Plea to Indiana

Put it away, put it away, put it away now…

NEWS FLASH: Most Americans see Obama’s ex-pastor as nonissue, poll finds—in spite of a Soviet-style sensationalist news blitz in the States. “It’s like they gave him his own channel,” Chris Rock apparently said about the pastor … Was it really that bad?

UPDATE: Some personalities at Spiegel and the Huffington Post have already called the nomination for Obama. I think they’re right.

     posted 6 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Politicians Who Remain Human

... and how they sometimes fail to get elected, in the pettiest “great” nation on earth: William Pfaff slices a number of hamstrings in favor of Obama.

     posted 8 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Grammar Bitch Online 2

This is one of my favorite grammatic quibbles, the sort of thing everyone gets wrong when they realize they’re speaking in public. Even Barack Obama. Earlier this week, at his measured, mature, eloquent, patient bridge-burning operation that should have laid to rest the matter of his former pastor once and for all, in a rational nation — a great healthy nation populated by thoughtful citizens curious about their candidates for president, concerned about freedom and justice rather than the freak show of stray friends and associates that must surround every candidate, including John McCain (and by the way has anyone noticed that the most damaging dirt anyone has found on Obama is not even about the man himself? I mean how long has he been on the campaign trail? Isn’t that another unprecedented aspect of this election?), not a nation populated by hotheads easily distracted by any non-controversy kicked up by an irresponsible tabloid-TV journalism culture — sorry, where were we? — um, Obama said this:

But he was somebody who was my pastor, and married Michelle and I, and baptized my children…

Michelle and ME.

For fuck’s sake, people. What is the mental block here? But it happens to everyone, or every American, especially when they’re staring into klieg lights and TV cameras. Because we all had it drilled into our heads in second grade while we were subject to the half-assed grammatic tyranny of Mrs. Schneider, or whoever, telling us it was flat wrong to say anything resembling “Mrs. Schneider? Michelle and me kind of need to go to the bathroom?” That sounded so atrocious that Mrs. Schneider would give us a lecture — instead of letting anyone pee — along the lines of, “Always say ‘Michelle and I.’” And God help your soul if you dared to say “Me and Michelle.” I saw a boy flogged for that once in the locker hall.

But Mrs. Schneider was wrong. “Michelle and me” is right in certain cases, namely the accusative. There’s an easy way to check this point of grammar, even while you’re staring into klieg lights. Ask yourself if you would ever say, “He married I.” Sorry, bad example. How about: “He took I.” He was my pastor, he took Michelle and I to the store?

Does that sound like good grammar to you?

In some distant corners of the old British Empire it was called pidgin:

Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit

But when educated Americans make this mistake, they’re not thinking about the eloquent poetic license of Ras Tafari. They think they sound educated.

     posted 9 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Delia Makes a Döner

“Rather like slates on a roof.” Right. In any case this should serve as home instruction for everyone who won’t be able to afford a döner after the price goes up.

     posted 13 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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I Did Not Know That

“The United States is one of a handful of countries with no guaranteed paid maternity leave policy, along with Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Liberia, researchers found last year.”

     posted 13 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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If the Waves Are Good

A group in Israel called Explore Corps is helping to set up the first surf club in Gaza and generally get Palestinian kids out into the fresh air. It now has a web site. The guy in charge, Matt Olsen, showed me around the coast of Israel and took me surfing when Arthur Rashkovan was busy. They’re both friends with Dorian Paskowitz, the venerable (and still-kicking) Californian pioneer of Israel’s surf scene. “God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good,” Paskowitz told journalists last summer, when he brought a quiver of boards across the Gaza border to help seed a surf scene there. “When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can’t help but say something that brings them together.”

     posted 14 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Shark!

A 66-year-old triathlete got killed by a shark on Friday off Solana Beach, where I lived for a year in college. Major news outlets disagree on whether it’s the first shark-attack death in Southern California since 1959 or 1994 or what. In San Francisco you count on at least one surfer per year appearing on the TV news, alive but in a cast, after getting chomped off a Marin beach; but the warmish south is a nursery for young sharks rather than a feeding ground for adults.

Surfline has details:

Local surfer Rob Blase was sitting in the lineup at Pillbox, just to the south, when the attack happened. “The group of triathletes swam straight out from the ramp at Pillbox,” said Blase. “They swam out towards the kelp beds and then headed north. They were maybe five minutes into their swim when I heard some screams. I heard the one guy yelling, “Shark!” By the time I was able to paddle to the swimmers, they were pulling him onto the beach and the lifeguards saw it too. They were on it, giving him CPR.”

Blase continued, “The top half of the bite was right above the kneecap level. They said the bite width was 22 inches across. It just shredded his wetsuit. From the time it happened until the time they brought him in, it was probably seven to eight minutes. But he was already as white as a ghost.”

More people get killed by elephants every year than by sharks, so these stories are a big deal.

But I’m skeptical about that death in 1994. AP seems to be misleading everyone by saying it was in San Diego County. This Malibu Longboards page places the 1994 death in “Central or Northern” California and the Ventura County Star says it was off San Miguel Island, in Central California, where the shark in question caught up with an unlucky abalone diver.

     posted 16 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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That Food Crisis Thingy

In case you had an impression that the violence from Haiti to Bangladesh was all about biofuels, or global warming, utterly unrelated to the rising price of gold or oil or other investment opportunities hedge funds have been seeking since US real estate went south, Spiegel has a comprehensive feature. William Pfaff also has an excellent column. Warren Buffett didn’t think there was a bubble in agricultural commodities last year, but even then he said, “It’s like most trends: At the beginning, it’s driven by fundamentals, then speculation takes over. As the old saying goes, what the wise man does in the beginning, fools do in the end.”

     posted 18 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Ampelmännchen Don't Surf

They just ride flash cars.

     posted 20 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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He Always Looks Like He's Casting a Spell

     posted 22 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Actual Wipeout of the Year

UPDATE: No that is not me. I think he’s French.

     posted 25 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Ride (and Wipeout) of the Year

Shane Dorian just won a Ride of the Year award from Billabong, a surfing prize which involved some well-deserved monetary compensation. But you get a false impression from the BBC report. Over direct video evidence to the contrary, the announcer says Dorian “manhandled” the wave and, “despite coming dangerously close to a wipeout … held on to scoop the award.”

Watch Dorian’s wave, either in the clip above (third segment) or on the BBC page. You’ll notice he managed a fast ride against most human odds through Teahupoo’s thick, notorious tube before getting hurled against the wave’s wall (instead of through it!) by the nasty spitting spray and then sent careening pinwheeling ass-over-tit into the air before the same wave finally decided to own him on a coral reef.

It was absolutely the ride of the year. But Dorian, I’m afraid, wiped out.

     posted 26 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Täglicher Faschismus

London’s war on public photography has been a theme at Boing Boing for a while, and now they have a campaign to help one British MP defend innocent people for taking innocent pictures in the street. This shouldn’t, of course, be necessary: Taking pictures of things that happen in public is a normal freedom in the West. But since the “War on Terror” it has eroded because of paranoia about terrorists who take pictures of things; because of defensive cops worried about getting filmed while making arrests; and because of general police and rent-a-cop ignorance of what is and is not legal.

Alas, it’s not quite news that the War on Photography is alive and well in America, too.

But let’s be clear: The cops actually have no right, no power — none — to keep people from taking most of these photos. When police don’t know (or ignore) what’s legal or illegal, the rule of law is breaking down, and when the rule of law breaks down in the face of such a simple right, we’ve begun to get used to Täglicher Faschismus, everyday fascism — in particular when the same freedom is claimed by governments to put up cameras of their own.

     posted 27 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Sun and Surf

You can tell from this sample of public art that Newquay thinks of itself as a surf town. Which of course it is. What you can also almost tell by peering through the ironwork is that sun and surf were gracing other parts of the world last week. But the small clean waves on Towan Beach were good for riding your foamy, and the surprising number of people in the ice-cold water explained the shocking size of Cornwall beach crowds in the summer. (See the same link.)

     posted 28 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Wanting to Be President

Harper’s has an excellent, almost ancient piece on its web site consisting of celebrity answers to the question, “When did you stop wanting to be president?”—posed after Nixon’s resignation in 1975. Ronald Reagan has an answer that’s worth reading only because it suggests he did want to be president in those days, even if the main virtue he names for the office is not wanting it; and William Burroughs typed up a dry satirical routine that still works as a lucid warning to anyone seeking the White House now:

My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County—$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund … I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.

[snip]

What would you do if you were in the President’s place? You would be inexorably pressured by the forces and the individuals that made you President, and by your own desire to be President in the first place; so you would wind up doing just what they all have done. It’s enough to stop any sane man from wanting to be President.

     posted 29 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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