Citizens of 4F, April 29, 2013

Minneapolis folks are a little confused today, weatherwise, and it’s easy to understand why. Within the space of 10 days we’ve had a major 12-inch winter storm snow, then some warm days culminated by a two delicious weekend days of 80 degrees. The citizens of the 4F bus into downtown Minneapolis this morning reflected that confusion, with garb ranging from cutoff shorts, tanktop T-shirts and open sandals (the kids heading for DeLaSalle high school on Nicollet island), to gloves and scarves (some of the older professionals heading for the downtown offices).

Danny seems confused in a slightly different way. Probably in his early 60s, he doesn’t fit into any of the standard downtown stereotypes. On the surface, he projects a kind of western cowboy appearance, with a Stetson hat and rust-colored canvas barn coat. It’s not quite consistent, though, as he also wears what appears to be older negative heel shoes (we used to call them Earth shoes, in my day), aviator-style wire-rimmed glasses, and newer JC Penny denim jeans (not Wranglers, not even Levis). His sand-colored hair is longish under the stetson, and his short beard is a mixture of white and buff, like the remnants of a small wood fire that leaves its white ashes mixed among the coarse sands on a beach.

Most unusual is the plastic covering for his Stetson, which fits like some kind of shower-cap, with an elastic band the snugs it up under the brim. Real cowboys, I'm told, will wear such a raincoat for their treasured stetsons on stormy days. But it's bright sun in Minneapolis today, and this covering looks like it is worn permanently on Danny's hat.  On the top surface of the hat’s brim, the plastic fits tight and smooth, almost like it’s been glued in place, but on the upper dome of the hat, there is too much plastic and it bunches loosely around the dome of the Stetson: I can’t help but think of the image of an extra-large Trojan condom being worn by a man who really needs the standard size. 

It’s very hard to gauge Danny’s story, though he projects the energy of someone a little down on his luck. I find myself wondering if the entire outfit is simply what he was able to find at some second-hand store recently. When the seat next to him gets taken as the bus fills up, Danny looks steadfastly out the window in embarrassed shyness, away from his seat companion, for the rest of the trip. And my hunch that he doesn’t fit the downtown society is right; he gets off the bus on Franklin Avenue well before downtown, a street dominated on this stretch by bars, soup kitchens, day labor offices, check-cashing shops and other businesses serving the edges of society.

It’s too far from my own office and would cause me to be late for work to do so, but I’m tempted to follow Danny to obtain clues to a little bit more of his story. But I think somehow that he has troubles enough, without adding a strange middle-aged guy stalking him on Franklin Avenue at 7:00 am in a monday morning. 

As I watch him walk up the street, Danny hobbles just a little, but his steps are quick and he's making good time. As he reaches a gap between two building, full daylight fall upon him, and a beam of sunlight gleams off the plastic covering of his Stetson. Not a real cowboy maybe, but Danny has every right to the same springtime sunshine that favors us all. 

Spirit Airline, This Ain't

Tom over at Light Breezes (his link is in the right column) posted this,  and I couldn't resist sharing this. I fly fairly frequently on business, but always in coach except for very rare occasions when I get bumped into first class. But Delta first class never, ever looks like Emeratus first class on an Airbus 380 double-decker jumbo jet....

Mercurious on Books: April 24, 2013

Every so often, I get on a jag of reading books in a particular genre, or everything I can by one author. Awhile back, Jeffery Eugenides struck my fancy, and in the space of a week I devoured all four of his very excellent novels.

In recent years, though, it's often been science/nature non-fiction that strikes my fancy, with writers like John McPhee, Edward Abbey, Sebastian Junger, Mary Roach, Stephen Jay Gould serving as favorite targets for weeks at a time.

Last week I mentioned a book called Spillover, an excellent book about the heroic characters who trace the originals of highly infectious diseases the "crossover" from animal species to humans. This week, I'm highly recommending Blind Descent, an accounting by James M. Tabor of the race to find the deepest cave on earth a few years ago.  From the publisher's description:

The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong. In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk—Stone’s polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination—has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic.

This hardly does the book justice, as I've rarely seen a work of non-fiction that more compellingly recreates the sense of adventure and danger that is inherent in the lives of world-class explorers. Even in the armchair, you may have trouble not feeling uncomfortably claustrophobic. At one point, for example, we hear about one assault on a super cave the required the team to crawl on their bellies through crevices no bigger than the underside of your kitchen sink cabinet for three consecutive, non-stop days, at point wriggling through constrictions that required them to exhale completely in order to squeeze through. The literature of cave exploration is full of instances where cavers get caught in such squeezes, with their rescuers forced to break their bones and dislocated their joints to extricate them. In the midst of these expeditions forcing people underground for two or three weeks at a time, there was the ever-present danger of the Mexican rainy season coming early, filling 4 miles of cave entirely with water. Death among explorers of super caves is said to be far greater than among those who try to conquer Mt. Everest.

I can't recommend this one highly enough for armchair adventurers of Geezer vintage.

A Tale of Two Aprils

Since it appears that Minnesota has now entered the next great ice age, I'll take this opportunity to show you, with great fond memories, what my front garden looked like last year at the end of April, with tulips blooming and irises approaching bloom.

And, though I've been complaining about it plenty already, here's what April looked like late last week:

With that, I am hereby done with whining about the weather. Politics, movies, office politics: I'll continue to whine about these, but the weather is now off the table.

Mercurious at the Movies: April 20, 2013

It's rather in vogue to dislike Tom Cruise these days, and indeed there is much reason to roll your eyes when it comes to reviewing his public persona. The apparent arrogance of the man, the role as Scientology puppet, the carefully orchestrated and controlled PR machine....he's not a fellow that earns a lot of accolades for what he's done with his fame.

But when I think carefully about the movies I've seen featuring Tom Cruise, I have to conclude that there is a certain type of big-budget "B" movie (maybe B-plus) that he's really pretty good at.  And in his occasional turns in self-parody, he's also very good. Among the Tom Cruise movies I've thoroughly enjoyed:  Risky Business, Color of Money, Rain Man, Mission Impossible 1, Magnolia, The Last Samauri, Collateral, Mission Impossible III, Tropic Thunder, Rock of Ages.  In fact, when you look at the entire list of 40 or so films, there are really fewer dogs than you might imagine, given the actor is somebody you'd really like to dislike.  I realized that I very often wince when going into a theater showing a Tom Cruise movie, only to emerge a couple hours later to say to myself "not bad," or even "pretty darned good."

To this list I'll now add Oblivion, a very stylish and surprisingly thoughtful dystopian sci-fi film that features great special effects, but used in a manner that remains subordinate to an even more interesting story line. This isn't "Star Wars," for example (films that always frankly bored me  little with their ridiculous cartoon quality), but much more like "Inception" or "2001" in its visual stylishness and conceptual nature.

It's also a very nice homage to some of the very best classic sci-fi of modern times. It has bit of the best aspects of Star Wars effects, as well as traces of the Matrix, Terminator, Star Trek, Close Encounters, and most significantly, 2001, A Space Odyssey. If you are a fan of modern sci fi classics, you will recognize nods to those films in the imagery and directing.

Now, Tom Cruise's ego is such that he will always be "Movie Star ", and is unlikely to find a more socially conscious position in the Hollywood world, like former pretty-boy actors Brad Pitt and George Clooney pulled off. He could never imagine Cruise working with Terrence Malick in a pure art film, for example. Nor can you really imagine Cruise becoming a politically aware humanitarian spokesman like George Clooney or Ben Affleck. He's too self-absorbed for that.  But really, Tom Cruise needs credit where it's due. Oblivion is really quite a good movie, and may be as good a sci-fi thriller as you'll see this year.

The Spring that Wasn't

There are many, many, many good things about Minnesota life. Really, there are.

This isn't one of them.

The first measurable snow this winter came in the third week of October, 2012.  Six months later, this was the scene that greeted me this morning. This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that our humid, sultry summers are about 4 months long...this means that of the two pleasant seasons of the year, spring is approximately 3 weeks long, and fall a mere 5 weeks or so.

Sigh. I need to think about that retirement to Costa Rica.

Saturday Book Review, April 13, 2011

Like a lot of people who spent their youths in and around farms and farming culture, I have a bit of distain for the paranoia with which most Americans view ordinary microbes, the obsessive concern with cleanliness so rampant in America.  And there's some justification for this: one theory as to why there is such a high incidence of asthma, allergies, and intestinal problems is that people today are too clean, and don't have healthy mixtures of normal everyday microbes and bacteria. It's been shown for example, that farm kids have relatively few instances of asthma, and the reason is that their systems are more robust through lifelong exposure to animal and soil microbes. The people who get flu regularly always seem like the same people overly concerned about hand-washing and general cleanliness.

But reading David Quammen's Spillover has given me a bit of a chill. The next time I vist a farm or zoo, I'll likely be a little more likely to wash up after scratching the critters under the chin.

Quammen's book is a series of case studies of the epidemiology of various cases of zoonotic illnesses—viral diseases that start in other species and spillover into human populations. Like Richard Preston's Hot Zone (though featuring better science) or Laurie Garret's The Coming Plague (but narrower in focus and more up to date scientifically), Spillover is a fascinating and chilling study of the dynamics by which viral diseases arise in human populations and are identified and combatted by disease control experts.

The book examines many of the diseases with current buzz in popular culture, including HIV, avian influenza, swine flu, and ebola. Contrary to popular opinion though—which is that our courageous scientific community can find the answers to most of these problems—the message coming through is the rueful acknowledgement that for a great many of these diseases, we really know next to nothing about the original hosts of the diseases, not have any real idea of how to control them. Ebola virus, for example, has entirely decimated large populations of chimpanzees an gorillas in many forested regions of Africa, and is 75% fatal whenever it spills over into humans, yet we know absolutely nothing about whether it originates in bats, or birds, or insects, and we know almost as little about how it is transmitted.

A highly recommended book, to be sure, though one that might keep you up nights.

By the way, whenever you are looking for a good book to read, I heartily recommend looking up any list of National Book Award nominees from a recent year. Invariably, you will find excellent suggestions. It is a far better predictor of fine reading than, say, the NYT best-seller list.