Kit Stolz

Are texts the new quips?

Seriously. Being a big fan of dialogue — on stage, on screen, and in life — I track a couple of dialogue-tracking sites, but they've been eclipsed as of late by super-popular Texts from Last Night

Example:

driving around with you guys listening to the beach boys made me very concious of how white you all are.

I confess, that's one of the cleaner texts you'll read on the site, which specializes in outrageous college-age behavior. But it's still often funny…and given that the Internet (and phone systems) never seem to forget what is typed and sent, perhaps humanity has finally an effective means to capture its off-the-cuff quips.

The world and we are green: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac debate love

From a fascinating exchange of letters between Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac: .

“Realize, Allen, that if all the world were green, there would be no
such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to
be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all
the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn
away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How
can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like
lights?”
— Kerouac to Ginsberg, September, 1948

“The point is that all thought is inexistence and unreality, the only
reality is green, love. Don’t you see that it is just the whole point
of life not to be self conscious? That it must all be green? All love?
Would the world then seem incomprehensible? That is an error. The world
would seem incomprehensible to the rational faculty which keeps trying
to keep us from the living in green, which fragments and makes every
thing seem ambiguous and mysterious and many colors. The world and we
are green. We are inexistent until we make an absolute decision to close
the circle of individual thought entirely and begin to exist in god
with absolute unqualified and unconscious understanding of green, love
and nothing but love, until a car, money, people, work, things are love,
motion is love, thought is love, sex is love. Everything is love. That
is what the phrase ‘God is Love’ means.”
— Ginsberg to Kerouac, October, 1948

Kerouac may have connected green with love by chance, but that's how it
feels to me. See if it doesn't feel that way to you, too, under the
shelter of the largest California maple I have ever had the privilege to
walk under..

t/p: a new blog from the Library of America. Yes, it's official. Everyone now has a blog.

2010: Worst year ever for movies?

So wonders the ever-entertaining Joe Queenan, in the Wall Street Journal:

Where once there was "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," there is
now "Robin Hood," prince of duds. Where once we could look forward to
"Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "The Last of the Mohicans," we can now look
forward to "Dinner for Schmucks" and "The Last Airbender." This time
two years ago we were treated to the ingenious, subversive "Iron Man";
this year we have the insipid, uninspired "Iron Man 2." What does it say
about the current season that the third installation of "Toy Story" is
better than the first installation of anything else? Or that people are
actually looking forward to a sequel to the 1982 flop "Tron"?

Actually Salt (the movie) was okay. The plot fell somewhere between ludicrous and preposterous, as movie plots often do, but the characters were interesting — this is the only movie in memory with an idealistic German scientist as a love interest, and a character who introduced himself by saying he had no sense of humor (showing he did have a sense of humor).

And say what you will about Jolie, she works for her money.

Why would you want to leave coastal California?

That's what Monarch butterflies in SoCal are thinking. Makes one wonder how hard-wired some of these so-called "instincts" really are.

Here's a picture of garden designer David Snow petting a Monarch caterpillar.

A fun story for me to cover…off again now to the Sierras, this time to the Thousand-Island Lake area. Back a week from tomorrow. Have left some posts for you to chew on.

La Nina expected back this year

As is often the case, after El Nino. But this McClatchey/Fresno Bee piece is an unusually good one, complete with a charticle designed for web postings.

La Niña tends to influence wetter winters around the Canadian border,
but drier conditions along the Mexican border. So Southern California
— Los Angeles and San Diego — consistently get less-than-average
rainfall when La Niña occurs. The Pacific Northwest tends to get more
storms.

The midpoint between wet and dry with La Niña is about
Interstate 80 in California, said research meteorologist Kelly Redmond
of the Desert Research Institute in Reno.

A1_g0724_lanina_for_web.mi_embedded.prod_affiliate.8

Thanks Bee!

Ignoring a mortal threat: Appeasing climate change

A couple of weeks ago Tom Toles, in his witty but sharp way, brought up a powerful argument in the climate opinion wars. To ignore climate change, a mortal threat to our way of life, he said is comparable to appeasing Hitler in the late 1930's. Toles wrote:

let me be the first to haul out the heavy artillery of WWII analogies on this issue and call the climate legislation obstructionists the Neville Chamberlains of the planet.

This got me thinking, of course, of George Orwell, who despised the
Fascists and the Neville Chamberlains who who would appease them as much as any writer, on the left or on the right. I looked
in his diary (which has been unspooling one day at a time, on the web)
to see if he had some thoughts.

On March 7, 1940, Orwell wrote:

Everywhere a feeling of something near despair among thinking people
because of the failure of the government to act and the continuance of
dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command. Growing recognition
that the only thing that would certainly right the situation is an
unsuccessful invasion; and coupled with this a growing fear that Hitler
won’t after all attempt the invasion but will go for Africa and the Near
East.

"…near despair among thinking people because of the failure to act and the continuance of dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command."

Hmmmmm.

We certainly are seeing "near-despair among thinking people about the failure of the government to act." No shortage of "dead minds" amongst deniers. What would Orwell say about our government today?

Probably pretty much what Toles is saying…but in harder words.

Chart of the Week: The fall of Night

Has any director in the history of the movies fallen so far, so fast?

Via Marginal Revolution. If any discussion is necessary, the comments are excellent. M. Night Shyamalan must rue the day that sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic began quantifying their reviews.

Though that process is not beyond criticism. Rotten Tomatoes continues to rate Inception highly; Metacritic, not so much. I prefer Metacritic's more discriminating database, but the crowd continues to flock to Rotten Tomatoes, it seems…

Tracking 2010: in the race for the hottest year ever

The famous columnist George Will drives even his fellow editorial writers a little nuts with his condescending dismissal of global warming. As the LA Times wrote in an editorial yesterday:

You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News
commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed
global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the
highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half
of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice
melted at a record-setting pace in June.

How does Will do it? How does he dismiss over a century's worth of evidence? Simple. He focuses on global temperatures since l998. a big ENSO year. As he wrote in a column last November:

There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the
fact that global warming has not increased for that long [since l998].

At other times he's said there is no "statistically significant" warming since l998.

To be fair to Will, it's true that on this short time scale, warming is not increasing as rapidly as in the past century. But that doesn't reassure climate scientists who look at the trend. As NOAA wrote recently, reporting on June:

Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880
have occurred in the last fifteen years. The warmest year-to-date on
record, through June, was 1998, and 2010 is warmer so far (note:
although 1998 was the warmest year through June, a late-year warm surge
in 2005 made that year the warmest total year). Analysis by the
National Climatic Data Center reveals that June of 2010 was the warmest
global average for that month on record, and is also the warmest
year-to-date from January to June. This graph plots the year-to-date average global land and ocean temperature.

This just-mentioned graph, which I haven't seen before, helpfully puts Will's contention in a 21st-century context. Yes, l998 was a hot, hot year, although 2010 has a good chance of going down as the hottest ever, just as James Hansen predicted. But who in their right mind would look at this graph and wave off climate change?

(Click to enlarge.)

And if 2010 does turn out to be the hottest year ever, how will George Will continue to mislead?

Irritated editorialists want to know.

Obama accepts inaction on climate as bill dies in Senate

Tim Dickinson blames Obama for what became official today: the comprehensive energy/climate bill is dead. David Roberts blames Republicans and centrist Democrats, and sees no silver lining.

Yet at the same time, as numerous publications have pointed out, the coal industry has lost its mojo, in part because of campaigns such as the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal efforts, which have halted plans to construct over 125 coal plants in this country, and because the EPA has been empowered to take on climate pollution, which troubles investors. Stopping new coal plants is crucial to climate protection, no doubt. We might have reason for hope, if only we could act now — but seemingly, we as a nation can't.

It's worth looking back at the speech Obama gave a little over a month ago, after the BP disaster became plain, urging action on the comprehensive energy/climate bill. He said:

The one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will
not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too
difficult to meet.

Barack, I don't believe you any more. Sorry.

[image from the Rolling Stone article by Dickinson]

Scientist challenges denier: denier threatens suit

In a column this past week, George Monbiot pointed to a meticulously detailed take-down of the English Vicount Monckton's scattered attack on climate change science by an American professor specializing in heat transfer named John Abraham. Abraham went through a presentation by Monckton and surgically took it apart, point by point.

It's a devastatingly convincing talk. Abraham not only points out fundamental flaws in Monckton's attack (failing to cite references, that sort of thing) but he has the temerity to contact scientists that Monckton does reference, and ask them if they agree with his point.

For instance, Monckton cites a paper that he claims shows that as temperatures rise, polar bears will thrive; when Abraham contacts the scientists, they say no, it's just the opposite, rising temperature means less Arctic ice, which threatens the polar bears way of life.

This tactic outrages Monckton. On the popular denier site Watts Up With That? he writes:

At several points in the new version [of the talk], Abraham rashly persists in
misrepresenting me to third-party scientists, getting hostile
quotations from them in response to what I had not said, and using them
against me.

"Hostile quotations" — that is, they thought Monckton was wrong! For this Monckton darkly threatens a libel suit. He goes on to ask the denier community to write Abraham's employer, the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, to request that they take the criticism off the Internet, and discipline Abraham.

Obviously, as Monbiot says, Monckton can dish it out, but he can't take it. But what makes Abraham's analysis so utterly convincing is not the science he cites, nor even the flaws in Monckton's reasoning (if you can call it that). It's the fact that Monckton doesn't even agree with himself. Monckton cites charts, for instance, on recent temperatures, so crudely manipulated, they don't even match.

A New Zealand site called Hot Topic has responded by asking people to send messages of support to the administration of the University of St. Thomas. They've logged nearly a thousand so far. Care to add yours?