What's brown and sounds like a bell?

Dung!!!

May we all ring in the New Year in our own weird ways.

Breathtaking Inanity

Striking while the iron is still room temperature...

The Dover ID case has been decided for the plaintiffs and (between the lines) against intelligent design. Judge Jones slapped down the defendants with characteristic jollity--see the title of this post for his summation of their position. (It's not the "i" word I'd have used, but a good one nonetheless.)

Thick as it is, the ruling won't stop the court cases, including one mounting in Michigan as you read this. Nor will it blunt the wedge tactics. Districts in 42 states are getting into the sticky subject of science curricula.

I say "Bring it on!" It's great spectator sport, if nothing else. The brouhaha over ID also helps get some important epistemic and civic issues into the spotlight. Yes, something even more important than Tom Cruise's fractured compound or Nick-n-Jessica's compound fracture. Like, oh, I don't know:

1. where the line needs to be (re)drawn between secular and religious in US institutions;
2. where and why lines are drawn between science and nonscience (including pseudoscience) and who's doing the drawing;
3. parents getting involved in their kids' educations, if only for or against one issue (and it's not condoms for a change);
4. basically the pressures and deficiencies under which schools have to operated.

We just need someone to keep the rhetorical fan going to dispel the heat and smoke all sides keep on generating. Who could that be...?

CHRISTMAS Train!!!

If you saw a phantasmic locomotive whipping along the L tracks all decked out in tinkling lights and fairly reeking of reindeer musk, you were not hallucinating. Or maybe you were, and this just played right into your little reverie.

It was the CTA's official Holiday Train, spreading the spirit of the season several days a week leading up to "the Holidays."

This train (or more properly, its name) raises the suddenly spiky issue of how to greet people of undetermined religious orientation: i.e., the spreading use of an inclusive "Happy Holidays" being set upon and bludgeoned by Christian conservatives with their "Merry Christmas."

As a goy bridging the gulf between gentiles and Jews one mostly-kosher wife at a time - and as a lapsed Methodist teaching cultural relativism to mostly Catholic collegians - let me take a stab at this whole venom-fest.

» Any L train with red and green lights is a goddamn Christmas train.
» "Happy Holidays" is the most appropriate greeting for a period characterized by the convergence of Christmas, New Year's (in several flavors), Hanukkah, the Hajj (at least this year), and (whatever you think of it) Kwanzaa and for a country whose citizens are apt to celebrate two or more of them.

Ho ho ho.

Heteroglossolalia 2

This is a reminder for all those (myself included) who would take the role of pundit or scholar or expert, thereby putting others in the nonexpert slot:

The cultural authority of scholars, the complex language used in scholarly discourse, and the esoteric nature of academic channels of communication render academic interpretations of the beliefs of ordinary people generally inaccessible to those being studied...
David Hufford. 1999. "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice."

Cheers, Toasty!

A special thank you to Toasty Lundqvist for the favorable mention of this collection of digital detritus in his much better crafted (and infinitely more entertaining) blog. I think Vyvyan's mom from "The Young Ones" put it this way:

"Up yours, ugly!"

Why you'd pay any heed to the old, alcoholic bird is beyond me...

Donnelly '08 - the North (Atlantic) will rise again

It may be a bit early in the political season, but there is too much at stake not to start now. I'm going out on a limb and stumping for a candidate of true presidential timber. That's gotta be a mixed metaphor.

Bear in mind that I'm hardly politically active--or partisan, for that matter. The Libertarian test of political leanings put me at the mushy intersection of liberal, libertarian, and conservative. Nevertheless, after another anaesthetizing session of mass-media news, my eyes - and fancy - were caught by a copy of "Atlantis: the Antediluvian World" on my shelf. That sealed the deal.

In 2008 I will vote for Senator Ignatius Donnelly for president of the U frickin' S of A.

Our country cries out for a leader of the caliber of this great legislator and scholar from my beloved Minnesota. All of those Humphrey boys had their shot. It's time for a leader who actually put the Library of Congress to proper use, producing two learned tomes on protohistory (hmm, a president who reads and writes books...) while still keeping the country together through the dark times of Reconstruction.

OK, the Senator's been dead at least 100 years. Screw the technicalities--his time has come. Again. For the first time.

I ask you: Who better to make sense of our increasingly globalized world than a hyperdiffusionist? Who better to take stock of America's position in the world than the premier chronicler of a doomed, disappeared continent? Who better to unite our fractured body politic than a liberal republican with some real estate he'd love to sell you? Who??

I will strongly suggest that he hook up with the Extraterrestrial Political Action Committee, X-PPAC. Just think of the balance on that ticket!

?Dónde se encuentran las pinches cemitas?

While it was generally stressful for being all business, my year in Mexico was a treat in at least one respect: the food. I was able to persist in some of my adopted alimentary habits during our time in LA. And it's not like Chicago is devoid of good, cheap Mexican food (e.g. Burrito House).

But there are still unos platillos típicos, in particular ones from Puebla, that I need to track down.

• tacos árabes - think crackling gyro meat in near-pita tortillas
• cemitas - torta ingredients within toasted sesame seed buns

Apparently both are served at Taquería Puebla on North Ave. - not to be confused with a joint of the same name on Milwaukee - as well as exotica like mixiotes, judging by the photo of its menu posted on a local foodie message board. No pulque or gusanos de maguey, but pretty authentic.

Now if only I could find a correlate to my beloved Taquería Los Ángeles on Avenida 25 Oriente, with its fruit salads and aguas de sandia.

Lost my agatite

In the Sulzer branch of the Chicago Public Library, my wife recently found a fun (though unevenly researched) book detailing the stories behind Chicago street names. The pesky matter of honorary street names will be left for another time.

Apparently the most mysterious name belongs to Agatite Avenue, a quiet side street running intermittently between Montrose and Sunnyside (itself derived from a popular house of ill repute!) into the near northwest suburbs. Some interesting things can be found on the avenue, including the St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Catholic Diocese of Chicago.

The authors speculate, with admittedly no basis, that it could be a corruption of the mineral "apatite," or a lay hypercorrection of "agate," but their discussion consists mainly of failed attempts to find any positive evidence. Another source raised and then dashed the possibility of linking to a Caribbean tree.

Thus Google to the rescue...or so I hoped.

My most promising lead, a shape-note hymn called "New Agatite," turned out to be circular at best: the author lived on the street when he wrote it. Apparently an Agatite Road runs through Jacksonville FL, but that only deepens the mystery.

So here's what I turned up, in decending order of usefulness:

• a series of novels by Clay Reynolds set in the (fictional?) West Texas town of Agatite;
• an "Agatite Cement Plaster" manufactured by one Fred Harvey Quincy of Salina KS in the late 1890s;
• the Agatite Short Line RR that was absorbed into the Fort Worth & Denver RR at around the same time;
• "Red Agatite Stripping Guides" on some handmade fly-fishing rods.

Maybe agatite.com will settle the matter--if it ever gets up and running. But that would be too easy.

Sweet Smell of Stickney

I teach (extremely) part-time at Morton College in Cicero. It's quite a nice two-year school that's making big strides in the facilities and courses it provides its mostly Latino student body.

It's just not in the best location: essentially surrounded by a bunch of oil refineries and a horse-racing track. There is also a very particular odor in the air whenever I roll into the lot, hard to place--sort of latriney with a hint of petrochemicals.

Recently I caught a rebroadcast of WTTW's excellent homage to the Chicago River. Turns out the campus is barely a Biffy-length from the world's highest-volume water treatment facility, the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. (For those of you keeping track, that's 1.2 billion gal/day from 2.38 million pooping, swilling, self-moistening Illinoisans.)

As you can imagine, my chest swelled and my nostrils flared with the pride of knowing that this was, in fact, a world-class aroma...and the relief of assuring that it did not emanate from any part of my anatomy.