brainrow

Loreena McKennitt sings “Bonny Portmore” at a Borders book store. (The song is about the destruction of Irish forests by English ship builders.)

Must be nice to have talent.

I was born four score and seven years after Abraham Lincoln died.

That’s a cute little coincidence, but it’s more than that: it tells me that on the day I was born, there were people living in this country who had been born as slaves.

Not many of them, certainly. But there were lots and lots of people who had learned about American slavery directly from parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles who had actually been slaves.

Imagine that.

Abraham Lincoln has always seemed almost mythical to me, like a figure from Mount Olympus. His life, his presidency and his death seem frozen in amber, immutable and inevitable. Yet, on the day I was born, there were probably a handful of people still living who had once, as children, heard him speak.

When Lincoln himself was born, Thomas Jefferson was president. By the time Lincoln was president, Jefferson and his peers had become creatures of myth.

Time turns life into history and history into mythology. We wait for a mythical leader to appear and solve our problems, but life has never worked that way. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” If our problems are to be solved, we have to do it ourselves.

From Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress (the State of the Union Message of his time):

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.

What we do, or fail to do, matters. That’s no myth.

This is real: the Republican National Committee gets into the spirit with a selection of e-cards for Valentine’s Day.

Oh, the spirit of love is in the air!

We’re approaching the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, so you can expect plenty of year-in-review stories. Rachel Maddow prepares us for the “Obama’s a failure” storyline we’re sure to hear from Republicans:

The news story:

Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson says Haiti has been “cursed” because of what he called a “pact with the devil” in its history.

The prayer:

Dear Lord, you know I don’t like to ask you for anything. You know I’ve never asked you to do harm to anyone.

Well, I’m asking now. Please, Lord, strike down Pat Robertson with a bolt of lightning. Preferably in broad daylight with lots of witnesses.

I don’t believe Robertson was speaking for You about Haiti, any more than I believed he was speaking for You when he said Ariel Sharon’s stroke was Your vengeance for peace overtures to the Palestinians, or when he said Hurricane Katrina was Your wrath over abortion, or that 9/11 was Your response to secularism in America.

The problem is, he claims to be speaking for You, and some people believe it. It’s not good for us, and it’s not good for You. Some people think, “If that’s what God’s all about, I’m gonna be an atheist.”

One well-aimed bolt of lightning would do a lot to clear up this confusion.

Amen.

The answer:

Do you know who you sound like just now? Pat Robertson.

God, I’m so ashamed.

I was recently telling somebody about this old commercial. I think this is where “I Want My MTV” and other similar slogans got their start.

We spoiled baby boomers are getting old now. Expect “I Want My Poligrip” and “I Want My Hip Replacement” ads any moment now.

Boston.com has 2009 in news photos.

(It’s a three-part series: click for part two or part three.)

If you think 2009 was rough, you might want to review the past decade.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow reviews 2009: The Year in Crazy. There’s also a part two.

We’ve got shortages of all sorts of things, but we do seem to have an inexhaustible supply of The Crazy.

For space nuts like myself, this is a famous photo. Astronaut Bruce McCandless is testing a self-contained jet backpack called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), designed to allow astronauts to perform extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) untethered from their spacecraft.

NASA’s official title for this photo was “EVAtion”, but when the photo was posted on another blog a few months ago, I suggested a different title, which I still like: Sky, Viewed from Above.

Fairly amazing, isn’t it?

Hard to feel enthusiastic about outdoing the neighbor’s Christmas lights after viewing this: Boston.com has the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar — a new photo will be revealed every day until Christmas.

If you look at the photos and can’t wait to see more, you can check out last year’s calendar while you wait.

NASA’s Astronony Picture of the Day had this farewell photo of the earth from the European Space Agency’s comet-chasing spacecraft, Rosetta.

Via Daring Fireball, here’s an animated map showing the advance of unemployment in the current recession.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling explains the stock market, and perhaps the whole economy.

Dogs get to say things that humans have to be too cool to say:

Because we know that terrorists all have superhuman powers, and can be held only in specially-constructed prison cells made of kryptonite-reinforced concrete, John Gruber has started a log to keep track of who’s a-scared of terrorists.

BEN FRANKLIN WAS NOT AFRAID

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
–Benjamin Franklin, 1755

HOUSE MINORITY LEADER JOHN BOEHNER IS AFRAID OF THE TERRORISTS

The Hill:

House Minority Leader John Boehner said that Republicans will attempt to force Democratic leaders to hold a vote on a bill that would ban Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred to the United States.

And so on.