jude folly

This is the hot story about an abundantly famous athlete with a reputation as pure as the driven snow, a post-Thanksgiving auto wreck and brief hospital visit. As few details are known, and even less context, about said events, his refusal to elaborate has only stoked curiosity and ginned up the rumor swill. As someone who’s neither a fan nor a detractor, I hope he can keep a lid on it and maintain his privacy–sponsors and fans be damned. I doubt anyone’s ever had an arm twisted to watch him golf or to buy the shaving cream he’s selling. Perhaps he’ll lose some sponsors and he’ll lose some fans–hardly anything to whine about given the levels of success he’s achieved.

The fawning public needs to accept responsibility for idealizing and adoring an exceptional athlete who, just like everyone else, puts away his golf clubs one at a time. So, move along, spectators, there’s nothing more to see here.

As most readers have probably already found out earlier this week,  a resumed search for cluesinto the disappearance Steve Fossett has lead to a discovery of wreckage from the plane flown by the millionaire adventurer.

In an entry back on June 12, I speculated on the possibility that he had intentionally vanished from human contact as an act of the ultimate adventure. At the time I was not aware of a suggestionmade by US Civil Air Patrol’s Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan - that Fossett might still be alive, since the aircraft had yet to be discovered.  Now that the revived search has confirmed the finding of human remains at the crash site, it appears likely that this story amounts to no more than the tragic end to an exceptional life.

However, I await the results of DNA testing to be absolutely certain that this was not Fossett’s greatest feat.

Pregnant and unwed are the least of her problems.  Anyway, I’m convinced that for almost every occasion there is a Smiths song that commemorates.

The flush-lipped one goes into labor. I don’t give a damn; why should anyone else?

It surprises me no one has offered this scenario (at least publicly) about the Sept. 2007 disappearance of Steve Fossett: wouldn’t the ultimate adventure be that of vanishing from publicized human contact, if not all human contact?

Very reluctantly I’ve added some content to the ‘about‘ page of this site. I anticipate it changing… some time. Funny that without content it received more hits than this blog.

I neglected to acknowledge Julia and Jimmy from Blue Mouse Monkey who got this site running. I recommend them to anyone wanting a web site designed and prepped for self-directed content management. 

Big news from the medical research community: a study presented by McNesse State University and Louisiana State University describes the antibiotic potential of proteins found in alligator blood. I get a kick how a news headline could provoke a visceral  response to the idea of ingesting alligator blood for medicinal purposes.

I like how a narrative from the Bible can sometimes capture, or serve as an emblem for, contemporary times. Babel seemed a civilization unified by one vision and one language until their arrogance caught its people up in a sudden blast of wind that thwarted their goal.

This I mention as today I cast my words into what feels like an oceanic clatter of voices drawn together–not in service of one vision, but by an infinite variety of motivations and intentions. Though I hesitate to admit it, I think the most fundamental impulse that writing on a blog reveals is the one inside each person that says ‘look at me!’–the longing to be acknowledged, which has often played out in human history on an unfathomable scale. The Denver hip hop act Flobots recently released the tune “Handlebars”, which illustrates this in a timely fashion.

Anyway, I look forward to contributing subsequent comments on politics and culture, wielding my oblique and, perhaps sometimes troubling, point of view about the human condition (why we do or say what we do or say); where fear throttles the senses and imagination (didja hear the one about Sen. Obama, Rev. Wright and Minister Farrakhan, who walk into a bar...?).