This Universe and an Alternative One

The first image released from the Webb telescope offered the deepest view humans have had yet into the universe, showing light that is 4.6 billion years old.

There’s a alternate universe where religion has a long and rich history of respect for scientific inquiry since science allows us to see the grand order of the natural world, glimpse the true awesomeness of the universe and know humanity’s fundamental inability to comprehend it all.

A Post-Roe World

My wife and I were in our mid-30s, financially secure with good careers and a safety net, and parents of a happy, healthy 9-year-old when we first considered abortion.

We did not want a bigger family and, despite being stable and secure, were scared and uncertain.

So on a weekend, we sent our kid to their grandparents to spend the night, took a pregnancy test and got rip roaring drunk in the wash of relief that followed its coming back negative.

I booked a vasectomy following a simple conversation with my doctor and a referral to a urologist. The hardest part was figuring out paying a bill through some third-party system since my primary provider was affiliated with the Catholic Church. (You know.)

Today, we are now in the shocking-but-not-surprising place that our world is officially a post-Roe world. It hurts. It’s infuriating. It’s a lot of other things I don’t have words for.

Whatever emotional pain I feel pales in comparison to physical and emotional hurt, and entirely predictable disfigurement and death, that will come with abortion bans in Republican states across the nation.

There will still be abortions. These abortions will be more dangerous for those who cannot travel to states where the medical procedure remains legal, and our neighbors and loved ones and friends will feel less safe, less in control and less cared for, no mater their station.

Fuck these illegitimate, undemocratic, lying justices.

1,000 Miles

In March, I bought a brand-new electric-assist bicycle. I just hit 1,000 miles on the odometer.

I don’t ride it much for recreation, so that 1,000 miles represents 1,000 miles of replaced gas-powered car trips, including three days a week of replacing my 24-mile-round-trip commute, weekly grocery runs and other trips out of the house.

Planning my week around bike riding is becoming second nature. For the time being, we have two cars, but there’s only been a couple of occasions where we’ve used both.

While a full Midwestern winter is still an unattempted hurdle, I’ve ridden in temperatures below freezing (get a balaclava and warm gloves) and, now, in a heat advisory (just sweat, but at least you’ll get a good breeze). I think we can probably ditch one of our cars.

The speed and silence of the bike means you get close encounters with nature. I’ve startled deer, almost hit a raccoon and been attacked by a goose.

There is great joy in being able to ride with traffic at the speed limit, with drivers still seeing you as a slow-moving bike as you quickly fend off their attempts to pass. Short trips are faster, since you can almost always find parking near the front door.

There are certainly cyclists who look down their nose at ebikes, who call it cheating. OK, I’ll still pass them on my commute home without guilt.

Over these past 130 days, I’ve found this “magic flying machine,” as my wife calls hers, has returned a great amount of joy in cycling for me.

Jan. 6 in June 2022

Revisiting footage from Jan. 6, 2021, in June 2022, even just this was more powerful, more terrifying, than I thought it would be. Just this 10-minute clip, part of the first two-hour hearing, took me back 17 months.

I used the word “coup” then. The Select Committee used the word “coup” yesterday.

Many members of the GOP are trying to change the subject because it’s hard to see it as anything but an attempted coup.

How San Francisco Became a Failed City

Nellie Bowles writing in The Atlantic:

These are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

Iowa City is not San Francisco, but our politics, and, I suspect, our problems, share some similarities.

Vegas Staycation

During the summer of 2008, I worked in the newsroom of the now-defunct Tampa Tribune. It was once considered cutting edge, with a converged newsroom for its newspaper, television and online operations. Wow! Anyway, I helped produce multimedia — “what’s an audio slideshow?” my 16-year-old recently asked me as I instantly aged a million years — and launched TBOextra.com, an entertainment site (tbo.com was the cutting edge domain for the website, short for “Tampa Bay Online”). I just pulled the piece I wrote for the launch, published Aug. 4, from the Wayback Machine and wanted to save it here.

TAMPA – The allure of Las Vegas, that city’s tourism flacks will tell you, is its collection of celebrity chefs and world-class shopping.

We beg to differ. Vegas isn’t nicknamed Sin City because it has a Barney’s New York. The foundation of the city’s fame is gambling, flashy entertainment and lots of flesh.

But the economic downturn and the rise of gas and air travel costs have meant that visitors to Vegas are having less fun (and by “having fun” we mean “gambling”; in May, gambling revenues were down more than 15 percent from a year ago). Coincidentally, we’ve been saddled with the atrocious coinage “staycation” to describe a stay-at-home vacation.

Which got us thinking: Who needs to travel to Vegas? You can have the same fun without leaving the Tampa area.

Well, sort of.

For a change of scenery during your next stay-at-homer, we offer an itinerary of sorts: a night in Vegas … in Tampa Bay.

Noon: Go crazy
If Vegas was built on gambling, its dining scene — no matter how alluring to the foodie set it may have become — was built on buffets. So start the night with a bite at Crazy Buffet. You won’t find the standard Vegas cheap-‘n’-greasy, but for $15.99 you can gorge yourself on the buffet’s weekend brunch, featuring a steak hibachi, sushi and sashimi. (After 5 p.m., the buffet switches to dinner and the cost goes to $19.99.)

1 p.m.: A Vegas landmark
Tourists love getting their picture taken in front of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign on the south end of the strip, says Alicia Malone, a public relations representative for the Las Vegas visitor’s bureau. Yeah, it sounded like a pretty lame attraction to us, too. But since you’re spending a night in Vegas on the Bay, you might as well swing by a Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino “Vegas-Style Slots” billboard for a picture. One is located on Busch Boulevard near Interstate 275.

1:30 p.m.: Serious gaming
With a meal and a tourist photo out of the way, you’re ready to move on to the most Vegas-y event of the day: sitting and mindlessly playing the slots at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino for hours on end. While the casino doesn’t offer many card games, it does offer poker if slots aren’t your thing.

5 p.m.: A little flesh
What would a night out in Vegas be without a little flesh? (Answer: Phoenix, Ariz.) The Penthouse Club Steakhouse offers one variety of flesh on a plate and another on a pole. The prices can be a little, er, stiff — $45 for a 12-ounce aged New York strip steak — but you’re here for the food, right? (If you show up after 8 p.m. only to consume the Penthouse stripping, and not the steak, it’s $10 to get in.)

7:30 p.m.: A Tampa landmark
Tampa’s answer to Wayne Newton is Johnny Charro. Charro no longer performs in Bay area hotel ballrooms as he did when he was 40 years younger. Instead, he makes regular appearances at the American Legion and Tampa Bay Sports Grille. The setting may be less elegant (and the cocktail waitresses not up to Vegas standards), but Charro is still a crooner and a charmer — at least, if you find pudgy crooners charming.

9 p.m.: Fountains
Vistors to Las Vegas, our Vegas tourism expert assures us, love the Bellagio fountains on the strip, where they can watch the water come alive as it dances to nauseatingly melodramatic Celine Dion songs. On your way back from the Charro show, you’ll want to stop by the fountains in front of the Fox 13 studios on Kennedy Boulevard. Actually, you won’t — they’re painted swimming-pool blue and have no water in them — but it’s as close to the Bellagio’s fountains as the Bay gets, unless you count the flooding on south Howard after a good summer drenching.

9:30 p.m.: Artificial fun
You can’t have the true Vegas experience without spending some time in an artificial environment built solely for amusement. The Las Vegas strip has New York, New York, but the Bay has the world’s largest bowling pin and the rest of the supremely cheesy Channelside Bay Plaza. (Full disclosure: The Tampa Tribune and TBO.com have a business arrangement with the plaza.) Options for late night entertainment include Splitsville, a combination bowling alley, bar and restaurant, and Howl at the Moon, a lounge with dueling pianos. Stump’s Supper Club features a shag-carpet-covered stage and house band Jimmy James and the Velvet Explosion. Cirque du Soleil they are not.

You’re in good shape to ride out the night in Channelside and let whatever happens happen — because for one night, at least, what happens in Tampa Bay, stays in Tampa Bay. Not that it does you any good when you get home.

The Inadequacy of the CDC

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

To paraphrase Sonny Corleone, during a pandemic we need a wartime CDC. And it’s clear we don’t have one. The institutional apparatus designed for managing ‘ordinary’ infectious diseases, researching and improving care for chronic maladies simply isn’t designed for what we’ve confronted in the last two years.

This was my takeaway from reading Michael Lewis’ The Premonition, which felt both premature and prescient when I read it, too.

In my view, public service involves two, at times competing, calls. One is to leverage expertise. A second is to advocate for the best option. The political part of public service is about making calls — often really tough ones and sometime really unpopular ones — is the face of competing demands.

We’ve put the CDC in the place of having to issue perfect decisions or do the work of political leaders by including the balance in their work.

Good Riddance 2021

A review of a past future year in review:

To start with the obvious: this year was better than last year, mostly because coming out of deadly, mismanaged pandemic is better that going into one.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t come out.

I don’t want this review of the past year to get bogged down with schadenfreude, such as Trump’s ongoing criminal proceedings but it helped. The arc of justice blah blah blah. 

Nor do I wat to relive the horrific Iowa legislative session with its rightward push to move public dollars to private schools and reinstating the death penalty by folks who identify as pro-life.

There wasn’t nearly as much movement on any of these items as I expected, for good and for ill. The state government was pretty bad, though.

The first half of the year was very much 2020 2.0: excessive death caused by denial, entitlement and exceptionalism.

We saw more deaths from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, and we’ve let 1 in 100 of our seniors die from the disease.

But by summer that changed. Fewer dying people (good!), but with understandable pandemic fatigue, FOMO was on the rise. 

If 2020 was the year of the introverts, 2021 was the year of fighting off the extroverts.

And so, after my much-anticipated second vaccine dose, I was lured out by friends to enjoy my first meal at a restaurant in more than a year. 

This was kinda true. I ate in a restaurant in early July and felt pretty much OK! But: still lots of death.

Well, enjoyed is too strong of a word. 

I actually did enjoy it. I miss restaurants, but I like not being sick a lot, too.

But everyone else everywhere wanted to do everything in person. Meetings that had rightfully become emails or phone calls were, again, meetings. Everyone wanted to host a cocktail hour, lunch-and-learn or some sort of celebration. If it wasn’t celebrating this year’s birthday (Wait, we’re still eating cake after someone has blown all over it? Have we learned nothing?), it was re-celebrating last year’s missed anniversaries.

Everyone did want to switch to in-person events, though some were still hybrid through the fall. Feels like we’re in a real fuck-it mode right now as the year ends.

It’s not to say that I wasn’t glad to finally be able to see people in person. Thanksgiving and Christmas, my two favorite secular holidays, were better spent in my parents’ living room than spread across Iowa and Illinois, though I did miss the joy of the low-key aspects of the previous year’s pandemic holidays.

We actually traveled — on an airplane! — for Thanksgiving. And Christmas gathering was proceeded by rapid antigen and PCR tests. It was still pretty low key.

I’ve never been a fan of the pervasive “good riddance to [current year]” — the annual refrain suggests we have no real baseline — but 2021 was only marginally better than the year before, so good riddance.

This is 100 percent accurate. Good riddance, 2021.