Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Why Do I Get The Feeling We're Moving Backward?
More discouraging news about people in our country - the only industrialized nation where close to fifty percent disbelieve evolution.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
National Parks - NYT Editorial
Once again, we find evidence of what we already suppose...
Destroying the National Parks
Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow.
Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.
Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.
Some of Mr. Hoffman's changes are trivial, although even apparently subtle changes in wording - from "protect" to "conserve," for instance - soften the standard used to judge the environmental effects of park policy.
But there is nothing subtle about the main thrust of this rewrite. It is a frontal attack on the idea of "impairment." According to the act that established the national parks, preventing impairment of park resources - including the landscape, wildlife and such intangibles as the soundscape of Yellowstone, for instance - is the "fundamental purpose." In Mr. Hoffman's world, it is now merely one of the purposes.
Mr. Hoffman's rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks' purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman's rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly - a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks.
The pattern prevails throughout this 194-page document - easing the rules that limit how visitors use the parks and toughening the standard of proof needed to block those uses. Behind this pattern, too, there is a fundamental shift in how the parks are regarded. If the laws establishing the national park system were fundamentally forward-looking - if their mission, first and foremost, was protecting the parks for the future - Mr. Hoffman's revisions place a new, unwelcome and unnecessary emphasis on the present, on what he calls "opportunities for visitors to use and enjoy their parks."
There is no question that we go to national parks to use and enjoy them. But part of the enjoyment of being in a place like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon is knowing that no matter how much it changes in the natural processes of time, it will continue to exist substantially unchanged.
There are other issues too. Mr. Hoffman would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, and he removes from the policy document any reference to evolution or evolutionary processes. He does everything possible to strip away a scientific basis for park management. His rules would essentially require park superintendents to subordinate the management of their parks to local and state agendas. He also envisions a much wider range of commercial activity within the parks.
In short, this is not a policy for protecting the parks. It is a policy for destroying them.
The Interior Department has already begun to distance itself from this rewrite, which it kept hidden from park service employees. But what Mr. Hoffman has given us is a road map of what could happen to the parks if Mr. Bush's political appointees are allowed to have their way.
It is clear by now that Mr. Bush has no real intention of living up to his campaign promise to fully finance the national parks. This document offers a vivid picture of the divide between the National Park Service, whose career employees remain committed to the fundamental purpose of leaving the parks unimpaired, and an Interior Department whose political appointees seem willing to alter them beyond recognition, partly in the service of commercial objectives.
Suddenly, many things - like the administration's efforts to force snowmobiles back into Yellowstone - seem very easy to explain.
Destroying the National Parks
Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow.
Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.
Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.
Some of Mr. Hoffman's changes are trivial, although even apparently subtle changes in wording - from "protect" to "conserve," for instance - soften the standard used to judge the environmental effects of park policy.
But there is nothing subtle about the main thrust of this rewrite. It is a frontal attack on the idea of "impairment." According to the act that established the national parks, preventing impairment of park resources - including the landscape, wildlife and such intangibles as the soundscape of Yellowstone, for instance - is the "fundamental purpose." In Mr. Hoffman's world, it is now merely one of the purposes.
Mr. Hoffman's rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks' purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman's rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly - a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks.
The pattern prevails throughout this 194-page document - easing the rules that limit how visitors use the parks and toughening the standard of proof needed to block those uses. Behind this pattern, too, there is a fundamental shift in how the parks are regarded. If the laws establishing the national park system were fundamentally forward-looking - if their mission, first and foremost, was protecting the parks for the future - Mr. Hoffman's revisions place a new, unwelcome and unnecessary emphasis on the present, on what he calls "opportunities for visitors to use and enjoy their parks."
There is no question that we go to national parks to use and enjoy them. But part of the enjoyment of being in a place like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon is knowing that no matter how much it changes in the natural processes of time, it will continue to exist substantially unchanged.
There are other issues too. Mr. Hoffman would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, and he removes from the policy document any reference to evolution or evolutionary processes. He does everything possible to strip away a scientific basis for park management. His rules would essentially require park superintendents to subordinate the management of their parks to local and state agendas. He also envisions a much wider range of commercial activity within the parks.
In short, this is not a policy for protecting the parks. It is a policy for destroying them.
The Interior Department has already begun to distance itself from this rewrite, which it kept hidden from park service employees. But what Mr. Hoffman has given us is a road map of what could happen to the parks if Mr. Bush's political appointees are allowed to have their way.
It is clear by now that Mr. Bush has no real intention of living up to his campaign promise to fully finance the national parks. This document offers a vivid picture of the divide between the National Park Service, whose career employees remain committed to the fundamental purpose of leaving the parks unimpaired, and an Interior Department whose political appointees seem willing to alter them beyond recognition, partly in the service of commercial objectives.
Suddenly, many things - like the administration's efforts to force snowmobiles back into Yellowstone - seem very easy to explain.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Kurt Vonnegut Essay
This is from May 2004. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of Mr. Vonnegut's work. We're reading his Slaughterhouse-Five in my Contemporary Novel class right now, and I'm doing a little research for a project. I stumbled upon this article. There are others that can be found at this address http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut#External_links. Check it out.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Intelligent Design?
I can't really convey just how well this guy argues his point. Read this no matter how you feel about the issue.
August 28, 2005
Show Me the Science
By DANIEL C. DENNETT
Blue Hill, Me.
PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."
Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..."
Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.
With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.
Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.
But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.
We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.
All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab.
This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.
Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.
Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.
The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.
To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.
Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.
In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.
To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.
To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:
About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.
If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.
We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.
It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.
SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.
The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.
Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.
Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.
For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."
Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?
Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."
August 28, 2005
Show Me the Science
By DANIEL C. DENNETT
Blue Hill, Me.
PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."
Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..."
Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.
With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.
Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.
But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.
We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.
All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab.
This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.
Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.
Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.
The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.
To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.
Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.
In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.
To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.
To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:
About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.
If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.
We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.
It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.
SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.
The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.
Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.
Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.
For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."
Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?
Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."
Excellent Frank Rich Column from NYT
Mr. Rich talks about some of the parallels between the early stages of the US involvement in Vietnam and our current conflict, while lambasting both Republicans and Democrats for not offering a valid alternative to Bush's hapless policy-making on the matter. Exceptions include Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat Russ Feingold.
I also watched part of "CNN Presents" last night when I got home from work. It actually had some decent examples of good journalism - some analysis of just how we got suckered by the "intelligence" that led us into war and allowed Bush to cite dubious information about the (non-existent) Iraqi WMD program.
I also watched part of "CNN Presents" last night when I got home from work. It actually had some decent examples of good journalism - some analysis of just how we got suckered by the "intelligence" that led us into war and allowed Bush to cite dubious information about the (non-existent) Iraqi WMD program.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Picking a Method of Transportation
When I go, will it be in a handbasket, an automobile, an airplane, or perhaps a little red wagon?
Well, my classes have started as of Monday. I'm not thrilled to be back, but I am fairly willing to get started and get things over with, since I'm sure they'll go quickly. What is the next phase of my life? Will it be the internship in DC - will that even be a possibility? And if I do that, will I like it, or will it be just one more detour along the way to my ultimate destination?
The summer was too short, as always. My birthday, since I was five, has always signaled the end of summer to me, and the resumption of worries about school. It makes me uneasy. Actually being in class has been better since my hiatus of roughly two years. I'm a little more relaxed. Even when I'm stressing out, I realize that it's either going to work out or it's not, and that seems to be somewhat comforting.
A lot of my friends are (or are certainly going to be) very successful in the traditional definition of that term. In other words, they went to great schools, they're going to have great jobs, and they're going to make lots and lots more money than I ever will.
I used to have a pretty high opinion of myself and my level of intelligence, and occasionally I still do. However, I now realize that barring some unforseen development, I'm not going to be wealthy and I may not even be particularly "comfortable" in the same way that my life was growing up (in a lower to middle middle class family). I may have to struggle to make ends meet in a less than desirable apartment somewhere, and I won't have money to throw at new music and concerts and eating out and buying rounds for friends. Right now I can do many of those things purely because I'm getting student loans, and even with those, this semester is going to be tough. Living on my own is not only quite lonely, it's also expensive. I eat a lot. Grocery shopping is expensive, gas is pricey, and getting into car accidents and picking up speeding tickets doesn't help one bit. Paying back generous relatives and buying computers will be difficult. Going to DC in the spring will undoubtedly be a little challenging too.
I don't really want to get into a big thing on class warfare here, but lots of time, rich people make me very angry and resentful. I'm sure they often don't realize they're doing it, they just take things for granted and say things accordingly.
Of course, another group of my friends may never be wealthy either, but they have established a path for themselves that will allow them to be very happy, despite an occasional dearth of funds. They have found more important things in life to satisfy themselves, and they may be more "self-actualized" in the long run. I am very happy for them.
A key component of their contentment will no doubt be their companion or spouse, and maybe that's all that's missing for me. Hell - maybe there's more to it than that though. I thought I had something good once, but we often argued about finances even then.
I need to cultivate a situation in which I feel secure and content and needed and desired. I am not in such a situation now. I have none of those things. I am seldom very happy when I give significant thought to my present condition. Usually, it takes the addition of close friends to put a smile on my face. Although friends are enormously important, I need to learn how to make myself truly happy in the absence of others. Books have usually provided this for me, but even then, they are only temporary.
Everything, it seems, is very temporary. If and when I get to an afterlife, I hope that I'll be able to experience the feeling of love and kinship that I often enjoyed this summer, but that it will be available on a regular basis. A sense of permanence about our happiness is something we all strive for, I think.
Wow - you'd almost think from reading this that I had some kind of philosophy class today or something. But really that's not what fueled this...though I did have a philosophy class. I've just been thinking quite a bit lately. There's a lot of down time up here in Fredonia with no one else living with me.
That's it for now.
Well, my classes have started as of Monday. I'm not thrilled to be back, but I am fairly willing to get started and get things over with, since I'm sure they'll go quickly. What is the next phase of my life? Will it be the internship in DC - will that even be a possibility? And if I do that, will I like it, or will it be just one more detour along the way to my ultimate destination?
The summer was too short, as always. My birthday, since I was five, has always signaled the end of summer to me, and the resumption of worries about school. It makes me uneasy. Actually being in class has been better since my hiatus of roughly two years. I'm a little more relaxed. Even when I'm stressing out, I realize that it's either going to work out or it's not, and that seems to be somewhat comforting.
A lot of my friends are (or are certainly going to be) very successful in the traditional definition of that term. In other words, they went to great schools, they're going to have great jobs, and they're going to make lots and lots more money than I ever will.
I used to have a pretty high opinion of myself and my level of intelligence, and occasionally I still do. However, I now realize that barring some unforseen development, I'm not going to be wealthy and I may not even be particularly "comfortable" in the same way that my life was growing up (in a lower to middle middle class family). I may have to struggle to make ends meet in a less than desirable apartment somewhere, and I won't have money to throw at new music and concerts and eating out and buying rounds for friends. Right now I can do many of those things purely because I'm getting student loans, and even with those, this semester is going to be tough. Living on my own is not only quite lonely, it's also expensive. I eat a lot. Grocery shopping is expensive, gas is pricey, and getting into car accidents and picking up speeding tickets doesn't help one bit. Paying back generous relatives and buying computers will be difficult. Going to DC in the spring will undoubtedly be a little challenging too.
I don't really want to get into a big thing on class warfare here, but lots of time, rich people make me very angry and resentful. I'm sure they often don't realize they're doing it, they just take things for granted and say things accordingly.
Of course, another group of my friends may never be wealthy either, but they have established a path for themselves that will allow them to be very happy, despite an occasional dearth of funds. They have found more important things in life to satisfy themselves, and they may be more "self-actualized" in the long run. I am very happy for them.
A key component of their contentment will no doubt be their companion or spouse, and maybe that's all that's missing for me. Hell - maybe there's more to it than that though. I thought I had something good once, but we often argued about finances even then.
I need to cultivate a situation in which I feel secure and content and needed and desired. I am not in such a situation now. I have none of those things. I am seldom very happy when I give significant thought to my present condition. Usually, it takes the addition of close friends to put a smile on my face. Although friends are enormously important, I need to learn how to make myself truly happy in the absence of others. Books have usually provided this for me, but even then, they are only temporary.
Everything, it seems, is very temporary. If and when I get to an afterlife, I hope that I'll be able to experience the feeling of love and kinship that I often enjoyed this summer, but that it will be available on a regular basis. A sense of permanence about our happiness is something we all strive for, I think.
Wow - you'd almost think from reading this that I had some kind of philosophy class today or something. But really that's not what fueled this...though I did have a philosophy class. I've just been thinking quite a bit lately. There's a lot of down time up here in Fredonia with no one else living with me.
That's it for now.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Article on Rock Snobs
I don't actually consider myself a rock snob, since most of the bands I like are actually adored by many people - just not many of my close friends.
However, given the ridicule that I've endured about my obsessive nature, I do identify somewhat with the characters in High Fidelity, which is mentioned in this article. I also have come to resent others being able to just download music that cost me hundreds of dollars.
I'm one of those people who enjoy collecting music in its tangible forms, complete with the artwork, liner notes, et cetera - so this speaks to me. Enjoy.
However, given the ridicule that I've endured about my obsessive nature, I do identify somewhat with the characters in High Fidelity, which is mentioned in this article. I also have come to resent others being able to just download music that cost me hundreds of dollars.
I'm one of those people who enjoy collecting music in its tangible forms, complete with the artwork, liner notes, et cetera - so this speaks to me. Enjoy.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Well...
There are quite a few posts still in the draft form that have yet to be published - that's what happens when I don't have regular access to a computer with a decent connection.
So I just deleted a very long unfinished post on the topic that I was going to elaborate on at a later date. I believe I have good reason for doing this. Perhaps I will explain my feelings at a still later time. However, things are not quite as concluded as they may have been, which tends to happen sometimes.
I believe I'm more emotionally involved in this than I was previously admitting to myself.
So I just deleted a very long unfinished post on the topic that I was going to elaborate on at a later date. I believe I have good reason for doing this. Perhaps I will explain my feelings at a still later time. However, things are not quite as concluded as they may have been, which tends to happen sometimes.
I believe I'm more emotionally involved in this than I was previously admitting to myself.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The Politics of Evolution vs. "Intelligent Design"
This article discusses a foundation/think tank pushing the so-called Intelligent Design theory and the organization's funding sources.
Very Informative Article on Oil Production & Capacity
Anyone interested about the future of gas prices and their effect on our economy should read this.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Christopher Walken for President
With thanks to ozcorpdailybyte.blogspot.com, and while still not believing this is for real...
Christopher Walken is running for president in 2008. Check out the website - it certainly looks as if he's a progressive.
Christopher Walken is running for president in 2008. Check out the website - it certainly looks as if he's a progressive.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Maureen Dowd NYT Piece - Biking Toward Nowhere
Here's a sample:
'"I just don't like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation," the usually good-natured Bush senior barked at reporters on the golf course. "So I hope you'll understand if I, when I'm recreating, will recreate." His hot-tempered oldest son, who was golfing with his father that day, was even more irritated. "Hey! Hey!" W. snapped at reporters asking questions on the first tee. "Can't you wait until we finish hitting, at least?"
Junior always had his priorities straight.'
'"I just don't like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation," the usually good-natured Bush senior barked at reporters on the golf course. "So I hope you'll understand if I, when I'm recreating, will recreate." His hot-tempered oldest son, who was golfing with his father that day, was even more irritated. "Hey! Hey!" W. snapped at reporters asking questions on the first tee. "Can't you wait until we finish hitting, at least?"
Junior always had his priorities straight.'
Pierce Brosnan Out as 007
Not entirely unexpected, since we've been hearing rumors since the last film...however, this appears to be confirmation.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
2005.08.13 Everclear at Gateway Harbor Park Tonawanda, NY
Setlist:
Everything to Everyone
Heroin Girl
Volvo Driving Soccer Mom
Fire Maple Song
Almost Instant Karma
Heartspark Dollarsign
Wonderful
Song from an American Movie, Part 1
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Strawberry
Father of Mine
Glorious
I Will Buy You a New Life
Encore:
Beautiful Dream
Santa Monica
867-5309/Jenny (Tommy Tutone)
were found in the Flickr stream of Dennis Reed Jr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/agenbyte/sets/72157604860051304/page2/
There was a favorable review in The Buffalo News (see below) about this show, but I can tell you that it was pretty shitty... the bass-heavy mix was very bad and the performance was below-average. Some idiot decided to crowd-surf and managed to kick Chelsea in the head, which didn't exactly make either of us very happy.
______
Everclear Gives Crowd a Shot of the Strong Stuff
By Mike Regan
News Contributing Reviewer
Published 8/14/2005
Concert review
Everclear and Last Conservative
Saturday night at the Molson Canal Concert Series, Gateway Park, Tonawanda.
Some moments are worth waiting for.
That could have been the theme Saturday night at North Tonawanda's Molson Canal Series in Gateway Park. After taking the stage more than an hour after its scheduled time, Everclear made up for hurt feelings and rocked the crowd.
"How are you guys doing tonight? We're Everclear. We're from Portland, Oregon," said lead singer Art Alexakis as the band burrowed into the beginning of its set.
Labeled post-grunge, alternative, punk and pop, Everclear began a quick rise up the ladder of musical triumph after it formed in 1991. By the mid-'90s the band was practically a household name.
With hits like "Father of Mine" and "Fire Maple Song," Everclear translated Alexakis' difficult upbringing to its audience though its reverberations. Everclear did dip into its bag of mainstream hits Saturday, but was avoided the somewhat brooding overtones of a few of its songs.
From the opening "Everything to Everyone," onlookers were ready for more. And Everclear didn't disappoint them. Alexakis came off as a veteran musician, prodding the gatherers to move as he barked at them to "jump."
And the masses gladly complied.
The evening began on the right note with the passionate Middleman. The four-piece band from England is touring the States and brought its mildly distinctive pop-hop style to the canal with a combined style of live and electronic music.
Buffalo's own Last Conservative showed why it is one of the more popular performers in the area. Its new CD, "On to the Next One," was recently released and the group didn't hesitate to introduce it to the audience.
During its 45-minute set, Last Conservative drilled home a few new songs like "The Answer" from the new CD. The group's rocking style came across with such vivaciousness that members may have influenced the crowd to sweat right along with them.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050814/1067227.asp
Friday, August 12, 2005
Everclear Saturday
Tomorrow I'm headed to a free Canal Concert Series performance in Tonawanda by the band Everclear, or at least what's left of them. Everclear was the first concert I ever went to, back on March 7, 1999 at SUNY Geneseo.
Anyway, it seems like a bunch of us will be heading up tomorrow, so that should be fun. Like old times, except we're a lot older and some people are married and Art's the only one left in the band.
Guess it's not like old times after all. Perhaps the songs will remain the same.
Anyway, it seems like a bunch of us will be heading up tomorrow, so that should be fun. Like old times, except we're a lot older and some people are married and Art's the only one left in the band.
Guess it's not like old times after all. Perhaps the songs will remain the same.
Pink Floyd Reunion Aftermath
This was posted to the Echoes mailing list that I subscribe to...there are some errors, and when I cut and pasted it from my email, it became sort of jumbled. However, I am for the most part leaving it alone because I don't have the time now to adjust it and I think there will be some interest among the readership. It's an interview with Bob Geldof after Live 8 with some quotes from some others thrown in. As the Echoes member writes, it is not a complete transcription of the article, but most of the important parts are included. Enjoy.
To: "Echoes" <>
I don't think anybody has put this online yet, so here it is. It's not complete (can't possibly transcribe the whole thing) but I made sure all the juicy bits are including, leaving out stuff that has already been printed elsewhere.
Live 8 / Floyd Feature in Word magazine
Transcribed by Thanasis Tsilderikis WITHOUT PERMISSION
WORD MAGAZINE, July 2005 issue
When, midway through their 20-minute set, Waters announced he felt "incredibly emotional to be back with these three guys again", he meant it. As he tried to sing Wish You Were Here, a song about Syd Barrett, his childhood friend and the band's inspirational founder who left in 1968, his voice cracked and he could barely get the words out. Gilmour, Waters's arch-enemy in one of the longest feuds the rock world has witnessed, carried on scowling down at his electric guitar. Although the band played on, none of them had expected such a public declaration from the man who had sued, insulted and mostly just ignored them for 20-odd years. Even Nick Mason, the group's unflappably urbane drummer - and the only member on speaking terms with Waters before the Live 8 reunion - admitted later that "we were all very surprised at the way Roger behaved".
Peter Jenner, the band's first manager, recalled that Waters "was the one who had the courage to drive Syd out, because it was chaos", but that it hurt. "Syd was the only person, I think, who Roger has ever really liked and looked up to, and he always felt very guilty about the fact that he'd blown out his mate." According to Gilmour, Waters proceeded to take it out on him. "I was the new boy. Not only that, I was two years younger than the rest of them, and you know how those playground hierarchies carry over. You never catch up. Roger is not a generous-spirited person. I was constantly dumped on."
Mason believes that it is Waters' absorption in his solo projects which has taken the sting out of rejoining his old adversaries. "Roger's very pragmatic. Because he's enjoyed working on his own, I think that being back with the band feels like a novelty to him."
As relations were warming in one corner of the frosty foursome, they were cooling somewhat in another. Mason's lavishly illustrated, delightfully chatty personal account of Pink Floyd - Inside Out, published in 2004 - did not find favour with David Gilmour.
The book's gossipy, self-deprecating style shortchanged the band's real musical achievements, Gilmour grumbled privately to friends. (Though they live not far from each other in the South of England, in West Sussex and Wiltshire respectively, Gilmour and Mason haven't socialised for years.)
In terms of their recent public profile, the closest thing to a gig Pink Floyd had done prior to Geldof's intervention was a brief performance at the funeral of their manager, Steve O'Rourke, in the summer of 2004. Gilmour, Mason and Wright played WYWH during the service at Chichester cathedral and Wright followed it with a solo piano rendition of Great Gig in the Sky. "It didn't feel like a gig," Mason noted, "and we didn't ask Roger to take part because he still had some differences with Steve, who was very much a part of our team. So he wasn't asked to come at all."
(comment ---> this, I believe, is the first official confirmation that such a 'performance' in O'Rourke's funeral took place, other than the initial rumours that claimed Roger played too, along with Dick Parry.) But here comes the good part. Geldof's own account of the reunion, with his characteristic, wholy un-British, frankness. Enjoy! :-)
Word magazine: Why were you after PF in particular? Bob Geldof: Well, that world audience, those sales. Also, that morning I'd receive a print-out from some guy from an Internet site saying that the Pink Floyd would never play again unless it was something exceptional like Live Aid. So I rang Nick Mason. He said, are you serious? I can't see what would make the others talk to each other. So I called David Gilmour. I've known him since The Wall and he was driving up to London with Polly and he practically swerved off the road. And said mmmm, you know? I said, well, I'll come and see you. I rang him again and he said, look, the answer's no. I want to do my solo album now. Also there's the concern that the record company think there is a giant pot at the end of the PF rainbow. I did a Vicky Pollard - yeah, but, no, but - I said well, don't say no now [ed: Vicky Pollard is a comedy character on British TV, satirical of the 15-year-old working class girls in 'Little Britain' and the way they talk in fits and starts]. Give me a chance to lay out my stall, my purpose, let me come and see you and maybe argue my position. I said I've got to come down and see you, which train do I get? So I get to Croydon and he rings me says Bob, there's no point. I've got as far as Croydon. I'm at East Croydon station, Croydon East, you know! And I said, at least come and pick me up. He was a bit grumpy but he turned up in this lovely od Merc and we went back to his place. And I went into it. He knew I was there to pitch. He was being kind but it was a little awkward and he kept his head and at the end he just said, I just can't go through all that stuff again, and told me I had to try and understand all that.
- - So how did you sell it to him?
Geldof: I laid out the politics of the thing, what would happen if the PF played. The world audience, the uniqueness of the event, the fact that they never said goodbye to the audience, and that every person who ever bought a PF album in the world would have access to them again. He was sotto voce in the end. He took me upstairs and played me some tracks from his new solo album and I told him to take some speed! He said, I get a lot of pleasure out of all this, and they ware very beautiful songs. So he said well, I don't know, I'm not going to change my mind now, Bob. So I didn't crap on about it. I said, at least think about it. He said he was going on holiday for a week and there'd be no time to rehearse. I said do think about it. But then Mason called to say how did you get on? I said, I don't think very well but I'll write him a letter. Next Roger Waters calls me, in a great mood. I think a lot of people think he's bitter and cynical but I don't think he is at all. He's hilarious and has this acerbic wit and he's very up and funny. And he said what's happening? I said will you play? And he said all things considered, I'd love to. That took me back a bit, so I checked with Nick that Rick Wright would be up for it and he said he would. And I rang Roger back and Roger said 'What's Old Grumpy up to? I said, still being fairly grumpy."
:-D :-D :-D
Geldof: "There were clearly lots of unarticulated things going on, lots of water still flowing under those bridges. And Roger said I'd like to do it and I'd like to do it in London if we can do it. I said, dude, you can do it on the moon, you know! Now Nick, Rick and Roger appeared to be absolutely wanting to do it but Dave was away. I said I'd written Dave a letter, I called Nick again and told him about Dave and he said "It's the curse of leadership."
- - Referring to Roger or Dave Gilmour?
Geldof: "Referring to Dave, I suppose, as Dave's the one who has led the Floyd for the last 20 years. The burden of carrying on gradually. And Dave is with his new family and he's just got rid of that house and Dave I think just didn't want to go back to that place he'd been before. Roger on the other hand had become hugely expansive and was wanting to gig and quite prepared to let sleeping dogs lie. Terrible cliche but it's true. It was sort of like a reversal of roles really. And Roger said, have you got Gilmour's number? I heard no more for two weeks and then the phone goes and a voice says, all right then. I said sorry? He said "It's Gilmour. All right then." "I said you're not fucking serious! Fuckin' hell, you've made an old man very happy. Not that I can stand you cunts but you've made an old retro-punk very happy! Cos I never liked their music, really."
comment ---> Sir Bob doesn't mince his words, does he? You gotta give him that!
Geldof: "I rang Roger and told him Dave had called and he said "Oh Good. Where will we be on the bill?" Apparently that first meeting they had together was great. What older people should behave like, all grins and smiles. Nick told me, you know without being mawkish or anything, that it was like being in a band again. So familiar and fun and so good. Instantly they got to sorting out what songs they would play and even asked me at one point if I thought they were all right. 'What do you think?' I said, what do you mean what do I think?! The enormity of the Floyd playing again. The sheer numbers of eyeballs watching, all marshalled to a political end, it's amazing. In the US this is a bigger story than Live 8, why this band with such a painful history of disorder, why are they doing it?
- - Was this the biggest news story you could have engineered? I can't think of a bigger one.
Geldof: "In pop terms, absolutely. The whole point was the brand, and the individuals have become more and more fascinating as a result. As you began to understand the dynamics of each song and who did which bit it became fascinating. And their strange sense of politics, politics on a polite English level but with a profound bitterness. I didn't care for the music much but I genuinely like them as people.
- - Do you think all bands will reunite eventually, and that events like Live 8 just give them the excuse to do so?
Geldof: "No, I don't really. I think age is the excuse. You look at it and think back to what it was. We were glorious, you know! I don't know why we were glorious but let's acknowledge it! I'd like to play to all those people again! Whatever happened to us was just clearly uniquely good. It's not to recapture the old glory." Later in the article, there's that Mason quote reprinted again: Mason: "Bob and Roger are a bit like Hitler and Stalin with a better sense of humour. And, in Bob's case, worse hair."
There's an interesting account (Nick's) of the whole dynamics of Gilmour's upcoming solo album and PF reuniting for Live 8: Mason: "The moral pressure on anyone to do something like this is phenomenal." He totally sympathised with Gilmour's predicament:
"Live 8's going to impinge on next year when he tours as a solo artist. People will be saying, "Come on Dave, do some Floyd material", as they will have just seen him do some. And it takes a hell of a long time to establish yourself as a solo artist. But Bob rang me and said 'David Gilmour won't do it'. And I felt, well, that's Dave. You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink. In Dave's case you can't even get him near the water. So Roger rang David and that cemented it. Bob then spoke to Roger and he agreed. I think he felt -well we all felt actually - that it was a shame we didn't play Live Aid but we didn't really exist as a band at the time."
Very interesting stuff.
To: "Echoes" <>
I don't think anybody has put this online yet, so here it is. It's not complete (can't possibly transcribe the whole thing) but I made sure all the juicy bits are including, leaving out stuff that has already been printed elsewhere.
Live 8 / Floyd Feature in Word magazine
Transcribed by Thanasis Tsilderikis WITHOUT PERMISSION
WORD MAGAZINE, July 2005 issue
When, midway through their 20-minute set, Waters announced he felt "incredibly emotional to be back with these three guys again", he meant it. As he tried to sing Wish You Were Here, a song about Syd Barrett, his childhood friend and the band's inspirational founder who left in 1968, his voice cracked and he could barely get the words out. Gilmour, Waters's arch-enemy in one of the longest feuds the rock world has witnessed, carried on scowling down at his electric guitar. Although the band played on, none of them had expected such a public declaration from the man who had sued, insulted and mostly just ignored them for 20-odd years. Even Nick Mason, the group's unflappably urbane drummer - and the only member on speaking terms with Waters before the Live 8 reunion - admitted later that "we were all very surprised at the way Roger behaved".
Peter Jenner, the band's first manager, recalled that Waters "was the one who had the courage to drive Syd out, because it was chaos", but that it hurt. "Syd was the only person, I think, who Roger has ever really liked and looked up to, and he always felt very guilty about the fact that he'd blown out his mate." According to Gilmour, Waters proceeded to take it out on him. "I was the new boy. Not only that, I was two years younger than the rest of them, and you know how those playground hierarchies carry over. You never catch up. Roger is not a generous-spirited person. I was constantly dumped on."
Mason believes that it is Waters' absorption in his solo projects which has taken the sting out of rejoining his old adversaries. "Roger's very pragmatic. Because he's enjoyed working on his own, I think that being back with the band feels like a novelty to him."
As relations were warming in one corner of the frosty foursome, they were cooling somewhat in another. Mason's lavishly illustrated, delightfully chatty personal account of Pink Floyd - Inside Out, published in 2004 - did not find favour with David Gilmour.
The book's gossipy, self-deprecating style shortchanged the band's real musical achievements, Gilmour grumbled privately to friends. (Though they live not far from each other in the South of England, in West Sussex and Wiltshire respectively, Gilmour and Mason haven't socialised for years.)
In terms of their recent public profile, the closest thing to a gig Pink Floyd had done prior to Geldof's intervention was a brief performance at the funeral of their manager, Steve O'Rourke, in the summer of 2004. Gilmour, Mason and Wright played WYWH during the service at Chichester cathedral and Wright followed it with a solo piano rendition of Great Gig in the Sky. "It didn't feel like a gig," Mason noted, "and we didn't ask Roger to take part because he still had some differences with Steve, who was very much a part of our team. So he wasn't asked to come at all."
(comment ---> this, I believe, is the first official confirmation that such a 'performance' in O'Rourke's funeral took place, other than the initial rumours that claimed Roger played too, along with Dick Parry.) But here comes the good part. Geldof's own account of the reunion, with his characteristic, wholy un-British, frankness. Enjoy! :-)
Word magazine: Why were you after PF in particular? Bob Geldof: Well, that world audience, those sales. Also, that morning I'd receive a print-out from some guy from an Internet site saying that the Pink Floyd would never play again unless it was something exceptional like Live Aid. So I rang Nick Mason. He said, are you serious? I can't see what would make the others talk to each other. So I called David Gilmour. I've known him since The Wall and he was driving up to London with Polly and he practically swerved off the road. And said mmmm, you know? I said, well, I'll come and see you. I rang him again and he said, look, the answer's no. I want to do my solo album now. Also there's the concern that the record company think there is a giant pot at the end of the PF rainbow. I did a Vicky Pollard - yeah, but, no, but - I said well, don't say no now [ed: Vicky Pollard is a comedy character on British TV, satirical of the 15-year-old working class girls in 'Little Britain' and the way they talk in fits and starts]. Give me a chance to lay out my stall, my purpose, let me come and see you and maybe argue my position. I said I've got to come down and see you, which train do I get? So I get to Croydon and he rings me says Bob, there's no point. I've got as far as Croydon. I'm at East Croydon station, Croydon East, you know! And I said, at least come and pick me up. He was a bit grumpy but he turned up in this lovely od Merc and we went back to his place. And I went into it. He knew I was there to pitch. He was being kind but it was a little awkward and he kept his head and at the end he just said, I just can't go through all that stuff again, and told me I had to try and understand all that.
- - So how did you sell it to him?
Geldof: I laid out the politics of the thing, what would happen if the PF played. The world audience, the uniqueness of the event, the fact that they never said goodbye to the audience, and that every person who ever bought a PF album in the world would have access to them again. He was sotto voce in the end. He took me upstairs and played me some tracks from his new solo album and I told him to take some speed! He said, I get a lot of pleasure out of all this, and they ware very beautiful songs. So he said well, I don't know, I'm not going to change my mind now, Bob. So I didn't crap on about it. I said, at least think about it. He said he was going on holiday for a week and there'd be no time to rehearse. I said do think about it. But then Mason called to say how did you get on? I said, I don't think very well but I'll write him a letter. Next Roger Waters calls me, in a great mood. I think a lot of people think he's bitter and cynical but I don't think he is at all. He's hilarious and has this acerbic wit and he's very up and funny. And he said what's happening? I said will you play? And he said all things considered, I'd love to. That took me back a bit, so I checked with Nick that Rick Wright would be up for it and he said he would. And I rang Roger back and Roger said 'What's Old Grumpy up to? I said, still being fairly grumpy."
:-D :-D :-D
Geldof: "There were clearly lots of unarticulated things going on, lots of water still flowing under those bridges. And Roger said I'd like to do it and I'd like to do it in London if we can do it. I said, dude, you can do it on the moon, you know! Now Nick, Rick and Roger appeared to be absolutely wanting to do it but Dave was away. I said I'd written Dave a letter, I called Nick again and told him about Dave and he said "It's the curse of leadership."
- - Referring to Roger or Dave Gilmour?
Geldof: "Referring to Dave, I suppose, as Dave's the one who has led the Floyd for the last 20 years. The burden of carrying on gradually. And Dave is with his new family and he's just got rid of that house and Dave I think just didn't want to go back to that place he'd been before. Roger on the other hand had become hugely expansive and was wanting to gig and quite prepared to let sleeping dogs lie. Terrible cliche but it's true. It was sort of like a reversal of roles really. And Roger said, have you got Gilmour's number? I heard no more for two weeks and then the phone goes and a voice says, all right then. I said sorry? He said "It's Gilmour. All right then." "I said you're not fucking serious! Fuckin' hell, you've made an old man very happy. Not that I can stand you cunts but you've made an old retro-punk very happy! Cos I never liked their music, really."
comment ---> Sir Bob doesn't mince his words, does he? You gotta give him that!
Geldof: "I rang Roger and told him Dave had called and he said "Oh Good. Where will we be on the bill?" Apparently that first meeting they had together was great. What older people should behave like, all grins and smiles. Nick told me, you know without being mawkish or anything, that it was like being in a band again. So familiar and fun and so good. Instantly they got to sorting out what songs they would play and even asked me at one point if I thought they were all right. 'What do you think?' I said, what do you mean what do I think?! The enormity of the Floyd playing again. The sheer numbers of eyeballs watching, all marshalled to a political end, it's amazing. In the US this is a bigger story than Live 8, why this band with such a painful history of disorder, why are they doing it?
- - Was this the biggest news story you could have engineered? I can't think of a bigger one.
Geldof: "In pop terms, absolutely. The whole point was the brand, and the individuals have become more and more fascinating as a result. As you began to understand the dynamics of each song and who did which bit it became fascinating. And their strange sense of politics, politics on a polite English level but with a profound bitterness. I didn't care for the music much but I genuinely like them as people.
- - Do you think all bands will reunite eventually, and that events like Live 8 just give them the excuse to do so?
Geldof: "No, I don't really. I think age is the excuse. You look at it and think back to what it was. We were glorious, you know! I don't know why we were glorious but let's acknowledge it! I'd like to play to all those people again! Whatever happened to us was just clearly uniquely good. It's not to recapture the old glory." Later in the article, there's that Mason quote reprinted again: Mason: "Bob and Roger are a bit like Hitler and Stalin with a better sense of humour. And, in Bob's case, worse hair."
There's an interesting account (Nick's) of the whole dynamics of Gilmour's upcoming solo album and PF reuniting for Live 8: Mason: "The moral pressure on anyone to do something like this is phenomenal." He totally sympathised with Gilmour's predicament:
"Live 8's going to impinge on next year when he tours as a solo artist. People will be saying, "Come on Dave, do some Floyd material", as they will have just seen him do some. And it takes a hell of a long time to establish yourself as a solo artist. But Bob rang me and said 'David Gilmour won't do it'. And I felt, well, that's Dave. You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink. In Dave's case you can't even get him near the water. So Roger rang David and that cemented it. Bob then spoke to Roger and he agreed. I think he felt -well we all felt actually - that it was a shame we didn't play Live Aid but we didn't really exist as a band at the time."
Very interesting stuff.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Bye Week Lives Again
With the help of what may be described as a 'ringer' (a professional playing for an amateur team....we were assisted by Alex's friend Eric, who recently graduated from Princeton), Team Bye Week climbed back to the top of the heap at the Anchor Inn Trivia Night. The team was composed this Tuesday of Alex, Eric, Matt, Turck, Lindsay, Chelsea, and myself.
Turck and I celebrated with Irish Carbombs. Following a White Russian, some of us went to the Saloon to play some darts and pool. Nate was in all his Graceful Turck glory.
A fun night.
Turck and I celebrated with Irish Carbombs. Following a White Russian, some of us went to the Saloon to play some darts and pool. Nate was in all his Graceful Turck glory.
A fun night.
The Land of Oz
Due to popular demand, this is the link to Alex's (Ozzie) Cell Blog D. Enjoy at your own risk.
You never know what topic Oz will tackle next - from steroid use to date rape to the most pressing concerns of Harry Potter fans everywhere....and last week he even managed to use the blog as a very indirect way of breaking up with his girlfriend.
For the most diverse use of blogging technology, I salute you.
You never know what topic Oz will tackle next - from steroid use to date rape to the most pressing concerns of Harry Potter fans everywhere....and last week he even managed to use the blog as a very indirect way of breaking up with his girlfriend.
For the most diverse use of blogging technology, I salute you.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Zach's Wedding Weekend
Thursday night at Sears, I called and checked my messages at home. It was fortunate that I did, because Kristen had called to let me know that everyone had arrived and was ready to hang out. I had been house-sitting for my grandparents all week, so I went there to make sure everything was in proper condition as well as to change out of my work clothes. What follows are just some of the many highlights from a very entertaining and fun weekend.
When I got to Kristen's house and hugged Kristen, John, Steve, Christine, and Bruce - and also met up with Clayt for the first time in about six years - we made our plans for an abbreviated Second Street Shuffle. The Triple S involves hitting every tavern, bar, and pub on Second Street from Falconer to Jamestown and having a beer, shot, or mixed drink. I'm not sure it's actually possible, but if anyone could do it, I think we had some promising candidates with us. We were also joined by John's sister Laura, Randy Binko and his girlfriend, as well as Debbie Yahn and Mrs. Bisignano.
Our first stop was Bonesy's (or Bonsey's, depending on what sign over the bar you'd like to believe). There was confusion among the regulars as to what our true purpose was, but we quickly confirmed that it was to drink. Licenses were tossed on the bar from California, Colorado, and New York. Clayt was wearing a curly black wig. Biz spotted his drink of choice in the cooler behind the bar, and seven bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon (what? It comes in bottles? Apparently....) were ordered. We made another positive impression on the crowd when we played the same Stones song twice to kick off our jukebox selections - I believe it was Gimme Shelter, but I could be wrong. Steve's hat was tossed out the door on three occasions. Eventually, we determined that it was time to leave and we simply couldn't grace Bonesy's with our collective presence any longer. Kristen enlisted my help to finish her beer - a trend that would continue during the evening.
We left Bonesy's with Mel's Place as our next destination - yet another fine establishment that I had never visited. John and Laura took off at an astonishing pace, and we could barely keep up. In apparent frustration, Clayt kicked a composite stone garbage can at a high rate of speed. He did not fall, but he would later accuse Steve of giving him a stress fracture due to the fact that he had no memory of the garbage can kick. After a brief sprint, we strolled up to Mel's Place, a bar that boasted numerous NASCAR signs and a POW/MIA flag. Upon entering, we were treated to Shania Twain's Come On Over. We were able to play some 'ski-bowling', a game which I do not have any talent for playing. Kristen and Steve encountered a former neighbor, and Mrs. Yahn was hit on, and then it was time to leave.
From Mel's, we headed over to the glorious Bullfrog Hotel. Surprise and dismay was expressed at the fate of the Long Branch, which had burned down. Upon entering the lobby of the deluxe Bullfrog, we discovered that a shitty band was playing very loudly, and also that it was approximately 819 degrees Fahrenheit inside. We decided to skip the Bullfrog and head directly to Miley's, where Zach and others - including Tony, John's brother - were waiting for us. The moms took John, Laura, and I in one car. No sooner had we pulled out of the parking lot and passed our comrades in front of the hotel that John stuck his upper torso out the back window and yelled "WOOOOOOO!" just in time for a passing patrol car to see him and pull a U-turn, lights flashing. The officer was very understanding once he saw that our party had the benefit of maternal guidance and left us with a few words of wisdom - "try to stay in the car while it's moving..."
Stuck in Draft form for about 7.5 years, I think I'll publish this now without attempting to remember anything else from that weekend... 2013.02.08
When I got to Kristen's house and hugged Kristen, John, Steve, Christine, and Bruce - and also met up with Clayt for the first time in about six years - we made our plans for an abbreviated Second Street Shuffle. The Triple S involves hitting every tavern, bar, and pub on Second Street from Falconer to Jamestown and having a beer, shot, or mixed drink. I'm not sure it's actually possible, but if anyone could do it, I think we had some promising candidates with us. We were also joined by John's sister Laura, Randy Binko and his girlfriend, as well as Debbie Yahn and Mrs. Bisignano.
Our first stop was Bonesy's (or Bonsey's, depending on what sign over the bar you'd like to believe). There was confusion among the regulars as to what our true purpose was, but we quickly confirmed that it was to drink. Licenses were tossed on the bar from California, Colorado, and New York. Clayt was wearing a curly black wig. Biz spotted his drink of choice in the cooler behind the bar, and seven bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon (what? It comes in bottles? Apparently....) were ordered. We made another positive impression on the crowd when we played the same Stones song twice to kick off our jukebox selections - I believe it was Gimme Shelter, but I could be wrong. Steve's hat was tossed out the door on three occasions. Eventually, we determined that it was time to leave and we simply couldn't grace Bonesy's with our collective presence any longer. Kristen enlisted my help to finish her beer - a trend that would continue during the evening.
We left Bonesy's with Mel's Place as our next destination - yet another fine establishment that I had never visited. John and Laura took off at an astonishing pace, and we could barely keep up. In apparent frustration, Clayt kicked a composite stone garbage can at a high rate of speed. He did not fall, but he would later accuse Steve of giving him a stress fracture due to the fact that he had no memory of the garbage can kick. After a brief sprint, we strolled up to Mel's Place, a bar that boasted numerous NASCAR signs and a POW/MIA flag. Upon entering, we were treated to Shania Twain's Come On Over. We were able to play some 'ski-bowling', a game which I do not have any talent for playing. Kristen and Steve encountered a former neighbor, and Mrs. Yahn was hit on, and then it was time to leave.
From Mel's, we headed over to the glorious Bullfrog Hotel. Surprise and dismay was expressed at the fate of the Long Branch, which had burned down. Upon entering the lobby of the deluxe Bullfrog, we discovered that a shitty band was playing very loudly, and also that it was approximately 819 degrees Fahrenheit inside. We decided to skip the Bullfrog and head directly to Miley's, where Zach and others - including Tony, John's brother - were waiting for us. The moms took John, Laura, and I in one car. No sooner had we pulled out of the parking lot and passed our comrades in front of the hotel that John stuck his upper torso out the back window and yelled "WOOOOOOO!" just in time for a passing patrol car to see him and pull a U-turn, lights flashing. The officer was very understanding once he saw that our party had the benefit of maternal guidance and left us with a few words of wisdom - "try to stay in the car while it's moving..."
Stuck in Draft form for about 7.5 years, I think I'll publish this now without attempting to remember anything else from that weekend... 2013.02.08
Thursday, August 04, 2005
August 4, 1981
Happy Birthday to anyone who might have been born on this day. Hope your life is going as well as you'd like.
NYT Article Regarding SC Nominee John Roberts
Some disturbing, but likely unsurprising information about John Roberts and his views on the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1980-81.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Ramble
Well, I've been posting rarely, since it's difficult to write anything substantial while at work and my only other opportunity to access the internet comes at a blazing 26400 bps via the antiquated phone line that connects my parents' house to the rest of the world. I don't venture to Fredonia that often - in fact I mostly just go to pick up and pay bills. My apartment's climate is stiflingly hot since it is on the second floor. I stole a fan from my parents' basement two days ago and brought it there to help alleviate the jungle atmosphere.
I have not made any concerted effort to find a roommate since Matt's loan reduction forced him to back out of living there in the fall. The walls are bare and now the couch is gone, so it's even more attractive now. I don't think I'm going to bother spending too much to replace furniture or various amenities that Aaron reclaimed when he moved out. It seems to make little sense to move a bunch of stuff up there when I'll be out by the end of December or early January. I don't feel like looking for/auditioning roommates either, since I'm fairly particular about who/what I will tolerate. In other words, I'm an asshole.
With recent increased readership, I've become somewhat more reluctant to post my feelings about current events (in my life - not the world in general). Hopefully that will change as the summer draws to a close. ...and yes, I probably could be more vague if I really tried.
Anyway, I've seen quite a few movies lately and I've been reading quite a bit. I'd like to devote some space to that kind of thing, but this internet connection just tries my patience so much that I doubt I'll get to it very soon.
In the world of politics and global current events, it may seem as if things have slowed down, but of course that's not really true. I'm certainly not as informed now as I was during school, since I've been effectively limited to the 24-hour "news" channels that spend as much time on shark attacks and missing person cases as they do to Supreme Court nominations or scandals involving chief Republican strategists like Karl Rove. Without the high speed connection to monitor Democracy Now or even really the time to read talkingpointsmemo.com and the NY Times on a regular basis, I feel a hell of a lot dumber, or at least out of the loop.
Life is funny, in a sad kind of way of course. If you've ever doubted that, talk to me sometime. Things are weird.
I know, I know - not too eloquent, right?
You may have noticed - or even emitted a sigh of relief - that I never got around to posting reviews of the Plant shows. I feel bad about that, but a large part of my laziness in that matter was due to my disappointment with other people that attended the shows and sat down for every non-Zeppelin song. At the Toronto show I finally got angry enough to mock people and tell people that they better sit down whenever a track off the new album was played.
Oh - one highlight of that trip...in the bathroom before the show started, Thom overheard this exchange...
"What has seven arms and sucks?"
"I don't know - what?"
"Def Leppard."
For anyone who doesn't know, the drummer for DL lost an arm in a car accident.
Yeah, it's mean. But you laughed.
Alright. Well, I'm going to take off now. I'm housesitting for my grandparents this week. No computer there. No cable/satellite either. So I read and watch movies.
This post sucks. Sorry.
I have not made any concerted effort to find a roommate since Matt's loan reduction forced him to back out of living there in the fall. The walls are bare and now the couch is gone, so it's even more attractive now. I don't think I'm going to bother spending too much to replace furniture or various amenities that Aaron reclaimed when he moved out. It seems to make little sense to move a bunch of stuff up there when I'll be out by the end of December or early January. I don't feel like looking for/auditioning roommates either, since I'm fairly particular about who/what I will tolerate. In other words, I'm an asshole.
With recent increased readership, I've become somewhat more reluctant to post my feelings about current events (in my life - not the world in general). Hopefully that will change as the summer draws to a close. ...and yes, I probably could be more vague if I really tried.
Anyway, I've seen quite a few movies lately and I've been reading quite a bit. I'd like to devote some space to that kind of thing, but this internet connection just tries my patience so much that I doubt I'll get to it very soon.
In the world of politics and global current events, it may seem as if things have slowed down, but of course that's not really true. I'm certainly not as informed now as I was during school, since I've been effectively limited to the 24-hour "news" channels that spend as much time on shark attacks and missing person cases as they do to Supreme Court nominations or scandals involving chief Republican strategists like Karl Rove. Without the high speed connection to monitor Democracy Now or even really the time to read talkingpointsmemo.com and the NY Times on a regular basis, I feel a hell of a lot dumber, or at least out of the loop.
Life is funny, in a sad kind of way of course. If you've ever doubted that, talk to me sometime. Things are weird.
I know, I know - not too eloquent, right?
You may have noticed - or even emitted a sigh of relief - that I never got around to posting reviews of the Plant shows. I feel bad about that, but a large part of my laziness in that matter was due to my disappointment with other people that attended the shows and sat down for every non-Zeppelin song. At the Toronto show I finally got angry enough to mock people and tell people that they better sit down whenever a track off the new album was played.
Oh - one highlight of that trip...in the bathroom before the show started, Thom overheard this exchange...
"What has seven arms and sucks?"
"I don't know - what?"
"Def Leppard."
For anyone who doesn't know, the drummer for DL lost an arm in a car accident.
Yeah, it's mean. But you laughed.
Alright. Well, I'm going to take off now. I'm housesitting for my grandparents this week. No computer there. No cable/satellite either. So I read and watch movies.
This post sucks. Sorry.
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