Scratchings

Oh man, I cannot wait until we evolve into a species capable of focusing together on an important issue for five minutes without being distracted by squirrels and shiny things.

From today’s New York Times:

MADRID — The Rev. Eubilio Rodríguez’s church is a prefabricated building in an area of this city hard hit by Spain’s economic crisis. In front of the altar are a few scraggly potted plants. Behind it, some plastic chairs.

How, he asks, can the Roman Catholic Church be getting ready for a lavish $72 million celebration in this city — some of it paid for with tax dollars — when Spain is in the midst of an austerity drive, the unemployment rate for young people is 40 percent and his parishioners are losing their homes to foreclosure every day?

“It is scandalous, the price,” he said. “It is shameful. It discredits the church.”

A friend on the WELL passed along this paragraph from an essay in today’s Washington Times (“Hope and change in a magic tea pot” by Wesley Pruden, page A4; the piece isn’t in the online edition):

But this time, the Republicans and other conservatives did not flinch, their spines stiffened by courage taken from the tea pot. Washington hasn’t seen a panic like this since Beauregard sent the Federal army scrambling back to Washington from Manassas battlefield in the summer of ’61. This was the change we’ve been hoping for.

Good blog post by Tom Toles today.

The fun game of trying to determine which WAY Obama is a a bad president continues without respite. The fact of his badness goes without saying. If he compromises, he’s a sellout. If he doesn’t, he’s no better than Republicans! If there is gridlock, he’s to blame. If there is an imperfect compromise, he’s to blame. Feckless! Insincere! Passive! Ideological! Non-ideological! Partisan! Too non-partisan!

The possibility that he is roadblocked by an absolutely impossible Congress needing two houses and a filibuster-proof majority to tie its shoes in the morning, and they are two right shoes, is not one of the multiple-choice answers. If I were writing the headlines, that’s what I would write every day! INSANE CONGRESS DESTROYING NATION!

Great, great cartoon by him today, too. But I’m unclear on how to link to a specific cartoon, only to whatever that day’s cartoon is. Oh, well, if you see this on a different day it’ll probably still be a great cartoon.

Or does it seem like whenever John McCain feels moved to voice his highly principled opposition to something, odds are good that whatever it is that he’s suddenly always been against has just caused the Dow to fall 200 points?

I’m seeing the exact same word used over and over in the media (including of course multiple pundits from Fox) to describe something John McCain said yesterday, so I assume this is another of those organized Republican stay-on-message talking-point things.

But come on, seriously, since when is calling somebody a hobbit a “smear”?

So I was looking at Der Spiegel this morning — the stories they’ve translated into English, anyway, because my German isn’t quite good enough to read the news without stopping to look up every eighth or ninth word, which would be good for me to be doing as far as keeping my German in shape goes but I have much else to do — and I came across an article about Heligoland (“Helgoland” auf Deutsch).

I’d heard of Heligoland but knew very little about it other than that it was an island in the North Sea. Well, it turns out that it’s actually two small islands in the North Sea, belonging to Germany but a three-hour sail from the mainland. (Here’s the Wikipedia article.) They were a single island until a storm in 1720 washed away the middle of the island, leaving two separate islands remaining. Over the years it’s been a base for smugglers, a German resort, a British resort, a German naval base, and a British bombing range. Now it’s a German resort again.

Heligoland is in the news today because over the weekend the residents (all 1650 of them) voted 55% to 45% against a $141 million Dubai-style construction project to fill in some of the shallow sea between the islands to increase the size of the larger island by about a quarter and connect it to the smaller island. And Der Spiegel has published a number of photos of Heligoland along with the article, and the photos go a long way to explain the vote.

Well, good lord, if you lived in a place that looked like that, would you want to tamper with it? I sure wouldn’t.

Fun facts: Early D’oyly Carte company member Richard Mansfield (he created the role of Major General Stanley in Pirates of Penzance spent much of his youth living in Heligoland, which was British at the time. And Werner Heisenberg came up with the beginnings of his theory of quantum mechanics while vacationing in Heligoland, which was German at that time.