Give your Wardrobe a Little Black Gold

Scientists have recently perfected procedures to make coal burn clean, which could signal a resurrection of the resource (and the regions whose livelihoods relied on it) in American life.

What better way to celebrate it than with fashion?

A column, by any other name

I got an e-mail today asking if I wouldn’t mind writing a monthly sports column for Current magazine. I answered that no, I certainly wouldn’t.

The only problem — well, the most pressing one — is finding a title for said column.

Any ideas? A free night of beers for the creator of the answer that I pick.

Flightless birds and American fixation

Of the narrating roles that Morgan Freeman has undertaken — which includes the Oscar-winning gem, Million Dollar Baby — few have had the pandemic-level impact that his voice did when it plodded methodically, Freemanically, over two hours of penguins waddling around.

His voice, not to mention those wobbly feathered creatures, have pulled in more than $127 million dollars since 2005, according to boxofficemojo.com. More relevantly, they helped to stir up a frenzy throughout America that had until then been more of a dull fascination, the preserve of toddlers in love with Disney…and middle-aged women in love with Disney: A frenzy for penguins.

But why penguins? Why have flightless fowl suddenly ascended to their current state as a massive, national curiosity? Everywhere you look, birds with useless wings and poor balance. They’re in Coke commercials. The very strange thing that was Happy Feet. Special exhibits at museums. Those Opus books. In windows of toy stores. On backpacks, lunchboxes.  When, in Thanksgiving Weekend 2006, The Hallmark Channel played March, the channel attracted its largest audience ever.

Penguins seem, in both March and their cultural positioning, to represent all the good parts of humanity without all the existential and moral mess. People saw a parable in March, a human narrative in the quixotic and inevitable yearly mission. Penguins appear to have feelings of love, or at the very least a rather fervent passion for commitment, without sleeping with their secretaries. They hug, not stab. They chatter and swim, not bitch and gossip. They hunt for fish, not for each other. And every year, emperor penguins spend one year with a mate to help hatch an egg and raise a baby.

But, what such an interpretation of the creatures does is merely glorify an instinct. Is it that America is so starved for a sense of family morality (see: Religious Right, or those who voted down gay marriage) that it must look to a set of creatures who sit atop completely different limb on the evolutionary tree? It has to project a value-set that was contrived and manufactured to begin with, a value-set that has been organically rendered obsolete?

Why not pick the way that bucks hurtle themselves into one another as an allegory for how man must battle (and experience hell of headaches) for love? Or hibernation as a metaphor for taking time to smell the roses? How about squirrels or dogs licking themselves as a display of self esteem?

Director Luc Jaquet has condemned this personification, pointing at a number of fallacies in the metaphor, not the least of which is the fact that penguins practice monogamy in the same way that Scott Baio does, not to mention penguins’ willingness to form homosexual partnerships.

“I find it intellectually dishonest to impose this viewpoint on something that’s part of nature,” he said. “It’s amusing, but if you take the monogamy argument, from one season to the next, the divorce rate, if you will, is between 80 to 90 percent… the monogamy only lasts for the duration of one reproductive cycle. You have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans.”

Not only have penguins exhibited bisexual promiscuity, they’ve also been known to steal penguin chicks, ostracize their own and, according to Wikipedia (and thus probably wrong), practice prostitution.

I’m not sure how they would pay.

But maybe we can take some lessons from these mindless interpretations. Rather, we can take some lessons from the antitheses to these interpretations. Maybe penguins don’t offer familial parables, but their yearly quest provides cause for examination.

For penguins, it’s instinct, an annual 100-kilometer pilgrimage without alternative. If we’re to go with the scientific consensus (as well we should), animals possess only vapors of consciousness. Not quite enough to recognize good-vs-evil in any way beyond immediate survival.

Good with a capital G — the eternal, universal Good involves a conscious and willful rejection of evil (whatever that is), a renunciation of the many pulls against that Good.

I don’t really mean this Good in a religious sense, but I guess it would jive with a great number of religious mythology. But in this life, we must realize our opposition, not just follow our instincts and let ourselves fade into autopilot. We must fight against that opposition, our heads lowered, yet eyes up and our minds never once underestimating that opponent.

There’s little glory in an unexamined, easy mission, just like, as Kierkegaard wrote, there’s no validity in following a code blindly. There must be a leap of faith. We must admit that our paths could be incorrect. Without that leap, without acknowledging that what we are doing could be wrong, we’re just coasting.

Our generation faces endless, ever-growing choices, from career to cereal. There are more than ample ways for us to go wrong every second of every day. But also, in those ways, just as many ways to go right.

Sartre’s hero in The Myth of Sissyphus achieves heroism by accepting that his act is futile, yet persisting in it nonetheless. As such, he takes away the gods’ ability to mock him, pushing his rock to the top of the hill and dutifully chasing it down the other side, then repeating the process ad infinitum. The joke was on him, until he owned it.

Take heart from Sissyphus, the model for the modern condition. Just don’t beat back, like Fitzgerald said, boats against the current. Beat forward, against more and more currents. But recognize that resistance, accept the fight.

We’ll be stronger for it. With or without polar ice storms.

A case of the Mondays

While I finish up an essay about penguins (ready by tonight or tomorrow morning), check this out, with the political season getting warmer and all.

And because it’s Monday…

Some screaming.

Fun on Friday

I get to go to work, five blocks from the Stock Exchange, today wearing shorts and a polo shirt because of how productive yesterday was. So, because of that, it’s time for some damn fun.

Every week, those who work for or regularly frequent Somethingawful.com — a collection of snarky, mostly witty but monumentally nerdy people — come up with something called Photoshop Phriday, where they take one source picture and go off on a theme for a week.

Today:

Repurposed vehicles.

Farewell, Floyd

When you look at his face, into his eyes, you can see the yellow jersey recede and dive back through the Arc de Triomphe. Now you can see it floating over the second-place winner. You see Floyd Landis’ face, and you understand that steroids have not only rendered a victory useless: They have effectively erased a year of one of the world’s finest and most prestigious sporting events. No one gets the first-place medal. It’s just a wash, an impossibly quick cycle through the country of France conducted by men who’ve trained their whole lives for it.

Yesterday, thirteen months after the tests were taken after his 2006 Tour de France victory, Floyd Landis’ positive results were upheld in court. Landis, who tested positive for Casanova-high levels of testosterone in his blood after the race, had been engaged in judiciary precedings after that, claiming his innocence in his petulant, childish way the whole time.

His reaction, the refusal to acknowledge a crime that overwhelming evidence (enough to hit unreasonable-doubt territory) proves he committed. It’s a kid with his hand in the cookie jar saying that his sister’s the one who’s been stealing them.

Nobody’s surprised that the winner of the Tour took steroids. They’ve haunted Lance ever since his first win. Further, nobody’s really surprised that Landis took steroids, given that he surged from a middle-of-the-packer the whole way to first in one Lance-ian thrust. The two other explanations would be your everyday superhuman adrenaline. The other is, of course, the collision of rays from Krypton’s sun and the terrestrial Sun.

But what Landis doesn’t quite grasp is, well, science. The human body is capable of only so much. And now, certainly, some feats once considered walls for human physiology — the four-minute mile, for instance — have been revised. Walls are broken. ‘Extremes’ push outward. Anomalies, good and bad, exist.

For Landis, his fateful Stage 17, when he nearly erased an eight-minute lead from Oscar Pereiro with, seems (beyond, again, a reasonable doubt) to have come from more earthly, more synthetic substances than Krypton rays. The urine sample he supplied after the race showed, allegedly, an 11-to-1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone.

Now, that doesn’t mean a lot until you realize that the maximum allowable ratio, and thus pretty close to the natural peak, is 4-to-1. The human body can only produce so much.

What Landis is still doing right now is clinging to that unreasonable doubt, claiming that something was amiss in the testing. Perhaps it was. And maybe one day he’ll be exonerated. Wrongful convictions, do, indeed happen.

Well, they did happen before we had the technology to prevent them and to make doubt pretty damn unreasonable.

Now is time for Landis to apologize, to say ‘you got me.’ Until that happens, not just with Landis, until our athletes stop dodging these convictions — until they stop denying with their hands in the cookie jar — this will continue.

And more seasons will be erased.

Sequel Day

And now, I present to you the second installments of two clips that have provided you minutes of distraction!

Since we last met, it seems that Gino has a day job to pay for clubbing, while, in the second clip, the pride of Brookline, Mass. gets the Treatment.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Former Mayor and now Presidential Candidate and the mob

The New York media, fond as it is of pairs (pickles and pastrami, Jeter and A-Rod, intersection names [10th and 3rd, for example]) has now focused its attention on a new duo engaged in a dance: Rudy Giuliani and the mafia. The thing is, they’re not actually engaged in any such thing. Just let the hyperlinks tell the story…

Giuliani’s signature move while working as a lawyer in New York — and his ticket to Gracie Manor — was dissecting organized crime. So the relationship between the man and the mob, once so adversarial, has now somehow achieved a status of tacit mutual approval within the media.

First, there was the story of Robert Duvall’s endorsement of Giuliani for president, which drew the headline “Corleone Consiglieri Endorses Giuliani.”

Giuliani finally brought pomodoro-hot scorn upon himself from the Italian-American community by, for the 875th straight day, using his Don Corleone impression when speaking in public.

Then the Village Voice uncovered the one pocket of organized crime that Giuliani didn’t seek when he felled much of NY’s mob scene: school buses. By Tom Robbins. 

—

Oh yes. The Voice also has a picture of Pink’s nipples. A picture taken by Bryan Adams. That Bryan Adams.

(And that picture is here)

Question

If you could be a professional baseball player (for girls, a starlet actress, maybe?) and have a 10-year career in which you’re regarded as one of the best in the game, but on every day you’re not playing, you get nosebleeds every hour, would you do it?

Whisky, strings and more whisky

My uber-buddy Justin and his cohorts went into the Maryland mountains and came out with this. (Check out the song ‘Sally Gooden’)

This is country-bluegrass, baby. Listen and let America stomp its dirty boots on your danged heart.