It is our country.

November 7, 2009Americana, What's a man?Steve Stern

Sarah Palin is still talking about the real American and the goofy birthers
are still saying Obama is not a real American. Now Pat Buchanan is complaining that
"Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are
replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez." – For God's sake, Pat, Robert
E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were traitors, is that the best you can
do? Listening to them, I have starting thinking about what does make a real American?

Maybe a real American is like pornography: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. One real American is Hung Ba Le, a native of Hue, Vietnam, who left that country
as a five-year-old refugee and was picked up at sea by a U.S. Navy ship. This this month, he became the commander of the USS Lassen, a guided missile
destroyer.

There is so much that I like about this (and this picture). The delicious irony that Le was saved by a US Navy ship and is now the commander of US Navy ship. The Navy is the most conservative of all the US armed services – by far. Just look at the picture, Le is wearing a sword… a SWORD! and they still use a pipe whistle as part of the boarding ceremony. Sixty years ago, the Navy was all white except for black mess stewards and Filipino cooks, now three of the six people in this picture are minorities and the new commander is a Vietnamese American.

The new America, the real America is not Sarah Palin's America.

The new, improved, T-Rex; or believing is seeing

November 7, 2009UncategorizedSteve Stern

Over the years, everybody's favorite dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus Rex, has changed radically. When I was a kid, dinosaurs were slow, lumbering, stupid, cold blooded animals. They were primitive and had small brains. They walked sort of upright, dragging their tails.

Just looking at the pictures of T-Rex and you could tell it was a dumb animal. Then paleontologists began to question those assumptions. First there was questions about the evidence that the dinosaurs were cold blooded. Led by Robert Bakker, paleontologists started seeing the the same evidence – the same bones – in a new way. T-Rex stopped dragging his tail and started looking more alert and dangerous.

Then came DNA testing and we learned that dinosaurs were related to birds. So we now have the new T-Rex. Complete with proto-feathers. T-Rex has never been an animal anybody would want to mess with, but this latest version looks particularly bad-ass.