Camille’s adventures down the Music Hole

Here’s something you don’t come across every day:

What is a singer? It is someone who sings in the shower every morning like everyone … But, then you go to a recording studio and record the same song you made up in the shower. Except you’ve found crazy enough people to invest on the shower so the shower becomes a hit.

There are plenty of things about French vocalist Camille that might make someone roll their eyes. Body percussion has something of a dubious reputation in my circles; few dispute the talent required, but most tend to remember the likes of Bobby McFerrin with an unfortunate cringe. While one-hit wonders come and go, perhaps even worse a fate is to be forever branded with such an object of derision as “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.

This does not seem to present much of a problem for Camille. With songs like “Cats and Dogs”, or “Gospel with No Lord”—the first single off her new album, Music Hole—her irreverence is considerably more subtle than we might recall of McFerrin’s lucrative but denigrated legacy.

At least, it seems that way now. It feels strange, indeed, to find myself so taken with a sound at first exposure. The history of such briefly-acquainted infatuations is fraught with disaster. How many cassettes and compact discs lay forgotten in boxes tucked away in garages or storage units, ne’er discarded entirely for some bizarre sentiment despite the fact that they will probably not be heard on our own sound systems ever again?

Nonetheless, Camille has my attention. And while she isn’t touring stateside until at least after the new year, I don’t expect her star to pass like another tumultuous fad. There is more here than a couple of pleasing intervals laid atop an overwrought chord progression and a familiar gleam of polymerized, synthetic emotion. Rather, there is music, real and inspired.

(A tip of the hat to Public Radio International’s The World, just one of many reasons listener-powered radio deserves as much support as we can give it.)

Empowering the monkey-man

We know that the American political arena is a difficult one. And while shutting off microphones in an attempt to silence opposition is not a tactic confined merely to the FOX News crowd, what is the Beltway equivalent of covering one’s ears, shutting the eyes tightly, and singing “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la Mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb!”

Welcome to the Bush White House. (What? Like you didn’t see that one coming?)

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Breasts to the rescue?

Because we all know that the only excuse men need to think about women’s breasts is any excuse:

The idea of an energy-generating bra isn’t as crazy as it might sound. A company called Triumph International Japan recently unveiled a solar-powered bra that supposedly will generate enough energy to power an iPod. But I live in foggy San Francisco and prefer not to walk around in my underwear in public. Could someone design an iPod-powering bra for me?

I decided to run the question past some scientists. It turns out that the physics of breast motion have been studied closely for the last two decades by a gamut of researchers, most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has studied breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies like Nike to develop better sports bra designs. Lawson was enthusiastic about my idea but warned it would be tricky to pull off. You would need the right breast size and the right material, she explained, and the bra itself would have to be cleverly designed. “It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot, between reducing motion to the point where it’s comfortable but still allowing enough motion to power your iPod,” she said.

Lawson explained that breasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. “Let’s face it—if you’re a double-A marathoner, you’re probably not going to get that iPod up and running,” Lawson said. Measurements compiled by Lawson and her colleagues show that a D-cup in a low-support bra can travel as much as 35 inches up and down (35 inches!) during exercise, while a B-cup in a high-support bra barely moves an inch.

Wow, now you can save the Earth and think about tits? Make sure you thank Slate‘s Adrienne So for that one.

Oh, and get to work, all you horndog geniuses.

Good faith, and what the hell is going on here?

While some of our politically conservative neighbors in these United States might be mourning what they perceive as the death of marriage—a lament we should expect to hear many times in the future, wondering just how many times an idea can die—it seems almost ironic that we cannot say the same of the concept of good faith, largely because the patient’s condition is classified.

Michael Abramowitz last weekend brought us the front-page story of how the White House ignored legal advice that its detention policy for terror suspects was untenable. We should not be surprised that at least one lawyer would be willing to state the point clearly: “I can virtually guarantee you,” wrote John B. Bellinger III, in August, 2006, “without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants”.

Just skip this one

File under “Duh“.

Jeremy Caplan reports for Time:

Apple may be golden because of the iPhone, but the soon-to-be-updated device is also increasingly the source of forbidden fruit. Steve Jobs’ company is keeping a civil, if embarrassed, silence on one of the potentially most lucrative and controversial uses of its handheld jewel: porn.

The technological feats of the 3G iPhone are key to the coming pornucopia. To date, mobile porn has consisted largely of still images, racy text services and “moan tones,” which are sultry-sounding ringtones. In Europe there is an active market for video chatting; customers pay on average $50 a month to exchange dirty messages with actresses. But now, thanks in large part to the iPhone’s video dexterity, short clips are becoming a staple of the mobile porn business ….

…. Leading porn purveyors see the iPhone as a dream come true. Its relatively ample screen size, speedy Web access and ease of use are just part of it. The device’s miniaturized version of Apple’s Safari software simplifies mobile access and streamlines the process of tailoring dirty sites for optimal viewing on the go. “It’s by far the porn-friendliest phone,” says Devan Cypher, representative for San Francisco–based Sin City Entertainment. As evidence of the gadget’s rocketing popularity in California’s porn capital, the San Fernando Valley, numerous iPhone-specific porn sites have been launched in recent months. “There are a few hundred iPhone porn sites now in use,” says Farley Cahen, vice president of business development for AVN Media Network, the adult industry’s trade body ….

Add to that the usual trappings for a story like this. Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock (seriously) says of course the company doesn’t condone porn distribution, and will take measures to restrict adult content. The development community does nonetheless have certain potential. The porn industry sees a huge new market. And, of course, the children: won’t somebody please think about the children?

This town needs an enema!

Well, what headline would you write?

Eduard Korniyenko reports for Reuters:

A health spa in Russia has unveiled a bronze monument of three cherubs carrying an enema, a design inspired by the 15th century Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

Around 100 hospital staff and patients at the spa in south Russian cheered when balloons lifted a red drape into the sky unveiling the oversized version of the pear-shaped medical instrument.

“We administer enemas nearly every day,” said Alexander Kharchenko, the head of the sanatorium which specializes in treating illnesses of the digestion tract.

“So, I thought, why not use our sense of humor and give it a monument,” he said of the bronze statue that stands about 1.5 meters high.

The monument, designed by Svetlana Avakova, cost around $42,000; the artist says she looked to Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” for inspiration:

“The irony is that the little infants steal the weapons of Mars. They joke with him, with the god of war, and war is a tragedy.”

“Likewise, an enema is an unpleasant procedure as many of us may know. But when cherubs do it, it’s all right.“

Further irony is that, in the fifteenth-century masterpiece, Mars is actually asleep; the cherubs are joking with or talking to Venus. But, hey, the end result is a line for the ages.

When cherubs do it, indeed. Strange as the work may seem, I admit I like it.

Seeking solidarity: The pregnancy pact

What? The latest trend, maybe?

When I was in college, my girlfriend told me about how parents in her high school had worried that Basic Instinct might make their daughters turn lesbian. And, of course, in a small town with nothing for the kids to do, apparently it seemed like a good idea. And the boyfriends, she said, didn’t seem to mind. They were hoping to get some extra action.

Ah, such halcyon days, when girls sharing orgasms was something for parents to worry about. We might wonder if parents in Gloucester, Massachusetts are wishing that was their concern.

Right. Kathleen Kingsbury broke the story for Time:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.

Okay. Right. Did you catch that?

An open letter to Mr. Tim Rutten

Mr. Rutten:

Your June 18, 2008 opinion column, published by the Los Angeles Times, is untenable. Your attempt to reduce Bush administration collusion to license the torture of terrorism suspects to mere politics is a disservice to the people of the United States of America, and an insult to our neighbors around the world.

While indeed these are difficult times marked by sharp political disagreements, the pretense that bad-faith legal advice customized to warrant blatant disregard for the law, the United States Constitution, and the international agreements to which our nation has signed its commitment and prestige is mere political maneuvering does not simply verge on the outrageous, but rather punches through that border and demands a wholesale transcension of the very concept of rule of law.

A Canadian judge says what?

Um … okay.

Yeah.

Just work with me here for a moment, okay?

If … if, if, if …. If things ever managed to get so bad in the United States that there was no sensible recourse but to flee, Canada just got scratched from the list. Okay, I don’t speak French, so Quebec wasn’t high on the list to begin with, but try to wrap your head around Jenny Wagler’s report for the National Post:

A 12-year-old Quebec girl who felt so strongly about her end-of-year school trip that she took her father to court after he forbade her from going is at the centre of a case that challenges the authority of parental discipline.

The extreme measure of taking the case to court, which the girl’s lawyer defended as a necessary move to ensure the child was not denied a significant rite of passage, was upheld by the judge in a surprise ruling last week.

Guns or butter? (A slippery question)

There is a certain lesson that echoes from childhood about priorities. I shan’t trouble you with a sketchy recollection from the dusty book of Things My Father Said; you might start to think I have a complex about him.

I probably do.

Er … anyway, moving right along, a question of priorities. British commentator Mark Steel, writing for The Independent, notes,

It’s so difficult, apparently, to work out how to solve the food shortages in Africa. Because the price of food has just gone up, the way prices do sometimes, caught by a freak gust of wind or flare from the sun or something and whoosh, up they go, whether it’s oil or an Olympic Games or rice and it’s just bad luck.

Combined with the growing population, it means there’s no simple way of stopping millions of people starving. But fortunately the same laws don’t apply to other essential items, such as arms. That’s why you never get reports saying: “What with the booming population and rising prices, there just aren’t enough weapons to go round.

“The crisis is so deep there are now allies of America without access to a single cluster bomb, and in one region of the Congo warlords have to share one flamethrower between two. Charities have sent out truckloads of Tomahawk missiles to Uzbekistan but the queues of government officials go back across the hills, and the fear is that for some this shipment may have come too late.”

And aid programmes require summits lasting several days, followed by statements about tying aid to trade deals, that begin: “You don’t solve the problem of hunger simply by giving people food.”

So while getting food to the hungry seems impossible, there has been a 37 per cent increase in global arms spending in the past 10 years, which raised last year’s tally to $1,204bn. Those of you who don’t understand economics might wonder why there can’t be an agreement to only spend $1,203bn instead, then wander round Sainsbury’s buying a billion dollars’ worth of food and take it to people who are starving, especially as Sainsbury’s currently have a special offer of a free box of Shredded Wheat if you spend a billion dollars or more.