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Chick Fil-A music video...

At the gym today, while on the treadmill, I had the choice of watching a CNN report on genital mutilation of women (it's a scandal!) or FOX News. I picked FOX. First they had a fairly well-balanced panel on the job report- fair in that it had one Obama supporter versus 2 against. Then they did a Chick Fil-A story, lamenting that the mainstream media ignored the support shown. Only conservative regional media in the south reported it, they said. Then they brought on discredited former NYTimes reporter Judith Miller, without saying that she had been discredited. It was nauseating and I had to turn it off.

Now reading, in parallel: Flannery, Brad Gooch's recent biography of Flannery O'Connor, the brilliant and alarming and iconoclastic (believing Catholic, infusing her fiction with it, yet Southern) writer. Asked why Southerners wrote about the grotesque so much, she replied, "Because we're the only ones who can still recognize it." Right, MsGuy? Riveting read, if you grok her work. The Strangest Man: A Biography of Paul Dirac, by one Graham Farmelo. Life of the indeed strange, possibly autistic, physicist savant who figured out how the electron truly behaves. Or, rather, a set of impossible-to-solve equations that would, were they soluble, describe how it behaves. In reading some parts of it, I drift into the fleeting illusion that I grasp some vague notion of what quantum electrodynamics really is. Then I put down the book, go have supper, and realize I have not the least idea what I just thought I had almost understood. As I love books like that, having a high old time with this one. Johnny Von Neumann, Einstein and other acquaintances color the story too. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the magisterial biography by Martin J. Sherwood and Kai Bird of the father of the bomb. I have read and re-read it so obsessively already that I could likely give a Samuel Clemens-like recitation evening behind a public lectern without once referring to the printed text. Utterly compelling. Joins a long list of books about the science, personalities, and politics of all things nuclear that are on my shelf of essentials. Among many: Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. McGeorge Bundy's Danger and Survival: Decisions about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. General Leslie Groves's memoir Now It Can Be Told -- military director of the Manhattan Project, who selected Oppie as Scientific Director, and who single-handedly, more or less, commandeered the budget and drove through the contracting and construction that built the national atomic bomb production complex -- an enterprise on the same economic scale by the end of the war as the U.S. automotive industry at that time. You will note the wide diversity and absence of mania in my choices.