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Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

2011-10-14T10:21:00.001-07:00

You might see a movie trailer in which a dark and brooding nobleman thunders down to some conniving peasant, "You have no voice!" This nauseates me. As an archetype, an image, and a theory -- it literally nauseates me. Why? Because that artless peasant is William Shakespeare and the heroic, high-minded noble is the Earl of Oxford, the true genius behind the commoner's humble facade. To me, it's like saying the Beatles' hits were written not by some working-class kids from Liverpool, but by a wealthy Hollywood record producer. I just don't understand why anyone would go out of their way to believe the world is so ordinary.

To be fair, this isn't a post about the movie. I haven't seen it, and know very little about it. This post is about this curiously stubborn urge to somehow debunk the existence of William Shakespeare. The basic logic is that a man born to a middle-class family in rural Stratford lacks the worldliness or intellectual heft to produce Shakespeare's body of work, and that the true author must've been some educated aristocrat. But let's just put aside how mind-numbingly patronizing that sounds.

William Shakespeare was no aristocrat, but he wasn't born into poverty. He was an alderman's son. An introductory education was not beyond his middle-class reach. And most of what is crystal clear from the plays that bear his name is that the author was someone with a bead on popular tastes, an obsession with stories, a rich imagination, a healthy sense of humor, an uncommon grasp on the human condition, and a singular way with words -- absolutely none of which requires an expensive Oxford education.

Some say that the plays demonstrate a suspicious familiarity with noble lifestyle, but do they? How? Which bits? Yes, his stories feature characters of noble-birth, but surely we can postulate that commoners knew that such people existed. And it's not as if his dialogue or plots were otherwise preoccupied with the ephemeral details of the aristocratic life. Often, it was quite the opposite. What might not be obvious to the contemporary American reader is that the plays are full of period country affectations, so much so that his dialogue was actually attacked by some of his fellow playwrights (such as Cambridge-educated Robert Greene) for sounding too provincial.

This is the problem, we've gotten much too used to thinking of Shakespeare's plays as lofty, high-class theatre. Centuries ago, it was anything but. We are outside of the context. We shouldn't assume we get what they are right away. Because the truth is that these plays weren't remote, courtly meditations; they were raucously popular entertainments. As alien as it sounds to us, the Shakespearean cadence wasn't something the groundlings had any trouble following. It's not that everyone spoke like Hamlet. The plays didn't reflect the way Elizabethan people spoke any more than a contemporary box office blockbuster reflects the way we speak (we're never so fluid or coherent). The plays, like most drama, reflected the way the audience imagined they spoke.

The only reason we assume these works are the stuff of academia is because we only know them from academia. We don't immediately notice any of the humble flaws and brushstrokes. In A Winter's Tale, the author makes reference to the "coast of Bohemia," but Bohemia was a landlocked country. A curious mistake for a university-educated aristocrat to make. It's been said that these plays contain many references to the sea, indicating an aristocrat's tastes for travel. And yes, the sea is a fixture of the plays, but let's remember that it's portrayed as a wide and forbidding dominion of shipwrecks, gods, and magical storms. It's not the voice of someone who's spent much (if any) time at sea. It's the voice of someone who fears the sea. It's the voice of someone who's overheard inflated sailor stories in pubs. There's no real evidence that the plays' author was well-traveled. Again, Shakespeare was perfectly aware that Venice and Rome existed, but merely setting a story in Italy doesn't by itself scream that he must have been to Italy.

But he at least had to speak fluent Italian to adapt the Italian folktale of Romeo and Giuliette, right? Not really. Trashy Italian love stories were all the rage on the streets of London, and there were at least four versions of the Romeo and Juliet story in print before Shakespeare's play. Two of which were indeed in English. Likewise, stories of grand historical figures like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra were already pretty firmly rooted in the popular culture.

For me, the most important question is why. Why would anyone need to invent this cover? The usual answer involves some ambiguous claims about the dangerously subversive subtext in some of his plays. And yeah, there were poetic allusions to events of his time, but nothing that ever got Shakes in trouble. We have no record of the man ever being arrested. No one made an example of him. He wasn't exiled or executed. He had a full and respected career. His supposedly dangerous works were performed for the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, the most powerful offices in the land, without evidently raising any eyebrows. So what on earth was "the real author" so relentlessly wary of? What was he supposedly hiding from, for all of four decades?

I don't know why we have no letters in Shakespeare's own handwriting, but is it really so strange to suggest he simply didn't write home much? Are handwritten 16th century documents so bloody common in modern day flea markets? Either way, people obviously knew this man. He had fans. He had a family. He had a hometown. He has birth records. He has a grave. He had a professional reputation. He had rivals and critics. He was a busy man. The life of a working playwright wasn't some cloistered existence. He worked in the theatre. He revised scenes. He gave the performers their lines. Actors John Heminges and Henry Condell worked with Shakespeare for two decades, and published his first folio with this dedication: "to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes." Ben Jonson (another playwright with no university education) calls Shakespeare a personal friend in his private journals. Who was he lying to, in his own journal? And why?

So let's review what we know. We know that a "William Shakespeare" was at least credited as being the author of several plays. We have no evidence this was seen as an implausible feat by anyone who saw the plays or knew the man. We have no evidence his social background and education stirred any suspicions whatsoever. We have no evidence his plays were conspicuously difficult for uneducated audiences to follow. In his own lifetime, in the white hot epicenter of this supposed conspiracy, not one soul in all the world ever thought to ask who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Not one single soul in forty years. By all accounts, they all fully believed they knew.

So, when I hear this theory that a person (or persons), for some unspecified reason, contrived a massive conspiracy to write over a hundred poems and dozens of well-admired plays under the name of a man who was more or less perfectly capable of doing it himself, I have trouble grasping the point. You see, to my admittedly biased thinking, you do not just shred a writer's credit on a lark.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

Goodnight, Spirit

2011-05-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

A Martian sunset photographed by the Spirit rover.

After months of silence from the Spirit rover, NASA has officially admitted the robot's demise.

The Spirit rover was designed to work for three months...

She explored the red planet for six years.

Spirit was built in Pasadena, not at all far from where I sit right now. Finally she rests, quietly gathering the dust of another world; her home planet, a pale blue star in the evening sky.

Spirit turns her eyes towards home and snaps a picture of Earth (as seen in the Martian sky).

Yes, Our Era is Unique --

2011-05-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

-- but so is every other era.

For as long as human civilization has existed, there have always been too many volcanos and earthquakes and floods. There's never been a perfectly acceptable amount of disaster or tragedy. There's always too much crime. There's always too much injustice. There's always too much poverty. There are always too many maniacs, despots, and crooked politicians.

There's always bad art and graphic pornography. There are always dumb love songs and bloody stories. There's always sexy dancing and violent games. There's always some new gadget that scares and baffles the old timers. There's always someone remembering the good ol' days and wondering what the world is coming to.

There's always some ancient inscription and a prophet who "knows what it means." There's always someone yelling about hellfire and brimstone. The signs and omens are always "urgent." The astrological alignments are always "significant." The final showdown between good and evil is always "the day after tomorrow."

For millennia, there have always been people expecting the one and only doomsday to strike at any minute, and they have always been wrong.

Twenty Light-Years Away

2011-05-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

This GIF is a scale model that illustrates (in real time) the time it takes light to cross the distance between Earth and the Moon (about 1.26 seconds). I'm sure I've posted it before, but it's such a neat illustration of the fact that light does have a speed -- something to remember when reading about the recent hubbub surrounding a planet called Gliese 581 d.

Gliese 581 d is a planet orbiting a small red star in the Libra constellation. Picture a warm, wet world under a dusky red sun. It might have monsoons. It might even have oceans. Scientists are calling Gliese 581 d the most habitable of any exoplanet yet discovered. And (as many reporters seem keen to add) it's just 20 light-years away...

Only 20 light-years? That's not so bad. In a galaxy that's almost a hundred thousand light-years across, 20 light-years is practically right next door... Right?

Well let's remember that a "light-year" is the distance light travels in a year. And let's also remember that humans can't travel at the speed of light. We can't even come remotely close.

Apollo 10 set the speed record for any manned vehicle at 24,791 mph.

After that, the fastest manmade object ever is the Helios 2 probe. It clocked in around 157,000 mph.

Crazy fast stuff, right? But here's the kicker -- the speed of light is nearly 300 million meters a second. That's many times faster than the fastest thing humans have ever built. Ever.

Science fiction has relentlessly demystified the humbling distance of the light-year. We've all seen countless fictional spaceships zipping about from planet to planet with little more than the push of a button.

But sadly, this is the real world, and we don't have hyperdrives or warp drives or jumpdrives or stargates. What we have are rockets. Sure we've toyed with stuff like solar sails or ion engines, but nothing outside the plain Newtonian physics of just basically booking it from A to B as fast as possible. In that context, nothing outruns light, and crossing a 20 light-year distance means at least 20 years in a vacuum-sealed space capsule (and probably quite a bit longer).

Not that I believe opening a wormhole or bending spacetime are ultimately impossible goals, but they are goals well outside NASA's current budgetary restrictions. In a world wherein politically ambitious deficit hawks circle hungrily over every mundane space probe NASA proposes, defying the laws of physics is simply not on the table. (It's not even scheduled to be considered to be on the table.) In the here and now, 20 light-years may as well be a hundred million.

There's only so much ordinary people like you and me can do about all that, but it ain't nothing. Write your president. Write your congressperson. Tell them to make science a priority. Tell them to go to Mars and to keep going. Write tweets. Write blogs. Write stories. Write movies. Talk about it. Be your future's own evangelist. Dream big. Because big dreams cast long long shadows. Longer than light-years.

Look up tonight. Somewhere up in that huge night sky, there are unseen oceans shimmering under alien suns. You want to see them? Make someone else want it too.

Wait... Doomed? Or Not Doomed?

2011-05-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I may have appeared to contradict myself. Are we an imperiled people living in the shadow of a brooding volcano? Or is doomsday bullshit?

All of the above... Let me put it like this:

Massive cataclysms do happen. They just do. Mankind will likely confront one at some point in the future. But the odds that *your* lifetime happens to coincide with the sort of fiery Roland Emmerich catastrophe that strikes once every few hundred million years are unspeakably slim.

In short, fret for humanity, sure, but don't cash out your retirement fund.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

An Islander's Dilemma

2011-05-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Picture an isolated tribe living on some unknown South Pacific island in the shadow of an idly smoking volcano. Before airplanes or transoceanic voyages, this island is all they know. Generations upon generations are born and die here. They don't fear the smoking mountain because it's never overtly threatened them. Yet as old as the tribe is, they are young by the mountain's standards. They are but a single tick of its geological clock.

Some in the tribe dream of leaving that island, but the prevailing wisdom is that the timber is needed to build homes, not boats. They feel they can't indulge the yearning to venture beyond the horizon until they've sorted out how to best live on their island. Nevertheless, no matter how responsibly they farm their land or how egalitarian their values become, the tribe's fate is tethered to the imbecilic whims of that mountain. It isn't alive. It has no soul. It has no sense of justice. It is simply a bubbling cauldron of liquid rock; arbitrary and indifferent. And in the instant it explodes, nothing this tribe has done will matter.

So the tremors begin, and inevitably they grow stronger day by day as that column of smoke turns a brutal shade of black. Fear grips the islanders. But it's too late now to build boats. Even if it wasn't, they have no place to go. They've been content to allow the sea to be a menacing expanse that confines them. When the eruption strikes, everything they are and everything they wanted to be burns in a scalding avalanche of vaporized rock. The richness of their heritage; the promise of their future; it's simply snuffed out as if they never existed at all.

And it would be a shame that they'd never spread off that island, not only because their culture would have endured, but also because the memory of their homeland would have endured. The songs of their tree frogs would have endured. The colors of their flowers would have endured. It would be shame because they'd yearned to explore and had been perfectly capable of following that wanderlust. It would be a shame because the things they might have seen beyond the horizon would have stirred their soul.

This is our situation here on Earth. This is the context of manned spaceflight. Beyond all the questions of cost and ethics is a very simple concern -- If the day comes when you hear of a massive asteroid barreling down on your home planet, would you rather not be on it? Does mankind have anything you'd choose to save from that catastrophe? Is your species still growing up, or is it finished? Because we live in a capricious universe. As long as we confine ourselves to this lonely island, we could end poverty, reverse global warming, and become something deserving of survival only to be summarily obliterated by a lump of cosmic iron. I promise you, inertia will eventually destroy us, whether we deserve it or not.

We should indeed live in a way that recognizes the marvel of a world we inhabit, but we shouldn't assume that doing so fully exempts us from profound risk. On at least five separate occasions, even in the absence of smog and nuclear weapons, more than half the life on Earth has been wiped out by some random extinction event. These events may be as extravagant as a comet the size of a mountain or as tedious as a global drought. But they do happen. Life can be robust, no doubt, and it is certainly not unacquainted with the risks and sometimes disastrous perils of a single-world existence. But to the best of our knowledge, never before has evolution endowed a single species with the means and the inclination to grow beyond those risks. Never before has a species imagined itself on other worlds, or been so physiologically and intellectually capable of carrying the legacy of Earth into the cosmos, and we have no special reason to think there will ever be another.

We have been travelers for longer than we've been human, literally. The only reason we've survived long enough to set foot on the Moon is because we were never content to stay in one place. It wasn't the Almighty who exiled Adam and Eve from Eden. It was their own relentless curiosity. Because some organisms prowl and hunt. Some graze. Some drift on the wind. And some sink roots deep into the ground. But Man, he is a wandering dreamer of dreams and asker of questions, for better or worse. He is a voyager.

Dinosauroid Poetry

2011-05-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

You go back in time to the Jurassic and step on a shrew and you return to the modern age only to find that dinosaurs, not humans, have evolved into a majestic civilization. They have cities and language and art. They have religion and science. The letters in their books may be different; the music they play may sound exotic, but the whole thing is nevertheless tantalizingly familiar. Because in the absence of humans, these industrious reptiles have developed a society.

It's an occasional trope of science fiction -- you venture into the far future or to a parallel reality or under the sea only to find that some non-human species has evolved an entire human-like civilization. In these stories, Earth seems to be almost crawling with heretofore unknown peoples and races. I'm as big a fan of this sort of thing as anyone, but it derives from one mercilessly stubborn misunderstanding of evolution -- that it has a purpose, a goal, and that the goal is to eventually become civilization.

But get back in your time machine and jump back to the halfway point of Earth's history, about 2.3 billion years ago. You don't see forests. You don't see giant lizards. You see an apparently barren world. Evidence of life is subtle. Here, at the halfway mark of natural history, the only organisms on the entire planet are microbial -- bacterial mats, perhaps algae. And it has been this way for most of the entire first half of our planet's history. In another two billion years, the first multicellular animals will begin to appear, but for now, all is hauntingly quiet.

Consider this for a moment, really consider it -- a full three quarters of Earth's history saw no creature bigger than a protozoa. Neither tower nor tree rose up from the desolate expanses of bare rock. No ships nor sharks crossed the empty seas. No sunsets were witnessed. No songs were sung. No stories were told. No shred of civilization, nor any indication that there ever would be. For over three billion years, three times as long as the entire history of all animal life, bacteria was by far the most complex organism on the planet. That is, to say the very least, an astonishingly stable ecosystem.

It is sometimes said that we are unwilling to be accept the fragility of our human civilization, but I don't think that's the case. Often, we are too willing to accept it. We either believe the show ends with us, or we believe the event of our extinction will be followed by some new non-human civilization evolving to replace us, and perhaps even accomplishing all the things we couldn't. We aren't quite so obsessed with our own inevitability, but we do like to think music and art and poetry and philosophy are inevitable; that if it wasn't us who created the things we value, it would at least be something a lot like us. The notion that our stories and ideas are fragile is perhaps even more terrifying than the notion that we are fragile. To think that we are but a fleeting blur of activity bookended by eons of wilderness chills us to the bone.

And it should. It should terrify us. We are too willing to lay down and wait for an end to swallow us up. To value anything we've done -- sonnets or ballads -- is to value us. If we are endeared to an ode on the beauty of an ancient forest, then our duty is not only to nature, but to the heart that aches to describe it. We should behave as if we understand that the very best of what we are can indeed be lost and forgotten along with the worst, because when it comes to creatures so complex, it would seem Mother Earth creates no species twice.

The Latest Apocalypse

2011-05-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end." - Assyrian clay tablet, 2800 BCE

You may have seen the billboards already, but in under two weeks, the world will end. At 6:00pm on Saturday May 21st, hundreds of millions of Christians will suddenly vanish before a wave of shattering earthquakes rolls across the globe, effectively ending human civilization. Not to be confused with last month's Supermoon antics or next year's ambiguous Mayan cataclysm. No, this particular armageddon was uncovered by the calculations of one 89-year-old radio evangelist.

It isn't our first such prediction. (Hell, it isn't even his first.) From time to time, humanity likes to imagine itself perched at the climax of history. These days are only different in that we should probably know better. But as we seem to be entering a new golden age of obsessing over cosmic alignments and strange omens and ancient prophecies and all that, I thought it might be a rather opportune time to peruse a few of the doomsdays that never came.

1000 CE:
Many common Europeans would not have been aware what year it was, but among those who were, the seductively round year of 1000 was believed to be the year of Christ's return -- the "deadline," so to speak, to convert the pagans of Northern Europe to Christianity. Yet the turn of the first millennium can't be said to have been any more apocalyptic than the turn of the second.

1033 CE:
Once Jesus did not arrive on the thousand year anniversary of his birth, theological thinkers pushed the expected date of his return to the thousand year anniversary of his death, with similar success.

February 1, 1524 CE:
A supposedly novel alignment of the planets in the hydrologically significant constellation of Pisces lead some London astrologers to forecast a world-drowning flood. Homes were abandoned. Food and water was hoarded. But, alas, the 1st of February passed without so much as a single drop of rain.

October 19, 1533 CE:
In 1532, a devout Christian and noted mathematician, Michael Stifel, published a dire volume claiming the Day of Judgement would begin at precisely 8:00am on the 19th of October in the following year.

1555 CE:
In the 15th century, a well-known French theologian by the name of Pierre d'Ailly calculated that the end of the world would fall the 7000th year of human history -- a milestone he assigned to the year 1555. Christopher Columbus was among the suckers who bought into this ultimately arbitrary forecast.

April 28, 1583 CE:
For reasons known only to them, numerous astrologers and clergy interpreted the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn as a sign that Jesus would return at noon on April 28th.

October 22, 1844 CE:
Perhaps the most notorious failed doomsday prediction, dubbed "The Great Disappointment" by the many thousands of William Miller's followers after the famed Baptist preacher's much-hyped apocalyptic prediction fizzled without event.

1910 CE:
Astronomical observation of Haley's Comet detected trace amounts of toxic cyanogen gas in its tail. The fact that Earth would be passing through the comet's tail spurred much fearful speculation (including a front page New York Times article) on the existential threat posed by this cosmic death cloud. Much to the dismay of scientists, popular hysteria escalated, but naturally no such disaster ever materialized.

July, 1999 CE:
One Nostradamus quatrain states, quite frankly: "The year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come great king of terror." Yet the Summer of 1999 seems to have been largely devoid of any mighty cataclysms falling out of the sky.

January 1, 2000 CE:
Ah yes, the dreaded Y2K -- the day on which every computer in the world would forget what year it was. Blackouts, nuclear meltdowns, planes falling out of the sky. It was to be the day on which we'd be done in by our modern hubris. It was instead just a moment that came and went like all the moments before.

Obviously, the world is not an unchanging place. We know that old continents will break themselves apart to build new continents. We know that species will die out as new species are born. My understanding is that in roughly five billion years our Sun will begin to burn the last of its hydrogen and swell to eventually consume our planet. My understanding is that we are not necessarily fated to be present at "the end of the world." We could, like so many dominant species before us, fall victim to an asteroid or a supervolcano or even our own machinations. But I don't know that anyone can tell me exactly when.

Catastrophes, sometimes huge catastrophes, do happen, but not when some blustering holy man promises they will. Meteors don't adhere to ancient Mayan schedules. Mountains are not heaved up in one cataclysmic instant at the top of the hour on the word of a number-crunching evangelist. And we can't sit and wait in ecstatic dread simply because some starry-eyed believer stands on a street corner and pronounces that the end of ends is two weeks away. It's such an old old tune. And we've all heard it before.

*(Many more expired doomsdays at A Brief History of the Apocalypse and Failed end of the world predictions from 30 to 1920 CE.)

The Chronoporter; or The Anachronistc Exploits of a Hero, a Caveman, & a Future Girl

2011-03-02T10:59:00.001-08:00

A pulp story told in tweets, collected here for your reading pleasure...

Travis Beacham (@travisbeacham)
1/30/11 1:11 PM
Running from the SS, Kit Revere strapped on the stolen Nazi teleporter. As they opened fire, he pressed the button — & was gone. #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/1/11 8:11 AM
As the Neanderthal hunters bore down on him, Kit Revere realized he hadn't stolen a teleporter; he'd stolen a time machine.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/4/11 1:23 PM
When Hok the Neanderthal accidentally triggered Revere's device, he was flung to the year 3030 AD, dawn of the Global Robot Empire.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/17/11 8:57 AM
The robots cornered Hok the Neanderthal & Z the last human. There was but one escape... Hok gave Z the timejump device — & braced to fight.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/20/11 3:02 PM
The block of prehistoric ice contained a man in modern attire. The name on his uniform read "K. Revere." And he was alive... #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/24/11 8:01 AM
Even in this far-flung future, the Neanderthal Hok was still a force to be reckoned with. He ripped the robot army limb from sparking limb.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/26/11 5:16 PM
With each time-jump, Z grew to see history as a vast gulf of wild and barren silence. Mankind was a lost city on a mote of temporal dust.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
2/28/11 7:28 PM
As the spinosaurus opened its mighty jaws, Z bet her life on the chronoporter's final jump. She pressed the button and was gone. #tweetpulp

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
3/1/11 4:29 PM
None knew where the mysterious chanteuse called Zee came from — until a Nazi scientist found a curious device in her abandoned Berlin flat.

The Tweet Pulp (@thetweetpulp)
3/2/11 7:42 AM
Kit Revere's masked mentor knew the teleporter he'd sent his protege to steal was actually a chronoporter. He'd once been that young man.

Thus concludes this harrowing Möbius strip of a tale (insofar as such tales have conclusions), but take heart, loyal reader — new yarns are always spinning. Follow @thetweetpulp on Twitter for more 140-character pulp fiction by yours truly.

Answering the Challenge

2011-01-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

Twenty-five years ago today, we were reminded of what was once a rather obvious conceit — space travel is dangerous. We used to know it was dangerous. We used to understand that cramming a few brave souls into the nose cone of a three hundred foot missile and blasting them into the vast and airless gulf of outer space was, at heart, in defiance of any sane definition of safe behavior.

But we got too good at it. Extraordinary became ordinary. We grew numb and bored. We pulled back from the Moon, about two hundred thousand miles back, tenuously content to dip our toes into near Earth orbit from time to time with the shuttle program. Until Challenger, twenty-five years ago today.

We saw the shuttle explode and we thought about the astronauts and the teacher, handpicked by NASA to go into space in a tragically desperate effort to rekindle the public's waning imagination. But that angry plume of smoke seeped into our national will, and we began to wonder what the point was. Our faith in our national aerospace institution was eroding.

Tragedies like the Challenger disaster have unfortunately contributed to NASA's rather abysmal public reputation, reinforcing the idea that this is a bloated and ineffective expenditure of resources. And if there was any massive expenditure, it'd be difficult to argue that this reputation wasn't deserved. But that's just not the reality of the situation. Public perception is that NASA constitutes up to 20% of the federal budget. The reality is that NASA's funds are usually from about 0.5% to just under 1% of the federal budget. Could you pay for a safe, hundred million mile roundtrip to Mars with less than a quarter of the TARP budget? (The answer is "no.")

And yet, for what little they have to work with, NASA has built a vacuum-sealed habitat almost three hundred miles above the Earth's surface, taken pictures of the beginning of time, and landed robotic explorers on a planet thirty five million miles away. All for just half of one percent of the federal budget. Just imagine what they could do with two percent. Or three...

Accidents like Challenger and Columbia are often attributed to bureaucratic incompetence. The reality may just be that breaching the cosmic void of outer space is considerably more difficult than the minuscule fraction of a fraction we spend on it. Maybe we don't believe it's worthwhile because we, as a nation, have ceased to entertain especially worthwhile aspirations. We seem content to underfund and underestimate the institution that sent us hurtling to the Moon.

Space travel is dangerous, whether you go to Mars, the Moon, or just a quick hop to the International Space Station. It's extremely difficult and extremely dangerous. It can and will cost some of our brightest and boldest lives — no matter how far we reach... So let's reach far. Let's have goals that are worth the risks. Apollo 1 burned on the launchpad, but the Apollo program endured. Why? Because we decided to go to the Moon. Good, amazing people with all the right stuff will die trying to get us to the stars. So let's raise the ceiling and let them stretch their ambitions. Because the ones who have succeeded have become our reasons to dream big, and because the ones who have fallen, the astronauts of Apollo 1 and Challenger and Columbia, would have never in the darkest corners of their souls wanted to become our excuses to aim low.

- Travis

(via mobile device)

The True Meaning of Christmas

2010-12-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

Brace yourself, but Christmas is much older than its name. Yes, there's long been reason for Midwinter revels; especially in the days before central heating. See, the Solstice is the dead of Winter and the shortest day of the year; the crest of the snow-capped peak; the day after which the daylight hours begin to grow longer and warmth begins to grow. The Sun is returning. Spring is coming. There's a twinkling light at the end of the frigid tunnel. There is hope. It's always been celebrated with some enthusiasm.

We can see the vestiges of Christmas's pre-Christian roots in many of our holiday traditions. We know the Romans exchanged gifts and made merry during their winter Saturnalia. Pagan Scandinavia's Midwinter observance was known as the Yuletide, and was a heavy influence on our modern Christmas. Yuletide gave us the Christmas tree, the Yule log, and wassailing. Even in modern parlance, Yule is all but synonymous with the season. And to this day, Jul is the Scandinavian word for Christmas.

When it first crossed Pagan Europe, Christianity was a more fluid species of evangelism than the iron-fisted fire and brimstone we see today. It seeped into cultures by nimbly adapting to native expectations. It insinuated itself into existing traditions and familiar mythology. It evolved according to the needs of the locals. They were already celebrating the birthday of the Sun. Insisting it was also the birthday of the Son was only a rather modest rebranding. Keep your greenery and lights and music and add this sacred story to your holiday lore.

But during the Reformation, it wasn't the atheists or the Pagans attacking Christmas. It was the Puritans. That devout faction denounced Christmas revels as little more than Papist hedonism. To the stark Puritans, Christmas feasts and decorations and music were all seen as a repugnant display of ungodly excess. They detested it, and banned it; and their reasons were strictly religious.

Not only was Christmas not always Christian. It wasn't always American. Our founding fathers looked down on it as an essentially British tradition, and as such, a tradition they had little interest in preserving. Knowing full well that they'd be unprepared for it, George Washington attacked the Hessians on Christmas. He would not hesitate to exploit this sacred observance in order to shed his enemies' blood. Yes, Virginia, George Washington didn't give a reindeer's arse about Christmas.

And I say all this only to say that I do give a bit of a reindeer's arse about Christmas. Though it certainly does turn my stomach to hear a certain devout crowd jealously fighting for their interpretation of the holiday's auspices. I hate the insinuation that there is a concerted effort to neuter this inherently Christian holiday of its inherently Christian significance. Because the simple fact of the matter is that it has never been an entirely Christian holiday, and Christians themselves haven't always cared so much for it.

Not to let the atheists off the hook. And I don't mean the ones who simply don't believe in a supernatural higher power. I mean the ones who deeply believe in not believing, with all the fervor of a Cromwellian zealot. The ones who claim offense to even hear the word Christmas (which strikes me as a profoundly meta superstition), because there's nothing really at stake, is there? I mean it's one thing to strive to purge Creationism from the public curriculum. It's another to strive to purge any remotely theistic vestige from a multi-thousand year old cultural vocabulary. To wit, as someone who doesn't believe in Thor, I could struggle to rename Thursday as 5day, but it'd be an impossible fight with an unspeakably pointless goal.

At the end of the day, I'm rather fond of Christmas, exactly how it is. I like the big Pagan tree in the living room right beside the old crèche. I like the thousand year old elven saint with the Coca-Cola red overcoat. I like it all. Christmas is a storyteller's holiday. It's an intersection of histories and legends. It's a mongrel child of contradicting gods and traditions. It's old and it's new. It's spiritual and it's secular. It's heavy with stories, the blood of human culture, and that's what I love about it. Not only that, it's a season where people make some shred of an extra effort to tolerate one another, and whatever the reason, it's good enough.

- Travis

[via mobile device]

The Price of Imaginary Security

2010-11-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

I hate airport security. Every time I'm threaded through the whole bureaucratic tangle of procedures, I can't help but feel like it's primarily concerned with merely seeming meticulous; as if the TSA is basically just covering their ass. What is it if not a preposterously theatrical series of exercises; a cartoonish creature engineered by committee to combat a confluence of all our silliest nightmares.

A guy hides explosives in his shoes and suddenly every passenger has to take off their shoes. A crotch bomber fails to detonate his undies and the TSA rushes to deploy machines that can see through our pants. Never mind that those half-baked ideas might have easily never worked, it makes us feel better. Seems as if any halfwit terrorist need only light a match on a plane to trigger some new intrusion in our growing Rube-Goldberg array of airport security measures.

And this is usually the point at which some very stalwart, well-intentioned passenger inevitably chimes in to dutifully surrender our collective privacy with an unflappable declaration along the lines of, "If touching my junk is the price of security, I'll pay it." Which is noble and patriotic and wonderful, except for one thing — IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY MAKE US SAFE.

Safety isn't currently on the table, is it? Privacy or security — as much as we'd love to frame it in these very dramatic terms — isn't the practical reality of our situation. Deep down inside, we all realize this. We all understand that a naked psychopath looks almost exactly like a naked well-adjusted citizen. We only believe our convoluted little games work because we desperately NEED to believe they work. We NEED safety to be an option. Yet if we give ourselves permission to question that premise, it immediately becomes very easy to see the flaws in the assumption.

I'm no expert, but neither is the guy at the x-ray monitor, jaded by the endless parade of portable devices scrolling by; and really how difficult is it to disguise an explosive as an iPad or a Kindle? I don't know, but it doesn't seem totally impossible, does it? A potential hijacker looking for a sharp edge to hold to someone's throat need only snap a CD in half. Prison riots have been started with less than we're allowed to take onto planes. So ban all electronics. Ban all carry-ons. Okay. What's stopping the intrepid madman from infecting himself with smallpox before he boards? The plots that work are never obvious until they're played out, and they will always be at least as numerous as our most clever enemies — regardless of security.

Our whole airport security infrastructure, in all its vast Byzantine complexity, is bizarrely obsessed with policing inanimate stuff. But it's not a stuff problem, is it? Our would-be attackers aren't so casual in their righteous hatred that they'd give up because they suspect they couldn't get away with strapping C4 to their balls. It's not a stuff problem. It's a problem of intent. And that's not an excuse to appoint Juan Williams as head of the TSA; there's still plenty of caucasian psychos out there. No, the most dangerous thing a terrorist can take onto an airplane isn't a pair of scissors or a Quran; it's little more than the will to do serious harm, and we have no machines to detect that.

We need a new way of thinking about security. A new philosophy. Maybe a passenger vetting program; maybe bomb-sniffing dogs. Ultimately, I don't know what the ideal combination of security measures looks like. I don't know how you build a perfect system. I don't even know if you can. What I do know is this — bloated reactive protocols and humiliating violations don't make us safe. They make us tools, but they don't make us safe.

And anyway, is there any TSA obstacle more compelling than the unspoken social contract that any especially suspicious doings (like trying to detonate your blackberry or whittling a plastic shiv) will probably buy you an epic, mile high ass-kicking?

- Travis

[via mobile device]

On Names...

2010-05-14T11:22:00.001-07:00

What's in a name? It's true, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but were it named a gore-turd, I doubt many would smell it. It'd certainly hold diminished sway in matters of romance. So perhaps there may be something in a name.

Ancient Egyptian priests sought to discover the names of the gods because they believed to invoke a god's name was to invoke a god's power. For similar reasons, ancient Hebrews were bound by a potent taboo that kept the name of their own omnipotent God shrouded in unspeakable mystery. Because names have a power. They have a soul. They have transformative magic. The simple act of naming a pig, for instance, is a strange alchemy that changes it from meat to a pet. From an it to a he. From bacon to Rufus.

Your name, I promise, was agonized over. It was discussed and debated to no end. Lists were made. Hours if not days or months of thought were put into it. It was likely first uttered before you were even born, bringing a smile to your parents — Yes, that's it; that's who this new person will be. It encapsulates history and aspirations and has, over time, tangled its roots into your very identity. And it's the same with anything, really. Cities, streets, mountains, ships, inventions. Names are agonized over, because the name will become the very thing, and the thing will become the name. Names are tested, tasted, and argued. Anyone may have only a handful of opportunities to name something, but each is its own ordeal.

So imagine what it is to constantly be naming things; to be an author of fiction; to give every nameless person, place, or thing the calculated moniker of something real. It could be a world as small as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Lovecraft's Arkham, or as wide as Baum's Oz or Tolkein's Middle Earth, or as unfathomably vast as Banks' interstellar Culture or Herbert's Dune — where the scale of the naming has made it an altogether different sort of endeavor. And none of them, from Faulkner to Herbert, from Stan Lee to Homer, from Chaucer to Whedon, none would dream of saying a name is unimportant.

Just imagine if Stagger Lee was Sonny Lee, or if Vesper Lynd was Prudence Rectum. There is a very deliberate reason Dracula is not named Nigel or Walter. Just as it's no coincidence the cryptic Captain Nemo's name is Latin for "No One," or that a fellow called Remus Lupin transforms into a wolf. And beyond that, just the way a name sounds can say so much. Think of Atticus Finch or Forrest Gump or Moriarty. Dickens was a master in the poetry of naming. Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Mister Fezziwig, Abel Magwitch, and so on. You need only speak the syllables to begin to know these characters; before they utter a word — just from the way the cadence tastes on your tongue. Names can be carefully designed to trip certain wires in your mind whether you know it or not. Names contain a simple kind of power in that they are the beginning of your story. They are the very thing itself in the most perfect of nutshells.

What's in a name? As much as you decide to put in it, I think. And for my part, more is far far better than less.

Tranquility Base 7

2010-05-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Testing out the Scripts Pro iPad app. Works for me...

Second Best

2010-03-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Wizard of Oz
Citizen Kane
Double Indemnity
It's a Wonderful Life
The Third Man
Sunset Boulevard
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Graduate
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
Chinatown
Jaws
Network
Star Wars
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Dead Poet's Society
Beauty & the Beast
A Few Good Men
The Shawshank Redemption
Pulp Fiction
Apollo 13
LA Confidential
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Moulin Rouge
Fellowship of the Ring
The Dark Knight
Avatar

Avatar FTW

2010-03-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

You will, no doubt, hear many reasons why Avatar is undeserving of the Oscar. Well, more like the same reason many many times.

Mainly, that it is derivative. You will hear how it is a rehash of Pocahontas or Ferngully. And yeah it's a little like those things. And Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, etc, etc. But for me, it was much more like something of the same species as those old ERB planetary romances; ripping yarns like Princess of Mars and Carson Napier of Venus, and personally I was giddy to see that kind of Barsoomian swashbuckling exploding across the silver screen. So yeah, I agree that it's "derivative," if that's the term you want to use. I'm just not sure why I should care.

Calling a movie derivative is like saying it's a movie. Of course it is. You think you've seen new stories? You haven't. Believe me. You can take any movie and make a long long list of all the things it is like. Even Avatar's Oscar competitors. Hurt Locker has famously been compared to Point Break, and no one can say that doesn't make sense. We've seen Precious god only knows how many times. I recognize Up in the Air's Bingham from basically every Chuck Palahniuk novel I've ever read (and let's face it, he wasn't new then). And as for Inglorious Basterds — well, come on, we all know Tarantino. If we like something, it's an homage. If we don't, it's derivative. Sometimes it's a rip-off, sometimes it's a love letter, and sometimes we just don't bother to think about it. But it's always there. Everything is like something else. After all, D9 is certainly no stranger to the well-tread story route Avatar's plot follows.

Homer, Chaucer, or Shakespeare would have thought pure novelty a strange priority. Their mantra was to tell a story, to captivate their audience; not merely to impress those few jaded critics and aficionados who might want little else than to be surprised by the mechanics. Cleverness, in and of itself, isn't an especially substantial aim, you see. Drop by any second year film school screening if you don't believe me. Go and see what a brand new kind of story desperately reaching for originality looks like. Because it isn't moving or meaningful. Not necessarily. And that shouldn't really come as a galloping surprise to anyone, should it? Is demanding to be surprised by some fresh new plot device any less shallow than being impressed by a familiar yarn with lushly crafted visuals?

I'm not saying Avatar's flaw is everyone's flaw. I'm saying it's not a flaw. Stories have always been and can only be old. We're not trying to say new things. We're telling you the stories that said something to us. We're bringing our voices and imaginations to the stories that have lived in our hearts. We're reshaping the words that shaped us, to make them urgent again for you. Your voice can be original, but the words are timeless. They can only be timeless.

That said, to argue Avatar doesn't tell it's story with an inventive flair is just patently myopic. This movie summoned up a whole world from nothing; gave it a geology and a natural history and peopled it with an alien species; gave them a culture and a religion and a functional language. This kind of creative attention to detail is neither common nor easy. And neither, for that matter, is getting the average American to give a shit about a tree or the fate of the blue-skinned creature who lives in it. And yet this movie brings its considerable engines of creativity to the task of creating a sense of wonder. It should be gorgeous. It should be huge. It should be a spectacle. It is attempting to communicate in the broadest elemental terms the value of a natural world many audience members may never encounter. I've never seen it done so well, and neither have you.

Here is a big budget genre flick that isn't a remake, isn't based on any book, or video game, or comic book, or tv series; and yet has somehow become one of the most successful films of all time. As a creator and lover of original genre stories, I'm sleeping fine. Why wouldn't I? A capably crafted sci-fi popcorn epic with ground-breaking visuals, a lavish imagination, and an utterly worthwhile message is nominated for the Oscar. You're goddamn right I hope it wins.

The Austin Tea Party

2010-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems as if the Tea Party and Al Qaeda finally have something in common.

And no, I'm not saying the Tea Party is a terrorist organization. They'd be the first to tell you, it's hardly an organization at all. It doesn't even have organizational aspirations. Take, for example, the movement's resistance to its own convention in Nashville. The Tea Party isn't interested in being a party at all. And that's the problem, isn't it?

The Tea Party is essentially a generalized area in which the most disgruntled parts of several otherwise unrelated belief systems overlap. Many may well be rooted in coherent, well-intentioned philosophies. But nothing about the movement as a whole necessarily precludes especially extremist philosophies. On the contrary, the movement's ambitions are almost protozoan in that they possess no structure whatsoever -- ethical, or otherwise. What it does have is an enemy and a lot of anger. It's difficult to imagine what would stop its more destructive fringe elements from drawing strength from that culture. It's difficult to imagine Joe Stack would not have at least felt perfectly at home in that culture, or would by virtue of belonging to it be disinclined from his suicide attack.

Because the Tea Party seems, to me, concerned mainly with aggregating, amplifying, and empowering generalized anger, without codifying or channeling it. It articulates itself with signs, costumes, and caustic chants. It is a medium in which outrageous rumors spread far faster than sober information. It has no leader. It has no John Hancock or Patrick Henry, nor does it want one. It has no will to organize. It has no voice save for noisy chaos. It wants no formalized agenda or priorities, or to take any action which might ideologically alienate any of countless separate but intensely furious elements, some of which are not the most wholesome folks in the world. It seems therefore as if its two most essential values are rage and sheer numbers. And that isn't a party, or a movement, or a revolution. It's a mob.

Pale Blue Dot

2010-02-12T19:05:00.001-08:00

pale blue dot, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Twenty years ago today, a small probe coasting through deep space somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto received instructions from home to turn around and snap a photograph of the distant world that had sent it out into the universe. The picture Voyager 1 sent back shows our very own Earth as seen from across that humbling 3.7 billion mile gulf. If you look very closely, you can see it -- a pale, blue dot hanging in the first ray from the right. Sagan had lobbied for Voyager to take this picture, and though some of his colleagues were reluctant to chance the probe's sensitive equipment on such an unscientific task, the picture speaks for itself. The tension between our heartbreaking fragility and the reach of our ambitions has never been so potently illustrated.

"Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

- Carl Sagan

Goodwill Toward Men

2009-12-17T08:50:00.001-08:00

mankind was my business, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Tea Party hardliners have lately embraced Rand's libertarian philosophy as embodied in this scurvy little germ of a saying as an intellectual and moral validation of what many a wise man have called mankind's basest tendency -- mainly, frigid self-interest. So often our choices are not between good and evil, but between easy and hard. The truly vile thing about this little bon mot is that it appeals to the temptation to pursue the easiest path, that of cruel narcissism and indifference to our fellow man, and somehow manages to sound righteous about it. But this season of all seasons shines a harsh and unforgiving light on this jaundiced worldview, by reminding us of the inexorable truth stridently articulated in a truly ubiquitous literary classic that will likely outshine that small, self-serving nugget for some time to come...

"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The Caseyad

2009-10-28T11:36:00.001-07:00

the caseyad, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Sing in me, Obama, and through me tell the tale
Of a man who alone ventured unto Dixien frontiers
To challenge those hordeful slickers and prevaricators
So intent on blighting his beloved homeland.

Born Adam of the Clan Casey in the Smith Fields,
Stood he a man apart.
Eleventeen cubits tall and bearsomely bearded,
He cut a long and fearful shadow,
And was known far and wide.
But before he banish'd Zeus from his thundered throne
And made the mighty Thor to weep,
Before he groped Aphrodite's untouch'd tatas
And boned fair Isis witless,
Before he saddled the dread Sharkodactyl
And ascended unto planet Mars,
He was first defender of truth and scourge of lies.

It came to pass that a rosy dawntide of bold change
Had washed the sullied night off his ravaged land
And young Adam's heart swelled with pride and hope.
But darkly envious minions of night
Watched with a great surge of spite
And quietly drew their wicked plots.
Twisted Apostles of the frigid frost-harlot Palin,
Tea-bagging Furies and Birthers
Of viral lies born on unctuous waves of vitriol.

And lo, Adam saw his shores licked by this infectious tide
And vowed it would not, could not, abide.

Muster'd he his lightning wits and bruin strength
And set out for the very den of the demon,
That black soul-rotting hole in the good earth
From whence are birth'd the delusions and knavespawn
Strangling his countrymen in their perfidious thrall.
Through the mired Limbogs of the Beckcountry
And into that fetid pit he did march,
A brazen light into the hoary darkness,
Wherein the heathen trinity dwelt.

He found them in the whispering dark,
Three in number.
A lurksome Ghoul and a scurvy She-Wolf
Crouching in tacit deference to the third:
A great ballock-cringing Crone,
A true Birther bloated with a brood of lies.
Out-number'd but not out-witt'd,
Brave Adam unsheathed his sword.
Thinking this intruder merely a bewitch'd minion,
In her dull pride the ungodly Crone was swept off guard
When like a thunderbolt Adam did strike
At that swollen purpled womb.

She came upon him
With all the furor of a storm-churning dragon,
Belching her blazing spume of baleful sophistry
Which hath blackened the hearts of so many.
But not Adam. No, not he.
Stood he firm with his truthful sword,
And slayed the festerly Crone,
The She-Wolf and Ghoul looked on the fall of their mistress,
Their eyes flickering with a great and lucid dawning,
As truth began to thaw their bale-frozen souls.

Emerging from the dark,
The sun fell warm upon his skin,
And Adam of the Clan Casey
Knew he'd fought a rare and goodly fight,
And prevail'd.

And so take heed, gentle reader,
Of lessons here enshrined:
That his victory was not in slaying the Birther Crone
But in the match-less bravery of his charge
And in the hearts opened to look upon it.
So take up arms of light, noble brethren,
And chase away the night.
Pursue her to her dank and dark strongholds;
Into every pit, cave, warren, and well --
Bring forth that brave new day.

~

(My friend Adam Casey spotted a GOP booth at a fair and twittered that he should have asked to see their birth certificates. I responded that he must do just that, and that if he did, I'd write a glorious epic poem about it. So, the next day, he returned and threw down with the crazies manning the booth. And that, friends, is the origin of The Caseyad. The accompanying illustration is, I'm pleased to note, by Adam himself. And stay tuned for more, Adam and I are hard at work on an unrelated but surpassingly awesome comic book.)

All Under Heaven 9: Non ho, Shanghai

2009-07-27T19:09:00.001-07:00

supertall, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

"Non ho" is a greeting in the Shanghainese dialect. It's their way of saying "nihao" (which as it turns out doesn't mean anything like "have you eaten?").

And that's Shanghai really -- another world. Almost. Certainly another China. Forget everything you thought you learned about China. Wipe the slate clean. We're starting from scratch.

Shanghai hasn't been around since the beginning of time. It was never the seat of imperial power. It's considerable gravity is a very very recent phenomenon.

Before the mid 19th century, Shanghai was little more than a sleepy mudflat town at the mouth of the Yangtze.

We had a glimpse of what this former Shanghai might have been like when we visited a small town called Xinchang just outside the city. It's a forgotten salt-panning village tucked away in the marshes, forgotten since the collapse of the salt farms some hundred something years ago. Xinchang looks like something out of someone else's dream, with it's cobbled avenues too narrow for cars and half-moon bridges arching over brackish canals. We negotiated it's alleys between the sagging timbers of old teahouses and mouldering plaster facades as the elderly, leather-skinned locals turned their curious eyes on us from the windows and doorways of their five hundred year old houses. They'd nod with a quiet twinkle in their eyes or flash jagged, ancient smiles or mutter a tentative "non ho," but mostly the swallows were the only sound. The absence of vendors and surplus of watchful eyes made me wonder if anyone ever comes here. There were ghosts in this place, dead and alive. It was very close to perfect.

This, I imagine, is what Shanghai might have been like. Might still be had the stars not conspired a different fate.

Shanghai (as we know it) was the child of two worlds, East and West, born of the Opium Wars, a trade dispute which saw Western powers divy up the nacent city amongst one another. Trade with the Far East was opening up, one way or another and whether the Far East liked it or not, even if the West had to pry open the mouth of the Yangtze by raw brute force. Shanghai was the port to this very end.

It was a divided city. Like Jerusalem or Vienna after the War. The British settlement. The French Concession. The Chinese City. The sheer volume of authority meant, in effect, there was no authority. And we've seen this before, haven't we. The lawless gold rush town on the edge of the known world. This was Shanghai. Multiplied a thousand fold. Because it sat on two frontiers. This was where East grinded against West. And the gold was more than just a promising lode, it was the wealth of an entire hemisphere.

And Shanghai grew. It grew like an explosion.

By the time the Roaring Twenties hit Shanghai the Roar was deafening. This Shanghai of the 20's and 30's is the Shanghai of legend. Of films, songs, and pulp novels. The Paris of the East. The Pearl of the Orient. It cast a towering glow in the Far East just beyond the horizon. A dangerous and radiant splendor. It's streets were populated by spies and tycoons. By triads and taipans. By witches, warlords, and jazzmen. This is the Shanghai that holds a merciless grip on my imagination. I wanted to lose myself in the mirrored labyrinths of the Great World. I wanted to sneak into a Blood Alley cabaret in time to see a bobbed peach part the slit of her cheongsam to flash some leg as she renders a Cantonese "Paper Moon."

Of course I knew I couldn't. Born much too late. Nevertheless I wanted to see where it all happened.

Shanghai's a different place these days. But she's no less important for it. Lately, she's become the poster child of the new China. The cloud-raking summits of her ambitious skyline gleam like ambassadors from the future (three of the tallest towers in the world among them), lending her the atmosphere of a permanent World's Fair. And on that note, there was one thing in particular I could cross off my Shanghai list. So as soon as I got a free moment, I blazed a trail to the Shanghai high-speed maglev.

It's the first commercial maglev in the world and covers the 30 km distance between the city proper and the Pudong airport in just over seven minutes (about seven times faster than our tour bus). Electromagnets pass the train down the track, cracking speeds 350 km/h in just the first two minutes. Michele pointed out the streaks on the bullet-shaped front, as if thousands of small creatures had met their unexpected end on it's windshield. This train, in short, goes very fast. You know the feeling you get when a plane throttles it down the runway on takeoff? That's what the maglev feels like. Except it doesn't ever leave the ground, it just keeps picking up speed. The landscape outside smears across the window (Was that a telephone pole or a house?). The ride is eerily smooth and quiet, save for the low magnetic drone and the sounds of clicking cameras as the cabin spedometer tops out at the 431 km/h. The point (or part of it at any rate) is that China is as much the land of invention as it was in the days when paper and gunpowder were new. And that Shanghai is where the country's ingenuity lives.

I'd decided that I rather loved new Shanghai -- perhaps as much as old Shanghai. We strolled along the Bund and admired her stately gothic edifices and art deco towers. The Cathay Hotel. The Customs House. The Shanghai Club. This waterfront thoroughfare was the face of old Shanghai's coming of age. This was where it all happened. And I turned to glance across the Huangpu River, to the supertall skyscrapers rising from the opposite bank. The bulbed spire of the Oriental Pearl Tower soared fifteen hundred feet above the river and the stark angles of the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center loomed behind, her glass-bottomed observation deck hidden by the clouds. And I wondered if the space between the two riverbanks wasn't perhaps smaller than I had imagined.

(Visit my Shanghai set on flickr for more images of Xinchang old town, the Bund, the maglev, and more.)

All Under Heaven 8: That Beijing Air

2009-07-26T18:59:00.001-07:00

armillary, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Beijing was my first experience of China. (And yes, I know I already did the Xi'an post and I am confusing the order of the trip here, but just cut me some slack.)

Beijing (or Dadu or Beiping or Peking as it's been variously known) has been the center of Chinese culture since the days of the Mongols some 800 years ago. By itself, an impressive span that comfortably swallows the whole of American history, but to the Chinese it's rather like the last two or three chapters in the history book. Because written Chinese history (just the *written* bits mind you) begins almost four thousand years ago. Viewed through that telescopic lens, it's easy to imagine how Beijing could still be considered the new kid.

The very very first thing you notice is the air. Beijing, you see, is a bit smoggy. Or, to do it proper justice, five minutes in Beijing left me feeling as if I could not up to that point claim to have experienced smog. And I was coming from Los Angeles of all places. But LA's haze (and you'll notice the very deliberate absence of quotation marks) is like a gossamer will-o-wisp when measured against Beijing's sweltering blanket of sooty murk. In LA the very worst of it is "I can hardly see downtown." In Beijing it's "I can hardly see the building next door." Just breathing Beijing's air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, literally. So, I say again, this was my first experience with smog.

But let's talk about a different sort of atmosphere altogether. The political atmosphere. It is almost inescapable after all. This is the capital of China we're talking about. And Beijing not infrequently feels like the place every red-blooded American neo-con fears the whole of China to be.

Take this as a for instance. There is one very specific reason every Westerner has heard of Tiananmen Square. A reason that can't be far from the front of any Western mind visiting Tiananmen Square. A reason very pointedly omitted from the commentary of local guides even as we crossed Tiananmen Square. And so here you are in this broad, notorious plaza bordered by stark red star emblazoned colonnades on either side, the unblinking portrait of Mao before you, and an airport-grade security checkpoint at your back and at some point you may have the fleeting notion that you might be in a communist country.

There are guards everywhere. There are surveillance cameras everywhere. There are even signs with cute anime-style guards gesturing towards cartoon surveillance cameras like Hello Kitty's Big Brother. It would almost feel a trifle Orwellian if not for all the tourist buses.

Here, contradictions are somewhat par for the course. China contains multitudes, in every possible sense. There is at least as much to like about Beijing as not.

Even here, at the axis of the largest communist empire on the planet, capitalism exerts an obvious influence. You see it in the avenues of impressively garish hyper-modern high-rises. You see it in the ranks of vendors swarming around the gates of any major attraction. It rained on our second day in Beijing, rained hard -- a merciful respite from the smog but not pleasant in and of itself. Well never fear, because no sooner do the clouds open up than some unlikely entrepreneur's tapping you on the shoulder hawking umbrellas.

And mentioning the smog without mentioning the billions of dollars China's spending on reversing it would leave you with an unfair impression of the country's priorities. Beijing has the largest fleet of natural gas buses in the world and thousands upon thousands of recently planted saplings dotting her growing cityscape.

The Forbidden City -- with its acre upon acre chock-a-block with shrines, palaces, and courtyards -- is jaw-dropping even under the dreariest conditions. (Did I mention it was raining?)

And the Great Wall of China... Where do I begin? Here is a wonder, if ever there was one, most deserving of it's reputation. We hiked the Badaling section threading the precipitous contours of the mountains outside the city, plunging down the face of one only to soar straight up the next dizzying slope. Following the crest of the wall up such a steep, stair-less grade can't help but leave any sane hiker wondering, "With mountains like this, who even needs walls?" But only for as long as the beguiling scenery permits such distractions.

But maybe the most unexpected treasure I found in Beijing came in the form of the Old Observatory. Oldest in the world to be precise. Completed in 1442 when stargazing was far more than a pastime. It was integral to the Emperor's authority. For the Emperor was the Son of Heaven, and that wasn't just a lofty pretense. The Emperor was expected to possess a special wisdom, a unique insight into the movements of the heavens by which he could, among other things, set the calendar -- an act of priceless import to a feudal nation fed and peopled by illiterate farmers. And to this end, the Emperor employed legions of imperial astronomers.

The Observatory, for me, was a more than welcome change of pace. Quiet, uncrowded, and preoccupied with the scientific trappings of another age. The rain was lightening, just enough to rinse the smog and cool the summer air. It pooled in the stony crevices of the tree-shaded courtyard under giant bronze armillary spheres and celestial globes intricately gilded with coiled dragons and other mythical beasts. I'd have been perfectly content to explore it well into the day. It was distinctly hard for me not to fall in love with the Old Observatory. Here was an ancient artifact of a culture endearingly obsessed with the stars. It occurred to me that China might just be the perfect place to witness an eclipse of the century.

(For more images of the Old Observatory, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and all else Beijing, drop by my Beijing set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 7: Impressions of Xi'an

2009-07-25T15:06:00.001-07:00

the great mosque of xi'an, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

China, it should be said, has a long long history. Something we all seem to forget when we speak of the "Rise of China." And there may be no place in China where the full breadth of this history is more intimately felt than the timeless city of Xi'an.

It was the site of a bustling Stone Age village before becoming the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. And it has been the capital of China for much of a period beginning over a thousand years before Christ and on into the storied Tang Dynasty some twenty centuries later -- right about the time distant Europe was enthusiastically plunging into the thick of the Dark Ages.

All this from a city (I'm embarrassed to admit) I'd never heard of, though I doubt I'm alone in that regard. As the Silk Road fell from importance and other dynasties relocated the Chinese capital time and again before finally settling on Beijing, Xi'an suffered a kind of obscurity until that fateful day in 1974 when a farmer stumbled across one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century -- the Terracotta Army.

To this day, the site is the pride of Xi'an and a vital tourist draw every bit as integral to China's cultural identity as the Great Wall itself.

The story of the Terracotta Army's creation is detailed in a film called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which serendipitously premiered on our hotel's HBO the night before our visit to the museum. And maybe it "premieres" every night in Xi'an but nevertheless, I felt I had the whole backstory down by the time I saw the clay warriors the next day.

But seriously folks, the real story's rather more earthly (if you'll forgive the pun) but no less impressive. This extraordinary feat of craftsmanship was undertaken by order of the first emperor of China over two millennia ago.

So what about Xi'an these days? Well, to draw an awkward comparison, if Beijing is Washington, then Xi'an is something along the lines of Philadelphia: older, industrial, and with loftier historical claims. The whole place is boxed in by mountains and rural farmland and, despite it's heady growth, feels somehow overlooked. To its independent credit perhaps.

The Xi'anese we met were less dogmatic than Beijingers and generally quicker to criticize the faults and wastes of the government. From the absent ventilation system in the Terracotta Army's sweltering main pit to the shoddily paved airport highway. Not only that, but the ravages of Mao's Cultural Revolution which infamously sought purge the country of its heritage was largely ignored by the local party officials in Xi'an. Consequentially, as Beijing's once proud city wall was dismantled for its bricks, Xi'an's Ming-era wall still stands pristine around the distinctly modern city center, critical to the city's unique personality.

By and large, and (as with all things China) for the moment, Xi'an seems on the cusp of finding some sort of healthy balance between its modern ambitions and its older heritage. You drive thru the stone arch of the 700 year old city gate, past name brand boutiques under faux Tang-style eaves, and you turn a corner to find yourself suddenly in the gorgeously ramshackle mayhem and crammed street markets of the city's old Muslim Quarter. And tucked somewhere in the maze of winding alleys tangled with bamboo scaffolding lies the thousand year old Great Mosque of Xi'an, her timeworn stones sagging into the very fabric of the city.

The Mosque in particular struck me as a quietly haunted place. Sweat drenched my clothes as I explored it's cobbled walkways and I all but forgot Xi'an's suffocating summer heat. (And Xi'an, I should pause to point out, boasts unspeakably hot summers. 110 degrees that day.) You find the Mosque like a treasure at the center of a crowded urban labyrinth. There it sits, untouched amid the bustle, an ancient place in a growing city, permitted the rare dignity of aging and crumbling like a revered elder.

And really, I can think of no more essential point on which to wrap up my impressions of Xi'an.

(For more images of the Great Mosque, the Terracotta Warriors, and other Xi'anese stuff, visit my Xi'an set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 6: Picture This

2009-07-25T11:58:00.001-07:00

rickshaw driver, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

I'll be uploading pictures from my trip over the next week or so. I've created a collection to this end on my flickr. It includes sets for Beijing, Xi'an, and Shanghai respectively and will, I imagine, be updated in intermittent fits of productivity. You're welcome to check back from time to time if you're at all curious.

All Under Heaven 5: Room With a View

2009-07-23T08:51:00.001-07:00

over shanghai, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Incidentally, this is my view as I type this from my hotel room on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai skyscraper. Beat that with a stick.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to return to the states. So naturally I'm pretty stressed about that, but what else is new.

All in all, it's been an extraordinary trip full of much more raw experience than free time to recount it. But, worry not - I'll do my best to fill in all the gaps after I settle down to a pace more like everyday life.

All Under Heaven 4: Totality

2009-07-22T08:40:00.001-07:00

totality, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Eclipses are creatures of extraordinary coincidence that occur when the sun and moon line up in the sky. An alignment so snug and precise we can just make out the sun's blazing atmosphere outlining the moon's shadow, as if they were made to fit like that. And never mind that the sun is about four hundred times as big as the moon, because it also just happens to be about four hundred times as far away. And so, owing to this odd little fluke of planetary geometry, we have on this singular planet in this fleeting instant of earthly history the rare pleasure of witnessing a total solar eclipse.

It started raining not long after our tour touched down in Shanghai. It was the night before the eclipse of the century and a thunderstorm was raging outside. And even though the worst of the weather had cleared by the morning, it was still dismayingly cloudy. Many among us, very bright individuals, were beginning to doubt we'd see much of an eclipse at all. The outlook was bleak and we'd all just about resigned ourselves to it.

But a chilly wind began to blow across the lake (an oddity in this corner of China at this time of year, I assure you), and soon we began to realize that it was no longer the clouds slowly darkening the sky overhead. To the contrary, the cloud cover was thinning even as the sky was dimming.

And then we saw it. That final sliver of crescent sunlight shining through the thin veil of clouds. There were distant gasps as the wind rolled off the water. The onlookers all stopped making plans to catch the next one and slowly rose from their seats. They lifted their eyes to the sight. The eclipse of the century. The eclipse we had all accepted we would not see.

And suddenly, very suddenly, totality hit and all was as black as night. Lit only by the ghostly ring of the sun's corona shining crisply through the broken clouds.

All night and all morning, the sky had remained oppressively cloudy. Right up until the very last minute or so before totality. The longest totality of the century I feel I have to add. And somehow, we saw every bloody minute of it.

It rained all the way back to the hotel.

Like I said, eclipses are creatures of extraordinary coincidence.

All Under Heaven 3: Small Steps & Giant Leaps

2009-07-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

We're leaving Xi'an in a bit to fly to the eclipse site just outside
of Shanghai so I don't have a lot of time. I just wanted to take a
moment to recognize that forty years ago today mankind singled itself
out from all other earthly species. Forty years ago we became the
first species in the natural history of our planet to look back on the
world that bore us from the dusty surface of another. Today is the day
we look to the heavens and remember that our fate is yet unwritten. We
decided to do something impossible, and forty years ago today it was
no longer impossible. Around 24 hours from now I will look up to see
the moon pass in front of the sun. And as the shadow of that lunar
sphere falls across east Asia, I'll smile and think to myself, "There
are human footprints up there." Remember that.

All Under Heaven 2: Photoblog Beijing

2009-07-19T08:01:00.001-07:00

lion dog, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

It's just about 11PM here in China (all of China, because China doesn't have time zones) and we're wrapping up our first exhausting day in Xi'an. More on all that later, but for now I just barely found some time to post a chunk of Beijing pictures on my flickr photostream. Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Ancient Observatory, the Tomb of the Mings, the Great Wall, etc, etc. Enjoy. The pictures pile up fast. Just one day in a new town and already there's much more where that came from. Stay tuned.

All Under Heaven 1: Nihao

2009-07-15T17:41:00.001-07:00

Nihao is the customary Chinese greeting. Basically, "hello."
Literally, "have you eaten?" (Or so Michele informs me.) Kind of a
rhetorical question I suppose. Like "what's up."

And, yes, as you've no doubt gathered, we've arrived safely in
Beijing. After a dauntingly protracted plane ride in a kind of perpetual dusk. We more or less skirted the continental margins from
Cali up to Alaska and over to Asia, never venturing too far over open
water. And the whole way the sun never quite came up and it never
quite went down, as if we were surfing the crest of twilight. It hung
just below the stark horizon in a precariously frozen sunset. And upon
finally landing in Beijing, that coy old sun finally decided it didn't
want to set at all, so it just came up. We'd taken off Tuesday night
and landed on Thursday morning. And somehow, strangely, Wednesday had vanished entirely. I don't know what happened to it.

I'm so over-stimulated by the sights and sounds of new continent and
the giddy exhaustion of just getting here that I'm afraid I'll have to
leave it at that. Except to say that our hotel is no more than a few
blocks from Tiananmen Square and that there's something surreal about
driving past that giant portrait of the Chairman flanked by billowing
scarlet flags, not as an iconic image in a textbook, but just an
ordinary sight on a city road from A to B. Here, between the airport
and the hotel, a vast square pulsing with the everyday traffic of any
city, almost oblivious to its own gravity. But the stately edifices of
the Forbidden City behind Mao's unblinking visage remind even the
casual out-of-towner, this is most certainly not just any city. This
is Beijing. This is China. Nihao.

All Under Heaven: Preface

2009-07-09T10:55:00.001-07:00

I'm going to China next week and it has me scared rather witless. Not
only because the signage will be only casually deferential to my
familiar alphabet, stacking the odds I will at some point order some
innocent noodles only to be met by a bowl of writhing octopus tendrils
or a seahorse on a stick, but also because the flight is a daunting 12
hours over the deepest, blackest ocean in the world and I seldom board
a plane, any plane, without feeling like I'm boarding a tragic news
bulletin.

I usually get over it roundabouts cruising altitude, but that leaves
-- what -- like ten hours during which my inability to sleep while
sitting up will put my notoriously shifty attention span to the
ultimate test.

Why go, you ask? Because! Because it's freaking China! The Far East!
Once the very definition of "other world!" (And to this day about as
far as you can go without leaving the planet.) And ah, but there's
another element... An eclipse! That's right, a total solar eclipse!
And so on the 40th anniversary of Apollo I am to meet the shadow of
the Moon on the other side of the world as it falls on the fabled city
of Shanghai. Are you kidding? Why *not* go?

As many times as I've strolled on the beach and shaded my eyes to the
lip of the sea, I can't help but wonder what's over there. There is
something inviting about that wide horizon. I want to cross it. I want
to say I've been to the Forbidden City and touched the Great Wall and
walked the Bund. And I want to feel the fleeting chill of a vast
cosmic shadow, and know for an instant the humbling size of things.

If that's not worth all the hassles and the phobias I don't know what
is.

So that's where I'll be: China, bouncing between Beijing, Xian, and
Shanghai. I'll try very hard to post some blogs and/or pictures, if
the censornet permits. Otherwise: not to worry, I'll bore your pants
off after I return.

~ Travis

(Mobilis in mobili.)

Golden State Parks

2009-06-08T21:41:00.001-07:00

golden state parks, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

As you may or may not have heard, the state of California faces a daunting budget crunch. And in a last ditch effort to close the gap, the Governor has lately proposed a series of massive cuts. Many, flagrantly contemptible. But without digressing to my usual partisan rants, I'm going to draw a bead on one cut in particular that I find especially odious.

I'm referring to the proposed closure of 220 out of California's 279 state parks. About eighty percent of our entire state park system - shuttered. I for one think this is a conspicuously bad idea for a number of reasons.

These are extraordinary places. Every one. Trust me, there is nothing arbitrary about their protected status. Beaches, canyons, and mountains; havens from urban madness. Where else can a thirty minute drive take you from the cumbersome bustle of one of the world's largest urban centers to the thunderous silence of a seaside cave on a lonely beach?

This is the people's interface with the natural world. No reservations required. These vital escapes are available to everyone. And for some, indeed these sites are they only escape available. In this, a time of soul-crushing financial hardship, closing the parks and beaches would deprive low-income families of the state's most democratic and affordable opportunity for recreation.

But I realize intrinsic social value can be difficult to quantify, so let's crunch the raw numbers. Funding for state parks is a tenth of one percent of the state's operating budget. That's it. Just one tenth of one percent. Or about $70 million a year. A bargain according to a recent study. Because it turns out the many millions of visitors to California's state parks inject over $4 billion of direct spending into local economies. I say again - a $70 million investment that yields a $4 *billion* return. You do the math.

Finally, consider the practical reality of closing these state parks, many poised at the margins of heavily populated areas. You're not locking the people out. You're locking the law-abiding people out. Never mind the inevitable vandalism or any of the more obvious criminal elements these closed parklands could suffer. Let's skip all that and talk about a very special breed of disaster never far from the nightmares of SoCal suburbanites. Let's talk about what happens when unsupervised campfires meet uncleared brush. See where I'm going with this? That's right. Wildfires. Just one such blaze could easily spread to nearby towns and neighborhoods and swiftly burn away that cool sliver of cash saved by closing the parks, several times over. Just one.

These cuts aren't only draconian, they're idiotic.

That's the practical case for the parks. And it's a sound one to be sure, but it doesn't really do justice to what's at stake. It doesn't give you a very clear sense of what it is we'd be losing.

These are the crown jewels of California. Not Hollywood. Not Citywalk. Not Rodeo Drive. These places. These parks. These beaches. When someone asks me why they call it to the Golden State, these are the places I show them.

People who don't much care for the state have a certain mental image of California. Cars idling on endless ribbons of pavement. Urban sprawl under a patina of yellow smog. They close their eyes and they see over-priced bistros and theme parks and they think this is California. But those of us who've seen her wild places know better. These untouched places, the golden sand and the velvet chaparral, these parks are the naked Golden State. This is the California I fell in love with.

This summer I'll be visiting and blogging what can only be a small fraction of these threatened parks. I invite you to join me in taking stock of this priceless natural heritage we're asked to surrender. I invite you to join me in asking why.

First up: Leo Carrillo State Park. Stay tuned...

***(In the meantime, you'll find more info about what you can do to fight the closures at the California State Parks Foundation.)

BSG

2009-03-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

A television series is ending tonight. Though, truth be told, it's less of a series than a single story unfolding, with all the intricacy and vividness of a Dickensian epic, piece by piece, into a complete thing. Of course, I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica. And I'd be remiss if I let this moment go by without speaking some small fraction of my peace.

If you have a television set and haven't been following this singular yarn, you've really been missing something. I know, it would be easy to glance only at the forbiddingly sci-fi title and dismiss it as something best appreciated by that rare, unfortunate breed of pubescent boy who knows Klingon. But you'd only be depriving yourself of something roundly described by men and women of all inclinations as the best thing on television.

BSG is, in fact, one of the clearest illustrations of why I so often prefer to work in the broader arena of science fiction and fantasy. The show has delved more often into the concepts of justice and virtue than the finest spun courtroom and police procedurals. It's given us deeper explorations of death and mortality than the most riveting medical dramas. It's found true heroism in the vilest of scoundrels and transgression in the purest hearts. We've seen genocide and war and faith and love and redemption. We've seen humanity stripped down, the rawest reflection of ourselves. We've seen our most fundamental dreams dashed. And we've found impossible hope in the darkness. Their story is not a fantastical escape. Their story is our story. And it has been, in short, a bolder and more revealing portrait of the human condition than the most intimate of earthbound dramas.

The uncompromising creators and magnificent cast have left us the rarest of gifts. An elegy for humanity, while we still live and breath. And so before the last battered and brilliant embers of mankind go into that endless night, I say to them from the bottom of my heart: Thank you.

So say we all.

CA/NY

2009-02-13T15:17:00.001-08:00

Overheard this conversation today. Two guys arguing about California
vs New York. Well you know me.

"I don't know how to say this," the older one says, "but California
doesn't do everything first."

"Maybe. But California does it best," I interjected.

He squinted at me. "New York is the scientific and cultural center of
America. Hands down. Hands down."

"Forty years ago," I added.

He looked at this mouthy upstart who just snarked his way into his New
York centered universe, a little baffled and irritated. "Well. I'm a
journalist and a lecturer," he said.

I wondered where his point was hiding there. And I nearly asked if he
coincidentally happened to hail from New York but thought the better
of my time.

So I simply chuckled a little and zipped up my JPL jacket before
walking away.

~ Travis

(Mobilis in mobili.)

In Honor of Darwin's 200th...

2009-02-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

I'm re-posting my epic Ben Stein Is a Fuckin Idiot series. Originally written in response to that pointlessly offensive documentary of his that I can't recall the name of, the whole thing sort of evolved into a broader meditation/explanation of evolutionary science. It's probably as user friendly an exploration of the evidence as I'm ever likely to muster.

Part 1: Bad Science
Part 2: Legwork
Part 3: Design Flaws
Part 4: Deep Time

There's a Part 5 I'm hoping to get around to someday.

In Defense of Zoos

2009-01-29T09:18:00.001-08:00

polar bear and fog, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

The LA Zoo's been trying to expand its elephant enclosure. And the
publicity surrounding the whole thing has spurred hardline animal
rights advocates to action. And so armed with more love than
understanding they pushed for the liberation of the elephant in
question. And but for the eleventh hour pleas of the zoo staff (people
with both love and understanding) they almost succeeded.

Yes, I like zoos. Many don't. It's become distressingly fashionable to
think of them as prisons. People go and see the zebra basking
motionless in the sun and they think that because it's not galloping
for its life the zebra must be sad. What they fail to realize is that
the real world's not a Disney cartoon and a zebra usually gallops
because something's chasing it.

Animals don't have a poetic yearning for big skies. Animals in the
wild are moved by the same yearnings any human would feel if left to
the fickle whims of nature. To survive.

Basically, animals need food and water. Their territories in the wild
are so vast not because they like to explore but because elemental
sustenance is so often hard to come by out there. The copious amount
of food an elephant needs to survive doesn't naturally occur in a snug
little area. And if it did, it's hard to imagine the herd ever wanting
to leave.

A zoo's neatly compressed habitat provides the bounties of a
rainforest. Free of all predators and rivals. With medical care thrown
in for good measure.

Why would a tiger prefer to juggle finding prey and dodging poachers
to life in a respectable zoo? Why would a polar bear choose to labor
from one uncertain meal to the next over a zoo's clockwork meal
ticket? Who among the legions of zoo detractors is prepared to give up
their own house with all its conveniently centralized comforts to fend
for themselves in the wild? Who among them would call that freedom?

What manner of dire existential distress does a modern zoo inflict on
her inhabitants? A zoo doesn't ask an animal to work or dress up or do
tricks. A zoo asks of an animal little more than it's continued
healthy existence. And goes to far far greater lengths than Mother
Nature to ensure it. So kids can come and see and learn and care. So
kids can remember an elephant as something grander than a picture in a
book. Because if we leave these creatures in the picture books next to
the pterodactyls and triceratops (and here's the heart of it really)
it won't be long before they follow those ancient giants into oblivion.

~ Travis

(Mobilis in mobili.)

Unrealistic Expectations

2008-11-06T12:55:00.000-08:00

First it was a lot of talk of fairy tales and dreamers and "He can't
beat Clinton." Along with the ol' "He's a paper tiger at this game."
Then I guess those were just paper-cuts that felled his "better
qualified" Democratic adversaries.

Then it was "He can't beat the Republicans." And, "He'll never land
PA." "His friends are a liability." "His middle name's a deal-breaker."

Then a lot of "Okay, but he seriously can't beat McCain."

But after McCain spent a summer getting smacked around in the polls it
became "This Palin character's got Obama's number."

It went from "He's all talk and no details," to "His details aren't
detailed enough," to "His details are lies." And, oddly, never really
"His details are bad."

The fact that he allegedly didn't have a message was basically the sum
of his opposition's message. Until he spelled it out for them and they
upgraded to "His message is total bullshit."

But in the rush to uniformly dismiss his lofty promises, no one on the
other side ever thought to make any of their own. Because I suppose a
telltale sign of politically crippling inexperience is the urge to do
shit.

They'd have still been calling him an "ineffectual upstart" in the end
if it didn't seem so silly in light of him drawing glowing
endorsements from the likes of Warren Buffett and General Powell in
addition to raising enough coin in a single month to fully fund two
McCain campaigns. So they threw "radical Marxist" and "Muslim sleeper
agent" at the wall.

Apparently the only salient difference between a naive dreamer and the
Antichrist is how many people are buying what you're selling. Not for
nothing but that coincidentally happens to be the biggest difference
between a naive dreamer and a good president. But what do I know?

Considering the litany of worn out epithets and dangling
prognostications from his detractors, I'm sticking to the only
prediction I've ever had:

"He'll do better than you expect."

It's been right more often than all the other stuff.

~ Travis

(sent from one of many possible futures)

Welcome to the Real America

2008-11-05T12:32:00.001-08:00

welcome to the real america, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

I'm so proud of my country today. Because we looked at this man and we didn't care that he didn't look like any president we've ever had before. We didn't care that his middle name was Hussein and not Walker. We didn't dock points for his ivy league intellect or liberal inclinations. We didn't care about all the labels and lies. We looked at him and listened to him. We heard his message and his ideas and evaluated them on their own merits. We permitted ourselves to find the promise of yankee ingenuity in what his opponents called "inexperience." We decided to see his imagination as a strength, not a weakness. And for the first time since the towers fell, we, as a nation, turned our backs on fear and prejudice and allowed ourselves to feel the hope that moved the hearts of our founders. We decided to believe the talk. To believe in him and believe in our neighbors. And in so doing to believe in the power of government to do good, finally realizing that the exquisite innovation of our democracy is that we the American people are the American government. We made a decision, collectively, to push the frontier of impossibility and to try to become something better. My God... I'm so proud of America today.

OBAMA (349; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Indiana (11)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
~~Missouri (11)~~
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)*
~~North Dakota (3)~~
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (173; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
~~Indiana (11)~~
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Missouri (11)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
North Dakota (3)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

*North Carolina is apparently a gray state. Straight 50/50 split. Last time I checked, Obama had a slim 10,000-something lead in the popular vote -- less than a 1% difference.

Election Update (8:00PM PST)

2008-11-04T19:09:00.000-08:00

(Summary: Barack Obama, son of a white woman from Kansas and a Kenyan shepherd, has been elected the 44th President of the United States...)

OBAMA (333; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
~~North Dakota (3)~~
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (146; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
North Dakota (3)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

Election Update (7:00PM PST)

2008-11-04T18:34:00.000-08:00

(Summary: In keeping with my original forecast, Obama wins New Mexico and Iowa while McCain claims Louisiana, West Virginia, Texas, and Utah...)

OBAMA (207; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
~~North Dakota (3)~~
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (129; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
North Dakota (3)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

Election Update (6:23PM PST): Obama Wins Ohio!!!

2008-11-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

(Summary: As predicted, Obama claims a crucial win in Ohio...)

OBAMA (195; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
~~North Dakota (3)~~
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (76; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
North Dakota (3)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

Election Update (6:00PM PST)

2008-11-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

(Summary: As predicted, Obama claims wins in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin while McCain picks up Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, and Wyoming. Conversely, I predicted North Dakota would go to Obama; it went to McCain...)

OBAMA (175; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
~~North Dakota (3)~~
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (76; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
North Dakota (3)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

Election Update (5:00PM PST)

2008-11-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

(Summary: No surprises in the first round. As expected, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and DC all go to Obama while Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee go to McCain.)

OBAMA (103; 367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
North Dakota (3)
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (34; 171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

standard = predicted
bold = realized
italics = add
~~strike-through~~ = subtract

Election Predictions

2008-11-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

At the risk of tempting the wrath of whatever from high atop the thing, here's the election night predictions I threw together a week or so ago (based mostly on raw polling data and a little on gut feelings)...

OBAMA (367)

California (55)
Colorado (9)
Connecticut (7)
Delaware (3)
Florida (27)
Hawaii (4)
Illinois (21)
Iowa (7)
Maine (4)
Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (12)
Michigan (17)
Minnesota (10)
Missouri (11)
Nevada (5)
New Hampshire (4)
New Jersey (15)
New Mexico (5)
New York (31)
North Carolina (15)
North Dakota (3)
Ohio (20)
Oregon (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Rhode Island (4)
Vermont (3)
Virginia (13)
Washington (11)
Wisconsin (10)
District of Columbia (3)

McCAIN (171)

Alabama (9)
Alaska (3)
Arizona (10)
Arkansas (6)
Georgia (15)
Idaho (4)
Indiana (11)
Kansas (6)
Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (9)
Mississippi (6)
Montana (3)
Nebraska (5)
Oklahoma (7)
South Carolina (8)
South Dakota (3)
Tennessee (11)
Texas (34)
Utah (5)
West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside, turn around three times, and spit.

Quote of the Day: The Living Infinite

2008-10-23T14:27:00.001-07:00

that's a moray, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath
is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where a man is never
alone, for he can feel life quivering all about him. The sea is only
a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist
inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.

-- Captain Nemo
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Obama's $3 Million Overhead Projector

2008-10-09T17:40:00.001-07:00

Carl Zeiss Universarium IX, Photo: Dave Bullock/eecue.

Well first of all it's not an "overhead projector." That's a pretty lavishly ignorant way of referring to the Zeiss Mark IX Universarium.

We've got one at the Griffith in Los Angeles. It's an impressive piece of equipment and Obama wanted it for Chicago's Adler Planetarium -- America's first planetarium, incidentally. It was intended to replace the Adler's old Mark IV which has fallen into the sort of embarrassing obsolescence you'd expect from a planetarium artifact that predates the Apollo Moon landing.

The new Mark IX projects a 360 degree starfield with seamlessly integrated cinematic elements. Essentially, it throws movies onto the most pristine, crystal-clear night sky you'll ever see.

Now, I've sat in the dark, looking up into the dome, and seen the Milky Way swell, billions and billions of stars streaming by as a hushed audience was taken to the outskirts of the universe. I've seen grown men wipe tears from their eyes to witness the humbling vastness of it all. To see a moat of dust emerge from the darkness and grow into a modest blue orb tucked amidst the sparkling sea of stars, and to realize with a bittersweet pang of recognition that this pale blue dot is our home.

But despite Obama's laudable efforts, it's an experience the schoolchildren of Chicago will not have. For now, they'll have to make do with the forty year old clunker with a burned-out Jupiter. And perhaps that's a small victory for men like John McCain who balk at the thought of shelling out three million dollars (the price of a single M1 Abrams tank) for a so-called "overhead projector."

I close my eyes and picture a country wherein war is holy and education is a boondoggle and the place I see is not my America.

Obama wanted to introduce the children of his city to the universe. If that's what you mean when you say "pork," John McCain, then as far as I'm concerned you may kindly go fuck yourself.

A Peek Inside the Mind of a McCain Supporter...

2008-09-24T01:11:00.000-07:00

What follows is my brief attempt to reconstruct the mindset and political positions of the typical McCain/Palin supporter... Ahem...

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT McCAIN:
His stick-to-it-iveness.
His perseverance.
His position on freedom.
His position on holding the door open for old ladies.
His position on integrity.
And also Sarah Palin says he's badass.
Also Sarah Palin is pro-babies.
And she has pretty glasses.

WHAT I HATE ABOUT OBAMA:
His tone of voice.
The fact that so many tools like him so much.
All those dumb columns behind him.
His middle name.
How he acts like he knows so much just because he went to Yale or whatever.
His stupid, lying muslim face.

And I'm sorry but if their internal political musings possess an iota of savvy or sophistication beyond those core points, then none have indicated as much to me.

Is Sarah Palin a Reptile?

2008-09-19T20:27:00.001-07:00

is sarah palin a reptile?, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

What has cold blood, a thick leathery hide, a virulent bite, dull wits, ample clutches of young, and an appetite for large, hoofed mammals?

Two things come to my mind: Komodo Dragons. And Sarah Palin.

Is Sarah Palin a hyper-evolved reptilian humanoid disguised as a person?

I don't know. But I tell you what -- I don't want to find out on Inauguration Day when she snaps McCain's neck in a single bite and assumes his throne.

Is Sarah Palin a reptile?

Bet your freedom on it if it suits you. But me? I'm voting for a mammal.

Is John McCain a Commie Sleeper Agent?

2008-09-19T20:23:00.001-07:00

is john mccain a commie sleeper agent?, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

In the midst of the Cold War, Chinese officials release American POWs captured during conflicts in Southeast Asia.

What the POWs don't know, what they can't know, is that they've been programmed by their Chinese handlers as Communist sleeper agents -- the perfect tools to infiltrate and ultimately overthrow the American government.

Just a movie?

Oh yeah?

Are you willing to gamble your freedom on it?

Not me...

Coastal Clean-Up Day

2008-09-19T14:06:00.001-07:00

coastal cleanup day, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

It is un-fucking believable how much garbage people leave on the beach and in the ocean. Everything in this bag (and indeed the bag itself) I picked up on a quarter mile stretch of beach in Santa Monica. Crumpled water bottles, candy wrappers, empty pretzel bags, mylar balloons, bottlecaps, liquor store bags, styrofoam cups, ad nauseum. How heavy was it? Something between a 12 pack of cokes and two full milk jugs.

Tomorrow's Coastal Clean-Up Day. So I'd love it if everybody went out to pick up some trash. Do it to feel righteous. Do it for the love of the sea. Or hey, if you're a Republican, do it to prove those preachy Hollywood liberals who made WALL*E wrong -- I don't care why you do it. Personally, I just want to walk on a clean beach some day and know that we're all on the same page about how lucky we all are.

The time is tomorrow at 9AM. The place is everywhere. I'll be lurking somewhere around lifeguard tower 24 just South of the Pier.

McCain & Palin Are Liars

2008-09-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

...and here are just a few of their greatest hits.

1. Obama supports sex ed for kindergartners.

This strikes me as the desperate accusation of a small, small man. The legislation Obama supported included provisions crafted with the aim to protect kindergartners from sex predators. I dunno -- maybe McCain and Palin think there's something tawdry about telling kids not to take candy from strangers.

2. Combatting government excess, Sarah Palin sold a state-owned luxury jet on E-Bay for a profit.

The state sold the jet thru a private broker after Palin failed to sell it on E-Bay. The deal lost the state money. There was no profit.

3. Sarah Palin said "thanks but no thanks" on that notorious Bridge to Nowhere.

Palin went so far as to campaign for the Bridge in her gubernatorial race. It was Congress who told Palin "no thanks." But even after they called off Palin's earmarks and it became clear the project would never be completed, Palin refused to return the federal money.

4. Obama will raise your taxes.

Do you as an individual make more than 200 grand a year? No? Then chill, he ain't raising your taxes. Maybe you should go on the internets and review the candidates' policies before you vote.

Sent with MagicPad

Casey's Cartoons

2008-09-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

Go visit Adam Casey's blog right this second. He piles more truth and humor into a single panel of art than I can get across in a coupla pages of ranting.

Just a Few Reasons Not to Vote Republican

2008-09-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

The Environment

Hey, do me a favor. Look down. What are you standing on? I'll give you a hint -- it's Earth. Republicans often seem giddy to screw the planet to spite the green liberal hipsters.

Drill, baby, drill? Seriously? Listen kids, you can go ahead and suck that milkshake dry if you want but you're not getting away with anything. You're just sucking the ground out from under your own feet. Like one of the goddamn three stooges.

Trying to out-fox the planet is like trying to out-fox the house you live in. Fill your house with poison gas and I promise you, the house won't give a flying fuck when you suffocate and die. The poison will simply clear and someone else will move in.

So come on out to the continental shelf and drill, baby, drill. But it won't bring your job back. You'll put off better ideas. You'll undercut the livelihood of people who live here. And in ten years you'll have saved yourself all of two fucking pennies. Which is just as well because it'll leave you with a few less beaches to drive to for the Summer.

The War in Iraq

"U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" That's what the crowd roared when Palin mentioned our troops. As if the whole affair was a hockey game instead of a catastrophic mess claiming our sons and daughters every day for no one reason anyone can seem to put their finger on (apart from being able to say "I told you so" to the EU).

McCain talks a lot about bringing them home "with honor." Senator, these kids signed up to man the homefront when the storms hit. These kids signed up on the blackest day of our history, after they saw the towers fall. These kids ran into the fire. Senator, they already had honor. And it's your party, not mine, who seems hell-bent on using it all up.

After all, what honor is there in reducing a living human to a mist of blood and bonedust with a shower of hot metal from on high? It fucks our boys up. It fucks up their heads and it fucks up their hearts and it fucks up their families and their kids. It's a messy, brutal business that should only be embarked upon when the objective is clear and true. To ask our bravest guardians and heroes to risk their lives and their souls for anything else -- religion, politics, ego, pride -- is the vilest betrayal I can imagine.

It's not a fucking hockey game. People are dying. Try to reign in the frat boy bullshit.

National Security

I'll paint you a brief picture of two men. One -- a religious fanatic. The other -- a secular dictator. One man attacked us. One attacked Kuwait. Which man is dead and which is free? And remind me again how you'll protect us...

Pro-life

I'll say this for the GOP. No one's more committed to protecting children...

Unborn kids in particular...

Not so much poor kids. Or sick kids. Or homeless kids. Or black kids. Or brown kids. Or the kids of illegal immigrant. Or the kids who fight and die in our wars. Or Iraqi kids. Or kids in Afghanistan. Or starving African kids. Or kids with two dads. Or kids with two moms. Or kids dying of anything stem cell research might cure. Or the kids orphaned by abortion clinic bombings. Or, for that matter, kids who've been raped and kids pregnant with kids of their own...

Unborn kids though, yeah! Fight the good fight and so forth!

"Pro-life?" Really? There's precious few with the stones to tell you to your face -- but when you call yourselves "pro-life," it sounds like a pretty tacky joke.

Gay Marriage

Plant your feet between two lovers and you won't be on your feet for very long. Love wins, kids. At the end of the day, love wins.

Creationism

I'm not going to vote for a Luddite. I'm not going to vote for a Flat Earther. And I'm not going to vote for a Creationist. I won't vote for anyone who's thrown up their hands and proclaimed, "I'm done learning shit!" You wouldn't let that kid teach the class when the teacher's away so why would you leave him with the nuclear launch codes? There was a time when men of faith declared that Galileo was full of shit for the same reasons. And yet it was his legacy, and not theirs, that took us to the Moon. Ignorance of science is ignorance of the wide world and beyond. And America can't afford to be ignorant any more. It's time for us to get back to what we do best.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

2008-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

From Yahoo News...

An Interior Department investigation describing a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by workers at the agency that issues offshore drilling leases and collects royalties hit lawmakers Wednesday just as they prepared for votes next week on expanding offshore drilling.

Settle down, lads. When they said, "Drill, baby, drill," they didn't mean "-the interns."

Oh, the party of values...

Obama's Words

2008-09-09T13:08:00.001-07:00

obama, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

A word cloud of Obama's speech to the DNC.

McCain's Words

2008-09-09T13:07:00.001-07:00

mccain, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

A word cloud of John McCain's RNC speech. The size of a word corresponds with the number of times it was used.

Who Am the Devil-Christ??? Food For Un-Thought!!!

2008-09-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

(A blow-by-blow reply to the most fuckwitted e-mail I've ever seen... Ever...)

A Trivia question in Sunday School: How long is the beast allowed to have authority in Revelations? Guess the answer?

Hmm, don't know off the top of my head. Do you mean the Beast Revelations describes rather lavishly as a leopard-like creature with seven heads and ten horns? A metaphor you'll no doubt insist... Well obviously, not to be taken literally... Unlike the seven days it took to make the world, the talking snake in the Garden of Eden, the giant boat that carried two of every animal alive, Jonah's fish-belly holiday, and the smouldering shrub that dictated the Ten Commandments... That's all real. But seven-headed dragons are obviously the stuff of fairy tales. Clearly a shrewd literary metaphor for this Obama guy...

Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you know what that is. Almost a four-year term to a Presidency. All I can say is Lord Have Mercy on us.!!!!!!

Holy shit! That's fucked up! Hey, you know who else who would have a reign eerily similar in length to a presidential term? Any president.

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40's, of MUSLIM descent...

Well, no. It actually makes no mention of any "anti-Christ" whatsoever. No middle-aged dude at all really. The whole tediously apocalyptic acid trip is really just a bunch of thousand-winged bandicoot-headed angels with flaming swords slaying one ludicrously psychedelic slut-beast after another.

Oh yeah... And Obama's not a Muslim...

...who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal...

George W. Bush?

...the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything...

Holy crap, it is Bush, isn't it?

Is it OBAMA??? I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to repost this as many times as you can!? Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet...do it!?

Umm... Okay!? Sounds good!? I'll get right on it!?$

I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who came out of nowhere.

"Now somebody remind me -- Does this Sarah What's-Her-Face spell her name with or without an h?"

Happy 227th Birthday, Los Angeles

2008-09-04T17:09:00.001-07:00

downtownlasunset, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

On this day in 1781 a band of 44 mixed-race settlers dubbed "Los Pobladores" arrived at a spot near the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains to found "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula." A somewhat florid name that would soon be truncated to simply "Los Angeles." A town that would rise to become an alpha world city and, on the way, earn the fitting epithet, "City of Dreams."

She's still changing. After all this time. Fast and Often. Maybe that's why tourists and visitors call her "flighty." But some of us who stay between the Summers see a bigger picture. We call it "evolution happening right before your eyes." And I wouldn't be at all surprised if one day not too long from now the rest of world woke up to find that Los Angeles had become something unexpected while no one was looking -- the Capital of the World.

Sarah Palin Quote of the Day

2008-09-03T00:33:00.001-07:00

Flare, originally uploaded by Bob Petrie.

"I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."

Walking With Dinosaurs

2008-09-02T23:30:00.001-07:00

stalking tyrant, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Been getting a few questions about these pictures. They're from a show called Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience based on the acclaimed BBC television miniseries of the same name.

Apart from winning three Emmys, making the BFI's 100 Greatest TV Programmes, and being the most expensive documentary series per minute, the original Walking With Dinosaurs TV series is noteworthy for approaching the subject as a nature documentary in the present tense. No dusty skeletons or talking heads, just one narrator and a whole lot of dinosaurs. A bit like a prehistoric Planet Earth. It even employs some subtle fourth wall trickery to this effect -- stampedes spatter the lens with dirt and errant tails will from time to time bump the camera.

And as my pictures perhaps hint, the stage show is infused with this same level of craftsmanship. These are wireless, fully-mobile, life-sized dinosaurs. And for my part, it's one of the most impressive spectacles I've ever seen. That's a twenty foot tall, forty five foot long t-rex in the picture. And it's movements are as fluid and slick as a living, breathing elephant. And again, no wires. It can stride from one end to the stage to the other, turn around, and come back. And it has a roar you can hear with your feet.

This may be the closest you'll ever get to being in the presence of flesh and blood dinosaurs.

The rest of my pictures are up on my flickr photostream. But trust me, you wanna see the show for yourself. Residents of the LA area will have another chance when it comes to the Staples Center from September 25th to the 28th. Check the show's website for more information.

2012 AD: The Actual For Real Apocalypse No Bullshit This Time

2008-08-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Things that will happen in the year 2012:

Poland, Bulgaria, & Latvia will adopt the Euro.
London will host the Summer Olympics.
Australia and Ireland will stop broadcasting analogue television.
California's ban on foie gras will take effect.

Things that will NOT happen in the year 2012:

Humanity will not evolve into a new species.
Earth will not transform into a New World.
A comet will not slam into Earth, snuffing out civilization as we know it.
Mankind will not experience a global psychic awakening.
Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Snake God of the Aztecs, will not return.

Workblog? Workblog.

2008-08-08T00:17:00.000-07:00

Another Reason Not to Take the Bus

2008-08-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Dunno how I'm just now hearing about this...

I'm distinctly uncomfortable living in a world where a guy can get his head sawed off with a hunting knife... on a bus... in front of 37 other passengers.

I blame performance art.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080801/ap_on_re_ca/canada_bus_stabbing

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

Picture of the Day: Big Guns

2008-08-01T11:06:00.001-07:00

470px-BB61_USS_Iowa_BB61_broadside_USN, originally uploaded by deane_crilley.

The USS Iowa fires a full broadside from her 406 mm guns.

Each bullet is about as tall as a grown man and weighs just shy of a ton. Each of the destroyer's nine 16 inch guns can fire these five foot shells at speeds exceeding two thousand feet per second up to a distance of seventeen miles (or from just off the Santa Monica Pier to Downtown Los Angeles).

Depending on range and other factors, a single round can blast a fifty foot wide, twenty foot deep crater in solid concrete. In the Vietnam War, an offshore destroyer could lob one shell into the jungle and clear an area up to five hundred yards across.

The destroyer is now retired but her guns are still the largest ever fired by the United States Navy.

Happy Friday!

Birthday of an Idea

2008-07-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

On this day, July 1st in the year 1858, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution thru natural selection was first unveiled to a public audience when the paper On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, co-authored by his unsung contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, was read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. It was an idea he'd been sitting on for a while for fear that the wider church-going public would condemn it as atheism - a heresy which at the time carried the penalty of certain incarceration.

I'll close by adding - the word "persecution" is too freely batted around from the pulpit. Persecution is not the academic exile of teachers who entertain intelligent design in their classrooms. Keeping an idea to yourself out of a fear that it's very utterance will bring down criminal indictment and leave you bound in irons - that's persecution.

Jury Duty; God Help Me

2008-06-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

Lecture me about civic duty. Go ahead. I will drop the frakking sky on your ass.

Straight Talk Express Stops in Santa Barbara, Promptly Insults Santa Barbarans

2008-06-24T12:23:00.001-07:00

Abandoned Oil Platform, originally uploaded by Scott London.

About 39 years ago, Unocal drilling platform Alpha in the Santa Barbara Channel blew out, spewing 3 million gallons of crude into California coastal waters. For weeks an appalled nation watched as sickly birds matted with noxious treacle retched and staggered across tar-smeared sands as thick, syrupy waves broke in viscid silence.

And today, John McCain's campaign has come to this very place to reiterate his call for resumed offshore drilling. His defenders will no doubt praise it as testament to his trademark boldness and candour. But those who remember cleaning up the broken promise of a chronically irresponsible industry, those who still scrape the rancid black gum from the soles of their feet, they will see it as what it is - the hollow, ill-considered promises of an empty suit either too eager or too myopic to give the long term consequences for my corner of America much consideration, and too old-fashioned to conceive of a legitimate, fresh solution.

I don't think the folks out here know how to not be offended by such staggering lack of imagination. "How do we solve the oil problem? We find more oil, of course." The fact that he's a tired old man will stop being a factor when he stops giving tired old answers.

I'll have to live in the America he makes. He won't. It's that simple.

The Things We Wouldn't Touch

2008-06-19T21:08:00.001-07:00

hurricane point, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

I'm not unsympathetic to the economic woes spurred by four dollar a gallon gas. But come on. Let's call a spade a spade. Raise your hand if you didn't know the stuff you were putting in your car was ever going to run out. Dwindling supply, ballooning demand... You're grown-ups. You crunch the numbers. Seriously, we saw it coming. I learned the difference between renewable and nonrenewable in like third grade.

Now President Bush and Senator McCain have a way to turn our problem into our children's problem. We drop the long-standing moratorium on offshore drilling and sink some wells off the California coast. It's not a real solution. Bush's own people concluded long ago that tapping offshore reserves would yield less than a two cent drop in price no sooner than two decades from now. It'll no more solve America's energy problem than Iraq solved America's terrorist problem. But it's an election year and the Republicans are up against an eight year stretch of very public failures. They know people are sore about gas prices so they're going to try to put Democrats on the unpopular side of the issue by making empty promises. They'll let you down gently after you put them in power.

But the gamesmanship isn't what infuriates me the most. What has me in a tiff is the audacity of Bush and McCain to ask California of all places to risk permanent environmental damage to our proudest treasure all for a temporary fix to an addiction that, if California had its druthers, would simply not exist.

We tried the offshore drilling thing. We know the cost better than Bush or McCain or anyone else. Because in 1969, following the malfunction of an offshore rig, California saw three million gallons of crude oil swamp Santa Barbara's idyllic beaches. It was a catastrophe that birthed modern California environmentalism and the memory still looms black and toxic whenever locals hear the words "offshore drilling." Now conservative pundits assure us that technological advances make another serious accident statistically unlikely. But I don't imagine the statistical improbability of last year's COSCO Busan spill is much consolation to the San Franciscans who had to clean the shit out of their bay.

California's environmental policies have created in that state the largest ethanol market in the US. California is the country's undisputed leader in renewable energy - solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Almost one fifth of the state's electricity comes from the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear plants. California went above and beyond the federal guidelines by promulgating far stricter emissions standards. The EPA under President Bush said no. I say again, the Environmental Protection Agency said to California, "Lay off the poor auto companies." Nevertheless, California has the lowest per capita energy consumption in the US and still accounts for thirteen percent of our national GDP and ranks in the top ten largest economies in the world. It'd be easier for red state conservatives to brand the "Left Coast" as a commune of Marxist tree-huggers if we didn't have the wealthiest gross state product in the country. Bar none. It can be done. California is demonstrating to the country that it's possible to be both economically prosperous and environmentally circumspect at the same time.

There is no state in the union that is working harder to create a viable renewable energy economy. And it's no coincidence. Because there is perhaps no other state as keenly aware of what's at stake. California possesses a staggering wealth of breathtaking natural wonders. California is home to the country's largest, most vital marine sanctuary. Weighing in at over 4,000 square nautical miles, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is globally recognized as one of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems in the world. California's storied coastline boasts a majesty and cultural prestige that's almost impossible to overstate. Not only is it a world-renowned destination, but it's quite literally a US National Monument - all of it, the whole stretch, 850 miles North to South and 12 miles out to sea. It's our home. We live here. The oil's still out there not because we haven't gotten around to drilling it, but because we know better than Bush, McCain, or Fox News where our treasures are.

It is ageless. It is immutable. It's worth more than the price of gas. You will die and turn to dust and the surf will still be clawing at the sands of Santa Barbara. Your SUV will be forgotten scrap and the cliffs of Big Sur will still tower above the Pacific fog. Every penny to your name will be scattered into oblivion and the whales will still come to the waters of Monterey Bay. These things are bigger than us. They are elemental and the world is the richer for having them in it. And if we can't recognize that, if we can't protect it, then I swear to God, I don't know what we're doing here.

The earth's like fifteen hundred times older than human civilization. Is it at all possible that it's something more than our life support system?

Californians are too often disparaged for having frivolous and superficial priorities. On this point, I will have to respectfully disagree with the rest of America. Because I don't believe there's anything frivolous or superficial about the majesty of the natural world. I can think of nothing more profoundly relevant. Sometime in the distant future, after the last chapter of humanity's story comes to a close, nothing will speak more clearly to who we were than that which we choose to leave behind. Perhaps the things we held sacred, the things we would not touch will say more about us than the things we carved our mark upon. A modest road thru a grove of ageless redwoods or a warehouse full of old pine furniture? Which will speak the better of us?

I'm heartened to imagine extraterrestrial explorers chancing upon earth after we're long gone and finding, in addition to all the abandoned highways and heaps of rusting combustion engines, an easily reached yet untapped reservoir of oil under a pristine, blazing ocean sunset. I rather like what that'd say about us.

To Know And Love the City of Angels

2008-05-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor just became one of my favorite human beings. I was just listening to KPCC's Off-Ramp when I heard Mr. Keillor read an op-ed he did for the LA Times, La pura vida beckons in LA. It pretty handily sums up my experience of the city from day one.

IT USED TO BE that Angelenos were much too cool to express outright pride in their city, feeling that boosterism is for yahoos from the Midwest. But when I was in L.A. last week, I got an earful about what a good place it is from friends who never said anything like that before. They had always talked about choking traffic, the unreality of real estate prices, the sprawl, blah blah blah. Now, suddenly, they couldn't live anyplace else.

The bright burst of civic feeling might have been because of the bad brush fires, including a blaze a month ago in Griffith Park in the heart of the city. Eight hundred firefighters put that fire down and immediately became heroes, and it showed people how much they loved L.A., just like your mother's colon operation jolts you into reality.

Everybody knows the comedy version of L.A. — the city of skinny tanned women, cellphones in hand, driving Suburbans the size of personnel carriers at 80 mph, taking a tiny child to the therapist to address self-esteem issues.

Those jokes play well in the flat parts of the country. A Midwesterner goes to L.A. and feels a certain sense of moral disapproval. The squalor, the opulence, the expense of natural resources to support middle-class life in an arid place, the fascination with the misshapen lives of young celebs. It isn't the Canaan it was for our grandparents. We look at it and see a rundown bungalow selling for half a million and cars inching along the 405 and say, "No thanks."

But it's good to know there's another point of view. The sun does shine there, and people enjoy their lives — the spirit of la pura vida, or the love of life for its own sake, the opposite of Calvinist America.

L.A. is more than ever a city of immigrants, the Europeans diminishing, the Rodriguezes and Jimenezes burgeoning. (Check out the phone book.) Immigrant culture isn't so pretty — you rent a cheap storefront, work 16-hour days, make your kids toe the mark — but there is dignity to it.

Unrestricted immigration is a dangerous thing — look at what happened to the Iroquois. They failed to impose border controls and, before they knew it, they were dying of infectious diseases they had no names for. In the case of California, however, it was Spanish before it was English, and now it's simply tending back that way.

I met up in L.A. with a niece from Boston who told me she was there for the first time in her life, so I did my uncle duty, got a car and took her for a spin as the sun was setting. We headed out on the Santa Monica Freeway toward the ocean, and some faintly disparaging remark she made ("it goes on forever") inspired me to wind up and give her a pitch for L.A., its gentle winters, its writers and musicians, its cosmopolitanism, its easygoing energies.

We walked along the beach, the Santa Monica Pier glittering in the distance, and then we cruised some lush streets around UCLA, and headed east on Sunset, the sunroof open, traffic juking and bopping around us, and then, looking for Melrose Avenue and the classic front gate of Paramount Studios, I lost my bearings and circled for a while in the dark. But it felt good to promote L.A. to an Easterner.

We live in a growly, snarky time, heavy irony clacking everywhere like people walking around in tap shoes, and it's a privilege to speak up for a despised city. Seattle, sit down. New York, shut up. Vermont, this is not about you. You want to hear about New Jersey or North Dakota or Nebraska, just ask.

Ben Stein Is a Fuckin Idiot 4: Deep Time

2008-04-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

Do something for me. Go grab some blank hundred page notebooks and I want you to write down four and a half billion X's. Yeah, I said billion. With a b.

Go on. I'll wait.

Well, no I won't. Because assuming you make one X every second of the day, without pausing for anything, you'd be finishing up in about 142 years. And anyway I don't think you have that many notebooks.

Four and a half billion, you see, is huge huge number. And scientist think it's very close to the total age of the earth. 4.5 billion years.

If for any reason, you think evolution far-fetched, think about your four and half billion X's. Do you think you could tell the difference between the X's on the page you started on and the ones on the page you ended on? I bet I could. And in that scenario, you'd actually be trying to make the same symbol over and over again. Imagine if every X was as different from the one before as a child from a parent.

And this is when they say - Four and a half billion years? Pffft, yeah right. How could they possibly know that?

Sheesh. One in every crowd. Alright, but you asked for it...

A few ways. We can get an idea from the rocks with radiometric dating of uranium-rich zircon - a hardy crystal which endures a barrage of wear and tear; erosion, tectonic stress, and even intense metamorphic heat and is thus uniquely positioned to tell us how long the ground beneath our feet has been there. We find another witness in our own sun. So we compare it to a host of other stars to get a rough idea of where it is in its life cycle; basically like gaging the age of a familiar face by comparing it to all the faces in a crowded train station. Additionally, we can analyze and date the isotopes in the oldest rocks of the solar system - meteorites - essentially the leftover bits from our formation. So you do all this and if the same number keeps cropping up - well - then you know you might just be onto something. And in these (and a lot of other) cases, the number was right around four and a half billion. So it's probably not a coincidence.

So if anyone had a grand design, they took their sweet time getting around to it.

Let's compress the earth's history into a single hypothetical day. Throw the whole 4.5 billion years up on a 24 hour clock...

For a vast majority of the day, from around 3 in the morning to 9 the following night - before sunrise to after sunset - there wasn't a scrap of life you could find without a microscope. Just single-celled organisms. That's eighteen out of twenty-four hours on our geo-clock, that the earth would have looked at first glance as barren and naked as an alien world.

Put another way, if you built a time machine and instructed it to take you to any day in the history of the earth - any day at all - you'd have a healthy 2 in 3 chance of arriving on a day on which you could scour the face of the earth and find nothing more complex than single-celled algae.

In fact, algae would be a bit of a lucky boon. Because the odds are 50/50 it would be a day on which you couldn't even find anything with a recognizable nucleus. Just simple, microscopic bacteria. I say again - fifty fifty.

And if you were hoping your time machine might drop you into a day when you could perhaps happen upon George Washington or Jesus - well then I'm afraid I have some bad news. The odds aren't very good. See, humans only just showed up around a minute before midnight. And recorded history? Like - everything from Gilgamesh to September 11th? Sorry about this - but on our little clock, well, it's just a few seconds. Yes, all of it. Moses. The Roman Empire. Columbus. The American Revolution. Charles Darwin. The Moon landing. The whole ball of wax. On our earth clock, it all happened in just a fraction of the time it took you to read this sentence.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you were to look at the entirety of the earth's four and a half billion year history, you'd have to conclude that if the planet was crafted for anything it'd have to be bacteria. With humanity being just a fleeting, evanescent flare of commotion at the end.

Just picture watching the life of our planet in time lapse. Take that 24 hour day and compress it further - say, a minute. In that minute, you see geology happening before your eyes. Even rock becomes fluid and dynamic. You watch the oceans form. You watch the continents drift and collide and crack apart again. You watch as huge green forests slowly unfurl and shrink and bloom again. You see icecaps spread like spilled milk.

And towards the end of that minute, if you're paying very very close attention, you might just see it. An unspeakably brief, blurred instant of light and bustle. A shudder. A blink of an eye. A hiccup. All of human civilization. In less than a hundredth of a second.

Ben Stein Is a Fuckin Idiot 3: Design Flaws

2008-04-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

So here's a thought experiment.

Picture a herd of gazelles. In one strange season the herd births three foals with three chance mutations. One is stark white from head to toe, one is golden like the tall grass, and the last only has three legs. Now, which of these three do you think is the most likely to live long enough to pass his mutation on to the next generation?

Creationists seem to constantly marvel at how exquisitely adapted we are. Well how else would it be? Even without divine intervention, how does it happen any other way?

What is the process by which defective traits could possibly be spread throughout generations finally to be piled up in a glaringly ill-suited modern population? How would you ever end up with a herd of clumsy, three-legged gazelles? The gazelle you picked - If his genes alone give him an edge on survival, why would he need divine help?

Douglas Adams had a salient analogy. He imagined a puddle of water waking up in a pothole, and marveling that the hole in which it found itself could be such a flawless fit. Every crack and crevice. The puddle therefore deduces that the hole must have been designed to have the puddle in it. Never daring to guess that perhaps water just fills things. Maybe that's just part of what water does.

And anyway, the truth of the matter is that we are far from perfect. The immaculate design of the human machine is pretty grossly over-stated. It works well enough. Sure, it has amazing properties. But it also has flaws, ungainly and easily-remedied frailties that would seem sloppy or slapdash in any paragon of design.

Let's start with the human eye... Oh, the eye. What fortuitous natural force could realize such a fine and sophisticated instrument? Intelligent Design backers are always quick to trumpet the mysterious perfection of the human eye. Here, they say, is all the proof you need of a Designer's hand. It's just too perfect to be anything else.

But our eyes really aren't that perfect. Not at all. They're wired back to front. Nerve bundles and blood vessels thread thru a hole at the back. All your light-sensing cells sit at the back wall of your eye. Which means light has to pass thru one whole layer to even get to the receptors. And that hole in the back - the one all the nerves and vessels come thru - no light receptors there. It leaves a blind spot. Your brain can generally fill in each eye's blind spot with input from the other eye, but still - it's not the octopus. He lucked out with a front-wired eye that has no blind spots. Birds have far fewer blood vessels in their eye. An eagle's vision is HD next to our humble VHS.

And there's more...

The female pelvis, maximized for bipedal locomotion, suffers childbirth that is far more painful, cumbersome, and dangerous than that of our primate cousins.

Males have external testicles that dangle precariously outside the protection of the body wall.

Women have reproductive plumbing that is so close to their waste disposal plumbing that it puts them at more or less constant risk to a host of disagreeable infections.

The Y chromosome can't swap genes with the X chromosome, so it's been slowly accumulating damage.

See? None of this is requisite in some profoundly mortal way. It's just careless shit.

Ever hit your funny bone? It's because your ulnar nerve runs on the outside of your elbow.

Ever have your wisdom teeth removed? Most of us have jaws that are just too small for this extra set of molars.

What was the logic behind giving men nipples?

Sure our bodies make a lot of what we need. With the critical and uncommon exception of vitamin C. A nutrient synthesized in a vast majority of other living things who, unlike us, will probably never come down with scurvy.

Did I mention the food you swallow cuts right past the opening of your windpipe? This seems to me like one of our more capricious design flaws.

The appendix is just a useless lump of flesh that does more or less nothing except succumb to potentially lethal infections.

And how about this? If even one of your heart cells - just one cell - starts to beat even a little out of sync, it can kick off a fatal electrical cascade that will shut down your heart on the spot. It's called sudden cardiac death and it happens to 300,000 Americans a year.

The mark of the omnipotent hand may be conspicuous perfection, but the mark of evolution is just benefits that outweigh the risks. Walking on two legs may leave the female pelvis awkwardly configured for childbirth, but the use of our hands is an undeniably fruitful perk. Or, when considering our cruel vulnerability to a boot in the groin or a crack on the funny bone, the risk of discomfort just isn't enough to threaten our survival as a species. Or in other cases, as with our oddly imperfect eye, there can be no doubt that it gives us an edge over something with no eyes at all.

Why should we be perfect? If evolution is a property of life just as flow is a property of water, why would we be perfect? If it is indeed a force of nature with no key and no plan, then of course it can't fine-tune the details. It can't bang out the unsightly dents. It can't dot the i's or cross the t's like a scrupulous Designer. It just gets us something that works well enough to succeed. Whatever flaws we have may seem blundering, maladroit, or just downright careless when considered as part of an omnipotent Creator's pièce de résistance. But aren't they exactly the sort of quirky glitches one might expect to find in a natural process that only demands general success and overall survival?

Critics of evolution look at the human body and they say a natural process can't possibly produce such divine perfection. You know, I actually agree. And I think if they took a closer look, they'd see - it sorta hasn't.

-T

Ben Stein Is a Fuckin Idiot 2: Legwork

2008-04-22T23:54:00.000-07:00

So first there was Creationism. Which was basically this - In the beginning God said, Check this out... Nothing in this hand... Nothing in this one... And SHAZAAM!

And suddenly there were rabbits, bandicoots, toadstools, blue whales, beetles, mammoths, giant redwoods, amoebas, seahorses, sunflowers, dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats and a naked white couple with fig leaf undies. Along with every other conceivable living creature that dwells or has ever dwelled on the planet. Yeah, I know - all in one place. Wild, right?

For some reason this never quite settled the matter for - well - pretty much anyone who ever went outside or payed the slightest bit of attention to their surroundings. And so the scientific community went out into the jungles, islands, and fossil beds of the world. They came back with dirt under their nails and bird shit in their hair and poured over their notes and specimens. And gradually, falteringly they began to put together an understanding of an apparent natural process they called evolution.

For whatever reason, tradition or intellectual laziness, adherents to the Shazaam hypothesis, individuals with clean nails and glossy hair and no specimens or notes, decided this evolution thing was total rubbish. But eventually even they had to admit the scientist had done all the legwork. All in all, it was getting pretty difficult to defend the belief that t-rexes ever lived in close proximity to frail, naked white people. The research spoke volumes. Something was indeed going on.

So, Creationists were left with one final choice - concede defeat or... like a dull-witted quarterback on the day his group presents their science experiment to the teacher, hastily carve their name under all the respectable work that had already been done. Er... Yeah... Sure... Go evolution! Woohoo! All part of the Lord's grand intelligent design! Knew it all along! Case closed. Let's order pizza!

And perhaps it really would have ended there. Except they wanted to get Intelligent Design into science classes and textbooks. All fine and well but for one piddling little detail...

It's not actually science.

Gasp! Why ever not?

Well just for starters, just picture the pop quiz...

The evolution of life is governed by...
a) Natural selection as outlined in the work of Charles Darwin
b) Chance mutations and neutral genetic drift propagating exponentially over time
c) a & b
d) The mysterious will of a vast, omnipotent Presence from beyond the edge of the cosmos

Seriously. Can we all please agree that last bit should never ever be in a science class? Words that read as if they could comfortably share a comic book panel with Galactus probably shouldn't be an answer in a biology quiz. But that's just a rule of thumb. Here's a bigger reason...

Falsifiability. Can a theory be disputed thru observation? Can it be argued with? Not - is it false? But rather - could it be proven false if it was?

Example - All species of turtles have shells. This may not be explicitly false. But you could, in theory, prove it to be false by simply looking around and finding a species with no shell. The statement itself contains an implied mechanism by which it could potentially be challenged. However - All species of turtles have souls - has no such mechanism. No amount of observation or testing or evidence could ever demonstrate it to be false. It's a statement that's snugly cloistered from any serious scrutiny. And therefore outside the bounds of science.

By introducing an unknowable spiritual entity, advocates of Intelligent Design have effectively concocted a "theory" that is conveniently incapable of being questioned, verified, or challenged in any way. Ever.

Evolution, on the other hand, has falsifiability. It's possible to imagine a scenario by which evolution could be refuted. Easily. In fact, I can give you several...

If evolution had never taken place, one would perhaps expect to regularly find complex vertebrate fossils sharing the same billion year old sediment layers as much simpler invertebrates. There'd be countless fossil beds waiting to be uncovered, with all manner of specimens smattered thru all layers in no particular order.

You could map the genomes of chimps and humans and if you found that they shared no meaningful genetic similarities whatsoever, it would be a major blow to evolution.

One might imagine a sequence of controlled lab experiments to observe bacteria in slowly changing conditions and watch as they perish in mere generations, totally incapable of adapting to their new environment.

Among the implications of evolution is the thinking that mammals and birds developed from two separate groups of prehistoric reptiles. You could seriously shake this up if, off in the jungles of Borneo or what have you, you discovered a species with combined traits. Say, a feathered deer or an emu that produces milk.

You could punch serious holes in evolution if you went out there and got dirt under your nails and found some shocking new evidence that the earth was somehow billions of years younger than anyone knew, dicing up those vast stretches of "deep time" evolution needs.

That's the thing about evolution. If it never happened, if it's just a total crock of shit, then finding evidence to that effect shouldn't be too terribly complicated. After all, the world is a big, dumb hunk of rock where stuff happens. It doesn't scheme to cover up the truth or throw up scads and scads of evidence for something that never actually went down. Everything that happens here, leaves its mark here. And it's not impossible to imagine what evidence against evolution might look like.

But what about Intelligent Design? Is it falsifiable? Maybe I'm wrong and it's totally an objective scientific theory that belongs in the classroom just as surely as Newton and Einstein. But first tell me about the legwork I'd have to do in order to put it to the test. I put it to you -

What might good, strong evidence against Intelligent Design look like?

- T

Photo Shortlisted For Travel Guide

2008-04-22T10:22:00.001-07:00

estuary, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

So I got this e-mail that one of my pictures has been shortlisted for inclusion in a California travel guide.

I wondered which one it could possible be. Was it that one I took on the Big Sur Coast? Or maybe the polar bear at the San Diego Zoo. Or maybe it was my all time favorite sunset. Or possibly my other favorite sunset.

But no. Turns out, oddly enough, it was this simple, modest picture of the marsh at Point Mugu State Park. I would never have guessed, but I'll take it.

Ben Stein Is a Fuckin Idiot 1: Bad Science

2008-04-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

My latest strategy for dealing with proponents of Intelligent Design has been to not dignify them with a response. But it seems that when you shut up and ignore them, they don't just go away like you'd hoped. No. They build museums. They lobby for legislation to get the bullshit into science classes. And apparently, they make movies...

Well, I've bit my tongue long enough I think. So let me just begin by saying -

Ben Stein, you sir, are a fuckin idiot.

Perhaps that's not civil. Perhaps it's even offensive. But I don't feel it's any less civil or more offensive than saddling evolutionary science with the blame for the Holocaust.

What's that? Yes, I said the Holocaust. In his new cinematic monument to stupidity, Ben Stein, quite pointedly, links the Nazi's "final solution" ideology with the work of Darwin.

Well you know what that means - history lesson time!

I did some checking up on this and it turns out racism is pretty old. Yeah, I know. Who knew, right? Antisemitism in particular is quite old. The Romans had a time with it, just to give you an idea. You got the Spanish Pogrom of 1066. You got the 1096 Pogrom in France and Germany. The 1190 massacre in London and York. And the widespread massacres of 1348 in Dresden, Stuttgart, Chilon, Ulm, and Strasbourg.

There's really a bunch more. And when you spread the net to include examples of racism applied to indigenous peoples, well then it gets ridiculously numerous pretty quick... But I'll stop there because you get the point. Which is that we're still like 511 years shy of the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. And I'll go out on a limb and say there's probably one or two racist bigots out there today who've still never gotten around to reading it. Just guessing about that.

I wonder how many of those bigots have never read Genesis... Hmmm, we'll save that head count for another day perhaps.

Blaming Nazi crimes on Darwin's research is about as ridiculous as blaming September 11th on the Wright Brothers. Or foisting Marie Curie with the albatross of Hiroshima.

The Nazis twisted evolutionary science to justify their place as the epicenter of the cosmos. You know it isn't science, Mr. Stein, because they begin with a single unequivocal, emotionally-charged belief - The Aryan people are the master race and are thus destined to rule the world. They then proceed to cherry pick any bits of information which may support it while dismissing whatever doesn't.

I'll throw in another example - Mankind is the grand masterwork of an omnipotent Creator and is therefore the very raison d'être of the universe. Again, we begin with the coincidentally flattering assumption of cosmic self-importance. And not in this respect unlike the Nazis, believers like yourself, Mr. Stein, struggle to make evolution jive with that raw emotional belief. Be wary, kids, of folks who say things like - Well, first off let's assume I'm the center of the fuckin universe. Because while that might be awfully convenient for you, it's just not science.

So what does science look like? Simply put, it doesn't start with a conclusion. It doesn't start with - Assuming I'm as important to the grand scheme of things as my mom said I was...

No, it starts with observations. Like - Hmm... That's strange. Seems the deeper I dig, the simpler the fossils I find. And after many many more observations, finally, a guess. Such as - Perhaps there is a natural process by which advantageous mutations cumulate over many billions of years to eventually give rise to new species. Elegant. Objective. Empirical. No ghosts. No angels or magic. No shuffling the deck to make room for your ego. Just a tentative, feasible guess.

My point is not to suggest that Creationists and defenders of Intelligent Design bear any resemblance to Nazis in character (or lack thereof). My point is simply to illustrate that science does not start with Bible verses and it doesn't start with Nordic fairy tales from the Nibelungenlied. It starts with opening your eyes and looking around. What you Creationists don't understand any better than those fuckwit Nazis is that when it's edited, modified, and twisted to bolster deep-rooted spiritual or extremist agendas you already held to begin with, it's not science no more. It's just propaganda.

And is that not precisely the sort of thing we should endeavor to keep out of the classroom?

- T

PS - Stick around. I'm just warming up.

I've Been Wondering...

2008-04-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

Why is it that Clinton gets to define the victory?

She's convinced everyone that, in order to be taken seriously, Obama must win in a territory that strongly favors her.

Okay... Right... But, conversely, why is Clinton not similarly required to claim anything in Obama's territories? She is, after all, behind. That's right - behind...

Yeah - no, it's not practically a tie. See, when you have two numbers and one is bigger than the other, that means someone's winning.

Maybe no one remembers but there was a time before all this started when she had it sewn up. She had the clear head start in putting together her campaign. She had the infrastructure. She had the war chest. She had the brand name. She was Hillary Clinton and she was inevitable. There was no one else. That was it. Inevitable. Destined. Ordained. It was her turn and she was going all the way.

And then something happened. This random young guy from Chicago came out of nowhere. He filled stadiums. He rallied the youth vote (a holy grail demographic that until now no candidate could ever seem to crack). He out-fundraised Clinton by staggering margins. She's barely keeping up with expenses. He put so-called red states into play for the Democrats. This newcomer came out of the clear blue and fought the Clinton juggernaut to a standstill.

If Clinton's organization can be so utterly paralyzed by someone she herself brands as a greenhorn - a candidate who started with less than half her resources - well then I think it seriously questions the value of experience, connections, and insider knowledge. Because, there's one of two things going on here - either the Clinton camp is far far more feeble than they've ever let on, or Obama is a serious political force to be reckoned with.

Either way, I'm not sure why she gets to frame the win.

Ill Defined

2008-04-03T10:41:00.001-07:00

The word "enormity" refers not to the "immensity" of something, but to
the "atrocity and horror" of something. To speak of the "enormity" of
the Grand Canyon makes no more sense than talking about the
"wickedness" of the Grand Canyon. "Enormity," kids: war crimes have
it, sweeping vistas do not.

Also, "decimate" does not mean "totally destroy." Just as "decimal"

refers to a base-10 counting system and a "decimeter" is a tenth of a

meter, "decimate" in fact means "to reduce by one tenth." So if an

army is "decimated" they've lost ten out of every hundred men. Not

exactly total obliteration, is it.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

The Sturnus Vulgaris Farce

2008-03-19T14:39:00.001-07:00

Stick with me - I'm going somewhere with this...

The European Starling is a non-native songbird. It's a small black
bird with an unctuous sheen and a shrill, bombilating call. It sounds
rather like a mockingbird practicing a car alarm impression... without
end. The attic of my last apartment had an infestation and between the
jittery raking of claws on drywall and that schizophrenic symphony of
purring and screeching I almost didn't finish Clash of the Titans.

They congregate in massive roosts that can comprise up to one and a
half million individuals. As you can well imagine with so many birds
in one place, the shit alone can quickly become a problem. The larger
roosts can drop a blanket of guano over 30 cm deep. It pretty much
kills whatever may be growing there (including the very tree the flock
is perched in). And it goes without saying that these million-strong
roosts (in addition to being the loudest thing you've ever heard) are
exceptional Petrie dishes for parasites and diseases like salmonella
and encephalitis.

Starlings are exuberantly aggressive in their nesting habits. They
cram themselves like sardines under the roof of your house where they
spend their time ripping out fiberglass insulation and liberally
soaking the rafters above your head with guano. In the wild and
backyard birdhouses they drive out other birds and promptly set up
shop in their nests. They are thus a serious threat to pretty much
every native and endemic North American species. Swallows, sparrows,
martins, woodpeckers, wrens, chickadees, bluebirds, and all the rest.
Starlings eat the eggs and chicks, peck the parents' skulls in, sit on
the nest, shit all over it, and screech incessantly.

There are 200 million starlings in North America and it is not only
perfectly legal to kill them anywhere anytime, but many states
actually have a standing bounty on the birds.

This present 200 million exploded from a modest population of 60
released into Central Park back in 1890. And here's the point I've
been getting to...

It wasn't an accident and it wasn't remotely practical. It was a
wealthy German immigrant named Eugene Schieffelin who was one day
overcome with the rather strange ambition to introduce to the wilds of
the New World - every bird mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare...

And there you have it - But for the eccentric whim of a 19th century
impressario and a passing line in Henry IV, we'd not today be saddled
with 200 million shrieking, shitting, vicious starlings.

There's your fact for the day.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

Thank Christ, Another Place I Can Bring My Gun

2008-03-18T18:58:00.001-07:00

The Washington Post reports, "Gun rules may be eased in U.S. parks..."

The NRA is lobbying for concealed firearms to be allowed in National
Parks (in states with concealed/carry allowances - which is to say
most states). Previously firearms in US parks were pretty roundly
verbotten and perhaps predictably National Park grounds have thus been
- well - not especially prone to violence or crime in the statistics.

Holy shit, breathe a long sigh of relief, America, because the
National Rifle Association swooped in to save the gun-less day. What a
fuckin fabulous idea. Next time I go to the Grand Canyon, I will rest
assured that constitutional liberty is protected because there are
boozed up frat boys, Texas militia members, and jumpy octogenarian
tourists all packing heat in those woods and I will feel that much safer.
Yep, thanks guys.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WGA Strike: Fade Out.

2008-02-12T22:10:00.001-08:00

The WGA strike is over.

The member vote to end the strike was approved by a 92.5% majority.

This wasn't a vote on the terms of the deal. This was a vote to
officially end the strike before the lengthy process of formalizing
and ratifying the agreement.

(How about that - us writers don't especially relish striking... Yeah,
who fuckin knew?)

Phew...

And with that - back to work...

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

The Word

2008-02-06T01:15:00.001-08:00

The results are mostly in but it looks like the morning will find
Obama with a wide advantage in states won and possibly a slim lead in
pledged delegates.

Clinton's camp will find some way to spin a victory out of it but to
me Obama is still the clear-eyed utopian visionary with a compelling
message and thunderclap gravitas the likes of which Democrats have not
seen since Kennedy. And the fact that he's still squaring against a
conniving nepotistic bureaucrat whose best selling point is her
uninspiring insistence that she's "ready" seems both bizarre and (with
luck) exceedingly temporary.

Obama can blow the doors off any room with the force of his oratory.
The way movie presidents do. There's a reason someone had an
itch to put that stump speech to music.

"Just words," they all say. False hopes. Platitudes. Empty promises.
Just words...

A friend of mine reminded me lately that we went to the Moon once upon
a time. Perhaps the single most ambitious human endeavor in history
and it was Kennedy who got us there. No, he didn't build the rocket or
fly the lander. He just dared to speak the words. And he did so with a
fire that would rally a hundred Americans, after a frenzied decade of
innovation, to finally realize that dream long after the dreamer
himself had fallen.

Words, you see, are mighty. And from the mouth of a bold and hopeful
president, words can move the cosmos. We used to be a nation that
understood that. I very much hope we still are.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

That New Frontier I Was Talking About...

2008-02-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

Yes We Can Obama Song by Will.I.Am

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Super Tuesday

2008-02-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

Make it happen...

WGA Strike: Nevermind, Strike That...

2008-02-03T13:59:00.000-08:00

Rumours of a resolution are apparently somewhat premature. Strike
still on.

C'est la vie...

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WGA Strike: V-Day!!!

2008-02-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

Word on the street tonight is that the writer's strike is over.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WGA Strike: A Word on 'New Media'

2008-01-13T20:57:00.000-08:00

This is exactly the sort of thing the WGA means when they say "new
media."

Netflix is gearing up to offer its 7 million subscribers unlimited
streaming access to its library of 90,000 titles on the internet.

This is not a speculative novelty or a vague wisp of innovation on the
distant horizon. It's happening now and money is being made. With
this, DVR, Apple TV, and the like new media is how more and more
people are viewing content. As the set-top box becomes more
interactive, the model for broadcast residuals becomes increasingly
superfluous. The folks who create the content deserve SOME cut of the
revenue generated by their ideas for as long as those ideas generate
revenue.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

> Netflix expands Internet viewing option - Yahoo! News
>
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080113/ap_on_hi_te/unlimited_netflix_6
>

WGA Strike: Breaking News

2008-01-11T22:32:00.001-08:00

The aforementioned talks between the WGA and The Weinstein Company
have coalesced this afternoon into yet another interim deal.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WGA Strike: The Brothers Warner

2008-01-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Warner Bros. has decided to sack over a thousand employees to mitigate
the prohibitive cost of the strike.

They've opted to pursue this temporary and severre remedy over the
more permanent alternative of exploring the WGA's proposals -
proposals, it has to be said, which proved reasonable enough to yield
agreements with far less affluent entities United Artists and David
Letterman and ongoing discussions with Lionsgate and the Weinsteins.

Writers Guild members have been directed to converge on the Warners
lot on Monday Jan 14th in solidarity with the thousand studio workers
facing this unfair and unnecessary mass layoff.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WGA Strike: The Golden Globes

2008-01-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

The Hollywood Foreign Press has officially cancelled the Globes' award
ceremony in favor of a press conference announcing the winners.

This will likely deal a major blow to the studios' award season box
office and has cost ceremony broadcaster NBC as much as 10 million
dollars in ad revenue.

~ Travis

(sent via technology!)

WALL*E

2007-12-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

I can't think of many movies this year I'm more excited about than this...

WALL*E Exclusive Trailer

WGA Strike: Swag

2007-12-10T21:07:00.001-08:00

Strike tee-shirts printed locally by LA's American Apparel.
All profits go to the WGA Support Fund to help non-WGA members
affected by the strike.

http://strikeswag.com/

~ Travis

(sent via - you're not gonna believe this - a mobile freakin
telephone!!!)

WGA Strike: Write Aid

2007-12-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

Write Aid is a one night only event conceived by members of SAG and the WGA to benefit industry workers imperiled by the strike.

The lineup includes Eddie Izzard, Lewis Black, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and Tenacious D. So I know I'm going. It's set for Friday, December 14th at 8P in UCLA's Royce Hall.

Last I checked, tickets were going very fast so visit the UCLA Live website or contact Ticketmaster for details. Again, it's for a worthy cause.

WGA Strike: Roger A. Trevanti

2007-12-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

Roger Trevanti explains the AMPTP's new proposal...

WGA Strike: Update

2007-12-07T22:24:00.000-08:00

This from the AMPTP's statement this evening after talks broke down:

We're puzzled and disheartened by an ongoing WGA negotiating strategy that seems designed to delay or derail talks rather than facilitate an end to the strike... Their quixotic pursuit of radical demands led them to begin this strike and now has caused this breakdown in negotiations. We hope that the WGA will come back to this table with a rational plan that can lead us to a fair and equitable resolution to a strike that is causing so much distress for so many people in our industry and community.

What'd I tell you?

Lastly - quixotic? Seriously? Why don't you just put that thesaurus down before you say something you don't mean.

WGA Strike: All About the Benjamins

2007-12-07T15:16:00.001-08:00

The most insidious stereotype about Hollywood screenwriters is that we all lead facile worriless lives of disproportionate affluence and privilege. No doubt SOME do but most don't at all. And I don't have to speculate about that, the numbers talk.

The WGA requires members to make at least $30,000 a year to qualify for health benefits. At present, half of the Guild's 12,000 members go without.

The median annual income in the US is about $44,000 a year.

I'm going to say that again: half - HALF - of those Hollywood writers make less than three quarters of the median national income and pay their medical expenses out of pocket.

That's all I'm sayin'.

~ Travis

(sent via - you're not gonna believe this - a mobile freakin telephone!!!)

WGA Strike: War

2007-12-07T14:37:00.001-08:00

Reports indicate the AMPTP has hired a team of cutthroat PR advisors.
Talks with the WGA have endured all week but speculation has it that
this move anticipates an impasse and that the AMPTP is gearing up for
a massive PR assault on the strikers the moment the talks break down.

Today we're hearing back-channel reports that at least one studio is
prepared to sacrifice the Spring AND Fall TV seasons to ride out the
strike for the long haul. Word is the AMPTP plans to abruptly cut off
talks by accusing the writers of being persistently uncompromising and
hard-line. The WGA leadership has preemptively refuted this charge by
challenging the AMPTP to join them at the bargaining table thru the
Christmas and New Years holiday.

At any rate, it seems we may get a hint by the end of the day as to
just how long this strike may go...

~ Travis

(sent via - you're not gonna believe this - a mobile freakin
telephone!!!)

Runoff

2007-12-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, let's narrow this down a bit. Last one, I swear...

Vote once - Ted, lookin at you, man - ONCE.

You!!!

2007-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to sort out what gets my readers' hearts pumping. So be a dear and click the sort of posts you like most. Thanks!

((And this of course does not include anything about the WGA Strike. Was planning to amp up the coverage of that anyway.))

WGA Strike: Rumour Control

2007-11-30T14:17:00.000-08:00

This week negotiations resumed under a news blackout. Rumours swarmed
that the strike was practically over. After 4 days, talks ended and
the studios released an optimistic statement lauding a proposed
"breakthrough" compromise sunnily labeled the New Economic Partnership
on which they'd be awaiting the Guild's inevitable approval. And after
a weekend recess, the WGA negotiating committee will return to the
table, refute the offer, and appear insane.

So what happened? We all thought everything was going so well.

Though details of the AMPTP's proposed New Economic Partnership remain
scarce in public releases, the offer as outlined to WGA members late
Thursday night was dishearteningly similar to the miserly offer the
AMPTP left on the table just prior to the strike. And what's with the
disparity?

Speculation is the negotiations were instituted and subsequent rumours
of a "done deal" spread by studio interests in order to create and
nurture hope of an end to the strike only to dash those hopes. The way
this sort of strategy (and it's not an uncommon one) would play out is
that the writers, having expected a settlement and left in the throes
of disappointment, would be more inclined to take a shitty deal
without the studios having to concede anything.

The upshot is that it smacks of a desperate last resort, doesn't it?

~ Travis

(sent via - you're not gonna believe this - a mobile freakin
telephone!!!)

Strange Sounds Coming From Saturn

2007-11-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

The Cassini spacecraft, in orbit of Saturn going on four years now, has beamed back some bizarre sounds coming from the planet's poles.

The spooky radio emissions sound for all the world like some vast theremin. The lurching, wailing tremolo is, I shit you not, like something you'd hear in The Day the Earth Stood Still or Forbidden Planet.

It is the sound of Saturn's polar auroras (rather like those on earth). So not entirely without explanation, though it must be said this is a phenomenon all but tenuously understood.

And taken with the notoriously enigmatic hexagonal vortex also circling Saturn's north pole, who knows, there may indeed be something distinctly science fiction happening beneath the swirling clouds of ammonia.

Nevertheless, is it not weirdly apt for it to sound like this. Seems we always knew it would. Somehow it had to.

NASA - Eerie sounds from Saturn

(Thanks to Ted for pointing me to this story.)

WGA Strike: Opinion Polls

2007-11-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

A flurry of new public opinion polls reveal a majority of Americans support the WGA's strike efforts.

The numbers break down thus: 63% of Americans side with the writers, 33% are unsure, and a piddling four percent stand behind the corporations.

A survey conducted exclusively in the greater Los Angeles area showed that 69% of locals favour the writers, eight percent support the studios, and 22% remain undecided.

The press release on the WGA's website includes comments from various industry experts and labor economists to put the results in a greater context but the gist of it is this - the creators of a lucrative commodity are squaring off against shareholders in the brand spankin new arena of 21st century technology for a fair cut of the profits. And the American working public understands that when the guy with the idea gets a raw deal, we all get screwed.

WGA Strike: Day 2

2007-11-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

I've got many opinions about the strike. And if it goes on long
enough, I'll have ample time to ennumerate them all in lavish
cinematic detail. But for now, a better writer has readably
articulated many of them already. What do I think of the strike? Read
Joss Whedon's blog.

Yeah... What he said.

Oh yeah, sorta related, on the off chance anyone from the NY Times is
reading - Do you guys ever get dizzy circling the drain or, after a
while, do you just get used to it?

~ Travis

(sent via - you're not gonna believe this - a mobile freakin
telephone!!!)

Considering taking my work blog public. Any thoughts?
	About frakking time! Would love to read it!
	Hrm... I would not be opposed to reading it...
	Who are you and what do you do?

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What should I focus new posts on?
	More thrilling tales of strange science!!!
	Rants!!! Pick stuff you don't like and go to town!

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I'd love to see more with -
	space, dinosaurs, and all that science shit
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