A Nicely Written Paragraph

From Harper's November 2009 issue:

But the significance of far-reaching events rarely lies where we please. Evangelizing environmentalists, much like evangelical Christians, have too often held humanity to an impossible standard, impossible for being imaginary. Some see Earth before agrarian humans as an Arcadia against which we can assess the sins of industrial society. The world without us, in this view, would return to its true temperature, its steady state. Growing up as a species, however, means accepting that we are neither blessed by Heaven nor shatterers of the natural order. No such order exists: no true or natural climate, no normal rate of extinction, no ideal ecology. The only thing normal about climate is its propensity to slam back and forth between maxima and minima, between infernal winters and refrigerated summers. In the oscillating dance of the glaciers, species die. Whether they die from meteorites or from billions of human decisions makes no difference. Either way, they leave behind abandoned niches—the ecological spaces organisms inhabit—resulting in evolutionary cascades of new species. Everything alive is matter in one momentary form, soon to take some other momentary form.

This is something interesting.
I have to think about it.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/bin-laden-family-reportedly-held-in-iran/?hp

The Quiet Rebellion

The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully, you know, don't buy a lot of stuff. And uh um and don't don't get their view of the world from television and are willing to spend four or five hours researching an election rather than going by commercials.

The thing about it is that in America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing and it involves action and force and looks good. My guess is the forms of rebellion that will end up changing anything meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual and probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside.

I'm now hoping for less interesting than more interesting. Violence is interesting. Horrible corruption and scandals, rattling sabers and talking about war and demonizing a billion people of a different faith in the world- those are all interesting.

Sitting in a chair and really thinking about what this means and why the fact that what I drive might have something to do with how other people in parts of the world feel about me isn't interesting to anybody else.

That was very close to the truth, but I don't think it's going to make much sense. And plus, I mean I'm a writer, not a politician or a political thinker or anything. Just a scared little American... living in California.

David Foster Wallace in a long ranging 2003 interview for German television.

I find this interview extremely interesting, not just because Wallace is one of my favorite writers, but that you can see the man behind the work he's created. Two things that I immediately recognize in him is how his long battle with depression has worn him, and his brilliance. He's clearly the smartest person in the room and he's also terribly self-conscious. He is extremely uncomfortable throughout the interview, perhaps not just with the idea of the interview itself (which is clear) but with the way in which his intellect is being put on display. The man is incredibly complex. Full of contradictions. By his reactions to the dialogue with the woman interviewing him, you can see how blazingly fast his mind works. And his extreme humanness.

Someone could write a behavioral thesis just on the interplay between the characters in this interview.

What Went Wrong?

What Went Wrong With Obama's Healthcare Plan?

Democrats didn't act like Republicans.

Re: Sarah Palin

This.

New Pencil Sharpeners

I don't want this post to turn into some sort of Andy-Rooner-ish rant, ("I remember in my day...") but pencil sharpeners have changed.

Even as a child I exhibited the classic symptoms of the anal retentive accountant type personality I would grow into. I get my perfectionism from my mom; my rapidly diminishing sit in front of the computer all day side comes from my dad. Good riddance. I used to take extreme interest in getting my pencils to the most perfect, sharpest point that I could. I would readily break the lead to get the point to where I was able to write with the tiniest of points.

Now that I have occasion to use red pencils again, I find that pencil sharpeners have themselves changed to thwart my desires. You can see the As Seen On TV ads now:

Are you tired of pencil sharpeners always breaking your leads? It makes it impossible to write and what a mess! Now you never have to break a pencil end again with the amazing new...

The design is basically the same. A razor blade set in a box with a conical opening in one end for the pencil. Some frickin' genius got the idea that if you angle the blade more sharply towards the opening end, you sharpen less of the pencil and no longer elongate the end of the lead so much that it breaks off. The lead is more structurally sound.

However, the end no longer gets pointy, as you're sharpening less of the pencil to expose the lead. So you end up with a chipped, sharded end that is impossible to write with in miniature.

I tell you, people, If it's not broke, don't fix it.

Also, I have very strange fixations.

Sanford II

Maureen Dowd, when not plagiarizing helpless bloggers, often has very good points to make. She wraps this slightly overlong critique of the Sanford saga with a nice bow:

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.