Xark!

She's Done It Again!

Forget Michael Jordan.  Muhammad Ali doesn't even come close.  With the June 2007 issue of O magazine, Oprah Winfrey has appeared on the cover a record 102 times!!! That's right, and all 102 have been consecutive appearances.  We at Xark! recognize an accomplishment when we see it and would like to extend our congratulations to Oprah on a job well done.  Congratulations, Oprah. May the streak continue!!

Sports Rules

As something of an appendix to his autobiography, You Cannot Be Serious, John McEnroe provides a list of ideas that would make professional tennis more interesting.  Of these ideas, the one I liked best was fairly simple:  A let on the serve does not negate the serve.  That is, no more calling “Let.”  If the ball hits the chord, so be it.  The serve still counts as good if it’s in, as bad if it’s out.

When I was at a bar in Athens, Georgia several years ago, I found myself at a table of patrons engaged in a conversation about baseball.  While I love Major League Ball, several of the people at the table found the game insufferably boring.  When I asked what could be done to make it more interesting, a young woman said with no hesitation, as if she had thought about this a lot, “So, when the guy hits the ball, he can choose to run to either first or third, depending on what he wants to do.” 

While in one case, the idea is a bit more practical than in the other, in both cases, we have very interesting and fun ideas about what could make professional sports more fun, or more chaotic, to watch.  While I previously suggested on Xark that we encourage loud fan behavior at tennis and golf, I’m interested here in ideas we might share that concern changing the rules of professional sports.  While I know Dan’s not crazy about meme-type posts, let’s play with this one.  Ever had an idea about how to make football, baseball, hockey, boxing, soccer (for heaven’s sake) more fun?  I’d love to hear it.

Population Limits: A Half Baked Proposal

In an article originally published in the Washington Post, Edward Cody reported on the Chinese government's crackdown on people who were not following its "1-Child-Rule."  He notes, "Birth-control bureaucrats showed up in a half-dozen towns with sledgehammers and threatened to knock holes in the homes of people who had failed to pay fines imposed for having more than one child."  While the article goes on to note the ways in which members of these villages and towns fought back against the police, I found myself intrigued by the very policy, something I hadn't given thought to in quite some time.  And I wondered: if the world as a whole is reaching a population saturation stage—given the types of resources people use--should we in the U.S. encourage our legislators to also find ways to encourage people to have fewer children?  With the world's population expected to soar by 52 per cent to 9.3 billion by 2050, shouldn’t we start thinking about this now? Could it be crafted in a way that didn’t involve sledgehammers?  What would such a policy look like?

In my mind, such a rule would need to fit at least three conditions:  first, it couldn’t be mandatory; second, it should allow two children rather than one; and third, it couldn’t be so regressive as to only allow the wealthy to choose to have more than two children.  While I am would almost always favor discursive persuasion (e.g., a public relations campaign) over economic coercion, we may be reaching a population saturation stage that justifies economic “encouragement.” 

Pick the winner in my latest contest

See the original post -- along with all the reader entries -- at my Fun & Games blog.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

The Pleasures of Struggle

In the past several weeks, I have twice been involved in conversations with “church attending” friends. Both of these conversations took the same turn—a turn I’ve become very familiar with and a turn that leaves me feeling slightly irritated.  In both cases, I’ve held my tongue because I wasn’t sure that my irritation was warranted, and I wanted to process the ways in which these conversations may work as an indictment of my behavior. 

So, here’s how the conversation goes:  Somehow, the topic of spirituality or worship or church attendance will arise.  Either before or after I observe that I attend Mass on a regular basis, my partner in conversation says something akin to this: “Oh, I’ve joined a fill-in-the-blank-liberal church because they believe in all the same things that I believe in” (e.g., gay marriage, reproductive choice, female clergy).  It may be because I am Catholic and have beliefs which tend to run counter to standard Catholicim (and I am hence being defensive), but there’s something about this response that bothers me. It’s not that I think people shouldn’t be able to join any church for any reason—hell, of course, they should be able to believe whatever they wish and join or not join any group of their desire—it’s more that I don’t like the fact that the position my friends take assumes that it is morally superior to choose a church based on one’s politics.  Let me restate:  choose or don’t choose your form of worship based on your politics, but don’t act like its an obviously better moral position to make your choice on that basis; don’t make an assumption that would posit my own attendance at Mass as a morally inferior position, because I would argue that my position, while no better, is both spiritually and politically useful.

More Spoleto video

Here's my piece from today's Spoleto opening ceremony, which was oh-so vague and parsed... and this was my previous piece on the calm before the festival storm.

L'Ile de Merlin video

Over at SpoletoToday.com, my first presentable piece of pro-blog video, which I shot, wrote and recorded yesterday and then edited in spurts yesterday and this morning.

 It's my second run on Final Cut Express, the cut-down version of the full professional video-editing program for the Mac (not only was I completely on my own for the first video I cut, I was also using the camera for the first time and submitting to YouTube for the first time. The results were... let's just say, less than competent).

This time I had admin help in arranging the materials, plus handy advice on solving some of the niggling problems that come with learning new software and recording setups (thank you, Geoff).

I'd do some things differently now because I learned some skills during the editing, but in general I'm pleasantly surprised this one turned out as well as it did, technically, given my level of experience with the software and the equipment. Video is an interesting medium, and I'm just getting started.

Photo: Janet

Heroes: Anyone Else Under-Impressed?

My husband and I have religiously watched Heroes since it premiered.  We liked the characters and we loved how it kept us guessing while still forwarding the plot.  We spent a good half hour on average after every episode betting on the futures of various characters, and while we turned out to be wrong much of the time, the explanation always made sense.  We could trust that anything that didn't fit right would eventually be explained in a future episode, and for most of the season that assumption was well supported.

What happened?

(many many spoilers ahead)

Mr. and Mrs. Spoleto head

As some of you know, Daniel and I are part of a team attempting to do multimedia coverage of Spoleto Festival 2007 and Piccolo Spoleto, its companion festival sponsored by the City of Charleston. We're going to have a podcast everyday, and we will be blogging with other team members at  SpoletoToday.com. If the muses are willing, we'll have some video as well.

I've been  into it for a couple of weeks and Daniel is getting ready to turn his attention to it, since the opening ceremonies are Friday. Other team members are Jack McCray, THE man when it comes to the jazz scene; Harriet McLeod of GMLc fame;  Geoff Marshall, our videographer, sound editor and English import extraordinaire from Geofftech;  and Dottie Ashley, Post and Courier arts reporter.

Considering that this is experimental and even the paper doesn't really know what to do with us, I think I've managed to control my twitching and drooling admirably. If you xarkers would check it out, that'd be awesome. (I'm thinking that so far we've probably had more than 20 hits, even if you don't include my relatives.) Post a comment or two and, if you go to anything, be sure to e-mail me about any gossip or cool happening or curiousity you see.

Rain of fire, the Younger-Dryas, and extinction

From The Observer, on Sunday:

Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.

Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and Asia.