Bill Murray's Blog, page 89
April 20, 2017
Lip Service
It has always been said that the French are consummate debaters, and with, as they say in the screen grab, “total uncertainty” about the outcome of this weekend’s first election round, the next couple of days are the right time to find a panel discussion on France24.
April 19, 2017
Animals with Personality
I’ve been reading lately about the prevalence of traits we think of as human traits in animals. The idea of animal “personality” is problematic by anthropomorphic definition. But still. Here are a few creatures we’ve met down through the years. For me, it’s hard to imagine them not having personalities.
Click them for bigger versions at EarthPhotos.com.
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Quotes:
“We humans living on our one planet wring our hands about the brevity of our lives and our mortal restraints, but we do not often think about how improbable it is to be alive at all. Of all the zillions of atoms and molecules in the universe, we have the privilege of being composed of those very, very few atoms that have joined together in the special arrangement to make living matter. We exist in that one-billionth of one-billionth. We are that one grain of sand on the desert.”
April 14, 2017
Quotes:
““When something quite new and singular is presented … The memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance. It stands alone and by itself in the imagination. (This) constitute(s) the sentiment properly called Wonder, and occasion(s) that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others, when wondering at some new object.”
– Adam Smith on Wonder.
Titanic History
Object of Rearrangement:
Deck Chair from the Titanic, from the
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax
105 years ago tonight the Titanic met its fate. Short excerpt from my new book Out in the Cold:
As in the Swissair tragedy, when the Titanic sank in April 1912, ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax, then as now, was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.
The Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying communications cable, led the recovery effort. Two days after the sinking she set out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a preacher.
Over the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the CGS Montmagny. Together they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.
Just 59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local businesses donated bouquets of lilies. The Maritime Museum on Halifax’s waterfront has an extensive Titanic exhibit – complete with deck chair.
Haligonians couldn’t have imagined it, but after the Titanic an even more horrific tragedy lay five years down the road, and this was all Halifax’s own. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest conflagration of the Great War. I don’t know if it’s just me, but polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest man made explosion before Hiroshima either….
Weekend Reading
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Join me in exploring these articles over the weekend, which for a lucky few is three days long. I’ve bumped them over to Instapaper but haven’t finished them all myself. Let’s see where they lead.
Thanks for your participation in yesterday’s photo quiz, and if you haven’t ventured a guess yet, you have until next Thursday to do so. I’ll draw from the correct answers then and send the winner a copy of the audiobook version of Common Sense and Whiskey. We’ll do this Fridays for the rest of the summer.
Meanwhile, this is a momentous weekend for the Turks, who go to the polls on Sunday to decide on granting more power to President Reçep Tayyip Erdogan. Opinion leaders can’t decide among themselves which way to lead; either the Turkish President is a badass anti-democratic juggernaut, or a defeat could put him in peril:
Win or Lose on Referendum, Turkey’s Erdoğan Spells Trouble
How Erdogan’s Referendum Gamble Might Backfire
But enough of that for now. On to some articles for your weekend perusal:
Icebergs by George Philip LeBourdais at thepointmag.com
Operation London Bridge: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death by Sam Knight in The Guardian
A Town Under Trial by Nick Tabor in the Oxford American
Why some infinities are bigger than others by A W Moore in Aron Magazine
The Case For Butterfish by Neal Ascherson at Granta.com
April 13, 2017
Friday Photo Quiz, Thursday Edition
Let’s have a little fun. Are you game to test your geographic knowledge? Fridays through the summer I’ll put up a random photo from one of the 120 countries on EarthPhotos.com. For starters we’ll do this first one a day early. You play sleuth. Where on earth can this be?
Leave your best guess as a comment. I won’t publish the comments so no one can give away the answer.
I’ll put all the correct answers into a hat, draw one, and the winner of the drawing will win a copy of the audiobook version of my book Common Sense and Whiskey. Free stuff, once a week.
New photo every Friday, drawing the next Thursday, winners notified by email Friday.
Good luck. Have fun.
So, game time: from what country do you guess this first photo comes?
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Friday Photo, Thursday Edition
Let’s have a little fun. Are you game to test your geographic knowledge? Fridays through the summer I’ll put up a random photo from one of the 120 countries on EarthPhotos.com. For starters we’ll do this first one a day early. You play sleuth. Where on earth can this be?
Leave your best guess as a comment. I won’t publish the comments so no one can give away the answer.
I’ll put all the correct answers into a hat, draw one, and the winner of the drawing will win a copy of the audiobook version of my book Common Sense and Whiskey. Free stuff, once a week.
New photo every Friday, drawing the next Thursday, winners notified by email Friday.
Good luck. Have fun.
So, game time: from what country do you guess this first photo comes?
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April 12, 2017
Free-ish Bird
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This week’s United Airlines debacle raises questions besides the violation-of-decency-in-search-of-corporate-efficiency one. The Libertarian blog Reason makes a salient point under the headline Why Should Police Help United Airlines Cheat Its Customers?
Blurring the lines between private enterprise and quasi-law enforcement bodies makes me nervous. When it’s just you and me, hapless Joes trying to catch a flight, who really knows who has what authority in airports?
The men who hauled that United passenger down that aisle were Chicago Aviation Police, unarmed, sorta real cops who play “an important, supplementary role in keeping [Chicago airports] safe by overseeing access points.”
Would you know that at the moment they muscled their way down the aisle? Does it matter? Should you just instantly cave in forfeiture of your rights to anybody in uniform? It seems like that’s what the enforcement cadres would prefer, in the name of keeping you safe.
There are God knows how many entities said to be looking out for your best interests in airports. Homeland Security people, uniformed TSA people, your local police, anybody an airline or rental car agency or for that matter, TGI Fridays down in the food court might slap a uniform on. If the guy who drives the Marriott shuttle and wears the official cap yells and screams real authoritatively, what about him, too?
In a sympathetic article from many years ago, “Chicago-area airport security chief Jim Maurer” says “What I think is unique about airports is this is a business. And our job is to make sure that that business is conducted efficiently. We’ve got to get people in and out of the airport and we’ve got to get them to their destinations. There’s a whole different perspective.”
Sure is a different perspective. We’re not enforcing laws. We’re making sure business, like United Airlines’ business, is conducted efficiently.
So why are they called police? Why are government bodies in service of private profit-making?
•••••
I was flying around doing reporting trips for my book Out in the Cold in 2015, and once after returning from the Arctic, I found a card the size of the customs form inside my bag.
“Notice of Baggage Inspection from the Department of Homeland Security: To protect you and your fellow passengers your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag.”
Come now.
They say “may have been.” I’m pretty sure that if they didn’t open the bag I wouldn’t have found the notice inside. You figure?
“If the TSA security officer was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the officer may have been forced to break the locks on your bag.”
May have been.
“TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, however TSA is not liable for damage to your locks….”
Of course not.
•••••
The Department of Homeland Security claims their entitlement to the inside of your property in the name of your security. This is unsettling because what might they need to seize next to keep you safe? Your social media passwords?
Oh, wait.
Unsettling too because this week cops can haul you bleeding from your paid-for flight. Note that after auditioning all the other options, United CEO Munoz finally apologized, but no enforcement organization I’m aware of has distanced itself from the Chicago Aviation Police.
You just wait for the day that TGI Fridays cop splays you out on the floor on account of your complaint about the cold fries.
YOU’RE IN THE AIRPORT. I’M HERE TO KEEP YOU SAFE.
•••••
Also published here on Medium.
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April 10, 2017
The Price to Be Paid for Vile Customer Service
When a constituency has been beaten down for long enough a crystallizing moment can prove fatal. Beware tonight, United Airlines. Beaten Down: Airline passengers. Average seat pitch formerly 35 inches, 31 now. Fees, fees and more fees. United Airlines, already last in customer satisfaction, richly deserves the pain coming from it’s just really ugly, unforgivable police action today.
The frowning, sometimes dimly-qualified, testosterone-pumped enforcement cowboys whose gauntlet you must run these days to United’s friendly skies may wish to think otherwise, but the interior of an airplane is not a war zone. Although you wouldn’t know it on this day.
Honest now, most likely United Airlines chairman Oscar Munoz, like a thousand other captains of industry, kissed his wife and kids and obeyed traffic rules this morning on the way to the office. There is no reason to believe he did anything besides look after his shareholders’ interests right up until, entirely outside his control, an incident occurred on board one of his planes waiting to leave O’Hare airport.
Mr. Munoz’s company needed four of its employees to be somewhere other than Chicago and all of the passengers declined to volunteer their bought and paid for seats for the airline’s benefit.
The first offer? $400. No takers. The second? $800. Again, no takers. People gotta go where they gotta go.
A crucial thing: rules are, passengers are eligible for up to $1,350 for such a disruption but United Airlines apparently decided not to offer more than $800. They preferred to enlist strong men to haul a paying passenger from his seat instead.
It would appear that in the wake of the incident, after a wavering moment of incipient decency, in which Chairman Oscar Munoz called the incident “an upsetting event to all of us here at United” the chairman tilted awry by calling the bumped passenger “disruptive and belligerent.” Said he, the airline agents “were left with no choice but to call Chicago Aviation Security Officers to assist in removing the customer from the flight.”
Oh, Lordy, whether the passenger was belligerent or not (and none of the emergent videos, see here, here, and here, demonstrate such), this was exactly, precisely, even perversely the wrong response.
The passenger declined to be forcibly bumped from a flight he had paid for with money, because the airline thought a better use of his seat was to transport its own employees. (Further why should police abet the airline in the airline’s wrongdoing?)
A single event won’t usually overtake a career. On this one, Mr. Munoz, who was under fire just last week for denying passage to teenage girls for wearing leggings, just might get caught up in the deluge. Sometimes, a constituency beaten down for long enough will rise up. Sometimes a big enough misstep from the loftiest heights can lead you over the corporate cliff.
Even while I have written just now, I see 2310 new Tweets with the hashtag #United. Since Mr. Munoz kissed his wife and kids this morning, I wonder if he may have kissed his job goodbye.
