Will.i.am has done another impressive job of assembling a huge talented group of people to convey his message.

To learn more about this video, visit Soupy Trumpet.

For its entire existence as a sport bodybuilding has struggled to gain acceptance with a mainstream audience. Some say it never will. They say that the freakishly exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders will never be applauded by the general public. And so, bodybuilding remains a cult sport. Looked down upon by many as a freak show.

As hard as it is for male bodybuilders to gain acceptance as legitimate athletes, it’s even harder for female bodybuilders. The male bodybuilder creates an exaggeration of the male form. They have taken the shape and the characteristics of male-ness and pushed it to its limits. They give the impression of being a “super-male”. Though freakish to some, at least it’s consistent with their gender.

The problem for very muscular women is that as they become more muscular the general public sees them as becoming less feminine and more manly. This has been a growing problem for women’s bodybuilding since the early nineties as advances in training and chemistry have enabled female bodybuilders to far exceed their natural muscle building capacity. Debates about “feminity vs masculinity” in female bodybuilding are an eternally hot topic on bodybuilding forums around the world and discussed with the same fervor that “God vs no God” is debated here on Dangerous Intersection.

Into this fray jumps celebrated photographer Martin Schoeller. Martin’s latest project is a series on female bodybuilders that is being exhibited at the Ace Gallery starting in March. Known for his stark brand of portraiture, Martin’s work has a frankness that is often controversial. Presidents, royalty and celebrities have all sat in the glare of his harsh lighting. The result has been described as honest or raw; real or unflattering, depending upon your point of view.

Martin’s art intrigues me as a documentary filmmaker. Martin attempts to get a photograph of the “real” person by removing all artifice and getting them to let down their guard. He does this by stripping away every crutch that photographers, the photographed, and we as viewers have come to expect. There are no costumes, no props, no scenery, no backdrop, sometimes no makeup, no sense of place or time or fashion. What is left is deceptively simple and leads people to think that it is cheap or easy. It is not, because the hard part comes when he then attempts to disarm his subject, relax them and catch them off guard. A tactic that I endeavor to employ every time I shoot footage for my films.

True to form Martin photographs the bodybuilders when they are at their most vulnerable. Spirited away in the midst of their contests before they know their placings, some of them literally right off the stage, the women are exhausted, insecure and dehydrated. He then strips them of their last crutch…he does not allow them to pose. Asking a bodybuilder not to pose is like asking a singer not to sing, a dancer not to dance or a politician to be silent. There is nothing left to do but be yourself. (more…)

As some of you may know, I am a dedicated reader of Language Log, the blog where a bunch of linguists hold forth on a variety of topics, sometimes only tangentially related to linguistics. Their posts ridiculing ignorant peeve-rants about the degeneration of English are hugely enjoyable; but another frequent theme is bad science writing and modern forms of innumeracy.

However, in this post Mark Liberman singles out an article in the New York Times Magazine for praise for finding a way to explain how “small but statistically reliable differences in group distributions” should not be seen as “essential properties of the groups themselves.”

The article profiles a school that is changing its educational policies based on hack theories about male and female brains:

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Are there differences between male and female brains? Research findings suggest there are some. Does any brain research yet suggest that differential single-sex education is superior to co-ed classrooms? Hardly.

Scans of boys’ and girls’ brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. “Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage,” the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.

One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place.

Of course, in elementary school the height/locker room assignment would be almost completely random, and in middle school, there might be more girls than boys in in boys locker room, and vice-versa. A better analogy would be an adult fitness club that made locker room assignments based on height. How many people reading this might find themselves in the “wrong” locker room on this basis? And remember that the correlation between gender and height is stronger than the correlation between gender and brain development rates, (and also remember that there’s no evidence that the differential development rate is related to learning in any way.)

While being assigned to the wrong locker room would no doubt be traumatic, think about the harm that is caused by teaching girls that it is unfeminine to to like reptiles, or depriving boys of opportunities to learn how to work together cooperatively.

It’s time to chuck the “evidence-free rubbish” out of our schools.

I want to share with everyone a passage from the opening of the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. This silly 1980s movie provides a very oversimplified, idealized image of African Bushmen, but at the same time gets its label of modern westernized man spot-on. This excerpt from the film’s opening narration always makes me pause and consider the needless complexity of modern life:

“…Here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him.

So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But he didn’t know when to stop.

The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

For instance, if it’s Monday and 8:00 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings…and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 9:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 5 minutes…And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time…you adapt to new circumstances.

No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.”

Re-reading this part of the script really gets my mind a-brewing, thinking about all the wasteful, stress-inducing things we do to make life “easier”. More on this soon.

This speaker’s name is Randy Pausch. This video shows a farewell speech that Pausch originally gave to his students at Carnegie Mellon.

This video is well worth your eleven minutes, especially if you have far more than eleven minutes to live. One of Pausch’s closing lines: “If you live properly, your dreams will come to you.”

You can find an alternate site for this video here (he gave his speech a second time on Oprah).

For more information, here’s Randy Pausch’s homepage.

Bear with us as we improve this site. I realize that the comments function was not working this morning. That has now been fixed. Also, posting capacity was down for awhile. Those problems have been ironed out.

We’re making lots of changes here, most of them to the backside of the site. These changes (I am told by Nick Smith, our website designer) will make our site faster and easier to use. Last night, Nick upgraded this site to the newest version of WordPress, adding dozens of new plug-ins. We now have the capacity for podcasting and we will soon have the capacity to host our own videos.  We are considering numerous other changes that will improve navigation.

There are a few features that will appear (and, perhaps, disappear) on the home page in the next couple of days. We are trying out a few things and mulling them over.

If anyone has any comments on the usability or technical issues with this site, I would really appreciate your feedback, so we can address the situation.

In his post on our obliviousness to incremental changes, Erich referenced the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the 20th century. It was one of those pivotal changes that went almost unnoticed at the time.

A few days before Erich’s post, I picked up Floris-Jan Van Luyn’s A Floating City of Peasants: The Great Migration in Contemporary China at my local bookstore. Synchronicity?

The book contains very moving profiles and photographs of a handful of the some 120 million peasants who have left rural villages to find work in China’s larger cities since the 1990’s. This is not a “story” that gets much coverage in our press, but it’s one of the most history-changing events of recent times, in my opinion.

I urge everyone to take a look at this book, and then contemplate how much of the daily stuff of our lives here in the US owes to these people and their hopes and sufferings. Our national debt is being financed by China, out of wealth created by these migrant workers living for the most part without basic human rights or protections.

China’s development is bound to have major environmental consequences as well. In 2005/6, there were explosive protests against pollution and environmental degradation in rural China. Since then, there has been little news, but whether this has because the movement has been repressed, or that the Chinese government has succeeded in banning the international press from protests, I don’t know.I don’t have any answers or solutions or big pronouncements about globalization or economic/environmental justice right now. I’d simply like to advocate for attention over oblivion to what’s going on in China. The 2008 Olympics will certainly deliver a huge dose of spectacle, not exactly what’s needed.

Finally, continuing the the theme of one of my recent posts, Van Luyn includes in the book a calligraphy fragment from Yan Jun, a poet/musician in the underground music scene in Beijing. The piece is called “Against All Organized Deception.” I can’t find out much more about Yan Jun and his music or poetry, but you have to love the title.

You know that life is out of balance.

If you are looking for a provocative film that allows you to feel this problem, I have a classic video to recommend.  I just saw it tonight for the first time: Koyaanisqatsi. The 1982 film was directed by Godfrey Reggio.  Ron Fricke provided the memorable cinematography and Philip Glass provided the haunting music.

In a documentary that accompanies the current version of the DVD, Reggio explains:

[T]hese films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

The title of the film comes from the Hopi language. At the end of the film, Reggio provided a multi-part definition based on the Hopi etymology: 

1. crazy life; 2. life in turmoil; 3. life out of balance; 4. life disintegrating; 5. a state of life that calls for a different way of living.

I really do enjoy these displays of gadgetry. Quite clever. I just wish I could read the little notes at the end of each episode–I assume I’m missing a good joke.

I stumbled onto this excellent column by Damian Thompson about the modern proliferation of pseudo-information. That is, the way various formerly obscure conspiracy cults (UFO’s, moon landing hoaxers, second-shooters, 9/11 Truthers, Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Inflating Earthers, etc) manage to disseminate their beliefs convincingly to wide and gullible audiences.

Before Gutenberg, only reliable, church-approved texts could be widely read in western culture. Then a new technology came along, and suddenly heretics like Martin Luther or Galileo could publish widely before the church could disappear them and their ideas. It took a few generations to settle down to the publishing and  editorial ethic that made it clear which information was reliable and accepted, and which was fringe. It helped that there was still some economic hurdle to wide publication, and publishers needed to maintain their reputations. This lasted until almost the end of the 20^th century.

Now, we have the web. Any misinformed but layout-talented individual can produce publications (pages) that look as wise, vetted, and reliable as Britannica. But without the necessity of prissy little details like fact checking or actual expertise in the subjects being purveyed. Must it be another couple of generations before the average browser can tell fact from fancy?

(more…)

I’m a newcomer to an extremely popular website called Lifehack.  The site specializes in “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.” 

There is obviously a lot to consider at Lifehack.org.  One might wonder, though, how much time one should spend on productivity lest one’s productivity sags.  Despite this self-limiting concern, Lifehacks marches on relentlessly, reporting on hundreds of ideas, big and small, that claim to enhance productivity. 

I really enjoyed a post called:  “Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus.”  Mingus was a highly respected bass player, composer and band leader. 

I’ve played a fair share of jazz guitar over the years (I’ve long been inspired by the music of Wes Montgomery).  that experience often has me wondering how much of those jazz techniques transferred over to other activities.  In particular, is jazz playing merely good subliminal therapy, mental chiropractic, or do some of those jazz skills have clear relevance to other domains?

The author of this Mingus post, Dustin Wax, was inspired by Mingus’ autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, arguing that some jazz techniques do indeed transfer to other walks of life.  To me, Wax’s arguments make intuitive sense.  His article is succinct and well-crafted.  Here’s a sample:

You don’t play alone: Too many people think about the great Jazz geniuses as exemplars of individualism: free minds striving for greatness. Here’s what Mingus would do when a soloist thought too highly of his own genius — he’d direct the band to stop playing, leaving the soloist hanging without any backup, looking like a fool. Improvisation is as much about the relationships between people as it is about our own self-expression; work with the input of those around you instead of trying to stand out against it.

Here are some of Mingus’ jazz rules Dustin Wax found to be useful beyond jazz playing.  I found myself nodding agreement to each of these:

Go with the flow

Learn the rules so you can break them

Play by ear

Embrace limits (Infinite choice is paralyzing)

When you make a mistake, keep playing

Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old.  We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories.  These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments.  Many of these posts (I’m guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day, and will age quickly.  There are many other posts that may be of some value months or even years after they were written, however.  Our authors work hard to embed useful quality links in their posts in an effort to inject lasting value into their posts.

Quite often, I run into a topic that has been addressed in some detail by a previous post.  Tracking down those older posts can sometimes be a challenge. The Dangerous Intersection website, which is built upon WordPress, includes a search function that often works fairly well in digging up previous posts and comments.  On other occasions, however, the algorithm of that simple search function pulls up too few or too many search results to be useful.

On those occasions, I have turned to the exquisite “Advanced Search” function of Google.  Google’s Advanced Search allows you to focus on the content of a particular website.  You can do this by inserting the URL of that website into the “Domain” field. For instance, if you wanted to search only content found on Dangerous Intersection, merely insert http://dangerousintersection.org/ into the Domain box.

At that point, you can continue to fine-tune your search in many additional ways.  See, for example, the top four fields on the advanced search screen.  You can request Google to return only those results that contain each of the words you enter, or an exact phrase, or all those results containing at least one of a string of words.  You can also ask Google to exclude content containing a word or words that you designate.

You can fine-tune your search request in other ways too.  For instance, you can request content within certain date ranges or limit your search to content found in certain parts of a webpage (e.g., only in the title).  For more assistance in using Google’s advanced search, see the Google Help Screen for it’s Advanced Search.

I offer this information regarding Google advanced search for those of you who might want to search for information on this site (or on any website) where the simple search feature offered on the website itself doesn’t quite get the job done.

If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”

This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).

One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.

Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (”unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.

(more…)

I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.

Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.

Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.

Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.

This book gives plenty of ammo to those arguing against Creationists whose understanding of biological evolution might be along the lines of the Creationist apology: Evolution: The Fossils Say No! That book seriously misrepresents what fossils are, how many there are, where they are found, and what they’ve been discovered to mean, when, and by whom. But its main claim is that evolution is a theory based only on fossils. The Making of the Fittest barely mentions fossils (outside of those within the genome) and completely supports and explains evolutionary theory.

What about “new” traits being spontaneously created where they weren’t before? (more…)

Psyblog presents a handy summary of ten of the most famous social psychology studies. The post is a succinct review of each of the following studies, along with thoughtful commentary.  The social psychological studies include the following:

 1. The Halo Effect - Nisbett
 2. Cognitive Dissonance - Festinger
 3. Robbers Cave - Sherif
 4. Stanford Prison Experiment - Zimbardo
 5. Obedience to Authority - Milgram
 6. False Consensus Bias - Ross
 7. Social Identity Theory - Tajfel
 8. Bargaining - Deutsch
 9. Bystander Apathy - Darley & Latane
 10. Conforming to the Norm - Asch

Who is Psyblog?  It’s Jeremy Dean, a lawyer/psychologist who has assembled an impressive collection of clearly written posts on various aspects of psychology.  It’s definitely worth a visit–though you might end up staying for quite awhile.  I certainly did. 

Other recent Psyblog posts include the following:  Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind? (it’s questionable) and Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted.   And why is career planning wasted?  Because we aren’t even capable of knowing what sandwich we’ll want each day for the upcoming week, much less our job preferences.  “Your future self is probably a stranger to you.”  In fact, “70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.”

One of my favorite current cartoonists is Brooke McEldowney. I discovered his work online a few years ago in the form of “A Fairy Merry Christmas”. In the interest of copyright non-violation, I’ll leave it to youse to Google up your own excerpts.

This cartoon series was an NEA sponsored 6 week series. Finally, a use of NEA funds that anyone can appreciate. Except that it only appeared online, and maybe in a few papers. Anyway, I was captivated by the sense of humor. It doesn’t hurt that McEldowney has a magnificent grasp of sensual line in his figure drawing.

After its conclusion, I found his two other strips, 9 Chickweed Lane, and Pibgorn. It took my local paper about another 2 years to discover either one of these, but I’ve been reading them online. (Pibgorn is temporarily without a home as of this writing).

Well, I’ve started reading the cartoonist’s blog, wherein he refers to his teenage daughters as Snark Major and Snark Minor. This led me to one of the Snarks own blog, currently written from her post as a freshman at Aarkvard University (arch rival of Dale, you know).

So, if you want to follow a mental roller coaster of exceptionally twisted and oblique prose, check these out. I had enough fun there to be willing to impose it on yall.

I was shown this clip at a conference today. It’s already made the rounds, but it’s worth a chuckle or two if your haven’t yet seen it.

If I were asked to divide the world into two groups of people, I would flatly refuse. It is extremely unfair, I would argue that it would be absurd to divide humans, as ineffably complex and diverse as they are, on the basis of one quality or trait. But then again, that would just be me being politically correct. I actually believe that on some level, all of us tend of categorize people into two groups on the basis of one overarching quality. We tend to empathize with individuals who ‘have’ that quality, and believe that the world would be a better place if everyone were like them. For some this ‘vital’ quality is hard work, for others humility, and for some others, it may be looks, or a sense of style. The quality that I regard as most important is the ability to be affected by your surroundings.

I have to come to realize that I have always tended to view the world as consisting of two groups of people. The first group consists of individuals who only concern themselves with the interests of their own selves and that of the immediate circle of family and friends. These individuals do the work that is expected of them, and have no interest or concern for people who are not directly related to them. The other group, whose members I admire, consists of individuals who feel connected to and, hence, are affected by the larger environment they live in.   They take a keen interest in their extended surroundings. Some of them even have a sense of moral obligation to alleviate humanity and human condition as a whole. I term people who belong to the former group as ’shallow’ and people who belong to the latter group as ‘humane’. Lately though, I have noticed, in many instances, an inexplicable overlapping of these two groups. Some people are so difficult to categorize into either of these groups that I have begun to question the very foundation of my system of assigning worth to individuals. Are the “humane” people of today genuinely humane, or are they merely a more fashionable manifestation of an all-pervasive shallowness?

In this context, I would like to mention two movies which dwell on moral ambiguity amidst urban decadence, the first being French film director Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960’s movie Masculin Feminin. A fragmented and frustratingly abstruse movie, the movie documents (and comments on) the attitudes among the French youth in the 1960’s, is universal in its significance.  The filmmaker’s thoughts are equally valid for any youth almost anywhere in the developed or developing world today. The movie is about the doomed relationship between Paul, a young, politically aware, conscientious, idealistic man, and Madeleine, a girl who is an ardent consumer of pop culture, whose conscience has been rendered inactive by the self-indulgence encouraged by the consumerist culture around her. Through most of the movie, Madeleine is shown to be an insouciant creature. An aspiring pop-singer, she generally sports a blank expression on her face, inert to almost any problem around her, and most of her time is spent in combing her hair and applying make-up.

It would be easy to think that the director uses these two characters to represent the two ends of our modern moral spectrum: Paul, as an “ideal” human being, someone whom we must aspire to be like, and Madeleine as a symbol of urban decadence, the modern automaton, devoid of soul. But that is not the case, as the director is equally critical of both characters. The criticisms levelled against Madeleine, the quintessential consumer of modern capitalism, may have seemed unique in the 1960’s, but by now are commonplace in social and cultural criticism. She is a self-obsessed, vacuous woman who, despite her lack of intelligence and talent, manages to find success as a pop star.  This woman represents the modern individualistic and anti-communal notions of success. In a striking segment of the film entitled “Interview with a consumer product”, Paul interviews a young teenaged girl who has been chosen as the face of a fashion magazine. The girl has no qualms in admitting her ignorance of almost all political events around the world. Yet, she admits she is drawn towards rebels, and dislikes ‘yes men’. The last point made by her is quite telling.

In this context, I would like to reference another movie, “Network”, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1976.  (more…)

The state of Missouri has never had an official poet laureate.  Like many people, I didn’t know that, although unlike many of those many people, I should have.  One of the hats I wear (besides the one in the cool profile photo above) is the president of the Missouri Center for the Book.

What, you may ask, is the Missouri Center for the Book and what, furthermore, does it have to do with state poets laureate?

I’m so glad you asked.  The Missouri Center for the Book (hereafter known as MCB) is the state affiliate to the Library of Congress Center for the Book.  All 50 states have such an institution now, and we are all as different in our structure and specific goals as those states.  The common thread is that we are all dedicated to promoting what we call the Culture of the Book.  This includes authors, certainly, but also publishers, editors, reviewers, literature teachers, schools.  We see all these things as inextricably part and parcel of that culture, though obviously authors are the most visible part.

We do not do remedial reading work.  There are other agencies that do that and do it far better than we could.  That’s not our mandate.

In our heyday, the first several years after our founding in 1993, we did all sorts of things to promote the idea of books and reading, mostly through the mechanism of conferences which addressed certain themes.  We had notable guests, lots of writers and publishers, an open forum.

And then, as happens in such things, funding slipped away and we did smaller and smaller programs.

Among the things we do is administer the state Letters About Literature contest, which is a very cool program for three levels of students, primary to secondary, in which a student writes a letter to the author of a book that has had a significant impact on that student.  We select the best, the winners go on to a national contest.  Some of these letters, even from very young students, are tremendous.  They give me hope for the future.  Quiet hope, a confidence that we have a chance, that the young are not dumber than their parents or grandparents, but are generally smarter.

As president for the past three years, I’ve been reorganizing and rebuilding the MCB.  We have plans to relaunch the conferences.  We intend to rebuild our website, which contains an author database which was, when it was instituted, the first of its kind in the nation.  We intend that it be made interactive.  That’s going to be a bit pricey, but once done it will be a great tool.

There are other programs we’d like to do.

But one thing we’ve been working at for the last eight years, doggedly and consistently, is the creation of a state poet laureate.  I won’t go into the details of that effort, they would bore you.  Mostly the work consisted of letter writing, long conversations with “influential” people, planning the structure of the post, often just being a pest.  MCB itself could not do this—for it to be “official” it must come from either the governor or the legislature.  Most states, it is an appointment of the governor.  It boils down to convincing the governor to do it.

Governor Blunt has decided to do it.  Last month we received word that the position would be created and the first poet laureate will be named in mid-December.  MCB has been named the agency which will administer the post and work on selection.

Warning:  what follows is an unapologetic promotional request for financial support.

I canvassed a number of states about their poet laureate programs.  There are about 8 or 9 states that do not have the position.  Among the others, the post is largely honorary, with no funding.  From the beginning, we thought the post should have some money behind.  It is incredibly difficult to make a living as a writer, triply so as a writer of poetry.  Besides, we intend for our laureates to travel the state, speaking on the matter of the literary arts.  That shouldn’t come out of the laureate’s own pocket.  But we’ve already learned that Missouri’s laureate post will also, as far as the state government is concerned, be honorary.

So I am asking for donations.  MCB’s future programming efforts will be built around the poet laureate–not specifically so much as thematically.  Missouri is stepping up to the plate, symbolically, to declare that literature, that reading, that authors are actually important.  In order to move forward and take advantage of the very public opportunity this is giving the Culture of the Book, we want to put some teeth behind it.

You can go to our website– books.missouri.org –and read a bit more about us.  Mind you, the site as it stands is going to be changed in a year or so, but there’s still worthwhile content.  If given the chance and the support, we intend doing a job of elevating the stature of the written word in Missouri.  So if you are so inclined, please send your tax deductible donations to:

Missouri Center for the Book
600 West Main,
P.O. Box 2075
Jefferson City, MO 65102-2075,

or call 573-751-1821

Before you ask, I cleared this with Erich.  MCB is a 501c3 nonprofit organization (which receives no money from state or federal sources).

As I said, I am unapologetically, unabashedly, unashamedly asking for money.  We want to pay our poets laureate a reasonable honorarium and we want to fund programs that will do for books what PBS does for documentary film or NPR does for radio broadcasting.  Granted, on a more modest scale, but still.

The governor has decided to announce this before Christmas.  Seems like a good time to give a present to the state and to make a stab at doing better for one of the things we all love and need so much—good books.

Thank you for your time and attention.

On October 20 and 21st, 2007, Blumenthal attended the Value Voters Summit, “a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.”

I admire Blumenthal’s work.  He sticks his nose under the tent to allow us to see what ordinary and celebrity neocons really think.  We get access to unvarnished ultra-conservatism at the click of a “Play” button, thanks to his persistent digging.  

This particular convention, the Value Voters Summit lets you see the far right the way they see each other.  It’s not the diluted version that they present when the national news shows come calling.  

For other videos by Blumenthal, see here (The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour) and here (his personal effort to draft College Republicans).

[If you found Blumenthal's video interesting, check out this 2007 Bill Moyers video regarding yet another ultra-conservative convention]

Here’s another of those memorable videos making the rounds on Stumbleupon.com.  It’s well worth a viewing or three or five. 

I have a friend who wrote a song to me. (Free mp3 download courtesy of Anderson Productions, Ltd.) “Dear Friend” appeared on Russ Anderson’s 2003 album, “Arsenal Street”. All his CD’s are Available here. I recommend listening to the song before proceeding.

This nice, eerie, and sometimes psychedelic song is a heartfelt plea for me to discard my narrow, science-informed view of the world and just try to accept the ultimate truth of his favorite, ancient, re-translated book.
When my very Christian 11 year old nephew heard the song,