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The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Friday
Apr082011

The Wunderkind Wizard of Washington

Paul Krugman tears Paul Ryan's "ludicrous and cruel" plan to little bitty shreds.

Once again, my comment was iced, so here it is:


Karen Garcia aptly labeled Paul Ryan and his plan Cheez Whiz, but I have another Whiz in mind -- the Wizard of Oz. Ryan has somehow managed to wrap into his persona the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion & the Tin Man.

The Scarecrow may be a stretch, for you have to assume that Ryan doesn't have a brain. If you take him at his word -- that he really believes he has devised a great plan that will be good for the country -- then he is the Scarecrow. As Krugman and other analysts have illustrated these past few days, Ryan's numbers, especially those based on Heritage Foundation projections, are unbelievable. Ryan isn't above contradicting himself, either -- accepting some CBO numbers while rejecting others. So if you believe Paul Ryan is an honorable man, you have to assume he doesn't have a brain -- like Frank Baum's Scarecrow.


The Cowardly Lion is an easy one. Even in this newspaper, columnists have been calling Ryan "courageous" and "brave." If Ryan were courageous, he would have told the truth when he rolled out his plan. Instead, he concentrated only on the spending cuts in his roll-out video with its charts and graphs. Had he even mentioned the big ole tax cut part -- which the cowardly Mr. Ryan did not -- he would have completely undermined his argument that these humungous cuts in essential services were necessitated by the deficit. You just can't say in the same breath you are going to cut programs for the neediest Americans and cut taxes (to below the middle-class tax rate) for the richest Americans without somebody catching on. Ryan roars, all right, but he is a Cowardly Lion. He doesn't dare tell the truth about his own program.

And the Tin Man? The Tin Man -- just like Paul Ryan -- lacked a heart. I don't know what has made Mr. Ryan so craven, but perhaps he thinks of each of us as just a number. (Probably shouldn't be the Social Security number -- deep in his heart, Ryan wants to gut Social Security, too, but he's saving that part of his plan for another day.) If Ryan thought of us as living, breathing people rather than as abstract numbers, he would have to think of the people under age 55 whose retirements he plans to decimate. He would have to think of the disabled people he will leave to fend for themselves. He would have to think of the poor, sick people who would not be able to get medical help until it was perhaps too late. He'd have to think of the deserving students who couldn't get low-interest financial aid for college. If Ryan had a heart, he couldn't sleep at night. He couldn't look at himself in the mirror. So I can only conclude he isn't sleeping, doesn't have a mirror -- or, more than likely, he doesn't have a heart. He's the Tin Man.

In Baum's story, it turns out the Scarecrow really had a brain, the Cowardly Lion really had courage all along & the Tin Man did indeed have a heart. But real life isn't as neat as fiction. In real life, we got Paul Ryan, a man devoid of those characteristics that define us as honorable women and men.

Wunderkind? I'm not sure Ryan even qualifies as humankind.

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