Category: Current Affairs

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Woods Lovely, Dark, and Deep: Stay the Hell Out

[Update 12/7/06: According to various media reports (for instance, one today in the San Francisco Chronicle), the Oregon State Police now say that the story recounted below about the family getting the map at the Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce is false. I called the Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce to hear what they have to say; they’re standing by their story that the Kims were there; I’ll write more about that later.]

More on the search for James Kim, the CNET editor lost in the mountains of southwestern Oregon (his wife and two daughters were rescued Monday). Today’s drama is around items of clothing (and pieces of a map) that he might have left as “breadcrumbs”–either to aid searchers or (a possibility I haven’t heard raised) to find his way back along the route he took. Without dwelling on what might have befallen him did befall him (tragically, he was found dead earlier today), here’s a telling passage from CNET’s story today:

“The Kims were warned that the Bear Camp Road was dangerous this time of year when they stopped into the Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce about 20 miles south of Portland, Ore., on November 25 around 1:30 p.m. PST, Mark Ottenad, executive director of the Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce, said Wednesday.

“The employee working that day gave the Kims a copy of the Oregon State Department of Transportation highway map, Ottenad said.

“James Kim ‘asked what would be scenic road and she highlighted the Agness-Galice Road, but cautioned against trying to travel on that road this time of year,’ Ottenad said. ‘Instead, she recommended staying to the main roads–Highway 38 or Highway 42,’ especially as it was late in the day and it would be dark soon. ”

I suppose you have to make allowances for people at the Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce trying to cover their asses (what if they really said: “It’s a beautiful road! You’ll enjoy it!”?). With James Kim still lost, people are keeping their hope for alive by talking about how resourceful he is. If he ignored a warning like the once described in the CNET story, I can think of some less flattering descriptions of him.

(And also: Talk about taking advantage of an advertising opportunity, here are some links at the bottom of the CNET story:

Cnetlinks

Of course, these are supposed to be “smart ads” in the sense that they’re related to keywords in the Kim story and automatically generated. Also remarkable: The mix of blame and backbiting in the reader discussion attached to the CNET story.)

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Engaged in a Great Verbal War

The PBS NewsHour this evening featured another round of “Iraq: Is It a Civil War or Not? And If It Is, What Difference Does It Make?” (The game will never take off with a title like that.)

On hand was Donald Kagan, a history professor from Yale. He started out by saying that he felt the discussion–is it or isn’t it?–is “frivolous.” Check.

Then he went on to say he feels the debate over what to call the conflict is “a calculated effort on the part of those people who would like to see the United States flee from its responsibilities in Iraq to use a term that is more frightening, more dangerous-sounding than simply the kind of uprising that they’ve been dealing with and decide that it’s a civil war in order to make it a more frightening prospect to try to win this thing and persuade Americans that it’s hopeless and they should go away.”

A “civil war” is more frightening than what we’ve been dealing with? The discussion has been ginned up by people who want the United States to flee its responsibilities? Here’s an alternative theory, respectfully submitted to Dr. Kagan: Maybe people are just trying to understand what the heck it is we are involved in. The people who were putatively responsible for knowing what they were getting us all into have demonstrated they had less than no idea what to expect in Iraq and have been incapable of telling the truth about it for going on four years now. Maybe once we have some understanding of the situation–if it’s not too late for that–maybe we can decide whether the instinct to pack up and leave is sound or not.

Eventually, the “NewsHour” interviewer got around to lobbing Kagan a real softball. Something along the lines of, “Professor, does this kind of semantic argument happen in every war?” Kagan’s answer:

“The best historical example that jumps into my mind is the American Civil War, which I don’t remember anyone calling it that during the time. The South referred to it as the War Between the States to suggest they were within their rights in breaking away from the other states, and up here in Connecticut we referred to it as the rebellion of 1861. And it’s that sort of thing that’s characterized this kind of issue throughout history.”

What jumped into my mind when I heard Kagan say that was the phrase, “We are now engaged in a great civil war.” He’s right that “anyone” did not say that. Lincoln did, in the Gettysburg Address, which he sure enough made “during the time.” Somewhere or other, someone can tell us the very first time the term civil war was used to describe that conflict; it’s doubtful Lincoln was the first.

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Holiday Gift Guide

Undeterred by the lack of popular demand, and inspired by Marie, who put together the finest collection of Lincoln- and Springfield, Illinois-related gifts anywhere, it’s time to launch this year’s Holiday Gift Guide. All of the goods below come with the usual Infospigot guarantee: This is all real stuff, at real Web addresses, offered by public and private entities that will take your credit card number and perhaps deliver the goods before you’ve forgotten you’ve ordered them (four items below; more to come, maybe).

Angry Squid T-Shirt

Angrysquid LgRemember the plucky Japanese marine biologists who snagged and photographed a giant squid? The cephalopod in question lost part of a tentacle. You can commemorate the event, and perhaps express solidarity with the monstrous sea creature, with the Angry Squid T-Shirt from San Francisco’s Mule Design Studio. I ordered one of these for a college student in Oregon. I can attest it’s as good as it looks. 20 bucks. Also available: Angry Squid hoodies and beanies (what we used to call “sweatshirts” and “stocking caps”).

Rock Paper Scissors T-Shirt

Scissorscut2-1

As recently discussed in this space, Rock Paper Scissors has gone big time as a competitive activity. Surely it’ll soon appear as a demonstration “sport” in the Summer and/or Winter Olympics. The shirt, in always-in-vogue black with a fancy-ass graphic, looks sharp and will allow you to say in years to come that you were in on the ground floor (OK–maybe second or third floor) of this worldwide craze. $19.99.

U.S. Mint Medals

BushmedalThe mint is about a lot more than feeding the annoying profusion of coins in that big Tupperware container behind the blender on your kitchen counter. By occasional act of Congress, the mint also strikes commemorative medals. You can get medals celebrating recent secretaries of the Treasury and directors of the mint. For instance, Henrietta Holsman Fore, honored for her “steady leadership” of the nation’s coin factories. A 3-inch bronze medal (90 percent copper, 10 percent zinc) of Ms. Fore will run you $38; and you can almost hear your giftee gazing at this “study in artistic flow and medallic composition” and murmuring, “What the f___ is this?”

But if you think a less obscure personage makes a better gift, the mint offers an eclectic collection of American luminaries. You might choose the handsome Albert Gallatin medal–the medal, at least, is handsome ($38, 3-inch bronze). It’s a terrific first step toward closing your Albert Gallatin knowledge gap. Second step: go look him up on Wikipedia.

Looking for a more recent Great American? That hard-to-please gift recipient–your boss, your bill collector, your recently deceased Great Aunt Flossie–might spend hours (or eternity) fingering a fashionable Gerald and Betty Ford medal ($38, 3-inch bronze; $3.75, 1.5-inch bronze), which is extra-historic now that the former president is now the oldest man ever to have held the office.

The mint sells medals commemorating all the presidents, in fact, including the current incumbent ($38, 3-inch bronze; $3.50, 1.3-inch bronze; the medal would make a fine companion to last year’s Gift Guide hit, George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String Air Freshener).

Sorghum

SorghumThose of us fortunate enough to have spent seemingly endless hours motoring across America’s plains and prairielands have occasionally unglued our eyes from the horizon long enough to glance at fields filled with an alien-looking plant. On the bottom, it looks like a stunted cornstalk; on the top, it’s festooned with bountiful heads of reddish-brown matter of some kind. It’s sorghum, and one thing’s certain: 2006 is as likely as any year to be the one that sees sorghum, an obscure but important cereal grain, replace chocolate, cookies, cakes, pies, egg nog, and fruitcake as the foodstuff of choice among holiday gift-givers and -receivers. You can join in the wild new popularity of this noble crop by giving sorghum and a whole range of sorghum-derived or -related gifts: from organic whole grain sorghum ($6.84 for 5 pounds–boil two handfuls for 1 hour for a gut-cleansing gruel) to Pure Sorghum (Molasses) ($15.95 for 16 ounces–just the thing for sweetening gruel) to sorghum flour ($6.68, 20 ounces–made for your gluten-free lifestyle) to cookbooks, aprons, hats, and T-shirts from the National Sweet Sorghum Producers and Processors Association.

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Leslie Griffith Non-Watch: Terminal Edition

Leslie Griffith and KTVU made it official this morning: She’s out, and life and the station’s news shows–from which she’s been missing for 87 days–will go on. KTVU put out a kissy-face mutual press release in which Griffith says she’ll pursue the inevitable “other interests.” For its part, the station professes its undying love for her. The big immediate change on the news shows is that the anchors will no longer have to say, “Leslie Griffith has the night off.” Of course, the untold story is the behind-the-scenes melodrama and nastiness that led to The Vanishing in the first place. The world likely can do without all that, though.

So long, Leslie. Thanks for the memories from your early, bright, relatively carefree years. Thanks for all the fodder for snide commentary. And I hope you wrung every last dime out of the station you and your lawyer (her lawyer is her dad, I hear) could get.

Related earlier posts:

The Case of the Missing Anchor

Newscast Gone Bad

Newscast Gone Bad, Again

Leslie Griffith: The Career

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Sunday Dribblings

Scissorscut2

News to Me: The world of organized rock, paper, scissors play. Seriously. NPR did a story on the world championship yesterday. There’s an RPS league. There’s a gory-looking RPS T-shirt (above).



Will I ever read it? “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.” By Michael Lewis (“Liar’s Poker,” “The New New Thing, “Moneyball”). Kate read an excerpt to me this morning–a detailed narration of Lawrence Taylor’s famous destruction of Joe Theismann. Excerpt snippet: “Theismann has played in 163 straight games, a record for the Washington Redskins. He’s led his teams to two Super Bowls, and won one. He’s 36 years old. He’s certain he still has a few good years left in him. He’s wrong. He has less than half a second.”

Oldest president ever: Gerald Ford, as of today. It’s possible he’s aged better than Chevy Chase, his erstwhile stunt double.

Decree from Lingo Emperor: If I could decree one thing and one thing only about our language, I’d abolish the word utilize and erase any sign that anyone ever used it … or utilized it.

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Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month

Armistice/Veterans/Remembrance Day

“… So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed,

And they shipped us back home to Australia.

The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane,

Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla.

And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay,

I looked at the place where me legs used to be,

And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me,

To grieve, to mourn and to pity.

“But the band played ‘Waltzing Matilda,’

As they carried us down the gangway,

But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared,

Then they turned all their faces away. …”

From “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” by Eric Bogle (audio).

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Today’s Top News

OK–it’s a story in The Onion, so remember: It’s not real. But it is pretty funny:

“Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer to Rematch”

“I can’t deny that cancer got a piece of me last time,” Armstrong said. “A big piece of me. I think about it every day. But once I got done with cancer, it was nowhere to be found. It disappeared. Well, cancer, you know where to find me. I can beat you again in six—no, in three months.”

“I want cancer,” Armstrong added. “I want cancer so bad I can almost taste it.”

Cancer, the much-feared disease that has defeated legendary athletes such as Floyd Patterson, Lyle Alzado, and Walter Payton, is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, and is 0-1 when battling Lance Armstrong.

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Sausage Factory Confidential

Well, maybe all those MoveOn phone calls added up to something after all. I wrote before about Saturday’s telephone session, calling voters in Ohio and New Jersey (both the candidates we were calling to support, Sherrod Brown and Robert Menendez, won; in Brown’s case, he beat a Republican incumbent). Then:

–We had a couple people over on Sunday and made another 280 calls or so all together for Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Missouri. Both of them–Bob Casey and Claire McCaskill–won. In Casey’s case, I printed out some background material on him, including a Wikipedia article that (accurately) describes his conservative views on abortion (he’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned) and gun control (he doesn’t like it). But MoveOn, which I think it’s safe to say has an image of being on the left edge of the Democratic Party’s left wing, was calling on his behalf 1) to help knock off Casey’s opponent, radical right-winger Rick Santorum, and 2) to further the Democrats’ strategy to win back Congress (another conservative Democrat it worked for: Heath Shuler, elected to the House from North Carolina).

In any case, one of our guests started reading about Casey and exclaimed, “I don’t like this guy at all. Why am I making calls for him?” I didn’t really disagree with her thoughts about Casey; after all, how many more Liebermans do the Democrats need? But my stronger feeling was that we’d been given a job and I wanted to complete it. Luckily, I kept the new anti-Caseyite on board by giving her some Missouri voters to call; Claire McCaskill is a much more palatable candidate from a Berkeley liberals point of view.

–On Monday, I went into the MoveOn office in the early afternoon and stayed late enough that my car got locked into the city of Oakland parking garage I was using, a couple blocks away (not that it was that late: Oakland’s swinging downtown turns the lights out as soon as the local officeworkers head home, and the garage closes at 7). I spent part of the day calling MoveOn volunteers to see if we could get them to commit to more last-minute calling; most of the calls were to people in the East Bay, including half a dozen or so to people with Berkeley phone numbers. I was a little chagrined that among the Berkeley folks I contacted, no one had done the calling they had committed to, and no one wanted to do any. The charitable course would be to withhold judgment and recognize my own lack of past involvement; later, I’ll take the charitable course. For now, I think a lot of people in Berkeley feel like they’re taking a stand by living here and tolerating or partaking in the wild and crazy atmosphere, which is so enlightened compared to anywhere else you can think of.

I think I remember calling into two states on Monday: Maryland, for Senate candidate Ben Cardin (he won). Then, at the tail end of my shift, into Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, which is an amazing chunk of territory: 58,000 square miles or so, more than half the entire state (and bigger, by itself, than the entire state of Illinois). We called on behalf of the Democrat running there, a lawyer named Ellen Simon. At one point, I reached a guy who said he had four mail-in ballots, cast for Simon and other Democrats by himself and family members, but he didn’t know what to do with them now that it was too late to mail them in time to get them counted. I thought it would be easy to find out the details of Arizona’s law on this, but nowhere I looked–state and county and Democratic Party websites, gave a definitive answer. As a last resort, I had the brainstorm of looking up the candidate’s home phone number, since I knew her hometown. Surprisingly, there was a listing online. I called, and got a guy who said that Ellen Simon was out on the campaign trail. I explained what I needed to know, and this guy–her husband, I presume–told me that all the voter needed to do was bring the signed ballots into a polling place and they would be accepted. As it turned out, though, Simon needed those four votes and then some: She lost by 13,000 votes.

–On Tuesday, MoveOn opened the Oakland office at 5 a.m. I got there about 5:20, and there were already about 10 people making calls or getting ready for the day. Since I brought my laptop, I made calls through the group’s online call site: first to the 20th District in New York; then to the 2nd District in Connecticut; then to the 1st District in Iowa; then to MoveOn volunteers to try to rally people one last time to make more calls.

The whole feeling of the day was different: First, people saw light at the end of the tunnel. For both the people making the calls and the people getting them, they knew the blitz was almost over. But something else was different from even the previous day.

The entire calling process is a vast numbers game, nearly impossible to get a grasp of when you’re calling number after number in far-off states for candidates you may well have never heard of before you started dialing the phone for the day. At the beginning of the calliing campaign, the phone lists are pretty rough. I’m not sure of the criteria that landed people on our rosters, but at a minimum, I’d guess two factors were present: They had been registered Democrats, and they hadn’t voted in one or more elections over the last few years. When you start calling through the raw lists, you get lots of what seem like fruitless calls: hang-ups, disconnected numbers, people who tell you in no uncertain terms they love President Bush and wouldn’t think of voting for a Democrat now. Many, many calls are unresolved: A machine picks up, and you leave a message; the people on the other end won’t tell you how they’re voting, even if they say they’re Democrats; some say they’ve already voted. Occasionally–very occasionally, someone will tell you they plan to vote for the Democrat in the race and might even tell you what time they plan to go to the polls. So what you and the tens of thousands of other people calling from around the country are doing, one number at a time, is winnowing down the lists, culling out the bad numbers and the hostile voters one by one until, on the morning of the election, your left mostly with those who have indicated they’re going to support your candidate.

So while it was still dark in Oakland Tuesday morning, I was calling people in New York to make sure they were doing what they had said they were going to do: Get out to the polls and vote. The aim isn’t to get every single promised voter out the door, but rather to nudge enough of them that they might make a difference in a close race. And the assumption was they all the races we were making calls on were very close.

So: the New York 20th. Kirsten Gillibrand–the online calling interface advised it was pronounced JILL-uh-brand–was running against a pretty well entrenched Republican (though one, I heard later, had a possible history of domestic violence to explain during the campaign). She won.

After making 20 or so calls there and getting mostly cheerful- or relieved-sounding people, the calling system started spitting out numbers for the Connecticut 2nd District, for a guy named Joe Courtney. With all 242,000 votes in the district counted, he’s ahead by 170.

Then on to the 1st District in Iowa, where a college professor named Dave Loebsack was running against another well-established Republican. My 24 calls into his district all went to a little town called West Liberty, just east of Iowa City. I got lots of machines and precisely one voter who said they planned to go out and vote for Professor Loebsack (pronounced LOBE-sack). He won.

–After about five hours of that fun, I went home, took a nap, took the dog for a walk, and voted. I came home and, urged on by a MoveOn email, logged on to the calling site and made some last-minute calls to New York, to Colorado, to Idaho. When Kate got home, we went back to the polling place to drop off her absentee ballot, picked up a couple hamburgers, and came home to watch the returns. I was surprised that the broadcast networks all stuck with their prime-time programming. So, we had a diet of CNN, MSNBC and even a dash of Fox News until 10 p.m., when we switched over to the still Leslie Griffithless KTVU news. Sometime after 11, our neighbors Jill and Piero came over and we opened a bottle of champagne to toast the results. The last time we did that was 1992, the night Bill Clinton won, in the street in front of our house. You know, that was really a long time ago.

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Who Votes

I’ll refrain from beating the usual dead horse–why don’t more people vote?–just to observe that the turnout estimate for California is just over 50 percent of registered voters. To break it down with the round numbers I heard on the news, the state has 22 million-some eligible voters, 15.8 million of whom are registered. About 8.1 million of the registered group is expected to vote, because nothing is on the ballot except the usual–the state’s future. But I said I wouldn’t beat that horse, and I won’t, except to offer the quick off-the-cuff arithmetic that 8.1 million out of 22 million is something like 37 percent. I think the Iraqis, with deadly peril all around, did a lot better than that. But then, they have something to vote for.

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Sausage Factory

From the “If You Like Bratwurst, Stay Out of the Sausage Factory” file:

Yesterday, Kate and I hosted a mini-MoveOn calling party. “Mini” because we only had one person not a member of our household show up. What we lacked in numbers we made up for in enthusiasm, wit, and sapient commentary.

This was the drill: We printed out voter phone numbers, 192 in all. They were evenly split between New Jersey, where appointed incumbent Senator Bob Menendez is running against Tom Kean Jr., an appointed state legislator whose biggest asset is his dad’s name and a willingness to sling mud, and Ohio, where Bush rubber stamp Michael DeWine is trailing Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democratic congressman. We found a Kean campaign ad online so that we knew how to pronounce his name (it’s KANE, like Charles Foster Kane, not KEEN) in case it came up, and I printed out a few stories from New Jersey papers about the race so that if a voter asked us a question we didn’t seem like complete idiots (of course, Kate is a New Jersey native and I’ve visited the Garden State many times, so we have an actual connection there).

We needn’t have worried so much about knowing the background. It seemed as though the numbers we were given were in a Latino precinct in northern New Jersey. We encountered lots of people who said they couldn’t speak English or simply hung up when they heard the quaint Anglo jabbering on the other end of the line. Of the 96 Jersey numbers we called:

–49 were hangups, disconnected lines, or otherwise bad numbers; we took them off the calling list.

–44 were answering machines or busy signals and will be called back.

–3 were voters, all of whom said they were voting for Menendez.

On to Ohio. After the New Jersey experience, I didn’t bother scouring the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cincinnati Enquirer, or the Ashtabula Strident Bugle for campaign background–we just jumped in and started calling. One immediate difference: The households we reached were American-speaking. That had the effect of speeding up hang-up times for folks who didn’t want to hear from “Dan Brekke, a volunteer for Call for Change.”

Of the 96 Ohio calls, 47 were answering machines or busy; 27 needed to be removed from the list; 12 reached voters who said they were for Sherrod Brown; and 10–10!–were answered by people who said they planned to vote Tuesday but still hadn’t made up their minds about whom they’d support.

I admit I’m nonplussed by the undecideds. They seem to split into two groups: those who are so unplugged they’re not really sure who’s running, and those who seem at least somewhat thoughtful who are really wrestling with the decision.

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