Thursday, December 27, 2007

R.I.P.

I was ready to wake up this morning and drop another funny on you, but I'm afraid all attempts at lightness or humor fled when I signed on and discovered a true horror: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. A candidate in the scheduled Jan. 8 parliamentary elections in Pakistan, she served as the first female leader of a Muslim nation from 1988 through 1990, and was a brave advocate for democracy in a region that has known precious little of it. Pakistan weeps, and so should we.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Good listens: Chris Cubeta

I am a Chris Cubeta fan -- and if you like lyrics that sound like poetry and music that sounds like a combination of Bruce Springsteen and John Hiatt and a singer who sounds like he means it through every second of every song, you might be one day, too.

Cubeta is a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter who backs his perceptive, artful words with stirring roots-rock/alt-country arrangements, and sings with total commitment. In past reviews I've compared the quality of his lyrics to big guns like Springsteen, Dylan and Hiatt, and I'm not backing off now. Quite the contrary; his new Change EP is one of the most powerful, amazing discs I've heard all year and you should really go buy it right now.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Don't try this at home

Or at the airport, for that matter.

Holy Huckabee, indeed

In a spare moment this weekend I spent some time with Newsweek's profile of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, the new man to beat in the Republican half of the Iowa caucuses. Disagreements on policy issues aside, he seems like a decent enough guy until you get to the part where he doesn't believe in evolution. Yes, it seems Pastor Huckabee (he's a Baptist minister) is a Biblical literalist, including on the subject of creation.

Now, personally, I've always found it puzzling why people on both the right and the left have so much trouble reconciling faith with science. The tale of creation as told in the Torah (a.k.a. the Old Testament) and the scientific narrative of the Big Bang and evolution have always sounded to me like two different ways of telling the same story. The conflict feels somewhat manufactured by the hardcases on both sides who insist they must be a hundred percent correct, and therefore the other guys must be a hundred percent wrong.

Be that as it may, it still startles me when an otherwise responsible, intelligent human being states with rock solid certainty that evolution is fantasy and creation fact, because the Bible told them so. (I've often wondered exactly how many bullocks these folks slaughtered on their stone altars that week.) And yet, in some parts of the country, there are actually schools trying to get accredited to offer master's degrees in science education for teachers who want to teach creationism. Which is fine, if you want to teach at a privately funded religious institution. But you don't teach tenets of faith as scientific fact in a public school -- at least, not in America. For that, you have to go someplace like Iran.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

War on Christmas update

So much for the war on Christmas; it seems Hannukah is in greater danger. Hopefully they'll throw the book at these clowns. At least the subhead to AOL's teaser -- "Muslim aids Jews attacked on train" -- offers some hope for humanity.

Will they call him “’Roider” Clemens now?

Surprise, surprise. The sportswriters’ golden boy Roger Clemens is reported to be prominently featured in retired Sen. George Mitchell’s forthcoming report on baseball’s steroids mess.

Actually, this is not much of a surprise to those of us who have observed Clemens doing the very same things that have repeatedly been used as evidence of Barry Bond’s steroids use, e.g. bulking up and maintaining strength in his late 30s and early 40s.

Oh sure, but in Roger’s case it must have been those legendary workouts. You know why? Because he doesn’t trash-talk reporters, that’s why.

I’m an advocate of the Golden Rule and Barry Bonds has dished out plenty of the scorn the media has thrown back at him these past two years. But if all those angry sportswriters are really going to claim that they consistently maintained their professionalism, that they never lost their objectivity, that they never made it personal, then I expect to see a rash of columns in the next few days raining approbation down on Clemens’ head, calling for asterisks on all his records, pledging not to vote him into the Hall of Fame, and generally holding him up as the new poster boy for all that is wrong in the land of baseball.

Waiting.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Writers' strike, day 44

So: writer, pop culture aficionado, Jon Stewart fan.

Those three clues should provide all the evidence required to figure out where I come down on the subject of the Hollywood writers' strike.

What has been shocking to my apparently sheltered sensibilities has been the number of comments I've found strewn across various message boards in recent days demanding that the lazy no-good commie bastard writers get back to their computers and get cracking on those fresh episodes of According To Jim right now, dammit!

Forget about fairness, forget about the networks and producers reaping literally billions in profits off of creations that simply would not exist without both the imaginations and the skills of the writers behind them -- we want our TV and we want it now! Like the surly, strung-out addicts they appear to be, middle America is quivering with outrage that there WON'T BE A NEW EPISODE of Las Vegas until further notice. It's almost like the outrage you might expect if our political leaders had lied their way into an unwinnable war and then destroyed what was left of our nation's moral authority by torturing prisoners -- oh, wait.

Be that as it may, I found it astonishing how many people -- many of them, apparently, regular working people -- seem to just want the writers to quit whining and get back to cranking out their (i.e. the viewers’) shows. Have none of these people ever sought (a) a raise or (b) fair treatment from their own employers? Or is it just that, in the minds of middle America, the writers who created all of these memorable characters and shows rate no higher than the proverbial million monkeys tapping away at typewriters in hopes of one day accidentally cranking out Shakespeare?

Monday, December 10, 2007

Good listens: Switchfoot

Sometimes you just want to rock, but sometimes you want to think, too.


Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman writes thinking person's rock songs. And while he writes from a Christian perspective, his songs are not evangelical; he chooses to ask the big questions about life and the universe without advocating one particular set of answers over another.

It doesn't hurt that his songs rock, too.

In any case, it was my great pleasure to interview Jon by e-mail recently; results are here. Enjoy, and if you're looking for album recommendations, Nothing Is Sound is amazing, The Beautiful Letdown is terrific, and Oh! Gravity is really, really good.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

California the ungovernable

I often take columns from the SacBee's resident curmudgeon Dan Walters -- who skewers politicians of all ideological stripes with equal and unrestrained cynicism -- with a heaping teaspoon of salt.

That said, when he's right, he's right. And he's right about this:

"Government worked better four decades ago because California was a simpler, more homogeneous place then with more clearly definable priorities. A governmental/political process that requires consensus cannot function effectively when the society it serves has become the most complex on Earth and no longer can muster consensus on any issue..."

Those who think terms limits or redistricting reform or budget reform or any other sort of fiddling at the margins is going to solve California's governance problems are kidding themselves. The state has in actual fact become, through no fault of anyone in particular's, virtually ungovernable.

There are simply too many people with too many different opinions of the direction the state should take on any given issue, and this reality is not just a prescription for but a near-guarantee of political stalemate and paralysis. In that sense our Legislature really has evolved into a microcosm of the U.S. Congress; the ideological divide between the Right and the Left is so huge that you are sometimes left to wonder how meaningful conversation between the two is even possible.

Former Assemblyman Stan Statham's proposal for splitting California into three separate states might have seemed like a crackpot idea at the time, but it's looking better every day now.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Dept. of Some People Never Learn

The Great Prince Fan Site Rebellion of 2007 rages on, now generating coverage from the New York Times (that's prince.org webmaster Ben Margolin in the Times picture at right). By now the Purple One is surely seeing red, having ignored the most important maxim of the last 150 years: never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel (or bandwidth by the terabyte).