Pictures of Sausage
The axes began falling today in the sausage factory where I work which is not a sausage factory. I will still work at the sausage factory in July, but many will not. Many who do the heaviest work will be gone and many who stay can hardly tie their shoes unaided. The axes were a long time coming. Because we put too much sawdust in the sausage for too long and because people thought they could get sausage on the Internet instead. Not realizing it was only pictures of sausage.
-Miles Lascaux
Isn’t It Convenient
That the list of the nearest sun-like stars, those most like our sun in brightness and age, and thus most likely to have an Earth-like planet around them with some sort of evolved life, already have names that look like they were coined by science-fiction writers?
Epsilon Eridani
Tau Ceti
Sigma Draconis
Delta Pavonis
82 Eridani
Beta Hydrii
Zeta Tucanae
Beta Canum Venaticorum
Gliese 67
Gliese 853
18 Scorpii
51 Pegasi
Most of them go back to the 17th or early 18th centuries, thanks to the Bayer and Flamsteed catalogues.
-Miles Lascaux
Songs for the Times
I wanted to post up “Depression Blues” by Gatemouth Brown, but I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Never mind, this one will do:
Look at all the Germans just standing around. How can you stand around when Gate plays? Europeans may respect the blues, but they don’t effing get it.
-Miles Lascaux
Slap My Assets
Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed a “choke the money” strategy to solve complex problems. Obama slapped financial sanctions on three of the most vicious Mexican drug cartels and threatened to prosecute Americans who do business with them. The same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the administration will try to seize the financial assets of Somali pirates.
Fighting drug lords and pirates by pinpoint surgical strikes on their cash streams sounds like a bad joke in a country where we can’t even discover what our own financiers are doing with our own trillions until it’s too late.
The quickest and cheapest way to undercut the cartels, of course, would be to legalize marijuana, which, according to the White House drug czar, accounts for 62 percent of the Mexican drug cartels’ profits. But Obama doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.
-Miles Lascaux
Pirate Lessons
The media inhabit an eternal and simplified present tense, and when they try to set up a historical backdrop they usually get it backward or upside down.
For instance, AP and other wire service news accounts of the recent dust-up between the U.S. Navy and Somali brigands (I pitched the headline “Yankees 3, Pirates 0” but was overruled) called it “the first such attack on American sailors in around 200 years.”
It isn’t. Evidently the AP was aware of the Barbary Coast pirates but not later cases. Especially the naval war against Sumatra pirates in the 1830s. Which is a shame because the parallels there are a lot more informative than the ones that can be abstracted from the Barbary Coast war.
A good, brief account of the fight is in Max Boot’s “Savage Wars of Peace.” If I can do the link right, the relevant passages are here,from the bottom of page 46 to the end of page 49.
It involves a lawless Muslim land on the Indian Ocean. It involves U.S. merchant ships seeking precious cargoes (spices) and carrying on dubious trade (opium). And it shows the influence of politics on military decisions and the consequences of disproportionate responses and collateral damage.
It also shows that nothing — hard power or soft power — worked for long. What worked was when the Dutch took over Sumatra and banned all non-Dutch ships from the spice trade there. Then and only then did the pirates stop attacking American ships — because there weren’t any.
Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, when you look at history, the best antidote to piracy is colonialism/imperialism. That’s how the British quelled the nasty gang of cutthroats preying on ships from along the southern Persian Gulf in the early 1800s — they cowed them into submission out of fear of what other colonial powers might do to them, and eventually made them a protectorate of the Empire. The Arab pirates learned to behave, then their descendants discovered the virtues of oil. Now they’re our good friends in Dubai. Who recently aspired to run our ports.
-Miles Lascaux
Haunted Earth
My eyes say their prayers to her and sailors ring her bell, the way a moth mistakes a light bulb for the moon and goes to hell.” [Tom Waits]
Now I think I know what it is about the Moon.
All the other planets have satellites. Most have many: little rat-rocks that chase their tails around a gas giant — it’s not the same. We have something big and bright and near that draws up our tides and our yearnings in the night. So big some wise heads call us two a double planet.
What we have is no captive asteroid. We have a lover, a subtle companion, a Scheherazade made of myth and green cheese and howling dogs and valentines. For all we know she raised us: Tidal pools where the rock-wash baked in the young Sun sprouted life on Earth.
To the eggheads, the Moon’s a problem. It’s all a problem to scientists. The Moon is not like the Earth: It lacks the iron. Therefore our Moon couldn’t have congealed out of the cosmic muck like we did.
They cracked their heads against it and sicced their big computers on it, and they’re getting close to an answer. Heartlessly knocking off all the other theories and models like “American Idol” contestants till they get an answer that fits.
The Moon got pulled out of us. Like a rib, while we slept unborn. It got bashed out of us by a shadow planet. Lilith, passionate and unstable, a firstlove almost big enough to be our twin. A dark Mars that could not share space with us and had noplace else to go.
She fell into us and shattered. And what was torn out of us when she died, and what she dissolved into in her Götterdämmerung, in a year, maybe a hundred years — a teary eye-blink in the history of time — became the Moon in the night.
The Moon hangs guilty and sullen in our sky. We are two, the plodding, stable Earth and her, but there is a third, sensed and gone, and she, too, is in our eyes when we stare up and in the moon’s face when it looks blankly back down on our cheating nights.
Even scientists feel for her. They gave her a name, Theia, which I don’t think is the right name but it will have to do.
They, being scientists, want to look for bits of Theia in the corners of the sky, behind the old armoires of heaven, where the dust collects for years. Maybe they’ll find a girl’s diary, full of tears.
“Computer models show that Theia could have grown large enough to produce the moon if it formed in the L4 or L5 [Lagrangian] regions, where the balance of forces allowed enough material to accumulate,” Kaiser said. “Later, Theia would have been nudged out of L4 or L5 by the increasing gravity of other developing planets like Venus and sent on a collision course with Earth.”
Venus, of course. Who else?
It would be better if we hadn’t known. Now there always will be the shadow between us. These scars, years after the horrible crash we cannot remember, still twitch. It’s not our Moon anymore. It’s not the Earth we thought it was.
“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”
~ Miles Lascaux
Ambiance 