Fleet Week: Big Boats and More

Surrounded by a gaggle of sailors, I went to see The Day After Tomorrow this afternoon. It was satisfyingly catastrophic, I will have sweet sweet dreams tonight of Jake Gyllenhall fighting bloodthirsty wolves and there were lots of opportunities to giggle. I was also pleased to see that in spite of recent history, apocalyptic movies will continue to honor the filmic tradition of at least one appearance by the Cyrillic alphabet. Then I come home and open the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly only to see a small paragraph on page 50 essentially repeating Dennis Quaid's hapless whistle-blowing speech to the thinly-veiled-as-Dick-Cheney Vice President. Except that it's an actual scientific report entitled, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." I couldn't find that but I did find this. It is with great joy that I anticipate the return of our friends the Saber Tooth Tiger and The Woolly Mammoth.

On a similar theme, in this month's Harper's Patrick Graham describes sorry attempts to put down the Iraqi resistance as a situation where "the production values are incredible but the script sucks," winning the award for clever metaphor of the week. He also noted, with a prescience we might call "research," that most Iraqis found Chalabi to be a scumbag: "the most pro-American -- and arguably least popular, less even than Saddam Hussein -- of Iraqi politicians." Oops.