How I Spent My Christm Holiday Break
Well, boy. As you may have noticed I took about a week off from this site, left my troubles behind, flew off to the Alaskan Wilderness for my annual thinking/relaxing/mountain surveying retreat. As it happened, though, I spent most of my time watching TV, drop-jawed at the horror coming in over the screen.
Still, a few fun times were to be had. To wit: For Christmas an old, round-heeled lady friend of mine surprised me with something I'd put on my Amazon wishlist only as a gag, thinking it'd be a cold day in you-know-where if anyone bought me that. But she did: An iPod Mini! I spent much of the week, then, bleeding my ears with some of my favorites -- the audio version of James McPherson's great book on Antietam, The White Stripes over and over and over again, and after watching the droll "Napoleon Dynamite" I hooked on to this great instrumental group The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, who, really, I can't recommend enough.
The reading life was not as well nurtured, but I did squeeze in a couple tomes. One I'm almost embarrassed to admit, but this blog's about truth, so here we are: "State of Fear," Michael Crichton's anti-environmental screed. I have to say, as much as I hate the man's views and his thin characters and predictable plotlines, he sure does know how to keep a fella intrigued. I don't know what it is -- it's the kind of book you can't put down, partly because you're angry, partly because you can't bear not to find out what happens in the end. And also, too, Crichton's anti-global warming evidence is ... interesting. I'm not saying I believe him. But it's well-documented, well-annotated, and were I a climate scientist I'd be rushing to the public square right this second to disprove him.... Anyone? Anyone?
Lastly, then, I reread "On Photography," Susan Sontag's masterwork on the visual life. We lost great one this week. RIP, old girl. RIP.
3 Comments:
Can you enable XML syndication for this blog? I'd like to read it, but if it doesn't have syndication, then my RSS reader won't be able to access it.
Dennis, I agree with you regarding global warming. The thinking around it is still soft. I agree that there are a lot of 'data points' that could be construed as compelling, but the skeptic in me thinks that environmentalists still have a long way to go in firmly establishing the link.
I'm one of those voters who isn't Republican, but can't stand the Democrats as they're exceedingly ineffectual. The Global Warming 'threat' just seems to me to be an area where they're barking up a tenuous tree - at best.
On Michael Crichton: you should check out http://realclimate.org/
it directly addresses Chrichton, and has a good discussion of related climate change information and misinformation from a scientific viewpoint.
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