I wish I could write prettier

Popular society's pretty good at picking up on tragic brilliance a bit late, and I'm not well equipped to find these people ahead of time. The only artists I can think of that I was aware of before their tragic ends are Kurt Cobain (because of my older sister) and Hunter Thompson (because of Johnny Depp, again because of my older sister) -- and they were both on a flatter part of their coolness trajectories when I latched on.

David Foster Wallace is now dead as well, and that is a shame because he wrote the one the best things I've ever read. I read it because slate told me to. Here is my favorite passage:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful:

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

I like that the "insect on a dead thing" line comes in the final line of the sixth footnote to the article. It seems to me like my favorite authors, like Thompson and Hemingway, built chapters, if not compounds in Aspen, around lines like that. I would probably have a t-shirt made explicitly quoting myself if I could muster such a classy bit of text.

Now that he's dead, reading his shorter pieces brings about the same type of enjoyment I found listening to music there would be no more of like Queen and Zeppelin... oh wait.

Sarah Palin uses many words to say few things

Sarah Palin was interviewed by Charlie Gibson, and it aired tonight:

• A nucyooler Iran is a real threat to the security of this country's people.

Supposedly many former southern politicians pronounced nuclear as nucyooler and it is included in Merriam-Webster. It is a signal though, and I'm still scared.

• You can see Russia from Alaska

You can see Bel Air from UCLA, but that hasn't made me an expert in exorbitant wealth... yet.

• McCain/Palin is for reformation of federal government
• A person with decades of Washington experience is part of the old machine

This summer I read a really cool article by Peter Atkins in this book about how time might seem to occur much faster in greater gravity, so it might be that the McCain-Palin campaign is indeed in its own spacetime. If this is the case, it could explain how such a notion differentiates McCain from Biden. It would also explain why McCain is so squat.

• She quoted Abe Lincoln's statement that war may be carrying out God's will without attribution

I see a couple problems there. First, It is a very solid and graceful thought that the defeat of slavery was a clear correction of an ungodly practice. The same argument is harder to buy about the eradication of "Islamic extremists" from Iraq when it might be that our military presence there brought more of them than there were to begin with. If the statement was specifically about Afghanistan, I'd buy it. Second, the softish interrogative technique used by Charlie Gibson only led Palin to point out that Lincoln, and she herself (maybe after thinking through her previous statement), didn't presume to know God's will (but could seemingly act based on a principled understanding of it) -- not that it isn't clear that the President of a country hosting a bunch of different definitions of God(s) can say things like that to begin with. She certainly didn't use such nuance when she said referenced the war as God's will (she also saw the Alaska pipeline as God's will). So, I presume that she believed that God's will was being carried out in Iraq -- but wasn't sure after introspection. That seems like some progress from the outgoing bullheadedness, but, generally, I hope that the leader of our country will leave the hyperbolic missions from God to people who have a clearly defined enemy.