Tag End

From Reuters:

Afghanistan’s only pig quarantined in flu fear

Jon Carroll writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes five columns a week. If the thought of that doesn’t fry your brain, you need to try it sometime. In public. (It doesn’t count unless you do it in public, you know.)

In today’s column, he confesses that he is the Zodiac killer. (I don’t know if this was planned or one of those deadline things. In the column business, your plans and deadlines often are in conflict.)

If you do not read Jon Carroll, you need to make this important change in your life and start reading him today. As Carroll himself has written, and as all columnists know (but not necessarily their editors), if you write multiple columns a week, it is guaranteed at least one will be a stinker. It’s a natural law or something and can’t be helped.

But Jon Carroll doesn’t write too many stinkers. I’ve been a fan for a long time. I thought I’d toss one of his columns your way. Give him a week or two. Read him every day. You will smile, you will think (he encourages it), you will notice fine sentences being built. Watching a fine sentence being built is one of life’s better pleasures, no?

This morning the Journal sports section ran a commentary by Blair Kerkhoff of the Kansas City Star. The subject was the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) schools and how they get the lion’s share of college football money. In the course of the commentary, there appeared a partial quote from Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas. (Oh, you silly goose, of course Congress is involved in college football. Where else would we go for answers to such vexing questions?)

Anyway, in the course of listing the sins of the BCS, the Republican said the system that’s been in place since 1998 is “like communism.”

I need someone to explain to me why conservative Republicans go down the “communist” road at every opportunity. I understand it when they’re talking about Barack Obama, that well known communist/socialist/fascist. Everyone understands that.

But college football? BCS Communists? Times have been tough for Republicans, but still … Why do they say these things?

Help me out here. I really do want to know. Why do they do this?

Haley Heinz, a good, young police reporter has a story that needs a new headline in today’s Albuquerque Journal ($sub.req.) Here’s the Journal headline: “Run on Ammo Leaves Cops Short.”

I’m thinking a more correct headline would go something like this: Right Wing Yay-Hoos Reap What They Sow.

The reason for the ammo shortage is — wait for it — Barack Obama. But you probably already knew that.

Remember when Obama was a secret Muslim, and then a socialist, and then he played nice with Hugo Chavez, and then there was that birth certificate thing, and then he bowed too much to …? Well, they all kind of run together after awhile and I have a hard time keeping all the conspiracies straight.

Anyway, the same yay-hoos who bought into all these rumors (one often hears some of them on KKOB, prattling on about the latest secret government plan to take away their “rights”) are running around America buying up all the ammo because Obama is going to take away their guns — and their ammo, too, I guess.

Of course, Obama is going to do no such thing. Nobody is coming to get their guns. Nobody is coming to get their ammo. Oh, there might be a lefty or two out there who wants some kind of common sense in gun control, but we all know that won’t happen because the NRA bought Congress a long time ago.

Of all that ails America these days, guns and ammo don’t make the cut. They’re not on Obama’s to-do list. But they do make for fertile rumor soil. So the yay-hoos are out there making ammo scarce and making life difficult for … Obama? No.

Liberals? No.

Democrats? No.

They’re making life harder for police officers.

Now, if they can just “prove” that Obama secretly imported swine flu so he could get all the ammo when they were laid up coughing and sneezing …

My friend, John Fleck, the veteran Albuquerque Journal science writer, has introduced me to a couple of physicist pals of his who regularly take on the evolution debate, which of course always leads to a religion debate.

In today’s Times, Stanley Fish, writes an essay on a book by the British critic Terry Eagleton. It sounds to me like Eagleton does a pretty good job of describing what science can and can’t do; and what religion can and can’t do. The book is “Reason, Faith and Revolution.”

Here’s a small bit: ”

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

It’s just a headline — Despite Recession, Fearful Brazilians Keep Armored Car Sales Booming. I suppose it’s a serious issue in Brazil, serious enough to buy that armored car if you can afford it, but not all headlines are created equal, and this one stopped me in my tracks. Here’s the link to the story if you want to read the whole thing.

If there is a better teller of America’s story than Dan Barry of The New York Times, I can’t imagine who it might be. He writes a column called This Land, traveling the country to tell its stories. Today it is a story of being sold out, a family who has sold Pontiacs since they first began in 1926. They talk about betrayal by GM. There will be no more Pontiacs to sell.

I’ve Twittered, I’ve Facebooked, I suppose I might as well Blog. I got together with Dave Thomas, a physicist who knows his way around a computer and we got the thing off the ground. I just now noticed that in my hurry to post something — anything — grammar took a dive (an apostrophe in the wild, floating around where it should not be). “Oh, well,” as my longtime friend, the late Tony Hillerman might say.

Speaking of Tony, the name of the blog — Tag End — is shamelessly stolen from him. He wrote once that the Sandia Mountains were the “tag end” of the Rockies. For some reason the phrase stuck in my head over the years. So Tag End it is.

Actually, I began experimenting with it some time ago, but I was working at the Journal then and didn’t feel too comfortable going off the reservation. Now, after working there for about 31 years and writing a column for 28 of them, I am “retired,” whatever that might mean and I no longer have a reservation to go off of.

What will the blog be? I’m not sure. That remains to be seen. A commentary here and there, I suppose. A few links to stories and essays that catch my eye. I’m forever sending these things to friends, so I might as well post them here and be done with it.

I’m still working on the basic nuts and bolts of the blog and much learning needs to be done. So you can expect many mistakes. I am, after all, something of a newbie.

Suggestions (without flames if possible) would be most welcome. If you have links to blogs you think I need to check out, send them. The blog roll is in its infancy.

All right, enough of the noodling around. I think I’ll start clicking on Blogger tabs and see what happens.

In The New York Times, an old story — bigotry — comes with a new twist — swine flu. I am always at a loss when it comes to bigotry’s ability to change with the times.

Hello, World!!

Here is a link to my friend John’s blog. Since I am in the habit of blaming him for all things that go wrong with my foray’s into cyberspace, I thought the least I could do is start off this blog by linking to John’s excellent science blog. (He’s the veteran science writer at the Albuquerque Journal.)