Wanker of the day

Nan A. Talese, former editor and publisher of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey:

As for Frey’s use of fictitious elements in his ostensibly factual account of addiction and recovery, Talese said: “When someone starts out and says, ‘I have been an alcoholic. I have lied. I have cheated.’ … you do not think this is going to be the New Testament.”

From Gawker’s live-blogging of the Frey flogging on Oprah with Talese in attendance:

Oprah’s people were contacted by someone from the Hazelden clinic days after the book was picked. This person questioned the book, so Oprah had her people contact Talese. Talese’s team backed it up and said Frey’s book was “non-fiction.”

I’m actually glad Talese has dragged l’affair Frey back to public consciousness; those were good times.

Addendum: Gilding the lily, perhaps, but let’s just add this tidbit from the above-linked Smoking Gun exposé of Frey:

When Doubleday sent the book’s galleys out to reviewers, editor Sean McDonald wrote a letter touting Frey’s “fearless candor,” while a publicity manager hailed his “unprecedented honesty.”

Quid pro quo

No one should be surprised by George Bush’s exposed scheme to have Delta Black Ops Team Bravo Commando Force take out selected PPK leaders in exchange for Turkey not sending waves of troops across the border into Iraq. This was inevitable, given Bush’s predilection for military solutions - when your only tool is a hammer, you treat every situation like a nail - and the desperate need to forestall an outright Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.

The truly interesting question which no one has yet posed involves the Iraqi Kurds. There has to be more than one quid pro quo at work here. Unless Bush and his minions are completely untethered from reality, they must have made some offer, some promise, some outright bribe to the oft-betrayed Kurds in order to buy a level of acquiescence.

So what have we offered the Kurdistan Regional Government?

And whatever it is, has anybody told the Shi’a and Sunnis?

Ingmar Bergman

I saw Fanny and Alexander once. I didn’t get it. Of course, Wikipedia wasn’t around then.

Anyway, the director responsible for my confusion has passed away at 89.

Take that, steroid-addled freak

Because BoSox hurler and professional opinionista Curt Schilling said on Costas Now what pretty much everyone across the country is saying about Barry Bonds - that is, that he’s a steroid cheat - Bonds fired off a rejoinder at, er, Bob Costas. Apparently, steroids don’t do much for your aim. Anyway, Bonds called Costas a “little midget man who absolutely knows shit* about baseball.”

“Midget man”? Weird. I don’t know what the Revolutionary War has to do with anything, but let’s move on.

Costas responded to the affable Bonds today with the verbal equivalent of a nice little curveball. It looks pleasantly hittable, and then drops right off the table:

“As anyone can plainly see, I’m 5-6 1/2 and a strapping 150, and unlike some people, I came by all of it naturally,” Costas said Thursday in a telephone interview. [...]

“I’ve actually always had a pretty cordial relationship with Barry,” Costas said. “I have no ill feelings toward him personally. I regard him as one of the greatest players of all time who got an inauthentic boost and then became a superhuman player. I wish him no ill whatsoever.”

Don’t think Bonds will catch up to that one. As they say at Deadspin, +1 to Costas.

*Nearly all press accounts have substituted “nothing” or “bleep” for Bonds’ scatological invective. Yeah, like you’d believe that coming from Barry.

Jesus! vs Darwin!

By artist Derek Chatwood.

Man, I wish I could draw.

(Via Gawker Artists.)

Beware of bursting cans

The fun food season continues: Canned food products from Castleberry Foods are literally bursting with botulism. The label is not a familiar one to me; it seems to be found at smaller mom and pop stores, as well as grocers like Food Lion, Kroger, and Piggly Wiggly.

The bursting cans were among those being held by Castleberry’s Food Co., which last week announced a massive recall that now includes more than 90 potentially contaminated products, including chili sauces and dog foods.

News about the bursting cans gives new urgency to warnings from federal health officials to get rid of the recalled cans from pantries and store shelves. [...]

Four people have been sickened and hospitalized by the contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The recall covers potentially tens of millions of cans of food; officials fear the tally will grow.

FDA investigators believe Castleberry Food failed to properly cook some or all the products, allowing the Clostridium botulinum bacteria to survive the canning process.

The bacteria produce a toxin that causes botulism, a muscle-paralyzing disease.

“We’re not talking here about a bug that lands you in the bathroom for a few days with diarrhea. We’re talking about a toxin that puts you in the intensive care unit,” said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s lead food safety expert. “This is foodborne illness with an extra kick in it, big time.”

A word to the wise regarding handling:

As the bacteria grow and reproduce, they produce gases that can cause contaminated cans to swell and burst. Health officials say the extremely potent toxin can infect people if it is inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the eye or breaks in the skin.

“The longer this stuff stays in the can, the worse it gets,” Acheson said.

A Slashfood post links to several lists of recalled Castleberry products. The list at the food company’s website seems to be the most inclusive.

Show Me State showing Matt Blunt the door?

While Matt Blunt has finally inched up into political sunlight for the first time in his tenure as MIssouri’s governor - 46% negative, 48% positive, for a whopping net job approval rating of +2 - the recent SurveyUSA poll pitting him against Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon throws Blunt back into deep shade. As the pollster put it, Blunt would be “buried” if a general election between the two was held today. Here’s the fun reading:

In a head-to-head hypothetical matchup against Democratic Attorney General Jay Nixon, Nixon defeats Blunt 3:2, carrying every part of the state. The survey of 514 Registered Voters statewide was conducted exclusively for KCTV-TV in Kansas City. Nixon and Blunt are effectively tied among men. But Nixon leads by 37 points among women, a startling gender gap. Nixon leads by 20 points among younger voters, by 18 among older voters. 25% of Missouri Republicans cross-over and vote Democrat in a head-to-head contest today. Independents break 3:2 for Nixon. Blunt carries 67% of the Conservative vote, but loses 73% of the Moderate vote. Blunt runs strongest in the Ozarks, but still trails Nixon by 9 there. Nixon leads by 17 in greater Kansas City, by 19 in Central Missouri and by 25 points in greater St. Louis.

Blunt’s only chance for retaining his job is that voters will somehow forget that he threw tens of thousands of people off the Medicare rolls, cut deeply into vital state services, tried to “zero out” a popular program serving kids with developmental disabilities, and cut finds for adoptive families. Not likely.

(HT to Fired Up! Missouri.)

Ten thousand birthday wishes

Today, July 27th, marks what should have been a joyous celebration, perhaps including a party filled with family and friends. Today would have been LaVena Lynn Johnson’s 22nd birthday.

The month of July also marks another solemn milestone.

Two years ago this month the body of PFC Johnson was returned to her family and laid to rest, but there can be no rest for her her family and friends. The military continues to claim that LaVena took her own life while serving in Iraq, despite several indications to the contrary.

The details of LaVena’s death have been shrouded in lies and deception - the kind of official obfuscation that surrounds the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman and other fallen soldiers. Let’s honor PFC LaVena Johnson with a push for ten thousand signatures on the petition to reopen the investigation into her death.

Alcohol, the right stuff

In all fairness, if I was going to be sealed in a can and boosted into friggin’ outer space at a velocity approaching 17,000 miles per hour, I’d want to down a couple of Jack and Cokes before liftoff myself. It still doesn’t qualify as a best practice, though it seems to be more common than you’d expect among space shuttle astronauts.

An independent health panel studying NASA astronauts found “heavy use of alcohol” before launch, according to a published report Thursday.

Aviation Week & Space Technology, a weekly trade journal, reported the finding from the panel on its Web site. The weekly said that the committee found that on at least two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.

The alcohol use by astronauts was within the standard 12-hour “bottle-to-throttle” rule applied to NASA flight crew members, Aviation Week reported.

Hard to say which is more awesome - the title of the CNN headline (”Report: Drunk astronauts allowed on shuttle”) or the concept of a twelve-hour “bottle-to-throttle” rule.

Ride to nowhere

It’s certainly fair to wonder now whether anyone will finish the Tour de France.

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