Rhinocrisy

I recently had the opportunity to watch the movie The Island, which deals with Weighty Issues such as, “Will scientists grow power-mad and create a clutch of clones to use as organ banks for rich people, cynically denying their humanity?” These are, in fact, serious and delicate issues that deserve careful consideration, and director Michael Bay has clearly done extensive reading on the ethics involved from an essay his son wrote for his seventh-grade science class.

As annoying as the obtuse treatment of the issues involved was (I could actually feel my brow-ridge expanding as I watched), what was REALLY goddamn annoying was the product placement.

Here’s a shot of Ewan MacGregor at the bar. There’s some drinks. Oh look, the bartender is setting down a bottle in front of them, with the label turned so we can read it clearly. Wow, they still drink Aquafina in the year 20X6.

Oh! Here is hot blonde actress Scarlett Johansson engaged in some fancy-shmancy virtual kickboxing with Ewan MacGregor. Hey, what’s that familiar logo being not-so-subtly flashed in the background? It’s the X-box logo! Boy, those X-boxes are sure advanced in 20X6!

Here’s director Michael Bay, counting his money. Hey, Michael Bay - do you think we’re fucking baboons, or what? Do you think that sort of shit makes us do anything other than roll our eyes and mutter, “Jesus, that’s some shameless, shameless product placement.”? Did it occur to your advertising geniuses that maybe our disgust would make us less likely to buy those products?

Not that this kind of stuff is new. One of my favorite films from the early eighties, Blade Runner, has some equally glaring product-placement. There’s Coke advertisements all over the dystopian future. Except Ridley Scott had the good taste not to insult us: in Blade Runner, those ads are just another garish, weird feature of the ugly urban landscape. Even in the future, this shit will haunt us.

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Speaking of deep contemplation of ancient history, I challenge you and the rest of the Internets to provide a shorter and/or more diffult tongue-twister in American English than my proud invention:

BLUE GLUE GUN GLUE

It’s easier when you read it on the page, but just try to say it a few times.

If that was too hard, try:

POP-UP TURLOCK TURKEY TIMER

I took the train out to Salisbury on Saturday and saw Stonehenge. Sometimes the world surprises you by being more magical than you gave it credit for, but this was not such an instance.

Salisbury is a stark place, only ground and sky, completely shorn clean of any trees or rocks or even the barest susurrations in the surface of the earth. It’s one of those places where you stand in the center of a yawning chasm, empty blue of impossible vastness above you and a flat, aspectless plain beneath you. You are a dot in the middle of nothing.

The Iron Age unknowns who created Stonehenge plainly understood the elemental quality of the magic of Salisbury, and their monuments speak the same simple language. Besides Stonehenge there are some four hundred-odd barrows in the area, grassy burial mounds for dead kings or shamans that have somehow endured over thousands of years. They speak quite clearly, “Here lie the dead,” and let that weighty fact lend all the aura and majesty that is required to the monuments, probably better than any mausoleum covered with ghoulish iconography could.

Similarly Stonehenge itself. In its long history the site served an unknown purpose (I do not believe it was merely a calendar), but whatever the meaning of the mysterious syllable it sounds, it is plainly intended to be clear and resonant.

None of this is what you find when you reach it. Whatever eldritch energy the Salisbury plain has is clipped into fragments by the highway that trisects it, and whatever bottomless note Stonehenge may be singing is drowned out by the steady stream of cars zipping past it and the chatter of tourists and camera shutters that surrounds it.

Stonehenge is a UNESCO World Heritage site, but I’m uncertain what “heritage” it attempts to preserve. There are rope barriers laid out to keep you from walking amongst the stones, to prevent idiots from chipping off pieces of the stones, as if they could thereby carry a piece of Stonehenge home with them. But the site is cheapened by turning it into a spectacle, a mere thing to gawk at. It might as well be a bunch of stones, or some carnival curio. “Come see the World’s Largest Spinning Dynamo! One of A Kind! Tonite Only!”

There’s some effort in a positive direction; there are proposals for restoration projects to put the nearby roads underground so the site is unblemished by their proximity (although these were recently defunded by the British government). But I think far more damaging than the proximity of the roads is the attitudes of those who come to visit it, which is not one of pilgrimage at all.

Plainly this was an important site for whoever built it so many years ago. And thus it should be important to us, if, by attempting to understand its significance to those who lived so many years ago when our race was young, we can glean some greater understanding of ourselves. History has wisdom in it, and we should read it. But if we don’t know how we should read it, what exactly are we remembering?

Daily news! The U.S. Congress just did something goofy. They got rid of much-ridiculed earmarks for a couple bridges in Alaska, ostensibly saving taxpayers $432 million. But they still gave the money to Alaska, to spend as the state likes. So not only do the taxpayers still get the shaft, but so could the environment.

Have these people ever looked at the Alaska Dept of Transportation’s priority list? Probably not. That’s why they have furry creatures like me. Take a look at the Southeast Alaska Transportation Plan, with its $250 million road across Baranof Island. (Note to Alaska: This cost estimate for a 25-mile road through endangered ptarmigan habitat is very, very lowball.) It would connect Sitka with the Inner Passage, saving some ferries and ferry passengers a few hours on the water. In return, passengers would traverse 4,000-foot rockfields and glaciated peaks well above the tundra — in cars — to get to 9,000-population Sitka, which is currently one of the more car-free places to live in North America.

But that’s just part of its wonderful vision of killing ferries:

In southern Southeast, the construction of new highways would establish a through connection from Ketchikan to the Cassiar Highway in Canada. This new route would also include connections to Wrangell and Petersburg. Initially these highway routes would require several shuttle ferry links, which ultimately could be replaced with bridges. With these links in place, travel between these communities and trips into Canada, would no longer require a lengthy ferry trip.

That’s all business as usual in Alaska, where transportation policy can be summed up as “we’ve got oil, we should use it.” The state where they wisely created a water-ferry system and a scrappy bunch of bush pilots rather than over-engineered Interstates and jet airports now wants to join the rest of the USA in our oil-profligacy by building jet airports and highways throughout the vast, 600,000-population domain. Jeez, just build the bridge to nowhere already.

Bye! I’m off to the other side of the pond for a merry jaunt, wot wot! While I’m there I’ll be sure to smoke a kipper and throw a shrimp on the barbie. Wait… is that somewhere else? Um.

Anyway, while fretting about plane travel, I looked up mortality statistics at the National Safety Council. Turns out that almost no one dies in plane accidents. However, more than 10% of externally-caused deaths are people shooting themselves. Suicide overall is almost 18%. Holy cow! That’s one sad country.

Charismatic megafauna ate my food stamps. And my student loan, my utility regulations, and my Medicaid. Did I mention my child support payments?

The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is home to an important caribou herd. There is no excuse for disrupting its existence — and the existence of the Gwichi’in Indians who eat the animals — for the sake of a few barrels of crude. There is also no excuse for the liberal establishment to protect ANWR at all costs, even if that means sacrificing other possibly bigger principles.

I recently spoke with the global warming campaigner for one of the biggest environmental groups in the country. I asked her why I hadn’t heard a peep out of her group when Congress was about to approve the dreadful energy bill in August. She said she didn’t know. I asked why I had received mailings and press releases trying to get ANWR drilling out of the bill. Was that the group’s only priority, I asked. She agreed that they had spent far more time on ANWR than on anything else. As a result, this bill will markedly increase global warming, which will probably do more to wipe out the caribou than an oil drilling operation.

But hey, they “protected” the charismatic megafauna.

In general, if you see the Republicans putting ANWR oil drilling into a bill, you can go to the bank knowing that the bill contains many far more heinous provisions. And you can count on the Democrats to use all their political capital and parliamentary tricks to kill ANWR drilling while simultaneously sacrificing all the other policies.

The Repubs last week dropped ANWR drilling from a spiteful, mean-hearted budget-cutting measure. They left behind the cuts to “Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and child support enforcement,” according to the Anchorage Daily News. The entire “budget-cutting” measure would have saved less money (about $10 billion a year) than the Repubs plan to spend by permanently repealing the I-guess-I-should-have-given-away-the-money-before-I-died Tax (more often called the Estate Tax).

The good news is that the Must-Drink-More-Oil wing of the Republican Party was so pissed at the loss of the ANWR drilling that they killed the rest of the bill. So I guess sometimes stopping ANWR drilling can have a bigger effect, especially when Karl Rove is in the doghouse.

White House says:
No Evidence Bush Lied About Iraq
Bush Administration officials denied earlier today that pre-war intelligence was manipulated or that Congress did not receive the complete picture. Speaking from his position knee-deep in a BFI dumpster behind the White House, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters, “Look, guys, if that were true, we would have been lying, right? And if we were lying then, then we’d be lying about lying now. Which would be a double negative. And as we all know, that’s just not possible in English. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve, uh… lost… my… wedding ring… in here somewhere.”

Vice President Dick Cheney, cornered en route to his home with two large, rustling garbage bags full of “table scraps” for his “new alpaca, Cecil”, further commented, “Some of these Democrats who are kicking up a fuss were the same ones who voted for the war. If we knew then what they know now, then we should have been against the war. But we weren’t.” More questions proved impossible as reporters were terror-stricken by Mr. Cheney’s determined grimacing.

I hope I’m not the only one to worry upon seeing that this guy is advising the Jordanian government on counterterrorism. Wasn’t he the first of Bush’s crony-nominees to get the axe? Sadly yes. He’s the one who botched the training of Iraqi police and used his 9/11 budget bump to set up a bedroom for booty bumps. And now… the NY Times says:

“This is going to lead to a lot of good intel,” said Bernard B. Kerik, former New York City police commissioner, who has been advising the Jordanian government on security issues. The bombing was “a demonstration that this is not about Zarqawi’s hatred of America but about his hatred for his own people,” Mr. Kerik said of the Jordanian-born militant.

And in other news, I wonder what the arrest of an embittered Iraqi woman will do to those who knee-jerkedly blamed Israel for the Jordan bombings. If only enmities were so simple.

The San Jose Mercury News makes me say “whoa”:
Over the next decade, our gadget fetish — when combined with microwaves, coffee makers and the like — will require more power than we use to heat or cool our homes….

The nation’s 266 million TV sets already consume about 4 percent of all residential energy. That’s enough to power all the homes in New York state for a year, according to a National Resources Defense Council study.

At this rate, there will be more televisions in the United States than people in the next five years. TV energy consumption will increase by more than 50 percent, as people replace their old sets with high-definition, home theater-size screens.

Plasma displays are particularly porcine, snarfing two to three times as much energy as other types of TV screens.