Finally getting around to reading some of those articles that have been lying around for months …
Like this, for instance, by John Seabrook in The New Yorker on the Antikythera Mechanism, which I got halfway through before I was finally convinced it wasn’t just some elaborate hoax, like the archaeological equivalent of Sidd Finch.
Or James Surowiecki’s financial column, “Fuel for Thought,” which puts the current debate over CAFE standards into historical perspective:
In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster. In the nineteen-twenties, Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors, insisted that the company could not make windshields with safety glass because doing so would harm the bottom line. In the fifties, auto executives told Congress that making seat belts compulsory would slash industry profits. When air bags came along, Lee Iacocca told Richard Nixon that “safety has really killed all our business.” A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create “massive financial and unemployment problems.
Speaking of both articles I should’ve read before now and of fuel economy, Co-op America’s summer newsletter takes a long look at alternative fuel options. You can read the entire issue at that link, but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version.
The bottom line: They think plug-in electric hybrids are a Very Good Thing and that corn-based ethanol is a Very Bad Thing.
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The Alliance Defense Fund is mostly a pernicious group. They’ve made a career out of nurturing and feeding off of the absurd notion that evangelical Christianity is a persecuted majority, rather than an integral part of the civil religious hegemony that has become so thoroughly tied up with American culture that it can no longer distinguish where the one starts and the other stops.
Every once in a while, though, they take up a case with some merit, like this one:
An evangelical Christian campus group that was expelled from Savannah State University is in a legal battle with the college over the question of whether the practice of foot-washing can be considered hazing. …
Off campus, the group held a weekend retreat at a nearby beach at which members washed the feet of new members, following a practice instituted by Jesus with his disciples.
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Have your Cake and download it too. Free and legal, Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” from Cake’s recent B-Sides and Rarities collection.
(Speaking of free music on the Internets, Nettwerk Records, home to Hem, Neil Finn, Gogol Bordello and Leigh Nash, among many others, is offering a free download this weekend of a compilation album featuring songs from “Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, The Be Good Tanyas and many more.”)
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OK, so, I knew about Jesurgislac’s Journal and bulbulovo, but it took me way too long to figure out that Jake also had a blog (full of fine rants and links to others’ fine rants, like this one).
So ‘fess up people, who else out there has got a blog? Cut-and-paste me some links in comments below.
(Jesu link fixed. Sorry ’bout that.)
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Update: In retrospect, just linking to the Amazon page for the Plimpton novel seems lame. The original article was a lot more fun. You can read the whole thing (minus the photos or a sense of how to spell “Stottlemyre”) at Boston Baseball: “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.” See also the Museum of Hoaxes.
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