One of my peeps, as in snarky, Tanglish*-speaking person of Madras** origin, tires of Cincinnati and visits the Creation Museum. It’s great stuff, so please head to his blog and read it all.

This paragraph, in particular, cracked me up because of its conclusion.

Cincinnati is a large city with levels of urban excitement that slightly exceed that of a doped bear in hibernation. So when I found myself staring at a 2 week long stay, I was worried about what I would do in my leisure time. That was when my colleague Harish … pointed out that the Creation Museum was just a few miles from downtown Cincinnati, my religious (and blogging) instincts fired up and we found ourselves at 2800, Bullitsburg Church road, Petersburg, Kentucky on a Sunday afternoon. Kentucky is filled with places that end in burg and for some reason it reminded me of whiskey and hooded white men wielding torches that burned crosses, so we decided to play it safe. I became Christopher (Chris) Asher and my friend, Harish Ravindran became (as a result of his undying fanboyism) Harris Jeyaraj. I even told him that he could explain his last name to evangelical Christians as Victory of the Kingdom of God or something to that effect.

… I am always disappointed when my precisely nurtured stereotypes fail to come true.

Such cross-cultural exploration has distinct advantages. Like repeatedly reminding us that the more humans are different the more we are the same, superstition is not the specialty of a single group of people, we are all whackjobs so it’s a miracle humanity has done anything constructive, etc.

… Now, lifetime members are a different species altogether. They pay $495 and are people who seriously believe that (barring the engineering that built the museum itself) science is generally bad and that (a specific English version of ) the Bible is literally true. But then I have met VHP-RSS type uncles in Chennai who believe that India had the Pushpaka Vimaana thousands of years before the Wright brothers. And people drop jewellery into the Hundi at Tirupati, so to each his own I guess.

Not to mention the creation of happy-making neologisms such as Wyoming Tyranoswareshwara Iyer and the Vadivel Theory of the Origin of Man.

* Tamil-English. Think Tex-Mex, but funnier. Also, snarky Madrasi is a redundancy.
** I refuse to call it Chennai.

Untoward. But not unfathomable. We in these here parts are accustomed to years-long aftermaths and revelations, after all.

WDSU.com | Government Accused Of Bungling Spill Evidence: Companies Say Failed Blowout Preventer Not Adequately Preserved

al.com | Oil spill claims czar: “I over-promised and under-delivered” Meanwhile, back in the real world where people live and die paycheck to paycheck, Gulf Coast Residents in Financial Dire Straits, Waiting for BP Claims. Feinberg could have delivered at least 20 checks in the time it took to feel sorry for himself.

nola.com | New wave of oil comes ashore west of Mississippi River The Zombie points out that this article was well-hidden in the Times-Pic’s Outdoors section (gotta have our information priorities).

CBS News | Oil 2-Inches Thick Found On Gulf Sea Floor As far as 80 miles from the BP well.

***

The EPA yesterday concluded a two-day hearing in Binghamton, NY on the topic of hydro-fracking. This is what an attendee said at this hearing (as tweeted by @edrcommonground): “No one wants H2O contamination but NY economy is bleeding blue collar jobs, need fracking now.”

Sound familiar, Louisiana?

It has hit again. Conference and meeting travel doesn’t count. I can wreck my neck and hands while typing into a computer and then trudge over to happy hour right here.

I also long for real outcrops. This last trip to Fort Collins afforded no time for a hike or even to touch a dipping sandstone for five minutes, to commune with the texture of its well-sorted quartz grains. See, I need a fix and quick.

You heard me, real outcrops. Not glacial erratics or the painfully horizontal Mississippian argillaceous shale down the road from my parents’. We keep talking about a trip to Ireland this fall. One Precambrian marble in place. That’s all I ask for. Like this one. Never mind that it’s as far away from Dublin that you can get in Ireland.

Our media and pundits are useless.

Thought I’d point out a few things about Dinesh D’Souza’s latest for Forbes in which he opines on Obama:

Here is a man who spent his formative years–the first 17 years of his life–off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

… To his son, the elder [Kenyan] Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism.

The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison countered, “… conservative pundits and writers such as D“Souza have been indulging in so much evidence-free, ideological babbling for the last two years that many of them now seem convinced that this babbling is actually extremely serious, insightful commentary.”

Sweet myopia, Larison and everyone else. Haven’t you people learned already to stop and examine what was really said before you knee-jerk react and repel?

For starters, this is pure projection. Dinesh D’Souza himself spent his formative years – the first 17 years of his life – off the American mainland, in India. He arrived here through an international Rotarian program to attend college. Phew, the self-loathing must be strong in this one.

Next, remember the Town Hall meeting before the last presidential election in which McCain placated an audience member with “Obama is not an Arab.” Wait up. Being an Arab is bad? Listen to what comes out of their mouths: Being anti-colonial is bad? Conversely, colonialism is good? Armed with this realization, liberals now challenge conservatives like Gingrich and D’Souza on whether they agree with this notion.

As I have witnessed, unfortunately, a pro-colonial sentiment is very alive and well all across conservative America. For one example, a very prominent area Republican, highly educated in science and history, informed me that Haiti wouldn’t suffer half of its infrastructure problems if it were still under colonial rule. “These people just don’t know how to take care of themselves and there is no accountability structure.” This is the American democracy we ship abroad, folks: not self-determination but external accountability structures.

So, what D’Souza and Gingrich spew before midterms is not necessarily evidence-free babble but the fearless articulation of long-held beliefs. It is great insight not into Obama but the conservative psyche. And I am amazed at how often the media and their experts hit the mother lode and haven’t the first clue what to do with it.