A Big Cuddly Hecatomb

From yesterday's Huffington Post, this headline:

Actually, I'm not sure whether this is a headline or a threat--you know: "Give me the briefcase or cute animals will have to die."

Apparently, the linked article is all about how most of the pro-environment behaviors that make the bourgeoisie feel less guilty will be entirely insufficient to prevent bad, bad things from happening (and, in fact, some of those behaviors are actually surprisingly counterproductive). It's the kind of article that someone like The BeeMaster would love, but Fosco is actually more interested in speculating about the deaths of cute animals. Like, for instance, do we get to choose which cute animals die?

I already know that Mere would willingly sacrifice pandas for an ice cream cone. But let's up the stakes a little: which cute animal(s) would be willing to sacrifice in order to stop global warming? Of course, in some sense, there might not be much of a choice: extreme global warming might kill all the cute animals anyway. But, think about it this way: which cute animals won't you miss?

Personally, I think I am willing to give up zebras, lions, raccoons, wolves, and kangaroos. I would be sad about moose and mountain goats, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. I would really miss black bears and the pretty-colored songbirds. And sea otters are entirely non-negotiable.

Oh megafauna, why must you be so charismatic?

From the Annals of "Holy Crap!"

I've been meaning to mention this for a couple of weeks. From SFGate:

Science closing in on cloak of invisibility.

Seriously.


Of course, as cool as it sounds, this is going to be an extraordinarily bad thing.

Your Initials Could Kill You (Seriously)

Fosco enjoys making fun of Parade Magazine as much as any other person who prefers to read magazines that don't come free with the Sunday paper (well, except for the Times Magazine--that rocks!). But every once and while, it's actually possible to learn something from Parade. Like, for example, nine tips on how to live a longer life. While some of them are pretty obvious ("6. Have your heart attack in Las Vegas," or "9. Don't cross the street on December 23." Duh!), there is also this surprising titbit:

In one intriguing study, California researchers analyzed death records to find out whether there was any correlation between people's initials and how long they lived. They divided their subjects' initials into positive and negative groups. The good-initial group included ACE, WIN, WOW, and VIP; the bad contained RAT, BUM, SAD, and DUD. Then they matched up initials with lifespans and looked for any correlation. The results were stunning (and also hotly debated): A person's initials actually may influence the time and cause of his or her death. "A symbol as simple as one's initials can add four years to life or subtract three years," the researchers wrote. They speculated that bad initials were irritants, or stressors, which over the course of a person's life can add up and contribute to health problems.

Luckily, the real people behind the Fosco and Oz avatars, as well as Fosco's new friend Anne Jacqueline Hathaway, have initials that spell neutral nonsense words, so they're in the middle. However, Fosco does know some people who will probably be affected:

• Friend-of-the-blog John Ezekiel Mackey spells JEM. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing or a good thing in terms of longevity, but I do know that it is truly outrageous.
  
• Gay activist pal Ted Aquinas Gideonse spells TAG. This is a good thing if we're talking the game, but bad if we're talking the body spray.
  
• Corn-syrup-defamer Todd Ulysses Draper spells TUD, which isn't a word, but still sounds yucky regardless.
  
• Romantic blogger Joanna Oprah Goddard spells JOG, which is a healthy activity and will no doubt lead to greater longevity.
  
• College roommate and blog czar David Shasta Lat spells DSL, which is slower than cable internet access. I think that bodes ill for his life expectancy.

Of course, if something as minor as one's initials produce enough stress to shorten lifespan, we probably should start worrying about other, similarly minor, stressors. Things like itchy socks. Or persistently cawing crows outside one's window. Or freecreditreport.com television ads. And there is no fucking way that Fosco is ever going to wash his car again. That should be good for like ten extra years.

I'm going to live forever!

Decline and Fall

Let me begin by saying clearly and without exaggeration that The New York Times is the record of civilization.

Some of you may find that to be an odd statement; Fosco stands by it. He's not saying the NYT is perfect, nor is he an apologist for its many failures. He generally finds their coverage of things they don't understand to be snide or dismissive. And yes, he recognizes that their sports coverage is really myopic. But despite all of those flaws, there is no other publication in the world that attempts as ambitiously (and mostly succeeds) to tell the story of life in our world. Like I said, the Times is the record of civilization. I just don't see how anyone, even a hermaphroditic skeletal lizard, could maintain otherwise.

And yet, according to an article by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic, the NYT is already dead and will be decomposing more quickly than any of us could have expected:

[W]hat if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

Don't laugh. It's actually a serious possibility. More likely, however, is that The Times won't shutter entirely. Rather, Hirschorn lists a number of potential alternatives that will save the paper from complete insolvency. However, none of them will save the paper as we know it. As Hirschorn argues:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist.

Fosco is very upset about this. Really. And not just because the fiance of one of Fosco's favorite people writes for The Times. No, this is something that will have serious consequences for our society. As Hirschorn notes:

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

And suppose that The Times does become an online-only concern. It still won't be The Times as any of us know it:

Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

[...]

In this scenario, nytimes.com would begin to resemble a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting.

Now don't get Fosco wrong: he loves The Huffington Post immoderately. But there is no question that a HuffPo-style tabloid/blog hybrid (tablog? blogloid?) is not a substitute for a real newspaper of record. A world without The New York Times will be a world that is a bit less worth living in.

Literature: Some Prophecies

As Fosco mentioned previously, he's been having a literary love affair with Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 (lauded by even the semi-literate as the best novel of 2008). Well, Fosco has done some more reading in the Bolaño canon and he's pretty impressed. Fosco recently finished Bolaño's thin novel Amulet, and it's pretty excellent (although a little less temporally conventional than is 2666!). The narrator is the self-proclaimed "Mother of Mexican Poetry" who is trapped in a university bathroom during the military occupation of the UNAM in 1968. During her captivity, the narrator offers a retrospective on the future (and sometimes the distant future). Part of her retrospective takes the form of prophecies about literature in the future. The prophecies are weird, funny, and probably contain lots of in-jokes about twentieth-century Latin American writers (who Fosco knows almost nothing about). Enjoy!

Then I took a deep breath, hesitated, let my mind go blank and finally said: These are my prophecies.

Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become a Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.

For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033. Ezra Pound shall disappear from certain libraries in the year 2089. Vachel Lindsay shall appear to the masses in the year 2101.

César Vallejo shall be read underground in the year 2045. Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045. Vicente Huidobro shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.

Virginia Woolf shall be reincarnated as an Argentinean fiction writer in the year 2076. Louis-Ferdinand Céline shall Purgatory in the year 2094. Paul Eluard shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.

Metempsychosis. Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall manifest itself in a different form.

Cesare Pavese shall become the patron saint of Seers and Lookers in the year 2034. Pier Paolo Pasolini shall become the patron saint of Escapees in the year 2100. Giorgio Bassani shall emerge from his tomb in the year 2167.

Oliverio Girondo shall come into his own as a children's writer in the year 2099. The complete works of Roberto Arlt shall be adapted for the screen in 2102. The complete works of Adolfo Bioy Casares shall be adapted for the screen in 2105.

Arno Schmidt shall rise from his ashes in the year 2085. Franz Kafka shall once again be read underground throughout Latin America in the year 2101. Witold Gombrowicz shall enjoy great prestige in the environs of the Río de la Plata around the year 2098.

Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.

Who shall read Jean-Pierre Duprey in the year 2059? Who shall read Gary Snyder? Who shall read Ilarie Voronca? These are the questions I ask myself.

Who shall read Gilberte Dallas? Who shall read Rodolfo Wilcock? Who shall read Alexandre Unik?

A statue of Nicanor Parra, however, shall stand in a Chilean square in the year 2059. A statue of Octavio Paz shall stand in a Mexican square in the year 2020. A rather small statue of Ernesto Cardenal shall stand in a Nicaraguan square in the year 2018.

But all statues tumble eventually, by divine intervention or the power of dynamite, like the statue of Heine. So let us not place too much trust in statues.
Carson McCullers, however, shall go on being read in the year 2100. Alejandra Pizarnik shall lose her last reader in the year 2100. Alfonsina Storni shall be reincarnated as a cat or a sea-lion, I can't tell which, in the year 2050.

The case of Anton Chekhov shall be slightly different: he shall be reincarnated in the year 2003, in the year 2010, and then in the year 2014. He shall appear once more in the year 2081. And never again after that.

Alice Sheldon shall appear to the masses in the year 2017. Alfonso Reyes shall be killed once and for all in the year 2058, but in fact it shall be Reyes who kills his killers. Marguerite Duras shall live in the nervous system of thousands of women in the year 2035.

If we accept this, that means there is at least one reincarnation of Anton Chekhov currently bopping around in the world somewhere. Anyone seen him (or her, I suppose)?

Also, it's kind of a pity that Fosco will be long dead in the early 2100s. That's going to be an exciting time! Thomas Mann as an Ecuadorian pharmacist. Sweet.

From the Annals of Future Terrorism

Fosco is no expert on French domestic politics (he leaves that to KFR), but he finds this story worrisome. According to British paper The Observer,

The French government fears a wave of extreme left-wing terrorism this year with the possible sabotage of key infrastructure, kidnappings of major business figures or even bomb attacks.

Based on secret documents, The Observer reports that

A report by the French domestic intelligence service talks of "a rebirth of the violent extreme left" across Europe that is likely to be aggravated by the effects of the economic crisis. Other secret documents expose alleged links with activists in Italy, Greece, Germany and the UK. "It has been growing for three or four years now and the violence is getting closer and closer to real terrorism," said Eric Dénécé, director of the French centre of intelligence research and a former Defence Ministry consultant.

Now this report is worrisome for several reasons. One possibility is that this is an attempt by the (relatively) Right-wing Sarkozy Government to create a climate of fear that would allow a power grab (taking a cue from George W. and his cronies across the Atlantic). The other worry is that this report is true--and terrorism (whether Left or Right) is a force of chaos. Our world is only getting scarier.

[The above painting is part of Gerhard Richter's Baader-Meinhof series, reproducing photographs of the 1970's terrorists.]

From the Annals of Future Disasters

They say that fire is one of the biggest causes of earthquake-related destruction. If so, then maybe the San Jose Mercury News has some good news today. A new study suggests that, in the event of a large earthquake along the Calaveras Fault, the Anderson Dam in Morgan Hill could fail. What would this mean?

In the worst case, a complete failure of Anderson Dam could send a wall of water 35 feet high into downtown Morgan Hill within 14 minutes, and eight feet deep into San Jose within three hours, under state emergency scenarios.

An eight foot wall of water in San Jose? Kowbunga (dude)! Unfortunately, the surfing won't be totally primo, as the water will presumably be choked with the corpses of Morgan Hillers. Of course, this occurrence isn't super likely:

How likely is a massive quake on that fault that could threaten the dam's integrity?

In recorded history, there have been no 6.6 or larger magnitude quakes on the Calaveras Fault. But one isn't impossible.

In 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that there is an 11 percent probability of a quake of 6.7 or larger on the Calaveras Fault in the next 30 years, and a 2 percent probability of a 7.0 or larger quake on the fault over the same time.

"If the Calaveras Fault ruptured across multiple segments, you could get an earthquake up to 7.2," said David Oppenheimer, a USGS seismologist in Menlo Park. "I don't think that's likely to occur, but you can't rule it out entirely."

For those of you who enjoy imagining the Bay Area Apocalypse, this should help you out a bit.