Excused Lame

Renée Fleming sings Glück das mir verblieb from Die Tote Stadt by Erich Wolfgang Korngold at the Metropolitan Opera’s 125th anniversary gala.

Off this weekend to the Reliant Series of Dog Shows at the Reliant Center in Houston.  We had two dogs entered for the three days of shows, our class boy Dutch (Soyara’s The Flying Dutchman) and our special Knight (Ch. Soyara’s Sir Agravaine Ex Libris CGC).  On Friday (Houston KC), Dutch was Best of Winners for a 3-point major under Mrs. Houston Clark; some way to get your first points!

On Saturday (Beaumont KC), we were astonished when Col. Joe Purkhiser gave Dutch Best of Breed over five specials, good for a 5-point major.  Of course he didn’t do anything in the Hound Group – not with the likes of Brian Livingston, Bruce Schultz, Erin Roberts and Lori Wilson handling their BIS winners – but we’re delighted that the Beeg Boy has in a weekend completed the hardest part of his championship quest, getting his two majors.

Today (Galveston KC) for reasons unknown, Dutch had an aversion to the judge, shied away when examined, didn’t show particularly well and went Reserve; Friday and Saturday’s Winners Bitch was similarly afflicted.  We were happy that the Winners Dog went on to go Best of Winners for his second major and his championship.  Knight, who showed superbly all weekend, was Select Dog.

While at the shows, we took the opportunity to have Mike McCartney do Dutch’s portrait.  I think he captured him well!

Long-time Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has died at the age of 80.  Megan McArdle points out the shrewdness of The Boss’s demise:  by dying in 2010 he spared his family paying estate taxes.  She adds,

There’s actually a pretty solid body of evidence that the estate tax can affect the timing of deaths.  Right before it goes up, wealthy people have a tendency to die early; right before it goes down, they live longer than expected.

The Yankees, purchased in 1973 for $10 million, are now worth some $1.6 billion.  Think of how much this untimely death is costing the government!

But do not fear.  Under the never-to-be-insufficiently-prayed-for Obama-Pelosi-Reid health care system, the wealthy will die at exactly the right time for their value to be maximized for the benefit of the Treasury coffers.  The health care panels will see to that.

At last, a good use for the New York Times:

Cellulose ethanol production from waste newsprint by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae KNU5377

Insu Parka, Ilsup Kima, Kyunghee Kanga, Hoyong Sohnd, Inkoo Rheeb, Ingnyol Jina

Process Biochemistry (Amsterdam, Netherlands) (2010), 45(4), 487-492

Abstract:  A thermotolerant ethanol-fermenting yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae KNU5377, isolated from a sludge of a local industrial complex stream in Korea, was evaluated for its capability for lignocellulosic ethanol production from waste newsprint in high temperature. In this fermentation, most of dry-defibrated waste newspaper was first saccharified at 50 °C for 108 h using a commercial cellulase and, then with the last addition of dry-defibrated newsprints to the pre-saccharified broth, simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) of 1.0 L of reaction mixture was carried out at 40 °C, slowly being dropped from 50 °C, for further 72 h in a 5 L fermentor by inoculating the overnight culture of KNU5377. The maximum production of 8.4% (v/v) ethanol was obtained when 250 g (w/v)/L of dry-defibrated waste newspaper was used for ethanol production by SSF. These results suggest that S. cerevisiae KNU5377 is very useful for cellulose ethanol production by the SSF system.

The music of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) is principally represented in performance by his nine great symphonies.  Rather less well known is his religious music, not only the three masses (in D minor, E minor and F minor) of his mature years and the Te Deum but also by his exquisite motets like Os Justi, Christus Factus Est Pro Nobis and Vexilla Regis.

Even less known is Bruckner’s secular choral music, now pretty much represented in the repertory by Helgoland for male chorus and orchestra.  Here’s a rare performance of his Abendzauber in G flat major for baritone, male chorus, three yodelers and four horns, written in 1878 soon after the disastrous premiere of the Third Symphony.

Ahhh, it’s been a good month for emptying the world of these dirtbags!

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation with a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died on Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87. […]

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his stature as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.

To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

Another Red bites the dust!

Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88.

The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, her son Bill Engst said.

Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and plutonium.

When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid near a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event.

“We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”

Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate.

In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.” […]

She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause.

“It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”

There are more ways than nuclear weapons to kill millions of people.  Ms. Hinton wholeheartedly embraced a philosophy that did exactly that; no doubt she was spared its consequences by her nationality.

What a monster.  What a moral nullity. No great loss to the world.

Who knew that the Good Lord had such a sense of humor?

A six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ with his arms raised along a highway was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm Monday night and burned to the ground, police said.

The “King of Kings” statue, one of southwest Ohio’s most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m., Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained early Tuesday.

Here’s a picture of Touchdown Jesus Himself:

We used to drive past it all the time going north to Dayton after getting on I-75 at Ohio 63.  That such an object has met its Nemesis shows that the Almighty has better taste than we thought.  It’s one thing for time, labor and money to be spent to raise a medieval cathedral to the greater glory of God, but $250,000 on something this ugly is positively blasphemous.

A very good question asked by Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times is, “How much would you spend on a sick pet?”

Most pet owners say that cost is a factor when deciding whether to seek medical care for a sick dog or cat. And about 40 percent worry they won’t be able to afford care when it’s needed, according to a new survey from the Associated Press and the Web site Petside.com.

Most pet owners (62 percent) said they would likely pay for pet health care even if the cost reached $500, but that means more than a third of pet owners said that might be too much to spend on an animal.

What if the bill for veterinary care reached $1,000? Fewer than half of pet owners said they were very likely to spend that much at the vet. Only a third said it was very likely they would pay a $2,000 vet bill.

Once the cost of saving a sick pet reached $5,000, most pet owners said they would stop treatment. Only 22 percent said they were very likely to pick up $5,000 in veterinary costs to treat a sick dog or cat.

For us, the answer is “it depends.”  Our criterion is the value of life:  if a full recovery and a normal quality of life are likely, then we just have to suck it up.  Possum developed a huge malignant tumor on her chest when she was 8.  Amazingly, it wasn’t attached to any bone nor were there any major blood vessels running through it.  We had the surgery done and she lived several more comfortable and happy years.

Ilya fell gravely ill on his arrival in Texas last year.  We rushed him to the vet and had to make a very fast decision about having surgery.  Since the prognosis was a good one if he survived, we went ahead; the cost of the surgery and convalescence came to $3500 but today Ilya is happy, healthy and sparring with his brother.

On the other hand, when Rowdy was diagnosed with cancer in his shoulder and we were told that amputation or euthanasia were the only alternatives, we did not hesitate to put him to sleep.  Beyond the question of his life expectancy afterwards, how could we ask an active, running dog like a Borzoi to get around on three legs?

Who could look forward spending a couple of thousand dollars on treatment for a pet?  Yet we brought them into this world and it’s our responsibility to take care of them as long as they can enjoy their lives with us and not spend their days in pain.  Either going too far or not going far enough does them no service.

From Don Surber, discussing the qualities of Our President:

As to constitutional lawyer, I get the feeling he studied that that document with the same contempt an atheist may attack the Bible.

Congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks, who won the Stanley Cup with an 4-3 overtime win over the Philadelphia Flyers last night.

I was pulling for the Flyers, of course, but I could see the writing on the wall in Game 4, when Chicago coach Joe Quenneville shuffled his lines and the Hawks scored twice in the 3rd period to make a blowout uncomfortably close.  Despite their gritty play, Philadelphia was clearly outmatched in Games 5 and 6. 

And congratulations to the Flyers as well.  They made the playoffs only in the final game of the season (and on a shootout, no less) but went on to defeat New Jersey and Boston (both to my great delight) before putting down Montreal to go to the finals.

This is Chicago’s first Cup since 1961.  Now the longest wait for a Cup belongs to Toronto (since 1967), Los Angeles and St. Louis (none since joining the league in 1967), Buffalo and Vancouver (none since joining in 1970) and Boston (since 1972).

Where else but the New York Times?

To the Editor:

The energy bills coming out of both the House and the Senate prove yet again how utterly ineffectual our political system is at really solving the nation’s biggest problems. The bills do not go nearly far enough to wean the United States off foreign oil or fossil fuels. The United States has the resources and technological capacity to do both, but we obviously don’t have the will to make it happen.

What is really needed is a John F. Kennedy man on the moon moment. Barack Obama should make the following statement to set in motion what is needed:

“In 15 years the United States will no longer import any more oil. The United States can become entirely energy self-sufficient using emerging and established clean energy sources, including a combination of nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels. To help pay for the transition, a simple yet substantial carbon tax will be implemented.”

Oh, I can just imagine the Rt. Hon. Abraham Delano Fitzgerald Mahatma Obama delivering a speech like this!  Especially the “substantial carbon tax” part to generate plenty of smoosh to give to his pet constituencies.

Helen Thomas has been retired with extreme prejudice after videotaped remarks suggesting that the Jews in Israel “go home” to Poland and Germany where, when she became a reporter in 1943, they were being treated with the deepest respect.

The story says that “Ms. Thomas, 89, was known for posing questions in the kind of tough and provocative manner that could make press secretaries gasp and her colleagues cringe.”  To me this is just one of the less attractive features of the superannuated:  the assumed belief that because of their age, they can get away with saying anything.

Ms. Thomas is a hateful old harridan, but I am uncomfortable with her dismissal.  The first reason is that I dislike firing anyone for what they say, however I reserve the right not to listen to such crackpots ever again; I stopped listening to Pat Buchanan the day he mentioned Israel’s “amen corner.”  The second reason is that she is a relic totally without influence; she’s no longer a reporter and no one, but no one reads her Hearst columns.  The third reason is that it creates a martyr, giving the usual crew the opportunity to blame the influence of the international Jew bankers – er, sorry – Zionist neocons.  The fourth and biggest reason is that I would love to have her remain a public figure and for someone to yell “Jew baiter!” at her whenever she opens her mouth.

Now that she’s retired, perhaps the White House press corps can get an audioanimatronic robot of Ms. Thomas and install it on the first row at the President’s press conferences.  There it can spew out preprogramed garbage-as-a-question and everyone can chuckle and murmur, “Good old Helen!”

Where else but the New York Times?

To the Editor:

One reason the government does not have any capacity to fix the oil leak is that it is lacking the know-how and experience. One way to gain that experience is to nationalize the oil companies.

While free marketers will claim that national oil companies are less efficient than commercial ones, consider the fact that the private companies have demonstrated no competence in environmental protection, while given every incentive to do so. Repeated oil spills are a given of oil operations in the United States.

Another consideration is the enormous influence that these immense companies have on both foreign policy and energy policy.

The recent spill is yet more evidence that energy is too important to be given to the private sector, and that the companies are too big for the government to control. Little wonder that as much as 90 percent of the world’s oil is now controlled by national companies.

Nationalization will have its problems, for sure. But it just might stop our march to an unthinkable future.

Apart from the little problem of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation”) and from where a cash-strapped government will come up with the money to nationalize the oil companies, we need only look at the dreary examples of Pemex and PDVSA to see how well government runs one.  Unless, of course, collapsing production is considered a feature, not a bug.