Not with a bang. . .

. . . But a twitter.

An e-mail from my Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) informs me today that he will begin twittering and NASA has announced that Astronaut in training Mike Massimino will be doing the same. They're drawing a line that I will not cross.

I mean, I still have some pride in being adult and being able to read without moving my lips and able to follow something longer than 140 words without my thoughts wandering toward the need for iPodal noise injection and wiggling in my seat. What's next, the congressional record spelled out letter by letter on alphabet blocks by a fuzzy, green sock puppet? Three body orbital mechanics brought to you by the letter N?

Sure I'm interested in what Nelson has to say and I am interested in space technology -- but. Haven't we had 8 years of the dumbing down of everything already? OK, so maybe it's not quite how the world ends, but it sure looks like the way adulthood ends and as far as I'm concerned, NASA and Nelson and all the other bird brains can twitter this, for all I care.

When trolls attack

"How's the hope and change thing working out for you, moron?" reads the comment. If you're a blogger outside the red tribe, you're used to this sort of thing. You're used to the cut and paste pop culture snark bombs: how's the _____ working out, I don't think so, Hello, etc. Of course trying to rule while wearing only the hollow crown of cynicism only exposes the nakedness and weakness of someone who has to rely on mimicking sitcom characters to simulate insight or wit; and of course the smartest people around are called morons more often than the rest of us; far more often than actual morons are. It's a fact.

Of course if you look back at every post I've made in the last few years, you'll not find a single "hope and change"slogan. In fact if you have the patience and stomach to read all or part of it, you'll note that I'm most consistently a doom and gloom nihilist with no hope for or expectation of change, unless it be decay. Still, I'm sure the armchair assassin thinks he really scored and perhaps he's getting his 5$ per post bonus from the GOP to boot. There's nothing to be done really and as I said, I'm a nihilist and a pessimist; I expect no better from my fellow apes.

If I did, I would have to feel insulted by the assumption that I was stupid enough to think a new president -- any new president -- could reverse the damage of decades in two months: two months of sabotage and opposition by people who ran the ship aground and pay sticky-fingered troglodytes to ask how the hope and change is going for us. Need we ask how the election went for them? or how the supply side, zero regulation market thing is going? Those tax breaks for Wall Street tycoons making you rich? Hello! I don't think so!

“I’M GLAD YOU DIDN’T SNEEZE”

Today marks the anniversary of the assignation of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968. Dr King had traveled far on the civil rights road but he knew the struggle was far from over.
In fact, his last speech to the sanitation workers of Memphis on the eve of his death is peppered with references to his own premonitions.

The most recognizable excerpt of that speech:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Of course, he was receiving multiple threats daily and had already been attacked on several occasions. Given the violent history of the equal rights struggle in America, it really would not have taken much in the way of clairvoyance to know how tenuous his hold on life really was.

But there is an excerpt from his speech that night that doesn’t usually get coverage and I’d like to rectify that here because in it lies a message of hope and love that can never be stabbed or shot or strangled away:

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood--that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And Dr King, so touched by this simple message went on to say:

"And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."

Imagine all the events that might NOT have happened had Dr King sneezed. Sometimes it's the small, seemingly insignificant things in life that have the greatest impact. Dr King, I'm also glad you didn't sneeze.

Information Overload?

Kathleen Parker's column yesterday was about how we're exposed to too much information. In it, she notes that "the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data" in 2006. "[T]hat's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes [emphasis mine]."

This is, of course, truly astonishing. I tend to believe that humans are pretty adaptable - impressively capable of parsing the constant barrage of information - but information overload has been shown to...well...make us dumber. Parker continues:

[...] brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we're not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime. (If you have to schedule relaxation, is it still relaxing?)

Daydreaming, we used to call it. Ask any creative person where they got their best ideas and they'll say, "Dunno. Just came to me out of the blue." If you're looking for Eureka -- as in the Aha! moment -- you probably won't find it while following David Gregory's Tweets. Or checking Facebook to see who might be "friending" whom. Or whose status has been updated. George Orwell is . . . More likely, the ideas that save the world will present themselves in the shower or while we're sweeping the front stoop. What the world needs now isn't more, but less. The alternative to mindless activities for the mindful is turning out to be not a less-informed nation but a dumber one.

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

I certainly don't want my IQ to drop 10 points. So, what are your thoughts on this? Are we exposed to too much information? Clearly there is an astonishing amount of it out there, but is that necessarily bad? Can we, if we choose, ignore the plethora of needless information while still being able to quickly summon that which is useful? What does this mean for future generations more dependent on this network of knowledge?

Der Flughaven

The average flight delay at FKI is 30 hours longer than next worst airport and the customer service help line connects you to a hat store in Stuttgart, but that's just a minor criticism of Prague's Franz Kafka International Airport. Corridors end in the middle of nowhere and you're likely to spend an eternity in the security check, or should I say Czech.

No, I'm not making it up. You can't make this stuff up, unless you actually are Kafka and of course you couldn't pick a better name for the labyrinthine, frustrating and surreal airport. Czech it out and maybe next time JFK won't seem quite so bad!



And for heaven's sake, don't put FKI on your itinerary on April 1st!

WHY DID THE SEA TURTLE CROSS THE FLORIDA KEYS?

To go to the doctor! That is the opening sentence of Miami News article that can be found HERE.

A 73 pound loggerhead sea turtle showed up at the Turtle Hospital, the only licensed veterinary facility in the world that solely treats sea turtles. The loggerhead was suffering from a bacterial infection and has been treated with meds and is recovering in a hospital tank.

While the hospital staff are mystified by the turtle’s behavior, I have a sneaking suspicion our own (O)CT(O)PUS may have had a ummm, hand (tentacle?) in steering the turtle to medical help.

HIT AND RUN POLITICS

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has released this video blaming Republicans and the previous administration for the current economic crisis.  My question: Is this fair criticism? While I may agree in part, is it reasonable to blame everything on Republicans? After all, the repeal of Glass-Steagall was signed into law by former President Clinton on November 12, 1999.



What does this video hope to accomplish? Will shaming Republicans result in more cooperation, or inflame and further polarize our body politic?  Is this a way to make friends and win votes?  Your thoughts ...

A NOTE OF THANKS FROM CANADA

Not that we deserve a note of thanks … considering the Fox News smugly sarcastic "new clear" bomb that offended our neighbors, sullied our reputation, and reinforced our Ugly American image in the eyes of the world.

But sometimes our voices do carry. Voices like our esteemed Captain Fogg and your peevish Octopus who have spoken out against our number one national export - Yankee dumbness. Today, I received this heartwarming note of thanks from friends in Canada who read our blog:

Give [ ... ] a big Canadian hug from us. We (our country) have been in this war going on seven years and maintain peacekeeping missions in long-forgotten places of conflict for decades without any fanfare. That is the Canadian way and why we are known as the ‘gentle and caring nation' by most countries. All of my American friends were outraged by the Fox news-comedy hour segment and fully know that our brave soldiers and their families are doing their all to help the good people of Afghanistan take-out the insurgents while working side by side with our US allies.

Not all Yankees fully comprehend the depth of hurt caused by Fox News. It seems our country is too preoccupied with itself to see how the rest of the world sees us.  Today's Sunday editorial from the OTTAWA CITIZEN explains far better than I possibly can (reproduced in full):

Talking aboot our American cousins

by JANICE KENNEDY

Excruciating, wasn’t it? That Fox News program clip we all watched last week with the guffawing buffoons parading their ignorance? That clip about Canada, the “ridiculous” country with the effete, inactive military and the policemen in red jackets riding horses?

Not that I generally watch Fox News, understand. (Why would I? I don’t consider myself a) a redneck, b) a right-wing fanatic, or c) dumb.) But, like the rest of Canada, I did see this morsel of televised moronism. And all I could think was, yikes, how embarrassing. Do they have any clue how dim-witted they sound?

Judging by their knowledge vacuum, you might conclude that the Fox characters (who also dismissed Mexico as the land of the siesta) were merely simpletons who had crawled out of some backcountry swamp. But that’s the terrible thing. Extreme and tacky, they were nonetheless not unique. In fact, they summed up a chunk of the prevailing American mindset.

Profound American ignorance about Canada is neither new (“I don’t even know what street Canada is on,” said Al Capone) nor confined to Fox. Nor is it the exclusive purview of the right wing or the uneducated. It’s simply an absence in the culture, an empty space where knowledge should be.  And not only about Canada.

When American commentators or comics need a punchline, no matter what their political orientation, they dig into their big bag of international clichés and come up with ready tags for everyone from the Mexicans (siestas), to the French (baguettes and retreating armies), to Canadians — frozen yokels who say “aboot” and are borrrrring. (Unless the bag of clichés belongs to Rush Limbaugh and company. Then we’re Soviet Canuckistan, buncha socialists.)

Besides the recent Fox embarrassment, we’ve also been treated lately to conservative Matthew Vadum’s American Spectator blog, which says Natasha Richardson may have been killed by Canada’s “socialist, government-run healthcare system — similar to the kind that President Obama wants to ram down the throats of Americans.”

At the time of the Iraq invasion, Conan O’Brien noted that “the prime minister of Canada said he’d like to help, but he’s pretty sure that last time he checked, Canada had no army.” Jon Stewart, having been to Canada, has “always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.” See? It comes from all sides. Nor should we overlook the touching earnestness of Britney Spears, who gushed that one of the coolest things about being famous was the travelling. “I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.”

On TV last week, there was a curiously telling line on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which includes the running gag of a character with a Canadian past (i.e., endless comic fodder involving hickness, maple syrup, Mounties and snow). When one of her reminiscences makes even sex up here seem boring, another character wails, “Canada … Why? Why do we let you be a country?”

Interesting choice of words, right? Not to get all Freudian or anything, but the joke does reveal something about the American soul — its Americentric worldview, its Manifest Destiny belief that the U.S. is the sun around which all other nations orbit. Or are permitted to orbit.

Only a fool would deny that our superpowerful American cousins are anything other than mighty and crucial to the future of the planet. But the sun? Americans too often are blinded by their own rays, and that’s where the problem lies.

When you can’t see beyond yourselves, you assume there’s not much out there worth seeing anyway. You rely for your knowledge on hoary and absurd stereotypes, recklessly uninformed opinion and gut prejudices based on nothing more substantial than wisps of misunderstood information.

That is ignorance. And that, my American friends, is the core constituent of your collective worldview.

(All you Americans who actually know things about both Canada and the rest of the world? Yes, I know you exist. But you’re a minuscule minority, and your perspective is not what gets airtime, at home or abroad.)

To those of us who live reasonably decent lives without the benefit of citizenship that is starred, striped and stamped with bald eagles, it’s all a bit alarming. Here we have the gigantor of nations, an incredible global hulk capable of alarming rampages, and it doesn’t seem to care what’s out there, and what might get trampled.

I can’t speak for other nations, but I can speak as a Canadian reduced to Made-inAmerica stereotype. Would it help to point out to Americans that a lot of us hate winter? That real socialists would laugh themselves silly at the notion that Canada is socialist? That most Canadians don’t buy real maple syrup because it’s too darned expensive? That health care here may be flawed but does actually work? That many Canadians don’t give a hoot about hockey? That we actually have a fairly lively culture up here in the hinterland? That not one 9/11 hijacker crossed over from Canada? Oh, and that 116 Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan?

It would not. That’s because Americans, hubristically, just don’t want to know.

Introducing a segment on the public-radio program This American Life, writer-broadcaster Sarah Vowell once observed, “Like most Americans, I don’t particularly care about Canada.”  Or any place else, apparently. That’s the American tragic flaw in a nutshell.

One final word from 8pus:  Ahh hope mahh fella Ahhmerikans finally get the point.

THE FIRST LADY DOING TOO MUCH?

There is an article over at Politico discussing the possibility that First Lady, Michelle Obama may be taking on too much and “spreading herself too thin.”

“Obama’s approach so far is decidedly different from the usual model of the modern first lady — pick a platform of two or three issues and stick to it, by and large, for four years.”

The article goes on:

“She’s become the spokeswoman for all sorts of issues and topics — from fitness, parenting, the environment and women’s rights, to redefining images of black women in American culture and promoting self-esteem for young girls."

Yet in the midst of all those themes, it isn’t yet clear whether her self-described core messages — about military families, volunteerism, and helping working women balance work and family life – are truly breaking through. Some wonder if she’s spreading herself too thin to emerge in the public mind as a leading voice on those topics.”

Then they present these two opposing views:

“I think when she thinks about work-life balance, it’s really broader than simply work and family in the general sense,” said Jocelyn Frye, her policy director. “It’s really thinking about how we make sure our families are healthy, how do we make sure that people eat right and take care of themselves and educate themselves about making good choices.”

“I think it’s fragmented. She stands for so many things right now, she’s doing so many things. She’s in the kitchen at the White House, she’s building houses, she’s digging in the garden. It’s all very nice, but I thought to myself, ‘Why is she planting herbs?’” said Mindy Sabella, director of marketing at Siegel+Gale, which specializes in strategic branding.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet anyone that Mindy has never been a mother. When my four children were young, I worked two jobs, kept the house, did the grocery shopping, was a Cub Scout den mother and volunteered for several different community groups. And then every Sunday, I got everyone out of bed and dressed and the whole tribe went to church where I taught Sunday school.

Did I spread myself too thin? Sometimes, I probably did, but I believed that each of these endeavors were important so I treated them all with the same degree of care, making sure I was prepared and competent.

I believe what we are seeing from Mrs. Obama is just her natural energy and passionate commitment to topics that matter to her, much like the rest of us. But, could Mindy be right? Is our First Lady too fragmented to make a difference?

“Obama’s early moves have shown the topics where her interests run the deepest. During her visit to a struggling high school in a poor D.C. neighborhood she talked about being teased as a young girl by people who said she talked “like a white girl,” but ignoring the taunt and striving for excellence anyhow.”

“I really wanted to write it off as another school visit but I heard the snippets and it was like listening to a woman’s leadership conference. She genuinely wanted to put lift under every chair in that room, and to leave each of them with a picture of possibility that they may or may not have had when they came into that session,” said Sue Hodgkinson, who heads The Personal Brand Company. “She is clear that she has the ability in every exchange to leave that signature behind her, and I was in fact taken by that. She was not just showing up.”

Mrs. Obama has made a believer out of Sue Hodgkinson and she’s made a believer out of me. And I’d say, in the next ten years or so, we’ll be seeing just how many believers she's made out of the children in that classroom.

Mrs. Obama is beautiful, fit, young, active, passionate and intelligent. She is her own woman with her own style and I, for one, think she is doing a great job in her new role and to her detractors…

READING THIS POST WILL SEND YOU TO PRISON

Last week, our venerable Captain Fogg posted this article, Flori-DUH, about proposed legislation making it illegal in the Sunshine State to watch animals having sex. As our esteemed Captain explains here:

Every bit of legislation needs a scare story to justify it and this one demands our immediate attention because -- you guessed it -- someone says if you screw the pooch, you might become a pederast and sexual predator. Correlations are a dangerous thing, of course.

Last month, your wayward Octopus inked the aquarium with this post, CURSES, about proposed legislation in the State of South Chinalina making the use of "bad language" illegal. Last time, I managed to avoid self-incrimination.  Not this time!  I double-dare you:


Why is it legal to read this but forbidden to watch our revered law makers doing this?

Gotcha!  Your devious Octopus has entrapped you ... turned you into a felon in the Sunshine State.  Do we need more dumb laws written by ignorant, impotent sub-primate castrati still messing with their missing parts?

Would you like to see how cephalopods DO IT?