Nearly Drowning in Outer Space

 Check out this harrowing account from astronaut Luca Parmitano about an unusual and nearly deadly accident - water filling up his space helmet while outside the International Space Station.

Read the entire account here, which details the event and reveals his steady and calm resolve to reach safety. An excerpt:

"The water has also almost completely covered the front of my visor, sticking to it and obscuring my vision. I realise that to get over one of the antennae on my route I will have to move my body into a vertical position, also in order for my safety cable to rewind normally. At that moment, as I turn ‘upside-down’, two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head. By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid."

James Franco Takes on Cormac, Faulkner, and Art Itself

Cormac McCarthy's novels have found new life in movies, and his early novel "Child of God" is about to hit the festival circuit in the movie version written and directed by James Franco.

The book was my introduction to McCarthy, a spare and grim tale of Lester Ballard, a Sevier County man who slips away from civilization and into a cave, from outcast to killer. It's a powerful book, and truthfully for many years I've thought it would make a stunning movie.

And Franco's version emerges alongside his movie of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", an equally challenging Southern story of a family's attempt to transport the body of their mother to a distant cemetery.

Neither film is likely to hit box office gold. So what is Franco after?

In the past few days, Franco has used the Internet to promote a new TV series called "James Franco Presents", launching photos of himself as Mona Lisa and Van Gogh.

He writes of the series "... it's about Art. Duh".

He's also in production of a movie about the gnarly life of poet Charles Bukowski.

So, entertainment for English majors and Art majors? Perhaps. With fantasy, comic books and 3D franchises all the rage in Hollywood, he's carving out a unique path of literary oddities.

I say thank goodness someone is.

I Read Books

I read books. 

I mean the printed-on-paper kind, the original hand held technology. If you read them too, consider how you react when you see a person out in public with a book - do you try and see what it is? Do you assess who or what they might be based on the title, feel a kinship if it is a book you know and like? What if the person was reading from a wee plasticized screen?

Despite the worries and prophecies of some who claim print media is no more and that reading a book is akin to wheeling about town in a cabriolet or phaeton while perusing Sumerian cuneiform figures on a clay tablet, I read books.

(As a corollary, it seems worth noting that writing on a clay tablet preserves information for thousands of years while digitized discs and drives last perhaps 10 years.)

The often insightful Seth Godin wrote recently on the demise of the book, noting:

"The beloved shelf (or wall) of books is less well-thumbed and less respected than it was. We’re less likely to judge someone on their ownership and knowledge of books than at any time in the last five hundred years. And that shelf created juxtapositions and possibilities and prompted you when you needed prompting. Ten generations ago, only the rich and the learned owned books. Today, they're free at the local recycling table."

Countless times in years past I visited homes with rooms whose walls were lined with books, with chairs and lamps and the tsunami of comfort I felt was inescapable. The room was a way station in Time itself, where clocks did not matter, where histories were stored, where I could stay and learn as long as I wished. (Often such rooms were called a "study".)

A friend who teaches high school recently told of the frustration and confusion her students experienced as she required them to use a library's card catalog to seek information. (I should note too that another friend, a voracious reader of printed and digital books, who pointed me to Seth's comments, received a hard bound book from me of a novel which he is free to keep or share with others.)

I know that if, at the age of 12, I was given a marvel of technology like a hand held mobile Internet device, I would have glommed onto it with a fervor beyond description. Yet I also know that I experienced, concurrent with my infinite curiosity for information, a very physical searching was required to discover books and essays and information, a time-consuming task which contained lessons unwritten, valuable lessons.

I am certain that the ease of discovery and access to information is likely greater today than ever, which I find most encouraging. Still, as with most every experience, the more arduous the task, the more I glean from the experience.

That is a truth which cannot be imitated. 

Happy Blog Birthday to Me

This month marks the start of Year Eight for this humble and lovable blog.

Blogs are not the hip thing they once were, and mine is wordy, sporadic, a jumbled landscape of politics, news, art, oddities, ruminations, activist and slacktivist, non-affiliated, witty and weird and yet - still pushing into the Web like an unfettered relative at a dubious family reunion.

You can explore the naive first week or so of this Cup of Joe here.

I invite you to continue to return in future too - there's no end in sight.

Wine-Dark Sea: Homer, Physics and Metaphor

Certainty, accuracy, nailing down meaning and fact - we might understand the concept of such an idea, but achieving such may well be an impossibility.

This train of thought was launched by an Internet discussion I found today via MetaFilter, as folks wondered just what the heck Homer meant by the phrase in The Iliad "wine-dark sea".

I confess that as a reader, the meaning of the phrase wasn't literal but figurative - the poet evoked a mood, a feeling with the phrase. Little did I know scholars debated the phrase, with questions like "were the Greeks color blind? The sea is blue not red!"

But debate rages. Can we distill fact from fiction? Is metaphor reality?

In truth, the story of The Iliad was shared by speech and by book and was translated from one language to another and no reporter/investigator contacted Homer to press the question: "What did you mean by that?"

So, debate remains - at least for some. For me, the phrase is more than enough. I have no doubts to its meaning, as I have no doubts about the phrase "rosy fingered dawn", also found in Homer's work. It is what it is.

Yet should you decide to question it too, then the notion of color itself becomes a puzzle and then becomes an immense maze. What is color? Is it light? What is light? Is it a wave? Is it a particle? Is it both?

No question that humans place vast meanings on color and light - Red state vs Blue state swamps American politics today. In certain parts of the world, a lack of color brings life and death struggle, such as the danger an Albino person finds in Tanzania, where such folks are murdered and dismembered as myths of the "magical" qualities of their skin hold great power.

Working in the Arts, as I do, I fully embrace the idea that colors evoke emotional responses, just as music does, just as shape and even time itself does.

Metaphors load meanings into almost all that we do - is there any way to turn metaphor into fact or vice versa? 

Sequester Guts Judicial System

The forced cuts in federal spending means federal public defenders must cut staff by as much as 50%, but the law demands far more expensive private attorneys must be hired to replace them.

"While these cuts have strained the system, the anticipated cuts for next year will be much worse. Because nearly 90 percent of a Federal Defender office’s budget is dedicated to pay salaries and rent, no amount of cost shifting can avoid the layoffs required in the face of the impending shortfall. As a result, federal defenders will be forced to continue laying off between 30 percent and 50 percent of their staff and closing branch offices as early as next month.

" If federal public defenders are not available, courts must pay private lawyers who cost more to do the job."

More details on the judicial impact here.

Drew Johnson's Self Destruction

It was no real surprise Chattanooga's Times-Free Press fired Drew Johnson.

More surprising was his hiring in the first place. As noted by Roy Exum's essay this weekend, Johnson's tendency to fabricate and self-promote was a liability on Day One:

"This week his ego and arrogance leapt from his Twitter account again when he wrote, “I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper's most-read article." That is hardly the truth, no matter how much mileage he was able to squeeze from it. Drew Johnson was fired because he regularly and increasingly antagonized his employer. It is that simple.

To assume it was due to disrespect for the president or even a vulgar innuendo makes for good TV fodder but censorship and politics had nothing whatsoever to do with it – it was a case where Drew Johnson finally gathered enough of his own rope to hang himself. It had been coming for months, I am telling you."

Southern Style Running of the Bulls

After a few months off, I'm easing back into writing about politics and cultural trends, and the notion of an Americanized "running of the bulls" seems appropriate.

Later this month organizers are staging a Pamplona-inspired run in Virginia, with more planned across the South and the West. 

In truth, New Orleans has hosted their own version for some years, though the "bulls" are members of an all-girl roller derby team who whack runners with wiffle bats.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Welcome to World's Largest Doomsday RV Park

Developers are putting together a 2 million square foot bunker where folks can avoid the Apocalypse and enjoy family fun!

"We're becoming a modern day fortress or a citadel with ample security, fully underground storage and all the other amenities that are needed to survive," Vicino said.

"The complex will be a true resort with indoor golfing, a bowling alley and swimming pool complete with a water slide among many other amenities."

Life in the Age of Endless, Invisible CyberWar

The debate and discussion of Cyber War,  which has been underway for more than a decade, is murky, confusing, and of course, full of secrets.

Thanks to recent revelations, the massive scope of surveillance and technology is being exposed ... sort of.

A recent Wired article outlines how large the information gathering business has become and highlights the the global war all of us are deeply involved in:

"Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh."

Also, a look at one city where digital existence is required - via this report from NPR.

The State Demands DNA Database

The Supreme Court's ruling this week on collecting and storing DNA is yet another loss for American liberty - it bolsters efforts by State and federal officials to require every person in the nation to be cataloged and indexed, and steadily decreases the  concept of privacy.

I note too my view on the issue aligns me with Justice Scalia, a more than rare event.

Arguments for this new legal twist say it gives law enforcement the ability to solve "cold cases" - unsolved crimes. Seems reasonable, say some - but it's a fundamental shift in how our legal system works.

Justice Scalia noted:

"That, Scalia wrote, was the difference between DNA collection and fingerprints. Police take fingerprints primarily for identification, he explained. That’s acceptable because police must identify those they arrest. DNA, on the other hand, is collected for one reason only: “to solve unsolved crimes.” That is not acceptable, he wrote, because it’s exactly what the Fourth Amendment has always forbidden: a search of a person for evidence of a particular crime without any suspicion that he was the perpetrator."

Think of it this way - how would you define the basic function of Laws? Are they written to punish the guilty or to protect the innocent?

If you say "punish"  then your view indicates a belief we are each of us best seen as criminals-in-waiting, Guilty until proven Innocent.