Update: decided to bump this to the top of the page.  People need help.

   A bunch of email is still sitting unopened; my apologies to
folks I haven’t replied to lately.  Still, most of this site’s best stuff
is sent in by you guys, at least when I can get around to checking it out.

    Andy B., who has done considerable relief work
himself in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, shares suggestions re charities in
the wake of the Java earthquake, both specific to the event and more
general.  I can’t vouch for perfection here, but I’m sure he knows a
boatload more than I do.  I paraphrase a bit for brevity:

    Since World Vision apparently has a bit of a specific-god missionary rep, he also suggests for others of a slightly different god bent the Church World Service, ADRA , CRS/CARITAS, and LWS, depending on how your own god bends.  He also suggests a number of European groups, among them: Merlin, Malteser, GOAL, and Concern.

    Meanwhile, Atlas Logistique
transports stuff for other good guys, so they’re a way of hitting the
relief infrastructure, if you will.  For shelter projects, he
recommends the International Organization for Migration.  Let’s also not forget the International Rescue Committee and the American Refugee Committee.

   
If you go for more capitalist solutions, setting folks up with small
businesses that are intended to make relief self-perpetuating and
profitable, check out Population Services International or other groups you can Google under “social marketing.”

   
Andy also points out that there’s a big diff between short-term relief
and long-term development work, and that sometimes in a crisis the
former tends to get all the play, when the latter needs support just as
much.  Good point.  So aim accordingly.

    Finally, if you ever have a yen to run off to someplace that could really use your time, check out Relief Web, which has a job board and everything.

    Sorely tempting, I must say. 

    The quake scoreboard, so far: 6200 dead, 30,000 injured, 200,000 made homeless.

    Want to help?  Go to it.

    Thanks.

    My friend Neil Innes just breezed through town the other night.  He and the band gave a terrific show, and I’ve been humming the melodies for days.  The tour’s over by now, but if you ever do get the chance, go.  If the Monty Python, Rutles, and Bonzos stuff don’t do it for you, and his more recent solo tunes don’t climb into your head to live, you are clinically dead.

    Keep an eye on this young man.  I see big things ahead. 

    PS: I have several friends, acquaintances, and mere objects of admiration who have great projects out of late, and when I get a minute I’m gonna try slapping a Recommended Stuff module over on the right.  When I get around to it.  Neil’s show was my weekly trip out of the house.  Amazing thing

You’ll notice quite a few changes around here. We’re updating the look a little. It might mutate a few times in the new few weeks. So enjoy that.

Also, you’ll notice that Prisoner of Trebekistan, my new humor book about not winning so many times on a certain quiz show, and how stuffing a whole slew of seemingly-disconnected info into your head can have unexpected effects, is now available for pre-ordering.

The book is already getting some crazy-nice blurbs from people I admire so much I could plotz. But more about that later. Lots more.

For now, if you’d like a copy, you can be the first kid on the block to pre-order. Then brag to your friends about it if you like.

Spent last evening at the opening night of the new Al Gore enviro-flick An Inconvenient Truth.

First,
an aside.  I have mixed feelings about Al Gore.  I’m not a fan for
about a dozen reasons, some of which you’ll gather below.

Two
thoughts on the way out, however: (1) surprisingly fascinating, funny,
and moving, given that you’re basically watching a cinematic treatment
of a PowerPoint presentation. And (2), AAAIIIIEEE! I never really looked this all at once before.

Yeah,
I’ve read about the rising CO2 levels.  We all know about the
increasing water temperatures and the shrinking icecaps.  I’ve seen
arctic glaciers fracturing and river beds drying up with my own eyes. 
But assimilated piecemeal like this, it’s easy not to see how all of
these small impacts are adding up.  So I went in thinking, OK, I know
the rough outlines of this.

But put it all together, and mix in some truly stunning visuals the way Gore and the producers have, and holy angels’ armpits on a flaming stick — LOOK!  LOOK!  GAH!  AAAIIIEEEEE!

Even if Gore is bullshitting by (loose thumbnail here:) a factor
of ten — and I’d say, given the occasional gloss over a few minor
areas of some dispute (an almost inevitable occurence, actually, in
trying to summarize something so large in such a short period of time)
and his history as a politician, it’s probably a factor of two or so —
this conversation needs to move front and center in a way I hadn’t
realized before.

Go see the damn thing.

Find a theater and go.  If you live in a small town, call your theaters and bug them to bring it.

That
all said, one huge caveat.  I dearly wish it wasn’t Gore at the center
of all this, because as an American politician, he retains veneer of
residual sleaze that (for me, at least) gets in the way of an extremely
important message.

It’s very hard for me to square his
self-serving talk about his precious connection to the farm he grew up
on knowing that there’s a big ol’ zinc mine on the same land,
just walking distance away, that the Gore family have collected
hundreds of thousands of royalties from over the years.  I can never
square Gore’s greenspeak with his and Clinton’s behavior regarding the WTI waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio.  That one was unforgivable to me in 1992, and it’s unforgivable now.  

So screw any image of Al Gore as a saint.  The guy got screwed by
the press about a lot of little crap over the years.  But still.  East
Liverpool alone.  School kids, Al.  School kids.

But that does not make the underlying scientific consensus
about global warming and its causes untrue.  New info comes in every
damn day now — every single goddam day — about how badly we are
screwing our own future.  The BBC
just reported that new studies show that rising temperatures will also
accelerate the release of additional CO2 from the world’s ecosystems,
snowballing the problem worse than had been previously expected. 

So
when Al Gore — yes, often-self-serving frequent-hypocrite Al Gore —
compares the denial-for-profit of fossil fuels’ impact on the
environment to the decades of denial-for-profit of tobacco’s impact on
human health, he’s correct.   When Al Gore — seen throughout the movie
zipping around the globe on jet airplanes, which produce enormous
emissions — urges that we should urgently start cutting our emissions,
he’s right, despite the inability to find a convenient mirror to look
into.  And when Al Gore — yes, still a politician, one who
refuses to deny his possible candidacy in 2008 — tells you that the
potential melting of Greenland and Antarctica would be exceedingly
dangerous to human civilization, he is telling the truth.

So see the movie. 
Forget who’s doing the talking, think critically, and realize that he’s
mixing indisputable facts with a few minor glosses over what seem to be
open points, all while mixing in some worst-case scenarios.

But consider how nice it would have been had worst-case scenarios been taken seriously prior to Katrina.

Go see the movie.

Then go back again, and drag along your friends, your family, and people you can’t even stand, and make them watch, too.

Afterwards, go home, talk about it, do your own research and
thinking, and come to your own conclusions.  When you’re done, you may
want to tap Gore lightly in the head with a piece of zinc, or a bit of
toxic waste from Ohio, just as I do. 

But you’ll probably also feel an urgency to become more environmentally involved.  You’ll want to know more.  You may be a little less freaked out than you were on leaving the theater, but a little more than you are now. 

That will be a good thing. 

Go see the movie.

That is all. 

Sing along with Kim Jong Il! [link dead, see below]

(Seriously.)

The North Korean song of National Defense given the Mitch Miller treatment.  Truly odd. 

Makes me worry about them both more and less, simultaneously.

First noticed via Boing Boing, which is truly wonderful every day.

UPDATE: The North Koreans seem to be blocking access to the site now, but you can still get there by visiting http://www.korea-dpr.com/ — be sure to be terribly impressed by the giant hydroelectric plant in the logo — then clicking the flag to enter, then clicking on “Friendship,” and then clicking on the KFA Star.

I do not, however, recommend actually joining or supporting the KFA, unless you’re the sort of person who thinks large hydroelectric plants administered by police states really ought to be something to sing about.