My favorite poet has a piece, "Albanian Virgin," in poemeleon's "Gender" issue. The poem (if I may defile it with Wikipedia links) concerns the "sworn virgin" custom in Albania in which a woman (for instance, a family's only child) lives her life with the social privileges of men in exchange for foreswearing sex. Checking my tags I find I've linked to this piece on the practice in the New York Times before.

Wednesday night quadruple threat.

* Maybe my favorite science story ever: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron Collider] before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. I love this story so much I don't care that they're only half-serious.

* Why Are Insurers Exempt From Antitrust Laws? Ezra Klein investigates in light of Harry Reid's statements on the Senate floor today.

* Wes responds to his FMF critics. (Via Eli Glasner)

* One thing that's being lost in all this discussion of the Saudi proposal that oil-producing nations be compensated for declines in oil demand is, as Jaimee reported for the Indy not that long ago, energy companies in the U.S. want the same thing.

Jaimee made this.

Friday night roundup.

* Why would they send Obama to Copenhagen if there was any chance it might not work? Really poor showing from the White House on this one.

* Best thing on the Internet today: Liu Bolin's extreme camouflage photography. Warning: May blow your mind.

* The Sesame Street Mad Men parody. Warning: probably will not.

* Scenes from the A-Team movie.

* Bill Simmon is rapidly losing patience with Flashforward. I agree—but as I wrote in the comments over at his place, we have to remember that Lost's first great episode was episode four, and that the show was by and large pretty terrible until at least the second half of season three. So there's still hope. It's doing well enough in the ratings that the producers should have time and leeway to develop the story however they want.

* Related: What caused the flashforwards?

* Jaimee has a review in the Indy this week.

* Presenting the gas mask bra.



* And some bad news: Supermassive Black Holes Bringing Universe Closer to Death.

Sunday! Links!

* Jaimee has a new poem online at Country Dog Review.

* Traxus has a nice post on status update activism jumping off my post at HASTAC the other day.

* In praise of the sci-fi corridor.

* All about ocean acidification, the climate change disaster no one is even talking about.

* Confessions of an Aca/Fan has two good posts about where District 9 came from, one on transmedia promotion strategies and the other on Afrofuturism.

* NeilAlien is your source for Disney/Marvel merger news, especially more Photoshopped images than you can possibly handle. Here are even more Photoshopped images.

* Why is Glenn Beck wearing an East German military uniform on the cover of his new book? No, really, why?

Two book reviews from my household in the Indy this week: my review of Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War and Jaimee's review of Fred Chappell's latest book of poems, Shadow Box.

In a related sidebar, Lisa Sorg asks: "What's the difference between Daniel Boyd and Blackwater's Erik Prince?"

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

Jaimee has some new poems online this week, "Chlamydia" and "Echo and Narcissus."

Other stuff.

* Jaimee has a piece in the Indy Green Guide this week comparing dueling energy initiatives in the North Carolina State Legislature.

* Begging as labor: Alex Greenberg thinks it over.

* Science fiction's most evil corporations.

* Hope for Dollhouse? 'Prison Break return disappoints,' scoring 75% of Dollhouse's regular audience in the Friday night death slot.

* Making Samuel Beckett.

* The Brick Testament has reached The Book of Revelations.

* "Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism," by Terry Eagleton. Via MeFi.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

*Think Progress says "Obama’s Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions Of Senior Bushies On The Table." People need to accept that Obama's going to let us down on this. He told us he would. He will.

* Your taxes at work. See also.

* A major EPA ruling this week declared carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. More analysis at the Oil Drum.

* Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

* The Wire series bible.

American poetry is (still) dying.

The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country's many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S. They include National Poetry Month (April); readings, lectures and contests held across the country; initiatives to get poems into mainstream publications such as newspapers; and various efforts to boost poetry's presence online (poets.org, the Web site of the Academy of American Poets, even launched a mobile version optimized for use on the iPhone). Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.

The winners and judges of Independent Weekly's 2009 poetry contest will be reading tonight at the Pinhook in downtown Durham starting at 7 PM—and that includes Jaimee. Come around if you can make it...

#2: culture!

* How HBO changed TV.

* Is Sarah Connor canceled?

* Europe names crew for simulated mission to Mars. Devotees may remember that this is strikingly reminiscent of the first episode of The Twilight Zone.

* Examined Life is your crash course in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life." In fact, I'm quite sure she didn't. But as with Taylor's previous film, "Zizek!" (whose subject, the Slovenian madman Slavoj Zizek, appears here at a London garbage dump, claiming that mankind isn't alienated enough from the natural world), the movie has a philosophical element of its own that is not free of guile. By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O. Trying to rehabilitate the concept of revolution while rowing in the Central Park lake, post-Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt literally runs aground on a half-submerged boulder. I'm far more sympathetic to Hardt's intellectual project than I should admit, but, really, what can you say?

* The great American novel v. women. (Or maybe that's the other way around.)

* Alan Moore v. comic book films. More Moore here and here.

* How they marketed Watchmen: a look back at the original solicits from 1986.

* Gary Westfahl: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future. Another thing Suvin makes clear in his very good book on science fiction is that if you're expecting science fiction to predict the future you're asking the wrong questions.

* The Indy just announced the winners of their 2009 poetry contest, and once again Jaimee was one of the judges.

* And Neil sends along some optical illusion fun.

They call me Jerry Two-Times because I say everything twice.

Jerry Canavan, a Duke graduate student who was waiting for the train with his wife, Jaimee Hills, also volunteered for Obama, canvassing in North and South Carolina.

"It just feels like starting over," Canavan said of Obama's election. "It's just been an unending series of disasters since we started paying attention to politics, so this just feels like starting over."

Canavan and Hills, who works at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, will be staying in Arlington, Va., with a friend.

"We're just going to walk over the bridge from Arlington and see how far we can get," Hills said.

A second test of my new camera (in outdoor conditions!) from the Durham train station this morning. You'll note Jaimee's level of contempt for the camera has now reached "2."

Happy birthday, Jaimee! Everyone else, I'll be back with posts tomorrow.

Jaimee and I both have capsule reviews in the Indy's end-of-the-year booklist. I wrote about Bolaño and Jaimee about Aravind Adiga's Booker-Prize winning The White Tiger, but here's Jaimee on the book everyone's talking about.

Goodnight Bush
By Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Little, Brown & Company

Many a child may be fooled by the cover of this "unauthorized parody" of the classic children's story Goodnight Moon; upon closer inspection, however, the cover of Goodnight Bush, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, portrays a nightmare world of factory smokestacks, oil drilling and Florida 2000 ballots roasting on an open fire.

Accompanied by a simple text in a rhyming series of good nights ("Goodnight Constitution, goodnight evolution"), it is with a careful eye one must read the pictures full of visual puns. We are led into a child's room, Little Georgie about to go to bed in his flight-cadet jammies. Lines of cocaine are on one nightstand, My Pet Goat on the other, surrounded by the dollhouse White House, little soldier men, the fox, the rocking chair, the blocks, the ballots and "a quiet Dick Cheney whispering hush." Is that yellow cake that sits on the bedside table or is that a slice of the American dream in the form of apple pie? As the story progresses, the toys move and change to document another facet of the Bush years: another grievance, another mistake, another disaster.

If this book has a moment in time, it is now. George Bush's legacy is bandied about on political talk shows and is soon to be stamped into history books, and here is a tiny sardonic snapshot that captures all that went wrong; it is only here, in a child's world, where we can laugh at the worst that has happened in a kind of catharsis. The book ends with both good and bad goodbyes: "Goodnight Earth? Goodnight heir? Goodnight failures everywhere." As a large percentage of the country looks forward to a New Year and a new administration, this clever little book is worth a look. —Jaimee Hills

7%: my odds of divorcing in the next five years. Via Freakonomics.

Anyone ever heard of this guy Jerry Seinfeld? He came to Raleigh last night and Jaimee took me out to see him. I gotta admit, he was pretty funny.

Jaimee and I have the cover story in the Independent this week with our long, loooong-promised article on Peak Oil and alternative energy in North Carolina.

Updating this post, anyone looking to get a new laptop in the near future should think about grabbing one of the original recipe MacBooks before they stop being produced—they're starting at $999 at apple.com and $949 at Amazon until, I guess, they're all gone.

We just bought Jaimee's.

Duke students start here for a 10% discount.