Getting back on track

I know, I know…  It’s been nearly a month since I updated this thing.  But the semester is over, my program coursework is officially DONE, and I just might get my blogging muscles moving again!

Amazing how much happens when you don’t update a blog for a few weeks.  California’s Supreme Court upheld gay marriages (and licenses were granted starting yesterday; click those links to see all the great photos and profiles of happy people), Hillary Clinton finally “suspended“ her valiant effort to destroy the Democratic party, Tim Russert passed away (you’ll probably be able to find some gripes about him in the LATA archives, but it was clear that he loved politics, loved his job, and would have loved watching this historical election unfold)…

And there’s this breaking snooze news!  Al Gore pointedly failed to endorse John McCain yesterday!

Seriously, what the…?  I suppose he did find himself in an awkward position; perhaps it would have looked ungrateful or disloyal to endorse Obama instead of HC.  But it would also have meant something.  At this point, what IS the point?

By the way, I was in Ohio last week when Obama clinched the nomination.  I had decided it would be best for my health to not read paper formerly known as The Republican Courier (now just “The Courier”).  But I couldn’t resist looking at the editorial page after the HC farewell speech.  It was strikingly subdued - although they couldn’t resist invoking Jeremiah Wright’s name (yawn).  All they could muster up was a bleat about how the country must not be as racist as JW says.

A tornado passed the city to the north, but apparently didn’t touch down.  I took what I thought was a dramatic photo of the system as it advanced toward us (a little fuzzy; it was quite windy and starting to rain):

 

But then I saw this in the NY Times:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone actually stood still long enough to take that picture.  Amazing.

Oh. Mon. Dieu.

And to think… I would have missed this gem, I might have gone through life thinking Ms. Pickler was actually smarter than a sack of hammers (if I thought about Ms. Pickler at all), had the You Tube link not been featured in the sidebar of this NYT story, “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?“

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

I think I’m going to want to read Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason.

Humane apparel

Humane California is trying to collect 650,000 signatures by the end of February to put a Humane Farming initiative on the California ballot this year. Signature-gathering is not my strong suit, but I want to see this measure on the ballot, so I went to the volunteer page to sign up. Then I clicked on the Campaign Materials link to see if there was anything I could print out and start handing around while I wait for my petition packet. That page urges potential volunteers to “Get your Humane California t-shirts and other apparel. They’re great to wear while collecting signatures!!” OK, but…