Island Passage

In an almost dreamlike way, I have received the news that I have press credentials for an advanced screening of Joss Whedon's Serenity . I am not quite the fanboy over " Firefly ," (the television show that is the basis for the movie Serenity ) but I have watched every episode as it aired, bought the DVD box set and have driven Mrs. Islander nuts with repeated viewings, loaned the DVD set to several people, and have been on tenterhooks since the movie's distribution was delayed from May to September. How is this not the behaviour of a fanboy? Well, I don't wear a yellow knit toque, nor do I wear a brown duster. Part of the agreement for receiving the press credentials was that I would write up a review of the movie in my blog. So far, my blog has an audience of 3. So for all three of you, tomorrow sometime, I'll provide an unbiased, spoiler-free review. Favorite Serenity quote: "Think of [Serenity] as Star Wars, if Han Solo were the main character, and h...

I have always been the kind of person who has within himself a kind of interior dialog, a sense of riding around in my head about an inch behind my eyeballs. I have always had a sense of myself as an observer of my own life. Though Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living, this is kind of self-referential detachment is not without a price. There have been few moments experiencing that life when that sense of detachment wasn’t there. Seeing the sun setting behind the Olympics, sitting on the grass at the Hollywood Bowl listening to Barry Tuckwell perform a Mozart concerto, or even lying in the arms of a beautiful woman, The Observer was recording, commenting, assessing. The Observer didn’t always use words, but his knowing presence was there all the same: So, this is what the John Donne meant in that couplet! I wonder if I’ll ever see a green flash. How much better this sounds than the studio sessions! Last Saturday morning I completed my first test in Aikido, the t...

There is a good article today over at OpinionJournal.com about the sad state of Biblical Literacy: Do we need to know what it says in the Bible? Are we somehow illiterate if we don't? Up until, say, 100 years ago, biblical literacy would have been practically mandatory. If you didn't know what "the powers that be" originally referred to, or where "the writing on the wall" was first seen, or what was meant by "the patience of Job," "Jacob's ladder" or "the salt of the earth"--if you didn't know what an exodus was or a genesis, a fatted or a golden calf--you would have been excluded from the culture. It might be said that a civilization consists, at its core, of these easily transmitted packages of implication. They are one of the mechanisms by which cultures can be both efficient and rich. You don't have to return to first principles every time you wish to communicate. You can play your present tune on a received inst...

I have over the years enjoyed the radio work and writings of Garrison Keillor. I began listening to "A Prarie Home Companion" back in the 1980's. I bought cassette copies of my favorite shows. (My all-time favorites are "The Royal Family," and "Tomato Butt.") I bought Lake Wobegone Days , Leaving Home , and WBLT . I truly identified with his journey from small-town boy to a grown-up bemused by the changes in the world around him. So it really hurts to read what Mr. Keillor thinks of me. I seem to be some sort of monster in his eyes : The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, p...

Peggy Noonan has a thoughtful column today in the Wall Street Journal. In it she voices the concerns of conservatives over the Bush administration's spending policies. The point she makes is that we are straying from fiscal conservatism into an unknown future without any discusion about this major change of course: Here are some questions for conservative and Republicans. In answering them, they will be defining their future party. If we are going to spend like the romantics and operators of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society; If we are going to thereby change the very meaning and nature of conservatism; If we are going to increase spending and the debt every year; If we are going to become a movement that supports big government and a party whose unspoken motto is "Whatever it takes"; If all these things, shouldn't we perhaps at least discuss it? Shouldn't we be talking about it? Shouldn't our senators, congressmen and governors who w...

I ran across another item to add to my disater-preparedness to-do list: the home inventory. A home inventory can give you a good overview of what you have and where you have it. (Camcorder, upper shelf of hall closet.) This facilitates two actions: grabbing what is truly valuable when it's time to bug out, and recovering after it's over. I am not currently carrying renter's insurance, but I plan to become a homeowner in the next few months and this can substatiate and speed the claims process by a bunch. It may take a few extra hours, but just jotting down a list as we move stuff into our home could eliminate a lot of the, "Where's my super-suit?" dialog. Also: Taking digital pictures of each room, and shots of valuable items (TV, Computer, etc.) to illustrate the inventory would be helpful. The pictures could be burned onto a CD-ROM disk that is then kept with the valuable papers.

Major Quake Could Be Worse Than Katrina Asteroid Strike Almost Certainly Will Be. Geeze, I wish is that these stories would provide a little context . A category 4 or 5 hurricane strike (Katrina was a category 4) was inevitable, but the odds of it landing in any particular year were judged to be 0.5%. That’s why there wasn’t a Manhattan-Project-type flurry of levee and seawall construction during the last, oh 50 years. That's why people continued to live in a city below sea level. They were on a roll, playing the long odds. That's why people live in Los Angeles. If you roll the dice for long enough, you'll crap out. I have heard a lot in the last week or so about how residents of the Gulf coast would refer to the coming “Big One,” the storm that would descend like the wrath of God and scour the land. Lot of evacuees from New Orleans talked about the fatalism that was common in the city concerning its eventual destruction. All these remarks have an eerie simila...

Apparently the Avian Flu (see below) lacks the ability to be transmitted from human to human. All cases have so far been from bird to human (hence the name...). ...It [Asian flu] kills 100 percent of the domesticated chickens it infects, and among humans the disease is also lethal: as of May 1, about 109 people were known to have contracted it, and it killed 54 percent (although this statistic does not include any milder cases that may have gone unreported). Since it first appeared in southern China in 1997, the virus has mutated, becoming heartier and deadlier and killing a wider range of species. According to the March 2005 National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine flu report, the "current ongoing epidemic of H5N1 avian influenza in Asia is unprecedented in its scale, in its spread, and in the economic losses it has caused." In short, doom may loom. But note the "may." If the relentlessly evolving virus becomes capable of human-to-human trans...

CBS's foray into the blogosphere, The Public Eye , has a neat little sidebar called The Rules of Engagement . It's so neat, I'd like to take it home and adopt it for my own: Public Eye is going to have some pretty strict rules of public etiquette. People who want to post comments on Public Eye and join in our debates and conversations are going to have to follow our rules. We know that not all Web logs are like that, but this one is. If it's any comfort, the Public Eye team promises to follow the same rules. And we'll try our best to be clear about what the rules are. When they change -- and they will -- we'll let you know. There’s legal language nearby. Here's the plain English: no libel, slander, no lying, no fabricating, no swearing at all, no words that teenagers use a lot that some people think aren't swearing but we do, no insulting groups or individuals, no ethnic slurs and/or epithets, no religious bigotry, no threats of any kind, no bathroom ...

Taleena comments: Disaster Planning in this state was recently evaluated by a Representative who is also a National Guard. I was greatly reassured by his assesment of preparedness on a state level. I have talked to the kid's pediatrician about avian flu and am less unhappy about US preparedness than I was. Whether the avian flu will jump to humans and IF our medications work on it is another ball of wax. Avian Flu has made the jump to humans in Southeast Asia . The question has become: how contagious and virulent are the strains that have made the jump, and how effective are our current public health treatments and measures. As to treatments, apparently current antivirals are effective, a vaccination would be much more effective. As to the public health issues, the reason that I recalled the Swine Flu scare is that it became a metaphor of government incompetence in the late 1970's and helped keep President Ford from re-election. Recall also the bioterrorism scare in 2002...

People over a certain age remember the Great Swine Flu scare of 1976. On Februray 5th of that year, an Army recruit at Fort Dix, New Jersey said he felt tired and week. The next day he was dead. The public health officials of the time saw good evidence that the disease that killed the recruit was closely related to the "Spanish" flu that killed up to 100 million people worldwide in 1918-1919. The disconnect between the public health concerns about a new pandemic and the media's response is alarming . If the scientific complications of the National Influenza Immunization Program (NIIP) were not enough, the media only helped to make the situation worse. First of all, while the program received broad support at its inception, the press was quick to criticize the program once no new incidents of swine flu appeared in the months after the Fort Dix affair, and emphasized the criticisms of people such as Albert Sabin, known for his polio vaccinations, who originally supported t...

…And speaking of the Katrina disaster… Though the media are focusing on New Orleans , Katrina made landfall in Mississippi and the damage extended well into Alabama . Apparently the state governments there reacted appropriately. I don’t want to trade in stereotypes here, but how bad is your state government when it is less effective than Mississippi and Alabama ? I'm an implacable opponent of my Governor Christine Gregoire but she doesn't seem as inept as Governor Blanco. In any case, the last few nights Mrs. Islander and I started talking about disaster preparedness. While the example of the Superdome is extreme, it does point out the problems of not preparing for and not responding correctly to an emergency. We seem to be ahead of many of the poor families paraded before the television cameras: we own a minivan and a small pickup truck, we are married with all of our children grown and living on their own, we have some small money in the bank for emergencies. Bu...

Scott Edelman has an editorial over at SciFi.com entitled: The Odds of Being Uneven . It's a thought about how the fruits of science and technology seem to be poorly distributed among the population. He quotes William Gibson's aphorism, "the future is already here—it's just unevenly distributed." I sent a reply to SciFi.com and to Mr. Edelman that I am adapting for this post. Certainly the problem of uneven distribution of the fruits of scientific and technological advance is one of great challenges of our age. However, the challenge needs to be seen in two segments: those who cannot take advantage of those fruits, and those who (for various reasons) choose not take advantage. In the first segment we have those have no access to the "Future," those for whom geographic or cultural isolation bars them from those fruits. These can include indigenous peoples living in the Amazonian rain forest or sub-Sahara Africa. Bringing the future to these peoples seem...