drrrrrrrrrill, baby, drrrrrrrrrill

Tina Fey asked the Saturday Night Live writer assigned to the Sarah Palin sketches to script in lots of words with Rs in them. 'She loves those Rs," Fey said. "William Ayerrrrrrrrrs and terrrrrorrrrists - I think she thinks there's oil in those Rs, she's digging deep.' more ...

part-time crusader

Edward Abbey

'Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.' more ...

waxing for longer

Malcolm Gladwell says lyric poetry isn't only a young person's game. Just look at the First XI.

'T. S. Eliot’s 'Prufrock', Robert Lowell’s 'Skunk Hour', Robert Frost’s 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', 'William Carlos Williams’s 'Red Wheelbarrow', Elizabeth Bishop’s 'The Fish', Ezra Pound’s 'The River Merchant’s Wife', Sylvia Plath’s 'Daddy', Pound’s 'In a Station of the Metro', Frost’s 'Mending Wall', Wallace Stevens’s 'The Snow Man', and Williams’s 'The Dance'. Those eleven were composed at the ages of 23, 41, 48, 40, 29, 30, 30, 28, 38, 42, and 59, respectively.' more ...

2012 is not about the olympics

Nobel prizewinner Rajendra Pachauri says,

'If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.'

quoted in Bill McKibben's review of Thomas Friedman's new book. more ...

from dismal science to deadly one

'We live on a planet with finite resources,' says the New Scientist, 'so why do we have an economic system in which all that matters is growth?' Special issue on how the economy is killing the earth. more ...

dazzling to be alive

Johann Hari says the Wall Street Crash hadn't happened for 80 years. The Arctic Crash hasn't happened for three million years:

This is, perversely, a dazzling time to be alive: every human being who ever lives will deal with the decisions we make here. If we disregard the voices of denial, Europe has a chance to do something extraordinary. We could be the people who saw this threat to our species coming and remade our societies to stop it. more ...

what's wrong with sustainable

'I don't like the term,' says architect Mitchell Joachim. 'It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning.' more ...

return of the parrot

John Cleese says, 'I used to think Michael Palin was the funniest Palin on earth.'

But now he says there's a Palin in another parrot sketch.

Cleese says, 'Monty Python could have written this.' more ...

aristotle in the usa

Hendrik Hertzberg:

If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s. more ...

infected world

Theatre director Richard Olivier has used Henry V and The Tempest for teaching 'leadership skills'. This week he starts a 'Shakespeare and Sustainability' course at Schumacher College using As You Like It as the text. Key quote:

Give me leave To speak my mind
and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.

More on Shakespeare and climate change. more ...

shift in concern

A shift in 'the traditional locus of moral concern', warns a disgruntled Theodore Dalrymple, means that

A man may be an irresponsible father, but that is more than compensated for by his deep concern about global warming, or foreign policy, or the food situation in Africa.

A false opposition: hard to imagine how a responsible father wouldn't be concerned about global warming. more ...

bottling out

Chris Patten's new book says it would require only $15bn to meet the United Nations Millennium Development goal of halving the number of people who lack access to safe drinking water, compared to 'the approximately $100bn a year spent on bottled water'. more ...

into neutral

To understand modern politics in Europe, writes Tom Holland, you have to understand Europe's Christian past

Neutrality, in the dimension of culture and religion, can never itself be a neutral concept: it is too much the product of Christian presumptions and history ever to rank as that. more ...

slipping

In a 1,200-word statement about his priorities for government David Cameron failed to mention the words 'environment' or 'climate change'. more ...

'theatre revels ...'

writes Guardian theatre blogger Andy Field,

'in the directness of its relationship with the real world. It is the perfect medium to begin playing with and making something wonderful out of our ever-more miserable weather.' more ...

out of the dark

When electrical problems at the Bush theatre took out the lighting, they scheduled a series of plays in natural light. more ...

170,000 sign

Petition asks ABC to reconsider its ban on too 'controversial' ad that promotes alternative energy. more ...

topical developments

Most Victorian scientists kept faith

'with at least one major inheritance from the Romantic period: the belief that science should be conducted in a language available to all intelligent citizens, and that the public should always be educated both in its deepest fundamentals and in its most topical developments.'
more ...

a tragedy of shakespearian proportions

Because McCain did it to himself. more ...

the next great global industry

Thomas Friedman's new book is as much about America, he tells Elizabeth Kolbert, as it is about the next big thing - energy technology

the whole purpose of my book is to redefine green. To redefine it as a geo-political, geo-strategic, geo-economic, patriotic. Green is the new red, white and blue.
more ...

david miliband's either/or

'So the choice is not between an economic growth lifestyle and climate change—I think it is high carbon lifestyle versus low carbon lifestyle.' more ...

why he likes early cultures

The 2008 Nobel prize-winner for Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (left), says

The dawn of peoples is important because we seem now to be living in the dusk. You have the sense that we are getting near the end.

For those who haven't read Le Clézio, a French professor at Columbia University explains his appeal, 'There is a concern for civilizations, a concern for ecology.' more ...

disko days

We've been following Cape Farewell's Disko Bay trip here. They had a bigger boat, more people and better weather than last year. Our associate editor Kellie Gutman, who's been keeping up with the blogs, says:

the most prolific blogger is the comedian Marcus Brigstocke. But all of the crew is blogging, and they are often very long, thoughtful, introspective, descriptive blogs - which is quite a change from last year. We've just scratched the surface with our sampling. There are a lot more video clips as well, and the official photographer has snapped great photos. more ...

the romance of science

Jonathan Bate reviews Richard Holmes' new book The Age of Wonder

Building on a generation of revisionist scholarship that has been barely visible beyond the groves of academe, Holmes triumphantly shows that the Romantic age was one of symbiosis rather than opposition, in which scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy were also poets and poets such as Coleridge had a shaping influence on scientists - we discover indeed that it was Coleridge who was responsible for the early 19th-century invention of the term 'scientist' as an alternative to the older nomenclature 'natural philosopher'.

H-t: Bookslut more ...

doing even less

Nearly two in three opinion leaders (63%) think that sustainability is a low or non-priority for business - and close to half (47%) believe that businesses will do even less in the current economic climate. more ...

the ad ABC won't run

They'll take an ad from Chevron, but not this:

The solution to our climate crisis seems simple. Repower America with wind and solar. End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy. So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy? Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy. Lobbyists, ads, even scandals. All to increase their profits, while America suffers. Breaking big oil's lock on our government ... Now that's change. We're the American people and we approve this message. more ...

verbage

So close to garbage, so far from language. more ...

the audition

He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. more ...

nuts and bolts

Australian theatre critic Alison Croggon quotes the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (left), who maintained that,

'if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures.'

H-t: Theatre Ideas. more ...

make-up

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, says the Wall Street Journal, and burns 23% of the world's oil. But what's striking is the make-up of the carbon footprint.

'Industry -- including oil, steel, chemicals and cement -- produces 23% of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the McKinsey study. But a handful of other emission sources more directly controlled by consumers far outweigh industry when those sources are pooled together ... Consumer behavior affects virtually all man-made greenhouse-gas emissions because consumers drive the economy.' more ...