The end of the world again

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 18 November 2009 14:44

If or when the world finally ends, expect the cataclysm to arrive with a sense of déjà vu.

We have seen the ultimate catastrophe happen over and over again on the silver screen, and last weekend yet another planet-chomping film arrived in theaters, Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” to dazzle us with extravagant mayhem we never thought we’d see, or survive.

Supposedly, as New Age hucksters tell us, the ancient Mayan calendar comes to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, foretelling a worldwide catastrophe that will hit on that date. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll wish it did.

Emmerich doesn’t make much of this in his flick, however. It is mentioned in passing, but the real purpose of the film is to display computer-generated special effects, not to promote some knuckleheads’ hoary, pseudo-religious end-of-the-world nonsense.

And that is all for the best, since nobody is more embarrassed by the Mayan calendar story than the poor Maya, down in old Yucatan.

Misinformation going viral

Written by Fred Musante
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 11:23

Good news, folks. The governor’s office announced last week that the first 20,000 doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine have arrived in the state at last.

Not so fast! While the H1N1 flu (aka “swine flu,” aka “novel H1N1 influenza”, aka “that thing that’s going around”) spent the summer making people sick in the Southern hemisphere, it gave the usual fools in the United States time to decide that getting vaccinated for it is a bad idea.

Last week, a state representative told me that his oncologist told him not to get a flu shot, and he is now telling other people not to as well.

In the weatherman’s paradise

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 07 October 2009 12:53

I asked Dr. Mel how he likes the weather. “I always love the weather,” he said.

And well he should. As one of the weathermen on WTNH-TV Channel 8 in New Haven, Mel Goldstein makes his living from the weather.

It might be rain and snow to us, but it’s Mel’s bread and butter.

Last month, Wesleyan University Press published “Dr. Mel’s Connecticut Climate Book,” his guide to the climate in Connecticut. Climate is more than just the weather. It’s weather averages and extremes and everything in between.

Itching to fight for healthcare reform

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 11:37

U.S. Rep. Jim Himes held three town hall-style meetings on health care reform. I went to the one on Sept. 3 at the Klein Auditorium, itching for a fight.

When Himes and other Democrats have held these open forums, lots of right-wingers have shown up to disrupt the event and generally act like kooks and louts. Lately, liberals have begun showing up, too, resulting in shouting matches.

The night before, Himes held one at Norwalk High School that turned “raucous,” as press reports described it, when the righties and lefties yelled and screamed at each other.

Defining extremist deviancy down

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 12:55

I recently bought a new pair of glasses with progressive bifocal lenses. When I first put them on, the unfamiliar visual distortion was so disorienting it made me dizzy and even a little queasy.

Reflecting on that, I thought maybe that’s what is wrong with conservative Republicans and other kinds of right-wingers in America today. They see the Democrats control Congress, and the president is not only a Democrat but an African-American, with an African part that is really, recently African, and they think there’s something wrong with their glasses.

America’s Woodstock moment

Written by Fred Musante
Thursday, 13 August 2009 09:05

When I picked up my friend Mike in Huntington and we headed for Woodstock in my Volkswagen Beetle on Saturday morning, Aug. 16, 1969, we still didn’t know what had happened. We only knew that all of our friends, everybody our age, had gone there, and we figured we might as well go, too.

But as we crossed the Hudson River and turned northwest, the news on the radio told us that Woodstock had turned from a three-day rock music festival into the signature cultural event of a generation of Americans.

One giant leap into the future

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 14:52

Where were you when man first walked on the moon?

You weren't anywhere if you are younger than 40, because you weren't born yet. But those of us of a certain age remember it well.

But younger or older, if you're optimistic about the future of humanity, the flight of Apollo 11 is a defining moment of history — when human beings reached beyond the restraints of gravity and left footprints on another world.

The skinny on Rell’s ‘menu bill’ veto

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 13:14

Would you like to know how many calories the meals on the menu have when you eat at a chain restaurant, such as McDonald’s and Chili’s and the Olive Garden?

A law passed in June by the state Legislature would have required chain restaurants to do just that on printed menus and menu boards — Senate Bill 1080, An Act Concerning Access to Health and Nutritional Information in Restaurants, also known as the “menu bill.”

We’re speaking about it in the past conditional tense (“would have required”) because Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed it on July 2.

Comparing health reform now and then

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 13:26

National health insurance reform is back in the news, as it was in 1993 and 1994 when President Bill Clinton made it a priority. Let’s compare then and now.

Back then, opponents of health care reform said, “If you like the post office, you’ll love national health care.”

Much ado on TV about nothing

Written by Fred Musante
Wednesday, 22 April 2009 11:31

I celebrated tax day, April 15, by taking out my aging copy of Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book “The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream,” in which Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event.”

My paperback copy of the book was a 10th anniversary edition that was renamed “The Image, A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” I read it when I was first starting out as a reporter.

The people most responsible for our present economic difficulties held a daylong pseudo-event on April 15. Boorstin, who died in 2004, was an historian, lawyer, professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and, from 1975 to 1987, the librarian of Congress. He would have laughed until he cried at the shenanigans last Wednesday.