DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So, I’ve left my band. I realized I was past due for a change of scene when I found myself enjoying playing a Creedence tune. I have nothing against dead-simple rock tunes — I just don’t want to play them. Nor hear them. Nor think about them. Nor stand in the vicinity of anyone who enjoys them. Nor admit knowledge of anyone who owns, or at any time owned any such CD. Etc. I’ll be spending what used to be rehearsal time learning music theory and composing.

June brings the return of Borrowed Time Studios… coming soon to a nursery near me.

In August or September, depending on how full my recording schedule is, I hope to put a progressive-rock band together. I doubt it would ever play out, but I wouldn’t care because I’d be playing crazy 4-limbed ostinatos in 7/8. (That, in fact, is the reason we’d probably never play out.)

Exploding Toads in a Hamburg Pond Baffle Scientists:

More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and German scientists still have no explanation for what’s causing the combustion.

This is a meme with legs. (Ahem.) See more exploding toad news. The toads have even been slashdotted.

Update: toads are exploding in Denmark, too.

Seeing this in print makes me laugh:

Update 2005-04-29, courtesy the Chicago Tribune (via Google’s Exploding Toad Alerts):

One German scientist has a theory: Hungry crows are pecking out their livers.

“Crows are clever,” said Frank Mutschmann, a Berlin veterinarian who tested specimens. “They learn quickly from watching other crows how to get the livers.”

Based on wounds, it appears that a bird pecks into the toad, and the toad puffs itself up as a natural defense mechanism, Mutschmann said.

But, because the liver is missing and there’s a hole in the toad’s body, the lungs burst, and blood vessels and organs ooze out, he said.

Spiegel.de weighs in with the same story, translated by babelfish:

If earth toads are on the Balz, they - humans not dissimilarly - come along every now and then quite blown up. Balloon equal the animals blow themselves up, in order to look quakend for partners. More than 1000 animals inflated themselves at the edge Hamburg pool, until they said good-bye bursting from this life.
…
That Hamburg Institut sent thereupon toad remainders to the citizen of Berlin veterinary surgeon Frank Mutschmann - which had promptly a plausible explanation for the large toad blow-out ready. “Crows were most likely,” said the amphibian expert… The discriminating birds toads purposefully anpicken and only their liver to feed.

Stephen Glass was a star journalist in the late 1990s, until the news broke that he’d fabricated all or part of about half his high-profile articles.

A movie about writing magazine articles would be pretty drab. Fortunately, Shattered Glass is really about the main character’s obsessive need to be accepted, praised, the center of attention. Playing the lead role, Hayden Christensen demonstrates something not at all apparent from his better-known role — namely, that he can act. His performance is a master class in manipulation.

The best part of the DVD release is the 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephen Glass, filmed about five years after his unceremonious retirement from The National Review. Glass had apparently spent a couple years in therapy, and a couple more in law school, which in some circles could be considered an appropriate punishment for, well, just about anything. Curiously, the state BAR association had held up his law license due to ethics concerns.

What was striking about the interview was how well Christensen had nailed the portrayal. While Glass spoke, expressing remorse for what he had done, I could imagine Christensen delivering the same lines, and I couldn’t help but conclude that Glass was back to his old tricks — after having watched Christensen-as-Glass deliver lie after lie with whole-body sincerity, watching the real Glass say something that is almost certainly true was entirely unbelievable.

In the same interview, an ex-coworker from TNR called Glass a “worm.” That has to hurt.

Then again, Glass reportedly got a six-figure advance for his semi-autobiographical novel about … wait for it … a magazine writer who fakes his stories. Check out the reviews; sadly for Glass’ writing career, it got universally panned at Amazon. (You’d think the one thing he could really do well is write fiction!)

But the movie, and especially Christensen, is great, and at ~$6 the DVD is a steal.

Read more about the movie at IMDB.

I haven’t seen the Enron documentary (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) yet, but I’m eagerly following the early commentary:

• Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing describes the rank-and-yank system that guaranteed that 10% of the workforce would be fired annually (in an effort to continually cull the worst performers)
• A reviewer at Amazon comments on the lessons we could learn from Enron: “Currently our president is telling us that we should gamble our future on the stock market. That’s right, take all of your social security money and give it to guys like Ken Lay.”
• David Weinberger sums it up: “We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.”

The Chron published a nice post-mortem on the electric car industry: Owners charged up over electric cars, but manufacturers have pulled the plug

The story, in brief, is that the Califoria Air Resources Board passed a law in the 1990s that required all manufacturers to produce some small percentage of zero-emissions vehicles every year. Electric was the only way to achieve true ZEV.

The automakers turned out some great solutions, like GM’s EV1 and Toyota’s RAV4 EV. But the laws changed, and one by one the big automakers pulled the plug on their electric-car programs.

GM had not sold any of its über-sexy EV1s; rather, they’d leased them. One by one, as the leases expired, GM collected the vehicles — ignoring hundreds of requests from owners who wanted to extend leases or purchase the ZEVs outright — trailered them to the desert, and crushed them.

Is that the most astoundingly evil and stupid thing you’ve read all day? It gets better. Or worse, depending on how much oil-company stock you own. Here’s the explanation for GM’s abandonment of its EV1 program, as reported by the Chronicle:

GM stopped EV1 production, spokesman Dave Barthmuss said, because “after spending over $1 billion over a four-year time frame, we were only able to lease 800 EV1s. That does not a business make. As great as the vehicle is and as much passion, enthusiasm and loyalty as there is, there simply wasn’t enough at any given time to make a viable long-term business proposition for General Motors.

“If we’re really going to make a difference in environmental auto issues, we have to be able to see vehicles in the hundreds of thousands of units, instead of hundreds,” Barthmuss said.

Asked why GM didn’t just sell the cars to the clamoring motorists, as Ford finally did with the Rangers, Barthmuss said that “parts are no longer available.” Even though buyers might waive the right to sue GM over any design or production defects, he said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

The explanation smacks of greenscamming. Let’s dissect it.

Barthmuss claims GM was only able to lease 800 EV1s. How does he explain the long waiting lists of would-be EV1 owners? GM has been under-reporting the demand for electric cars ever since they cancelled the program.

Barthmuss implies that the few ZEVs they sold were not making a great enough impact on the environment, but he doesn’t explain how selling fewer would be an improvement.

Addressing the question of why GM recalled all 800 EV1s, which were only about 2 years old at the time, and destroyed them, Barthmuss claims, “parts are no longer available.” Even if this were believable, it’s irrelevant; I’m quite sure GM’s high-powered attorneys could craft an end-of-lease transfer agreement that releases GM from the responsibility of supplying parts in the future.

For that matter, what car has ever come with a guarantee that parts will always be available?

Moreover, if GM had done a better job of putting EV1s in the driveways of the folks who were waiting in line for them, there would be enough customers to support an aftermarket parts manufacturer.

Finally, Barthmuss said something that is true — but still fails as an explanation for GM’s awesomely wasteful and short-sighted ZEV-crushing. He said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

GM sells something like 8 million vehicles every year. The 800 EV1s they managed to lease constitute about one-one-hundredth of a percent of the total. How much liability could there possibly be? Compared to the cost of cancelling leases, collecting and dismantling and crushing the EV1s, and enduring the ongoing public relations challenge of explaining the whole mess, I can’t help but think someone slipped a digit.

Maybe I’m an optimist, to think that GM could spend a billion dollars and come up with something fun and safe and eco-friendly and life-affirming, something to pay back a little of the negative karma they’ve developed by selling the hell out of those road-mashing Escalades.

At least Ford learned from GM’s mistake.