On the Rise of the Fabulous Nothing Class, or As Some Have Phrased It, "Our Royal Wedding"

Posted on August 25, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I see this Kim Kardashian person mentioned (too often) in the news and do my best to ignore her, and see her best as the butt (pun intended) of jokes from the wry Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (it was a kindly joke, too). But I just read a headline that seems to sum up a national—scratch that, international—21st century malaise: The Rise of the Fabulous Nothing Class. The headline was something to the effect of Kim Kardashian’s (most likely short lived) wedding/hookup being “Our Royal Wedding.” Which we might dismiss as absurd, which it is, but then again, all the hype about Kate & Pippa and that ridiculous, over-the-top, sham monarchy wedding in the U.K. is absurd as well. The cloud of fame and celebrity hangs over the world and seems to blot out the sun of rational thought. Too many people (it seems) ignore the dire state of climate change, economic collapse, and political stagnation, instead focusing on what a hideous troll called Snooki does on Jersey Shore. I’m sure there have been mindless entertainments just as bad as our latest crop of reality TV, only they were in times past, and this is now.

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On Finishing Tim Flannery's "Here on Earth," in Contrast to Justin Torres's "We the Animals"

Posted on August 18, 2011 by williamjcobb

So last night I reached the end of Tim Flannery’s new excellent book of nonfiction, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, which I rate as one of the best books of nonfiction I’ve read since Timothy Egan’s (two Tims?) The Big Burn (2009), and comparable to Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2004). In some ways it deals with climate change, but overall it deals with the dangerous state of our planet in a broader sense, with multiple threats to stability and sustainability. Much of it revolves around the question Are we a Gaian or a Medean species? Or put another way (the Gaian/Medean makes much sense when reading the book), are we going to save and nurture our environment, or are we going to destroy it, and in so doing, destroy ourselves? He has several scenarios, and overall is hopeful. He doesn’t play the doomsday games common in James Howard Kunstler’s books, for example. It’s an intelligent, lively, and even cerebral book.
At the same time I was reading Here on Earth I reviewed Justin Torres’s new novel(la), We the Animals, which is completely opposite. It’s a short but good novel about some mixed-race kids growing up in New York State, and one of them ends up being gay. It’s raw, emotional, and plucks the heartstrings. Tim Flannery plucks the mind-strings. Both are worth reading.

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Sing, O Muse, of the Dougherty Gang

Posted on August 13, 2011 by williamjcobb

So there’s something kind of classical about the Dougherty Gang’s story—classically tacky, Florida-style. I probably wouldn’t love their tale as much if they had not been apprehended near my Colorado home base of Custer County. Here’s a good ole-fashioned yellow journalism piece about them via the UK’s Daily Mail, with amusing photos:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2025304/Lee-Grace-Dougherty-Gang-stripper-smiling-loving-limelight-court.html
And here’s another “news” story that ends in a lie:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44103086/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
Here’s the lie, at the end of the article: “A Rocky Mountain escape made sense to a handful of locals gathered for pizza and beer at Viktorio’s after the chase. Asked why they thought the fugitives fled here, some just pointed toward snowcapped peaks just to the west. ‘It’s as good a place as any to disappear, I guess,’ Garcia said.”
Snowcapped peaks? Sounds nice, but it ain’t true. We’re in a drought out there, and the snow is long gone. That’s just wishful thinking, reporter-style.
But it is a good place to disappear. I do it every summer. Without firing a shot.

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Crossing Paths With the Dougherty Gang in Colorado, On the Lam & Having Fun

Posted on August 11, 2011 by williamjcobb

So at the start of the week I drove from Southern Colorado to St. Louis, and it seems I crossed paths with the Dougherty Gang—Dylan, Lee-Grace, and Ryan, twentysomething desperadoes from Zephyrhills, Fla. I saw a white car fly by, some yahoos inside shooting their AK-47 out the window, and figured it was just some locals celebrating the start to preseason football. They disappeared in a swirl of tumbleweeds. This newspaper story makes them sound like the Wild Bunch, only different. I like the quote from Lee-Graces’s Flickr page, how she “likes to farm and shoot guys and wreck cars.” The stock market is tanking, and Bonnie & Clyde (& my other-brother, Clyde) are back!

Maybe that’s why I saw this local business, in Pueblo, Colorado, where the Dougherty Gang passed through around the same time I was filling up with Unleaded, just in case.

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On "Bloodworth," a Film Adaptation of William Gay's Novel "Provinces of Night"

Posted on August 8, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I finally managed to watch the film adaptation of William Gay’s “Provinces of Night” (the title is a line by Cormac McCarthy), which is titled “Bloodworth.” It’s actually quite good, one of those low-budget films with a terrific cast. Val Kilmer steals the show as a rather portly country-western ne’er-do-well, Warren, who may be bad but he seems to be having the most fun. Kris Kristofferson plays the title character, an old blues musician.
It’s like “Crazy Heart” with violence. T. Bone Burnett did the music score. Although the characters are all hicks, they are certainly charming hicks.

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No Fence-Sitting Here: Republicans Are Anti-Environment, and That's a Major Difference

Posted on July 30, 2011 by williamjcobb

So Paul Krugman had a good piece recently about the issue of media fence-sitting, decrying those b.s. ‘journalists’ who repeatedly say, “Washington is broken! Both parties are to blame!” He then details just exactly how wrong the Republican and Tea Party positions are on most issues. And he’s right. Especially on environmental concerns. Here are a couple gems (or lumps of coal) in the news recently, detailing the Republican environmental positions. In the first one, the Republican candidate Huntsman (barely a moderate, I’d say) is taken to task for giving lip service to environmental issues. This quote sums it up: “He is speaking to a microscopically small segment of the Republican primary that has no impact on the primary,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson, who is not aligned with any candidate. “Last time I looked at the polls, environmental concerns ranked somewhere near fear of getting hit by an asteroid.” Here’s the url to the article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43931417/ns/politics-decision_2012/
The second one is about how the Republicans, especially the Tea Party phonies, are doing everything they can to eviscerate the EPA and all environmental regulations, here:

I don’t even like Mayor Bloomberg, but at least he sees the need for environmental change, and has come out against Big Coal. Under the umbrella of being Pro-Business, the Republicans are dooming our country, and our world.

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The Bears of Custer County & the Smell of Drought

Posted on July 28, 2011 by williamjcobb

Here’s an url to an article about bears in this morning’s NY Times:

I can vouch for the accuracy of some its statements, especially about bear behavior in drought. Here in the southern mountains of Colorado we’re suffering a drought, not as bad as the South or Texas, but bad enough to hurt the rancher’s hay crops and to make my creek look pathetic and my yard fried. Drought has a certain harsh smell to it, the dryness of the withered plants, more dust in the air. And this has been our biggest year for bear encounters. We’ve seen four different black bears in our yard, three small-medium-sized, and one big bruin who ripped a hole in my shed door to get at the garbage cans inside (a habit now abandoned, but that had never been a problem for eight years). And yesterday this fella went for the bird feeders on our deck. I sympathize with them. They’re hungry. I wish I could feed them but as they say, “A fed bear is a dead bear.” So I don’t. But I did snap his picture.

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On Reading Tim Flannery's "Here on Earth" on an iPad

Posted on July 26, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’m now reading Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth on my iPad, which is a curious and thrilling experience. Early on he’s discussing the works of Richard Dawkins and memes, of the spread of ideas, of how much faster cultural evolution takes place than physical evolution. Where does the iPad angle come in? iPads seem more than an object, more than the limited gadget that is the Kindle. I recently saw a factoid than 16% of households already own iPads, in the short time they’ve been on the market. They are ideas reproducing themselves, via the symbiotic apps.
And all this is also to say that Flannery’s book is remarkable, comparable to Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2004). Both books have a perspicacity (a word I don’t use often) that is remarkable, a marco view of the planet, culture, and the interaction of the natural world with the human that is both enlightening, fascinating, and in its way, charming. Read it.
Here’s a url to a website that is hosting a talk by Tim Flannery:
http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/may/03/here-earth/

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"Tattoos Get You Sex" and Other Observations from the Western Frontier

Posted on July 24, 2011 by williamjcobb

So you have to be blind not to notice the popularity of tattoos in the West, and it must say something about this moment in time, this world in which we’re living. Basically it seems everyone in Colorado/Wyoming (the two places I’ve been traveling in lately) has them. Old ladies, babies, librarians, and the traditional auto repair dude–everybody has ’em. Big ones. Bad ones. Big bad ones. Your average Walmart looks like a carny convention from the Fifties. At a Walmart in Salida, Colorado (nice town) I recently saw a Jeep with a bumper sticker that read “Tattoos get you sex.”
Well I had been mystified why they were so popular. Now I’m not.

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On Tim Flannery's "Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet," and LinkedIn Is Now Officially the Most Annoying Social Networking Site

Posted on July 17, 2011 by williamjcobb

So Tim Flannery, author of one of the best books about global warming, The Weather Makers (2006), has a new book out, which sounds like its subtext is environmental disaster—Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet. While the book by Hertsgaard (Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth) I’m reading has a tendency to get rather maudlin and overwhelmed-with-foreboding, Flannery’s The Weather Makers was fascinating in its grasp, and explanation of, the complicated science behind why we know what we know, or why we can make an informed estimate of the mayhem that can be caused by a warming planet. I rate Weather Makers as one of the best books about warming, which makes me want to read Here on Earth.
Meanwhile it was announced with some fanfare that LinkedIn is now the 2nd most popular social networking site, and all I can do is groan. I’m on LinkedIn, big deal. I get frequent reminders of people wanting to be linked to me, and I do, but so what. We have a debt crisis, turmoil in Europe (brought on by more debt they’ll never be able to repay, but no one wants to admit that), Tea Party morons who think the solution to everything is lower taxes for the rich and cutbacks on social programs, and then there’s social networking, which keeps us busy looking at those kitten videos and aren’t they cute?

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