South Of Heaven

A hat tip to F. Murray Abraham

For ninety-nine percent of us, F. Murray Abraham won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role of Salieri in the movie "Amadeus" and then... disappeared.

But he's been around, making movies that you've never heard of, or performing on stage (lots of Shakespeare, as well as Beckett and Gilbert and Sullivan) or teaching theater at Brooklyn College. He's been a drug dealer (in "Scarface") and portrayed a green leaf in a Fruit of the Loom commercial. Some people have called his Oscar a curse to his career, but he seems to be quite happy. He said, "Even though I won the Oscar, I can still take the subway and nobody recognizes me. Some actors might find that disconcerting, but I find it refreshing."

But I'm saluting him because I keep coming across his warm, rich, intelligent voice on public television nature documentaries. I just took a trip to a very weird stretch of the Andes last night and Abraham named all the strange animals and their bizarre and wonderfuls lives.

So, thanks, Murray.

Lies about torture

I know people get tired of articles about the Administration lying about torture but this one is pretty good.

Eddie Izzard rocks 'em.

Eddie Izzard is knocking them dead on his comedy tour. Girlfriend's two daughters went to see him Friday night. A hoot and a half. Here's a review.

"Tonight I thought I'd talk about everything," Eddie Izzard told a packed Orpheum Theatre at Thursday's opening of his solo show, "Stripped." Two hours later, he'd almost made good on that promise. The dizzyingly free-associating British comic had veered from the creation of the universe to his TV show, "The Riches," and current events ("It's not our place in Europe to encourage you, but vote for Barack or we'll start a war"), and from the glories of San Francisco ("Your city is shaped like a thumb") to the intersection of politics and theology ("I talked to God and he said he never heard of George W. Bush").

One issue he didn't address, which might be of more interest here than elsewhere on this 54-city American tour, is his attire. Izzard, sporting a short blond goatee, strode onstage in a tailcoat, jeans and pink striped shirt - a far cry from the tight dresses and spike heels of his previous transvestite-stand-up outings, "Circle" (at the Curran in 2000) or "Sexie" (at the Orpheum in '03).

Not that it made much difference to the audience that greeted Izzard Thursday with the enthusiasm usually reserved for rock bands - or probably will to those lucky enough to see his remaining local show (through tonight). Even stripped of his usual gear, Izzard is a hilariously provocative and iconoclastic phenom.

That just about makes it unanimous

Look who wants American troops out of Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says U.S. troops should leave Iraq "as soon as possible," according to a magazine report, and he called presidential candidate Barack Obama's suggestion of 16 months "the right timeframe for a withdrawal."

In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine released Saturday, al-Maliki said he was not seeking to endorse Obama. The Illinois senator and likely Democratic nominee has pledged to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months if he is elected.

"That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," al-Maliki was quoted as saying. "Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems."

Asked when U.S. forces would leave Iraq, he responded, "As soon as possible, as far a we're concerned."

That just about makes it unanimous, except for Dubya and McSame. It also suggests that the war will end in our lifetimes.

CJR on MoDo

We know it's a little slow in the political campaign this time of the cycle, but Maureen Dowd keeps up the dirty work.

The only evidence presented in the column that Obama has been “stingy with his quips and smiles,” by the way, is that he didn’t laugh at a drawing depicting him as a Muslim supporter of Bin Laden and his wife as a gun-toting Black Panther. Meanwhile, John McCain, who once reportedly called his wife a "cunt" after she joshed him, in front of reporters, about going bald, strikes Dowd as “a guy who can be teased harmlessly.”

But Dowd has another concern about Obama. He’s “in danger of seeming too prissy about food.”

In reality, it would be more accurate to say that he already seems this way…to Maureen Dowd. During the primaries, Dowd began to sense that Obama might not be a big fan of junk food. Since then, she has elevated this observation to the status of a brilliant character-revealing aperçu. She has mined every available piece of evidence in a dogged campaign to turn Obama’s eating habits into a proxy for his alleged inability to relate to those white working-class Americans for whom, from her Georgetown townhouse, she claims to speak.

Death by a thousand little cuts. In the meantime maybe MoDo can tell us what's on her menu. My guess is that there's no Wonderbread in her kitchen.

Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road

Ben & Jerry's is making an Elton John ice cream.

The limited-batch ice cream, made from "an outrageous symphony of decadent chocolate ice cream, peanut butter cookie dough, butter brickle and white chocolate chunks," is a take-off on his 1970s album and song Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Just keeping you posted with the news.

San Francisco is the most "walkable" city in America.

So says this story in the San Francisco Chronicle. (If the link doesn't work, it's because TYPEPAD's link button doesn't work.)

The city by the bay is the most "walkable" in the nation, according to rankings set for release today by WalkScore.com, a service designed to help those seeking a less automobile-dependent life. The distinction encompasses a host of environmental, health and economic advantages.

WalkScore, a division of Seattle software company Front Seat, evaluated the 40 largest U.S. cities based on residents' proximity to grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants, movie theaters and other amenities. Hills were not taken into account in the rankings, just distance and concentration.

San Francisco scored an 86 out of 100, besting New York's 83 and Boston's 79. Seventeen of San Francisco's neighborhoods ranked 90 or above - considered a "walker's paradise" - including Chinatown, the Mission, Nob Hill and Haight-Ashbury.

When I first was a letter carrier in San Francisco in the late 1970s the Chamber of Commerce put out a map that showed downtown San Francisco right next to Golden Gate Park. That summer a lot of unsuspecting German tourists ended up wandering into the Western Addition, one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in the City. Some of the tough kids in Banneker Way, one more dangerous projects, would swoop down on them.

I guess that the moral is that if you walk around, even in the most walkable city, make sure you've got a good map.

Comedy?

As a continuation of what is and isn't funny politically, here are a few links:

My sister pointed out JibJab as a good source of political humor. Try this. Excellent production values. I know, some political purists at Hullabaloo don't like JibJab. It wasn't incisive enough. Screw 'em (figuratively).

Here is Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter. It seems to run twice a week, tends to reference SF bay area news stories along with national ones. There's an archive button, so use it.

Here's Mark Fiore. Likewise, please visit the archives.

And here is This Modern World's take on The New Yorker cover. Worth the effort to link. Snark within snark wrapped in snark.

By the way, here's al-Jazeera's take on the whole New Yorker flap. Not funny, but good reporting so that the rest of the world can try to figure out America's sense of humor (or lack of it).

What's so funny 'bout political satire?

I got an email from my ex the other day. The headline announced, "I found him!" My immediate thought was that she'd found a replacement for the bum she'd been married to, or at least had some kind of religious conversion. [Please note: that was a joke.]

Actually, what she was referencing was a discussion we'd had years ago, listening to Tom Lehrer songs. I'd made a comment about how there weren't any good political satirists anymore.

The story goes that Lehrer quit writing songs when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming that satire was dead. He actually had dropped out of the musical business a few years earlier because he was bored with touring and playing the same songs night after night. He did say something about Kissinger and political satire and obsolescence, but it wasn't the direct cause of his quitting the business.

Anyway, the reason for my ex's email was her discovery of Roy Zimmerman, a songwriting political satirist from the San Francisco Bay Area. The guy writes funny stuff and comes from the same general part of the political spectrum as Lehrer did. I went out and got an album by him. If you liked Lehrer you'll like Zimmerman. More on him later.

What's funny and not funny in the world of politics has been on the front burner this week, mostly because of The New Yorker's cover cartoon of the Obamas in the White House. It has Barack dressed as a Muslim militant giving the terrorist fist jab to his wife, who is made out like Angela Davis. Above the fireplace is a picture of bin Laden, in the fireplace is a flag burning. The title of it is "The Politics of Fear." You'd think from the absurd collection of images and the title that it would be pretty obvious that the drawing was mocking the Republican fear mongers. The problem, apparently, was that some righties were using the cartoon as an illustration of their vision of the truth, ignoring the satire entirely. As if Tom Lehrer's song "Pollution" justified lowering the clean water standards.

So I guess that the first question would be: Is it satire if the people you're making fun of don't get it?

Over at Hullabaloo there was a mighty discussion going on. Things like "cognitive dissonance" were being thrown around, people were charging the cartoonist and The New Yorker with being racist. I'd been pulled into a heated discussion there last spring over the "pimp" controversy. A talking head on MSNBC made a snide comment about the unseemliness of the Clinton's "pimping" their daughter to do political rallies. The outrage and charges of sexism were amazing. And any attempt to disagree condemned you to being a sexist yourself. Now this is the Year 2008. "Pimping" has been used by the underclass and under 25s for years as a synonym for "selling." The usage has become so common that there is a TV show on MTV about accessorizing cars called "Pimp My Ride," competing with CMT's "Make My Truck Shiny." [Note: That was a joke.] People posting at Hullabaloo were saying How dare these people accuse Bill and Hillary of prostituting Chelsea! I tried to explain that it was a figure of speech, not a literal accusation, to no avail. If that MSNBC talking head really wanted to smear Chelsea and her parents he only had to mention that she is working for a hedge fund on Wall Street. [Note: that was kind of a joke.]

In fact, looking at a distance at Hillary Clinton's campaign it takes on a two-tiered shape. On one level it was all outrage, with supporters and staff ferreting out anything that could in any way be interpreted as sexist. More discreetly, her hitpeople kept feeding all sorts of "oppo research" to her friends in the media. The result was an exhausting, humorless campaign which ended when her suggestion that she should maybe stick around because something might happen like what happened to Bobby Kennedy didn't pull in enough voters. I suspect that some of the same people who had no humor then still have no humor.

Not that lack of a funnybone is all on the Left. Al Franken, the kind of dweeby, smarmy wonk who used to host a show on Air America Radio, isn't doing well in his race against Norm Coleman in the Minnesota senatorial race. If you recall, Franken used to be a writer and occasionally appeared as a comic on "Saturday Night Live." Coleman's people have been uncovering old comedy routines to smear Franken. For example, the one about how Franken praised the internet for helping his son research his fifth grade paper on bestiality. Talk about literal. Good Minnesotans don't like children looking at bestiality on the internet!

What is becoming very clear in this campaign is that there are a lot of people walking the streets who don't get satire. And that's why Rob Schneider is a millionaire.

Not only don't a lot of people get satire, but a lot of people count on people not getting, well, anything. When the Reagan campaign used Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" as theme song at political rallies they knew that the song was about a returning war vet who's life was screwed up. They just felt sure that their target audience wasn't going to get past the chorus, "Born in the USA!" And they were right. If Bill O'Reilly held up the cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker, he's not laughing at himself; and he's counting on his audience not getting that the joke is on him. Or them.

Thom Hartmann, who's usually pretty good at sussing out things, climbed on the outrage train too, saying that the cartoon wasn't "satire" but "caricature," and therefore was making fun of the Obamas. Like I say, he usually gets it, but he missed on the JFK thing too.

Caricature: I used to listen to the Stephanie Miller Show on radio in the mornings until Girlfriend complained that it was racist. I'd never noticed. Turns out there's a comedian who has an "Asian" voice. If North Korea's dictator is in the news you get this guy doing the "Hey Joe, why you so smart 'bouta..." stock Asian voice. If Myanmar is in the news, you get "Hey Joe, why you so smart 'bouta..." If there's someone Chinese in the news... Or Japanese. You get the point. I believe that the Firesign Theatre had the same Asian voice fatigue. Maybe if the routines on SMS relied less on caricature and more on substance they would have been funnier and less offensive.

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So what's funny? Well, Roy Zimmerman is funny. You can catch him on You Tube.I just picked up a copy of his album, "Faulty Intelligence." It's available on Amazon. The songs are well-arranged, with a full band and backup singers. If you miss Tom Lehrer, try Roy Zimmerman.

Here's a song of mine of some small satirical value, written back in the 80s when the remains of MIAs were being returned from Vietnam and many people were clinging to the hope that there were thousands of soldiers being held in camps there. You know, the Rambo thing. Maybe the song was a little too cutting.

Download mystery_prison.mp3

Maybe not so funny. Nobody likes my early 90s rap song chronicling the fall of the Soviet Union as told by an athlete looking for hooking up with babes on other Olympic teams ("Those Communist chicks with their steroid fix are overpowerin' sometimes, and small talk is off-the-wall talk when the government controls their minds..."). And yet I thought it was brilliant.

The fishing used to be better there...

...when there was water.

Mars once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers and a variety of other wet environments that had the potential to support life, according to two new studies based on data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and other instruments on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

"The big surprise from these new results is how pervasive and long-lasting Mars' water was, and how diverse the wet environments were," says Scott Murchie, CRISM's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md.

One study, published in the July 17 issue of Nature, shows that vast regions of the ancient highlands of Mars—which cover about half the planet—contain clay minerals, which can form only in the presence of water. Volcanic lavas buried the clay-rich regions during subsequent, drier periods of the planet's history, but impact craters later exposed them at thousands of locations across the planet.