41 Hours in the Gaping Maw of WalMart

Woe is us. A few weeks ago Skyler Bartels had an idea. The Des Moins, Iowa college student decided he would inspire himself as a writer by spending a week in the bowels of a 24x7 Wal-Mart. Fitted out with only with a debit card and a toothbrush, Bartels was consumed by Wal-Mart for a mere 41 hours before he was spit back out for a second chance at life. This story is remarkable precisely because it is not a story at all, though it has been replicated in hundreds of news outlets around the globe. Even Bartels remarked that he thought the exercise was a failure until he spoke to the Des Moines Register. And then the networks began to call. As did National Public Radio. And a book agent. And a film company.

So was the Wal-Mart experiment a success? Can Bartels take his rightful place within the celebrity pantheon because during March Break he spent 41 hours in a store, watched Chicken Run and took a nap in the garden center? Or was it a failure because it was inane, pointless and boring? Or will it be considered a success if it engenders a book or a movie or an interview with Oprah?

If Bartels' stunt can be compared to placing a canary in a coal mine, it appears that he survived this 41-hour ordeal quite nicely. However, the fact that such an an experiment was even attempted is proof that something vital in us has failed and may already be dying. Or dead.

So woe is us. And woe is U.S.

Truthiness and Fairlessness

Since Stephen Colbert inspired us to think about the meaning of "truthiness", I wanted to be the first to introduce the word "fairlessness". You never know when a word like this may come in handy, but what does it mean? In order to be fairless, one must be fearless about being less than fair. In other words, if you would be fairless, you must blatantly call for, or enact, unfair laws, principles and polices in the name of fairness. Fairlessness abounds in our world, and when ever someone begins a sentence with "We all have to make sacifices..." or "In order to create a level playing field...", you know that you will soon be up to your knees in fairlessness. At least now you have a name for it.

Fairless, adj: describing the quality of being fearless about being less than fair.

Is there a little Dowie in W?

President may be related to 19th century Evangelist

Mar 25, 2006, PenOpticon News - The White House refused to confirm or deny rumors that President George W. Bush is descended from John Alexander Dowie, the controversial evangelist who stormed America with Biblical force in the latter years of the 19th century. According to Dr. Russell Newcome, Dowie was the great uncle of George Herbert Walker Bush. "Dowie founded the town of Zion, Illinois in 1901 and employed Biblical principles to perform thousands of miracles in Chicago", Newcome told the PenOpticon. "He set up numerous Healing Homes in that city during the 1893 World's Fair and is said to have even cured Buffalo Bill Cody's niece. By the end of the Fair, there were sightings of Angels flying over Chicago and Dowie began to appear in public as the prophet Elijah." Though Dowie's ideas were radical, they may have paved the way for Bush's faith-based agenda. [Full story at satire.penopticon.com]

Look who's tending bar!

This "vision" came to me in a dream last night, so I decided I just had to oust the night demons by making this montage. You would have to open the full-size version to decode all of the faces, but here is the basic idea: Tony Blair has been mounted on the wall in a permanent grimace and stares at W, wondering what will happen next. My Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) grins sheepishly at his idol. Like a deer caught in the headlights, our big-headed barkeep stares at deadeye Dick. Guess what Dick is thinking about? God I hope I hope I hope I hope none of this is true.

Sunday evening anger

So Tony Blair is trying to convince himself that he did the right thing by toadying up to George Bush and committing British troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. As reported in CNN:

"If we want to secure our way of life, there is no alternative but to fight for it," he told a joint sitting of the Australian parliament in Canberra on Monday.

Well Tony, "our way of life" seems to be different all over the world. In Afghanistan, mainstream clerics and citizens want to execute a Muslim because he converted to Christianity. George is "troubled" by this. Condi calls President Karzai to explain the unacceptablilty of the situation. In that same country, village elders smiled and chatted with Canadian soldiers and then dispersed instantly (and knowingly?), when a young rebel ran out and slammed an axe into a Canadian soldier's head. And yet:

...in the struggle to defend global values, Blair said there was no prosperity without security, and no security without justice. He said a global alliance should be pushing to defend universal values wherever they were under threat.

Here's the thing. There are no universal values of justice. We can't even enact and apply laws equally and justly within our own countries. Don't pretend that bringing democracy to Iraq or Afghanistan or any other country is an altruistic gift that has no political or economic -- or cultural -- strings attached. Don't pretend that you are not filled with blind arrogance and a firm belief that your values, laws, god and way of life are superior to those of the countries you invade.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that any country that tries to run itself according to the laws of a medieval (or older) religion is a ridiculous enterprise that, when left to itself, will only lead to bloodshed and failure. But such countries should be permited to work out their problems without our "help". Unfortunately, when European and North American interests interfere, the misery of these failing states is usually prolonged. The only way to help is for the keepers of these "universal values" to stop selling arms and chemicals.

George and Tony: if you insist on spreading universal values, call it for what it is: an attempt to forcfully stamp Judeo-Christian-Capitalist values on every other culture on the planet. After all, the New York Times reports that Bush "was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons" according to a confidential memo written by David Manning, Blair's top foreign policy adviser.

Will Iran be the next country to bend over to be freedomized by George and Tony?

A step closer to a cure for T1 Diabetes

Three cheers to Denise Faustman, the innovative Diabetes researcher who has found a way to halt the autoimmune process that destroys pancreatic islet cells in Type I diabetics. So far, her work has focused on diabetic mice, but because her approach involves modulating the immune system, there is good chance it may also work in humans. She has succeeded in reversing diabetes in mice by injecting them with Freund's Complete Adjuvant (FCA), a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead bacteria. Apparently this compound stimulates T cells that attack the pancreas and causes those T cells to self-destruct. Faustman's research also involved transplanting spleen cells into the mice and she found that these cells differentiated into islet cells, allowing the treated mice to produce their own insulin. The big news this week is that three other labratories have now independently validated the first procedure -- the abatement of autoimmune islet destruction. While these labs did not confirm that spleen cells had any effect on producing new islet cells, they did discover that a significant number of tested mice regenerated their own islet cells after the destructive T cells were eliminated. In other words, by teaching the immune system to stop attacking islet cells, these researchers found that many diabetic mice were able to self-repair islet function and produce their own insulin.

This is absolutely fabulous news. A cure for diabetes would make millions of people happy and would free up billions of dollars that could be spent to tackle other diseases and global issues. It just might create an avalanche of good! With significant help from the Iacocca Foundation, Faustman is gearing up for human trials of this treatment. If you would like to help out, please donate a few dollars to help fund Faustman's work at the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Unit.

It's important to realize that despite the promise shown in Faustman's work, her efforts have garnered no interest or money from large pharmaceutical companies or from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Some have accused the JDRF of refusing funding due to a political bias that favours stem cell research. If that is the case, Faustman's work will rely even more on individual donations if it is to continue.

Have you Weboggled?

I’ve never been a big fan of computer games. Perhaps it’s because my brother and I were teenagers when the first TV “Pong” game came on the market. We had one, and for a few months we played against each other and against “the box” for hours every day. The games were limiting, but they did help us channel a bad case of sibbling rivalry into a safe, bruise-free virtual space. In any case, once you've experienced the monochromatic excitement of a 5-hour Pong marathon, modern 3D games with their billions of polygons and complex shaders just don't hold much interest. Or maybe it's just that I truly suck at 'em. In any case, the video game era has left me in the dust.

And then there was Weboggle.

It's a great web adaptation of Boggle. It's simple and elegantly done. It's fun and it's free. But the competition is fierce. You can take everyone on or you can play in teams. If you love words, you should PLAY THIS GAME.

Pick a handle and attach it to a sharp pointy idea

There is nothing deep about playing Weboggle, but a while back I was musing over the game handles players were choosing. The freedom to adopt any handle allows WebBoggle users to assert a kind of agency, to link themselves with a political movement, a trend, an emotion or just about anything. The screen on the left is fairly typical: players include “Bush War Devil”, “Kerry is Satan”, “AWOL Bush”, “Go SOX Go Kerry”, etc. Some players log in with web site addresses (hoping other users will visit their URLs). Others use self-disparaging (or aggrandizing) names. Nothing new here -- the web has always been about alter egos and virtual (risk free) grandstanding. For me the interesting aspect of using these handles is in linking the player’s message with their skill level. A pro-Bush player who wins consistently seems to mean more than a similar name that languishes in the bottom half of the score box. I don’t really believe this, but it “feels” like it is true. In Colbertian terms, there seems to be a quality of truthiness in Weboggle handles. I could add that it seems as if anti-Bush players seem land in the top five positions more frequently. But this could be my own subjective bias -- I am blinded by the truthiness. Perhaps all of this says something about the culture of winning that permeates our world and what it does done to our language. We compress complex sets of ideas into “platforms”, talking points, sound bites, slogans and even single words: flip-flop, AWOL, global test, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can be worth a million votes. Or so it would seem. On the other hand, looking for meaning in Weboggle scores is probably at least as silly the thought that exercising one’s “agency” by playing Weboggle could ever be a meaningful political act.

I needed a small (Canadian) chuckle so...

Ok, it's a very small chuckle. Rick Mercer of The Mercer Report fame recently challenged anyone with too much time on their hands to create an image that takes Canada's Prime Minister out of one strange context and insert him in another.

On the left we have the original: Prime Minister Harper poses in Zombie-like fashion with what appears to be either a tin of Plutonium or a lovely cheesecake. It wanted a bit of symbolism, so I placed Harper, a staunch westerner, on a rusty tractor so he could take David Emmerson's head to market. Not to be confused with Ralph Waldo, this Emmerson is a former Liberal M.P. who crossed the floor to join Harper's cabinet about 25 seconds after being re-elected. In Canada, some politicians are bought and sold like bushels of wheat. U.S. congress members are a little more expensive, I'm told. This is old news, of course, but it can be legitimately be repeated over and over out of respect for Emerson's constuents who were kicked in their political pearly whites by his defection.

If I was really trying to be fair (ha!), I would have completed the picture by placing Belinda Stronach in front of the tractor. Harper would be unlikely to brake for a Convervative member who defected to the Liberals and quite a few boomer Tories living in Newmarket, Ontario would be cheering him on.

On the otherhand, at least Belinda had the grace to defect before any votes were actually cast -- and she was still elected.

Spring! Sproing! Sprung!

Another gawdawful February has finally run its course -- though this Feb was more like a typical southern Ontario Jan and Jan was more like a Mar or an Apr. Clearly someone is mixing up the months. Could it be us? In any case, if you live in a northern climate then I hope this Chestnut-sided warbler gives you some hope for the coming spring. Two years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time around Pt Pelee, Ontario during spring migration. On the day this was taken, two large groups of birders were standing on either side of me, straining to see a fairly rare Golden Wing warbler. They couldn't understand what I was looking at because I was very close to the Golden Wing and not looking at it. My view of that bird was blocked, but this little guy decided to pose on a branch just a few feet from from me. Bayootifool plumage, wot? Just goes to prove again that the most beautiful things imaginable are often closer to us than we think and that learning how to see is as difficult as it is important. I keep relearning this lesson every time we tramp around the edges of forests, wetlands and lakes looking for birds. Annie Dillard points out in her essay, Seeing: "My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I'm bony and dense; I see what I expect". Bony and dense. She can say that again.