Moby-Dick in the News

You know when you learn a new word, and suddenly you seem to see that word everywhere you look? Well, that's started happening to me with Moby-Dick. Today, for instance, I read this Andrew Sullivan post about an editorial in the Anchorage Daily News:

Gov. Palin and her husband were obsessed with [Palin's ex-brother-in-law, State Trooper] Wooten the way Capt. Ahab was obsessed with the Great White Whale. No Wooten, no peace.

Sunday night on my plane ride home from NYC, there was something wrong with the Virgin America seat-back TV, to where I could not watch The Real Housewives of New York City marathon. This was very disappointing, because Ramona is kind of hot and kind of reminds me of a cross between a middle-aged Kathy Lee Gifford, a skittish deer in the woods, and Britney Spears' mom, the White Oprah. It turned out alright though because I used the time to read the Esquire Big Black Book of $3,000 briefcases that you would be an imbecile to not buy immediately. {I just checked and the watch I wanted in there - The U-Boat - is $3,850. I haven't worn a watch since about 2004.} I also watched the TED talks of Brian Cox (the Large Hadron Collider) and Paul Stamets (6 ways mushrooms can save the earth), which were extremely fascinating. I started watching Amy Tan's TED talk, but had to quit when she said

And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association -- quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence.

(photo of four rubber ducks, arrow associating them with Warhol-esque 4 panel portrait of Tan- "the metaphorical universe: synenergy (sic) and what matters")

because this is just really dumb. Look, I don't understand quantum mechanics either, but the THING of using the fact that it is weird and hard to understand to try to bolster and justify any kind of ridiculous, anti-scientific New Age mumbo jumbo is one of the most annoying things going in the modern world of ideas. (See e.g. Oprah favorite Gary Zukov's The Dancing Wu Li Masters - A Bantam New Age Book - from 1979. Oprah loves mumbo jumbo.)

I also watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm from whatever season is happening or just happened. The downside was that I found out a major plot twist that happens between the last episode I had seen (season 4?) and now, but sometimes you have to spend money to make money. One of the jokes was that Larry was depressed, and one of his friends was telling his manager that he was like Mopey Dick. Moby Dick? The whale in the Melville book? No, Mopey Dick, like he's depressed and he needs to get laid.

I managed to spend the weekend in NYC in the apartment of two girls who had colds, drinking and staying up till the wee hours, and I didn't get sick until Monday morning. But when I went to bed last night I knew my fate was sealed. Today I cancelled my physical therapy session at 8:30 (that is, I didn't go to it). My calf is fine and I think I'll be ready to play in the kickball playoffs this weekend. But my motorcycle is in the shop and I decided not to take the hour-long bus ride to the refinery in order to infect my coworkers and get nothing done.

Instead, I got an amazing fruit danish at La new Boulange de Polk, and picked up a New York Times, the new National Geographic, and the New Yorker. As my friends all know and preemptively cringe at, I'll probably be a little obsessed with New York City for a couple of months, followed by at least five years of fond memories and vague travel plans. What a great town.

The National Geographic has an article on the Right Whale, the principle other whale, besides the Sperm, that was hunted by whalers in the 1850's. Its numbers in the North Atlantic have dwindled to about 350 adults, from 10,000 in the 1600's.

The New Yorker has a lot of good stuff in it, but (at left) was the only Moby-Dick related thing I saw on my first perusal. "Day 247, still no fingers."

-Hip E., p.399