Huey Long, the Kingfish of Louisiana, is oft cited with admiration by Southern liberals as that Wascawy Wibewuw who Got Things Done…something like the hard left today admires Hugo Chavez. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no right-wing schill, might have referred to him more as a Hitler with a Heart of Gold. The history of the American left is filled with admiration for the next strongman who talks a progressive line and disillusionment that each strongman turns out to be yet another dictator or wannabe dictator. The old admiration lingers, though, because there’s always something to point to, like Cuba’s literacy rate, Stalin’s modernization, or Long’s roads and bridges. So there’s a tendency to tell stories that elide the nastier parts and focus on the Good Works.

Enter Willie Stark, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning version of Long in All the King’s Men that falls short of a hagiography in his thesis that everybody is corrupt at heart. An even less charitable take won an Oscar for the 1949 film of the same name. Unlike Long, Stark is not a lawyer with a penchant for taking a piece of corporate wrongdoing settlements and slowly building his popularity, but a self-described “hick” vaulted to office after fighting and losing a crony bid to build a school, whose fire escape collapses and kills three white children. He immediately becomes governor, but lets his zeal for doing the right thing by any means necessary and his sexual appetites prove his undoing–somehow missing Long’s siphoning of state funds, employee salaries, contracts awarded to cronies in exchange for ad space in his own paper, and false front businesses to profit directly from his regulation of industry. Apparently, Steven Zaillian thought that wasn’t kind enough and decided to do his own take.

My friend Mindy had passes to see the new version, so I went last night. Continue on if you want my take on Zaillian’s take. Spoilers abound.

Continue reading →

Wind power has been uneconomical compared to coal or hydro. Yet if newer slow-turn turbines are used and they are placed out of major bird migration routes, these former endangered-bird-choppers can be environmentally responsible power generators, producing no greenhouse gasses like coal, not destroying thousands of acres of habitat like dams or solar power, and not having a dangerous waste element like nuclear power.

Hydrogen is a really clean way of storing energy for use–nearly as efficient as oil. You can power cars and trucks from it. One problem is that you can either produce it from chemical reactions with fossil fuels–producing greenhouse gasses–or you can use energy to electrolyze hydrogen–and that usually requires some environmentally harmful energy source.

But, as Wired’s Autopia relays, General Motors has figured out that producing hydrogen via electrolosis powered by wind solves a couple of problems. The power need not be as cheap as coal if it is producing hydrogen instead of powering lights. The hydrogen can be made without creating the kind of problem it’s meant to solve–greenhouse gasses and other pollution.

One additional thing they didn’t mention is, as long as you build transportation infrastructure, you can place these hydrogen-producing wind farms in the kind of godforsaken places that don’t have a ton of wildlife (or people, a fatal flaw when producing energy for municipal consumption). As long as it has a source of water (or you can pump it in), you can produce hydrogen which can power the vehicles to transport the rest of the hydrogen for use in our cars.

We do it with oil wells, after all, so why not wind farms producing something other than straight electricity?

For those worried about peak oil, another piece of the solution to the question of “what next?” may have just fallen into place.

Oops. Not for a good thing.

I lived there for 12 years, and lived for 8 more in the next county over during college and grad school. I’m the same age as this guy. There, but for lack of inbreeding…

Who am I talking about?

Investigators arrested Vinson Filyaw in Richland County about 24 hours after rescuing Elizabeth Shoaf, who had sent a text message to her mother on Filyaw’s phone while he was asleep, said Sheriff Steve McCaskill in neighboring Kershaw County.

Shoaf had been missing for 10 days and was rescued Saturday from a booby-trapped bunker 15 feet underground.

Foamy, good body, not as heavy as the Brit styles but rewards slow enjoyment. Very light colored and a little bit fruity–very summery for an alt.

They do skulk about, don’t they.

Our national nightmare continues: The Simpsons have been renewed.

Sto-o-o-op…[it’s] already dead..

So back in April, I went up Mary’s Rock and the view looked like this:

I went there again a week ago and it looked like this:

Just a wee bit greener.

I have periodically enjoyed asking people what sounds animals make in various languages. Not the animals themselves; the way we imitate them. They aren’t the same. For example, in Russian, dogs go “guff guff guff.” Don’t ask me where they get the “g” from, but they put it in all kinds of places. The composer “Gandel” for example.

Now someone’s assembled a table of them. [Via Cute Overload]

Stieglbock is very nice–almost a little sweet, but smooth and rich. Nice beer for a spring evening.

So, just how Dixie are you, based on your word choices?

21% Dixie. You are a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Yep. Even though my mom is from Pennsylvania and my dad from Florida, I ended up with a speech pattern to the north of both of them.