1. "Actor Don S. Davis dies in Gibsons": R.I.P. Major Garland Briggs, for this among others.
["Don Sinclair Davis, a B.C. actor best known for his recurring role on the TV show Stargate SG-1, died of a heart attack Sunday morning at his home in Gibsons. He was 65. He had a massive heart attack," said Gail Wilson, a friend who lives just down the street from Davis. "The ambulances came [and] I know they tried to resuscitate him in the driveway and couldn't." Wilson said Davis had had heart problems for years and suffered from diabetes. Davis leaves behind his wife Ruby Fleming-Davis, who he married in 2003, and a son from a previous marriage."]
2. "Why $140 a Barrel Isn't High Enough": An editorial by Sal Cinquemani at Slant Magazine.
["Regardless of the factors, it shouldn't come as such a shock that a limited natural resource that has been steadily increasing in price for decades should suddenly spike in the wake of the fifth year of a failed war many believe was waged for oil (at the very least, partially and/or peripherally), an increasingly volatile hurricane season that threatens U.S. refineries, and the voracious thirst for fossil fuels in developing nations like India and China. The idea of sucking Earth's molasses-thick marrow out of the ground and pumping it into our SUVs has always seemed gluttonous to me. We've drunk the milkshake, indeed. Watching our elected officials scramble to find quick fixes for the crisis while the oil companies continue to get fat on record profits is even more obscene. We've spent the last two decades mainlining, and finding new ways to get our fix—whether it's exploiting our occupation of Iraq or drilling offshore or warming Alaskan caribou land with a nice, cozy pipeline in an attempt to compensate for rapidly maturing oil fields—isn't a long-term solution when it's already widely accepted that long-run survival requires that we get off the sauce almost entirely."]
3. "Gore Vidal Essays Drip Venom on Updike, Robert Kennedy": Craig Seligman reviews The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal for Bloomberg. (Hattip: N.P. Thompson)
["He's unimpressed, Nobel or no, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914": "To give the noble engineer his due he is good at describing how things work, and it is plain that nature destined him to write manuals of artillery or instructions on how to take apart a threshing machine." Granted, the ability to sneer magnificently is a narrow achievement. But nobody reads Vidal's essays for their range of feeling. We read them for their wit (Vidal is the true heir of Oscar Wilde) and their learning."]
4. "Recreating the sound of Aztec 'Whistles of Death'": From CNN.
[" Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods. The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico's ruins. For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded."]
5. "Toilet-trained chimp on the run in Calif. forest": More here.
["A 42-year-old chimpanzee who is toilet-trained and can eat with a knife and fork is believed to be at large in a Southern California forest after escaping his cage. The chimp called Moe disappeared Friday from Jungle Exotics, which trains animals for the entertainment industry. The chimp wandered into a house next door, surprising construction workers who saw him head for a nearby mountain. A weekend search in the San Bernardino National Forest 50 miles east of Los Angeles came up empty."]
Quote of the Day: Bern Williams
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): BFFs. Video here. (Hattip: Lauren Wissot)
Clip of the Day: A-HA! (Hattip: Jeremiah Kipp)
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Links for the Day (July 1st, 2008)
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3 comments:
Thank you for this, Keith. Especially the YouTube link. I will never, ever forget his telling of that "vision," and what it meant to Major Briggs to be able to tell it to his son Bobby, and what it meant to Bobby to hear it from hi father. This is one of the finest moments in television history.
"Regardless of the factors, it shouldn't come as such a shock that a limited natural resource that has been steadily increasing in price for decades should suddenly spike...
I don't understand the sudden spike.
The Slant piece seems to be written a little too quickly and so scattered shot. Minimally, extended $140 a barrel will cripple the economy, just slowly.
Re: Slant article
villainx, I tend to agree...
The piece hit all the standard anti-oil "talking points"...global warming, Bush lied about WMDs, evil corporate speculators, etc...
No doubt that the possibility of a spike in oil prices has been something we've been blissfully ignoring for the last 20 years (both Bushes included).
However, among the many things that weren't mentioned in the article included the fact that CANADA is our biggest supplier of imported oil (one reason a NAFTA renegotiation is a stupid idea), our country's fear of the nuclear power alternative because of a Jane Fonda/Michael Douglas movie, that many of us (including a lot of blue collar workers who are NOT part of the Enron crowd) have oil specutation investments as part of their retirement portfolios, the reality that electric cars won't address carbon emissions, etc. etc. etc.
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