As I wait to see if and how badly Houston, where I grew up, gets hit by Rita, and sit worried about my parents, family and friends, I obsessively check this, The Houston Chronicle’s Stomwatchers :

“[O]ur experiment in citizen journalism. The bloggers who are posting here live in various parts of the city, and they will be posting their experiences as Hurricane Rita approaches and moves through the area. Bloggers here are posting on their own and are solely responsible for the content of their blogs.

And let us now praise famous men, with particular attention to those who were famous only for being famous. They were heroes, too—they kept tongues wagging and gossip columnists gossiping and rumors flying, until they didn’t any longer and slipped into oblivion. But occasionally one of these figures rouses the interest of a journalist or biographer or social historian, and then he’s back among us—interesting as an artifact of a vanished zeitgeist if not interesting in himself. Which brings us to the latest disinterred hero of this species: Porfirio Rubirosa, or The Last Playboy, as his biographer, Shawn Levy, calls him. Raise your hands, boys and girls, if any of you under the age of 50 remember him. It doesn’t count if you’re from the Dominican Republic, have specialized in the history of polo, or have been studying the memoirs of Zsa Zsa Gabor (either version). Zsa Zsa and “Rubi” specialized in each other when they weren’t marrying everyone else; in fact, they would seem to have been each other’s nearest equivalent, their lives lived in headlines, nightclubs and between the sheets, although she was sometimes to be found in front of a camera, while he could be found on a horse or behind the wheel of a racing car.

more from the NY Observer here.

Why was she wearing fur?

That was one of the first questions experts asked when they began studying a 17th-century portrait of a woman who had the unmistakably stolid face of a servant but was decked out in a sumptuous fur collar. And why did the light on her face appear to be reflected off the dark surface of that collar when it should be absorbed by it?

“Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet” with the fur collar.
These were puzzling questions, since the woman, whose head is covered in a plain white bonnet, certainly did not seem to belong to the class of 17th-century Dutch society that had its portraits painted. Some experts would have taken one look at the canvas and immediately dismissed it as the work of a minor artist.

more from the NYT here.

I expected to be writing about how much I disliked Alison Lapper Pregnant, the 12-ton, marble sculpture that now graces Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. I had seen pictures of Marc Quinn’s maquette of the piece and had thought the subject matter – Lapper was born with no arms and shortened legs – too deliberately controversial, too feebly didactic and, as a result, rather banal.

But I should have known better. When it comes to sculpture, never underestimate the move from maquette to finished work. In the case of Alison Lapper Pregnant, something wonderful has happened in the zoom from miniature to massive, and it is not only the sheer scale of the thing (the statue is 3.55 metre tall and manages to feel even bigger) that demands a certain respect. White and dazzling, Quinn’s sculpture has set a grey corner of a grey space unexpectedly ablaze.

more from The Observer here.

From The Guardian:

Curtis Sittenfeld evokes the horror of being a teenager in her examination of the cruelty of cool, Prep, says Viv Groskop. Lee Fiora is a dorky 14-year-old from an embarrassingly ordinary family in South Bend, Indiana, who ends up at Ault, an exclusive Massachusetts boarding school. Prep is the story of her survival there. It is about how she learns to fit in somewhere she doesn’t belong, only to suffer social death the moment she finally feels accepted. Rejected by 14 publishers before it found a home, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut is an addictive portrait of adolescence – The OC meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with flashes of Clueless. After rave reviews and becoming a New York Times bestseller, it has also been optioned as a film by Paramount.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

You may or may not have pondered why your breakfast cereal tends to clump together or cling to the sides of a bowl of milk. Now there is an easy explanation. Dubbed the Cheerio Effect by scientists, this clumping phenomenon applies to anything that floats, including fizzy soda bubbles and hair particles in water after a morning shave. Dominic Vella, a graduate student now at Cambridge University, and L. Mahadevan, a mathematician from Harvard University, decided to change that. In a study that appears in the Sept. 15 issue of the American Journal of Physics, Mahadevan explains the Cheerio Effect using three basic concepts from physics: buoyancy, surface tension and the meniscus effect.

More here.

From The Guardian (with a link to a video of the event at the bottom of the article, not to be watched while eating or shortly after having eaten):

“What had been billed as ‘the grapple in the Big Apple’ in the end owed more to pugilism than polemics, with jibes, like jabs, missing more often than they landed, and many a blow below the belt.

Hitchens berated Galloway for his ‘sinister piffle’, congratulating him on ‘being 100% consistent in [his] support for thugs and criminals’ and declaring: ‘The man’s search for a Fatherland knows no ends.’ Galloway branded Hitchens a hypocrite and ‘a jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes’. Describing Hitchens’ journey from the left to the right, Galloway said: ‘What we have witnessed is something unique in natural history. It’s the first metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug.’ In the heat of battle the fact that butterflies come from caterpillars did not temper the applause from the audience, roughly two-thirds of whom backed Galloway.

Having both torched the moral high ground, they would both later claim it as their own. At one point Galloway told Hitchens ‘Your nose is growing,’ only to deride his opponent for his ‘cheap demagoguery’. Hitchens scolded the jeering audience for their ‘zoo-like noises’, only to say that Galloway’s ‘vile and cheap guttersnipe abuse is a disgrace’.

In a debate that drew as much from the culture of the playground as the traditions of parliament, no hyperbolic stone was left unturned.”

Or unthrown for that matter. 

Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post:

Simon Wiesenthal, 96, the controversial Nazi hunter who pursued hundreds of war criminals after World War II and was central to preserving the memory of the Holocaust for more than half a century, died early today at his home in Vienna, Austria. He had a kidney ailment.

Called the “deputy for the dead” and “avenging archangel” of the Holocaust, Wiesenthal after the war created a repository of concentration camp testimonials and dossiers on Nazis at his Jewish Documentation Center. The information was used to help lawyers prosecute those responsible for some of the 20th century’s most abominable crimes.

Wiesenthal spoke of the horrors first-hand, having spent the war hovering near death in a series of labor and extermination camps. Nearly 90 members of his family perished.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

In his global campaign against disease and destitution, Bono has taken the power of rock celebrity to new places — prime ministerial residences, the White House and the offices of the United Nations. But the success he has had is about a lot more than his soaring voice.

More here.

Josh Smith has brought this great site to my attention. It details NASA’s plans for exploration of the moon, and has a nice slide show and other information. Check it out here.

Joshua Hammer & Christine Spolar in The New Republic:

…yet, for all its problems, the election may have created momentum for democratic reform that the Mubaraks will have trouble stopping. Cafés have been alive with talk of politics, and the strategies adopted by the pro-democracy forces–such as challenging the regime’s election commission for the right to place independent monitors in polling stations–were closely watched. Monitors ended up having to negotiate their way into the polls, but they were surprisingly successful in many instances. And they gained valuable tools for the next go-round. Ayman Nour–the charismatic 40-year-old former parliamentarian whose arrest earlier this year prompted protests from the Bush administration–came in second with 7 percent of the vote, thus emerging as the leader of the nascent opposition. Nour’s campaign was low-budget and wildly disorganized. But his message–he attacked ruling party corruption and called for a repeal of the repressive Emergency Laws, enacted after the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat–grew bolder as the weeks progressed. Equally important, the campaign changed public perceptions of Mubarak. “Before, Mubarak was seen as a God–detached, unreachable,” says Negad El Borai, a human rights attorney and member of a pro-democracy group that sought to monitor the presidential elections. “Now the God is being forced to travel to the provinces, asking people to give him their vote. It’s a sea change in Egyptian politics.”

More here.

From Casa del Ionesco:

What the world needs now: a Burt Bacharach/Dr. Dre collaboration?

from The Independent

Once the world’s smoothest crooner, Burt Bacharach is now collaborating with Dr. Dre and attacking President Bush. He tells John Walsh why he’s swapped easy-listening for tough-talking:
more

Good article but one minor quibble: Burt is the Sultan of Songwriters, not to mention the undisputed Emperor of Easy, but his crooning is only marginally smoother than the use of sandpaper as a facial exfoliant: that’s why Dionne, Dusty, Tom, Gene, Perry, Jack et alia were let loose on those melifluous melodies. Burt’s exquisitely sophisticated arrangements even made Cilla sound good, though they failed to elevate his own resolutely earthbound vocals. As a songwriter… Burt’s natural habitat is more Mount Olympus than Hasbrook Heights but as a crooner… hell, he’s just another Icarus in diving boots.

More here.

From CNN:

The Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday called for a public debate on the proposed abolition of leap seconds, a tiny end-of-year adjustment to keep clocks in synch with the earth’s rotation.

The International Telecommunications Union will meet in Geneva in November to debate a proposal to abolish leap seconds after 2007.

Mike Hapgood, secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, said the debate has practical implications for computers, global positioning systems and for those who study phenomena — such as tides — that are related to the earth’s rotation.

There have been 21 leap seconds since they were introduced in 1972, and the next is planned for the end of 2005.

Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Birds

Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Fish.
Here follows a description of an unknown town.
Here follows the phoenix-flight from human eyes.
Here follows the friendship fish and langouste.
All the marvels of erotic danger follow here.
Here follows the phone number of a dead person.
Here follows a game based on perfect information.
Five minutes have passed since I wrote this line.
I mistook my baby’s cry for the radiator hiss.
Here follows the address of a place to buy cocaine.
Big sadness come your way, sunrise, skyline.
Let’s do it some new way next time we try.
Do you have anything you can put inside me?
Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Birds.

from Dan Chiasson’s Five Poems at The Paris Review.

Sartre and Beauvoir had met in Paris in 1929, when he was twenty-four, she was twenty-one, and both were studying for the agrégation, the competitive examination for a career in the French school system. Beauvoir was a handsome and stylish woman, and she had a boyfriend, René Maheu. (It was Maheu who gave her her permanent nickname, le Castor—the Beaver.) But she fell in love with Sartre, once she got over the physical impression he made. Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene. He had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can be charismatic, and he wisely refrained from disguising it. He simply ignored his body. He was also smart, generous, agreeable, ambitious, ardent, and very funny. He liked to drink and talk all night, and so did she.

more from Louis Menand at the New Yorker here.

From Scientific American:

Stem cells can transform into whatever cell the body tells them to. Unfortunately, scientists have yet to master that particular gift of gab. But investigators at Stanford University may soon crack the language with tiny “chat rooms” for stem cells. In their natural milieu, stem cells have a variety of neighbors that pass on chemical messages at exact spots at particular times in specific amounts to guide the cells’ development into a given cell type. In today’s laboratory, however, researchers often bathe the whole cell with chemicals–kind of like out-of-control beer keggers compared with the sophisticated cocktail parties the body normally throws for stem cells. To uncover the mostly unknown placement, timing and identity of the cues, Stanford materials scientist Nicholas A. Melosh and his colleagues are re-creating the niche where stem cells normally dwell. They are developing a microscopic lab on a silicon chip that surrounds a stem cell with as many as 1,000 cavities, each 500 nanometers wide.

More here.

From Nature:

Ever think your spouse is turning you grey before your time? Well things are very different for a beetle being studied by Swedish evolutionary biologists. They have found that some male bean weevils can slow down the ageing process in their mates simply by having sex with them. Female weevils (Acanthoscelides obtectus) live longer when mated with males that have been bred to reproduce later in life, report researchers at Uppsala University. By supplying a cocktail of age-defying chemicals with their sperm, the males stop their mates dying off before they have had the chance to produce a large family. “The males are promoting their own selfish interests by being the good guys in this case,” explains Göran Arnqvist, a member of the study team. “It benefits males if their mates live longer.”

More here.

Speaking of the James Cohan gallery (previous post), they are invloved, along with The Whitney and others, in finally realizing Robert Smithson’s dream of having a tugboat carry an island around the island of Manhattan. Links to various articles and so forth can be found here.

And here‘s something from New York Magazine:

New Yorkers enjoy the unexpected gesture, the extravagant folly, the existential leap. This fall, Minetta Brook (a nonprofit arts organization) and the Whitney Museum will realize a whimsical idea of this kind by the earthworks artist Robert Smithson. In a drawing made in 1970, three years before his death, Smithson conjured up a ‘floating island’ that would circle the fixed island of Manhattan like a slow-moving planet. Built on a barge and pulled by a tugboat, it consisted of a tailored landscape of rocks, trees, and pathways. It looked like something carved from Central Park.

Occupying the territory between Lee Friedlander’s formal elegance and Gregory Crewdson’s over-the-top American Gothic, Bill Owens has been using photography to pry into the American psyche for almost four decades. This show includes work from his best known series—”Suburbia,” 1972, “Our Kind of People,” 1976, “Working, I do it for the money,” 1978, and “Leisure,” 2004—as well as unpublished photographs from the late ‘60s that point toward Larry Clark’s vision of debauched American youth.

more from Artforum here.
a link to the James Cohan gallery where the Owens exhibit can be found is here.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes in this week’s NYTBR:

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears – Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most “people of faith” belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal.

Schlesinger asks if we are “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr.” As usual, on political issues my friend Alan Koenig already had a bead on this some time ago. Here’s an excerpt from his Beliver essay “Where are the Real Niebuhrians?”:

In noting America’s unease and odd naïveté in wielding power for universal ideals, Niebuhr cautioned that, “Consistent with the general liberal hope of redeeming history, the American Messianic dream is vague about the political or other power which would be required to subject all recalcitrant wills to the one will which is informed by the true vision.”

In the present circumstances, something about that seems awfully timely.