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

Happy birthday in St. Thomas…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

What I’ve been up to….

… to my own 60th birthday, early next week.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2006/12/04/aging_mother/index1.html

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/12/04/senior_std/index.html

Front door making a snow angel

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Brrrr, it’s below 30 degrees this morning.

This winter has been a very long time coming. But — hello, furnace, your summer vacation just ended!

The snow in this picture? Not here yet, that photo’s from February. Just my little hint to the weather gods for a white Christmas.

On Monday, December 4, Democrats and Republicans were set to battle once more about NH’s phone-jamming scandal–but on Friday, December 1, NH Democrats ended their lawsuit in exchange for an undisclosed settlement.

How much did the Democrats get? In between (it’s a wide range) $4,974 and $4.1 million (John DiStaso, November 30). Even the higher figure wouldn’t seem like too much for a list of defendants that included (among many others) the Republican National Committee, which spent millions already on James Tobin’s defense.

NH Democratic State Chair Kathy Sullivan, who told the AP she would issue a statement Saturday, has insisted the Democrats’ civil suit had been filed to obtain answers, not money.

Even so, as the case dragged on, year after year, its burden on NH Democrats and their lawyers has been heavy. Republican lawyers filed motion after motion, seeking to dismiss or delay the lawsuit. Even when Judge Mangones finally let Democrats question some of the DC higher-ups who might be implicated, stonewalling just moved to a higher level.

From John DiStaso’s November 2 “Granite Status” column:

Darrell Henry, a former energy industry lobbyist,.. refused to answer any of about two dozen questions related to the phone-jamming operation.

McGee had testified at the trial of convicted conspirator James Tobin that when the phone-jam was called off early on election day, Henry offered to contact associates in Washington to continue it.

When Sandler asked about what he told McGee, Henry said, “I assert my privilege.”

Henry, on advice of counsel, gave that answer to just about everything, even when he was asked to describe his educational background and employment history.

Maybe now that Democrats have broken the Republican stranglehold on House and Senate, an independent prosecutor may be able to get answers to questions that NH’s Bush-appointed US Attorney never chased down.

Today, NH Democrats gave up on trying.

Update: Kathy Sullivan’s statement, at least as it was reported by the AP, was not informative.

Update: The cash-strapped NH Republican State Committee will pay NH Democrats $125,000 over five years. The RNC and NRSC, with better lawyers, pay only $5,000 each.

Nancy Pelosi has a real opportunity to shine this week when she picks a new head for the House Intelligence Committee.

Josh Marshall points out that there’s an option besides the current no-win tossup of Hastings v. Harman.

There is after all, another member of the committee who used to work at the State Department monitoring nuclear weapons in North Korea, Iraq and the former Soviet Union and is also trained as a nuclear physicist. That’s Rep. Rush Holt (D) from New Jersey. Given our current focus on proliferation, those seem like decent qualifications for the gig.

Rush Holt was for years head of Princeton’s big plasma physics lab before, in a real Mr-Smith-Goes-To-Washington moment, deciding to run for US Representative.
Making a name for himself in DC since 1998, he’s made headlines (and this blog) for his work promoting a paper trail from voting machines.

Holt is smart, savvy, hard-working, experienced, and rock-bottom decent. By choosing him to head the Intel committee, Nancy Pelosi would herself look like the foe of corruption and business-as-usual America went to the polls this month to elect.

My fellow bloggers, let’s encourage Pelosi to look beyond the bad choices of Harman and Hastings.

In The Nation, David Corn strongly recommends Holt, saying

“…this would be a chance for Pelosi to send a signal: the Democrats do regard national security seriously and are willing to put aside political concerns to do the right thing. She would be saying, merit matters most when it comes to protecting the United States.”

You can contact Nancy Pelosi via this webpage.

I recently stumbled across AN Wilson’s “Tolkien was not a writer“:

“Take the example of the Ents, the talking trees. It seemed obvious to me on this reading that the Ents in The Lord of the Rings have partly been suggested by the talking apple trees in the film of The Wizard of Oz, and more by the suicides who have turned into trees in Dante’s Inferno. Beside both originals, Tolkien’s imitation seemed feeble.”

Jeesh! Of course you’re not going to like Tolkien’s “writing” if you try to read it this way–if you can’t willingly feel swept away by the miracle and mystery of (just for example) talking Ents. It’s like eating limburger cheese while holding your nose–all very well if you’ve made your mind up you won’t like it, but not the right way to find out what’s so great about it.

One of my favorite don’t-be-a-culture-snob factoids is that after the death of Charles Dickens, he was despised by a whole generation of English highbrows–at the very time Dostoevsky was studying how Dickens got his effects and Tolstoy would feverishly re-read David Copperfield when he ran into trouble while writing War and Peace.

The magical talking trees of Middle Earth are enormously different from the magical talking trees of the Emerald Kingdom. There’s no shame for Tolkien in his being inspired, if he was, by such richly-imagined and well-loved popular culture as Wizard of Oz.

These ruby slippers live in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, now closed for renovations. But you can see Dorothy’s slippers (and Abe Lincoln’s top hat and Thomas Edison’s light bulb and Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog and more) at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in DC, plus a special all-the-items exhibit online.

Herman Heine Goldstine (1913 – 2004) built the world’s first big computer (18,000 vacuum tubes!) at the Aberdeen labs during World War II.

But the serendipitous placement of the young mathematician in a lab that needed maximal calculations almost didn’t happen. As Goldstine recalled, in a much-later interview:

I got notification to go into the Army in July something of 1942, and I was sent to the Air Force in Stockton, California. …I got orders to leave Stockton from the Adjutant General [to go work on math at Aberdeen], and simultaneously I got orders from the local post to proceed to I’ve-forgotten-where on the way to Japan or some eastern place.

I called the commanding general, and he said, “Which do you want to do? ” I said, “I want to take the Aberdeen post.” And he said, “Well, the orders from the Adjutant General in Washington obviously take precedence over the orders from a post adjutant in some fort in Stockton, California.” “Son” he said, ”if I were you, I would get out of the camp, if you’ve got an auto,” he said, “I’d get in the auto, and start driving. Let the paper work catch up later on, because otherwise you’ll just have an impossible time.” So I got in the car and drove east.

Goldstine’s interviewer Albert W Tucker was not only a great eliciter of other people’s stories, he was also a great story-teller himself–Tucker invented the Prisoners’ Dilemma “story” to make a game theory paradox more accessible. If you enjoy reading scientists’ stories first hand, I recommend the many interviews Tucker did for Princeton’s math history project.

For more Goldstine stories, I recommend the recent Biographical memoir (pdf file) in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, June, 2006.

Thanksgiving is too big a holiday for just one blogpost–here are some of my other favorites today….

• Close encounter with a “fresh” but frozen turkey from the always poetic ZenOfMotorcycling…
• Great “crabby old lady” thankfulness from Ronni Bennett…
• “Thanksgiving 1.0” from Dave Winer…
• “Thanksgeeking in SF from AllAboutGeorge…
• Lisa Williams, ahead of the curve is planning for Christmas…

Whoa–let’s stop the season right here–I’m not ready for that!