28 September 2010 — As every former child prodigy knows, high expectations are both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing, because past accomplishments open doors which might otherwise stay closed; a curse, because where others are free to hone their craft in obscurity, the prodigy is watched by every critical eye the moment they through that specially-opened portal.

Alison Bechdel was no child prodigy, but she had a long run as a strip cartoonist during which time she was able to hone her craft in a gradually decreasing obscurity with Dykes to Watch Out For, an episodic strip that managed (at least to some extent) to broaden Bechdel's audience from its lesbian (and gay) base to many people who simply liked good comics.

But getting your work noticed by The Comics Journal is not in the same league as creating Time Magazine's Book of the Year for 2006, as Bechdel's first graphic novel, Fun Home, was. My copy opens with three pages of review excerpts containing words like "Masterful" and comparisons to David Sedaris, Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov, among others.

High praise indeed; not many books could live up to it all. Does Bechdel's?

29 September 2010 — The average Canadian keeps their mobile device for approximately 2 years and only 12% of used mobile devices are recycled. Recycle My Cell is run by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) and offers thousands of drop-off locations for Canadians to get rid of their old device.

Waste Reduction Week 2010 is happening from October 18 to the 24 and Recycle My Cell has become the official national sponsor. As part of this initiative the CWTA will launch the “Recycle My Cell Challenge”, a contest for students to see who can recycle the most wireless devices and accessories. The contest closes on November 30th, 2010 and it seems everyone will be a winner with their school being acknowledged on the CWTA website and in local media.

In case you missed it ... and always worth repeating

— Winston Churchill

Let's say that news throughout human time has been free. Take that time when Ugh Wayne went over to the cave of Mugh Payne with news that the chief of his group had broken a leg while chasing his laughing wife around the fire. That news was given freely and received as such with much knowing smiles and smirks to say nothing of grunts of approval or disapproval. — 688 words.

26 September 2010, NEW YORK — The jury was out too long on the BP oil spill of April 20, 2010. Five months after the horrific event, which killed 11 workers and injured 17, the truth finally surfaced.

28 September 2010, WASHINGTON, D.C. — The strong winds off the Atlantic Ocean could become a cost-effective way to power much of the East Coast — especially North and South Carolina, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia, a new study released Tuesday says.

The report by the conservation advocacy group Oceana argues that offshore wind could generate 30 percent more electricity on the East Coast than could be generated by the region's untapped oil and gas. It predicts that wind from the ocean could be cost competitive with nuclear power and natural gas to produce electricity.

The study appears just as new developments are starting to push U.S. efforts to catch up with Europe and China on tapping the energy in offshore wind. Great Britain last week opened the world's largest wind farm, and China built its first pilot offshore wind farm in 2008, using turbines from the nation's largest wind turbine producer, Sinovel. — Read the full story at McClatchy Newspapers, 1,022 words.

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27 September 2010 — The Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to pursue a probation revocation case against BP after the company was found to have violated a federal judge's March 2009 felony judgment, which required BP to fulfill the terms of a settlement agreement it entered into with government regulators five years ago to make certain safety upgrades at its Texas City refinery by September 2009, according to documents obtained by Truthout.

 

Instead, the DOJ will allow BP to spend two additional years to correct hundreds of safety problems that have plagued the refinery - the third-largest in the country - for a decade and have played a part in the deaths of 19 over the past five years. — Read the full article at TruthOut.org, words.

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28 September 2010 — At long last, good news. Fifteen years have passed since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the results are in. The controversial experiment has been a stellar success. The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has been good for the land and the creatures that live on it. Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.

28 September 2010, MÉRIDA — In Venezuela’s National Assembly elections on Sunday, opponents of President Hugo Chavez won approximately 20 fewer seats than they held during the 2000-2005 legislative term, while the pro-Chavez camp grew by several seats, Deputy-Elect Roy Chaderton said on Monday.

Chaderton said the opposition was setting up a “media farce” by comparing Sunday’s results only to those of the 2005 election, which the opposition boycotted, and thus reporting that that opposition drastically increased its presence in the National Assembly.

27 September 2010 — If a Martian, proverbial or otherwise, had landed on Earth in the last 24 hours the media had some practical advice. Or so it seemed. According to the Sunday Times and numerous other media outlets that followed up the story, the United Nations was "poised" to appoint an individual to be the first point of contact with aliens.

A bad economy, two losing wars and a black president ...

White America has lost its mind

29 September 2010 — About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.

It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).

Russian company promises space hotel by 2016

29 September 2010 — A Russian firm on Wednesday announced an ambitious bid to fill the vacuum in the space tourism market by stationing an orbiting hotel in the cosmos.

The Moscow-based Orbital Technologies has sky-high hopes that its planned Commercial Space Station can serve as a tourism hub for well-heeled travellers and offer overspill accommodation for the International Space Station and workspace for science projects.

But it's unlikely to come anytime soon — the company wants to launch a seven-room station by 2016 but may increase or decrease that capacity based on customer demand.

It also remained unclear whether the state-controlled RKK Energia company, named as the general contractor for the project, would have enough funds and capacities to carry out the plan. Energia builds Soyuz crew capsules and Progress cargo ships to deliver space crew and supplies to the International Space Station that would be the only link to space after planned retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet next year. — Read the full article at RawStory.com, 420 words.

 

Our acute case of financial madness   By Paul Krugman TruthOut.org   29 September 2010 — Future historians will marvel at the austerity madness that gripped policy elites in the spring of 2010.   In a flurry of blind panic and irrational exuberance, organizations from the European Central Bank to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suddenly abandoned everything we had learned, at a bitter cost, about economics during recessions and decided that fiscal austerity was the way to go while the world was in the depths of a slump — indeed, many claimed that spending cuts would actually be expansionary.   Not only was there an illogical push for austerity, but there also emerged a widespread demand for central banks to raise interest rates in the face of falling inflation and high unemployment.   This madness was exemplified by the O.E.C.D.’s economic outlook report in May, which supported these ideas. But the O.E.C.D. has suddenly changed its tune. — Read the full story at TruthOut.org, 779 words.

Taming the Celtic tiger

29 September 2010, Dublin — The last time I was here in Ireland, eight years ago, the Celtic Tiger was still roaring. The country had zoomed from poverty to wealth, enjoying an unprecedented economic boom, with unemployment down to 4.5 percent and consumer spending and average wages at all-time highs.

But now? I stood on board a restaurant ship docked along a bank of the River Liffey with my friend and colleague David Kavanagh, executive director of the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild. His hand swept along the shore as he used the panorama of the city skyline to describe what has happened to the country's economy in just two short years.

To the left, he pointed out the beautiful new Samuel Beckett Bridge, opened in December, shaped like an Irish harp placed on its side, and designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. (In this city that reveres writers there are bridges named after Beckett, Sean O'Casey and James Joyce - a Calatrava design as well. He's also the imagination behind the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub, under construction at Ground Zero in Manhattan.)

 

The Beckett Bridge cost 60 million euros to erect - about $80 million US (and no Waiting for Godot-like jokes about a bridge to nowhere, please). Near it stands Dublin's brand new national convention center, built for 380 million euros - that's almost half a billion dollars. Both structures epitomize the spending spree that once characterized Ireland's booming prosperity.

 

Torn down to make way for the convention center were red brick Victorian warehouses where trains delivered goods for transfer to the cargo ships that once docked here. A handful of them still stand. But next door, rising jagged like a broken tooth, is the unfinished building that was meant to be the new headquarters of the Anglo Irish Bank. — Read the full story inside, 1,039 words.