ceci n’est pas un cellphone

Sometimes a cellphone is just not a cellphone, as we learn from a NYTimes reader.

As an avid Central Park birder, I’m always on the lookout for the unusual. Recently, after two hours of early-morning birding, I reluctantly headed from the park when my ears caught the sound of a cellphone ringing.
I looked into the bushes where the sound was coming from but saw no one.
Then my eye caught a perky little catbird running through its repertory of bird songs. Knowing that it is a mimic, I listened carefully, trying to pick out the different songs. I heard it imitate a white-throated sparrow, a house finch, a song sparrow, and then the clear ring of a cellphone. My mouth dropped open in disbelief. I listened again and, sure enough, heard the catbird repeat bird song, bird song, cellphone and on and on. The little guy made my day.

War? What war?

How can we live with this fool?
Bushie delivered a major address to the Japanese Diet on February 21. A few seconds into the speech* he said:

My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific. And in that peace, the world has witnessed the broad advance of prosperity and democracy throughout East Asia.

I learned of this first from Reno‘s performance rant last night and found it online today. Reno suggested that his handler, Condy Rice, standing in the wings, must have thrown her hands to her head in astonishment, saying, “we coached him up through the thirties; we thought he knew about World War II!”
And I can’t imagine what the Japanese who were there thought.
Note: All official or unofficial transcripts I have been able to locate edited the written text to change our records of what was said, perhaps thus hoping we would sleep better at night.
* go to the WATCH/LISTEN video link on the right, “US President George Bush” for the full visual and audio record.

Iceland solves world’s problems

Iceland is on the way to full energy independence, and it does not involve fossil fuels. If we could only widely duplicate some of that country’s natural advantages and ecological enthusiasms, we could eliminate much of the planet’s pollution and make our current fuel-driven domestic and foreign policy totally obsolete.

Iceland, with its steaming geothermal power stations, already knows plenty about alternative energy.
Now this island of lava on the edge of the Arctic plans to become the world’s first society to ditch fossil fuels entirely, relying instead on hydrogen made using the power of its roaring rivers and volcanoes.
Enthusiasts even talk about it one day becoming the “Kuwait of the North” as an exporter of the new, green fuel to markets in Europe.

Violating Central Park

This one was for Rex!
Before he [under huge protest] succumbed to H.I.V. disease a few years ago, Rex Wasserman was a wonderful friend, a fanatical New Yorker, a fierce activist, and a City landscape architect with little love for Henry Stern’s self-promoting theatrics. When I saw an item by Stern on the Opinion page of the Daily News this week, I thought of Rex and of the Park we all love so much, and I couldn’t go on without adding a few words for myself and for my friend.
Today the News printed my letter, unedited, in its own box at the bottom of the Letters page.

[excerpt] “Our natural shrine” has, in fact, been exploited repeatedly by installations intended to enhance reputations, movements and pocketbooks. For starters, I need only mention any number of rock or other music extravaganzas, at least one Disney film marketing event, rallies for religious figures and the most recent absurdity, a CBS “Survivor” episode.

our own Heart of Darkness

America’s agenda, while it clearly does not include any real consideration for the welfare of the world outside, excludes most Americans as well, with the notable exception of only the very very rich, who remain the beneficiaries of our tender care.
The World Health Organization proposed last year that poor countries be provided with such basic items as antibiotics and insecticide-treated mosquito nets. If we had backed the proposed program, estimated to save eight million lives each year, our share would have been about $10 billion annually (about a dime a day for each American). The U.S. dismissed the suggestion with little grace.
In contrast and at about the same time, our legislators in Washington enthusiastically joined together in support of the administration’s proposal to make permanent the recent repeal of the estate tax, a bounty which will affect only some 3300 families yet cost the country $20 billion in revenue.

So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don’t hesitate. Leave no heir behind!

[By the way, the foreign aid figures Krugman uses in the column linked above are respectively 11 one hundredths and 13 one hundredths of one percent, and not 11 and 13 percent of our GDP. These are figures which usually shock Americans, who like to think we give away scads of dough to foreigners.]

The original Nancy Drew

Mildred Wirt Benson died tuesday at the age of 96. The author of the very first book and 22 others in the earliest series of Nancy Drew novels confided to a NYTimes reporter in 1993 that her esoteric fame could all sometimes add up to being a bit much. “I’m so sick of Nancy Drew I could vomit,” she said.

Nancy Drew, seldom just Nancy, inspired readers, many of them envious girls, to scoop up more than 80 million copies of the books in the series. Here was a heroine who could survive being beaten, choked and tossed into car trunks; escape spiders and snakes — and then retire at night in her four-poster bed in a golden bedroom. She dated the athletic Ned and basked in the attentions of her doting, widowed father, the distinguished lawyer Carson Drew. And she had no mother to interfere with her adventures.

I still have my own beautifully-illustrated edition of “The Bungalow Mystery” (1960) and “The Mystery at Lilac Inn” (1961) high on our library shelf.

war at home

Back to the sixties—or worse! It’s not the good parts this administration wants revived, but the infiltration and monitoring of political, religious and activist groups suspected of being critical of the government.
The NYTimes has it right in a sober editorial today.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has a gift for making the most draconian policy changes sound seductively innocuous. He was at it again yesterday, describing new domestic spying powers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as nothing more than the authority to surf the Internet or attend a public gathering. That is profoundly misleading. In reality Mr. Ashcroft, in the name of fighting terrorism, was giving F.B.I. agents nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity.
….
At a press conference Mr. Ashcroft promised that the new rules would be put in place with “scrupulous respect for civil rights and personal freedom.” The sentiment is welcome, but unconvincing. Mr. Ashcroft and his colleagues have missed no opportunity since Sept. 11 to expand the investigative powers of the federal government and to stampede Congress into supporting the changes by suggesting that opposition is disloyal.

Adding a modest obsevation: They couldn’t even handle all the data they had gathered when they had “restrictions!” It does not seem to have been lack of information that kept us from preventing September 11.

Don’t skip your Greens!

The Green Party nominees for New York state offices carry background credentials a progressive voter normally only dreams of. Compare them to the candidates of the two “major” parties for office anywhere at any time.
What do we betray or throw away when we support the things we believe in? What do we betray or throw away when we do not?

Dr. Aronowitz said that key issues in his program would include energy policy, especially the need to close the Indian Point nuclear power plan; the effects of the growing permanent war machine on our ability to meet social needs in the state; and, tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporate welfare. Like many of the speakers at the Green convention, Aronowitz spoke of the need to oppose the efforts by the national Democratic and Republican Parties to use September 11th as an excuse to curtail civil liberties and increase corporate welfare.
….
The Greens are committed to ecology, democracy, nonviolence and justice.

but too late for Mike Lyons

Things are looking up a bit for the gay or lesbian partners of those lost in New York and Washington September 11, but not everyone is here to see it.

The emergency funds made available after Sept. 11 came too late for Mike Lyons of Jersey City, who saw his partner of 18 years, John Keohane, killed by falling debris as the two fled the collapsing towers. Mr. Lyons, unemployed and suffering from multiple sclerosis, was slow to apply for financial assistance, and was running out of money when he committed suicide on March 1.

I tried to interest a number of people in that story back in March, but no one was interested. One reporter replied that he and his employer regarded such a suicide as a sensitive, private matter and so hesitated to report someone’s decision to take their own life.
I could not agree with the sentiment even then, and I’m not even a news reporter. I thought such an attitude was really not that different from the media conspiracy of silence when it comes to the private lives of celebrities (if the celebrity is gay).

still safe!

The Onion’s roving reporter “Opinion” box this week quotes one imaginary member of the public, in reply to a question about suicide bombers in our midst, as follows:

“The U.S. is safe, so long as the terrorists don’t see us being critical of President Bush.”

I just checked again. No need to worry yet.