The Junk Drawer

I love odd news stories.  Here’s one from Salt Lake City:

Fire Breaks Out at Salt Lake Crematorium

A dead man had one final earthly act before moving on.

Fire officials said the six-hundred pound man was in being cremated when his body fluids were too much for the oven.

The body fluids seeped out onto the floor and ignited causing a fire at the Garner Funeral Home in Salt Lake City.

“Those fluids can be very flammable,” said Scott Freitag of the Salt Lake City fire department. “Sort of like a grease fire.”

An employee used an extinguisher to put out the fire.

The room is self-contained and has its own drainage system.

“There really is no risk or a hazard of it getting into the sewer system, the water system or into the general public,” said Freitag.

Firefighters rarely see these kind of fires.

But they say a six-hundred-pound body can create problems during a cremation.

“It really does condense or breaks down that fat into a greasy product, just like a grease fire,” said Freitag. “Only a little bit can cause a flame to go up.”

The crematorium is back in business and the funeral director said they’ll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn’t harmed.

That last paragraph is almost as good as a punchline:  “…the funeral director said they’ll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn’t harmed.”

Um.  He’s dead.  And his body was in the process of being burnt to ashes.  How exactly does one define “harm” in this instance?

I read at CNN today that at Steve Irwin’s funeral, murners heard a song titled “True Blue” by “Australian Country singer John Williamson.”  I didn’t even know Australia had a Country and Western music industry, but I suppose it makes sense in some way.  Both Australia and America were once rural, frontier nations, and former colonies of England.

So I went to iTunes and looked up the song True Blue [link will open iTunes].  The music isn’t bad.  The album is rather humorously titled for a “country” album, Old Man Emu.  To me, it sounds more like folk.  Even so, it’s not to my taste; however, I’ll be interested to see if sales of the song or album improve as a result of the publicity.  Right now, there are no customer reviews of the album at iTunes or at Amazon.  Amazon does not even offer a picture of the album cover.

This is an interesting news item I stumbled upon first via Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing: Karl Rove’s step-father was gay. Author James Moore outs the elder Rove in his new book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.

Although the title sounds sort of Kitty Kelly-ish, the excerpt published at the HuffPo has the ring of truth about it. What I particularly liked, in the context of a story about Rove’s gay family ties, was Moore quoting Karl’s passionate description of the first time he met George W. Bush.

Rove said once, “I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, complete with the - in Texas you see it a lot - one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have.”

Homoerotic? Or is it just the admiration of a geek for the jock?

Read this fascinating NYT story. Here’s a portion:

Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.
The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

The Librarian of Congress has appointed a new poet laureate, Donald Hall.  I was hoping there would be some sort of official appointment ceremony today, which I could attend, but I can’t find any information about it.

Here is the Washington Post story on the poet, Set to Verse: Donald Hall is New Poet Laureate.  And here is the Library of Congress official announcement, Librarian of Congress Appoints Donald Hall New Poet Laureate.

Here’s a clip from the Post story:

Other poets and critics cite a complex, book-length poem called “The One Day” — published in 1988 but composed over 17 years — as Hall’s greatest achievement.

“In a sense, it is the last masterpiece of American modernism,” said National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, noting that as such, it is unlike the bulk of Hall’s generally more accessible work. David Lehman, reviewing “The One Day” in The Washington Post, called it “loud, sweeping, multitudinous, an act of the imperial imagination,” and cited a climactic line suggestive of the poet’s fundamental take on life:

“Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house.”

I’m going to check out this book-length poem, The One Day it’s only 67 pages long, which technically, I think, means that it is novella length rather than book length…but who’s counting pages?  Oh, I guess I am…

Assuming you are logged in to the NYT, this article on religion in recent film might be of interest to you, even if its ultimate conclusions are somewhat obvious. Here are the first few paragraphs:

“You don’t believe in God?” Tom Hanks’s character asks Audrey Tautou, who plays his partner-in-ciphers in “The Da Vinci Code.”

“Do you believe in God?” Liev Schreiber’s character asks a therapist who doubts that his adopted son, Damien, has devil genes in the new version of “The Omen.”

“Get right with God,” William Hurt preaches in the small, intense film “The King,” but he’s playing an evangelical minister, so he’s a lot more certain.

With echo upon echo of faith-based dialogue, movie theaters today often sound like church. But what seems like a new willingness to explore questions of faith — as if Mel Gibson’s blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ” had made religion safe for Hollywood — has the spiritual depth of the “Daily Show” segment “This Week in God,” with its quiz-show-style “God Machine” that spits out religions to satirize.

One of my pals, disgruntled by the lack of phone calls originating from NW Ohio, sent me the following story. Here’s the bit that, admittedly, resembles me:

“Denial is strong in Internet addicts who claim they cannot be addicted to a machine,” Wieland notes. The “one more minute” response to being asked to go offline is common and is similar to an alcoholic who says they will quit drinking after “one more drink.”

Come on, who hasn’t asked for just one more minute?

I imagine that all of you saw this at the NYT site. It’s an interesting list in part because I had no idea that Roth was so highly thought of. I’ve read four, five of his novels. Portnoy’s Complaint, of course (because of you, Matt?) And what he calls the Zuckerman trilogy. I’ve also read the DeLillo novels, some McCarthy (not Blood Meridian), the Robinson novel (which I have blogged about), Updike’s Rabbit, and Ford’s Sportwriter (not the one listed here).
I’m ashamed that I have yet to read Beloved, though I have read Sula and the Bluest Eye. I’d like to comment on the list, but have not read enough of the novels to put forward an opinion. DeLillo’s Underworld is remarkable, but it does seem to repeat with less “grunge” the work of Pynchon. Similarly, Robinson’s Housekeeping deserves to be on this list. the rest…I simply do not know.

I’m hoping to do some fun reading this summer and would live to read Blood Meridian, Beloved, and/or a Roth novel with any of you. . .Right now, I am reading To the Lighthouse and a mind-blowing novel, House of Leaves, which is the most experimental novel I have come across in a long while.
While I am at it, check out this article on Borges in today’s NYT.–tc

(Read on …)

From the Washington Post, William SLoane Coffin, Jr. Chaplain was Lifelong ‘Disturber of the Peace’:

William Sloane Coffin Jr., 81, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died April 12 at his home in Strafford, Vt. He had congestive heart failure.

From the moment in 1958 when Mr. Coffin roared onto Yale’s campus atop his motorcycle, he signaled that his presence would mean a distinctly radical approach to the social, political and moral upheaval that defined the next decade.

Mr. Coffin called himself a “Christian revolutionary” and believed that his outspoken activism sprang from the principles of his faith.

His 18-year tenure at Yale encompassed the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, each of which he confronted in bold and daring fashion.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I like his view of Christian ministers as people who disturb the peaceful slumber of parishioners. I am less excited by his view of ministers as “prophets.” It’s far too easy for a man to believe himself a prophet when in reality he is merely another vain, self-righteous prig, like Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Coffin states that, “The Prophetic role is…to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire social order under some judgment.”

I have problems with that word “judgement,” from a Christian perspective, because of course Christians are not called to judge, but to serve others.

NYT has a brand new look. I like it a lot.

Here’s a side of the the pro-choice movement you don’t normally see–the religious side. Read the full article here.

TC

In any given week, if you walked into one of Washington’s big corporate hotels early in the morning, you would find a community of the faithful, quite often conservative Christians, rallying the troops, offering solace and denouncing the opposition at a prayer breakfast.

So you might be forgiven for thinking that such a group was in attendance on Friday in a ballroom of the Washington Hilton. People wearing clerical collars and small crucifixes were wedged at tables laden with muffins, bowing their heads in prayer. Seminarians were welcomed. Scripture was cited. But the name of the sponsor cast everything in a new light: the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

To its critics, Planned Parenthood is the godless super-merchant of abortion. To its supporters, it is the dependably secular defender of abortion rights. But at this breakfast, God was everywhere, easily invoked by believers of various stripes.

“We are here this morning because, through our collective efforts, we are agents in bringing our fragile world ever closer to the promise of redemption,” Rabbi Dennis S. Ross, director of Concerned Clergy for Choice, told the audience. “As clergy from an array of denominations, we say yes to the call before us. Please join me in prayer: We praise you, God, ruler of time and space, for challenging us to bring healing and comfort to your world.”

“Amen,” the audience responded.

The Interfaith Prayer Breakfast has been part of Planned Parenthood’s annual convention for four years. Most ministers and rabbis at the breakfast have known the group far longer.