first rapids with a foot of water in our raft, spray dripping from hair and eyebrows and noses, adrenaline coursing through arteries. The water isn't swimming temperature by a long shot, but in our insulated wet suites, we don't notice the chill.

"Did anyone get wet?" inquires our grinning guide....

Skip Grant is stocky and blue-eyed, with chiseled Hollywood features and a 24-hour smile. During the week, he is Hoyt S. Grant, is a salesman of some kind of incomprehensible high-tech computer equipment. But on weekends, he comes up here as a licensed river guide. And lets loose.

Shooting the rapids, our paddling had been raggedy; now we work on getting in sync. We're still banging into each other as Skip calls out, "Back paddle on the left! Front on the right! Let's spin this sucker around!"

We take a break at Blue Ledges, a prodigious scarp of several hundred feet that stands directly in the path of the rushing Hudson. As a huge raven flies overhead, catching thermal updrafts along the cliff, we bask on the riverbank rocks in the warm sun and watch armies of fellow rafters come splashing by.

Each outfitting company has a different colored wetsuit, so it's like watching Kurosawa's film "Ran", with its color-coded armies. First comes a group in orange suits with orange vests, then a division of blue suits and orange vests, then a contingent all in blue plus red helmets. We drink coffee (but not too much - no bathroom stop for an hour!) and psych ourselves up for the next stretch.

By Carter's Landing Rapids (sometimes called Mile Long Rapids) we're paddling in sync, which is a good thing, because this is the most treacherous stretch of the river. It is market by several "holes" - gaps between boulders which catch the turbulent waters and trap them in pounding, roiling eddies.

You can roller-coster over them, but if you hit them at just the wrong angle, a raft can go over in seconds, dumping everyone. We pass "Jim's Hole", where one guide spilled his entire crew a few years back, and earned himself a place in local nomenclature.

(I learned later that, after our trip, an inexperienced group of rafters wiped out in Jim's Hole - and one died. It's rare, but it's real. And danger is both the carrot and the stick of every adventurer.)

We pass the rest of the five-hour odyssey in a blur of exhilarating rapids and lazy flat stretches. It's like the best carnival ride you've ever been on, but it lasts a lot longer than 30 seconds, and there's no waiting in line.

By the time we pull out of the river near the town of North Creek, the sun is disappearing behind the mountains. Back at our hotel – the American in "downtown" North Creek - we realize that our bodies are far too keyed up to even consider sleep. Tranquilizers are definitely required, and the American has the best post-rafting oasis in town: the Thirsty Moose. It's got a solid garnet bar (actually garnet ore, a bluish-black rock shot through with nodes and veins of the burgundy gemstone), and when we arrive the bar's stuffed-head namesake is presiding over a hubbub of voices exchanging rafting tales over ales.

"...And then we hit the rock and he went right over the side!"

"That's nothing - we bumped a shallow rock on a calm stretch and no one got dumped but our guide! He came up spluttering and real embarrassed...."

"I wish I could go again tomorrow. I checked and they're all booked up."

"I am going again tomorrow!"

Three hundred miles downstream, the Hudson flows quietly, a constrained river, between New Jersey and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But here in the north she's still a wild river. And she makes for one wild ride.

(Photo used under creative commons license from Flickr.com)

SETI may have found something

SETI, the search for possible extraterrestrial intelligence by scanning the heavens for radio signals, may have found something....

"Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
�We are looking for something that screams out �artificial�,� says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. �This just doesn�t do that, but it could be because it is distant."

This is pretty damn exciting...

90 years since the War to End All Wars...

"If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied."

This was Rudyard Kipling's shortest poem - his angry and anguished response to the death of his son in the First World War.
It's been 90 years since "the guns of August" began the process of tearing Europe apart that lasted most of the last century, and Adam Gropnick has a chilling essay in The New Yorker that looks at some new scholarship and some old truths.
As we approach the 1,000-casualty mark in Iraq, and revisit Kerry and W's war in which 50,000 Americans died, it's chilling to contemplate the reality of that earlier conflict:

"The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead...
On one day during the Battle of the Somme, in the summer of 1916, more than fifty thousand British troops died walking directly into German fire, without advancing the front by a single foot."

There are also disquieting resonances of our own time: the rush to war, the seeming inevitabity of it, the leaders who expected easy victories and think about or plan for what they would do if things didn't go the way they expected...
As we contemplate the prospect of a failed Iraqi state and a new Shia militancy spreading across the Islamic world, it's worth considering some of Gropnick's closing words:

"And so the question remains: Were they right to fight? What would have happened if the British neutrals had held fast on August 3rd and not gone in? A Europe overrun by a triumphant German militarism is only one possibility. A Communist revolution in France is a secondary possibility, with unknowable consequences...
"Yet it is hard to see even a victorious German Reich costing liberal civilization quite as much as its defeat did. Wilhelmine Germany was, if not liberal, at least plural... The logic of German militarism may have meant that there would be a war sooner or later. But, just conceivably, the force of German civil society — of science and reason, in that age of Einstein and Freud and Planck and Warburg — would have tempered the force of militarism. The experiment never had a chance. What is hard to imagine is a worse consequence: Britain and France demoralized and depleted, Germany humiliated but not vanquished, Russia robbed of any chance of liberal reform and turned over to a gang of psychopathic fanatics. What exactly would have been worse than that?"

Reading this piece, I am filled with fear - that we are heading into another storm like that one... and that the long-term consequences of W's splendid little war will be as unexpected, and as debilitating.

Enjoy Michael Moore while you can....

The Washington Business Journal reported last week:

Carlyle goes to the movies
District-based investment firm The Carlyle Group is one of three investors that have agreed to buy Loews Cineplex Entertainment from Onex Corp. and Oaktree Capital Management for $1.46 billion.

The Loews chain owns 200 movie theaters. For those of you unfamiliar with the Carlyle Group, it's a $17-billion military industrial powerhouse with a lot of Saudi money backing it up. Bush Sr. was on the board and did a lot of schmoozing for the firm.
The company does a lot of synergy - for instance, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, they bought the largest cigarette-manufacturing firm in Italy, positioning them to supply the troops and make a bundle. And it was a target in "Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11", for its involvment in linking Saudi money with the Bushes.
What would they want with movie theaters? Up until now the Rethuglicans have been able to work on their media mogul peers with the usual forms of pressure, blocking such things as the Reagan TV series on ABC and getting Disney to drop distribution of "Fahrenheit 9/11". But Moore did an end run, and got independent distribution. Solution? Buy up the theaters.
Is anyone else thinking about Howard Beale's sermons in the film "Network" at this point?