Short and sweet. I'm more of a Neil guy, but this song is one of my favorites.
(2 votes, average: 8.00 out of 10)
Loading... Yea, baby, I'm back. And you're asking for it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5hae6PlPYA
(5 votes, average: 8.20 out of 10)Loading... 
Comes the end of the year, the last First Monday of the year. With the world ending on Dec. 21 and all, my selection for this month seems entirely appropriate: Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
This 2006 best-seller by the science writer and Atlantic Monthly contributor was a huge, popular revelation when it was released. It brought to a mass audience a major revision of our understanding of Native Americans' impact on the environment, the depth and richness of Native cultures, and the utter (and largely unintended) devastation wrought on Native populations by Western diseases.
Mann compellingly musters the academic evidence to argue that Native populations were huge prior to the arrival of Westerners, that those populations had highly sophisticated economies, polities and cultures in many cases, and that many Native cultures had dramatic impacts on the landscape, from sculpting and expanding the Great Plains, to building magnificent pyramids, to cultivating a complex ecosystem in the Amazon, to crafting a sophisticated trading culture in the Andes.
Perhaps most importantly, Mann offers us lay readers a new understanding of the relationship between the Indians and the early settlers in North America. As the New York Times review of the book put it,
According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians may have died almost immediately on contact with various European diseases, particularly smallpox. That would have amounted to about one-fifth of the world's total population at the time, a level of destruction unequaled before or since. The exact numbers, like everything else, are in dispute, but it is clear that these plagues wreaked havoc on traditional Indian societies. European misreadings of America should not be attributed wholly to ethnic arrogance. The "savages" most of the colonists saw, without ever realizing it, were usually the traumatized, destitute survivors of ancient and intricate civilizations that had collapsed almost overnight. Even the superabundant "nature" the Europeans inherited had been largely put in place by these now absent gardeners, and had run wild only after they had ceased to cull and harvest it.
These are important cultural adjustments that will probably take another generation or more to fully be accepted by our national psyche. This is no guilt-ridden, lefty apologia, but rather an honest attempt to help us make better sense of our real past in this hemisphere. The book is fairly well-written, if non-linear in its presentation. It won't keep you up at night with riveting story-telling, but it has a lot to teach, and a lot to ponder. I would have appreciated Mann taking Jared Diamond's work more seriously (there are only two, brief mentions of Diamond's work in the book, even though much of the story he tells fits closely with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel explanations for European conquest of the New World), and eminent historian Alan Taylor delivered some trenchant criticisms in his WaPo review, but I nonetheless found the book to be tremendously interesting.
Shifting gears, I return to the end-times theme. It's the end of the year, which is a time of lists. And since this a book post, my lists are about books. Duh.
Here are two biggies: Slate's best books of 2012 and the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 list. Ho ho ho. I can honestly say that I have not read a single book on either of those lists (what, no A Dance With Dragons??? PrePOSterous!!!!). But I bet that in five years, I will have read a handful of them.
What are you reading, or at least buying for someone you love?
Tomorrow is election day. Go vote if you have not voted already. Else, it's all your fault.
This month's selection is Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, "The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl."
Wow. What a depressing book. Chapter after chapter of personal stories of misery and deprivation and environmental disaster. This is social history at its most relentless. Egan's National Book Award-winning book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding his parents' (or, for you punk kids, grandparents') generation. Here's a little taste:
On May 9, 1934, a flock of whirlwinds started up in the northern prairie, in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, where people had fled the homesteads two decades earlier. The sun at midmorning turned orange and looked swollen. The sky seemed as if if were matted by a window screen. The next day, a mass of dust-filled clouds marched east, picking up strength as they found the jet stream winds, moving toward the population centers. By the time this black front hit Illinois and Ohio, the formations had merged into what looked to pilots like a solid block of airborne dirt. Planes had to fly fifteen thousand feet to get above it, and when they finally topped out at their ceiling, the pilots described the storm in apocalyptic terms. Carrying three tons of dust for every American alive, the formation moved over the Midwest. It covered Chicago at night, dumping an estimated six thousand tons, the dust slinking down walls as if every home and every office had sprung a leak. By morning, the dust fell like snow over Boston and Scranton, and then New York slipped under partial darkness. Now the storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide, a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, weighing 350 million tons. In Manhattan, the streetlights came on at midday and cars used their headlights to drive.
....
New York was a dirty city in 1934.... On a typical day, the dust measured 227 particles per square millimeter -- not a good reading for someone with health problems. But on May 11, the dust measured 619 particles per square millimeter. ... A professor from New York University...calculated that on the seventeenth floor of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, the thickness of the dust was about forty tons per cubic mile, which meant all of New York City was under the weight of 1,320 tons. [pp. 150-152]
Thousands of residents of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas developed "dust pneumonia". During dusters, drivers would drag chains from their cars in order to dissipate static electricity. On "Black Sunday," April 14, 1935, an even worse storm struck. "The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal" (p. 8).
John Steinbeck wrote famously of the Joads and others who escaped the Dust Bowl. This book is the story of those who stayed behind. It is riveting, shocking, numbing reading.
So. Now that I've cheered you up, who wants to go watch some political commercials?
So, this began as an LTE, but I didn't want the conversation to get lost.
We all have favorites in baseball, be they players, teams (uh, Twins, duh. Why are you here?), numbers. This is a classic, pull-up-your-bar-stool game: IF you were a Minnesota Twin (for a day, or a week, or a lifetime), what number would you want your jersey to read, and why?
For the sake of argument, retired numbers are in play.
So, I didn't get much reading done this month either. And I'm currently back in the Motherland ("Hi, guys! Sure hope I can slip out for a Surly with y'all!"), ensconced with brotherS and sisterinlawS, preparing to deposit The Boy at the Alma Mater. Which means that this post was actually written some time ago.
Just in time to see this cool, new link to the Library of Congress's new exibition, Books That Shaped America.
So rather than talk about a book o' the month, I'm going to play the list game.
The list ranges from 1750 to the present (no shining city upon a hill stuff here people!)
Continue reading First Monday Book Day: Shape Up, America
The beatings will continue until morale improves the vjs post new stuff.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaTOMkHaET4
(4 votes, average: 7.75 out of 10)Loading... It's been a long, hot summer, curiously bereft of book posts. The Natives are restless.
Ok, ok, ok. My bad, people.
Truth be told, I haven't finished a book in the last two months. Back in June, I started reading a book about the experiences of a first-year med student learning about human anatomy via dissecting cadavers (no, it was not Mary Roach's Stiff, which is said to be a very enjoyable and funny read). I got about three chapters in and realized that I was bored. The author was determined to convince me that this was all such a wondrous, magical, spiritual journey, but I was bored. So I set it aside.
I then ran across Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky, his long-awaited sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and its sort-of-prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, both of which were absolutely awesome. Perhaps best known for his origination of the concept of a technological singularity, Vinge is a smart, sophisticated writer, equally impressive in his handling of complex technological concepts, inventing alien cultures, and writing compelling characters.
This one is engaging, but (life and) the quadrennial festival of bad television coverage of sports has intervened, preventing me from getting this thing done. Children stumbles a bit in the front end, with a somewhat unbelievable naivety affecting several characters, but the world Vinge created in Fire is thoroughly engaging. I am looking forward to re-focusing and finishing this one.
What are you reading, damnit?
Guthrie vs. De-duderino. Span in the lineup.
Happy vacation, Twayn!
It's the Return of the Gentleman Masher! Jimbo's last game in a Twins uniform was against the O's. How coincidental that his first second current return-trip to the Bullseye should be in an O's uniform.
Anyway, I know what I'm rooting for tonight: jacked dongers.
Of course, there WOULD be a lefty on the mound for the Twins in Scott Diamond, so maybe Jim will si
sit instead of start tonight. That would be absolute Boo.
In Diamond's last three starts, he has gone 7, 8 and 8, respectively, while allowing 2, 2, and 3 runs, respectively. He has emerged as the Koufax* of the staff, with a 2.62 ERA, 3.85/3.53 FIP/xFIP, and 45:12 K:BB in 79 innings.
His opposing number tonight will be Chris Tillman. In his only other appearance this season, July 4 against Seattle, Tillman went 8 2/3 of 2-hit ball, striking out 7 and giving up two runs. The big right-hander throws a mid-90s fastball, curve, and changeup. Tillman was part of the package, with CFer Adam Jones, for Erik Bedard back in 2008. He has had several cups of coffee since but struggled to put his game together in the minors (5.58 ERA, 5.31 FIP in 36 starts over three seasons prior to this year).
From the fangraphs piece by Jack Moore on July 5:
Tillman appeared to figure something out in Triple-A this year, striking out over a batter per inning again after dropping to under 7.0 per nine innings in 2010 and 2011. According to StatCorner, he drew 11.4% swinging strikes after marks below 10% in both 2010 and 2011.
Just a look at the radar gun readings shows what happened: Tillman’s fastball is back. He touched 97.2 MPH in the ninth inning — twice — after averaging just 89.5 MPH on his fastball last season. Tillman averaged 95.0 MPH on the fastball Wednesday, and every pitch saw an uptick in velocity — the cutter up to 93.0 from 84.2, the curve up to 77.4 from 75.2, the changeup up to 83.2 from 78.7 (a massive 12 MPH difference from the fastball).
Hopefully, he'll give Consuela and Morneau a couple of belt-high fastballs each tonight.
*Diamond is in his age-25 season. At age 25, Koufax went 18-13 with a 3.52 ERA and led the NL with 269 Ks in 255 2/3 innings while earning his first A-S appearance. So, umm, yea, it could happen.