A good review of a Neil Armstrong biography

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

Every week I am enjoying the book reviews in the New Yorker. Here's another good one - this time about a biography of Armstrong, that contains some stuff I had never heard before. Actually, the reviewer doesn't like the book much, but as usual with New Yorker reviews, the amount of info in the review is very interesting in itself. Here's a little bit:

"The two astronauts managed to “pat each other on the shoulder” when the L.M. touched down, but once they were outside Aldrin didn’t take any real pictures of the mission’s leader. The only decent still photograph of Armstrong on the moon was taken by Armstrong himself: he appears as a reflection in Aldrin’s visor. Aldrin now apologizes for his neglect, but blames the distraction of a surprise phone call from Richard Nixon to the lunar surface. Asked to consider the matter, Collins says it “never entered my mind that there was some nefarious plot on Buzz’s part to exclude Neil from the photo-documentation of the first lunar landing. It just never occurred to me. Maybe it should have.”"

I saw Collins lurking in the National Air and Space Museum book shop (in Washington) when he worked there in the 1980's. (I think he realised that someone had recognized him, and made a quick exit.) Makes me sound very old..

A little bit more on Latham

Magic fell from his fingertips, but my old boss is now sick [September 26, 2005]

In the interview above, Julia said "To have taken Labor from that position to the position of early 2004 where, we'd have to concede, magic just fell from his fingertips . . . "

Oh yeah?

The Australia also reported (but only in its gossip column) that Latham was pressing his publisher to arrange a National Press Club lunch deal for him. Please, please let them agree. It would one unmitigated spray at his audience from beginning to end, with journalists attacking back when they can get a word in. Trouble is, he would likely just avoid clear answers to serious questions (like Galloway.) Still, could be entertaining, in a slightly sick way, at least.

Terror in Iraq

The Australian: Masked gunmen murder teachers [September 26, 2005]

See link to another appalling incident of internal terrorism in Iraq.

I am curious to see if the trial of Saddam has any effect on this. Maybe not, but still I would like to see it get finally going as soon as humanly possible.

Inventive new use of the word "initiative"

Tel Aviv ignores Hamas' initiative to cease attacks on Israeli targets

From a pro-Palestinian news site, the above link starts like this:

"Gaza - The Israeli occupation authorities totally ignored Hamas' initiative to cease its commando raids on the Israeli territories from Gaza, which the Islamic Movement, said it was taken to foil Likud party leaders' plans to exploit the Palestinian blood in achieving political gains."

I suppose they had to attack first so that they could take "the initiative" of stopping, then to complain about the Israeli's not believing them.

My all time favourite line about the Palestinians is how "they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." I would have to go looking to see who is first credited with saying that...

Update: apparently that quote is attributed to Abba Eban in 1978, and he was referring to Yassar Arafat.

Under the sea

First Undersea Restaurant

See the above link for a short story and a nice pic of an undersea restaurant in the Maldives (just opened in April, but I haven't seen in on any TV travel show - yet). Looks very cool.

Dog

My dog. Not the best pic, what with the shadow and all. But she seems to be smiling...

Some Latham stuff

As you might expect, Clarke & Dawe's take on Latham is an instant classic. See it here if you missed it last night. (I heard it replayed twice on ABC local radio today.)

The simplest, but most accurate, cartoon about the diaries is probably this one here.

On a more serious note, you would have to wonder about how dire his mental state would be if his wife ever leaves him, given how much he goes on about the joy of being with his kids. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems hard to believe that the contents of the diaries could do anything other than harm his wife's opinion of him. (To be fair, I have not read it, because I don't want to financially reward him.) But even if everything else in the book is not so bad, Andrew Bolt's list of the worst bits is bad enough. It would seem from some of the extracts that he is, in many respects, incredibly shallow. This extract quoted in Bolt's column floored me:

"Anderson found his own (Christian) faith as a young man when he accidentally killed his sister with a misdirected cricket shot to the head.

"Poor old Ando, he should have just played a straight bat and ignored all this pagan idolatry, masquerading as religion, all those kiddie-fiddlers masquerading as priests."

But of course, before the election, he was having to pretend to be not hostile to religion.
Look at this Compass interview from last year. Some extracts:

"Mark Latham:
No I don’t find it in religion myself. It’s more just in the interaction between people, the desire to be a social animal, a social person, a social being. And you’re really wanting to live your life with positive messages from other people. You couldn’t live your life in isolation. Our whole existence I think comes from the gratification of helping others and then having that assistance reciprocated. And it’s that two-way flow of helping people that – a caring for people, loving for people, that I think gives us the greatest joy in life. "

Geraldine Doogue:
So it’s a sort of humanism?

Mark Latham:
Yeah, I’m a humanist, yeah that’s a good description of my philosophy. It’s the human desire to want to be part of society. What does that mean? It means a society where we build self-esteem by helping others and then having that assistance reciprocated. "

I may be wrong, but it seemed to me he only just realised he was a humanist when Geraldine suggested it....

And he certainly knows how to spread the love around at the moment.

"Geraldine Doogue:
You were also in the past, I’ll quote you: “I’m a hater”. This was 2002. “Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity”.

Mark Latham:
Yeah, that was an interview with Maxine McKew where we were talking about public housing cuts and the abolition of the better cities program in my electorate. And I started talking about how I hated what the government had done in policy terms to disadvantage my own constituency. So I suppose it flowed into a more personal description that I wouldn’t repeat now and probably wrong to express it that way at the time. I think you can have strong emotions in politics but it’s best to stick them, keep them to outcomes that matter for other people rather than the things about yourself. Probably hating others is a very corrosive thing in public life and a sign they might have got the better of you."

Irony of the highest order...

"Geraldine Doogue:
Do you see yourself as a Christian?

Mark Latham:
No, I’m agnostic. I think there’s a force, a spiritual world beyond the material. But I’m not in a position to define it, let alone put it into a certain form of religious practice.

Geraldine Doogue:
Are you curious about it?

Mark Latham:
Yeah I am, I am. I’m curious about it and at different times in my life I feel like I’ve had maybe an inkling of a connection to it...."

I saw this on TV, and thought at the time that he looked extremely unconvincing as he said it. I had more than an inkling of an attempt to suck up to the Compass audience.

What a pathetic character to have come within a few percentage points of being our PM.

I am hoping some blogger will extract further appalling bits from the book, so I don't have to buy it.

Helios Airways crash

Salon.com Technology | Ask the pilot

Speaking of "Ask the Pilot", as I did in the last post, I have now seen his article (link above) about the likely cause of the Helios crash. Seems a case of pilots not recognizing the pressurization alarm for what it was. As he explains, it is still hard to believe the pilots could not work this out. (Also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, even if the pilots passed out, couldn't a flight attendant have had a chance at reviving them? I suppose it depends on how long it took an attendant to go into the cockpit. And for that matter, I suppose they lock the cockpit now.) All very interesting...

Dumping it

How Do You Dump Fuel From a Plane? - Just turn on your fuel dumping system.

An aviation term that I didn't fully understand is dealt with at the above Slate link.

The Salon "Ask the Pilot" column is a pretty good source of aviation info for the general reader too. Only trouble is, you have to be seen walking through a Bush Derangement Zone to get to it.

Ye Olde Pregnancy Test

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pregnancy test link to frog fall

The link above contains this bit of medical history, about which I have never heard before:

"In the 1930s and 40s, live female Xenopus frogs were used widely in Europe, Australasia and north America in pregnancy testing.

A sample of the woman's urine was injected under the frog's skin; if the woman was pregnant, a hormone in her urine caused the frog to ovulate.

Alternative tests involved male frogs and toads, which produced sperm in response to the human hormone gonadotrophin.

Thousands of Xenopus were exported from Africa each year, potentially carrying Batrachochytrium with them, and - perhaps through occasional escapes - delivering it to the habitats of other continents, where it could inflict major damage on amphibian species that were more vulnerable. "

(Luckily, home testing kits today do not involve any combination of frog and pee at all!)

And the relevance of this: it may have the source of the fungus that is now widely believed to be decimating frog populations in many parts of the world. (The idea that frog researchers have also inadvertently been spreading it while on field trips has also been suggested.)

All you ever wanted to know about sex - weevil sex

Male weevils give females the gift of youth� Insects slow down their consorts' biological clocks.

You can't help but like a science article which contains a subheading "magic ejaculate", can you?

Or this line: "insect ejaculates are a soup of proteins and peptides that are immensely complex."

How do they even collect weevil ejaculate for study? Tiny little condoms?

Drinking with baby on board

Key Neural System At Risk From Fetal Alcohol Exposure

The study linked to above indicates that even quite low level drinking during pregnancy looks to be dangerous for the baby's brain, at least in monkeys.

I suspect that Australian doctors, who are currently far from consistent on this point, will probably have to swing around eventually to strongly recommending no alcohol at all during pregnancy.

Bad Existentialists

I don't care much for French philosophers of the modern variety, and I have never read Sartre or De Beauvoir, but I knew a little of their "open" relationship and the suspicion that, despite all the philosophical window dressing, De Beauvoir was a smart woman who didn't recognize she was still a victim of sexist adventurism on Sartre's part.

This week, a book review in the New Yorker has a good long discussion about their relationship. (New Yorker book reviews, I am finding, can be very good reading.)

The article reminded me of Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals", a very readable and amusing biographical examination of the contrast between the public pronouncements of various "intellectuals" and their private lives. I can't find my copy right now, but I don't think Sartre got a chapter. I remember Marx did, and it was very enlightening.

Anyway, the book review points out that Sartre was not exactly the best physical specimen:

".. she fell in love with Sartre, once she got over the physical impression he made. Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene. He had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can be charismatic, and he wisely refrained from disguising it. He simply ignored his body."

I wonder how often he bathed..

De Beauvoir explained their pact to each have affairs, but always tell the other about it, as follows:

"One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it. At times this meant that we had to follow diverse paths—though without concealing even the least of our discoveries from one another. When we were together we bent our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the moment of parting we still thought as one. That which bound us freed us; and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible. "

Yadda yadda.

So off they went, having an extraordinary number of affairs, it seems, and even though she denied it to interviewers while alive, it turns out from her posthumously published letters that De Beauvoir jumped into bed with many women too. It also turns out, by the sounds of it, that they were both unpleasant people:

"The most appalling discovery, for many readers, was what '“telling each other everything'” really meant. The correspondence was filled with catty and disparaging remarks about the people Beauvoir and Sartre were either sleeping with or trying to sleep with, even though, when they were with those people, they radiated interest and affection. Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis. With the publication of '“Letters to Sartre,'” it was clear that, privately, he and Beauvoir held most of the people in their lives in varying degrees of contempt. They enjoyed, especially, recounting to each other the lies they were telling."

Reminds me of a certain ex politician of current note, too.

People become (quite rightly) upset when clergy or other prominent Christians are revealed to be hypocritical in their personal lives, especially in the field of sexual activity. Books like "Intellectuals", and this story of a couple of pop philosophers of the 20th century, serve to remind us that purely secular figures, many of whom claim to be modern rebels against the strictures of religious conservatism, also often turn out to be extremely hypocritical in private, and to deserve no great respect.

There's lots more in the review, go read it quickly while it is still up on the site.

Cat from hell sent to heaven

In Slate, the story of cat so bad it had to be put down. Maybe its brain controlling tricks just weren't working....

North Korea blinks?

News From KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY of DPRK

So, it appears to be a satisfactory outcome for all concerned in that North Korea will (apparently) come back on board the nuclear non-proliferation train.

I am waiting to see how this is sold on the DPRK news site, linked to above. As of the time of writing this, the news service did not indicate much chance of success. Part of it read (sorry, no permanent link available):

"Laporte, commander of the U.S. forces in south Korea, when interviewed by American media recently, disclosed that the United States is "modifying its military strategy in the direction of depending on ultra-modern weapons to cope with the possible outbreak of military conflict with north Korea." Rodong Sinmun Friday says this in a signed commentary.
It goes on:
Multi-faceted dialogues and cooperation are now brisk between the north and the south of Korea and the six-way talks are under way to settle the nuclear issue and put an end to the military confrontation for the purpose of building confidence. The reckless remarks made by him against this backdrop, hinting at setting out a new military strategy, cannot be construed otherwise than a revelation of the U.S. design to chill the atmosphere of inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation and provoke a war of aggression on the Korean Peninsula at any cost." etc.

Kim Jong's spin doctors will be working hard tonight.

I am also wondering what the American Left's take will be. Somehow it will be twisted into anti-Bush.