Category: Current Affairs

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U.S. Americans, Helping the Iraq

So by now everyone has seen or at least heard about our national dunce of the week: Lauren Caitlin Upton, the South Carolina beauty queen whose brain shut down when she was asked to weigh in on why so many Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

The transcript: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because … ah some … people out there in our nation don’t have maps and … ah … I believe that e-education such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should … our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or, or should help south Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future. … ” (YouTube video here.)

Sure, it’s kind of a funny moment, though less so when you realize that Upton nearly won anyway (she still looked great in her bathing suit) and that when she was brought on NBC’s “Today” show — NBC’s parent company also owns the Miss Teen USA pageant — to talk about the faux pas, she was smothered with treacly understanding for her moment of difficulty. With three or four days to think about it, Upton came up with this answer: “”Well personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. And if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography.”

Yeah, finding your native country on a map — that’s a real geographical triumph. And on top of that, she’s heard of Iraq and South Africa and wants to help them. She’s practically ready for a cabinet position. Or a network news anchor’s job.

That thought occurs after witnessing Katie Couric’s performance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” this morning. Couric, who has piloted the “The CBS Evening News” into a death spiral, is in Iraq to a) cover the big story — the upcoming report on the effectiveness of the troop buildup and b) to prove she and her show are heavyweights.

Tragically, serious news consumers no longer expect the the major TV networks or their cable counterparts to be sources for more than the quickest, sloppiest (and in the case of Fox News, grotesquely spun) sketches of a story. On Sunday, Couric demonstrated the state of the art: With the obligatory Baghdad skyline shot in the background, she began with an overly general background statement about the state of affairs in Iraq, including a badly flawed summary of the history of the conflict in Fallujuah (she skipped over entirely the battle for the city in November 2004, probably the bloodiest single engagement of the war so far).

Then, she got to the meat of her report: She essentially parroted everything our commanding general and his briefers told her and showed her during her “reporting.” The lack of skepticism — not the political kind, but the natural journalistic kind that would demand to know what one isn’t being shown, what facts the general and his staff don’t want us to see — was breathtaking. To her minor credit, Couric allowed that she was seeing “what the U.S. military wants her to see.” But that didn’t stop her from concluding that “there are definitely areas where the situation is improving.” (ThinkProgress.org has a post on Couric’s performance, complete with video clip).

Me, I’ll take the South Carolina Fumbler over the make-believe newswoman. The Fumbler will do no damage in the end, unlike the faux journalist who drops in to tell us that things are looking up in Iraq without even the pretense of some independent fact-finding.

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Sunday Notebook

Vuelta a España: Two sprint finishes in the first two stages, and lots of crashes in both, including one that ended the race and probably the season for Discovery’s Tom Danielsen. First stage: Daniele Bennati (an Italian from Lampre) won the sprint ahead of Óscar Freire (Spain/Rabobank). Second stage: Bennati crashed near the end, and Freire won, with Italian Paolo Bettini (QuickStep) second.

Fantasy Vuelta: Is the game functional or not? The Velogames site says it suffered a server crash on Saturday that blocked last-minute entries. After two stages, though, the site still shows no results. I’m impatient because two of the riders on my team, Freire and Bettini, have scored lots of points the first two days and I want to see where my managerial brilliance and pro-racing savvy (yes, that’s a joke) have landed my squad. [Update: The first results are up. My team, the Berkeley Bombers is ranked 58th. Context, however, is everything: There are about 660 teams entered, so 58th doesn’t look so bad. It must be noted, though, that just one rider, Oscar Freire, is responsible for about 70 percent of the points I’ve scored so far.]

David Zabriskie, sometimes described as a San Francisco Bay Area rider, successfully defended his U.S. pro time trial title yesterday, winning by a second over future Slipstream teammate Danny Pate. Slipstream is the official Team Clean of the future of cycling.

Floyd Landis Watch: If you’re interested in any aspect of the Floyd Landis affair — where he’s riding this weekend, his latest interview pronouncements, what bloggers and the media are saying about our great Tour non-champion — check out Trust But Verify. A great resource on the entire case to date.

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(Late) Friday Notebook

My keys: An ever-popular household line: Have you seen my keys? No — seriously. I haven’t seen them since about Tuesday. I missed an appointment — a casual one, on Thursday — because I was stuck at home searching for them. So far, the usual thing — finding them in some obvious place that I never thought to look — has not happened and they remain MIA. So if you see them. …

Peet’s: I first went to Peet’s Coffee, the original store up at Walnut and Vine, in the late ’70s. The first time I really remember being there was when I was working as a construction laborer in early 1979. One day it rained and we couldn’t work — I think we were in the middle of digging a garage foundation by hand, since it was on a steep slope — and the carpenters on the crew said we ought to go to Peet’s. We hung out for awhile, mostly under the eaves out on the sidewalk, with about a dozen other people. It was chilly and wet, but it didn’t seem so bad because the coffee was so … well, it was really like a drug. I went home after two cups, and I probably didn’t sit down for the rest of the day. The foregoing reminiscence is prompted by the news, passed on by KTVU this evening, that Alfred Peet, the guy who really is responsible for both Peet’s and Starbuck’s, has died. He was a true coffee visionary, though uninterested in a commercial empire, and a first-rate drug pusher. (“Coffee Pioneer Alfred Peet dies,” San Francisco Chronicle.)

Poem: “After Reading T’ao Ch’ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass,” by Charles Wright (from The Writer’s Almanac).

And last: The Bay Bridge is closed tonight. Closed, completely. For four days. As part of the generations-long project to make the bridge seismically sound, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans, not Caldot) has shut it down for the holiday weekend. That’s all the time it needs to demolish a section of the bridge on the Oakland side of the Yerba Buena Tunnel and slide in a pre-built piece to replace it. The last time the bridge was closed so long: 1989, from October 17 to November 17, after the Loma Prieta Earthquake lifted up the east end of the bridge and let it drop, causing a section to collapse. That was a generation ago, and we have a ways to go before the bridge rehab and rebuild is complete.

Oh, and give me a holler if you see those keys.

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Testosterone: A Mood Enhancer for Landis?

A squib from the Scientific American on the still-unresolved Floyd Landis case. As the world of cycling knows, Landis’s blood test results the day of his astounding Tour-winning stage last year showed high levels of testosterone. The reader question that Scientific American puts to its expert, Michael Bahrke, is one that most people have thought about: Could a dose of testosterone produce such “an immediate and profound” effect as the one from which Landis may have benefited?

Bahrke largely discounts the immediate physical benefits of testosterone, but then he raises another possibility: “…It is feasible that the improved performance could have come as a result of a shift in mood level.”

Read Bahrke’s entire answer here: http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=84EC9327-E7F2-99DF-3275ED1BD923D659&ref=rss

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Footprint

Flying back from Paris on Saturday, our Air France 747 crossed southern Greenland. It’s one of the places I’d love to visit — to see the site of the medieval Norse settlements, if nothing else. The sight of the place makes a strong impression: A good 15 minutes, or more than 125 miles, before we got to the southeastern coast, individual icebergs appeared in the blue North Atlantic below. Then more and more appeared, as did their source: the glaciers snaking down from the island’s highland ice sheets to the bays on the Atlantic. We saw the glaciers calving dozens, hundreds, thousands of icebergs; icebergs that in some cases were the size of big Midwestern farms. The temptation in the time of “An Inconvenient Truth” is to see the masses of ice floating south as evidence of What We’re Doing to the Planet. The facts are much more complex: The glaciers have always calved icebergs in volumes that would amaze the first-time beholder; there’s likely a difference now from 1912, say, when one particularly famous iceberg trundled out to sea, but it’s not visible from a single pass in an airliner. Still, we can be reasonably certain that though the differences in the ice’s behavior might be subtle on a discreet level — this is what I saw on one day — they likely represent something profound about planetary climate.

Prompted partly by curiosity and partly by one person’s stark and dire summary of what’s happening around us today and our responsibility for it, I decided to calculate the carbon footprint of our August trip. I’m trying to account just for the big stuff — 4,000 miles of driving in an SUV that averaged 22 or 23 miles per gallon and three long plane trips. I’m not counting any of the electricity we consumed along the way or the cost of transporting the Pringles we bought from the Pringles works to the Rockies.

A calculator available on a site affiliated with “An Inconvenient Truth” suggests that the national average of carbon dioxide emissions per person in the United States is 7.5 tons (another site, CarbonCounter.org, comes up with a significantly higher number, 21.2 tons; other estimates, when they’re stated in a straightforward way, fall between these numbers ). Based on running our numbers for the trip, I come up with an estimate of 3.65 (from the “AIT” site) to 6.65 tons just for the 25 days of our travels. One surprise, to me, is the high figure for air travel, which the various calculators estimate at 2 to 11 tons of carbon dioxide for the flights we took (two long trips — five and six hours — and one extended one, 11 hours).

A lot of these calculators invite you to enter into a contract of some kind, ranging from “I’ll stop throwing away aluminum cans” to making cash payments, to lessen or offset your carbon impact. I even found a site, JunkScience.com, that has an alternative calculator that shows what a pitifully small impact your offset payment will make (the site’s subtext: global warming just ain’t that big a deal, you saps).

Bottom line, whether I can do anything to lessen the impact or not: We spewed out more than our share of CO2 during our little jaunt.

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Tuesday Notebook

Today’s best journal titles: Thorax and Chest, both encountered in the midst of a writing project.

Today’s top concern: Getting everything packed as I get ready to take my slow-motion, long-distance cycling thing on the road (translation: I’m leaving Berkeley for a cross-country road trip today; we’ll wind up in New York, where I’ll get on a plane for Paris-Brest-Paris).

Today’s related concern: Gas mileage. We’re renting a car to drive across the country. I’m bringing too much bike-related crap to do the smart thing and get a small, relatively fuel-efficient car. So I opted for a Subaru Outback, which is actually OK mileage- and emissions-wise. I booked it last week and showed up at the Hertz counter at the Oakland airport today to pick it up. My reserved car wasn’t ready because it turned out they had no Subaru Outbacks; when I complained — mildly, for me, mentioning that it was “weird” that there was no car since I made the reservation last week — I was told that the outlet was expecting an Outback but the current renter hadn’t returned it. Uh huh. It just so happened that they had a not-so-spanking new Toyota Highlander, non-hybrid version, ready to roll. So that’s what we’ve got. Crude oil just hit an all-time high today. Gas prices in the Bay Area are at about $3.10-$3.20 per gallon of regular, ethanol-doctored fuel. Big surprise — we’re going to get murdered on our gasoline bill.

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Hell of a Race

We got up Wednesday morning with the rest of the cycling fans and Tour de France geeks — we noble, perplexed few — to watch what everyone knew would be the climax of the 2007 race: a fantastically difficult climbing stage in the Pyrenees during which Michael Rasmussen, the Dane wearing the yellow jersey of the overall race leader, would try to fend off a last spate of attacks from the handful of riders who still had a chance to beat him. And putting aside my feelings about Rasmussen, a racer with no charisma who was riding under a cloud of suspicion because he had missed several random doping tests, there’s no other way to describe his day: He rode a hell of a stage.

On the slopes of the day’s final climb, he was left alone to contend with his three closest rivals, Alberto Contador (Spanish) and Levi Leipheimer (a Yank), both of the U.S.-based Discovery Channel team, and Cadel Evans, an Australian riding for Belgium’s Predictor-Lotto squad. The battle came down to Rasmussen, who rides for Rabobank of The Netherlands, and the two Discovery riders as Evans just struggled to hang on. Contador and Leipheimer didn’t spare their foe. They repeatedly tried to break him by charging off the front of the tiny group and challenging him to follow. But time after time, Rasmussen slowly caught them and waited out the next attack. Finally, with 1,000 uphill meters to go, he stood up and accelerated himself and easily outdistanced his opponents. He won the stage and increased his lead. He was a lock to be this year’s Tour champion, and he looked like he’s won it the hard way, by facing down his strongest rivals and outperforming them when it counted.

And then something happened — something not entirely unforeseen in a race and sport that is making a habit of throwing out its top performers over actual or suspected illegal doping: Rasmussen’s team fired him and withdrew him from the race over the issue of the missed tests; he not only failed to tell team and testing officials where he’d be in the month before the Tour, he lied about his actual whereabouts.

There’s no exact parallel I can think of in U.S. sports, though pro basketball and pro football are getting close with their aggressive discipline against lawbreakers and on-court/on-field miscreants. But in the Tour, it’s not just individuals players who are taking the fall. To date,, two full teams have pulled out of the race because individual members have reportedly tested positive for doping. In a few hours, Rasmussen’s team might become the third to quit. Imagine the New York Yankees folding their entire season because it was discovered Jason Giambi and friends had been juicing, and you come close to the enormity of what’s happening.

So what now? This year’s race might remain interesting as a freak show, though maybe the remaining 19 teams and 140-some riders might rise above what’s happened and put on a serious performance for the four remaining stages. But whatever happens between now and Sunday, this Tour is a race without a champion, and a race like that is hardly a contest at all.

Lots more to be said: about how much of what’s happening now is driven by hysteria and overreaction, about whether the notion of due process should be thrown entirely out the window, and about whether the international sports drug cops are really up to the job of keeping games and contests clean in an evenhanded, just, disinterested way.

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The Tour, on Xanax

Something’s up with the Tour this morning. The live telecast shows 188 cyclists who look like they’re out on a recreational ride. They’re actually going, well, slow. But there’s no explanation for it. The Versus Boys have noted the casualness of the day’s race; however, they’re only offering guesses about the cause: the pace has been dialed down because of a massive crash yesterday that left many riders battered, bruised and abraded; or maybe it’s the length of today’s stage, nearly 150 miles. Those reasons don’t quite wash, though: The one constant about the Tour for years, especially during the first week, is the furious pace no matter what the circumstances. (One more interesting observation about today’s pace, by way of journalist Martin Dugard’s blog: “But for some reason this morning, the riders displayed unusual reluctance to begin the roll-out, as the initial phase of riding is known. They lingered in the village, sipping water and coffee right up to the last minute. And then when it came time to begin, they clipped in and began pedaling casually, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this was an actual bike race.”)

My theory: This is a protest of some kind. After the crash yesterday, a couple kilometers from the finish in Ghent (Belgium), some riders complained about how narrow and dangerous they found the final portion of the course. Today’s stage features an alarmingly hazardous finish: within 2,000 meters of the finish, when the sprinters’ teams are usually driving at a high if not frantic pace, the field will be forced to negotiate two 90-degree bends in rapid succession. Then, just as they raise their speed again on the finishing straight, they’ll hit a section of bad cobblestones (pavé), followed by a couple hundred meters of what I see described elsewhere as “lumpy” asphalt. So maybe the message behind the lazy pace today is enough is enough — if you want us to put on a show at the finish line, don’t force us to risk life and limb to do it.

That’s today’s Berkeley-based Tour speculation … (and as I write, the pace in today’s stage has jumped as one rider makes a dash to try to grab the King of the Mountains jersey on the day’s lone climb. It’ll still be interesting to see how the finish develops, though.)

[Update: From the Tour’s daily race coverage: “17:53 – Well Behind Schedule: This is one of the slowest stages in the last 10 years of the Tour. The average after five hours was just 33.5km/h. It will be the first time that a stage has finished after 6.00pm since the neutralized stage to Aix-les-Bains in 1998.”]

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The Tour: The Versus Boys Are Back

We’re having our traditional Tour de France first stage party this morning: Usually we get up when the live broadcast starts (5 a.m. here in PDT), have a few neighbors over, and watch the peloton race toward the usual sprint finish. Today we overslept, so the festivities didn’t begin until after 7.

Phil Liggett, MBE, is doing his usual charmingly hackneyed, loopy race call. Just now he said, “The peloton are being led by the boys in blue.” It’s always “the boys.” His best moments today:

“The Tour’s Yellow Peril.” Referring to prologue winner and race leader Fabian Cancellara, who of course is wearing the yellow jersey (and using yellow pedals and a yellow helmet as long as he’s Number One). Yellow Peril: I’m sure that one popped into his head without any idea of its origin.

“The sprinters have their bird teeth out.” Bird teeth? It’s a mystery what he meant, and my early online research is no help. If you come across this and know what the heck he’s talking about, please help interpret Phil for me. [Hmmm: The insightful Kate speculates that Phil meant “egg teeth,” which embryonic birds use to break through their shells.”

“The team domestiques are out of the kitchen and working hard.”

And from Phil’s “analyst” partner, Paul Sherwen, on Robbie McEwen, who rode from the back of the pack to win: “He never panicked. He kept his calm like a magical poker player.”