Someone should – if it hasn’t been done yet – edit an anthology of poetry of the cosmos. Maybe they could make sure to sprinkle Hubble images all throughout it, just to make us cosmonuts happy and get our rocks off doing two things we love at the same time: reading poetry and pondering the stars. Via Miranda Celeste Hale.
The first Arab novel about the Holocaust
That’s what the newly refurbished cover of The German Mujahid tells us.* My guess is they tacked that phrase on due to Paul Berman’s lengthy discussion of is in his recent FOTI. Anyway, that’s how I first heard about it.
*I know this because I’ve actually held the book in my hand, though I haven’t read it.
Blood on the tracks
I was late to work this morning because some guy decided to lie down on the tracks and get himself killed by an oncoming train. In Rome. I remember when there was a flurry of “pushers” in New York around ten years ago.
I asked my colleague, “Do you think he may have been pushed?”
He replied, “I wish he’d just shot himself in the fucking mouth in the privacy of his own home.”
Suicide can be so inconvenient.
Nostaligia and bile
Read this eloquent piece in the Stranger on Gallagher 2.0. Ever wonder, as I have, what ever became of the craaaaaazy watermelon-smashing mainstay of Showtime, circa 1984? I am shocked – but, alas, unsurprised- that Gallagher circa 2010 is a “paranoid, right-wing maniac.” That just kind of fits perfectly with has-been, don’t you think?
And did I mention watermelon-smashing?
Stop smoking
I believe from time to time I get to be a bit of a pedant on my own blog. It’s the price my readers pay – especially those searching for Hubble images, a strangely growing phalanx – for all the diamonds and gold I’ve selflessly unearthed for them from my own mind.
So here is my pedantic trip for the day: Stop smoking. No caps, no boldface, no fancy fonts and no colored letters. I’m not dressing this up like a placebo with a bowtie. It’s dead serious and so am I. Stop smoking.
You know why. You’ve thought it through a million times yourself. Now I’m reiterating it for you. I want you to think of me next time you light a cigarette or buy a pack. Bogart wasn’t cool; he died a shitty cancer-ridden death. Sure, he looked cool in black-and-white. You, on the other hand, look like a fool. Because you know so much more than Bogart knew about what smoking is doing to you.
I want to be a pain in your ass about this.
Gary Shteyngart’s new novel
I’m not allowed to reproduce this wonderfully imaginative excerpt for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. I’m going to assume by the title he’s been hanging around Jonathan Safran Foer lately.
(Here’s a teaser, though: pistachio ice cream and early Velvet Underground!)
Days of 1994
I’ve been reading about the early years of blogging and find the evolution of it fascinating. I’ve never been a techie, so I completely missed out on the 1990s and the advent of blogging. In fact, as recently as 2005, I thought it must be the stupidest thing one could possibly do with one’s time (still a constant worry of mine.) Humble pie.
So I thought I’d try an experiment; after all, that’s how blogging began: by experimenting. I’m going to write a post in the voice of my younger self; in effect, I’m going to try and put myself in the shoes of Justin, who was only two states north of me in a different university when he began his Links in January of ’94. For the record, I was living in an off-campus apartment in Richmond, VA with a friend. I was enrolled in the VCU Art School. And I was miserable as hell.
January 27, 1994*
I stayed up all night listening to the VU’s Murder Mystery with headphones, jotting down the lyrics as best as I could. I kept having to turn one headphone down to hear Lou, and the other one to hear Doug and Mo. It’s the best song ever recorded, after Sister Ray. I should get some sleep.
Missed class today. Too groggy from my all nighter. I wish J would call me. What happened?
I can’t wait to get the fuck out of this shithole. This fucking ghosttown is piled up with corpses vampires. I HATE THE SOUTH. Take me to New York, baby. That’s where I wanna be.
Shitkickers. That’s what B was telling be about his high school. He was like the only kid in his entire town who knew who Fugazi was. He says they all drank beer and listened to Bocephus. Chased him around with a shotgun for kicks. Now he’s the beer drinker. WTF? Oh, Virginia.
Yesterday I bought a copy of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things on cd. Lester mentions it in his book. Sounds like Tom Verlaine, or vice-versa. I wish Lester were here now.
No one around here knows who the goddam Stooges are! If it was recorded before 1992 they’re not interested. But now they’re stealing my ideas, tuning down their guitars and jamming like Thurston Moore. Last year they hated Sonic Youth. Now they imitate them.
I think if I moved to NYC there’d be a ton of people with my same interests.
Ripped a t-shirt so I’d look like Richard Hell. My design teacher just stared at me like, “Whut?” Bitch. I’ll burn her classroom down.
And I did just that.
*I didn’t really write much in 1994, so this is a rather ad hoc attempt at nailing my major obsessions with hindsight. Anyway, it was a trip down memory lane.
Sucking up
Franco Frattini, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, keeps piping up about the “right” to display the crucifix in Italian public schools. He’s bristling over the Strasbourg Court’s hearings; soon they will have to make a decision over whether or not the crucifix can be legally affixed to the wall in public classrooms in Italy.
There are almost no politicians in Italy willing to stand up to the Church on this one (surprise, surprise). Left or right, it makes amost no difference. In fact, it was the State that appealed to Strasbourg after the court had decided that crucifixes were unlawful. The State doing the bidding of the Church. All in the name of brainwashing its own children from the time they are old enough to get an education.
Italians have broadly failed – and their representatives most miserably of all – to understand the principles of secularism. They want that label on their constitution, but are frightened to follow it up in practice. The pope gets angry and stamps his foot and frowns. And they, in parliament, are his subjects.
Homeopathy: placebos with bowties
I know a surprising number of people who think homeopathy actually works. Every time I begin asking, “But do you know how it works?” I realize we aren’t speaking about homeopathy but about herbal remedies. Actual ingredients, that is. Homeopathy, properly understood, is a perfect lack of active ingredients. There’s nothing in it but a fancy sounding name and a placebo with a bowtie.
Some of you will grumble, but you haven’t tried homeopathy! I have, and I can tell you it works. And that’s enough for me. And I will grumble back, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Allow me to pass the mic to Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column at the Guardian (in one of that newspaper’s more noble journalistic endeavors). His writing is as clear as sunlight poking through the London fog.
Homeopathic remedies are made by taking an ingredient, such as arsenic, and diluting it down so far that there is not a single molecule left in the dose that you get. The ingredients are selected on the basis of like cures like, so that a substance that causes sweating at normal doses, for example, would be used to treat sweating.
Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called “30C”: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their “What is homeopathy?” section, they say that “30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.”
They’ve since apparently deleted these embarrassing numbers, preferring the ambiguous “highly diluted substances” and a long list of celebrity homeopathy users like Jude Law and Tina Turner. Some celebrities use cocaine, too.
This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 100^30 [to the 30th power], or rather 1 in 10^60 [to the 60th power], which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or – let’s be absolutely clear – a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
That’s an awful lot of zeroes.
To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths’ terms, we should say: “30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance.”
Wait. One, two, three, four…
At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.
Did you get that last point? It doesn’t matter what science discovers about reality, the homeopaths prefer their crackpot dogma instead. This makes homeopathy irrational, akin to voodoo, astrology and flat-earth creationism.
If you “believe” in homeopathy – a locution which should set the alarm bells ringing in your head – you might be upset with me for having made such a brash comparison. Voodoo? I don’t stick little pins into dolls, thank you very much! Astrology? Yeah, like I think the position of Venus in the sixth house and Mars in the ascendant makes me snappy! Go get a haircut, bozo. And I will cite Oliver Wendell Holmes (with homage to Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst):
“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”
So try kicking homeopathy around a bit and see if it, too, is round and full at the end of the day.
The poverty of agnosticism
A woman named Zinnia Jones, who bills herself as the “Queen of Atheism” on her YouTube channel, has given Ron Rosenbaum all the answers he never wanted to his infamous agnostic coming-out. It’s kind of a long video, but she pretty much slices and dices Rosenbaum’s arguments-from-ignorance better than anyone except PZ Meyers. And she’s like twenty years old.
This has been floating around the internet for about a month now, but I only just sat down and watched it straight through . Oh, and don’t worry, I figured out she’s a he. He does a mean Mel Gibson, too.
Marc Di Martino 