Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

As Akma says, love the standing ovation at the end. But who could have resisted? Snip:

Chew slowly
But hurry
The bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside, don’t play rough, will you just play fair?
Be polite, make a friend, don’t forget to share
Work it out, wait your turn, never take a dare
Get along! Don’t make me come down there

My mom would have loved this!

From Kilworth To The Galtees

Originally uploaded by Kman999

On April 21, 1851, young Patrick Devine (he was 9) set sail with his auntie Elizabeth (she was 27) from Liverpool to New York City. (How they got from their birthplace–Mitchelstown, in County Cork–I do not know.)

I also don’t know much about how, some forty years later, Patrick was established in Manchester, NH, as “the” Roman Catholic undertaker. (Patrick and his dad started off as carpenters, making little pine coffins.) Patrick’s second son, Maurice, annoyed both parents by leaving the family business to go to law school. My father J. Murray Devine was the son of Maurice.

So that’s why Frank Wilczek and I are in Cork tonight, headed north to Mitchelstown once we sleep off the minor stress of flying here from Stockholm. I’m told Mitchelstown is most famous for “boring cheese” and that earlier family visits failed to turn up the name Devine, even in graveyards.

Piffle. So what. I want to see for myself.

I’m also carrying with me a small talisman from the other side of my family of origin. My mother kept a journal (on onionskin paper) of her 1963 visit to Ireland, including Mitchelstown, which I am hoping to follow if that is possible. My father organized the trip but my mother recorded it for them.

My mother–who had not one drop of Irishness in her and didn’t like Guiness–considered that the worst scolding insult to one of her children was “You’re a disgrace to the name Devine.” My mother, who was adopted, wrote her own obituary and carefully omitted from said obituary her maiden name.

I’m planning to share more of her stuff with you as we go on.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that Al Gore will get 1/2 the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Washington insiders say that lawyers for President Bush have quietly filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court, seeking to have that decision overturned.

“Don’t let those @$*?*!! Norwegians mess with Texas” says a memo being circulated to right-wing bloggers. The appeal will argue that Bush reduced hot air by keeping government scientists quiet about global warming, that Michael Crichton told Bush global warming is bunk, that Al Gore once claimed he invented the Internet, and that Bush looks sexier than Gore in a flight suit.

“I’m convinced already,” said a Supreme Court Justice who asked that his name not be used. “I just hope this moves fast enough so that in December we all get on Bush’s guest list for Stockholm, Norway! My wife says the Alps are lovely at that time of year.”

We walked home yesterday…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

And the 2007 Nobel Prize goes to Albert Fert (France) and Peter Grünberg (Germany) “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance” aka GMR.

If you have an iPod (or a recent hard disk) you should probably be thanking Fert and Grünberg too. The GMR effect, which they discovered, is the basis of the emergent technology of spintronics, based on changing the spin of electrons instead of shuffling charges around from place to place.

So, what does that photograph of clouds over Stockholm have to do with the Nobel Prize or GMR? Not much really–except perhaps very indirectly, by way of Einstein’s sense of the mysterious.

Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid. And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors.

Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?

“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.

Maureen Dowd never names Sin #8 in her scathing review of Schlesinger’s memoir, but she scalpels its diagnostics like a surgeon:

Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…

Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.

Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”

Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?

“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.

It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.

Happy, happy moment when I was 11

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Bright red is the favorite color of most small children. What a surprise it was, when someone told me this! Oh, you mean I was supposed to change my favorite color when I grew up?

October leaves in Norway and Sweden are rich in dark greens and yellows–but I miss the scarlet extravagance of autumn maple trees. I love this tree image from photoninja Judith Meskill…

Even more than that, I’m grateful that Judith added a poem of her own to her maple tree image. Judith’s title was “Walk with me…” For some reason (October melancholy?) her poem made me write my own first-poem-in-quite-a-while, a poem for my friend from childhood Mary Parfitt. Mary died of a brain tumor in 1989, so if I want to send her any messages now, blogging a poem is as good a way as any.

Walk with me
into a memory our past lives inhabit
but we do not.

Walk with me into
remembered October. Remember

the trees,
the beautiful whispering leaves,
scarlet tale-tellers,
undaunted by December.

Inhabiting other Octobers,
I remember
you.

The Boston Globe didn’t miss last night’s show but I did–this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony over at Harvard. I helped write the slide show, even from here in Sweden, but I didn’t get to stand in the thrilling darkness of Sanders Theatre, as I did last year, clicking my handiwork on and trying not to get too distracted.

The Tech went to the Igs, but I could not. I missed the bottomless bowl of soup, the sword-swallowing doctors, the crowd chanting “Eat it!” at hesitant laureates whose Toscanini ice cream had been flavored with vanillin synthesized from cow dung.

I missed the celebration of the “Gay Bomb.”

The list of 2007 winners is already online at the Ig Nobel website, whose servers are already under heavy demand. So it’s probably a good thing the webcast will be online just a bit later.

If you’re in the Cambridge area, one big and free Ig event is still to come. On Saturday (1 p.m.) at MIT in 10-250 (that’s inside the Infinite Corridor, but still quite easy to find) will be the Ig Informal Lectures. Don’t be late, even that great big room fills up pretty fast.

And Toscanini’s is giving free samples of its new “Yum-A-Moto Vanilla Twist” ice cream today (Friday) at 899 Main St.

I missed the show this year, but next year I surely will not!

The House Judiciary Committee has a new and better way to unravel the long, tangled phone-jamming coverup. Thats the real news in this letter from Conyers to Attorney General (pdf)–something reporters seem to have missed, so far.

“What did the White House know and when did they know it?” Several million Republican dollars and years of Department of Justice “slow-walk” (detailed timeline here) kept investigators from tracking NH’s phone-jamming scandal up into Washington.

Meanwhile, Republicans who were in NH in 2002 all seem to have lawyered up and/or lost lots of memory.

So Conyers will pull on the string’s other end, at last! He will pull on the DC end, not the NH end.

On behalf of the House Judiciary Committee, he wants to get answers from the US Department of Justice about incident after incident in their non-pursuit of the Republican phone-jammers.

• Why did all decisions regarding the phone-jamming prosecution have to be referred directly to the US Attorney General’s office?
• Why was the FBI agent assigned to the phone-jamming case (there was only one, and she worked part-time on it) ordered not to trace any leads that led to Washington?
• Why did the US Department of Justice help Republicans block enquiries in the NH Democrats civil suit in 2004?

Thanks to Congressman Paul Hodes (NH-Dem), a member of Conyers’ committee, for setting this investigation in motion. Let’s hope Congress goes further and faster than the DOJ!

That’s what the US Postal Service claims, on its tracking website.

October in Sweden can get (I’m told) pretty darn chilly–is it unpatriotic to hope that no “Foreign Customs” will hold up my cozy longjohns very much longer?

Thomas “TheWorld Is Flat” Friedman (with whom I rarely agree) wrote something good in today’s New York Times. “9/11 is over“:

9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

Friedman was inspired by an Onion article, “Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11.” The Onion article notes that, if elected,

“Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.”

The bullhorn of 9/11 has been used to justify Iraq and Guantánamo, political corruption of government function, huge national debts run up while rich people’s incomes soar and their taxes tumble. The bullhorn of 9/11 has been used to justify torture and to dilute habeas corpus.

And anyone who speaks out against any of this is quickly accused of treason to 9/11.

I agree with Friedman, 9/12 is long overdue.