All things considered, the numbers are surprising to me. Then again, I’m not hip, anymore.
The top-earning tours of 2010, from Pollstar via BBC:
Bookmark Edward Ball‘s opinion piece from The New York Times.
The next five years will include an all-you-can-eat special of national remembrance. Yet even after 150 years full of grief and pride and anger, we greet the sesquicentennial wondering, why did the South secede?
I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”
I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.
But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.
It is not so much that we should leave humor to the comedians. We all make jokes. Laughter, as the trite saying goes, is the best medicine; especially if you laugh yourself into injury. Maybe you hear something on the radio and drive the car into a telephone pole while cracking up. Perhaps you catch something on television, and laugh so hard you fall off the couch and gash your forehead on the coffee table. Or maybe you read an article on the internet and double over in agonizing amusement until you pull a muscle.
Okay, so it’s not that funny, but here’s the thing: Politics in America is a nasty business, and some people resent this. Many of them, of course, are perfectly willing to support their own brand of nastiness while condemining others. Sometimes this is justified. Wit, after all, is a bit more civilized than punching someone’s teeth. And, probably, a little less unhealthy to the wit than the fist.
Still, though, while our political cycles often play out amid a cacophony of disgusted and derisive laughter, sometimes genuine humor arises. In 2010, we had Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, to say the least. Or that Nazi celebrant from the midwest. Or the DA in Colorado who had a rape accusation and a rape confession, but decided to not press charges because it was obviously a case of buyer’s remorse.
I know, I know, I’m only picking on one side of the aisle right now. Fine, to be fair, we can all chuckle at the fact that Sen. Harry Reid survived his re-election bid, but that only brings the Democratic side of the aisle back to Sharron Angle.
In 2008, it was Sarah Palin.
I even remember in 1996, when President Clinton stuck his foot in his mouth about some cheap rap song by Sistah Souljah, Republican candidate Sen. Bob Dole came to his rescue by saying if he was president, he would outlaw that kind of music. I mean, c’mon, Bob: Before we can even argue about whether you can legislate like that, tell us, just how exactly would you destroy, evade, or otherwise overcome that nasty little thorn in your side called the First Amendment?
Yet none of these people are the issue for the moment. Rather, let us turn to Michael Reagan, son of the late former president, Saint Ronald:
We are rapidly becoming a nation whose distaff leadership is allowing radical feminists to redefine the role of motherhood.
Our moms are being all but ostracized by a raging cadre of radical feminists should they dare to consider cooking for their families to be a major part of their traditional role as wives and mothers.
I’m going to have to become some sort of physicist. Damn. I hate math.
No, actually, I don’t; I’m just a pathetic mathematician. Or, more accurately, not a mathematician at all. But that’s beside the point. Except, damn. I’m going to have to become some sort of physicist.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Some of the questions my brother and I asked thirty years ago probably astounded my father the way my daughter can absolutely befuddle me. “What,” she asked, not too long ago, “is a solar sail?”
Seven, by the way. Now eight.
Of course I told her about this far-flung idea of using a laser to push a spacecraft, and how the vessel could reach speeds near light. You know, stuff from fifteen years ago.
But I had no idea.
A BBC article brings me up to speed with lightfoil, which is a cool word despite the fact that no superhero will ever use it as a name:
Just as air causes lift on the wings of an aeroplane, light can do the same trick, researchers have said.
The effect, first shown in simulations, was proven by showing it in action on tiny glass rods.
Like the aerofoil concept of wings, the approach, published in Nature Photonics, works by making use of the radiation pressure of light.
The results are of interest for steering “solar sails”, a spacecraft propulsion based on the same force.
Each photon – or packet of light – carries its own momentum, and this “lightfoil” works by gathering the momentum of light as it passes through a material.
This radiation pressure has been considered as a fuel-free source of propulsion for long-distance space missions; a “solar sail” gathering up the momentum of the Sun’s rays can get a spacecraft up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
But until now, no one thought to use the pressure in an analogue of an aerofoil, said Grover Swarzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
B.D.'s Last Refuge 