[BRIEF NOTE] The Comparative Breakdown of Federalisms

Ikram Saeed notes that the Ibarrexte Plan proposed by the government of the Spanish Basque Country, which would make the Basque Country a semi-sovereign entity in its own right, and that there is consequently a significant constitutional crisis in the making. Myself, I'm curious as to whether the Spanish courts will refer to the Canadian experience.

[META] Blogroll Update

I've added the livejournals of SHWIers Arthur Chenin, Dan Goodman, and James Nicoll to the list of SHWI bloggers, and Jinderella's blog Hot Needle of Inquiry to the list of non-SHWI bloggers.

[BRIEF NOTE] Scientology Wants to Make You Happy (And How)!

Last night, I went for another reading at the Church of Scientology's Yonge Street headquarters, the first since my visit of the 8th of September. (It was warm inside, the greeter at the door had followed me for a couple of metres, and I thought what the hell.)

Inside, the same guy who read me in September read me again. My hands were fairly dry from the cold, explaining why he found it difficult to pick up my stress levels. He tried to sell me a copy of Dianetics for $C10.95, quoting the precise price after taxes, and I begged him off by pleading that I wouldn't get my paycheck for another week or two. We agreed that focus is something lacking in our lives, granted; his citations of Tom Cruise and John Travolta as focused Scientologists, though, weren't nearly enough to push me over.

We talked briefly about the most fatuous brand of self-help books, the ones which preach self-acceptable before (or even instead) of any actual changes. I raised the 1988 hit "Don't Worry Be Happy" as an example of this philosophy. Grim-faced, he told me that Bobby McFerrin had killed himself just nine weeks ago.

Naturally, when I got to the Grey Region I checked news.google.ca. And guess what? He's still alive. Now, the man wasn't necessarily lying, since Snopes documents an urban myth of long standing of to his suicide:

The 1988 feel-good anthem "Don't Worry, Be Happy" transformed a talented artist into a household name, garnering Grammy honors as song of the year and record of the year, and winning the "best pop vocal, male" award for Bobby McFerrin. It also served to spawn a long-lived rumor: As early as 1992, whispers were afoot that the man who had composed and sung this bouncy little ditty had failed to heed his own advice and had killed himself instead.

Usually those rumors were non-specific, baldly imparted as "He committed suicide," but sometimes the additional detail that he'd shot himself would be provided. The tale was justly ironic and thus much beloved: the man who'd crooned "In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double" ultimately couldn't stomach what he'd been spooning out to others.

Even so. One would think that a major, or at least a notable, element of one's outreach routine would have been more adequately researched than this.

[REVIEW] Simon Winchester's Krakatoa

I first encountered the author Simon Winchester in my early teens when I found his Korea, a journey on foot across the breadth of South Korea north to the DMZ, on the shelves at the Confederation Centre Public Library. It's a very good book, well-sourced and well-written and personalized, perhaps even be a sterling example of creative non-fiction.

One of his more recent books--Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded August 27 1883--has taken on a sadly unexpected importance for us 21st century folk, given the recent from the latest geological catastrophe centered in the Indonesian archipelago. I wasn't thinking of the Indian Ocean tsunami when I took Krakatoa out from the Yorkville library yesterday; the connections only came to me last night. This famous eruption deserves a good book to introduce it to the relatively uninformed reader.

Fortunately, Krakatoa does just this. Winchester is a good stylist, and an excellent researcher, bringing together all manner of contemporary and current anecdotes--his discovery of a Dutch engraving purporting to depict Krakatoa's 1680 eruption, the upset shown by a dwarf elephant attached to a travelling circus in then-Batavia just before the eruption, the death in Arctic exploration of Alfred Russell Wegener--to form a coherent whole. Winchester places the eruption in its various contexts: the geological (the Indonesian archipelago's tectonic instabilities, the development of plate tectonics theory in the 1960s); the human (the lives and communities destroyed by the volcanic explosion); the historical (the eruption's impact on emerging incoherent Indonesian anticolonial attitudes, its illumination of a world only recently united by instantaneous telegraphic communication). By Krakatoa's end, the reader has been superbly introduced to the devastating volcanic eruption in the Sunda Straits one pleasant summer day in the 1880s, and to its general ramifications.

(It's worth noting, after Winchester, that tectonic activities are needed in order for Earth to be a lifebearing world. Plate tectonics--manifested most obviously to humans by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions--recycle the Earth's crust, allowing the Earth's surface to constantly regenerate itself (as Neil Hoffman notes), releasing internal heat and recycling crustal materials. Without plate tectonics, Earth might well be as lifeless as Venus or Mars.)