Rio de Janeiro’s Transit Solution

by  Nate Berg, Wired Magazine

The slums of Rio de Janeiro—the infamous favelas—pile onto and up and over the city’s iconic steep hillsides. Simply getting from point A to point B requires a sub-alphabet of zigzaggery up stairs, over switchbacks, and through alleyways that can be just a few feet wide. There’s nowhere for public transit to go. Nowhere, that is, but up.

That’s the direction for the newest transportation system in Rio, slated to open in March: a six-station gondola line running above a collection of favelas known as the Complexo do Alemão. The government says that 152 gondolas will carry 30,000 people a day along a 2.1-mile route over the neighborhood, transforming the hour-and-a-half trudge to a nearby commuter rail station into a 16-minute sky ride.

Spending $74 million for this kind of imagineering may sound a little wacky, but in recent years Medellín and Caracas have also built gondolas for underserved areas. Jorge Mario Jáuregui, the architect behind Rio’s system, says the project has real and symbolic value—”real because the connection has been built, and symbolic because it makes the informal city part of the formal city.” Still, in the favelas—where there’s no running water or sewers and a street battle between police and drug gangs killed dozens last year—perhaps flying cable cars shouldn’t be a top priority.

Then again, sanitation and safety might not be the problems that Rio officials want to solve. With the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics coming to town, making the favelas look like a theme park could convey just the right impression.

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Spam Profits

Equation: How Much Money Do Spammers Rake In?

by  Julie Rehmeyer, Wired Magazine

After deleting the 10,000th Viagra offer from your inbox, you might wonder, does anyone actually make money off this crap? Chris Kanich and his colleagues at UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too—so they hijacked a botnet to find out. Kanich’s team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found in the wild that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. Then they changed the orders, effectively zombifying the botnet for their own research. Instead of sending hapless rubes to the botmaster’s website, spam ads would instead funnel them to a site built by Kanich’s team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but instead of taking credit card numbers in return for a bottle of sugar pills (or worse), the site coughed up an error message and counted the clicks. Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000. Here’s the equation they used to generate that number.

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Is Hell Dead?

by  Jon Meacham

As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill's growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.

A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: "Reality check: He's in hell." Bell was struck.

Really? he recalls thinking.

Gandhi's in hell?

He is?

We have confirmation of this?

Somebody knows this?

Without a doubt?

And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?

So begins Bell's controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Works by Evangelical Christian pastors tend to be pious or at least on theological message. The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises "eternal life" to "whosoever believeth in Him." Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, "for us and for our salvation came down from heaven ... and was made man." In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.

Bell, a tall, 40-year-old son of a Michigan federal judge, begs to differ. He suggests that the redemptive work of Jesus may be universal — meaning that, as his book's subtitle puts it, "every person who ever lived" could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be. Such a simple premise, but with Easter at hand, this slim, lively book has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond. When word of Love Wins reached the Internet, one conservative Evangelical pastor, John Piper, tweeted, "Farewell Rob Bell," unilaterally attempting to evict Bell from the Evangelical community. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Bell's book is "theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way." In North Carolina, a young pastor was fired by his church for endorsing the book.

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Seattle to Baghdad

[ed.  This article is a bit dated but has not lost any of its relevance.  I found it while looking for something else.  I was first introduced to Naomi Klein through her monumental work The Shock Doctrine which describes disaster capitalism i.e., economic/political opportunism in the wake of natural or man-made catastrophes.  I haven't read No Logo but would think that the concerns she expressed then, as I understand them, have been vindicated repeatedly over the last decade.]

by Naomi Klein, N+1 Magazine

Naomi Klein had already sent her first book, No Logo, to the printers when activists halted the November 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. For the new author, it was a serendipitous turn of events. No Logo was a chronicle of the “anticorporate” movement, an analysis of a new wave of protests against the business control of media, politics, and culture. When Klein started the book, she was connecting the dots of a largely underground world of resistance: “global street parties,” protests outside Niketown, occupations of Shell stations in Nigeria. In Seattle, the movement burst into full view. For people stunned by the Seattle demonstrations, Klein’s book was a field guide; for people inspired by them, it was a bible.

Less than two years after Seattle, two planes flew into the World Trade Center: a symbol of global capital, the towering logo for Wall Street. Political leaders and pundits proclaimed the nascent anticorporate movement dead, and practically accused the sweatshop opponents of bombing the Twin Towers. “The antiglobalization movement . . . is, in part, a movement motivated by hatred of the United States,” scolded New Republic editor Peter Beinart in an editorial two days after the attacks. Clare Short, the British secretary of state for international development, commented in November 2001, “Since September 11, we haven’t heard from the protesters. I’m sure they’re reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden’s network.” This was slander, but still, many commentators accepted the twisted logic that one of Washington’s enemies (the protesters) must be the friend of another of its enemies (al Qaeda). It seemed, at first, as though the movement that had produced the Seattle protests could not possibly survive.

Even before September 11, many “antiglobalizers” felt that journalists and pundits had tagged them with the wrong name. Here was an international movement if there ever was one: the shared effort of French farmers, Amazonian Indians, American steelworkers, and landless Africans to win a decent and secure livelihood. They protested something that, outside of America, most people called “neoliberalism,” after the liberal economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Neoliberals revived the 19th-century faith in the free market as the final arbiter of human affairs, a utopian certainty that had been dampened by the two World Wars and the Great Depression. They insisted that only the invisible hand could distribute goods efficiently or allocate wealth justly, and that therefore all barriers to its perfect operation—such as labor unions, tariffs, or welfare states—needed to be swept aside. When, in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the neoliberal ideology began to sweep the world, its proponents were able to identify it as “globalization,” making it sound like an inevitable trend, not a set of political choices. The result was that protesters could easily be painted as provincial xenophobes who yearned for an autarkic past and refused to accept economic reality. After September 11, it appeared that they might be branded traitors as well. Everything had changed, and it seemed that anticorporate activism—and with it, Naomi Klein—would simply fade away.

Instead, the opposite happened. The antiglobalization movement emerged—for a moment, at least—in a new, broader and deeper form, as the opposition to the war with Iraq. And Naomi Klein kept on writing, not only about the resistance to the war but also about the war itself. It is hard enough to write about politics in peace time. The stakes grow higher in a time of war. One must recognize how violence alters the most mundane aspects of our daily politics, yet also remain aware of the larger world—the political context—in which the fighting takes place. Klein, almost unique among political journalists, has struggled to make our post-9/11 moment continuous with the late 1990s. She has looked for the neoliberalism inside of neoconservatism. The degree to which she has succeeded tells us something about whether the movement for greater economic justice—under whatever name—can expect to have a future.

Wet House

by  John Burnside

Over the years, I've seen a number of people die from alcohol and, usually, it's a long, slow, fairly sickening process.

The body is surprisingly resilient and can take decades of abuse, culminating in what Dylan Thomas's doctor called "a massive insult to the brain", before it finally comes to a sorry and bewildering end.  Yet what the drinker's friends and family find just as distressing are the many dangers attendant on this long fall: the arrests, the accidents, the discovery in some wet alley, the thefts and lies, the assaults. Sometimes the worst thing is simply not knowing the whereabouts of someone you love, someone hopelessly vulnerable, for days or weeks at a time – where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, what might, at any moment, be done to them. As it happens, I have been on both sides of this scenario and I know that, for the drinker, it's a matter of almost unbearable shame and self-disgust. For the loved ones, the process can be likened to a campaign of attrition, a long and monstrous betrayal inflicted on them for no apparent reason.

It would seem obvious, then, that the provision of a safe place for those drinkers who do not want to be "saved" or "cured", would be a welcome development – and, at the St Anthony Residence, in St Paul, Minnesota, this is exactly what drinkers are offered, free of charge. For years, this "wet house" (one of four in the state) has provided shelter to its hopelessly alcoholic residents, at a cost of $18,000 per person per year. Nobody has to attend therapy sessions; there is no 12-step programme and no homilies about hope or the future.

Similar facilities are available elsewhere in the US, and in Canada, where a study based around Ottawa's "wet shelter" found that emergency room visits and arrests were reduced by around 50%, saving the individual drinker untold humiliation and pain and significantly reducing the bills of local taxpayers, while freeing up medical staff and police officers for other jobs. Can it be doubted, then, that such programmes provide a win-win situation? The drinker is taken off the street and out of the emergency room, the local community benefits and, though this is not altogether a solution to their problem, friends and family are eased of at least some of the pain that goes with loving a chronic drunk. Meanwhile, within the limits of their condition, drinkers attending facilities like St Anthony's are surprisingly happy.

And that, perhaps, is the problem. Hopeless drunks aren't supposed to be happy: they're supposed to suffer until they see the error of their ways and submit to a cure. Critics of the wet houses never say this, of course; they talk about wet houses "giving up" on people, about "writing people off" – and yet, though they may well be sincere, their opposition to harm reduction programmes raises serious questions about liberty and civil rights. When a grown man who, whether drunk or sober, maintains, often with real cogency and persuasiveness, that he does not wish to be treated for what other people may think of as a "condition" but which he sees as an essential part of his identity, what right does anyone have to oblige him to seek therapy? It may not be desirable (or rather, we may not see it as desirable) to be a chronic drinker, but it is not so long since it was seen as equally undesirable to be gay. When Alan Turing was forced to endure female hormone treatment ("chemical castration") in an attempt to "treat" his homosexuality, many people thought this was an appropriate course of action and attributed his suicide to his unstable – ie deviant – personality. That was in 1954. Will some future observer, say 50 years from now, look back on the treatment programmes that so many drunks have to endure and see a clear infringement of their most basic civil liberties?

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Karate School

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Panda Bread

[ed.  Too cool.  This is way beyond my ability, but perhaps not yours.  Recipe translated from the Asian web site Taro Taro]

Panda Bread:

Ingredients:

600g loaf (206 x 108 x100h)
230g bread flour
70g cake flour
30g sugar
milk + 1 yolk = 210g (I used skim milk)
4.5g salt
18g unsalted butter (I used 20g)
4g yeast
8g green tea powder dissolved in 10g boiling hot water
8g cocoa powder dissolved in 8g boiling water

Just A Minute

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Miso Happy

Miso: An Ancient Solution For Modern Meals

by Eve Turow, NPR

Get recipes for Miso-Glazed Halibut, Miso Ginger Salad Dressing, Grilled Miso-Marinated Flat Iron Steak, Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Eggs And Miso Butter, Dark Miso Soup With Sweet Potato, and Green Beans With Creamy Sesame-Miso Sauce.

It was 8 p.m. I had told my friend to be over at 8:30 for dinner, and there I was, dripping sweat in my yoga gear, plowing through my front door with my day's work clothes and yoga mat in hand.

"What had I been thinking," I wondered, "offering dinner a half-hour after I return home?"

My options were limited. Thankfully, I was cooking for a friend who I knew would love me, bathed or not. So I decided to skip a shower and throw on a sweatshirt instead. Scurrying into the kitchen, I threw the freezer and refrigerator doors open. Frozen tilapia, check. A fresh vegetable, check. Now, what to do with the fish?

My eyes scoured the back of the fridge. Then I spied my ingredient, hiding under gochujang — a hot pepper paste — and a container of cream cheese: miso. My sister had once made me a miso-glazed fish, and taking the filets out to thaw, I attempted to re-taste the ingredients in my mind. Something sweet, I recalled, and something tangy. Miso, unlike many other flavoring components, has a strong taste and texture of its own.  Feeling similar to nut butter on the tongue, it's exudes a distinct salty, funky aroma.

Miso is a fermented soybean paste. Though once uncommon in U.S. food stores, it is now available year round in several varieties. Miso ranges from light to dark, gaining flavor and intensity with the depth of its color. Some types are fermented with other grains: barley, rice and buckwheat, while others simply use the fundamental soybean.

The origins of miso trace back to the 700s B.C. in China, when fish bones and meat were used as the base. Soybeans became the main ingredient around 100 B.C. Miso, then known as jiang or "paste," was an essential condiment for pickling, keeping produce fresh for a longer period of time.

Miso arrived in Japan around the same time as Buddhism, approximately A.D. 550. It also traveled throughout Southeast Asia, taking on different names and qualities as each culture adapted the recipe, becoming varieties of Korean jang, Indonesian taucho, Vietnamese tuong, Thai tao-chio and Malaysian tau-cheo. Homemade miso traditions gained a stronghold in northern Japan, eventually integrating soybeans as they did in China by following a 6th-century encyclopedia outlining the how-to's of miso-making. Today it is an essential element in Japanese cooking, especially in the well-known miso soup.

A Mother's Gift

by Janny Scott

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.

Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”

Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”

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Sparking a Revolution

Laser sparks revolution in internal combustion engines

For more than 150 years, spark plugs have powered internal combustion engines. Automakers are now one step closer to being able to replace this long-standing technology with laser igniters, which will enable cleaner, more efficient, and more economical vehicles.

In the past, lasers strong enough to ignite an engine’s air-fuel mixtures were too large to fit under an automobile’s hood. At this year’s Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011), to be held in Baltimore May 1 – 6, researchers from Japan will describe the first multibeam laser system small enough to screw into an engine’s cylinder head.

Equally significant, the new laser system is made from ceramics, and could be produced inexpensively in large volumes, according to one of the presentation’s authors, Takunori Taira of Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences.

According to Taira, conventional spark plugs pose a barrier to improving fuel economy and reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a key component of smog.

Spark plugs work by sending small, high-voltage electrical sparks across a gap between two metal electrodes. The spark ignites the air-fuel mixture in the engine’s cylinder — producing a controlled explosion that forces the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder, generating the horsepower needed to move the vehicle.
Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner — burnt more air and less fuel — they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

Good Vibrations

by Hilary Howard

TOOTHPASTE? Check. Tampons? Check. Vibrator? Check!

For years, vibrators were bought quietly in sex shops, and later online, arriving in discreet unmarked packages. They were rarely discussed, other than perhaps during a late-night girl-talk session fueled by many glasses of pinot grigio. But now you can find them advertised on MTV and boldly displayed at Duane Reade, Walgreens and other mainstream drugstores, mere steps from the Bengay and Dr. Scholl’s.

The newest model on the shelves is the Tri-Phoria ($39.99), created by the condom company Trojan after a study the company conducted in 2008 in partnership with the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University revealed that over half of American women had used vibrators, and of that group, nearly 80 percent had shared them with their partners. James Daniels, vice president for marketing at Trojan, said: “The idea really came from consumers. They kept telling us vibrators, vibrators. And we just laughed. And then we realized they were serious.”

The Tri-Phoria joins the A:Muse Personal Pleasure Massager by LifeStyles, which arrived in stores in January, and the Allure, by Durex, which made its over-the-counter debut in 2008; both models are $19.99. Alan Cheung, senior brand manager for Durex, said that sales of the company’s vibrating products are up 60 percent over the last six months, compared with the same period last year. “Consumers are definitely not shy about this kind of purchase in the retail environment,” he said.

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The Golf Swing Explained

[ed.  Two approaches to the golf swing.  I'm more a student of the second.]

Exit Strategy

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Card Shark

You bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel and rented the car. But have you packed the right credit card?

by  Michelle Higgins

As credit card companies vie for a favored position in customers’ wallets, they’re pitching new travel enticements, from waiving foreign transaction fees that can add up to 3 percent to your purchases abroad to picking up fees for checked baggage. Earlier this month, for example, American Express did away with the 2.7 percent foreign transaction fees on international purchases for Platinum Card holders, and added two new travel benefits — Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for pre-approved travelers entering the United States.

British Airways and Chase brought back a promotion they had used two years ago — an impressive sign-on bonus of 100,000 miles (equivalent to two round-trip coach tickets from North America to London) to those who sign up for the British Airways Visa Signature Card, which has a $95 annual fee, by May 6 and spend $2,500 within the first three months. And Citigroup dropped foreign transaction fees on two of its new ThankYou Rewards cards that were introduced at the start of the year and allow users to redeem points for flights, hotels, cars, travel packages and activities.

But travelers should pay close attention to the fine print when comparing card offers to be sure the benefits outweigh the costs. For example, the American Express Platinum card comes with a hefty $450 annual fee. The range of perks that go along with it include $200 a year for airline fees like checked bags or in-flight meals, access to Priority Pass Select airport lounges (normally $249 for 10 visits), and zero foreign transaction fees. If you’re a road warrior who spends more time in airports and on planes than in your own home, it may be worth it. But it’s probably not the best card for the occasional flier. “If you’re getting it just for the currency conversion waiver, you will probably give them more than that back when you pay the annual fee,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, a financial research site.

To make the annual fees worthwhile, “look for a card with additional travel insurance like luggage replacement, emergency funds (in case the card is lost or stolen), car rental insurance and trip cancellation insurance,” said Carmen Wong Ulrich, author of “The Real Cost of Living,” who speaks from experience. After dinging a rental car while driving along St. John’s rough and hilly roads, “all we had to do was spend 10 minutes on the phone with AmEx, fill out a little paperwork and we never saw a bill for repairs,” she said. “Well worth the $125 annual fee” for the Gold card.

Also consider what kinds of perks are most valuable to you, and how much you need to spend to make rewards programs pay off. “The most important part of choosing the best credit card is finding one that best suits your personal needs and lifestyle,” said Amber Stubbs, managing editor at CardRatings.com, noting that she likes Capital One’s Venture Rewards card, which was introduced last year and lets users earn and redeem miles for any travel purchase regardless of the airline, hotel or cruise company. “However, for someone that frequents a particular airline,” she added, “it’s not a bad idea to get a card specific to that airline.”

To help you decide what to put in your wallet, here’s a list of some of the best cards for travelers, none of which are linked to a specific airline.

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Lester Bang's Basement

What it means to have all music instantly available.

by Bill Wyman

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That's a fantasy shared by many music fans—and, mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.

Music and movie fans of a certain age and a certain bent have strong visceral responses to this issue of availability. We grew up in an age of excited, roiling change in the music and film worlds, but the vicissitudes of the technologies and industries involved made the logistics of merely keeping up—much less being an expert—a time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes impossible chore. I won't bore you with the details, but let me tell you—it was a drag.

Actually, I will bore you with the details. The music you wanted to hear wasn't played on the radio and you couldn't find the records you wanted to buy. You couldn't even find the magazines that told you what records you should want to buy. It was almost impossible to see filmed footage of the artists you wanted to see. And movie fans? We scurried like rats after what could be, for all we knew, once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunities to see this or that film at movie theaters or in unexpected showings on television.

Fast forward a few decades, and we're approaching a singularity of sorts—one in which the digital convergence, in a gradual warm flash, is nearly complete. If you were born to this it's an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has. And once it's out there, getting your hands on it is a fairly simple process. The concept of "rarity" has become obsolete. A previously "rare" CD or movie, once it's in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that's a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don't have a CD in stock.)

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it's no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there's very little out there you might want that you can't find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

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Oh, No...

Children of the King

by Kelly Anderson

Most adolescents know what it’s like to be embarrassed by their parents when friends come over. Sometimes the shame involves lame jokes and stories, and, if you’re particularly unlucky, the naked baby pictures come out. But visual artist and director Stephanie Comilang had the edge on this one—her father is an Elvis impersonator.

Comilang recalls enduring embarrassment when her father, Steve, would burst into “Love Me Tender” and the like in front of her friends when she was growing up in Toronto. To deal with the shame, Comilang would hide behind the couch. But as she got older, she started feeling differently: Her friends loved it when her dad hammed it up in front of them, and Comilang started to feel, well, a kind of pride.

About 10 years ago, when she was 18, Comilang decided that in order to deal with her conflicting feelings she’d create a sort of improvised support group via a zine to be titled Children of the King.

“There are equal parts love and ‘Oh, Dad,’ and it’s always been like that,” she says. “I had these feelings of complete embarrassment, especially when I was younger. The zine was this really cheap way of reaching out to other people.”

Children of the King was made up of photocopied pictures of Comilang with her dad dressed in Elvis-style jumpsuits and short reports of her experiences as a child of an Elvis impersonator. One anecdote in the short-lived zine (there were only two issues) read: “For Christmas last year I bought Daddy a gorgeous pair of shiny silver Elvis glasses. I thought his gold ones were getting played out.”
She tried to get her zine into sympathetic hands by taking copies to sell at her dad’s gigs and at film festivals. But her target audience—the children of other Elvis impersonators—proved to be elusive.

Fast-forward 10 years. Having directed music videos for Canadian musicians Final Fantasy and Junior Boys, Comilang has returned to the idea behind Children of the King: She is working on a documentary of the same name, looking once again for the audience that she tried to find years ago.

“The zine was trying to reach out to other children of Elvis impersonators, to try to create this support group, and I wanted to see it through [with the film] and actually do it. Meet these people and make it more substantial by jumping into more layered issues,” she says.

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Cheesy Rider

End of Empire

Sleepwalking Into The Imperial Dark

by Tom Engelhardt

This can't end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can't afford to win or lose.

Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there's something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It's quite another thing to take it in when you're part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you're in the belly of the beast.

I don't know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this -- truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn't sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth's "sole superpower." In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily "beyond challenge" by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

A Country in Need of Prozac
Have you noticed, by the way, how repetitiously our president, various presidential candidates, and others now insist that we are "the greatest nation on Earth" (as they speak of the U.S. military being "the finest fighting force in the history of the world")? And yet, doesn't that phrase leave ash in your mouth? Look at this country and its frustrations today and tell me: Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?

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