On The Radio (POP!Best!)

POP!Best! is a weekly look at pop culture from the 7 days prior. Usually it's a little more upbeat than this.

Today finds me in a meditative mood of sorts; I've been thinking all week about Norman Colwin, a guy I'd never heard of before who died this week at 101.

I heard about Norman Colwin dying on the radio, which is fitting, because Colwin was called the 'poet laureate of radio' when he wasn't being called a 'citizen of the world.' I don't know what the latter means, but I do know what the former should sound like, and the brief (radio) broadcast I heard about Colwin's death made me miss someone I'd never even known existed until just that moment, and want to know more about him.

Radio, I think, gets kind of a bum rap these days, and maybe rightfully so, provided that you narrowly define radio. But I've always liked radio, in all its incarnations as I think of them, including things that aren't really radio.

I once wrote a post called "Football On The Radio, The Importance of Being Close To Canada, and a Quick Latin Lesson" (I'll link to it below.) In that post, I reflected on how I used to listen to football games on the radio, waxing poetic:

I first started listening to football on the radio back when Sweetie and I began dating. She lived about 60 miles from me, and sometimes I'd go drive my Ford Festiva up to visit her on Sundays. We'd hang out, maybe watch the Packers, maybe eat dinner, and then I'd have to drive home ... I would tune in to the NFL game, whichever game was being played, and listen to that,

...As I drove past sleeping farms and dark houses with warm glows flowing out of their windows, I'd focus on the road as the announcer told me someone was back to pass, it's up, and I'd drive and wait for it's caught or dropped or picked off and he's heading the other way.

The invisible men playing football in my mind ("kicking off, my right to my left..." announcers would say, and I'd picture them on the dashboard of the car) have always been larger and stronger and more enjoyable than the life-sized men playing on the football fields in real life

The radio has always been a big feature of my life. When I lived in Milwaukee, as a college student, I worked in the admissions office of the University. This was in the early 90s, before the Internet and iPods and even CDs were still pretty new. So we listened to the radio in the office. Every city had an assortment of music stations back then: there was the Oldies station and the Classic Rock station and the Top40 station and, if you were lucky like we were because we had two major colleges in Milwaukee, you had a "New Rock" station that played bands like Belly:

I remember listening to New Rock 102.1 when Belly, a group I loved, came out with their new album: the DJ said "Belly's just released a new album that sounds great. Here's their hit song "Feed The Tree," which was off their old album, and I didn't get how New Rock could get away without playing new rock.

I know now: Years later I read an article that talked about why radio stations don't put new music on more often, or more challenging music, and do you know why? It's because of us, and also because of how easy it is to change the radio station when you're in the car, which is where most of us listen to the radio, always. Most people, if they hear something unfamiliar, change the radio station. So radio stations play mostly familiar stuff, even the ones that promise new rock. The new rock they play is the same old stuff new rock fans want to hear.

I'm still that way, a lot. My radio now is my iPod, filled with songs that I download sight-unheard, and podcasts, and sometimes I'll put my 11,000 songs on shuffle and then click until I hear something familiar, if I'm in the mood for something familiar, although these days I'm at least slightly more adventurous in my music listening, which is how I got to hear new music that I downloaded based on its description, music like Regina Spektor, whose song Fidelity I downloaded without ever hearing it, and then loved it, and then went and got all of Regina Spektor's albums, which, fittingly enough for this post, includes "On The Radio":

A song that talks about ascribing some significance to listening to the radio so late at night that the DJ is asleep and plays the song November Rain twice, making the moments even more memorable.

Back in the 90s, we'd listen to music at the office, but we also listened to talk radio, which then was in its infancy and hadn't become nothing-but-conservatives. I recall a show called "That Jay Marvin" who tried to be kind of moderate, but moderation has no place on talk radio. I also recall listening to The Mark Belling Show and being goaded into calling and arguing with him by my boss, who would wander in, hear Belling saying something, and say "Call him up and argue with him" and so I'd do that because it beat filing, and the other office workers would go listen on the radio in the other room and laugh as I tried to argue a proposition I knew nothing about.

Once, Mark Belling told me an argument I'd made was the stupidest argument he'd ever heard. I kind of take that as a badge of pride, and also, I've heard that exact phrase repeated to me twice in my life. (The other one was a judge. Long story. But it was a stupid argument.)

Later on, a few years later, when I came back to Milwaukee after living in Washington D.C. and Morocco for 3/4 of a year, I moved into an apartment but couldn't afford a TV right away, so all I had was my stereo and a radio to listen to. At night, I'd listen to talk radio again, conservative talk-hosts slowly giving way to Art Bell Coast-To-Coast, and Art would talk about aliens and demon possessions as I laid there in the dark, the radio echoing off the bare walls and hardwood floors of my apartment.

Radio's been a big part of my life in part because I'm always doing something else: I'm driving somewhere or typing something or playing with the twins or working in the yard, and I can listen but I can't watch because I've got to watch what I'm doing. But, truth be told, I've always been somewhat impatient with visual media anyway.

I grew up reading books, graduating from comic books to book-books, and a book is like a mental radio: Someone feeds words into your mind and you build them into a world. I read almost every single book in the Hartland Public Library, and I'm not kidding about that. When my brothers and friends were watching TV (movies being a rare thing back before VCRs and cable) I'd be reading.

I've always liked the images I get in my mind, actually, more than the images that life actually throws at me. I've got a wonderful imagination; it's in overdrive, all the time. I fall asleep imagining stories and literally dream them up to begin writing them. It's really hard to compete with the special effects my mind can create.

I remember when they made The Lord Of The Rings into movies. I was concerned because in my experience, the movies never looked the way they should. I liked my Middle-Earth, my Frodo and Sam and Sauron. I didn't want to see someone else's versions of them, and was relieved that Peter Jackson actually made things look, more or less, right.

In that Football On The Radio essay, I noted that having listened to a portion of a football game on the radio once, I came home to find the game was being taped by The Boy, and watched the plays I'd just heard, and found the actual real plays to be less exciting than the plays I'd imagined, listening. Radio is like that: It can broaden the scope of what you're hearing by making your mind work.

Which brings me, temporarily, back to Norman Corwin. Here's what he's most famous for, in a world where, really, he wasn't famous at all anymore: The broadcast "On A Note Of Triumph." You can hear it at that link, which goes through NPR, or you can do what I'm doing and listen to it as you read this:

That's Corwin's broadcast on V-E Day, an hourlong celebration of the winning of the first half of the war. It's worth listening to, for lots of reasons, not just because you cannot imagine any radio (or TV) announcer these days talking like this:

"The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of the common men of this afternoon."

Corwin was in part, lucky: he was a radio broadcaster when only radio was broadcast, and he was a radio broadcaster when the U.S. achieved the greatest victory in its history -- but luck isn't just there for the picking; it has to be taken and run with. Lots of people get lucky and blow it. Corwin got lucky and didn't.

His career, if you read about it, was more than celebrating "far flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free" (seriously, go listen to it! Just put it on in the background while you read this). His biography notes that he published books of prose and poetry, got an Oscar nomination for his script about Van Gogh ("Lust for Life") and then, at the age of 80, came back to NPR and recorded a series of programs including "Good Can Be As Communicable As Evil", again speaking in words that almost nobody would dare to use, talking about how even if simply being kind won't cure all evil, it's still worth doing... now:

So long as conscionable and caring people are around, so long as they are not muted or exiled, so long as they remain alert in thought and action, there is a chance for contagions of the right stuff, whereby democracy becomes no longer a choice of lesser evils, whereby the right to vote is not betrayed by staying away from the polls, whereby the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, and dissent are never forsaken

(People in Wisconsin, and other areas, who stayed away from the polls now realize how foolish it is to forsake the freedoms of speech and vote as they exercise those freedoms to exorcise the people who rushed into the gap left open by those who didn't vote. But that's for another day and another blog.)

I've been listening to Corwin's broadcast as I type this -- hearing the crowds in Piccadilly and Times Square, and Corwin's words: ("This is it, kid. This is the day. This is what we were waiting for... but through the din and clamor we can hear a voice... listen: a flash across the dark Atlantic.. listen closely..." and he teases you until you can't wait to see what it is you're supposed to be listening for.

(I'm not going to tell you what you're to be listening for. Listen to it.)

I wouldn't have listened to Corwin's broadcast if he hadn't died; I didn't even know he lived, and I wouldn't have probably cared about Corwin's death if I wasn't one of those people who loves radio and even loves what radio has become and thinks it should become more.

Radio isn't dead, even if you don't like listening to nothing but conservative talk-show hosts on AM Radio; sure, they've taken over but that's just temporary, just like the rightward swing in politics is temporary, and we have to hope that no permanent damage is done under the fever-throes of fervor, to either the body politic or radio.

Radio these days isn't a wasteland, after all; every city still has their same stations: Madison, where I live now, has a "Classic Rock" station on which I listen to Alice Cooper's musical choices on Sunday nights, and they have a Top 40 station, and they have a New rock station that doesn't just play new rock and they have a hard rock station, and they even have one of those automated "We Play Everything" stations that, frankly, I like, because that's the closest radio comes to my iPod, playing Escape (The Pina Colada Song):

and then immediately following it with Macarena:

And I'm not going to apologize for liking either one of those, even if I sometimes do make up my own words to macarena and they go something like this:

Come on now a say a macarena

Why did you say that word the macarena?

I said the word cause you said say the macarena

Hey, macarena!

But we also have NPR, and we have the local talk radio station that has local hosts who talk about interesting things like local fetish shops (Hi, Forward With Kurt!) and, of course, sports radio -- we have two of those.

And then I have podcasts, which let me listen to radio when I want: Planet Money and Freakonomics Radio and Stuff You Missed In History Class and This American Life and the Savage Love podcast and more (I subscribe to about 10 of them), all of which I can listen to during what is otherwise dead time.

Dead time like when I was driving to court yesterday morning, leaving at 6:45 a.m. and driving until 8:15 a.m. and then driving back from 9:30 to 11 -- three hours in the car, time I would, absent radio, have spent just staring at the scenery.

I love the radio. I love listening to the more-sophisticated-than-me people on NPR's pop culture podcast -- a podcast is just radio, after all -- talk about X-Men: First Class or the Royal Wedding, and I like hearing Dan Savage alternately rant and laugh and offer sound advice, and sometimes, as I began noting in that earlier post I wrote, I just want to hear another human voice; sometimes, driving around in deserted landscapes at night, worn-out, it's nice to just listen to people talk, and to talk back to them, even if they can't hear me.

"That's crazy," I'll say, or "Well, right," listening to someone saying something and having a one-sided conversation.

I never got much into music videos, and a lot of the time, I treat TV as a radio -- I'll put on a TV show I like (usually one I've seen before) and listen to that without watching it, cleaning up the kitchen while Arrested Development plays over the computer speakers.

Most people are visual people, I know. But not me, not that way. I don't want to be told what to see, which is one reason I stopped reading comic books and found them, ultimately, unsatisfying. I want to imagine my worlds.

And I think that radio, using that term loosely to include podcasts and music and iPods, entertainment that is audio only, can be more than it presently is. I wonder, sometimes, why we have 24-hours sports-talk radio but no pop culture talk radio, and at those times I think "I should make a The Best Of Everything podcast and create pop culture talk radio," which is egotistic, I know, because if you look at podcasts for even a second you'll see that there's a plethora of pop culture talk radio, but there could be more, right?

I could do it, too. I don't just listen to radio; I've been a DJ, on a college radio station that for some reason broadcast only over cable, so you had to have cable radio to listen to us and I'm pretty sure nobody ever listened, but that didn't stop me from going on the air twice a week and playing indie rock and reading public service announcements for a whole semester, talking to people who might not have even been there.

I bet I'd have liked Norman Corwin. He seems like he was the kind of person I imagine myself to be: focusing mainly on one thing but doing lots of things and doing them well, back in the era when people did do lots of things. As we've become a more-visual, more-focused, culture, sometimes, I think, we've narrowed our scope. Look at the Founding Fathers. They did a zillion things. I read biographies of people in the 1700s and 1800s and they did everything. They were scientists and doctors and writers and politicians and farmers and then in their spare time they developed a theory of gravity:

Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 ...was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."

That's the first sentence of Newton's page on Wikipedia. Norman Colwin's begins:

Norman Lewis Corwin (May 3, 1910 – October 18, 2011) was an American writer, screenwriter, producer, essayist and teacher of journalism and writing.

My own Twitter tagline is "Lawyer... writer... and also... um..." and when people these days ask what I do, what anyone does, would any of us reel off a string of things we do? We wouldn't.

When celebrities these days, for good or bad, do more than one thing, we mostly try to push them back into that one thing. I'm as guilty as anyone; I laugh at Keanu Reaves writing poetry and discount the political opinions of Gwyneth Paltrow (the latter probably being more likely the right move than the former, maybe) and DJs make fun of Billy Bob Thornton or Russell Crowe being rock stars as well as movie stars.

Actors and directors, we get. Actors and writers? We say no way.

And maybe that's a result of the increasing visualization of the world. Maybe video really did kill the radio star -- maybe, as we got more and more used to being told what to see, we learned to only see one thing -- there couldn't be more than one way for Harry Potter to look after we saw how Harry Potter looked, and maybe that has slowly conditioned us to be only one thing, our minds narrowing in ways we can't even comprehend until after it's already occurred, a world that can only be one thing because our minds no longer know how to do anything but replay the image we were given.

That's what I fight against, sometimes: the feeling that we can only do one thing, or even one thing at a time. Why must I only be a lawyer? Or a writer? Or, worse, why must I only write one kind of thing? Why can't I be all these things at once?

I'll put it this way: If you did listen to Corwin's description, taking you from the celebration in Times Square across the Atlantic to Europe, how did you picture that passage as he described it. (Again, if you didn't listen to it, why not? Just put it in the background. It won't take any of your time.) Did you fly, disembodied, across dark waters to an England that was celebrating wildly? Did you travel on an airplane? Did you whiz low over the waves of the Atlantic or soar above the clouds, seeing both North America and Europe on either side of that cold ocean?

As Corwin talked, you could do any of those things, but if he'd shown you, using CGI or live-action, you'd have only done one thing.

Norman Corwin was a radio pioneer, but more than that, he was a way of thinking. There is a world where any thing is possible, and there is a world where only this thing is possible. I worry, sometimes, that we're moving from the first to the second, or that we've already done it, and Norman Corwin's life ending seems to me to be proof of that happening.

And maybe I'm stuck in that world. But if I have to live in that world, nothing keeps me from keeping on driving down dark roads, listening to voices from far away, giving me the building blocks of football games and wars and relationship problems and more, building my own worlds in my mind, and making sure that I can be everything I imagine I am, and the world can be everything I imagine it to be, even if only for a little while.

Read "Football On The Radio, The Importance of Being Close To Canada, and a Quick Latin Lesson" by clicking here.

Baseball: The Grand Illusion! (WHODATHUNKIT?!: The 3 Best Things You REALLY Want To Know About the 2011 World Series!)

WHODATHUNKIT!?, like John Stamos' career, is a joint effort between The Best Of Everything and Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!

Another major event, another major post -- WHODATHUNKIT!?, remember, is my post that, for every single major event in the world, provides you not the usual load of garbage the media foists off on you, but a unique brand of garbage that only I foist off on you: namely, three things that you probably didn't know about the major event, but which, once you do know them will fill you with wonder, a sense of mystery, and, provided that you subscribe to the payperview, 5D-version* of this blog, dark energy.

*5D version not available in Albuquerque, because screw you, Albuquerque.**

**They know what they did.

This year's World Series, like every World Series, qualifies as a major event, not just because I'm going for that coveted "I'm 78 years old and I love baseball" blog demographic***

*** I see you there, Mr. Kascheski! Hi!

but also because, as I understand it, nearly 14 people will annually tune in to watch the World Series, which, let's face it, is still more than will watch the entire run of that "new" Tim Allen "show" about how "men" leave the "toilet" seat "up."

Don't mind that last sentence. I was trying a little thing to see if extra quotation marks would give me a little gravitas, and I have to say, I think it "worked."

I watched a little baseball this year, "a little"*4

*4 Gravitas! Which, when you think about it, could actually be the Latin word for Dark Energy. And, having said that, I'm 90% sure that in about three months we will read that people at the Large Hadron Collider discovered gravitas, because who's paying attention? Besides me, I mean? And I'm not, really, because I've also got the TV on and I'm sort of listening to Colbert.

meaning only three innings of game 6 of the Series between the Brewers and the Cardinals before I fell asleep Sunday night. I feel bad about that, because the Brewers gave up four runs before I tuned in, and then when I was watching they were doing pretty well (or "pretty good" as I say when I don't feel I'm being watched by the Grammar Police) and then I fell asleep and they lost, which kind of proves that Dark Energy really exists because it was clearly influencing the Brewers through my "efforts" at watching them on TV.

Speaking of the Large Hadron Collider, did you know that you can help look for the Higgs Boson (a/k/a, The Best Way to Prove that "Scientists" Are Making It Up)? It's true: If you're the type of person who leaves his home computer on (Guilty!)*5

*5 Wait, I meant to plead not guilty! No! Get these cuffs off of me! Fools! Only I can stop them!*6

*6 I've had a little too much coffee already today. Does it show? And, more importantly, do you think that by using all these footnotes I'm subconsciously emulating that one guy who wrote Infinite Jest and then died and everyone wrote all that nice stuff about him so I went out and bought Infinite Jest, spending $18 on it, only to find it completely unreadable, giving up on it 70 pages in, and then I felt sad that I'd wasted my finite book money on a book that was terrible, and so I've never forgiven him and can't even remember his name?

then you can use your home computer to help search for the Higgs Boson (which doesn't exist, and might as well be called a gravitas) by joining the LHC@Home 2.0 effort: a program which will let your home computer simulate complex particle collisions and then send the results back to the Large Hadron Collider, which will compare them to the results it obtains, and, who knows, maybe YOU will discover the Higgs Boson *7

*7 You won't

And, in doing so, earn yourself a Nobel Prize -- because that's what that other guy got the Nobel for, remember: Taking photographs of space and comparing them to each other.

I've got a screenshot of what it looks like when your computer is simulating those particle collisions, so you'll know what to expect:

Try not to get too amazed by the science-osity of it all. Also, note that that screenshot, which is an Actual Screenshot of Science, proves that dark energy is all around us 'cause it's really dark in space.

About time I got around to the World Series, don't you think? Me, too:

1. Who invented the curveball? Trick question! There's no such thing as a curveball!

Well, okay, there's a little such thing as a curveball. But not really. Just about a year ago, a two researchers published a paper that showed that while curveballs move a little, the real effect of a curveball is... all in your mind!

Darn. I was hoping for some spooky music and effects there.

Anyway, the researchers found that the curveball's "break" or deviation from a straight line, is real, but very gradual-- not the drop that most viewers expect.*8

*8: A curve ball, contrary to what I always thought, doesn't curve right or left, but down: it has top spin, which makes the air pressure higher on top of the ball and pushes the ball downward, making Dizzy Dean's famous defense of a curve ball's actually curving ("Stand behind a tree 60 feet away and I'll whomp you with an optical illusion!") not make much sense, unless that tree was one of Larry Niven's integral trees.

The researchers hypothesized that the curve that viewers, and batters, claim they see isn't a curve at all, but an effect of switching from central to peripheral vision: The batter, they said, sees the ball using central vision until it's traveled 2/3 of the way to the plate, at which point they start using peripheral vision -- until the ball is at the plate and they switch back to central vision, which makes it seem as though the ball has dropped more because of the switch. Peripheral vision, they explain, has trouble distinguishing between various motions like velocity and spin, and the eye tends to follow the motion of the ball (downward) making it seem further like the ball is dropping.

Too much reading? I could've put the video first... but then all those words I typed would still be bottled up inside me, waiting to get their shot at fame. You wouldn't want to deny a word its time in the limelight, right? So now, give a word a hug and watch the video:

With that question answered, let's move on to question 2!

2. No, really, who invented the curveball?

Well, aren't you singleminded! As I was trying to find out the answer to that question, I wondered to myself "How many pitches are there in baseball, and how many are banned?" So I went to Baseball Reference.com, which ought to know, and found out the answer, which I will quote verbatim:

There are many, many types of pitches in baseball.

Okay! Moving on!

Actually, Baseball Reference lists four standard pitches (four-seam fastball, curve ball, slider, and change-up, the latter being a pitch thrown exactly like a fastball... only it comes in slow, and throws off the batter.)

Then, the Reference has 5 variations on the fastball:

The Two Seam Fastball, a fastball in which the fingers are held along the seams rather than across them, causing more movement and a slower throw,

The Sinker, which is a two-seam fastball thrown near the edge of the strike zone and is intended to drop out of it entirely,

The splitter, a sinker with a better downward break (or thrown against batters with worse peripheral vision?), a pitch that isn't used much because it causes injuries in pitchers,

the Cut Fastball, a ball thrown inside from an opposite-handed pitcher (lefty pitcher, righty batter, for example) that, when it works best results in a broken bat, and

the Running Fastball, which is a cut fastball when it's thrown by a pitcher with the same-handedness as the batter.

Don't those all appear to be simply standard pitches thrown in a particular area? That'd be like football calling a handoff a short pass with no gap between the quarterback and the running back.

But then there's all these trick pitches:

The Circle change, which looks like a two-seam fastball but then breaks in an opposite direction to that expected,

the Palmball, a changeup that's actually a fastball thrown using the palm of the ball to slow the pitch down, thereby making the batter swing before the pitch gets to the plate...

...and the existence of that pitch really does suggest suggest that a lot of this is in the batter's mind and tricks of the eye, doesn't it? A batter sees a fastball motion and swings but the ball isn't there yet and so he misses -- that's not pitch location or curve. That's just tricking the batter...

and the Gyroball, which made news not long ago because nobody believed it existed; the gyroball is a pitch that "falls faster than a fastball, but slower than a curve, and hardly breaks inside or outside." It's thrown with a spin that mimics the way a football spins -- the axis more or less parallel to the trajectory. The gyroball gets to the plate faster than the batter expects and makes the batter late on the ball, and because it's spinning looks like a breaking ball when it's not...

... which, seriously, it is all just illusions, isn't it?

There's also a two-seam gyroball, both of which tend to make the batters swing under them and miss, expecting the ball to drop more than they do.

The Japanese invented the Gyroball, and also

the Shuuto, a ball that breaks down and to the right, so, not very exciting. I expected more, so back to America with

the Knuckleball, a ball Baseball Reference describes as "tantalizingly slow but dances all over the place."

So like Christina Aguilera:

That really was just an excuse to put that picture in there.

Here's Sean O' Leary, knuckleballer:

And the first couple pitches I watched in that video didn't seem to move at all, but let's get a little more Baseball Reference hyperbole before exploring that. Says the BR:

It's been said that a knuckleball screws everybody up, as "the hitter can't hit it, the catcher can't catch it, and the umpire can't call it."

They don't attribute that quote. I bet it was Gandhi. Was it Gandhi? It was probably Gandhi.

Now go back and watch that video. At about 1:30 Sean throws a bunch of pitches that all appear to go perfectly straight. The slowed-down one about 2:32 in particular looks like it would've been knocked out of the park by everybody but me; I have lazy eye.

Other pitches with funny names include the "Eephus" an "impossibly slow" pitch invented by by Rip Sewell of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1930s -- "basically a lob to the catcher", BR says, that's not really used, a "Forkball" which "tumbles out of the strike zone (rather than breaks out of it) when thrown" that's a "brain scrambler" when the wind is blowing, and the:

Vulcan Change-up This is similar to the forkball. Often called V change or the "trekkie" because of its unnatural grip. It is held like the Vulcan greeting that is used by Spock the Vulcan in Star Trek (The dude with pointy ears in Star Trek). This pitch drops like a regular change-up, but just puts a little more friction on the ball. Basically it is a different way to grip a Change-up.

Cue the Sexy Vulcan!

And the "Slurve," a slider thrown at curveball velocity that is supposed to fool the hitter by taking longer to reach the pitcher...

...Illusions!

... and the "Screwball" or "backwards curveball", a pitch that breaks like a curveball thrown by an opposite-handed pitcher, which now I'm all messed up because people keep saying that the curveball drops but that makes it sound like it goes left or right, so which is it, baseball! I swear, I'm this close to dropping you and running off with cricket.

And then there's a bunch of other curveballs like the "12-6 Curveball", the "Sweeping Curveball" and the "Knuckle Curveball" and the "Spiked Curveball" and the "Knuckle Slider" and finally, the "Yellow Hammer," which sounds like a cut-rate superhero from the 1930s but is actually an even slower curveball that supposedly drops more than a regular curveball because it's only thrown at 50 miles per hour or so, but by now I don't know what to believe because it's all so confusing, so I'm going to assume that the pitcher doesn't even throw the damn ball and in fact, let's just admit that baseball doesn't even play the game anymore: all of baseball is just one game that was played at Comiskey Park in 1972, and they're using CGI to change the uniforms for you and if you go to a game in person you're just subject to Mass Hypnosis and it didn't really happen. There is no spoon! The cake is a lie!*8

*8: I still don't know what that means, but I like it.

Also, I wasn't far off on that Yellow Hammer. Remember this?

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was one of the greatest things ever made.

3. Seriously, can we find out who invented the curve ball?

You know, I haven't even touched on what pitches are banned yet -- like the spitball -- but you know me: I give the people what they want:

You need serious help.

so let's get down to the nitty-gritty of The Fabulous Story Of The Invention Of The Curveball. From Wikipedia:

Baseball lore has it that the curveball was invented in the early 1870s by Fred Goldsmith or Candy Cummings (it is debatable).

*Tries to pull at hair, doesn't have much hair, thinks better of that, contemplatively takes a sip of coffee while mulling what to do next.*

So ALL OF BASEBALL is ONE BIG TRICK, and the batters probably aren't even wearing pants, and yet that's the $(*#&%$#($^& best you could do about the invention of the curve ball?

Where is the mythos? Where is the legend? Where is the shrouded in time... etc? George R.R. Martin could do a better job with that, and all he did was take The Silmarillion and cut-and-paste "human" and "elf" and then say "battle-axe" a lot. You need to begin with something like...

...In a tiny unheated room of his parent's cottage in 1872, a young Alexander Graham Bell huddled over a fire built with a mixture of myrrh and polonium dust, communicating with the ghost of Lord Alfred Tennyson. Bell had been chosen as the pitcher in the Firste Annuale Worlde SeriesE starting the next day, but his arm was possessed by demons, according to a doctor who had considered diagnosing him with "muscle spasms" but had rejected that because this is 1872 and "muscles" haven't been discovered yet...

See where I'm going with that? That's way better than what you've got.

Whatever it's origins*9

*9 Mine is better than baseball's, so go with mine: magic!

the curve ball also was featured in a story published in 1884 in the magazine "St Nicholas," a popular (?) children's magazine at the time, which now raises into question all that crap they taught us in school about how hard life was in the 19th century with people dying of black plague or having to cross the plains or at least fight in wars or something; I don't know. I didn't really pay attention. But I distinctly recall being told that life was hard back then -- something about meat-packing, or maybe the Gold Standard? -- and if life was so hard, why were kids reading popular magazines?

Life was so hard that kids hardly had time to do the word jumble, is that what history tells us? Screw you, history. And Albuquerque, while you're at it.

The story in St Nicholas was called "How Science Won The Game," and was about a boy who used a curve ball to beat the other team, even though the curve was thought to be dishonest. You can actually read the whole story here. Spoiler Alert: Jack and his friends run off to meet a strange man in a hotel who says to them "Let me feel your arm" and then proceeds to compliment Jack on his muscles and then tells Jack and his friend to meet him outside in the alley behind the hotel.

Seriously.

Then he gives this advice to Jack: "Keep cool, and pinch tight."

Jack, of course, doesn't turn the guy in to Chris Hansen, but instead goes on to master the curve ball and win the Big Game, but here's the thing:

They win the game because Jack hits the ball to first base, but that guy commits an error and the right fielder backing him up throws home but Jack's friend, the not-at-all-symbolically-named Win, scores by jumping over the catcher.

Oh, and: SPOILER ALERT!

So the only science really involved was the Fosbury Flop, and, once again, Baseball has pulled a slight-of-hand -- promising you science (the curve ball) would win the game but really just having a bigshot sports reporter get credit for writing the story (as it turns out, the story was supposed to have been written by Hotel Guy about this game, because news was in short supply in those days so kids' baseball games got major coverage from all media.)

Here's a college player winning the game... With science!

Want to find out who's going to win the World Series? Click here to see my 100% accurate system! Never fails! Guaranteed. (Guarantee not valid in Earth-1's universe.)

Last year's World Series WHODATHUNKIT is here.

Announcing ...

What is it?

Well, what it sounds like: A Blogathon in which every day for 100 straight days I will ask you a Star Wars trivia question straight out of this book I got at a PTA fair the other day (the book is going unnamed to avoid me getting sued for copyright violations, so take that J.K. Rowling.)

Each day, I will post a question, and each question will be worth a randomly-generated number of points (between 1-50) for a right answer. The first person to post the correct answer gets the points for that question. But each person who posts an answer gets entered in the weekly drawing for a prize (a free book or t-shirt or other item) with additional prizes awarded for great comments or other reasons as I feel like. The more comments the more entries -- but it starts over each week.

The person with the most points at the end of the 100 questions wins the grand prize: they will get a printed copy of any of my books they choose, and awarded with a memorial sweatshirt commemorating their glorious victory! And because each question is worth a random number of points, don't sweat it if you joined late or didn't get some right at first -- you could sweep the last 10 and get 50 points each... maybe.

As an added bonus: those of you who have a book to hawk or a t-shirt to hype or something else to sell: if you mention it in a comment, I'll throw it in as a weekly prize somewhere along the way and help boost your sales!

The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows... (MiniBest)

...and it only took me 1 1/2 months to get around to posting number two:


I'm on the record as saying it's not just looks that make you attractive. Yes, Gloria from Modern Family is hot in an obvious way*

*obvious beauty is the worst, as Friends pointed out.

... but that's not what makes someone hot. Just like with Allana Harkin (who was elevated to the number one position by being funny, because funny +pretty > pretty only*),

*that's math, and math doesn't lie except when it pretends that dark energy exists

Gloria, as Sofia Vergara is primarily known for playing, has plenty of other attributes, like

1. She can shoot a gun. Which, I am opposed to guns, but let's face it, that's hot.
2. She's sneaky.





3. And, well, that's it.
4. Well, those things, plus this:




I mean, it's not all about personality.

Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin





In Just Exactly How Life Looks you'll be introduced to unforgettable people living remarkable lives. Cowboys wander in a timeless desert. Scientists meet in secret to plot a new way to get attention, and money, from people. A man and his would-be lover try to find lions on safari, and more. The people and places in this book spring to life fully-formed and full of anxiety and imagination. They worry about the time they have had and the time they have left. They bury their loved ones and look for new friends. They talk and laugh and hope and cry and die, while their friends and family and enemies and Gods watch them, seeing, in their faces and actions and fears, a portrait of just exactly how life looks.

Click here to buy it on Amazon; or look for it on your Kindle!

"Someone had a grade-A lungfish decorate their home." (THIS is a THING?!)

I think, for a change, I'm out in front on a trend, so it's time for me to explain that trend, and in doing so, make sure that I make it so uncool that it stops being a trend. I have to do that; I can't help it. I'm not ready to be cool or trendy. I never learned how to handle it. I'm far more comfortable being "the guy who knows that Ambush Bug started as a villain and then briefly was a hero before settling in as a kind of wacky one-off adventure kind of guy who battled a sock and got kicked out of the afterlife."

The thing that I know about maybe before many of you know about it is...

Bad Lip Reading!

What THIS THING is, in a Nutshell: "Bad Lip Reading" is what the creator of a series of hit Youtube videos does: He plays the videos, without sound, and interprets what the person is saying.

It makes more sense if you watch:

That's the first one of these I watched, because I'm a political guru who is a mover-and-shaker i in this world, sort of like James Carville if James Carville had done anything worthwhile since 1991 and/or had eyebrows, and also because anything that makes fun of Crazy Eyes Michele Bachmann is worth promoting.

How I, and maybe You, heard about THIS THING: I first heard about it on Gawker, which I now read on my cell phone and which I won't pretend I fully understand, as Gawker talks about a lot of pop culture things that I only know exist because Gawker talks about them, which is sort of like hearing someone from Bombay tell you about something they once saw in Australia: it can be interesting, and mystifying, and at some point my mind is going to wander while you talk about it, because I don't always get the place or people references.

But I digress. Gawker one day while I was killing time before a court hearing had this story:

Lip-Readers Transcribe Rick Perry’s Disturbing Psychobabble

Certain Internet forces with apparent magical powers have synced Rick Perry's lip movements during a speech to strange, alternate words that nevertheless are probably more coherent than what he was really saying. Does that make sense? It is hard to describe this sort of witchcraft.

With this video:

Since then, Bad Lip Reading has started to be noticed by the media more and more. Gawker posted that on September 27, Rolling Stone got a hold of the phenomenon October 7, and now you're hearing about it... from me. Because I'm third in that line.

Or fourth, behind "BeaumontEnterprise.com," which broke the story on September 28, 2011. Curse you, Beaumont Enterprise! Scooped AGAIN!

When Did THIS THING Start!? That's the other thing that convinces me I got in on the ground floor of this, bought Apple at $1 a share, created Google, or none of those things: It started only six months ago, which, sure, in Internet time means that all of this stuff is now so fossilized that the Republican debates are about to declare it a tool of the devil the way they declare everything including Hermain Cain's mysterious "9,9,9" plan to be a tool of the devil...

That actually is not a Bad Lip Reading. But really, given that Michele Bachman says stuff like that, don't you kind of go back and watch that actual Bad Lip Reading video and think "I bet that's what she talks about when the cameras are off?"

Anyway, the whole Bad Lip Reading THING that THIS is started just seven months ago with this:

That's Gang Fight, the reinterpretation of Friday, which you probably gathered. It was posted March 21, 2011, and has already been viewed almost four million times. That's...

*attempts to look for pen and paper, can't find one, realizes he long ago lost the ability to do math, doesn't want to open up the calculator on the laptop screen because that always causes it to crash and anyway Mr F took the equals sign key off the keyboard, so nothing ever adds up*

... a lot of people per month!

When did THIS THING officially pass into pop culture? Although Rebecca Black remains a pop culture hot potato, sure to attract attention everytime she pops up, that wasn't the video that really drew a lot of widespread (as opposed to hipster) attention; it was the Michele Bachmann video. Posted October 3, 2011, Bachmann's video has already been viewed 950,000+ times. That's more than 100,000 people per day, so not quite Nyan Cat territory, but still impressive.

That level of interest was, I'm sure, generated by the fact that Michele Bachmann is sort of the Rebecca Black of the Republican Party, only far less sympathetic, and by the fact, too, that Republicans obviously don't know how to use the Internet or don't get the joke: The Rick Perry video is averaging about 500,000 views a week, while the Obama video:

Has only garnered 700,000 or so views in 3 weeks, most of them, I'm sure, from FOX News reporters who think they've found a scoop and were about to Do It Live! only to be told it's not real, after which they still considered just running with it anyway, because FOX news viewers at this point are completely incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, as evidenced by the fact that a recent FOX News viewers poll found that 1,456% believed Obama once strangled Baby Jesus with a fish tie.

Is THIS THING still going on!? Hard to say; in that Rolling Stone interview, the Bad Lip Reader him?self said that he produces other songs and doesn't want his identity revealed, because he doesn't want to be known as the Everybody Poops guy:

Which (a) is the song I emailed to everyone I know (my wife, and three oldest kids) when I found this site, and (b) what would be so wrong as being known as the Everybody Poops guy?

Oh, right.

He's posted 11 of them so far, only recently branching into political videos, which he said he did because he wanted something quicker to do in between the more elaborate Bad Lip Reading Music Videos.

It seems like Bad Lip Reading is going to go on, as he's got sort-of plans to do at least one more video. He told Rolling Stone:

Maybe I'll do Biden next.

That'll definitely kill it off, though.

Photo courtesy of The Onion.

Can you sum up Bad Lip Reading for people who just skimmed this post and want a quick takeaway?

This headline, from the National Journal, adequately tells you what this phenomenon is going to be in mere minutes:

LOL Pols: 'Bad Lip Reading' Videos Lampoon GOP Candidates, Obama

LOL! Seriously! You should LOL about this BLR! About BHO! Also, it's more popular than Auto-Tune The News, whatever that was. Keep your old memories off my Internets, grandpa.

Oh, and I didn't forget:

Some other people did some other stuff this week, too. (POP!Best!)

The Best Of Everything, every Saturday, brings you POP!Best!: a stirring instrumental homage to the glories of yesteryear...

This week on POP!Best!: Nobel Prize winners, and some stuff you might want to know about them.

Do you know who won the Nobel Prize(s) this year? Odds are you saw the announcements were made, didn't recognize any of the names, and after briefly clicking that you Like "adaptive immunity," you moved on to see what your ex-girlfriend from high school was up to today. I know how it is.

The media makes a big deal about the Nobel Prizes each year, dutifully awarding them and then usually noting that the prizes have been given out each year since 1901, Alfred Nobel discovered chemistry, etc. and that's it. Nobody talks much about who the people are, or what they did and why it was worth giving them all that money.

This year, although the announcements were made, they were not just under-attended by a public that cares more about Ashton & Demis' divorce than they do about evolutionary changes in immune systems, but were also overshadowed by the death of Steve Jobs. It's kind of interesting to note all the attention that was paid to Steve Jobs this week, article after article detailing his accomplishments (which, to be fair, were big ones) but then see that only a paragraph or two gets devoted to what are deemed to be the most significant strides in major fields each year.

So, as usual, the mantle falls on me to do what the rest of the world won't. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and so on, and so I'm going to spend this week talking about the fascinating subject of Nobel Prize Winners, 2011.

And it really is fascinating. You'll see. Right this way!

First up, Medicine: Says the Nobel Site:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 was divided, one half jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity" and the other half to Ralph M. Steinman "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity".

Here's something I bet you didn't know: You can leave greetings and congratulations for the Nobel Prize winners on their site. And one well-wisher really likes these guys:

"YOUR RELENTLESS WORK FOR THE BETTER WORLD MAKES LOT OF US TO FOLLOW YOUR PATH.WE CAN CALL U AS LIVING GOD"

Nice to know that supersmart people aren't any better at Tweeting than the rest of us, isn't it? So are Drs. Beutler & Hoffmann, and Steinman as living gods? That depends on how you view their achievements.

Dr. Steinman actually died three days before getting the award, of pancreatic cancer, but you didn't see Facebook pages devoted to him, did you? Maybe because we don't all use his discoveries everyday, or at least don't use them to illegally download Lady GaGa's Born This Way.

Interestingly, Dr. Steinman may not actually be getting the Nobel Prize: They can't be awarded posthumously, so either you're alive to accept it or you were alive when they announced it but then died. In this case Dr. Steinman was already dead when they awarded it to him, but the committee didn't know that, so they're checking the rules to see if he can still win the prize.

Ultimately, the doctors' achievements may prove to be at least as helpful to humanity as a phone that tells you you're looking good today. The three were named together because their ideas built on each other. Steinman actually began his work in 1973, when he discovered dendritic cells, which are uniquely able to activate "T-Cells" to fight infections.

Building on that, Hoffmann later identified how fruit flies fight infections, and to get an idea how these scientists work, consider this phrase from the paper published about Hoffmann's findings:

Natural infections generated by coating flies with fungal spores...

The next time you think you're having a bad day at the office, ask yourself whether you spent your morning coating flies with fungal spores. (If you did spend your day that way, either quit copying Dr. Hoffmann or get some medication.)

Worse yet, from the perspective of someone who doesn't like this kind of thing, Hoffmann proposes to study this effect more by looking at mollusks and sea urchins, which means there's likely a job out there for people who don't mind spending the holidays coating sea urchins with fungal spores.

What, you probably are asking, does this do for me, though? Fair enough: Beutler, the third guy here, later on found in mice a gene that was like the fruit flies' receptor; Beutler was trying to find ways to avoid septic shock, and together with Steinmans' work on dendritic cells, has led to new vaccines.

Over in Chemistry, this year's Nobel Laureate, Dan Shechtman, discovered quasicrystals. Put more simply, Dan Shechtman discovered something that was impossible.

All in a days' work for a Nobel Laureate!

Looking at a compound crystal one morning, Shechtman saw this:

And in response to that, he wrote this, which I will put in its original, scientific-y, language:

???

Shechtman wrote that because what he was looking at was 10-fold symmetry in a crystal. All matter, mostly, is crystals, and prior to Shechtman's discovery that morning, the highest number of folds that could be symmetried was 6; nobody had ever seen five-fold symmetry and 7 and upwards were deemed impossible.

So Shechtman was looking at something impossible, and he did what any good scientist does at that point: he destroyed the evidence and claimed to have discovered velociraptors fighting hobbits in a dark matter universe created by black holes.

No! He tested it! And he discovered that he was, in fact, mistaken. He didn't have a 10-fold symmetric crystal, after all.

He only had a five-fold crystal. So, only half as impossible.

(Five-fold symmetry means that each atom is surrounded by five identical atoms, and it was thought to be impossible because in a crystal, each atom has to be an identical distance from all other atoms, which can't [they thought] happen with five-fold symmetry.)

When Shechtman actually told other people about how he'd discovered a five-fold crystal, other scientists (probably preoccupied with defending the brontosaurus) ridiculed him; his boss gave him a crystals textbook and told him to read it, and he was asked to leave his research group.

Shechtman, of course, was right, and people conversant with natural patterns like the Fibonacci sequence, or the golden ratio, should have known it; the Fibonacci sequence is the one in which each number is the sum of the two before it [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.], and Shechtman's impossible crystal used that ratio, thereby confirming the discovery through the use of aperiodic mosaics, which is a mathematician's game in which the math nerds try to make up mosaics that don't repeat themselves using fewer and fewer tiles. The record is 2, and that record is unlikely to be broken, although don't tell Shechtman it's impossible or he'll go and do it.

Quasicrystals help make steel stronger, and are being explored to turn waste heat into electricity. Bah! you say, What's that to do with me!? To which I respond, why are you talking like Ebeneezer Scrooge?, and also: It has this to do with you: Using quasicrystals in cars might be able to convert all that extra heat made by the engine into electricity, making electric cars more efficient.

Imagine, too, if they could do that with laptops -- the heat generated by your laptop keeping the battery charged for longer. Now, aren't you sorry that you didn't pay attention to Mr Hassemer in 11th grade? Me, too.

So at least Ed Begley will be happy, and that's what it's really all about, right?

Then there's physics, where three guys shared the prize this year, too, but shared it asymmetrically: One guy, Saul Perlmutter, got half, the other two guys, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, shared the other half, each getting 1/4. Or so I assume. Maybe Schmidt got 3/5 of 1/2 and Riess got 2/5 of 1/2. Who knows? (They know, I assume.)

What these three guys did is tell you all how we're going to die. And it's bad news for people like me, because, they say, it's gonna be cold.

We're going to die cold because the Universe is expanding, and that expansion is getting faster -- so the Universe is getting bigger at a faster rate each day, which means eventually we'll all drift apart from each other and die in the dark, cold and alone, like those spacemen after the rocket blew up in Bradbury's The Illustrated Man.

I am, as a form of bloggeristic objectivity, going to suspend my skepticism for a moment as I say the following two words:

Dark energy.

Dark energy, which I do not believe in and which I think is simply Einstein's cosmological constant, or a brontosaurus, if you will, is behind this year's Nobel Prize in physics, as two teams vied to map the universe. Perlmutter, on one team, and Schmidt & Riess on the other, were competing to find the most distant supernovae they could, using supernovae because the traditional stars used to measure universal distances, cepheids, were not visible that far out. So the teams here focused on white dwarf supernovae, which glow as brightly as galaxies despite coming from a star that physically is about the size of our planet.

Here's how they worked, according to the Nobel people:

The trick was to compare two images of the same small piece of the sky, corresponding to a thumbnail at arm’s length. The first image has to be taken just after the new moon and the second three weeks later, before the moonlight swamps out starlight. Then the two images can be compared in the hope of discovering a small dot of light – a pixel among others in the CCD image – that could be a sign of a supernova in a galaxy far away.

Rubbing fungi on flies seems good now by comparison, doesn't it? No, you're right: it still doesn't.

Here's what they get to look at:

Compared to, say, gossip bloggers, that might be a blessing: No Nancy Grace nipple-slips there!

The two teams found fifty different supernovae, and concluded that the light was getting weaker as time went on -- meaning that the supernovae were speeding up.

God's got his foot on the accelerator, it seems; we've been around for billions of years and haven't yet hit the red zone on universal speed.

And lest you dismiss my continued rantings about dark energy being simply "scientists saying Huh. We don't know," consider this, from the Nobel press release:

So what is it that is speeding up the Universe? It is called dark energy and is a challenge for physics, a riddle that no one has managed to solve yet. Several ideas have been proposed.

The simplest is to reintroduce Einstein’s cosmological constant, which he once rejected. At that time, he inserted the cosmological constant as an anti-gravitational force to counter the gravitational force of matter and thus create a static Universe. Today, the cosmological constant instead appears to make the expansion of the Universe to accelerate.

That is, in layman's terms: "Huh. We don't know." Dark energy isn't anything at all; it's simply a new phrase used for we don't know. Or, to put it another way, dark energy is what as kids we used to put up to keep others from tagging us during freeze tag:

It may be that the dark energy is not constant after all. Perhaps it
changes over time. Perhaps an unknown force field only occasionally
generates dark energy. In physics there are many such force fields
that collectively go by the name quintessence, after the Greek name
for the fifth element. Quintessence could speed up the Universe, but
only sometimes. That would make it impossible to foresee the fate
of the Universe.

In other words, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year went to some guys who observed the effects of something they're not sure exists and about which they're not sure how it works, but they're sure it's there. Or, as Nobel put it:

Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that is 95% unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

They didn't have to go to 50 distant supernovae to find that out, though. They could have just asked Shechtman.

I'd like to say how this prize helps you, but, frankly, I don't think it does. Dark matter and Dark energy will someday go down in history as an embarrassing episode of physics, like the era of medicine when they used leeches to bleed out the humours. Einstein himself rejected the cosmological constant as being simply a number he made up to make the equations work. Einstein wanted a static universe, and so he made up a number to match what he wanted, that being the exact opposite of how science is supposed to work. Physicists today want a universe that's increasing in speed, and so they make up a number -- "The universe is 75% dark matter, but not always, because God keeps fussing with the flow of quintessence!" -- to match what they want.

I hope the three enjoy their prizes. Columbus got fame for discovering the Indies, even though he was wrong, and his discovery helped create the Western world, even though he was wrong. Believing you've landed in India when you're in Haiti, and believing you've discovered the effects of dark energy when you're just making stuff up seem about the same to me. (For more about how scientists are wrong about stuff all the time, click here.)

It is a good excuse to play Dark Matter by Andrew Bird again, though:

Then there's literature, the prize for which this year was reputed to have gone to a Serb in an internet hoax that I have to admit I don't get -- is it funny because it was Serbia? Practical jokes are so hard to pull off, like the time Linus Pauling put Niels Bohrs hand in a beaker of sulfuric acid while he slept -- but which actually went to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, because, as the committee put it:

“because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.

That's the extent of their press release. Like a bunch of high school sophomores, the Nobel Committee couldn't come up with anything to say about the poems of Tomas Tranströmer, whose name, I'll just admit, makes me think of Transformers, and you can think less of me if you want, but at least I came up with something to say about him.

According to Poets.org, Tomas has sold thousands of books of poetry and been translated into more than 50 languages, which is surprising because I'd have bet there's only, like 20 languages in the whole world, not counting Klingon or Elvish.

Poets.org also says of his work:

His work has gradually shifted from the traditional and ambitious nature poetry written in his early twenties toward a darker, personal, and more open verse. His work barrels into the void, striving to understand and grapple with the unknowable, searching for transcendence.

Which makes the Nobels seem like they had a theme this year, doesn't it? Impossible crystals, ever-expanding universes, fresh looks at reality -- it was theme week in Stockholm, I'm guessing.

Tomas has his own website, on which he notes that bettors were giving 7-1 odds that he wouldn't get the prize this year, and the prize being $1.5 million, Tomas just proved you can make a decent living being a poet if you work really hard at it and try to grapple with the unknowable.

He has some of his poems on his site, too, like this one:

National Insecurity

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X

and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground

so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.

The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

That would be great on a Hallmark card, in their new line of "Fledgling democracy and insurgent rebels greeting cards." (Another one: Heard you were run out of your country by an angry mob of students who'd been secretly armed by the CIA...)

He also has this poem, which left me speechless when I read it, and so I'm going to end with it:

The Blue House

It is a night of radiant sun. I stand in the dense forest and look away toward my house with its hazy-blue walls. As if I had just dies and was seeing the house from a new angle. It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its wood is impregnated with four times joy and three times sorrow. When someone who lived in the house dies, it is repainted. The dead person himself is painting, without a brush, from inside.

Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, Upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragons heads of weed, lances, a weed empire! Across the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang that is thrown and thrown again. It has something to do with a person who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse comes from him, a thought, a thought like an act of will: “make… draw….” To reach out of his fate.

The house is like a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness that grew because someone—much too soon— gave up his mission to be a child. Open the door, step in! In here there’s unrest in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed hangs a painting of a ship with seventeen sails, hissing wave crests, and a wind that the gilt frame can’t contain.

It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real. A ship’s engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew’s magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we diving; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.