Bruce Feiler: January 2008 Archives

A friend sent along this email tonight that seemed worth sharing:

February 3, 2008 will mark the 49th anniversary of Buddy Holly's untimely death near the Mason City ,Iowa airport....I mark the day every year and often e mail my friends to remind them to mark it as well...for some reason the 49th anniversary has caused me to think about it more than usual...Buddy would be 71 years old now had he lived...he never saw miocrowave ovens...cell phones...8 tracks...home computers..the internet...DVDs or CDs....color TV or flat screens I pods...carbon fiber..and many more things...so the world has changed a great deal...BUT Buddy's music still lives on...I do not use the word timeless because nothing is timeless in the sense that as time moves on everything will be seen with a different perspective..we will never know what direction his work mayt have taken but his own words and his last recorded music such as Leaning the Game and Crying Waiting Hoping along with the orchestra back up in the Pytrhian Temple recordings indicate that he had alot to add to Rock and Roll and that he probably would have added many more hit records to his alrerady impressive body of work that he had compiled the 3 or 4 short years...His work has been played by many of the great Rock and Rollers and although it is not timeless to me it seems as ttimely and fresh today as the day it was recorded...and as Sonny Curtis said in his song about Buddy...the music did not die on February 3,1959 rather it lives every time someone plays roc and roll...so give this very talented musoical genius wgho left us too soon a moment of respect on February 3....I certainly will

A dozen years ago I was living in Nashville and spent some time with Waylon Jennings for my book about country music. He told me the story about the night the plane went down. He was supposed to be on the plane with Holly. It was a lottery system, as some people were driving and others were flying. The Big Bopper was sick that night. He pulled rank and basically bullied Jennings into giving up his seat on the plane. Jennings had no choice, but his dark, joking response was, "I hope the plane crashes."

A debate suddenly renewed on its 500th anniversary.

The world's great museums are awash in Michelangelo drawings: the consensus among Anglo-American and Italian scholars is that there are around 800 in existence, including those of the Risen Christ and the Labours of Hercules in the Royal Collection, and the artist's preliminary sketch for the Sistine Chapel's fresco of the Creation of Man, in the British Museum.

But if three eminent German scholars are to be believed, the methods by which Michelangelo prepared for the epic struggle of painting the 300 figures on the chapel ceiling remains a mystery, and the drawings that are said to explain it merely mystify it. In a beautiful and weighty new book, Michelangelo: Complete Works, they insist that only a small minority of the drawings currently attributed to the master are definitely by him.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

Barack Obama to the Christian Broadcast Network today on the robo-calls and emails that kept repeating his name as Barack Hussein Obama and saying he was a Muslim:

This is obviously a systematic political strategy by somebody because these e-mails don't just keep coming out the way they have without somebody being behind it.

Basically the e-mail falsely states that I'm Muslim, that I pledged my oath of office on a Koran instead of a Bible, that I don't Pledge Allegiance to the flag. Scurrilous stuff. I want to make sure that your viewers understand that I am a Christian who has belonged to the same church for almost 20 years now. It's where Michelle and I got married. It's where our kids were dedicated. I took my oath of office on my family Bible.

I lead the Pledge of Allegiance when I open up the Senate. I've been saying the Pledge of Allegiance since I was three years old. I think it 's very important for people not to buy into the kinds of dirty tricks that we've become so accustomed to in our politics and people need to understand I'm not and never have been of the Muslim faith.

I think that those who are of the Muslim faith are deserving of respect and dignity, but to try and feed into this fear-mongering and try to question my faith commitments and my belief in Jesus Christ, I think is offensive. And I want to make sure that people are absolutely clear about what's going on with this, and if they get another one of these e-mails that they're deleting it and letting their friends know that it's nonsense.

More evidence that Feiler Faster is slowly becoming the theme of yet another primary cycle.

Momentum Mori: Fred Barnes joins those noting that "momentum" has run out of steam in 2008:

The idea of momentum is that you generate support in subsequent primaries when you win one. Not this year. Fox News anchor Brit Hume now refers to "no-mentum." Obama won Iowa, then lost New Hampshire. John McCain won New Hampshire, then lost Michigan. And so on.

Indeed, this Saturday the press expects Obama to win South Carolina because the press assumes that Hillary's "momentum" from Nevada is virtually nonexistent. Likewise, Hillary's apparent strategy--lose next Saturday, win Super Tuesday--assumes that Obama won't get any Gary-Hart like momentum from South Carolina.

Let the record show that the Death of Momentum was entirely foretold at least eight long years ago by the application of the Feiler Faster Thesis (voters comfortably process information quickly) coupled with what turned out to be the Skurnik Two-Electorate Theory (voters who don't follow politics don't tune in until the very end). As outlined in 2000, late-focusing voters tune in to what the press is saying in, say, the two days before their state's election, which is usually something different from what the press says in the two days after the previous state's election. Four days = no mo' mo. Add in possible affirmative voter rebellion against what the press says--Huck's Hot! Barack Rock Star!--and it's overdetermined. ...

Oh, the science-cause-the-Bible's-miracles crowd is going to love this.

A powerful volcano erupted under the icesheet of West Antarctica around 2,000 years ago and it might still be active today, a finding that prompts questions about ice loss from the white continent, British scientists report on Sunday.

The explosive event -- rated "severe" to "cataclysmic" on an international scale of volcanic force -- punched a massive breach in the icesheet and spat out a plume some 12,000 metres (eight miles) into the sky, they calculate.

Most of Antarctica is seismically stable. But its western part lies on a rift in Earth's crust that gives rise to occasional volcanism and geothermal heat, occurring on the Antarctic coastal margins.

This is the first evidence for an eruption under the ice sheet itself -- the slab of frozen water, hundreds of metres (feet) thick in places, that holds most of the world's stock of fresh water.

Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience, the investigators from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) describe the finding as "unique."

It extends the range of known volcanism in Antarctica by some 500 kilometres (300 miles) and raises the question whether this or other sub-glacial volcanoes may have melted so much ice that global sea levels were affected, they say.

Note that this volcano was 2,000 years ago, not the 5,000 years ago the Bible suggests was the timing of Noah's flood, but the Bible does suggest the lood was caused by both rising AND falling water, so my guess you're going to see some biblical literalists jumping all over this story.

As the world markets wince, a startling view of the power of the U.S. economy. Source. [The full map may not appear on all screens, click on the link to see that the New Jersey economy is the size of...

Is Muslim modest clothing the new killer app in track and field?A high school track star has been disqualified from a meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules. Juashaunna...

Beliefnet has become the go-to place for provocative, balanced, multi-faith points of view. Now they're taking a survey. Cast your vote here....

And not a moment too soon.After losing out on a $1.5 million chair in Islamic studies last month, Temple University announced it has received a new gift from a local energy executive and former Catholic seminarian to fund a chair...

Finally we are hearing talk about a truce in the battle over race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don't buy it, exactly. The Clinton folks have too much too gain by subtly pointing out that race still divides...

Princess Diana has posthumously entered the interfaith relations debate a decade after her death. The inquest into her death heard that her mother called her a "whore" for "sleeping with Muslim men." Frances Shand Kydd made the comment when she...

As a parent of preschool-age children, I face this all the time. But in the sacrament?The Rev. Bill Miller-Zurell was recently presiding over Communion, moving from congregant to congregant, offering the body, offering the blood, until he got to a...

Food critics. Movie critics. Why not sermon critics?Singing hymns and clasping hands in prayer, they look like regular church-going Christians. But the worshippers at some Sunday services in Britain definitely are not. Instead they are mostly nonbelievers paid $60 a...

It's worth nothing that the Feiler Faster Thesis was coined eight years ago this week following John McCain's stunner victory in the NH primary over George W. Bush. (Week here is definted in political terms, not calendrical ones, meaning it...

Suddenly he's not so cute and clever anymore. TNR uncovers a trove of old Paul newsletters that suggest the TX congressman harbors "decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks,...

Daniel Rodosh explores the hidden mean of Huckabee's "vertical politics" phrase.The phrase is Christianese. And while it's used in a variety of contexts, it's most commonly applied to distinguish one type of contemporary Christian music -- the type that Huckabee...

Looks like someone is going to get a sweet settlement in her future (with a bit of pureed spinach tucked inside).An author today sued Jerry Seinfeld's wife for allegedly plagiarizing a cookbook she wrote and also accused the comedian of...

Chris Lehmann delivers a well-informed take-down of Joel Osteen whose erudition hardly softens its wickedness. Even the sub-head is blunt: "Joel Osteen's God really wants you to dress well, stand up straight, and get a convenient parking space." The piece...

Parents of twins are a small but loyal club. We can pick one another out of a crowd. Turns out one of our senior members has a son running for president of the United States. From NBC's Bethany Thomas, watching...

A couple I've known for decades sent along this report from the Iowa Caucuses this week. I've substituted Jon for the man and Ellen for the woman -- they are in their 60's. We attended the Caucuses this past Thursday....