Headline Muse, 8/16

Though for others, it seems a bit odd,
Winning games isn’t big for this squad
If you don’t score a goal
They can still win your soul
Cos they play to bring glory to god

Headline: Christian pro soccer team: ‘Scoring souls, not goals’

Ok, not so much a headline as a CNN blog post, but close enough. I only wanted to write about this team because they are seen as so anomalous, and their anomaly is attributed to their faith. I’m here to tell you, it ain’t necessarily so.

Back in college, I was a member of an intramural team (I’ll give you their name in a bit); depending on the season, we played softball, basketball, volleyball, or ultimate frisbee. We were sort of the B version of a separate team that was far more typical of the intramural league. Our team, not so typical. Other teams loved to play us, for two reasons. First, they got a win. Second, they got a fun game.

Now, you might think we were not very good. You’d be wrong. We played hard, and usually scored more points than the opposing team. But our team operated by a different set of rules. For one, before each and every game… (expected phrase: “we would pray”), we would officially forfeit that game. That’s right, we lost the game before we even played it. For two, our hard and fast rule was “never argue a call”. If the first base umpire missed a call by a mile, so what?

With winning and arguing tossed out, the only thing remaining was to compete, play a great game, and have fun. Given that it is more fun to play well, you’d still see us diving after a spiked volleyball or laying out at full run after a frisbee. I personally ended more games than not, bleeding and injured. But smiling.

The object of any game, unofficially, was to have the most fun we could. But that was unofficial. Officially, the object of every game was “not to spill your beer”. (Easy for me–I did not drink at the time.)

The name of the team? “The Heathens.”

Lady Franklin’s Lament, 2011

“Lady Franklin’s Lament” (AKA “Lord Franklin) is a haunting ballad, telling of Lord Franklin’s British Arctic Expedition (1845), an attempt at finding the fabled Northwest Passage. For centuries, that passage has been a dream; climate change is making that dream a reality. First, my favorite version of the song, then my update:

They sought a passage through the frozen seas
Where brave men searched and died for centuries
The dream of merchant-men and sailors too
Amid the icy white, a waterway of blue

To sail from Newfoundland to Beaufort Sea
A Northwest Passage when from ice it’s free
Now rising temperatures and cloudless skies
Have opened channels, and cleared the Passage prize

A land of Eskimo and polar bear
The metal ship is an intruder there
Once thought impossible, a sight so strange
What has happened, to bring about this change?

The lure of money means we’re bound to see
Canada challenged over sovereignty
This Northern treasure, never seen before
The perfect reason, for economic war

The north is changing at a growing pace
Because of challenges we all must face
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Now I worry… about our fate as well.

Via NPR this morning, a story on the Northwest Passage. Clearly, one could write entire books on the subject, so any brief story will be necessarily incomplete, but it touches on a number of interesting bits. For me the most frightening is that the US sees the Northwest Passage as international waters, and Canada sees it as an internal waterway. Oh, and we can add to this the notion that perhaps a fifth of the world’s oil might lie under Arctic ice.

Think about that.

Alien Invasion

Watching “Curiosity: Alien Invasion”; it occurs to me that we really don’t know how aliens will react toward us–different “experts” will justify their own hunches–but we have a pretty decent guess as to how we would act toward aliens. This was from the old blog, a couple of years back:
*****

Daringly, erringly,
Children in Panama
Saw a strange being, and
All held their breath:

Certain the creature was
Extraterrestrial,
Showed they were human, and
Beat it to death.

In some of the pictures, the “creature” looks like E.T., or “a fetus”, or some unidentifiable alien being. In the video, it is fairly clearly (to my eye, anyway) a three-toed tree sloth. But “teens beat sloth to death” is not nearly so cool a headline as “unidentifiable creature found in Panama” (the title of the linked video). Note the use of “unidentifiable” rather than “unidentified”; a small but crucial difference.

There are a great many stories already, and there will be more. Even CNN is going with the “unknown/unknowable” angle. As of this writing, Google news lists a mere 120 news articles. Any bets?

My favorite coverage thus far is this nicely skeptical article:

The story begins at a waterfall near the town of Cerro Azul, Panama. A group of teens, four in all, were playing in the area when the mystery creature, a large hairless monster, shuffled out from a cave hidden by the waterfall. According to most accounts, the creature approached the boys. Growing alarmed, they began to throw rocks at the monster. They continued to do so until it — Gollum, E.T., monster, whatever — stopped moving. Satisfied that they had killed the hairless mystery creature, the Panamanian emissaries of Earth tossed E.T. into the water.

But in all the pictures being circulated on the web, E.T./Gollum looks more like a hairless sloth (and has been identified as such by many who have seen a full body picture of the Panamanian mystery creature), which means that the animal moves at an extremely slow pace (it is difficult to move across the ground on its hooked-claw feet). Which means that the teens might have been alarmed when they first saw the creature but could have easily outran it, so remaining frightened at something that presents no real danger probably did not occur. And they certainly did not have to pelt the mystery creature with stones until it died. That the teens decided to make a sport out of hitting the mystery creature with rocks sounds like a typical teen reaction. But it is doubtful they did it out of fear.

So they lied. They’re teenagers. It’s what they do best, besides eat and sleep and whine about being bored.

There are other news outlets showing evidence that it is a sloth:

…

Nevertheless the local media has played up the story, reporting that zoologists are unable to identify the “alien-like” creature. But DNA testing should soon confirm what most are saying: the animal is a sloth.

As a consequence of a slow news cycle towards the end of summer, August and September tend to be peak months for sightings of “strange” and “unidentified” creatures including unusual marine life, malformed animals and the mythological beasts like the Chupacabra, the Mongolian Death Worm, Big Foot, and the Loch Ness Monster.

I wonder how long it will take CNN to correct themselves?

It’s a sloth. They are teenagers. Ignorance->fear->kill it. No wonder the aliens all choose to show themselves to isolated individuals with lousy cameras. They are scared!

Living The Dream

Look at the fearless Republican candidates
Telling the people their comfortable lies
Magical thinking, revisionist history,
Alternate versions as seen through their eyes

Compromise seen as a sign of your weakness,
No one admits to his previous deals
Matching the facts is completely irrelevant
Truth is determined by how a thing feels

Lying is raised to an art or a science
The bigger, the better, or that’s how it seems
People are frightened by too much reality
Better to peddle them beautiful dreams

There in the crowds, cotton candy surrounds them,
Melting away into sugary air
Sweet little nothings, political promises
Served by the ton at the Iowa Fair.

In the New York Times, an editorial, “Magical Unrealism“, examining the antics of not the extremists, but the putative center of the Republican party. It’s one thing when the wingnut faction lives in fantasy land; it’s quite another when the mainstream is building castles in clouds.

Hinkle, Hinkle…

Hinkle, Hinkle, anti-gay
Wonder what your emails say
Vote for same-sex marriage ban
Look on Craigslist for a man
Hinkle, Hinkle, anti-gay
Look! You’re in the news today!

Hinkle, Hinkle, steeped in scandal
Wonder how you’re going to handle
Colleagues call for resignation
Hard to work on legislation
Hinkle, Hinkle, steeped in scandal
Wonder how you’re going to handle

Hinkle, Hinkle, Hoosier Rep,
Needs to watch his every step
Sugar Daddy; married man,
Needs to do the best he can
Hinkle, Hinkle, Hoosier Rep,
Needs to watch his every step

…This could go on, but it’s just not funny. A sad story out of Indiana, where state rep Phil Hinkle has allegedly (he does not deny) met with a man he contacted through Craigslist.

The details are so familiar they are a caricature. He’s married, with two kids, attends the Catholic church, cosponsored the bill that created the “In God We Trust” license plate, voted against gay marriage… and had multiple but unproven allegations of gay hookups. His colleagues are urging him to resign, or merely to “do the right thing.”

I feel sorry for him; I hope, but cannot know (and have no business knowing) that he has been open with his wife, family, and self. I doubt it, though; it would be difficult. I hope he can come to terms with himself and accept his entire self…and it wouldn’t hurt to start accepting others as well. It would be nice if his district was supportive of GLBT issues; that would make his current situation a bit more hopeful. But his district voted against same-sex marriage and civil unions, and Indiana provides no legal rights for LGBT individuals.

Maybe he should contact his representative.

The Ballad Of Sally Kern

From the old digs….
Image: Michael McRae

A legislator, Sally Kern,
Was simply voicing her concern,
But Sally Kern was unaware,
Or if she knew, she did not care,
That someone had a microphone
So Sally Kern was not alone.
“Oh, I’m not anti-gay” said Sally,
To the fifty-person rally;
“But there are things you have to learn”
And who will teach us? Sally Kern.
Sally Kern, she knows the answer—
Knows how gays are like a cancer,
Knows they’re worse than terrorists
If Sally Kern can keep the lists.
So Sally Kern must raise her voice
Against unhealthy lifestyle choice;
The cost of life against God’s Word
Is clear, the people gathered heard:
Disease and death, and then you burn
In Hell, or so says Sally Kern.
Then Sally Kern, in pure effrontery,
Tells us gays will harm our country:
If we embrace these sinful ways,
Says Sally Kern, allowing gays
To join the City Council ranks
Or work in schools, or stores, or banks,
Our country would be tempting fate,
And all too soon would be too late.
Now, such a stance may seem too stern
But heed the words of Sally Kern;
If we let gays live right among us,
Soon, like mold, or creeping fungus,
Even straights will be infected—
Sally Kern wants us protected.
The path to safety is God’s Grace:
We must protect the human race.
Sally Kern just wants us purer…
Right. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.

Special bonus: The Modest Agnostic’s youtube version of this verse!

This verse is one of my favorites for its seussian qualities, its hyperbole, and its godwinesque last line. This is one of those verses that pretty much came out in real time and in final form, and I really didn’t know what the last line would be until I got to the second to last. And The Modest Agnostic reads it so well! Much better than my own voice would be.

A Snail’s Pace

Pokily, hokily,
Freshwater Gastropods
Put away proteins
In bits of their shell

“Fossil opercula
Geochronology”
Measures the proteins to
See what they tell

From the University of York (and in Nature), a cool story with a little help from my cousins the gastropods. As snails grow, they tuck away proteins in their opercula–the hinge/trapdoor deally that they hide behind when they hide in their shells. Turns out, these proteins are protected from the elements by calcium carbonate crystals, in what one of the developers of the technique (Dr. Kirsty Penkman) calls “a protein time capsule”.

Without external interference, what remains is internal degradation of the proteins, the extent of which tells how old the sample is, and in greater detail than with previous methods.

So it’s a cleaner sample than previous methods; the snails are commonly found worldwide; the method is highly reliable.

Win.