A Free Man

When I was born, thirty-ahremeah years ago, there were about 3.7 billion people in the world. The most recent estimates place the population of this planet at 6.725 billion, which means that world’s population has nearly doubled in less than four decades. At our current growth rate we face an imminent Malthusian crisis. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but at some point we’re going to reach the tipping point at which there will not be enough agriculture to sustain the world’s population. Food prices are on the rise and This is one of the reasons that I chose to do a Ph.D. in the field and the place that I did. It turns out that, in the long run, I’m neither breeding nor genetically engineering better crops but it is a field which I still follow with some interest.

There has been a renaissance in plant biotechnology in the last quarter century, which has made it possible to increase crop yield, develop new strains with resistance to many diseases or to too much salt, heat, drought or soil toxins. A big part of this golden age has involved transgenic, or genetically modified (GM), crops. A GM plant is one that has had a foreign gene inserted into its genome. This usually results in an added or modified trait. For example, some of the most common GM plants have had a gene from a soil bacterium which produces a protein that is toxic to some herbivorous pests. When these pests feed on Bt crops they are killed without the addition of pesticide.
The use of transgenic or genetically modified (GM) crops has been a contentious issue around the world for the last couple of decades and made the news here in Australia earlier this month. The governing Labor Party in Western Australia banned the growth of GM crops in that state four years ago. However, in recent elections, Labor was ousted and a Liberal and National coalition have promised to rescind that ban. This follows lifting of bans on GM crops in New South Wales and Victoria earlier in the year. With a changing environment and mired in a seemingly endless drought, Australian wheat farmers are poised to reap the benefits of transgenic technology if drought resistant or salt tolerant varieties could be developed. In other news from earlier this month, China announced a $3.5 billion GM crops initiative  to help the world’s most populous nation catch up with the West in the race to patent new plant genes. The Chinese are beginning to place a priority on food security and see GM crops as the best way forward.

I’m in the minority of plant scientists in the sense that I’ve always been a little hesitant about the use of GM crops. I’m not an alarmist, nor would I support a ban of GM crops for human consumption as the European Union has instated. I believe that most GM crops are perfectly safe and that the technology does have potential to revolutionize agriculture. Hell, I’ve made transgenic plants myself, though none that are going to find their way to your dinner plate. (Unless you have a rather unusual palate.) I do, however, have some pretty serious concerns about regulation, environmental issues and intellectual property.

In terms of regulation, my concerns revolve around scrutiny of GM crops that make their way into the human food pool. GM crops have been approved for consumption in the U.S. since 1994 and there have been exactly zero reports of ill health effects. However, there are an increasing number of instances in which unapproved GM crops are finding their way to the supermarket. The inadvertent release of Starlink corn, a GM line approved only for animal feed,  into the human food supply in 2001 raised some fairly serious concerns regarding regulation and ones that have not been fully resolved. There were no reliable reports of health effects of any kind, despite concerns over potential allergic reaction. More recently, in 2006,  a GM variety of rice that had never been approved or marketed appeared in commercially available supplies in both the U.S. and Europe. It is still unclear how the GM line “got loose”. This is the crux of the problem, regulation of transgenic plants is spotty and inconsistent with different universities, research institutes and companies having wildly different regulations. American consumers in particular should be vigilant here as there is a combination of lots of GM acreage and regulatory agencies stripped of many of their powers after 8 years of the Bush Administration.

One of the benefits cited for the use of GM crops is the reduction of pesticides and fertilizers required for cultivation. For example, growing Bt crops can vastly reduce the amount of pesticide required. Some researchers are concerned, however, that there are also environmental costs of the use of transgenic crops. The most serious of these is potential transgene escape. Recent studies of transgenic sugar beet and canola have shown that cross-pollination of non-transgenic relatives of transgenic crops can occur and that the presence of the transgene can persist for at least six years. This becomes especially problematic when GM and non-GM crops are grown in close proximity and is the most likely explanation for the GM rice escape in 2006. Beyond transgene transfer, there is an issue of harmful effects of transgene products. One of the toxins expressed in Bt crops has been detected in the guts of predators of plant pests. For example, aphids that feed on Bt corn are themselves fed on by ladybugs. Researchers at the University of Kentucky have been able to detect low levels of Bt toxin in the latter. In a controversial study published in PNAS by researchers from the University of Wisconsin, it was claimed that corn byproducts enter streams and are subject to storage, consumption, and transport to downstream water bodies and result in reduced growth and increased mortality of nontarget stream insects. It is worth noting that the large-scale mono-crop agriculture that predominates in the West is environmentally disastrous anyway. Most researchers think that GM crops offer, if anything, a slight improvement on environmental effects.

The final issue that I have with GM crops is that I’m not sure that, as things stand now, they will solve world food supply issues. The vast majority of GM crops are owned by one of a handful of large biotech companies. Monsanto produces more than 90% of crops worldwide with Syngenta, Bayer Cropscience, Dow and Du Pont producing the remainder. It is of some concern that these companies will have too much control over world food productionor will force traditional farmers out of the market.  The biggest fears around world hunger are in developing countries where farmers generally can not afford to buy new seed stocks each season and rely on ‘recycling seed’. Most corporations aren’t in the business of giving their products away for free and thus legally obliagte farmers to buy new GM seed each year. There are instances of biotech companies aggressively protecting their intellectual property. Call me a cynic, I just doubt that the biotech companies that hold the patents for most of the useful GM crops are that interested in solving world poverty.

I know I’ve spent most of this post discussing some of the concerns surrounding transgenic crops, but at the bottom of everything I do think that GM crops could, in the words of Nina Fedoroff, be the source of a new Green Revolution. The Golden Rice story is a wonderful example of academic scientists working with biotech companies for humanitarian purposes. I just think that regulation, on a global scale, is absolutely key. Because we now live in a global economy and agricultural products are shipped around the world, there needs to be a global consensus on how to regulate GM crops. The biggest unresolved issue, and potential for trouble, surrounds inadvertant spreading of GM pollen to neighboring fields or wild relatives. Regulations need to be established to minimize this risk. Importantly, you can not force people to accept a technology with which they are uncomfortable. Just as now we have organic produce alternatives, as GM crops become more prevalent, there should be non-GM alternatives. This requires either labelling of GM products or non-GM products to allow consumers an opportunity to make an informed decision.

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Aimee Mann’s “I’m With Stupid” is available from

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Image credits:

GM Soya

GM Money Tree

 

 Aimee Mann - "Frankenstein" [4:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
Chasing shadows moonlight mystery.
Headed for the overload,
Splattered on the dirty road,
Kick me like you’ve kicked before,
I can’t even feel the pain no more…

My first memory of The Rolling Stones is one of profound dislike. I’m not saying that I was some sort of music snob child progeny, but the Stones songs that I heard on Top 40 radio and saw on MTV in the early 80’s just flat out sucked. Cap their sub-par 80’s work off with the absurd duet that Jagger did with Bowie in 1985 that MTV played the hell out of and I think my impression of the Stones as overrated and lacking in any real talent was a legitimate, if short-sighted, one. This was a band for graying, beer-bellied bikers with the tongue emblems on the leathers that periodically roared through my dank north Florida town on the way to Daytona, not for the discerning young Culture Club fan. (Yes, really. Regrettably.)

The source for this distaste was that I had very little exposure to the Stones’ earlier work. The only “oldies” that I listened to was the old records and 8 tracks that my Dad had and he preferred McCartney and Lennon to Jagger and Richards. Certainly I would have heard “Satisfaction” and “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, but they never resonated with me growing up - they just didn’t apply to my small town childhood.  And then you see Mick Jagger “dancing” in the streets in a bright mauve silk shirt on MTV and it’s pretty easy to dismiss The Stones as irrelevant.

My opinion about The Stones started to change the first time that I saw Lawrence Kasden’s “The Big Chill”, or more precisely, listened to the soundtrack for that film. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is used so effectively in the funeral scene of that film (yes, that’s the kind of teenager I was) that I was inspired to go and check out more of The Stones’ earlier work. I bought the double cassette “Hot Rocks” and never thought of The Rolling Stones in the same way again. I can still remember the feeling that “Satisfaction” inspired the first time I really heard it in my late teens. That raw frustration, rebellion, absolute disdain for “that man”. The Stones were punk before punk was even an idea in Joey Ramone’s teenage mind. That rock and roll swagger of Honky Tonky Women” and “Street Fighting Man” that seemed cliched to me in the early 80s got me through the bulk of my 20s. From that greatest hits collection, I dug into Jagger ad Richards’ back catalog and some of the the obsessive, darker, introspective stuff from those late 60s and early 70s records hit home for me in my early 30’s.

‘Cause all you women is low down gamblers,
Cheatin’ like I don’t know how,
But baby, baby, there’s fever in the funk house now.
This low down bitchin’ got my poor feet a itchin’,
You know you know the duece is still wild.

Now, “Let It Bleed” is my favorite Stones album, but it’s not the one that the iPod chose on my Friday free day with Boy Z. Instead we got what is generally considered to be their best record, “Exile on Main Street”. This behemoth, upon its release in 1972, changed The Stones from just another 60’s rock band to THE rock band of the 1970s.  changed rock and roll on its release in 1972. So much so that whenever a band crosses some sort of critically established threshold, this is the album evoked as a comparison. For example, “‘Being There’ is Wilco’s ‘Exile on Main Street’” or “With ‘Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’, the Drive-by Truckers have recorded their ‘Exile on Main Street’”.

And it is a magnificent album. It’s a rollicking, seemingly endless trip - like a drunken summer afternoon riding around in the back of a pick up truck. It’s hot, it’s dirty, it’s fuddled. The boogie piano and mellow slide show this band at it finest - borrowing elements of country, soul, rhythm and blues, even jazz - to make a new kind of rock and roll.

Listening to “Exile on Main Street” with my son on Friday, listening through his virgin ears, I heard a song like “Hip Shake Boogie” for what it must have been at the time - a redefining of rock and roll. The subject matter of the song…

…I wanna tell you ’bout a dance
that’s goin’ around…

…is bog standard rock, is in fact how rock and roll started out a couple of decades earlier. But the way that The Stones come at it would have been all new at the time, the dirty boogie sound that they were employing and Jagger’s grumbling, lackadaisical vocals.

Z was indifferent to the music, but did like my singing and hip shaking. He’s more of a fan of dance than music right now. I’m a little disappointed that hes’s not up shaking his own hips yet. Particularly since Chris’s daughter, who is younger than Z, is all over the interwebs with her dancing. But hey, it’s not a race, right?

Right?

I do think that The Rolling Stone have held on for far too long. I also think that they’re the McDonalds of rock and roll, a universally recognized franchise with that damn tongue logo ubiquitous. And I think that they haven’t made a really good album since “Goat’s Head Soup” in 1973 (maybe 1980’s “Emotional Rescue”). But all that aside, the Rolling Stones changed rock and roll for the better in the late 60’s and early 70’s and some of those albums -  “Let It Bleed”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Their Satanic Majesties Request” and “Exile on Main Street” - are among the finest ever made.

Z, most likely, is never going to see the depressing spectacle is The Rolling Stones today and I’m a little envious of that. He’ll be able to pick and choose from their back catalog, ignoring “Dancing in the Street” and “One Hit To The Body“. Hell, Z may even think of The Rolling Stones as they would like to people to think of them - as the greatest rock band the world has ever seen.

Let this music relax your mind, let this music relax your mind.
Stand up and be counted, can’t get a witness.
Sometimes you need somebody, if you have somebody to love.
Sometimes you ain’t got nobody and you want somebody to love.

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The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” is available from Amazon.

 

 The Rolling Stones - "Shake Your Hips" [3:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Sad Dawgs Down Under.

We got skunked.

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Steely Dan’s “Aja” is available from .

 

 Steely Dan - "Deacon Blues" [7:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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For reasons that I just do not understand, ESPN in Australia has changed their programming for the day. Rather than showing the Georgia-Alabama game they are now showing Spanish Premier League Football. Spanish. Premier. League. Football.

Yet another reason to hate Australian TV. Before this, I was seriously considering subscribing to Foxtel. Now? Well, they can get stuffed.

Oh and to Florida fans Jamie and Ben (using my best Nelson Muntz impression): Ha ha.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Welcome to a new feature here on A Free Man: Deep South Smack Talk

With the SEC Football season moving in to full swing this week, I thought I would give the enemies, er opponents, of my beloved Georgia Bulldogs an opportunity to sing their team’s praises before the Dawgs take them apart. It’s just good sportsmanship, really. It was a bit of a challenge to find an Alabama fan who could form sentences well enough to put together a post, but I’ve found a fan of the Tide who was lucky enough to be educated at a proper university. Inexplicably, he retains his love for the University of Alabama. 

We’ll give the visitors the first shot. Writing, surprisingly eloquently, for the Alabama Crimson Tide is Alex from esmon dot net:

I was born where the red tide rolls and the sun droops low over the rose-colored skies at twilight.

I was born on the balmy shores of Alabama at the height of the era of terry cloth shorts and big plastic-framed amber vision sunglasses. Mobile is my hometown, perched right on the Gulf of Mexico. When I was one, Hurricane Edward roared through our city — as the story goes, I slept right through it. We lived there until I was three. The Gulf is a pretty neat place full of great seafood dives and a very, very slow pace of life.

But there are a few things that make people in the great state of Alabama get off their collective asses and shout for something that’s not just half-price night at an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. Football in Alabama means one thing (and I don’t care what the Auburn fans think, because who cares about them anyway): The Crimson Tide.

There are few teams that can match the storied history of ‘Bama football. I mean, come on — Paul “Bear” Bryant. Need I say more?

I will anyway. Here’s a number to mull over: 12. And no, that does not stand for the collective football team IQ. That’s National Championships, my friends. And honestly, what’s more intimidating that a team named after a harmful algal bloom of phytoplankton containing photosynthetic pigments?

Now, there are those from Georgia (you know – that state that borders us to the east and blocks our view of the Atlantic) that think they have a decent football squad. They may have had a few decent seasons, and I think they have even managed a few SEC crowns. But don’t be fooled — those Pop Warner wanna-be’s are nothing compared to the thundering herd that is the Crimson Tide. They talk about the great years in the 80s when some guy named Walker won a Heisman. Then they talk about the great teams under the current regime of Coach Richt. Then when they are reminded that none of those great teams under Richt have won a championship, they turn into Cubs fans — It’s all “Oh well, next year will be the year.”

Seriously, how many next years can there be? (Actually, as a Cubs fan, I know there can be quite a few “next years”)

And how many National Championships for the Dawgs? Two. Now I may be a simple boy from Alabama, but even I know that two is less than 12. But don’t worry Chris — The Gym Dogs have won nine gymnastics National Championships. I hear they do a mean halftime show.

So Chris, after the dust settles on Saturday and the stadium has emptied and your  “Dawgs” have been thoroughly throttled and washed into the Gulf, you can call me and we will talk all about next year.

Roll Tide.

And in reply, your underwhelming narrator:

Thanks, Alex, that’s very well said for a Bama fan, but you betray yourself as being the alum of a better school.

I’ve got a number for you too: 13. That’s the number of years that have passed since the Tide last beat Georgia. I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be 14 after Saturday.

Alex, all those purty words cover up one essential fact about your boys in crimson. The truth that they are pure evil.

Bama didn’t used to be evil. In the days of the great Bryant, when they won all those National Championships, they were the pride of the South. But things have been rough in the past couple of decades in Tuscaloosa and a couple of years ago, the powers that be in Tuscaloosa quite literally made a deal with the devil. They hired away the pretty much universally loathed Nick Saban from Miami’s NFL team for some obscene amount of money. I hope it’s worth it for you guys, but I don’t think it will be. There’s only one letter separating Saban and Satan and the bad guy always loses in the end.

So as the manifestation of pure evil rolls up into the north Georgia hills on Saturday, there will be a band of brave Georgia boys waiting between the hedges of Sanford Stadium They will be waiting to represent truth, justice and Good in the face of a crimson and white onslaught led by Satan incarnate.

Fortunately, that brave band of boys is one of the finest football teams to come out of the South in quite some time. Lovers of peace and freedom can breathe a bit easily knowing that they are proudly defended by a Georgia Bulldogs team that is getting better every week. The Tide are bringing in some unholy 400 pound demon called Cody to try and crush the Dawgs offense, but if they stop our dynamic tailback Knowshon Moreno then we can go to the air with quarterbacking phenom Matthew Stafford. We’re ready in every way for the demonic invasion.

The Tide is going to find Athens an unwelcoming place, a place for these evil upstarts to be put in their place. The players have called for a Blackout, replicating conditions under which we spanked another little team from Alabama. It is times like this that I really miss the States. A September Saturday night in Athens, Sanford Stadium packed and roaring for their heroes.  I can almost hear it already as the Dawgs burst out of the tunnel in black ready to tear the Tide down, bit by bit. This time the good guys are wearing black.

Oh, and Alex, this is next year. (For the Dawgs, don’t know about the Cubs)

A Free Man’s pick: Georgia 28, Alabama 14.

Georgia-Alabama kicks off at 7:45 p.m. Eastern (9:15 a.m. Sunday in Adelaide) on ESPN. I’m pretty excited because Boy Z’s great-aunt is going to let us watch the game over at their house. This will be the first time I see a game live on TV since 2004. Just seems right for my boys to win, doesn’t it.

Go Dawgs! Sic’ em!

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Neil Young’s “Harvest” is available from .

 

 Neil Young - "Alabama" [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 75% [?]

What a difference a day makes, or insert your favorite random cliche regarding the fickleness (fickility?) of time here. After spending the earlier part of this week in the peaceful bliss of fatherhood and idle days of the University break, I was barraged Tuesday afternoon with a slew of frantic e-mail from Job Number 2. I’m not really used to the bee in the bonnet urgency that a proper grown up company can get themselves into in comparison to the lackadaisical university attitude. In fact, one of the difficult parts of the transition from academia to industry has been getting used to the pace at which things move in the biotech industry. As an academic scientist you tend to slog away at the same project day after day after day. Any changes in focus tend to occur at a snail’s pace. It’s a bit dull, but after a decade in academia, comfortable.

Biotech on the other hand moves at a speed that your underwhelming correspondent just doesn’t. Every time I pop into the office something’s different - I’ve come in and found a different computer, different project, different desk, even a new office all without any warning at all. (The new office was cool as I went from a windowless cubicle to an office with the view that you see above.)

At any rate, Tuesday afternoon the e-mails came a zinging. Write this, right now. Now most of you probably know just how well that works and it’s a challenge even when it comes to technical writing. Everything had to be done yesterday and I just bore into it with uncharacteristic efficiency and work ethic. And after two solid, long days of it I had the immense satisfaction of kicking my work’s ass and the feeling of a job well done.

My reward? I busted my hump so hard in the past couple of days that I’m caught up again at Job Number 2. The University is off for another week and the weather forecast for tomorrow is 29°C (84°C) and sunny. It is springtime in Australia, I’ve worked myself into a day off and I’m springing the boy from kid jail for the day. You’ll be able to find us at the beach. It’s pretty good to be me.

UPDATE

Apparently I didn’t bust hard enough as I just got another “write this, right now” e-mail at 10 p.m. To be fair, it could wait until tomorrow but I better get to it now if this spring day isn’t going to be spent looking at that view above from behind glass.  Man, it sucks to be me.

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All of the images in this post are a part of my working days.

k.d. lang’s “Watershed” is available from .

UPDATE

 

 k.d. lang - "I Dream Of Spring" [4:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Boy Z’s health troubles continue, I shan’t bore you with the details. Dr. O’C called our local GP for an appointment this evening. They didn’t have any openings, but suggested that we call for a home visit. I thought they were playing a remarkably unfunny practical joke on us. But an hour or so later a proper M.D. showed up at our door, efficiently diagnosed Boy Z with the croup and wrote us up a script for Prednisone. What did we pay for this, you ask? Zero dollars and a lower income tax rate than what we would be paying in the States. Just saying.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Always closest to the flame
Ever closer to the blade
I am poison crazy lush
Built these hands to lift me up
We are servants to our formulaic ways

I am not an economist. John McCain and I share a stated lack of understanding about the economy. Hell, I’m not even that good with managing money. So, I’m really the last person in the world who should be writing about the current American economic crisis. But I’ve really gotten sucked in to this latest Bush mediated catastrophe, particularly into how it came to be. I’m not sure how the country is going to get out of it, but I’m pretty sure that letting new president Hank Paulson bully his way into unlimited power is not the best way out. Here’s hoping, for the sake of my friends and family still living in the People’s Republic of America, that our Congress finds a pair.

The reason that I feel qualified to declaim today is that you don’t really have to be an economist to figure out what happened in the States last week. You don’t even have to be particularly bright. President George Bush summed it up perfectly back in July when he exhibited a bit of uncharacteristic honesty and even more uncharacteristic accuracy saying, “Wall Street got drunk.” This is the first and hopefully last time you will see these words on my site: George Bush was right. “Wall Street” - the investment bankers, traders, speculators, Captains of Industry, Masters of the Universe  and their greedy ilk - were on a binge that they thought would never end. I imagine that there’s a few of us that can relate to that feeling, a party that we hope can go on forever, regardless of consequences, ignorant of the fact that we’re just drunken assholes staggering around in the cruel light of dawn.

In a way, the Wall Street revelers aren’t completely at fault. Someone continued to serve them as they staggered up to the bar, puking up dodgy mortgages and mumbling about liquidity. Someone was there providing the booze to keep the illusory party going. Someone failed to follow the unwritten rule that every good bartender knows - there’s a point at which some drinkers need to be cut off, for their own safety and the safety of others. The bigger failure in this crisis is the bartender’s.

The man behind the bar in this case was the federal government. After the last economic crisis similar to the scale of the one we’re in today, the one so great that we call it Great and study it in history, the Roosevelt Administration and Congress put a number of checks on the banking industry, a number of regulations to prevent a collapse such as the one in 1931. A lot of people didn’t like these regulations, considered them Socialism. But our well regulated financial system kept us in a state of prosperity for nearly 40 years. During these four decades, the hardcore capitalists where whining like petulant children about the undue hardship placed upon them by the government. Somewhere in the mid 70’s, our elected officials started to listening to these guys. And slowly, FDR’s legacy started to be chipped away. The crumbling started under the Carter administration, under pressure during the gas crisis in his administration. Reagan came in like a bulldozer, crushing banking regulations in his wake. Under a recession, Bush I was limited in his deregulation, but the last two presidents - Clinton and Bush - basically eliminated any controls that the Federal Government had over investment banks. Although the G.O.P. is in charge of this meltdown, it’s been a real bipartisan effort to get us here. All of these leaders had the misfortune of listening to the capitalist lie that the markets would regulate themselves, that everything would be OK if the government just got out of the way.

Now, if that sounds like madness to you then you are one of the sane people. Anyone with a modicum of insight knows that “The Market” is only interested in one thing - “The Market”.  Capitalism is at its very core, a purely selfish economic philosophy. It is all about a few folks that have a lot making a lot more  and everyone else, everyone in their way, be damned. It is about greed. The current problem revolves around mortgages. The credit market, not satisfied with its customer base and free of any restrictions decided to branch out and find some new suckers. Led by a few brave innovators, they began to offer credit to people who probably shouldn’t have them. Competition drives capitalism and soon the innovators were followed by all manner of lending agencies and the requirement for huge loans pretty much thrown out the window. After a while, surprise, some of these people couldn’t pay back their loans and the lenders suffered a real shortage of capital. Capitalism without capital equals a problem, panic ensued and here we are today with the Paulson administration ready to bail the lenders our of the drunk tank. What has failed in the U.S. this time, and in most of our previous economic crises, is capitalism itself. “The Market” failed to regulate itself. The government, stripped of its power, was ineffective to stop the few from screwing the rest of us. Ironically, and somewhat satisfyingly, the only apparent cure is socialism.

There is one group of people in this giant mess who are absolutely not at fault, despite what you may hear on Fox News and talk radio. The Cavutos, O’Reillys and Hannitys of the world are trying to place the blame on people who were offered and accepted these dodgy mortgages. These people took on mortgages and then watched their lives fall apart as the “variable rates” varied skyward and they could no longer afford the repayments. The right-wing jerkoffs would have you believe that these people intentionally went in to take advantage of their drunken mortgage lenders. That there was a conspiracy among “the poor” and “minorities” to bring down the American economy. This is clearly ridiculous; who would go in to buy a house with the knowledge that they would not be able to afford it and that the bank would come and take that away? Are there that many sadists about?

I know this to be true from personal experience. When still living in Oxford (yes, Britain has had the same problems and is suffering as well), Dr. O’C and I talked to a mortgage consultant about how much money we could potentially borrow if we were to buy a house. She quoted us an insane amount of money, several times more than our combined income. When we expressed surprise and mild concern, she turned on the hard sell and threw a lot of words at us - variable rates, interest only, incentivised risk - that we didn’t really understand. Now, Dr. O’C’s dream is to own her own house and I know that both of us were tempted to take this woman at her word and jump in to the financial deep end. I think that Dr. O’C and I are reasonably bright people, but we were nearly wooed by this brokers big talk of dreams fulfilled and money almost literally growing on trees. In the end, thankfully, we decided to wait. Thank goodness for that. I know for a fact that we would be one of the people on which the Retread Right is trying to, as a distraction, pin the blame.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out. I don’t know which presidential candidate would do a better job of sorting it out. Actually, I’m pretty sure that Obama would do a better job as he seems to have a better grip on what has gone wrong. McCain just seems to be reacting.  I don’t know if it’s going to get worse of if President Paulson’s bailout will sort it out. But I do know who is and who is not at fault. We can blame this on Wall Street greed, an incapacitated Government and Capitalism. Not at fault are people who were unwittingly sucked in to the whole mess and who now, apparently, are the only ones who aren’t going to be bailed out.

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I should point out that I don’t really care that much for Bush - they were kind of grunge posers - but this song just fit perfectly. But “Razorblade Suitcase” from .

 

 Bush - "Greedy Fly" [4:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Us you and me
River sea ocean
Moving on so far away and dreaming
Quality sea
Mix it to ocean…

When I looked ahead to having the first two days of this week off, I had all sorts of grand plans. I planned to do an insightful blog post on the collapse of American Capitalism. I had penciled in time to get ahead of my lectures for the remainder of the semester. I was going to read through my students’ lab notebooks and make comments on their work so far. I fully intended to knock of a couple of tardy reports for my other job.

But instead, I let all that go and actually took two days off. And I spent them with my son. And we went to the beach (have I mentioned how much I like living on the coast?). And we had ice cream. And I lived in the days. And I’m glad that I did. Days like these are few and far between and Boy Z is growing up faster than I would have ever imagined possible. Got to take the chance when the chance presents itself.

Us
You
Me
Far away
Far away
Let it go
Far away

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Badly Drawn Boy’s soundtrack to “About A Boy” is available from .

 

 Badly Drawn Boy - "River, Sea, Ocean" [2:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 58% [?]

Makings of a good Sunday:

• Georgia 27, Arizona State 10 (11 straight for the Dawgs)
• Missouri 42, Buffalo 21
• A much deserved Monday and Tuesday off.

Makings of a not-so-good Sunday:

• Another trip to the ER. Tonsilitis again. Everyone fine.

 

 Nick Drake - "Sunday" [3:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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