annus miribilis or choose your own adventure

The wire services have just released its annual review of most significant news stories for the past year.  Here are the top headlines, as pantomimed, by the classic stick figure samaritans and fabulists--all with quite thoughtful expressions, which one finds in the literature in the waiting rooms of school clinics, infirmaries and counselors' offices.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill and its terrible environmental legacy with the industry and consumer choices and policy that perpetuate these disasters.

The Health Care Reform initiatives in the US, that showed America's strange sort of envy at odds with the true aims of the effort.

US Mid-Term Elections and reversals of power, that was harrowing for what was sometimes characterised as a weary and disappointed electorate.











The US economy and world-wide economic crisis with the bailout and contributing factors that precipitated the collapse and wherein lies the blame and the lesson.

The devastating earthquake in Haiti and the recovery effort.










The popularity of the so-called "Tea Party" movement and its influences in US politics, part appeal to libertarianism and part to militantism.







The drama, tension, technological wonder and cooperation that led to the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners.

The US government leaking like a sieve in the most sensitive areas, call and response.












The ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the private toll war-making exacts.

word cloud

The Association for the German Language (GfdS, Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache) last week in Wiesbaden announced its superlative word for the year: Wutbürger (enraged citizen). This choice reflects the mobilization of many to call attention to various, serious causes during this past year--protest rallies in Germany and abroad, from anger over the Stuttgart 21 train station renovation, to raising tuition fees, to atomic energy, to genetically modified crops, to austerity measures cued by financial instabilities, to immigration, to the privacy and protection of personal data, and all shades of solidarity in between. The German language is more tolerant of nonce words--and does not emphasize the novelty of the neologism as much, when appropriate to string a daisy chain of words along into a compound meaning. Wut, however, can also connote rabid--whereas, not all causes being equal, many of these protesters, I think they deserve to be called Mutbürger, brave citizen.

making a list, checking it twice

Brilliant artist Ape Lad imagines that the next cable dump would be the ultimate disclosure of Santa's exhaustive annual performance appraisals, and shares his vision with Boing Boing, which is hosting a lot of excellent, on-going discussions on the topic and reporting from fresh angles.

gitty up, jingle horse, pick up your feet

The weather, save for all the daily headaches and tension that it is creating for commuters and travelers, is really remarkable and feels like a good and proper winter, as compared to years' past when the cold and annoyance came late. Routines are more chaotic and treacherous and spoiled plans can take on the taste of sour grapes, but for all that, an over-abundance of snow and ice should not give people license to humbug global warming and environmental initiatives.

Global warming is an unfortunate misnomer, pars pro toto, that has stuck, but broader climate change can embrace both hot and parched and frozen. The expected milder and rainy weather in the British Isles and Central Europe are sustained by the Atlantic Gulf Stream's or any other body of water's alternating current, which exchanges warm equatorial waters for colder arctic ones. Some tinkering with this global machinery has equally global results: altering the salinity of bodies of water, like from fresh water formerly locked up in glaciers and icebergs, effects how well heat can be transported. Extending the idea of greenhouse gases to ideas as venerable and basic as the theory of colour, the gleaming whiteness of snow and ice reflect back some 90% of heat and light projected on their surfaces. Whereas, open ocean water, instead of iced-over or peopled with icebergs, a craggy, bald mountain, as opposed to a snow-capped summit, absorb up to 90% of the light and heat falling on them, warming up all their surroundings and making more surfaces to capture the heat. All this seems to cascade down, but it seems to suggest that a little influence in the opposite direction could also have a big effect--that's what can cause white snow to dazzle one's eyes, makes piles of it in parking lots linger and can enchant snowmen. It's what makes the season certainly memorable, these challenges, and scenic, and for all the cursing and frustrations, shivers and sickness, it should be nothing to put people in the spirit to question or long for ecological collapse.

thrones & dominions or santa claus conquers the martians

My mother was sharing with me a documentary she watched recently that posited that Jesus was of extraterrestrial origin.  Imaginative and an idea to throw out there--it reminded me of the researchers who have suggested that those unaccounted-for years in the life of Jesus during his adolescence were spent on a pilgrimage to India (where the Wise Men were from) where he learnt the ways of the swamis and sages of the Far East and brought them back to Judea--I had no idea that there was such scholarship, speculation and a following attached to it.

My mother recommended that I write a gospel on the subject, which in actuality does not seem so far removed from the penchant of humans to model allegory and reinterpret meanings to fit what we are familiar with and what is needful--and not saying that the feats and miracles of Jesus were not enough or are no longer interesting and relevant with out some alien angle--but it seems that there's already an exhaustive amount out there: in addition to cleansing the sins of all of mankind, forever, it seems Jesus intervened to ensure that the Earth remained the domain of the Earthlings.  Comsic overloads seeded the primordial Earth with the genetic material that would eventual evolve in their image and cultivate a planet that would be one day suitable for their return.  Alien Jesus, however, fought for human liberation, and this historic enlightenment could be portrayed in several ways, depening on the sensibilities of the audience. 

Humans have not yet perfectly intergrated universal love and charity nor have they successfully displaced mortality, so it is not as if those Christian attributes and virtues are old hat, and though interesting and demonstrates that religious scholarship is a living entity, maybe it is a bit premature to reading the New Testament as a survival guide for preventing alien enslavement, though do not dismiss that possibility since it has always been a versatile and elastic document thus far.  Talking with my mother also made me remember visiting a Jesuit church that seems rather unassuming and conventional from the outside, but on the inside has this most fantastic and benign altar and adornments to Space Jesus and his Apostles.

through the rude wind's wild lament and the bitter weather

Precipitation in the form of snow can be quite the contrarian for the weatherman. I suppose it seems to buck the forecast in part because it lingers and the upbuilding of the flurries, not like rain that's an event, welcome or unwelcome, that is mostly obligingly soaked up or siphoned off. Snow transfigures the landscape and the view from one's windows like quite nothing else, dark of night nor lushness of Spring in full bloom.

 It is quieting, calming with its insistence, mounting and enduring, that invites one to consider all the millions, billions of particles of it, flakes buffeted and flocked or bullet-like projectiles something more cardinal than a cloud suspended or the water of rain drops, and something that seems just a bit outside of nature's cycle.