An Interview With Stanley Crouch

http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_25int2.html

Knowing One's Rights as a Shareholder

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/050201.asp

Revamped Sunday Star-Bulletin Comics Page

http://starbulletin.com/2007/04/22/features/story01.html

Blacksburg

The town of Blacksburg, Virginia, site of the bloodiest school massacre in American history, was a few days before named by Money magazine as one of the best places to retire young. Found here. One blog comment: Blacksburg, Virginia–Never heard of it

New Comics in Honolulu Star-Bulletin

http://starbulletin.com/2007/04/15/features/story09.html

When you read tomorrow's comics section, you'll notice some changes.

Webmaster's Note: The comics appear in the print edition of the Star-Bulletin only.

This is Step 1 of the revamping of our comics selection -- Step 2 happens next Sunday with a new lineup of strips in a new format (more on that later).

Weekdays, Zack Hill, La Cucaracha, and Preteena have been voted off the island [as a result of this solicitation--P.Z.], replaced by:

Housebroken: Steve Watkins tells the story of DJ Dog, a self-described "Ghetto Snoopy" and his adventures with two African-American siblings -- Mya Watson, 9-year-old multimillionaire businesswoman, and Malik, her free-spirited brother who masquerades as the costumed crime fighter "Blackman," fighting racial injustice (real or imagined).

State of the Union: Creator Carl Moore calls himself a "fallen liberal," and his caricature-driven satirical strip definitely has a conservative slant. But he says he's really a libertarian who only calls himself a conservative because "not enough people know what a libertarian is." ...

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!: Satire takes on a more sci-fi flavor at the hands of Tim Rickard, who describes his strip as "a parody both of old serial comic strips such as 'Flash Gordon' and 1950s B-level sci-fi movies. 'Brewster's' reach also extends to skewer other genres such as superhero, fantasy, monster and horror. Even real science and current events aren't safe." His setting is the space station R.U. Sirius.

Enjoy. We'll talk again next week when we debut an exciting new Sunday comics section.

30 April update: Back when Zack, Cucaracha, and Preteena were fresh.

Start Your Week Off Right

Kunstler usually has his weekly column posted on Sundays, despite the claim that it's published Monday mornings. This week, he takes on Thomas Friedman and his sanguine take on "The Power of Green."

Tom Friedman has no idea what the implications are of all these things. His fatuous advice to the nation -- served up by a confused and cowardly Times editorial staff -- will only spur more delusional thinking, which is, of course, the last thing we need. The showcasing of Friedman's article may represent an inflection point in the fate of the mainstream media -- the moment when it demonstrates most clearly its failure to make current events comprehensible, the moment when its lost legitimacy is finally recognized. That legitimacy has been passing to the Internet, where commentators have no advertisers to pander to and no need to defend any status quo.

UPDATE, 20 April: Harvey Wasserman, author of SOLARTOPIA!: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, takes Friedman to task in CounterPunch for suggesting that "clean" coal and nuclear power be considered green.

UPDATE, 22 April: Friedman's documentary, Green: The New Red, White, and Blue premiered Saturday on the Discovery Channel. (Here)

R.I.P., Don Ho

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2007/Apr/14/br/br4376190825.html

22 May update: As The Sopranos comes to an end, I wondered if there are any connections between the show and Hawaii. I recall a scene from one of the later seasons in which a newlywed couple was on their way to a honeymoon in Hawaii and a character calls out, "Say hi to Don Ho!" (I'll try to find more on this later.) This is an article on Dominic Chianese and his visit to Honolulu in 2004, where he showed up at Don Ho's Waikiki show.

Photo Caption: He may not be a soprano but HBO's "Sopranos" star Dominic Chianese did get a chance to show his musical side when he showed up at Don Ho's show.

More Lookalikes

I was watching Olbermann today. He interviewed Bob Herbert by telephone about Dun Miso* and I just realized how much Herbert resembles Michael Berryman. I mean no disrespect to either man, but the similarity of their faces, especially about the eyes, is amazing.

--------

*An anagram for a grizzled old coot fond of wearing cowboy hats indoors.

The Coombsweb

http://coombs.anu.edu.au/

Johnny Hart, Creator of "B.C." Comic, Is Dead

Josh Fruhlinger, of ComicsCurmudgeon, was one of Hart's more vociferous critics, but he writes:

"I’m not going to write anything mean about him today. Instead, I’ll just note that the dude died at his drawing board. That’s hardcore."

Both B.C. and The Wizard of ID will continue, according to this:

"Richard Newcombe, the founder and president of Creators Syndicate, which syndicates both BC and The Wizard of Id, said both cartoons would continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of drawings to work with, he told AP."

Hart was a devout Christian. This article from 1996 is about his faith.

17 April update: Brant Parker, with whom Hart collaborated on The Wizard of ID, has also died.

Update to List of Links

I've just added CounterCurrents.org to the list of political links. Based in India, it's a webzine much like CounterPunch. I found it yesterday while searching for writings by Thomas C. Mountain. I'll also add links to the names and titles listed in the Cockburn post.

Alexander Cockburn on C-SPAN2's BookTV

http://www.booktv.org/General/index.asp?segID=7879&schedID=482&category=In+Depth

Update (April 4, 2:58 p.m.): A brief segment (1:08:55-1:16:35) in the middle of the program features Cockburn at his place in Petrolia. Towards the end (beginning 1:15:17) were three lists:

People Who Have Inspired Alexander Cockburn

His father, Claud Cockburn
His mother, Patricia Cockburn
His friends at New Left Review
His friend, Andrew Kopkind
His friend, Pierre Sprey
The Abraham Lincoln Brigades
Patrice Lumumba
Frantz Fanon

Some of Alexander Cockburn's Favorite Writers

Marcel Proust
Stendhal
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
Thomas Love Peacock
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce
Flann O'Brien
Theodor Adorno
H.J. Massingham
Edward Abbey
Ezra Pound
Jean-Paul Sartre
P.G. Wodehouse

Alexander Cockburn is Currently Reading

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Control*
Douglas Peacock, Walking It Off
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear
David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified*
E.C.S. and Elizabeth Handy, Native Planters of Hawaii*
Joan Halperin, Felix Feneon
K.T. Achaya, Historical Dictionary of Indian Food
Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead*
--
*As identified on C-SPAN2. The author's first name is spelled Sigfried and the book's title is actually Mechanization Takes Command (all emphases mine)

*As identified on C-SPAN2. The book's title is actually Native Planters in Old Hawaii: Their Life, Lore, and Environment. The C and S in E.C.S. were transposed. The author's initials are actually E.S.C. (short for Edward Smith Craighill). An index to Native Planters was compiled in 1987.

*The Amazon.com results list for David Arora includes an item for a work (Treatment Options for Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Other Contaminants in Recycled Backwash Water [American Water Works Association, 2001]) co-edited by one Harish Arora. I wonder if David and Harish Arora are related.

*The original meaning of "the quick and the dead" is explained here.

GOP Hawaii Blog Returns

After an eight-month hiatus, GOP Hawaii ("The unofficial blogspot of the Hawaii County Republican Party.") returned March 30 with a blast at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the earmarks approved in order to secure 218 votes for H.R. 1591. The writer reminds people that:

In 2008 we need to support the conservative agenda and that means supporting either Rudy Guilani, Mit Romney, Newt Gingrich (if he runs) and possibly, Fred Thompson (again, if he runs). NOT JOHN McCAIN. This guy cannot be trusted. He is the GOP / MALE version of Hillary Clinton.

Kunstler Reports on His Visit to Maui

After reading The Long Emergency and many of the posts on Kunstler.com, I've wondered what Kunstler thinks of Hawaii and its fate after oil production diminishes. This post answers my questions in part.

March 26, 2007 Zowie

For all of you out there disposed to twang on me for riding a jet airplane all the way to Maui, please consider that United flight 35 would have flown from San Francisco to Maui with or without me on it. Here's the deal: I had to go to San Fran to give a talk at the Commonwealth Club. From there, I had a lecture gig on Maui. I stayed three extra days and nights -- since I'd come all that way. So, sue me. Now, to the business at hand, which is my impressions of Maui. Beautiful as much of it may be, it is hard not to view it through a tragic lens. Most of the damage on Maui has been inflicted over the past 30-odd years -- that is, since the Pepsi Generation got their mitts on the island. Certainly, there were massive prior insults, starting with the first landings of the Haole (foreigners, in particular caucasians) in the late 18th century, the introduction of cattle, eucalyptus trees, the mongoose, the monoculture of sugar cane, and other intrusions that upset the island's ecology. But the boomer-hippies really iced it. Those who managed to stop smoking marijuana long enough to string two consecutive thoughts together grokked the related notions of tropical paradise and land development with predictable results. That is, they turned the place into just an annex of California. The flatlands were allowed to develop along the lines of Fresno or Lodi, while the uplands became Pacific Palisades Lite. The longest stretch of the best beaches in the place with the least rainfall was converted into a strip of jive-plastic supersized resort hotels. The automobile was given first dibs in all civic design matters. The island's beauty has not been entirely defeated, but the usual complaints are heard for the usual reasons -- mainly, that the overwhelming majority of buildings, both residential and commercial (including the big hotels), are graceless industrial sheds, deployed artlessly on over-engineered streets, which has conditioned the public to believe that all man-made things are worthless pieces of shit. This in turn conditions the public to believe that nothing man-made can be ultimately beneficial, which makes it impossible for us to imagine coexistence with the rest of nature, and so on into the usual swamps of suburban dialectic. The terrain, of course, has largely determined the situation with the car. Maui is mostly composed of two rugged mountains, and cars have made it possible for people other than farmers to settle the slopes. Without motor vehicles, a person living up in Makawao, maybe two or three thousand feet above sea level, would be lucky to get down to the main trading town once a month, let alone to a job every day. But work-a-day Maui operates just like work-a-day California, and all the associated norms of behavior are in place. You drive everywhere for everything. As far as I could tell, even the educated locals out in Maui today are consumed with the same trivialities about traffic and "density" that you'd hear back in any mainland town. They are not thinking beyond the usual NIMBY issues. But it seems perfectly obvious that Maui life will change drastically in a future of oil-and-gas scarcity. The commercial airlines are the "canaries in the coal mine" of advanced industrial civilization, and they are very sick canaries right now -- even with the price of oil relatively stable the past six months. The airlines have pared down their employee ranks about as far as possible. The scene at the Maui airport this Sunday was a clusterfuck -- largely due to the fact that United Airlines had only one person manning the ticket counter, and 98 percent of the visitors have to check through luggage. A couple more rounds of oil price spikes and the airlines are going to be lying tits up with glazed eyes. Perhaps aviation will then reorganize itself on a smaller scale serving only the elite, for a while, anyway. In any case, that will be the end of the mass middle class consumer phase of commercial aviation -- and also of mass middle class type tourism. [Cf. Paul Fussell: "The touristic class is predominantly the middle, the one that has made Hawaii, as Roger Price unkindly designates it, 'Roob Valhalla.'" (p. 109, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, New York, 1983, Rpt. 1992)--P.Z.] Few people on Maui I spoke to were mentally prepared for the implications of this. But it's perfectly obvious that the Hawaiian Islands will become much more isolated again, and that the way of life that has developed there since 1970 will have to change drastically. I'm glad I went. I don't know if I'll ever go back. Beautiful as it was, I got tired of being in the car all the time and there was really no place to walk.

Comfort Food, Various Links to Purveyors of

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-03-22-comfort-food_N.htm?csp=34

http://www.smacnyc.com/

http://www.wichcraftnyc.com

Miami Rice Pudding

Rice to Riches

http://www.cereality.com http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2004-12-08-cereal_x.htm

http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/dessertonly_restaurants/

http://www.nyr4d.com/

http://www.chikalicious.com/

http://www.epicurious.com/gourmet/blogs/foodeditors/2006/12/dessert_bars_ia.html#more

West Egg Cafe
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Lickity Split Chocolate

Happy Birthday, Paul Fussell!

Paul Fussell, critic and historian, turns 83 today.

Why Newspapers Won't Go Out of Style

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/10/keillor/index.html

I Hear Voices

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

LibraryHistoryBuff.org

I found this site while searching online for a card catalog, namely the cabinet that holds the cards. It looks interesting.

Lawns to Gardens

I'm adding to the list of links lawnstogardens.com, which I found through Kunstler. It's a peak-oil website, but addresses many other topics as well.

Ted Steinberg's book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (Norton, 2006) is out in paperback next month. I've been meaning to get a copy but kept forgetting about it. The best (i.e., most eco-friendly) way to keep a lawn trim is to let animals (e.g., goats, deer) eat the grass. Close behind are regular mowings with a push-mower. The Brill Luxus is a nice example.

I'll be discussing lawns more soon.