Category: General

Linda Ellerbee reminded me (via comments; don’t you love the net?) that the video piece I posted the other day was from the final Overnight show. I had forgotten that. I have a few more memories, helpfully augmented by Google and Wikipedia.

The music is Lou Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a minor hit for him, his last, in 1974. He was covering, of all people, Jeannette MacDonald, who sang it in the 1930 movie Monte Carlo. I was never a fan of Christie, but he was part of the soundtrack of growing up in the sixties.

Ellerbee’s co-host at the end was Bill Schechner, whom I knew (and by “knew” I mean “saw on TV”) from his work on KQED’s Newsroom, another news show that died before its time (though it lasted somewhat longer than Overnight). KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate, has long since joined the PBS wasteland in programming little but drivel. Odd how the trajectories of public television and radio have been so divergent.

In retrospect, Overnight reminds me of Charles Kuralt’s contemporary Sunday Morning. The obvious connection is the closing video, I suppose, but more than that the two shows shared a kind of humanely intelligent attitude toward us viewers.

And so it goes. Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And although there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises…in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620 (via Drew Westen)

Remember NBC News Overnight? They used to close out the show, as I recall, with a short video, I assume done by their staff. I had this one on tape for a long time, but it disappeared long since.

Watch it full-screen; the quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. I suppose it’s manipulative; I don’t care.

All that and Linda Ellerbee too.

NPR’s On the Media is on balance my favorite radio program these days. Last week’s episode had a nice remembrance of Tony Schwartz.

In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had full careers as an ad executive and a pioneering folklorist. And he did it all without leaving his zip code. Schwartz died in June and we offer a piece from the Kitchen Sisters, looking back at his life spent listening.

Listen to a brief sample.

My regular commute to work ends with a walk from the Mountain View Caltrain station to my office, and the walk includes a freeway overpass (Shoreline Blvd over US 101 for the locals). Lots of lanes, lots of cars.

God, but we drive drab cars in this neck of the woods. The palette runs from white through various shades of gray and silver to black. The grays and silvers might have a subtle tint, and the blacks might be replaced by a green or blue so dark as to be indistinguishable from black. Oh, and the occasional tan or brown.

The one bright exception is that we appear to have permission to drive red cars.

There are rare exceptions, of course, just enough to demonstrate that if we chose to buy them, we could drive brightly colored cars. I predict a resurgence of yellow, you’ll see the occasional bright primary color, or even pink or violet, though few pastels and fewer two-tones (thank you Mini).

Take a look next time you’re on a freeway or in a crowded parking lot. Why is it that our cars are about as flamboyant as a man’s business suit?

philosophy bites is “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics.” Each podcast is c. 15 minutes long, and new ones show up about twice a week. The topics are wide-ranging, and the discussions are of interest to interested non-professionals as well as professional philosophers in other fields.

A sampling of recent bites:

Simon Blackburn on Plato’s Cave
Mary Warnock on Philosophy in Public Life
Stephen Law on The Problem of Evil
John Cottingham on The Meaning of Life
Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice
Barry Smith on Wine
Alain de Botton on The Aesthetics of Architecture
Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism
Edward Craig on What is Philosophy?
Roger Crisp on Mill’s Utilitarianism
Adrian Moore on Infinity
Anthony Grayling on Atheism
David Papineau on Physicalism
Timothy Williamson on Vagueness
Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage
Simon Blackburn on Moral Relativism
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
Peter Adamson on Avicenna
Mary Warnock on Sartre’s Existentialism
Jonathan Rée on Philosophy as an Art
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Anthony Kenny on his History of Philosophy
Quentin Skinner on Hobbes on the State
Onora O’Neill on Medical Consent
Stewart Sutherland on Hume on Design
Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love

Subscribe directly from the site, or through iTunes.

For those who were, like me, scratching their head over the number of teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, this from Wikipedia explains the number, if not the apparently arbitrary reasoning behind it.

Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play the “opening round” game to determine which will advance into the first round of the tournament, with the winner advancing to play the top seed in one of the four regions. The opening Round game was added in 2001 and has been played in University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio each subsequent year. The opening round is considered part of the tournament and is often referred to as a “play-in” game.

There have been 64 teams since 1985, with the 65-team “play-in” format since 2001. The women’s tournament has 64 teams, so no play-in game.

Wikipedia:

Petrichor (from Greek petros, “stone” + ichor) is the name of the familiar scent of rain on dry earth.

The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is adsorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. In a follow-up paper, Bear and Thomas (1965) showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.

The scent is generally regarded as pleasant and refreshing, and is one of the most frequently cited “favorite smells”. In desert regions, the smell is especially strong during the first rain after a long dry spell. The oil yielding the scent can be collected from rocks and concentrated to produce perfume. However, it has yet to be synthesized, perhaps due to its complexity. It is composed of more than fifty distinct chemical substances.

Harder to find: the smell of sheets just off the clothesline, and the smell of ironing. Still looking….

I was reminded the other day, why I no longer remember, of a bit of wordplay that was popular in some circles a few decades ago.

The only one I can remember:

Will and Ariel Rogers

I can’t quite say why that one struck me as particularly funny, but I think it was picturing Will Rogers and Ariel Durant as a pair.

In a similar vein, but years later, I got this one from my late father in law. It may have been original with him.

Peter Paul and Mary Ford

I think all those names are sufficiently embedded in the cultural mainstream that you don’t have to be of a Certain Age to get them.

W&AR doesn’t show up on Google at all. PP&MF does, but it doesn’t look deliberate to me. Hence this post: let’s get them onto the web, and see what happens.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life – I wrote this some years ago – that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, – we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, – news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, – they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers, – and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.”

Thoreau’s Walden, quoted (in part) by Judy Muller on NPR this morning.

One might reasonably conclude that Henry would not have been a big user of email or rss.

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SAN FRANCISCO CA
600 AM PDT WED JUL 18 2007

…UPDATE: 0.01 INCHES OF RAIN HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY RECORDED AT THE DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO CLIMATE SITE SETTING A RECORD FOR THE DATE. A RECORD EVENT REPORT HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT.

On NPR this morning there was a piece on the ten-year anniversary of the Grand Rapids flood (I come from that neck of the woods, down river from (which is to say north of) Grand Forks, Kittson County MN). The piece is upbeat; Grand Forks and East Grand Forks (on the Minnesota side of the Red River) have largely recovered from the disastrous flooding.

What caught my ear was this:

This week, a series of events is scheduled to mark the 10th anniversary of the flood. James Lee Witt, the former head of FEMA, will be the grand marshal in a parade.

Imagine the ten-year anniversary of Katrina. Picture the parade. Now imagine Witt’s successor, Mike “Heck of a job!” Brown as Grand Marshal….

Kurt Vonnegut, dead at 84.

I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

So it goes.

Dahlia Lithwik in Slate:

No, the real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s. Probably not a lesson she learned in law school. The dream of Regent and its counterparts, like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, is to redress perceived wrongs to Christians, to reclaim the public square, and reassert Christian political authority. And while that may have been a part of the Bush/Rove plan, it was, in the end, only a small part. Their real zeal was for earthly power. And Goodling was left holding the earthly bag.

At the end of the day, Goodling and the other young foot soldiers for God may simply have run afoul of the first rule of politics, codified in Psalm 146: “Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals in whom there is no help.”