BOSTON GLOBE: The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum — in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year — with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites. Seen below are some recent images of the Sun in more active times. MORE EDITOR’S NOTE: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FACTS: The Sun is about 4.5 […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR His starring role as George W. Bush in the new Oliver Stone film W. is the latest in a series of high-profile jobs for Josh Brolin — including the Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men. He was also seen recently in American Gangster and In The Valley of Elah. ALSO, Curtis Sittenfeld‘s new novel American Wife is about a kind, bookish, young woman who marries a wealthy charismatic young man who eventually becomes president. It’s based on the life of Laura Bush. One reviewer calls it “a compassionate, illuminating, and beautifully rendered portrait.” PREVIOUSLY: A Comedy Of Terrors
MESSAGE TO INQUIRER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Even A Broken Watch Is Right Twice A Day
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet, let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association. But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically […]
KILLADELPHIA: Death On The 14th Hole
INQUIRER: The body of a woman was found this morning on a Philadelphia city golf course, police said. A golfer discovered the corpse about 10:30 a.m. near the 14th hole of the Juniata Golf Course near Fisher’s Lane and Ramona Avenue, said Lt. Frank Vanore, spokesman for the Philadelphia police. Investigators have not determined the cause or manner of death, Vanore said. * RELATED: A triple shooting in North Philadelphia overnight critically injured a 12-year-old boy, police said. Two male teenagers were also wounded after gunfire erupted shortly after 1 a.m. on the 1400 block of North Broad Street. The […]
FILE UNDER X: UFOs Over Springsteen Rally
Filmed by somebody in the crowd at last Saturday’s Bruce Springsteen Rally For Change concert in the Ben Franklin Parkway. Our in-house paranormal analysts have reviewed this footage and concluded it can only be one of two things: NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings that might be a threat to NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings. Either that or it’s McCain, Snoopy and the Red Baron.
OBAMA: Time For A Moratorium On Foreclosures
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I’m also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you are a bank or lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and re-negotiate their mortgages, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet. It also means promoting a new ethic of responsibility. Part of the reason this crisis […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Case For Change
THE NEW YORKER: Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals? The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the […]
BIRTHDAY BLUES: Lenny Bruce Died For Your Sins
[Illustration by NEWTASTY] WIKIPEDIA: Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was an American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial led to the first posthumous pardon in New York history.On October 4, 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity[9] at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that “‘to’ is a preposition, ‘come’ is a verb” and that the sexual context of “come” is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone […]
LET IT BLURT: Lester Bangs Speaks
ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: Back in the day, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches formed a terrible triumvirate of rowdy, hard-living rock scribblers — angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of rock — feared and loathed by the music industry’s power elite. They didn’t just write about rock ‘n’ roll; he lived it, drank it, smoked it, felt it up, snorted it down and puked it up all over the page the morning after. BOING BOING: So what an incredible thrill it was to come across a 90-minute interview with Lester […]
MCCAIN: I Heart Cheney & Rumsfeld
It is all about judgment. SALON: Republicans are already starting to gird themselves for a Nov. 4 debacle. A front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times featured GOP leaders lamenting the disarray in the McCain campaign. More ominous for McCain are the results of a secret-ballot survey by National Journal magazine of roughly 100 prominent Republican campaign consultants. Freed from the demands of on-the-record spin, 80 percent of these operatives admitted that it was highly likely that Obama would win the White House. The other 20 percent — the cockeyed optimists of the GOP camp — predicted that the election […]
LOST IN TRANSLATION: Letter From Tokyo
Assistant Editor Eva Liao recently moved to Tokyo where she is studying Japanese in an intensive two year program that will, upon completion, certify her to conduct business in the Land Of The Rising Sun. She will be dropping us letters semi-regularly about her experiences as a stranger in a strange land. Dear Phawker, So yes, I’m in Tokyo! For almost a month now. I think I’ve made a pretty smooth transition. Or as smooth as I could have hoped for, I guess. Japan is unlike any other place Ive been and there are many tiny obstacles to surpass. Although […]
IMPERIAL HUBRIS: Rome Did Not Fall In A Day
NEW YORK TIMES: At the turn of the 20th century, toward the end of a brutal and surprisingly difficult victory in the Second Boer War, the people of Britain began to contemplate the possibility that theirs was a nation in decline. They worried that London’s big financial sector was draining resources from the industrial economy and wondered whether Britain’s schools were inadequate. In 1905, a new book — a fictional history, set in the year 2005 — appeared under the title, “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.” The crisis of confidence led to a sharp political reaction. In […]
HOCKEY BOMB: Palin Roundly Booed By Flyers Fans
FORBES: Palin Gets Booed in Philly! This is sure to be the headline splashed across television and newspapers Sunday morning, the day after the Republican Vice Presidential candidate and hockey mom from Alaska drops the puck at the ceremonial face-off for the Philadelphia Flyers’ home opener on Saturday night at the soon-to-need-a-name-change Wachovia Center. What will be missing from the news: the jeers were deserved. As every sports fan knows, no one is safe in front of Philadelphia fans—they have never needed a reason to boo anyone in their ballpark, stadium or arena. As usual though, the boring chorus of […]