This one may actually be Spambot of the month:
But a smiling visitant here to share the love.
Mesmerizing music
Every now and then I become mesmerized by a certain musician. Luckily, the force of each palls after a while, or I would be sliding inexorably into obsession territory, like the woman in Richard Thompson’s “From Galway to Graceland,” whose life was upended by her devotion to Elvis:
Now, I never was especially into Elvis. Don’t get me wrong; I certainly didn’t hate him, and I rather liked some of his music—accent on the “rather.” I understood that he was a huge phenom, but I just had no particular interest at all.
But Richard Thompson, yes! Leonard Cohen, ditto! And now Mark Knopfler, sigh!
What do these guys have in common?
Well, to start with, they’re guys. Although I like some female vocalists (Nina Simone, for example; although come to think of it she sometimes sounds a tiny bit like a guy), I seem to prefer male singers. I’m not sure why (except for the obvious), but it’s something that hasn’t escaped my notice.
Next, two of them are Brits (Thompson, Knopfler) and one Canadian (Cohen). Hmmm. And the Brits both have some Scots ancestry or influence. Double hmmm; perhaps that means something? Two went bald early (Thompson and Knopfler again). Two are great guitarists (same two).
None are what you’d call handsome, but they look great to me. All are now over 60 (ah, but I’m no spring chicken myself).
And none of them have beautiful voices. But they have distinctive voices, which is even better to me, voices that immediately got my full attention the first time I ever heard them. Voices that resemble each other a bit in that they have a certain gruffness and lack of polish, but which they use as well (or nearly as well) as they use the instruments they play (or in the case of Cohen, that others play) to accompany them—bending and shading and wobbling in just the right places, sometimes whispering for effect or when overcome with emotion.
Because I’ve decided that all three have another thing in common: the ability to convey feelings through amazing lyrics, and through a voice and demeanor that seems quiet and restrained but is really a repository for barely-leashed emotions of great depth and intensity. All three are poets—Cohen a “real” poet before he ever became a singer/songwriter, and the other two are poets masquerading as lyricists.
Note I wrote “singer/songwriter” for Cohen. I could say the same for Thompson and Knopfler, because they write virtually all their own material, and of course in the case of Thompson and Knopfler they play it, too. I cannot even imagine how hard it is to do all three at such a high level, but they manage it quite nicely. And that’s a huge part of the appeal, as well.
But in the final analysis the appeal is mysterious and mesmerizing. With Knopfler, almost literally so; I’ve had to tear myself away from YouTube, lest I go the way of Thompson’s Elvis-obsessed lady in pink from Galway (“they dragged her away, it was handcuffs this time…”).
You probably haven’t heard the end of me and Knopfler. But for now I’ll content myself with offering this video of “Tunnel of Love” (lyrics here, in case you’re having trouble hearing them). It was recorded in 1983, when Knopfler was in his early 30s and still had some hair; you’ll have to ignore (or enjoy) the 80s ambiance and fashion. It’s long, because I can’t bear to cut a note of it. But if you want to go forward and see less, the heart of the song begins around minute 4:00, the mostly instrumental part begins about 7:25, and Mark really gets going around 9:45. Note, at the end, the smile of the exhausted drummer, and then Mark’s funny little finger-fluttering wave:
[NOTE: Interestingly enough, Thompson has written a song that reminds me somewhat of “Tunnel of Love,” called “Wall of Death.” It also uses an amusement park and its rides as a metaphor for…for…well, see for yourself:
Here’s an explanation of the Wall of Death, in case you’re not familiar with it.]
[ADDENDUM: Here we go:
Two out of three ain’t bad.]
It’s that time again—last time for now
[NOTE: Bumped up once more, for the last time this cycle.]
Yes, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves.
But yes, it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.
Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. Comments are a very big part of what makes this blog work.
I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. But I’ll be discreet about it. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on NPR, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.
Marilyn Hagerty, the Olive Garden, and me
By now you’ve probably encountered the tale of 85-year-old Marilyn Hagerty’s polite column on the Olive Garden in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the middle-America restaurant review that went viral.
Initially, cynical bloggers and twitterers made fun of Ms. Hagerty’s respect for the pseudo-Italian restaurant chain. But then many others rallied to defend her, including her son, a journalist at the WSJ.
Ms. Hagerty sounds like a wonderful gal of a sort that’s becoming all too rare these days: feisty and gentle at the same time, without pretension or guile.
But I’m not here to defend Hagerty; she’s got enough people doing that. I’m here to defend the Olive Garden.
Now, anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I like food, and many of my food preferences are somewhat gourmet and/or exotic, although not excessively so. But I’ve been known to frequent the more pedestrian Olive Garden, and I rather enjoy it.
That’s not to say that I’m drawn to many of their offerings; I’m not. But I do like their prices (reasonable), their hours (pretty late), and some of their dishes. For example, the minestrone soup at the Olive Garden (and now I’m starting to sound like Hagerty) is quite serviceable. What’s more, it’s good for you, inexpensive, and you can get as much as you want. It comes with any of the entrees, although you have other choices as accompaniments, such as the salad (iceberg lettuce; ugh!).
But Sausage and Peppers Rustica is my very favorite entree there. It disappeared for a while, alas, but I’m happy to say it’s returned. Unlike the minestrone, I wouldn’t exactly call this a health food, but those peppers have got to be worth something, right? And only $12.25, folks, for the whole shebang:
Newt the spoiler
I’m in agreement with Sean Trende about Newt Gingrich’s goal at this point. Even Gingrich probably doesn’t really think he’s got a chance to win. He just wants to try to keep Romney from getting enough votes to go to the convention with the nomination in the bag.
Whether he will succeed in this endeavor (Newt, that is) is hard to say. If you read Trende’s article, he does an analysis of the trends (can’t resist the puns; sorry) and answers “maybe.”
If so, this would lead to the much-ballyhooed “brokered convention.” I haven’t a clue why anyone would want this—except Newt Gingrich, whom I assume would have the personal satisfaction of both screwing Mitt Romney up and perhaps extracting some promise or other from him in exchange for some delegates. Santorum and Paul might want it to happen for the latter reason, as well. But a brokered convention would (a) throw the decision back into the hands of that hated group, the “Republican elites” (b) further weaken the party in the eyes of voters; and (c) probably end up with Romney as nominee anyway. Which alternative “new” person do you think those “elites” would choose? Sarah Palin? Marc Rubio? Don’t think so.
Ah, you say, but Gingrich and Santorum would form an alliance and one of them would be the choice. That presupposes that their total would be enough to reach the nominating threshold, and right now that doesn’t seem any more likely (and is possibly less likely?) than Romney having it sewn up going in. Which brings us to Ron Paul, who’s not likely to drop out of the race, and whose delegates might just be enough to put Romney over the top. Paul appears eager to deny the nomination to Santorum, whom he perceives as especially un-libertarian.
If you go to RealClearPolitics elections, and look on the upper right, you’ll find the current GOP delegate count. Romney’s number right now (496) is greater than the total of the other three candidates combined (Santorum 236, Gingrich 141, Paul 67, which totals 444). Whether or not that continues, Romney will almost undoubtedly remain the leader in delegates, even if he doesn’t win it outright.
Does anyone really think it would help Republican chances if Santorum or Gingrich, the less popular candidates, were to somehow combine forces and one of them became the Republican nominee? I certainly don’t, for a host of reasons, perhaps the most important boiling down to the fact that I don’t think either has a chance of beating Obama, and I think Romney has just that—a chance of beating Obama.
Post-primary: Alabama and Mississippi
Let’s take a look at the results from yesterday’s primaries in the South:
Mississippi:
Santorum: 32.8%
Gingrich: 31.2%
Romney: 30.6%
Alabama:
Santorum: 34.5%
Gingrich: 29.3%
Romney: 29.0%
Ron Paul got between 4% and 5% in both states.
For three-way races, those are incredibly close, especially the Mississippi results.
If these were winner-take-all states, Santorum would be flying high. But they’re not (although, understandably, he’s feeling pretty good). Therefore the strongest message I take from yesterday’s primary results is how little has changed as a result of them (the Hawaii caucuses, which Romney won 45% to Santorum’s 25.3%, Paul’s 18.3% and Gingrich’s 11%, have hardly been mentioned). Because the Alabama and Mississippi delegates are awarded proportionately, and because both states were roughly split 3-ways among Santorum, Gingrich, and Romney, these primaries end up acting more or less as placeholders in terms of delegate counts.
That’s odd, isn’t it? But no odder than this entire primary season has been.
Here are the counts at present:
The partial allocation of delegates from Tuesday’s voting states left Mr. Romney with 495 in an Associated Press count, out of the 1,144 needed to win the nomination. Mr. Santorum had 252, Mr. Gingrich 131 and Ron Paul 48.
What’s more, there are only 4 winner-take-all states left: “Washington, D.C., on April 3; Delaware on April 24; New Jersey on June 5; and Utah on June 26.” Santorum isn’t on the ballot in DC, and we all know who will win Utah. New Jersey would seem to be Romney country, and perhaps Delaware also (can’t find a poll on that right now). If you look at the other states with future primaries that are proportional, you’ll see that the larger states with the most delegates (New York, Texas, California) show Romney in the lead as well (at least so far), with Santorum leading in Pennsylvania (his home state) and some of the remaining southern states as well as Wisconsin.
In Mississippi and Alabama last night, almost anything that could be said about one candidate’s failure to seal the deal could also be said about the failure of the other two to do the same. It is clear that—despite Santorum’s post-primary ebullience—no single candidate has caught on, and that each represents a separate and distinct faction of the Republican Party. It does no good to speculate how the results would have differed if one of the candidates had dropped out, either, because (a) that didn’t happen (b) it seems unlikely to happen during the next few primaries; and (c) even if it did, that person’s votes might be split fairly evenly between the two remaining candidates.
But a Gingrich dropout is clearly Santorum’s hope, and he evidently believes that if that were to happen he would be the clear beneficiary. I’m not so certain, but it certainly could happen, although I don’t see Gingrich going that route in time to save Santorum. And if Romney somehow fails to gather the requisite number of votes for a nomination by the time the convention rolls around, the wheeling and dealing can go any of several ways; Santorum can’t count on Gingrich’s delegates to be ceded to him because of his supposedly superior conservatism.
As for specific things I could note about each candidate as a result of yesterday’s vote, I observe that if the South is supposed to be Gingrich’s strength, then he was the biggest loser. Santorum is from Pennsylvania, but his positions—and especially his social con tendencies—make him a natural in the South, and these results show it. I think he will continue to be strong there, unless he does something really foolish. But even so, although Santorum did better than the polls predicted and won both states, he didn’t do all that well; his margins were small. Neither, of course, did Romney. But the fact that he did almost as well as the other two indicates that he’s not anathema in the deep South, either.
Let’s tackle the elephant in the room: the preponderance of evangelicals in this part of the country. Large numbers of voters in both states identify themselves that way (for example, 80% in Mississippi), among the largest percentages of any states:
In both states, the vast majority of voters identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, and about three-quarters said it mattered at least somewhat that a candidate share their religious beliefs. In both Alabama and Mississippi, Santorum held near-20 point advantages among those evangelicals who said shared beliefs mattered “a great deal” to their choice. Romney and Gingrich were more competitive among evangelical voters less focused on common religious beliefs.
There is very little question that Romney’s Mormonism hurt him with these voters. The bigger question is whether that would matter in a matchup with Obama. I tend to doubt they would prefer Obama in numbers large enough to turn these red states blue.
Both primaries were open ones. It’s hard to say whether that affected the results, or how, because we don’t know how many “real” Democrats voted, and whether they voted to gum up the works, and if so who they voted for.
What we do know is that this thing seems poised to go on without clarity or resolution for quite some time. And that’s a disappointment, because (as I indicated yesterday) the longer it goes on the more the Republicans tear each other up, and the less time there is to focus like a laser on the real opponent, Obama.
The good life, the long life
In yesterday’s thread about eating beef, commenter “SteveH” asks:
Where does this obsession with quanity of life come from? I could understand it if we lost years on the average lifespan over the past 100 years. But we’ve gained tremendously.
Surely this must be some sort of artifact of a people with a declining faith in what will happen to them when they die.
I think he’s onto something. But there’s another factor at work, as well: the phenomenon is a paradoxical result of the gains in lifespan.
Long ago—actually, not so very long ago—child mortality was great. Visit any old cemetery and you’ll see the evidence in the tiny headstones for the dead babies, and the short lifespans of so many women dead in childbirth. Then there is the evidence of epidemics, which could sweep through a family and kill all the members (or nearly all) in a couple of days or weeks, leaving family plots whose headstones have death dates that cluster around each other.
The possibilities were nearly endless: infectious diseases of all types, both endemic and epidemic, familiar and strange; accidents that would not be fatal nowadays but which back then caused rampant infection and death; and even the diseases that still plague us such as cancer and heart disease, but always incurable then and almost invariably fatal.
Doctors made house calls. But their most common function was to diagnose and predict the course of an illness: this one is likely to die, that one will reach a crisis in a few days but will probably live if he/she can get past that. They dispensed nostrums and potions, but everybody pretty much knew they were more for show than anything else.
People didn’t need any special memento mori; the intimate knowledge of death was with them all the time. In the fourteenth century, during and after the plague known as the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe’s population, art became laden with the image of the Danse Macabre, a skeleton cavorting in glee as it leads people of all ages and ranks to their demise:
The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penitence, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The danse macabre combines both desires: in many ways similar to the mediaeval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death.
So it could go either (or both) ways: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die; and get your moral and spiritual house in order, for the same reason.
We have conquered neither disease nor death, nor is it at all likely we ever will. But we have pushed back their borders. Death still comes to infants and to women in childbirth, but it’s a rarity, at least in the developed world and even to a certain extent beyond. Infectious disease certainly exists, but actual plagues have been replaced by fear of plagues (bird flu, etc.) that haven’t quite materialized, although they always could. Now most of our diseases are either those that kill us in old age or are chronic and cause discomfort and inconvenience but with which we live for long periods and whose effects medicine can usually at least help us control.
But death still comes to all. And even if it comes in very old age, most of are fortunate enough to have lived healthy and pleasant enough lives to want to extend them still further—at least, when we contemplate the prospect from the perspective of youth or middle age or even early old age. Our relative lack of familiarity with death makes us less accepting of it, I think, not more. Almost all death—except, perhaps, for the deaths of the centenarians among us—has begun to seem premature and unusual.
And as science and medicine have progressed, our faith in their abilities, and our expectations of those abilities, have grown. If science can conquer smallpox, why not heart disease and cancer? Well, there are lots of reasons why, including the fact that many infectious diseases tend to have a more simple cause and therefore usually have been more easily preventable. But that doesn’t stop us from demanding and wanting to have control over what heretofore seemed chaotic, random, and devastating, and to ask medicine to do even more to discover the secrets that the ancient alchemists pursued: the elixir of eternal (or as close to eternal as possible) life and youth.
Where’s the beef?
One by one they’re trying to take away our gustatory pleasures.
Salt. Sugar. Fat. Red meat—not just a lot of red meat, but any amount of red meat. According to this Harvard study, any red meat at all increases the chances of dying somewhat.
Of course, we’re all gonna go some time, so in fact our “chances” of dying are 100%. The question is when and how. Most of us who are not profoundly depressed would prefer it be later rather than sooner, and quicker rather than slower. We’d also like to remain in really good health, vigorous and pain-free, until that time comes.
My quarrels with the study are numerous, which is not to say it doesn’t have some validity. The pluses are that the number of subjects is vast and the time-frame long. The negatives are that it relies on self-reports about diet: people were asked to estimate how many times a week they usually ate meat within the past year. That seems pretty shaky to me, although I suppose it’s a very rough guide.
Another problem is that all unprocessed red meat was lumped in together: beef, pork, and lamb. I’ve read that lamb has a different kind of fat than the other meats, and is better for you as a result:
Lamb is not marbled (fat in the meat) as is beef. Over half of the fat in lamb is unsaturated. Only 36% of the fat in lamb is saturated. Most of the unsaturated fat is monounsaturated, commonly found in a healthy Mediterranean-type diet.
Lamb contains the fat that is good for you, consumed directly as part of the essential omega-6 fatty acid arachidonic acid (AA), a liquid unsaturated acid. Lamb is one of the richest sources of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), part of the omega-6, possessing unique and potent antioxidant activity . CLA cannot be manufactured in the human body. Most of the lamb’s fat is on the outside edges and is easily trimmed.
I don’t eat red meat all that often; I’m probably in the “once or twice a week” group, and it’s a small portion at that. But when I do, it’s often lamb. In that respect I’m probably atypical of American meat-eaters, and I would have liked the researchers to have separated out the different types of meat from each other.
Naturally, meat-eaters are not a random bunch of people. It stands to reason they have other health habits that might make them more prone to earlier death. And in fact, that’s true, according to the study, which tried to separate out these factors through multivariate analysis and found meat to be a separate risk factor.
So, what do you think? Do these results make it harder to settle down with a big juicy steak and down it with gusto? Or does it bring out the rebel in you?
I was planning to end this post with an image of King Henry XIII eating a hunk of meat. Instead, I found a lot of pictures depicting him as gnawing on a leg of poultry, found in this study to be unrelated to an increase in death rates. Hmmm. Then I got distracted by this video of Henry’s kitchens and the food they used to make there:
[NOTE: Here’s the full text of the research.]
Illiberal liberals
To someone such as me, who’s experienced a certain amount of liberal shunning and/or anger because of my political “change,” this report comes as no surprise whatsoever:
[The Pew Research Center] found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.
Note that it’s still a small minority who do this. But still, it’s a much bigger minority than the percentage of conservatives who act that way.
But if you were to ask liberals who’s more tolerant—liberals or conservatives—I have little doubt their answer would be “liberals.” And if confronted with the evidence otherwise from this poll, my guess is that a not insignificant number of liberals would justify it by saying some version of, “Well, it’s not intolerant when liberals block conservatives, because conservatives are evil/racist/intolerant people. Q.E.D.”
Another Tuesday, another set of primaries
Today’s most-watched primaries—Alabama and Mississippi—are in the deep South, and they are toss-ups in the polls. So tonight it may take quite a while for the networks to declare the winner.
Today’s primaries are the first time that Romney doesn’t have a state that’s labeled “absolutely-must-win” for him. Rather, it’s Santorum and/or Gingrich who desperately need at least one of these two southern states, since any successful nomination strategy for either would almost certainly rely on winning much of the South.
Today I noticed that this year’s Republican field is odd in a way I hadn’t thought about before (we all know it’s odd in other ways): the two leading candidates are from the Northeast. One of them is even from New England, an area of the country that hasn’t provided a credible Republican candidate on the national level since George H.W. Bush, who was from New England only in the same way that Romney is “from” Michigan: that is, he was born and raised there but left early to make his political career in a far-away and very different place (Texas). Before that, the only one I can think of is Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and that goes back to the early 60s.
Santorum is from Pennsylvania, another state not known for nurturing a crop of Republican presidential hopefuls. Santorum has the advantage of not having had to win on a statewide level there, and of course we know that he lost in 2006 and hasn’t held office since. But the fact that both men are from blue or blueish states indicates that they know how to appeal to independents and democrats. You may think it’s a bug, but I think it’s a feature.
The other somewhat odd demographic fact about the leading Republican candidates (and here I’ll include Gingrich) is that all of them are adherents of religions that have never or seldom provided a US president. There’s never been a Mormon, and there has only been one Catholic—JFK—elected to the office. Whether this will matter in November I don’t know, but I don’t think it will be a huge factor.
One wonders what would be happening in today’s primaries if either Santorum or Gingrich had dropped out already, and there was only Romney vs. the Last Non-Romney Standing. Conventional wisdom is that Romney would lose the contest, but I’ve seen nothing that indicates the dropout’s vote wouldn’t be split rather evenly between the remaining candidate and Romney. After all, Gingrich and Santorum are very different people who appeal to voters in very different ways. But the question is moot, because neither man seems to be dropping out any time soon.
I’m rooting for Romney for a number of reasons. First, as any regular reader of this blog knows, I think he’s the best candidate. Second, I think at this point the internecine battles for the nomination are hurting the Republican chances of winning the whole thing in the fall, and the sooner a candidate becomes truly inevitable, the better.
Afghanistan massacre
By now everyone who pays attention to the news knows that a US Army sergeant went on a killing spree in southern Afghanistan on Sunday and murdered 16 civilians in cold blood, many of them women and children.
But even those paying close attention know little more about the man’s identity except that he was a veteran of the Iraqi conflict. The army says it will release more information about the killer as its investigation proceeds, and especially after he is charged. And there seems to be little doubt that he will be charged with the military equivalent of multiple murder.
His heinous actions have further complicated our mission in Afghanistan, which has gotten murkier and murkier as the years have ground on. What would be the conditions there which would ever allow us to leave? Even though this man seems to have been the proverbial crazed lone gunman, the damage he’s done to what’s left of our reputation there appear to be immeasurable. People have a hard time separating out official policy and the actions of a group from the actions of a single aberrant member, if those latter actions are dreadful enough.
Those of us who are of a certain age probably thought “My Lai” when we heard the news. But this is quite different, and not just in scope (the My Lai victims numbered in the many hundreds). My Lai was a group action that followed from some poorly-defined and incendiary orders from a leader, and it occurred in the middle of a very hot and active guerilla war. That’s not an excuse of any kind, merely a description (I’ve written at great length about My Lai here and here, and anyone who wants further in-depth study can go here).
I wonder whether there are any characteristics of the sergeant in the present case that are especially sensitive, and whether that’s why the army has been so hush-hush about his identity. Maybe so, maybe not; maybe it’s just the way the military handles such things.
The case reminds us—as though we needed any reminding—how one much damage one person can do, both in killing other innocent human beings without reason or warning (which the facts released so far appear to indicate was the horrific situation here), and in damaging the reputation of other fine men and women and the work they’ve done over the years.
The larger question is what our mission in Afghanistan is accomplishing at this point, or is even meant to accomplish. Initially it was obvious: defeat the Taliban. Help set up an alternative government. But it was clear that anything more would require a societal, economic, and cultural transformation that might be beyond our powers, especially with the resources we were willing to commit to the project, and even if we were willing to do more and become a de facto colonial power there. It’s the dilemma we face in many countries around the world, Iraq being one of them: how to foster the growth of liberal democracies in places that seem unready for them (and may never be ready for them), and what to do in the meantime if their present-day governments threaten us?
Happy Birthday Romney
Mitt Romney turns 65 today (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Whatever you think of his politics, a better-looking 65-year-old you’d be hard-pressed to find.
Rick Santorum wished him a happy birthday. Sweet.
And this Mother Jones editorial fellow’s got a birthday playlist for him that’s only somewhat nasty. Sweeter.
But according to Romney, what would be sweetest of all would be a winning March 13 (Alabama, Mississippi):
Thanks so much for giving me this birthday present. Hopefully, I can unwrap it tomorrow.
And I read through half of this article about Romney’s great sense of humor before I decided it wasn’t a spoof. Come to think of it, though, when I saw Romney in person, he got a few good quips in, as did his wife Ann, who was the more relaxed speaker.
[NOTE: I’m giving in and adding a “Romney” category to the right sidebar.]