Beyond Rivalry

Yesterday I took photos of a clump of snowdrops (Galanthus) poking their heads up in the garden bed. Earlier in the week, they were still covered by snow and ice, but a few days of rain and warmer weather melted the snow and they were visible on Thursday and Friday.

Today, it's snowing again. I had to guess where the snowdrops were and move the snow that lay on top of them in order to photograph them.

I also took a photo of the bench and urns yesterday and today, for comparison. The winterberries in the metal containers lasted from Nov. into Feb., providing a bold stroke of red against the snow that lay on the ground all that time, but in February the red berries were eaten by some very hungry birds.

Swiss Army Librarian offers a lightly annotated list of photo sharing and editing tools, and some photo archive sites. I'm not familiar with some of the sites -- maybe you, too? I'm on Flickr and I've found Picnik to be nice and easy for photo editing.

Hate Hugh Laurie's 'American' accent but love the Fox TV show 'House' he stars in. It's a medical show, but really more of a detective show, as House and his interns hunt for the right diagnosis for baffling symptoms, and a character-driven soap opera, combined with quick, witty dialogue and an unrelenting engagement with truth and lies.

You can watch whole episodes, and clips, online, at Hulu -- excellent quality but only a few episodes; I watched the season 4 Christmas show, "What A Wonderful Lie," last night, before that episode 'expired' (why??) -- or at TV.com if you have iTunes (oops -- since Dec., the episodes are no longer available via iTunes), or HouseMDvideos (some have Japanese subtitles and the quality is middling). You can also rent the first three seasons through your local or non-local dvd rental store.

Each episode is reviewed in detail for medical correctness here -- don't look if you have illusions about it -- and they also rate the show's soap opera quality (i.e., how compelling the narrative is, depth of character development, etc.).

If you haven't seen the show, I recommend "Don't Ever Change," still up at Hulu. ("It's A Wonderful Lie" was better, though, IMO.)

This user-created clip at YouTube, pairing The Fray's "How to Save A Life" with shots of House doping and Wilson wanting to help, unable to help, is also worth the watch if you're already a fan.

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is connected with House clips by several users, including one about House and Stacy and one about House and Wilson (both with Rufus Wainwright singing).

(Dr James) Wilson: What's with the Secret Santa? You trying to bring them together?

(Dr Gregory) House: I want to drive them apart.

Wilson: With gift-giving?

House: Conflict's built right into the name -- Santa's about sharing, secret's about withholding.

House: Gifts allow us to demonstrate exactly how little we know about a person, and nothing pisses off a person more than being shoved into the wrong pigeon hole.

(Have I mentioned how fab Hugh is singing 'Mystery'?)

Wilson: "You can be a real jerk sometimes, you know that?"
House: "Yeah. And you're the good guy."
Wilson: "At least I try."
House: "As long as you're trying to be good, you can do whatever you want."
Wilson: "And as long as you're not trying, you can say whatever you want."
House: "So between us, we can do anything. We can rule the world!"

Wilson: "You're my friend."
House: "Oh, jeez. Have some backbone. If you think I'm wrong, do something."
Wilson: "Wait, you're getting mad at me for sticking up for you?"
House: "You value our friendship more than your ethical responsibilities."
Wilson: "Our friendship is an ethical responsibility."

< Photo c. 2005, Dean Headner/FOX >

DOT Creates New Lane For Reckless Drivers:

"'We made sure to interview a broad spectrum of dangerously incompetent and inconsiderate pricks,' said [Secretary of Transportation Mary] Peters, who stressed that the DOT sent questionnaires exclusively to drivers who have had five or more accidents in as many years or have been issued at least three 100-mph-plus speeding tickets in the last six months, as well as all members of the Corvette Club of America. 'Their feedback was invaluable -- so much so that we hired many to drive test sections of the highway. Several of those drivers will have sections of the new lanes named after them in memoriam.'" 

Report: 6 Out Of 10 Americans Cannot Locate Payless Shoes On A Mall Map :

"'In a modern, mall-going society, these important life skills should be second nature to citizens of all ages,' [Secretary of Education Margaret] Spellings said. 'No schoolchild should be allowed to grow up ignorant of the varied chain stores around him.' Despite her frustration, Spellings said she wasn't surprised by the poor test results, and claimed that they signaled a larger cultural illiteracy trend. According to Spellings, over the last decade Americans have fallen off in almost every field of study and endeavor, from mall geography to television history to basic text-message reading and writing."

And, related:

Victim Of Mall Shooting Determined Not To Die In Yankee Candle:

"'I remember thinking "This is it, I'm going to die,"' the 34-year-old contractor said from his bed at Buffalo General Hospital, where he is still under observation after sustaining three gunshot wounds, including one that left a bullet lodged in his spine. Then I looked around at where I was and told myself there was no way in hell I was going to let them find me curled up behind a floor display of Midnight Jasmine Housewarmer jar candles.'

"'How could this happen to me?' Mull added. 'I'm never anywhere near Yankee Candle.'

"Much of Mull's desperate plight was captured on mall security cameras. In the grainy footage, he can be seen inching his way slowly over the blood-slicked floors and past the contorted bodies of other victims before collapsing unconscious in the entrance of The Sharper Image."

Love Get Fuzzy today

(Go to the site within the next 30 days to actually see the strip.) 

I've uploaded another PDF file for anyone to use, a backgrounder for Cries & Whispers (1972), the last in the BergmanFest! series I'm hosting now.

An elephant died yesterday.

Delhi, an elephant at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, TN, died early yesterday morning in her sleep after a time of decline (you can read about her last days here).

She came to the sanctuary in 2004, having been confiscated by the USDA after she was neglected and harmed by the Hawthorne Corp., which lends elephants to circuses.

An email from the Elephant Sanctuary today said that "while her sisters and caregivers slept, Delhi made her transition. Her passing was silent and peaceful, she passed without waking. We are all spending the day honoring our last precious hours with her; caregivers are still fussing around her, whispering quiet goodbyes. Misty carefully touched all over Delhi's body and then gently stepped over her, sheltering her dearly departed friend."

 

There will be a memorial page for Delhi at the ES website soon.

The first thing I thought of when I heard about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's implication in a prostitution ring, after his years of hard-line rectitude, was the Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure, rather fresh in my mind since I saw it last summer. Even the title of the play, taken from Matthew 7:2 -- "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" -- makes the connection pretty obvious, but Spitzer's similarity (as portrayed in the media, anyway) to the Duke's puritanical-seeming deputy, Angelo, brings the point home. Angelo is known first and foremost as a strict and merciless enforcer of the laws, a zealous man, a disciplined man, a man who resists temptation; as the Duke says, Angelo "scarce confesses that his blood flows, or that his appetite is more to bread than stone."

Spitzer's critics and observers paint him with much the same brush: "I've never known anyone who was more self-righteous and unforgiving than Eliot Spitzer," said U.S. Rep. Peter King (R) of Long Island. Daniel Gross, at Slate, says that one thing is clear: "Spitzer has been hoisted by his own petard, brought down by the same kind of investigation he pioneered as a prosecutor." Walter Shapiro at Salon opens with "New York's first-term Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer turned out not to be the model of rectitude that he seemed" and later says, "Reform politicians who hold themselves up as moral exemplars run the risk of not living up to their own self-proclaimed ethical standards. ... Spitzer has gone from lion to laughingstock in just 14 short months as governor."

As Daniel Colvin notes in his excellent essay on MFM, "the congruence between outer actions and inner values is one of the overriding themes of the play, especially as it is manifest in the issue of seeming and being."

But though we may see both Spitzer and Angelo as hypocrites (Andrew Sabin of Sabin Commodities "described Mr. Spitzer's alleged conduct as 'the most hypocritical thing in the world'"), incongruent in the inner and outer being, espousing one thing and doing another on the sly, that's not the perspective of the play.

Colvin goes on: "[T]o call him a hypocrite misses the mark: he is as surprised at his lust as anyone else, at least at its onset, and he questions his moral status at first. His virtue had always been quite real for him, and his slide into sin catches him off guard ... : 'Even till now, When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.' ... 

"Angelo finds in himself, then, a double nature: the first is the virtuous individual that would have carried on with propriety; the second, a carnal, lustful, power-hungry character who, though surprising to him, is nonetheless part of who he is. ... That Angelo was liable to temptation and sin was not surprising, nor was the experience of his falling unusual (though by no means excusable). His pride, however, was quite unwarranted, and it was itself a major sin. Moreover, it made him especially vulnerable to temptation and sin." And to the schadenfreude now warming the hearts of many. 

Measure for Measure is not a tragedy but Angelo's lack of self-knowledge and his pride are certainly tragic flaws. Angelo is, in the end, tricked into marrying the woman he was formerly engaged to but threw over when her dowry was lost at sea,  and so he is saved from ruin, imprisonment or death, though he may not view it that way.

I have to disagree with the WSJ's judgment that Spitzer's story isn't "Shakespearean" because it's not noble enough. It's just as noble or ignoble as Angelo's story in Measure for Measure. It remains to be seen how Spitzer's play will end.

Added 3/12: Many seem to think that Spitzer is more like a Greek tragic figure than a Shakespearean one ...

There's loads of interesting stuff in the NYT, but my two favourite regular features, hands down, are the extensive daily "Deaths" column -- available online through Legacy.com -- wherein people, companies and organisations remember and eulogise the recently deceased, often in touchingly personal and quirky ways (their full-length obituaries are also usually interesting); and Metropolitan Diary, a weekly feature (on Mondays) of letters from readers about life in NYC and surrounds. Here's today's. Last week's also rocked.

IRS Spends Millions to Tell You the Check is Almost in the Mail

Al Tompkins at Poynter Online reports on The Associated Press story:

"Why spend this money? The story quoted Keith Hennessey, director of the president's National Economic Council:

"'"Any time you do something as a government tens of millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And so if you're going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few people as possible confused about what's happening, they understand what's coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS and Treasury have to figure out how to deal with it," said Hennessey.'"

If we take the NEC president's explanation at face value (some don't), the rationale seems vague and flawed to me. I'd like to know how many people don't already know they're going to get a "stimulus plan" check, how many people would be confused if they got a check from the IRS that, say, included a slip of paper in that envelope explaining it, and how many people who don't know and who would be confused to receive the check will actually open, read and understand the pre-explanation of the check. (To answer the first unknown, there's probably a Pew or Gallup poll out there that's already got the numbers. An ABC poll conducted a month ago asked whether people think the stimulus plan rebate is a good idea or not.)

Would it cost more or less than $42 million for the IRS and/or Treasury to add a brief explanation of the stimulus plan check mailing to its automated phone line, for those who are confused and who want answers before they deposit their checks? What about if the IRS phone number and a link to this IRS website page -- which explains why we're getting the checks -- were included on the checks or on a slip in the envelope with the check?

I guess it's really too much to expect that the refunds could be processed along with the tax returns.

$42 million ?! 

(Of course, there are worse uses of money. ... But at least some folks truly believed the war would cost less, be beneficial to suffering people, and rid the world of terrorists.)