Achenblog

[Didn't I say, just last week, that someone should kick the computer that put Iowa at No. 1 in the nation? Yeah, they were number 1 until they ran into that perennial powerhouse Northwestern! Now we just need to do something about TCU -- whoever and whatever that is -- and the two computers that think Cincinnati is better than Alabama.]

Note this line in the official Michael Steele, RNC reaction to the passage of health care bill in the House (after some world-class grandstanding and obstreperousness by our esteemed leaders): "Today with help from their liberal House allies, President Obama and Nancy Pelosi finally got what they have been creating behind closed doors these past months - a government-run health care experiment that will increase families' health care costs, increase the deficit, increase taxes on small businesses and the middle class, and cut Medicare." Never mind the throwaway "liberal" slur or the silly "behind closed doors" confabulation: The last two words of the sentence would seem to contradict at least partially what has preceded them. Medicare is "government-run health care." If Medicare is cut, that would necessarily diminish the fiscal problems caused by the "experiment." Regardless of whether someone supports or opposes the bill, it is the height of disingenuousness to slam government health care while being reverential about Medicare. The fiscal dilemma of the moment is largely built around the rapid rise in Medicare costs. Social Security is a rounding error compared to Medicare.

Fred Hiatt blames Obama for not wanting to inflict any pain on the middle class to pay for expanded health care, but members of Congress in both parties are similarly pain-averse. But at some point the bill will come due and I don't think my kids should have to pay for programs that we weren't willing to pay for ourselves. (Although come to think of it, the youngest one does owe me some money.)

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Check out Paul Krugman this morning on the difference between governing and rabble-rousing:

"Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren't interested in actually governing, they feed the base's frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone."

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The New Yorker tries to explain why Americans are constantly killing each other.

The Hasan story is still very murky: I'm struck by how little we know so far about what he may have been thinking and why he would have done what he is accused of. The demands of instant analysis are not always met by the supply of facts. The published facts are sketchy and contradictory (he seemed like a nice guy; no, wait, he seemed angry and weird). The discussion of possible motives has touched on two basic theories, what you might call psychological vs. ideological. Or maybe crazy vs. fanatical. See The Post story today,or Tom Gjelten's NPR report last night. Maybe this will all clear up. In the meantime, a couple of thoughts, in the category of just thinking out loud on a Saturday morning:

You may have heard the report about the bear that killed two militants hiding in a cave in Kashmir. Yep: Big ol' bear came home and found a gang of people on its home turf. Mastications ensued. From the BBC story:

"The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise -- police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked."

Gosh, I hate to say this, but -- that wasn't pudding. That was a militant.

Obviously this raises the question of whether the U.S. should adopt the bear strategy in all of these difficult regions, perhaps using some of the grizzlies enumerated by that USGS study McCain was so grumpy about. They got, let's see, 700 or so in the Glacier ecosystem alone. Our ally Canada could easily pitch in a bunch of bears. Sure, it's cruel, and insane, but compared to what? That video-game warfare with the drones and some guy joysticking in Colorado as he takes out a village in Asia? Also we have lots of spare wolves. And those pythons in South Florida. Drop them from choppers and watch the bad guys scatter. We should hit them with the whole bestiary. Even throw in Bigfoot. (This morning I have so many good ideas I feel like I'm on fire.) (No wait that's just the toaster.)

A year ago tonight, we saw on the streets of D.C. a lovefest for the ages. Remember? It was an explosion of euphoria. The place erupted at 11 p.m. when the polls closed out west and the networks called the election for Obama. To say that people were dancing in the streets doesn't capture the sizzling energy of the night. People were hugging, kissing, singing, chanting, whooping, hollering. Strangers went up to strangers and said: "I love you!" I took some snapshots for the web at 14th and U and, hours later, down in front of the White House.

A year later, it's a not-so-happy anniversary.

Yes, the Democrats can feel good that they won a House race way up in ... well, Canada. But that was kind of a freak show. The Republican dropped out. The Conservative tried the end-around. It showed a fracture in the GOP between the hard right and the remnants of the GOP middle. But the vote itself is hard to interpret because of the mangled ballot.

Sometimes guest Achenblogger Caitlin Gibson today gives us an in-depth look at a heroin ring among teenagers in the Washington suburbs. It's the first of a two-part article in the Style section. Pretty scary reading for those of us with kids in the firing line. These were high achieving kids who took AP classes and won spots on the cheerleading squad and so forth. From the story:

What soon became clear was that the teens had graduated to heroin from a stunning menu of drugs: ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, methamphetamines, cocaine, barbiturates, prescription pills....

The kids called it "partying," but it wasn't really; they'd use, then mostly just sit around watching TV, listening to music, smoking cigarettes. In a basement, or a bedroom, or a car. They were together but alone, adrift in their own oblivion. Even after police interrogations and arrests, they felt little anxiety about being caught.

It's one of those stories that obliterates the reader's it-couldn't-happen-here reflex.

[Here's the printer-friendly version fyi.]

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"Slow-blogging" -- I like it.

[Split wood last night and this morning my back is sore. Also am sore from gym Saturday. My feet hurt. When did I become an old man??? Oh, to be young like Brett Favre! Seriously, I don't know why people say you should exercise when the body quite clearly rebels against such. Are you sure that sedentary isn't the way to go? I've said it before: who speaks for sloth?]

[Iowa is No. 8 in the AP and No. 2 in the BCS computers. Look very closely and you'll see that one computer, that of Peter Wolfe (methodology described here), has Iowa in the top spot, ahead of my Gators. What do the computers know that we humans can't perceive? Isn't there a way to program the computers so that they know that Iowa should not be taken seriously as a football power except in dire emergencies?]

Paul Hollander's opinion piece today in The Post argues that Americans paid little attention to the crimes of communism and barely batted an eyelid when the Soviet Union collapsed. Really? We weren't aware of all that Darkness at Noon stuff? Aren't the crimes of Stalin and Mao cemented into textbooks? Isn't the collapse of European communism on the very short list of the most important things that happened in our lifetimes?

The evil that can come from idealism was the subject of two classic Orwell novels more than half a century ago. That communism repeatedly manifested itself as totalitarianism is pretty much burned into our consciousness. Sure, the Holocaust gets more attention than the Gulag, but it's hard to diminish the evil of a government-organized genocidal program. And the Nazis were flamboyantly imperialist, giving the documentary makers endless dramatic footage. The Soviets and their ilk tended to repress their people out of sight, in the dark -- a drab brutality that did not want its criminality exposed. But we know it happened. And we won't forget.

As you know, while they're blowing up the Post newsroom I've been sent to a Siberian redoubt in an adjacent building, a bunker of sorts that I will not disparage other than to note factually that it is devoid of light, joy, or hope, being little more than a storage space with a window that carries the eye outward and slams it into a brick wall shrouded in perpetual gloom.

But -- but! -- when I pull a weekend shift there is no one else around, and it is my office, mine alone, my space, my world, my universe. Anyone sane is elsewhere, in the inhabited parts of the building. In my realm I can play music. Just now I put on a delightful ditty from NPR, Bernstein conducting Shostakovich in a bombastic sort of thing that the NPR website describes thusly:

In the remarkable finale, Shostakovich achieves one of the greatest coups of his symphonic career: a "victorious" closer that drives home the expected message and at the same time makes an entirely different point -- the real one. The resounding march that ends the movement represents the triumph of evil over good. The apparent optimism of the concluding pages is, as one colleague of the composer put it, no more than the forced smile of a torture victim as he is being stretched on the rack.

Perfect for the bunker! (Decorating brainstorm: A gibbet for the south wall.)

Now let's see what's in the news.

From NPR, a story about that "superfood" you love to eat to stay young forever: blueberries. Turns out the migrants picking the berries in Michigan are as young as six. Child labor violations, etc.

From EurekAlert we see this bulletin saying that lots of dinosaur species are just baby versions of other species.

Horner suggests that one-third of all named dinosaur species may never have existed, but are merely different stages in the growth of other known dinosaurs. "What we are seeing in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana suggests that we may be overextended by a third," Horner said...

Hard to see how anything can be scarier than "The Exorcist". But "The Omen" is close. The movie that gave me nightmares as a little kid was "House On Haunted Hill." But apparently it was supposed to be campy.

Email tip: Don't hit Reply All.

Via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a blog I may have to start reading regularly.

James Grady has written a serial thriller for Politics Daily, check it out.

[More to come...]

Last week I heard Al Michaels on Sunday Night Football plug the new alien-abduction movie "The Fourth Kind" with some remark about it being based on real events. Seems to me that, no matter whether NBC is getting paid to promote a movie, a journalist shouldn't give cover to what is quite simply a hoax. The moviemakers want people to think that this is essentially a documentary. The abductions took place in a remote Alaskan town where alcoholism runs rampant and, according to a local paper, people sometimes just wander off into the night and are never seen again. The bottle, mixed with despair, seems to me a more likely explanation than midnight abduction by beings from another

But maybe I'm just saying that because I'm under orders from my master, Zartoog of Eta Carina.

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The GOP makes a big fuss about the size of the House health care bill and whether anyone will have time to read it. But this bill was introduced in draft form in July. This is now Halloween Eve. There have been changes along the way, but by Hill standards this is a very familiar piece of legislation at this point. It looks like some form of health care reform will actually be signed by the president before the end of the year -- a remarkable achievement for a do-nothing institution. Lots of people will be unhappy about various aspects of it, but check out the Dingell interview by Ezra Klein: Here's a guy whose Dad started pushing for health care reform in 1943 or something like that. He says this is the farthest that reform has ever gotten.

[My story in the Style section.]

Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter. Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information -- data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn't think he's a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn't quite work on a computer screen.

"You're on the Web and the Internet all day, and you got your trigger finger on that Scroll Down button. And you're looking to move material across the screen. Move-and-skim is the mood you're in."

And that's no way to read a story.

"A story curls you back into yourself," he says, "and you need a special time and place and setting and mode for that. If it becomes all one smear with your work life and checking your e-mail, your Facebook, it's lost all its reason for being."

Smith is saying all this by phone from his screened-in back porch in Charleston, S.C. This is where he writes, on a laptop resting on a teak picnic table, with a view of a small back yard with fruit trees -- orange, lemon, loquat. The loquat, he says, has a few pieces of fruit clinging to its lower branches. Yeah, an irrelevant detail, but notice how your brain reflexively inserts other details, like the humidity and the lizard scampering across the back walk and the languid cat on the fence post. Stories are collaborative; the listener paints the backdrop.

Smith is 55 years old, and his work has been heavily anthologized. His heroes know failure as surely as they know triumph. His favorite story, "Damned Yankee," was about a baseball player who might have been the next Yogi Berra but for all the guilt he felt from having accidentally thrown a javelin through his uncle's head. (Now that's a story!)

There's endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google's citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.

Media makeover

To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of "mobile phone novels." These are novels written on a cellphone keypad. The reader uploads the novel one cellphone screen at a time. The Japanese, always technophiles, find themselves reading their phones the way Westerners used to read the daily newspaper.

There are two ways to look at this situation: One is to make the electronic gadget the star of a heroic tale called The Changing Media. New gadgets can do anything! They can not only put you in touch with friends, they can store your photo album, tell you your longitude and latitude, and write fabulous novels. But another way of describing the situation is to say that you can't keep a good story down. The story, not the gadget, is what's irrepressible. So powerful is the story as a way of communicating that it will even sprout in a cellphone.

Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive who now runs an investment fund for innovative technologies, says by e-mail: "iPhones and Blackberries give us new formats -- like Twitter -- which is a type of story telling. Somebody will write a novel told as text messages."

Been done. It was in Finland, a novel called "The Last Messages," complete with typos.

[Click here to keep reading.]