Here comes the flood

“If again the seas are silent in any still alive, it’ll be those who gave their island to survive. Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.” Bless you, Peter Gabriel.

Inception cat!

Inception is coming out on DVD/Blu-ray. To get you in the mood…

Inception cat!

Celebrity auction to raise money for the American Tinnitus Association

ATA's celebrity memorabilia auction now has special items available for bidding from Steve Martin, legendary actor, tinnitus sufferer and ATA supporter! Check it out and become a part of this exciting auction with 100% of all proceeds dedicated to tinnitus research.

ATA 2010 Celebrity Memorabilia Auction | American Tinnitus Association

www.ata.org

Auction items will begin going on sale on Monday, November 22 and will continue to be posted every day throughout the week. Below you can get a preview description of what we will be offering. Be sure to check back to see when the auction items go live and to link directly to their individual eBay

Netflix

Netflix has decided to convert more of their customers to streaming, and try to step away from the DVD-by-mail business model. They’re doing this by raising the prices on the disc business, but offering a streaming-only plan that’s much cheaper.

That’s all well and good. I get it. I know as well as anyone this is the wave of the future.

My problem is that, while I do partake of Netflix streaming, the quality is slightly less than an old-fashioned DVD. But for those of us who rent Blu-ray discs, there’s no way, at least right now, that streaming can match the quality of the ultra-pristine, ultra-clear, ultra-sharp Blu-ray.

I’ll be hanging on the the old disc-by-mail option until streaming gets closer to that quality.

Lonely as a boat

some comedy, lonely as a boat
and wave after wave washes over me
with the weight of more than half the world
bound up in the sea

there’s a fire on the shore, and what’s more
a stranger’s eyes watch incredulously
my sails’ flap and flutter
hands on hips, don’t know her, could be anybody

digs her feet in the sand, calls out
“all your years have slept with despair!
come home now, there’s nothing out there!”
she’s graced with fair face and raging ragged smile

sunrise, and colors of the deep assemble
light up the emptiness of my nets
could this lost sailor dare dine with you?
sail home, sail home, lost and lonely boat

       (—1991)

Celebrity auction–please give!

The American Tinnitus Association is having a celebrity auction to help raise money for critical research and a cure. Many items donated by Steve Martin, William Shatner, Al DiMeola, Paul Oakenfold and others. Check out the website and help if you can --

http://www.ata.org/ATA-auctions/2010-Auction

Personal Message from William Shatner:

"Regardless of the characters I portray on TV and on the big screen, my tinnitus once buried me in a negative place where many of you are now - or have been. Believe me when I say, ‘I've been there.’

“The harsh reality of tinnitus has robbed silence from the lives of nearly 50 million Americans. Whether you hear it in your ears or in your head tinnitus means the same thing - noise that does not go away. But know this: you do not suffer alone.

“My tinnitus began while I was filming the Star Trek episode “Arena.” I was standing too close to a special effects explosion and it resulted in tinnitus. There were days when I didn’t know how I would survive the agony. I was so tormented by the screeching in my head I really thought I would not be able to go on. But then a ray of light burst into my life – the American Tinnitus Association. The help they gave me literally saved my life.

“ATA works with the best and the brightest scientists throughout the world who are investigating this terrible condition. What’s unique about ATA is that they give us all the opportunity to do something about tinnitus; they make it possible for ANYONE to contribute and support research that is moving us toward a cure.

I believe we CAN achieve this goal! I encourage you to join me in making a generous donation to the American Tinnitus Association. Its dedicated staff and volunteers are here for us today, helping us live with our tinnitus and supporting innovative research. Eventually, they will bring the good news of silence back into our lives. We must band together on this journey to help fund our critically-needed association so that one day, not one single person will ever have to bear the agony and distress of tinnitus.

“From the bottom of my heart … thank you for your help.”

The Daily Show takes on Glenn Beck

Last night’s episode is probably the best ever.

Part one of “The Manchurian Lunatic”:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
George Soros Plans to Overthrow America
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Part two:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Manchurian Lunatic
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

This Illusion’s Disillusion

Did she love and leave you
Did he shove and bereave you
Raise your hand! Raise your hand!

Did you press your hungry face into
The breast of your god’s lovingkindness
Looking for milk and finding instead
Sour flesh and fear’s bitter nets
Raise your hand! Raise your hand!

Did you strive to reach the top
Of a mountain of dead fish
All humankind’s artifice and arrangement
And look out upon the ocean
Of car parts and party bars
Crusty with dried promises and blood
Raise your hand! Raise your hand!

Did you reach for the sky
And find instead an empty entropy
Of burned out stars and black holes
Belching x rays and cold gas
For you and all your hangers-on
To breathe in and collect into bags
To sell to your wide-eyed children
And share the devastation of your souls
Raise your hand! Raise your hand!

Then come along, come along
And suck in this final truth
That the only thing that can fill the void
Is void.

                                RGA 12-8-09

What’s the antimatter with you?

Yet another piece of Star Trek tech finds itself a step closer to reality.

Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, successfully trapping the first "anti-atom" in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.

An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to create an atom of anti-hydrogen and then hold onto it for long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab.

"For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter," the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press.

"This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way," he added. "We really think that this was the most difficult step."

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why antimatter seems to have disappeared from the universe.

Theory posits that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. But while matter — defined as having mass and taking up space — went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab.

A one-way trip to Mars

I suppose I could think of a few people to send on a one-way trip to Mars.

Invoking the spirit of "Star Trek" in a scholarly article entitled "To Boldly Go," two scientists contend human travel to Mars could happen much more quickly and cheaply if the missions are made one-way. They argue that it would be little different from early settlers to North America, who left Europe with little expectation of return.

"The main point is to get Mars exploration moving," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University, who wrote the article in the latest "Journal of Cosmology" with Paul Davies of Arizona State University. The colleagues state — in one of 55 articles in the issue devoted to exploring Mars — that humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth.

Mars is a six-month flight away, possesses surface gravity, an atmosphere, abundant water, carbon dioxide and essential minerals. They propose the missions start by sending two two-person teams, in separate ships, to Mars. More colonists and regular supply ships would follow.

Humanity hanging from a cross of iron

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

Broken Boy

a big booming voice comes down at last
says in the echo "hey broken boy
your only hope is at the end of this rope
so dance, you ape, dance hard, dance fast"

so i dance for his joy
then pretending not to be hurt face down in the dirt
i smell the bones of my fathers and mothers
and i can see how hard they tried

but in the end he shaved their hair
strapped them in the chair
and for their reward they were fried.
oh lord we go down just like all the others.

It’s in the brain, not the ears

Researchers from US and Canadian universities have confirmed that the source of tinnitus – the ringing or buzzing in your ears after hearing nerve damage – isn’t really in your ears, it’s in your brain.

McMaster Professor Larry Roberts says they have evidence the high-pitched ringing or hissing noise tinnitus sufferers hear is generated by neurons firing in the brain, not the ear.

The phantom and sometimes constant ringing in the ears affects millions of people worldwide and has a dramatic negative impact on the quality of their lives.

Roberts says tinnitus is brought on by changes in the brain that take place when someone suffers hearing loss.

Monica Street, sometime around 1986

I remember night falling in the field as I played. I knew at some point I had to go back inside. Cars passed by and ignored me. Sometimes I heard their radios as they went by, like I was some kind of telepath picking up the random thoughts of strangers, and finding neither peace nor answers in any of them. I could not name the disease. I only knew I felt it in the air, some terrible thing in the future waiting to fall on my head. So I packed up the cheap guitar and walked back home, and put on Brahms who made all the commentary on the evening that it needed. I didn't reappear in the real world until she asked, "What were you doing outside?" and I said, "Looking for something."

I'm still a young man
but my hands are getting old.
They are yellow paper
where they once were gold.

They don't want to do
what I tell them to.
Try as I may
they won't touch you.

Who knows what desires
burn in our hearts.
They are raging fires
in our secret parts.

Is what you say on Facebook “protected speech?”

What you say on Facebook may be considered “protected speech.” This will be an interesting case to follow.

In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page.

This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.

The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

Getting away with it

Here's how to get away with felony hit & run:

A Morgan Stanley wealth manager will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because Colorado prosecutors don't want him to lose his job.

Martin Joel Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, is being accused only of a misdemeanor for allegedly driving his Mercedes into a cyclist and then fleeing the scene, Colorado's Vail Daily reports. The victim, Dr. Steven Milo, whom Erzinger allegedly hit in July, suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and, according to his lawyer Harold Haddon, "lifetime pain."

But District Attorney Mark Hurlbert says it wouldn't be wise to prosecute Erzinger -- doing so might hurt his source of income. Read more.

Election post mortem

The election this time can be summed up by the people who stayed home – the non-voters were the game changers in the midterms.

And the group of people who stayed home were younger voters who most likely would have gone for Democratic candidates. The youth vote did NOT come out like it did in 2008. The electorate for this election was mostly older and white.

So what does this mean for President Obama in 2012? A pollster who worked for President Clinton says that Obama is in much better shape at this point than Clinton was in 1994:

In a conference call on Friday, Stan Greenberg pointed to several silver linings for a White House that had just lost 60 seats in -- and control of -- the House of Representatives. Obama, he predicted, has a clearer path to a political comeback than Clinton did 16 years ago.

"In almost all cases here President Obama is doing somewhat better than President Clinton was and that was at a comparable time," Greenberg said, "[Obama's] approval rating is higher, [his] personal favorability rating is a little higher. And the other important piece here was when the Democrats were thrown out in '94, they had been in power for a long time and so the negative feelings on the Democratic Party were stark and reflected the difference on those numbers in '94."

Companies in October added most jobs since April

Job growth is continuing. From AP:

Companies created more net new jobs in October than in any month since April, evidence that businesses are shedding their previously cautious attitude toward hiring.

But the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.6 percent for the third straight month.

Still, the job gains should give Americans a bit more income to spend, providing some support to the sluggish economy. That higher income, combined with the potential extension of the Bush tax cuts and the Federal Reserve's move earlier this week to push interest rates down, could help the economy pick up steam, economists said.

The employment report showed much stronger job gains than Wall Street analysts had expected.

Vote

If you didn't take part in early voting, then get off your couch tomorrow and get to your polling place.

I have a simple rule: If you don't vote, you don't get to gripe.

Hell, that oughtta be a law!

Merging into the tunnel

From Jon Stewart's Moment of Sincerity Speech (otherwise known as the "merging into the tunnel" speech) at the Rally to Restore Sanity:

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay—you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

It's nice to imagine ourselves this way, but are politics and partisan media so poisoned that we'll never really be this way again?