Been away from this site for some time now…
Look for a fresh post next week!
Heading Into the Political Stretch
Since we are weeks away from summer’s official arrival, 2010 marks a unique period in Tennessee politics. Elections take place in August and November, and those August races are being watched by eyes all over America.
The race to replace John Tanner, who has served the 8th Congressional District for 20 years could be one for the ages… A number of candidates are running in the GOP primary, including Stephen Fincer, Dr. Ron Kirkland, and Dr. George Flinn.
On the Democratic side, Tennessee State Senator Roy Herron is running unopposed.
The geographical territory included in the 8th district is interesting…Jackson, Clarksville and Union City are all included along with Millington, which sits on the outskirts of Memphis. Come August 5th, 2010, we’ll see who wins the primary race in the GOP where Fincher and Kirkland are clearly the front runners…
Stay tuned…
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Lost: How It All Began…Sort Of
Whoaa…
Just when you thought you might have it figured out—along comes MIB Begins…
Tuesday’s episode of Lost surely caused furniture to be tossed about as watchers picked themselves off the floor following the jaw-dropping episode…
Here’s an excellent assessment from the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan…
For six seasons of “Lost,” Mr. Watcher has sat next to me on the couch, and his views and opinions on the show always inform what I write and what I think. Sometimes we disagree (he was a lot more cool with time travel than I was, and we had many discussions in which I might as well have been Hurley and he was a very patient Faraday).
Tonight, I thought I’d let him share a couple of thoughts on the episode, which I predict could well be the most polarizing one of the seasons.
Maybe others were on board with the Ye Olde Island Times episode. Those of us in Casa Watcher were both very disappointed by “Across the Sea,” and we agreed about some of the weaknesses of the episode, though there were some things that bothered me that didn’t faze him much (I’ll get to those later).
But here’s his take on the episode:
“I want to say goodbye to the characters. I could care less where the Man in Black/Smokey came from. They could have cut this down and interspersed it with scenes of the characters we’ve been following for all these seasons. There just wasn’t any substance to the episode. They wasted a really precious hour.”
Ouch. But I have to agree. For a lot of reasons, this was not an episode that goes in the Win column. It was actually seriously disappointing, if not disheartening.
lost abc One of the biggest problems with “Across the Sea” is that it brought up many, many questions that it failed to answer in satisfying and/or compelling ways. There were elements of the mythology that were fleshed out (well, in the case of the Adam and Eve skeletons, it was the opposite). And it filled in the gaps in the history of Jacob and MIB (that’s what I prefer to call the character when Titus Welliver plays him). We got partial answers to some of the questions the episode brought up.
But we also got the weirdness that was the MGC (the Magical Glowy Cave). And when it came to the biggest, most crucial questions, “Across the Sea” fumbled, and thus the hour was very unsatisfying, because those questions inform the very building blocks of the show.
We met the “mother” of MIB and Jacob, and we learned that she hated and feared the outside world. Why? Because people are bad. Why does she think people are bad? We don’t really know, except that she fears that people might try to harness or interfere with the Source of the island’s mysterious powers. Why does she fear that? Why would that be a bad thing?
We don’t know.
We don’t know what the exact powers of the Source are, where they came from, and we don’t know exactly what they can do.
Hence (and this is a very important hence), we don’t know whether her motivations and fears are justified or merely an expression of unfounded paranoia (and boy, the island seems to attract more than its share of freaky, fearful, misanthropic mothers, doesn’t it? Sigh.)
Yes, people came along and tried to harness or use the island after her time. Way after her time. What made her think that people trying to do that in her era would be bad?
We don’t know.
Is the island’s energy bad? We simply don’t know. And I’m not saying it has to be a black and white (ha!) issue. But the fact is, the island has healed people. Why is it so terrible to study or get to know the Source? Why does the Source affect the world? We simply don’t know.
titus welliver lost This is important — the fact that we don’t know whether what she is guarding is a force for good or evil or why she has the fears she has. Hence we can’t know if she was right to kill the twins’ mother, if she was right to lie to her boys, if she was right to attack her own son, if she was right to (presumably) murder an entire village. A few hours before it ends, “Lost” introduces a character whose motivations and priorities only become more muddied over the course of the single episode in which she appears.
The fact is, we didn’t get the kind of context that would allow us to decide whether the things she did to defend the island and the Source were justifiable or not. So, weeks before the show is going to end for good, why introduce her if we aren’t really going to find out anything profound or informative about her or her history with the island and/or humanity?
“Every question I answer will lead to another question,” she told the unfortunate Claudia. Well, yes. One of the most frustrating things about “Across the Sea” is that it brought up many foundational questions about the boys’ mother and just left them hanging. There were hints and allusions, but, in many cases, a lack of real answers. As usual, direct questions got evasive answers.
A lot of what she said was basically the island version of, “Because I said so.”
Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that centuries of island conflict stem, in a fairly reductive and predictable way, from mommy issues. Well, that’s just great. We’ve had so many characters wrestle with daddy issues over the years, but the Big Kahuna? The big problem at the root of the whole cycle of violence and pain? “Mom liked you better!”
Just kill me now.
In all seriousness, here are just a few of the questions I have about dear old island mom and the Source, which presumably will never be answered more robustly than they were here:
Where did she come from? How does she know the people who landed on the island are bad? Why is she so convinced that people in general are bad? Was she a smoke monster herself? Why lie and say only the island exists? Why did she want to die? Had she gone into the Source’s light and felt the pain that was “worse than death? How was Jacob “like [her]” once he drank the wine? What’s the Source? Why can’t it ever be used or harvested?
lost across the sea And last but not least, how did she feed two newborn infants? And how did she keep them from noticing the village on the island for 13 years? Oy. It’s really not a good sign when basic issues of logic are simply ignored.
What we do know is that she passed down — or tried to pass down — her misanthropic beliefs to her sons. MIB, despite rebelling and mixing with the settlers for years, shared her negative view of humanity. Yet Jacob, who loyally stuck by her, wanted to believe people were capable of better, perhaps having grown tired of mom’s narrow worldview.
Whoever she was, whatever she became after she arrived on the island, she planted the seeds of the conflict that sucked in the Lostaways so many years later. The conflict certainly didn’t lack for Biblical elements. Jacob was the Chosen One, while MIB (who still remains nameless, which is pretty frustrating at this point) was the rebellious prodigal son, determined to prove his parent wrong yet turning out much more like that parent than he ever thought he would be.
Resentment is what drives these two men, along with jealousy, frustration and sibling rivalry, and despite the passage of centuries, their conflicts are still going strong. At some point, I just wanted to tell Jacob and MIB to get over themselves. Perhaps the island conflict will be settled when they can finally work through all their issues.
But at this point, not even a round-the-clock team of ace shrinks could repair this relationship, it would seem. Mom’s guilt trips, lies and paranoia did a number on both boys and the choices they made as a result were catastrophic.
Not exactly something to celebrate with mom over a glass of uncorked wine.
Now, on to the things that bothered me more than Mr. Watcher.
Every week I look at Metacritic’s roundup of “Lost” reviews from a variety of critics and bloggers, and every week, I notice that I’m usually one of perhaps two female writers in that roundup. There are a lot of other smart women writing about “Lost” who aren’t on Metacritic’s list, but it strikes me that, as a TV critic, I’m bringing something different and somewhat unusual to the table — I’m a lady (I’ll say it for you — that’s no lady, that’s Mo Ryan!).
So, what follows might be an issue for you, or it might not. If it doesn’t ring true for you, whether you’re male or female, I get it. But I have to be clear about just why this episode was such a profound letdown for me.
abc lost I know, I know, I’ve complained all season about the fact that the women’s storylines have been consistently weak and relatively unimportant, especially contrasted with the epic, important and even cataclysmic journeys of the male characters. But this episode just made things worse.
“Lost” started out in Season 1 as an ethnically diverse show with a lot of potentially intriguing male and female characters. Now it is, to a large degree, a story about the epic, heroic or anti-heroic journeys of a bunch of white men. Non-white or female characters — with a few exceptions — just aren’t in the foreground of the main narrative most of the time. Given that, when the show began, I thought that “Lost” was going to be different in that regard, it’s disappointing.
This season has had some strengths, but the stories for women aren’t among them. And we finally got a female character who was tied into an epic, mythologically important story line — and it’s all about how her bitterness, misanthropy and evasions launched centuries of bloodshed. Fabulous.
After watching “Across the Sea” twice, it sure seemed to me that if it hadn’t been for “Eve’s” mistakes, perhaps the garden of Eden and the Source wouldn’t have been ruined or endangered, and perhaps her sons wouldn’t have gone to war. She tempted them with the knowledge of the Cave of Mystical Glowy Secrets, and an endless battle for supremacy began.
As I said, we don’t even know if she was well-intentioned or not, though it’s clear that she didn’t want her sons to suffer. But the fact is, a woman is at the heart of what first went wrong on the island. After years of putting up with lame Kate episodes, loony or smothering mothers and the killing off of great female characters like Juliet, the reward we get for our patience is … this? To say it was demoralizing is putting it mildly.
At least now we know for sure that “Lost” isn’t just the Island of Bad Dads — in fact, maybe the series of terrible fathers are looking better in contrast to the twins’ Mom.
I guess this is how “Lost” celebrates Mother’s Day. Maybe candy would be better next time.
At least there is something amusing about “Lost’s” female trouble (and let me be clear, not every lady-related thing on “Lost” has been a disappointment. I just had higher hopes for the show, hopes that Season 6 is most certainly not fulfilling in this regard).
But I must note the one thing I consistently find amusing about “Lost” — the number of caves, tunnels, wells, towers and mystical crevices we’ve seen over the years. So the mother guards the Mystical Glowy Cave, which is full of secrets and pleasures and pains that the boys should not touch. Paging Dr. Freud!
But we should spend a second on the Mystical Glowy Cave (MGC). The appearance of that was… well, very weird. On a scale of one to 10, it was about a 20 on the “What the heck?” scale, if you ask me. I think the show took one of the hardest right turns it’s ever taken toward the mystical and fantastical with depiction of that cave, which, honestly, looked like something out of a movie you’d catch on Syfy.
As executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said many times, providing answers can be inherently less interesting than exploring questions. And this was one of those times the answer was just … odd. The MGC not only looked odd, it didn’t really tell us much that we didn’t already know. We knew the island had a massive source of energy and tapping into it could be dangerous. So we finally got to see the Source of all that energy or mystical hoo-hah, and all I kept thinking was that Aslan or Gandalf was going to turn up any minute.
And when Jacob hit MIB in the head with a rock and sent him into the Mystical Cave that Boys Are Not Supposed to Explore, all I kept thinking was, “This is the worst flume ride ever!”
To conclude, I’ll just concede that it’s hard to draw the line with a show like “Lost” — Cuse and Lindelof have said that they certainly don’t want to emulate the “Star Wars” prequels and answer so many questions that the central mysteries of the story are de-mystified in a demoralizing way. But fans want answers, and some want more than others. It’s a hard line to walk, and people will always disagree about whether they explained too much or too little.
But “Across the Sea” brought up some questions I didn’t have before and it failed to answer them in a way that made up for the fact that it was depriving me of more Desmond, more Penny, more Sawyer, more Locke, more of the characters the show has made me love over the course of the past six years. There’s a fair amount that I learned that I didn’t really need to know, there were a few answers I wasn’t all that curious to get and now I have more questions about certain things than I did before. It just didn’t work for me (and I recommend you read this post by James Poniewozik, who writes really well about why he didn’t find this episode particularly necessary or dramatically interesting).
OK, I should probably stop writing before I turn off the two remaining readers with all my bellyaching. So my short Hail of Bullets will include a few more questions — maybe you figured all this stuff out, because I sure didn’t:
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Every Picture Tells A Story
Jackson. Millington. Murfreesboro. Nashville. The tales are told by families. Policemen. Undertakers. Children.
These images put together by Boston.com are sobering but real…
Last weekend, powerful thunderstorms drenched Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, dumping over 13 inches of rain on the region in two days. Creeks, lakes and rivers swelled with the rainwater, overflowing their banks, washing away roads, and causing the deaths of at least 24 people so far. The Cumberland River, which winds through downtown Nashville, Tennessee, crested Monday at 51.9 feet, 12 feet above flood stage, spilling into the city and surrounding neighborhoods. As the waters are now receding, cleanup and recovery begins, as municipal workers begin to repair power supplies and water treatment plants, and residents return to their homes to recover what they can. (38 photos total)
The Cumberland River floods outside of its banks Tuesday on May 4, 2010 in Nashville, Tennessee. More than 13 inches of rain fell over two days, more than doubling the previous record of 6.68 inches and leaving as many as 18 dead in Tennessee, including nine in Nashville. (Jeff Gentner/Getty Images)
Metro Fire Department Special Operation rescues a Belle Meade police officer off Harding Road in Belle Meade, Tennessee on Sunday May 2, 2010. Police officer Norm Shelton was clinging to a tree for an hour before being rescued. The location of his patrol car is unknown. (AP Photo/The Tennessean, Shelley Mays) #
A vehicle rests upside down in a sink hole which opened on West Forest Avenue during heavy storms just west of Madison County General Hospital on Saturday, May 1, 2010 in Jackson, Tennessee. The vehicle’s driver was rescued and taken to the hospital. (AP Photo/The Jackson Sun, Morris Abernathy) #
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The Disaster That America Forgot
May 2010 ushered in weather not seen in Tennessee for a number of years. Flooding here in west Tennessee was bad enough, but the effect of the heavy rains in Nashville was nothing less than historic…
So why didn’t the disaster get the coverage it deserved? Here’s perhaps the best explanation from Newsweek…
Thursday, May 06, 2010 12:33 PM
Why the Media Ignored the Nashville Flood
Andrew Romano
As you may have heard, torrential downpours in the southeast flooded the Tennessee capital of Nashville over the weekend, lifting the Cumberland River 13 feet above flood stage, causing an estimated $1 billion in damage, and killing more than 30 people. It could wind up being one of the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history.
Or, on second thought, maybe you didn’t hear. With two other “disasters” dominating the headlines—the Times Square bombing attempt and the Gulf oil spill—the national media seems to largely to have ignored the plight of Music City since the flood waters began inundating its streets on Sunday. A cursory Google News search shows 8,390 hits for “Times Square bomb” and 13,800 for “BP oil spill.” “Nashville flood,” on the other hand, returns only 2,430 results—many of them local. As Betsy Phillips of the Nashville Scene writes, “it was mind-boggling to flip by CNN, MSNBC, and FOX on Sunday afternoon and see not one station even occasionally bringing their viewers footage of the flood, news of our people dying.”
So why the cold shoulder? I see two main reasons. First, the modern media may be more multifarious than ever, but they’re also remarkably monomaniacal. In a climate where chatter is constant and ubiquitous, newsworthiness now seems to be determined less by what’s most important than by what all those other media outlets are talking about the most. Sheer volume of coverage has become its own qualification for continued coverage. (Witness the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James saga.) In that sense, it’s easy to see why the press can’t seem to focus on more than one or two disasters at the same time. Everyone is talking about BP and Faisal Shahzad 24/7, the “thinking” goes. So there must not be anything else that’s as important to talk about. It’s a horrible feedback loop.
Of course, the media is also notorious for its ADD; no story goes on forever. Which brings us to the second reason the Nashville floods never gained much of a foothold in the national conversation: the “narrative” simply wasn’t as strong. Because it continually needs to fill the airwaves and the Internet with new content, 1,440 minutes a day, the media can only trade on a story’s novelty for a few hours, tops. It is new angles, new characters, and new chapters that keep a story alive for longer. The problem for Nashville was that both the gulf oil spill and the Times Square terror attempt are like the Russian novels of this 24/7 media culture, with all the plot twists and larger themes (energy, environment, terrorism, etc.) required to fuel the blogs and cable shows for weeks on end. What’s more, both stories have political hooks, which provide our increasingly politicized press (MSNBC, FOX News, blogs) with grist for the kind of arguments that further extend a story’s lifespan (Did Obama respond too slowly? Should we Mirandize terrorists?). The Nashville narrative wasn’t compelling enough to break the cycle, so the MSM just continued to blather on about BP and Shahzad.
If I sound like I’m condoning the media’s inattention here, I’m not. My explanation is meant as a criticism. Given audience demands—especially at a time when traditional media companies aren’t doing so well—it’s impossible to avoid the stories with the most buzz and the strongest narratives. Nor should we. But urgency should be at least as important. In this case, the most urgent aspects of the oil spill and the Times Square attack had already been covered to death; the culprit was already caught, the containment was already underway. And yet we still kept rehashing each of those stories—and fighting about politics—while thousands of homes and business were destroyed and dozens of people died. That matters. Media silence means public ignorance, and public ignorance means fewer charitable donations, slower aid, and less political pressure. If that’s not reason enough to cover the flood–to do our jobs–I don’t know what is.
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Saving the Children
Last month disaster on the line of a magnitude seven struck the island of Haiti. Death and destruction was everywhere. Chaos was just around the corner. Then along came the world to lend a helping hand. In the midst of the devestation, a decision was made to help those who could not help themselves; the children.
Along with that decision came the consequences, as we read in this report from the BBC...
BBC NEWS
US missionaries face Haiti judge
Haitian and US officials are discussing whether 10 Americans held in Haiti for trying to take 33 children out of the country should be prosecuted in the US.
The five men and five women from an Idaho-based Christian group are due to appear before a judge who will decide whether they will face charges.
The Haitian authorities have accused the Americans of child trafficking.
The missionaries say the children have no parents and were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
They say they did not know they had done anything wrong and believed they had been given the right paperwork to take the children out of the country.
Haitian aid workers say some of the children appear to have surviving relatives.
The country’s government says it is now trying to find the families of the 33 children involved and is reinforcing security at the country’s borders.
“Whether they will have to follow the process here in Haiti or to follow the process in the United States, it is for the judge to decide about it based on the law in Haiti,” said Culture and Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8491996.stm
Published: 2010/02/01 17:14:58 GMT
© BBC MMX
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Forget Everything You Learned in School About Chromosones
Science taught us lots of things in school…. Matter, DNA, the Solar System—well, you get it. But those of us who paid attention and stayed awake when our teachers discussed chromosones now discover—were our instructors ever wrong! Here’s the scoop from the New York Times...
January 14, 2010
Male Chromosome May Evolve Fastest
By NICHOLAS WADE
A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself. This is “a result as unexpected as it is stunning — truly amazing,” said Scott Hawley, a chromosome expert at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Mo. The Y chromosome makes its owner male because it carries the male-determining gene. Boys are born with one Y and one X chromosome in all their body’s cells, while girls have two X’s. The other 22 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged are the same in both sexes. The Y chromosome’s rapid rate of evolutionary change does not mean that men are evolving faster than women. But its furious innovation is likely to be having reverberations elsewhere in the human genome. The finding was reported online on Wednesday in the journal Nature by a team led by Jennifer Hughes and David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. In 2003, Dr. Page, working with scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine, decoded the DNA sequence of the human Y chromosome. He and the same Washington University genome team have now decoded the chimpanzee Y chromosome, providing for the first time a reference against which to assess the evolutionary history of the human Y. The chimpanzee and human lineages shared a common ancestor just six million years ago, a short slice of evolutionary time. Over all, the genomes of the two species are very similar and differ in less than 1 percent of their DNA. But the Y chromosomes differ in 30 percent of their DNA, meaning that these chromosomes are changing far faster in both species than the rest of the genome. In the case of chimps, their mating habits are probably the source of the fierce evolutionary pressure on their Y chromosome. When a female comes into heat, she mates with all the males in the group, setting up competition within her reproductive tract between the sperm of different males. Many genes that govern sperm production are situated on the Y chromosome, and any genetic variation that improves a chimp’s chances of fatherhood will be favored and quickly spread through the population. Sperm competition may have been important in the earliest humans, too, for some years after the chimp and human lineages split. Sperm competition could still play a role in human reproduction, some experts think, given the trickle of cases of heteropaternity, the birth of twins with different fathers. Another reason for the intensity of selective pressures on the Y chromosome in both chimps and humans may be that natural selection sees it as a single unit, so a change in any one of its genes affects the survival of all the rest. On the other chromosomes, selection is more focused on individual genes because chunks of DNA are swapped between the members of each pair of chromosomes before the generation of eggs and sperm. This DNA swapping process is forbidden between the X and the Y pair, keeping the male-determining gene from being transferred into the X chromosome, creating gender chaos. But this prohibition has caused most of the genes on the Y chromosome to decay for lack of fitness. In the rest of the genome, a gene damaged by a mutation can be swapped out for the good copy on the other chromosome. In the Y, which originally had the same set of genes as the X, most of the X-related genes have disappeared over the last 200 million years. Until now, many biologists have assumed either that the Y chromosome was headed for eventual extinction, or that its evolutionary downslide was largely over and it has sunk into stagnation. Dr. Page’s new finding is surprising because it shows that the Y chromosome has achieved an unexpected salvation. The hallmark of the Y chromosome now turns out to be renewal and reinvigoration, once the unnecessary burden of X-related genes has been shed. “Natural selection is shaping the Y and keeping it vital to a degree that is really at odds with the idea of the last 50 years of a rotting Y chromosome,” Dr. Page said. “It is now clear that the Y chromosome is by far the most rapidly evolving part of the human and chimp genomes.” This does not mean that men are evolving faster than women, given that the two belong to the same species, but it could be that the Y’s rate of change drives or influences the evolution of the rest of the human genome in ways that now need to be assessed. It would be “hard to imagine that these dramatic changes in the Y don’t have broader consequences,” Dr. Page said. Andrew Clark, a geneticist who works on the Y chromosome at Cornell University, said the Y’s fast turnover of DNA could effect the activity of genes throughout the genome, because just such an effect has been detected in laboratory fruit flies. The decoding of the Y chromosome’s DNA was particularly difficult because the chromosome is full of palindromes — runs of DNA that read the same backward as forward — and repetitive sequences that confuse the decoding systems. Decoding the human Y took 13 years, and the chimp Y took eight years, Dr. Page said.
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What Do They Know That We Don’t?
While we’re scrambling here in the United States to keep from getting sick by washing our hands and getting shots, the Chinese have a totally different approach to stay healthy—and it’s becoming something of a benefit to Americans… The story from Yahoo…
Garlic prices soar in China amid flu fears
Yahoo! Buzz
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
BEIJING — Wrapped up in earmuffs and a heavy jacket to fight the Beijing winter, Liu Zhan shows little sign of soaring wealth. Until he removes his gloves — and reveals a large gold ring. At the Chinese capital’s biggest vegetable wholesale market, other traders call him “Millionaire Liu.”
The pungent root of that nickname is stacked in bags on and around Liu’s haulage truck. Garlic prices have jumped so high in China that the crop has outperformed gold and stocks to be the country’s best performing asset this year.
As H1N1 swine flu continues to worry China’s leaders — who are rolling out a nationwide vaccine program — its people seek a more traditional remedy. Just as some Chinese turned to turnips to prevent the SARS virus in 2003, garlic has emerged as a swine flu fighter in 2009.
“Garlic kills bacteria, and I eat at least half a bulb each day,” says Liu, 43, whose prices have leapt from just five cents a pound in February to almost 55 cents today.
Although Chinese government experts have cautioned consumers about the lack of scientific proof for garlic’s flu-killing powers, its supporters remain adamant. “Garlic can definitely help prevent swine flu,” claims Li Jingfeng, chairman of the Jinxiang Garlic Association in eastern China’s Shandong province.
Self-promoted as China’s “hometown of garlic,” Jinxiang county grows a quarter of all garlic in China, which in turn provides more than a quarter of global output, says Wang Hao, marketing manager for the China Garlic website. Jinxiang, whose name means Gold Village, has enjoyed its best-ever sales year, says Li.
“Next year, the price will be even higher, but our American and European buyers still think it’s cheap, as garlic sells for $6.60 for a pound in their countries,” he says.
A windfall for U.S. producers
The Chinese price hike has been a boon to U.S. garlic producers, says Bill Christopher, owner of Christopher Ranch in Gilroy, Calif., the largest U.S. garlic producer.
“There’s a lot less Chinese garlic being shipped over here, and what is being shipped is being shipped at prices three times more than last year,” Christopher says. “There’s a bit of a world shortage and of course that raises the price.”
Chinese garlic usually accounts for 90% of the U.S. import market, which supplies more than half of the bulbs consumed in the nation, Christopher says. This year, the Chinese have shipped about half the usual 200 million pounds of garlic, and the price has tripled since last year, from about $8 to $24 for a 30-pound box. For U.S. producers, whose higher quality bulbs sell for $40 to $50 a box and are marketed to restaurant chefs, prices have risen 15% to 20%, he says.
The cost of U.S. garlic rises every year, in part because of ongoing water shortages in California, “but (this year) that’s more than going to be offset by increases in the sale price due to the Chinese not shipping as much garlic,” Christopher says.
H1N1 only partly explains the garlic fever, Li says. Rising prices in 2006 sparked a rush to plant garlic that created a market glut over the next two years. Falling acreage and bad weather combined to leave suppliers in the driver’s seat this year, he says.
The real winners appear to be speculators such as Shao Mingqing, a jobless 22-year-old who borrowed money to buy 100 tons of garlic in September, then made a $59,000 profit selling in October, the state-run China Daily reports. He now drives a $26,360 Toyota, it says.
The volatile nature of the garlic market is typical of a cyclical product, says Chen Shuwei, an analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultants. “There is a lot of money in China, but private businessmen don’t have many avenues for investment as state-owned companies control many large industries. But it’s easy for them to enter a sector like garlic and make some short-term profits.
“Their money may head to another product soon,” he warns.
While Beijing closely watches potential bubbles in key industries such as real estate, the pricey bulb remains a minor concern, Chen says.
“The price of garlic is rising, and Chinese people need it for their daily cooking, but the rise does not have a big impact on household consumption, and matters less than key crops like corn and wheat,” he says.
Sticker shock
The soaring costs still raise eyebrows on China’s streets. “How can it be this expensive?” asks Zhao Wenjing, a Beijing nurse buying garlic Monday. “I haven’t cooked for a long time, but I heard some doctors said it could prevent H1N1, so I came to buy some, although I don’t actually like the smell,” says Zhao, 26.
Unlike some Chinese business booms, the garlic surge might help American businesses, at least in the short term. Garlic growers in the USA have long complained about their Chinese competition.
“Chinese garlic’s major price bump is a boon for California growers looking to recoup business that has been lost to cheaper Chinese garlic,” reads a blog post on the site of a major California grower.
Contributing: Oren Dorell in McLean, Va.
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Airline Passengers Turn Into Heroes
Once again, it’s all about the heroics. The people ultimately made the difference between a plane landing safely in Detroit or an absolute terrorist disaster at Christmastime. Details from The New York Times...
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LIPTON
Published: December 26, 2009
Despite the billions spent since 2001 on intelligence and counterterrorism programs, sophisticated airport scanners and elaborate watch lists, it was something simpler that averted disaster on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit: alert and courageous passengers and crew members.
David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., was traveling with his wife, Iliana, and their son, and sat two rows behind the suspect.
David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., was traveling with his wife, Iliana, and their son, and sat two rows behind the suspect.
Richard and Dawn Griffith were aboard the Northwest flight. Mr. Griffith praised the crew as having helped prevent panic.
During 19 hours of travel, aboard two flights across three continents, law enforcement officials said, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab bided his time. Then, just as Northwest Flight 253 finally began its final approach to Detroit around noon on Friday, he tried to ignite the incendiary powder mixture he had taped to his leg, they said.
There were popping sounds, smoke and a commotion as passengers cried out in alarm and tried to see what was happening. One woman shouted, “What are you doing?” and another called out, “Fire!”
And then history repeated itself. Just as occurred before Christmas in 2001, when Richard C. Reid tried to ignite plastic explosives hidden in his shoe on a trans-Atlantic flight, fellow passengers jumped on Mr. Abdulmutallab, restraining the 23-year-old Nigerian.
Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director seated in the same row as Mr. Abdulmutallab but on the other side of the aircraft, saw what looked like an object on fire in the suspect’s lap and “freaked,” he told CNN.
“Without any hesitation, I just jumped over all the seats,” Mr. Schuringa said, in an account that other passengers confirmed.“I was thinking, Oh, he’s trying to blow up the plane. I was trying to search his body for any explosive. I took some kind of object that was already melting and smoking, and I tried to put out the fire and when I did that I was also restraining the suspect.”
Mr. Schuringa said he had burned his hands slightly as he grappled with Mr. Abdulmutallab, aided by other passengers among the 289 on board, and began to shout for water.
“But then the fire was getting worse, so I grabbed the suspect out of the seat,” Mr. Schuringa said. Flight attendants ran up with fire extinguishers, doused the flames and helped Mr. Schuringa walk Mr. Abdulmutallab to first class, where he was stripped, searched and locked in handcuffs.
“The whole plane was screaming — but the suspect, he didn’t say a word,” Mr. Schuringa said.
He shrugged off praise for his swift action, which he said was reflexive. “When you hear a pop on the plane, you’re awake, trust me,” he said. “I just jumped. I didn’t think. I went over there and tried to save the plane.”
In an affidavit filed in court, an F.B.I. agent said that Mr. Abdulmutallab stayed in the bathroom for 20 minutes before the attempt, returned to his seat, told his seatmates that his stomach was upset and covered himself with a blanket. It was then that the smoke and popping sounds began.
After he was subdued and the fire extinguished, a flight attendant asked him what had been in his pocket, and he answered, “explosive device,” the affidavit said. The powder was identified by the F.B.I. as PETN, a high explosive.
The close call was followed by several tense hours as counterterrorism officials checked on other United States-bound flights to determine whether more planes were targets, as in the thwarted 2006 plot to smuggle liquid explosives aboard multiple flights leaving from Britain.
They found no immediate signs that other flights were in danger, officials said. They tightened airport security, ordering new restrictions on carry-on luggage and passenger movement inside the cabin, but did not elevate the nation’s threat level, which has been at orange since 2006.
Dozens of investigators led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were working Saturday to understand exactly how a passenger managed to get PETN and a syringe of chemicals aboard the flight. Intelligence agencies were studying intercepted communications to see whether clues were missed and to assess whether the incident could presage more attacks.
David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., who works in the information technology department at the Ford Motor Company, was traveling home from Moscow with his wife, Iliana, and their 5-year-old son, sitting two rows behind the suspect. He said he heard a pop, and then someone asking for water and screams coming from the rows in front of him. The fire, he said, lasted for a full minute.
“The guy wasn’t fighting or doing anything,” Mr. Schilke said. “He was just sitting there in the flames. I was shocked that he would do that.” He added that he was surprised at how little panic there was. Many passengers who were farther away thought the pops were from fireworks, he said.
Richard Griffith, 41, of Pontiac, Mich., who said he had been sitting in the back of the plane during the episode, praised the crew for its professionalism in preventing panic.
Mr. Griffith said the passenger who had been sitting next to the suspect told him the suspect got up once midflight to use the bathroom and returned to the bathroom about 20 or 30 minutes before the attempt, apparently to brush his teeth. Otherwise, he said, “He just sat there; he didn’t talk to nobody.”
The episode, which riveted the attention of President Obama on vacation in Hawaii and prompted counterterrorism officials to rush back to work, capped a year in which plots of violence inside the United States have surged. The attempt appeared to underscore the continuing determination of Muslim militants to kill Americans more than eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Passengers transferring from foreign flights at the Amsterdam airport, where Mr. Abdulmutallab changed planes and boarded the flight bound for Detroit, are required to be screened by security there before taking off on another flight, an airport spokeswoman said Saturday. She could not confirm the details in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s case but said he was presumably subject to that sort of screening.
Investigators planned to interview all the passengers on the suspect’s flights and to look over any security-camera video footage of him, a law enforcement official said.
Mr. Abdulmutallab apparently left Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos aboard KLM Flight 588, a Boeing 777, at 11 on Christmas Eve and arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam a little early, at 5:37 a.m. on Christmas Day.
Three hours later, at 8:54 a.m., Northwest 253, an Airbus A330, took off for Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, with three pilots, eight flight attendants and the 278 passengers.
Amsterdam has long been an airport of concern for American aviation security officials, like other major gateways in Europe, including London, Brussels and Frankfurt, where the Transportation Security Administration sees an unusually large number of hits from people on so-called selectee or no-fly lists associated with security threats, one former senior Homeland Security official said.
In 2007, the Amsterdam airport began testing body-scanning machines that can find threats hidden under passengers’ clothing, but there are only 10 such machines out of 200 security checkpoints at the sprawling airport. In the United States, the T.S.A. has begun to substitute similar machines, called millimeter-wave technology, for walk-through metal detectors.
“Those will pick up anything underneath clothing,” said Edmund S. Hawley, who served as the agency’s administrator until January. “If he had it taped to his leg, it could have easily identified something there.”
Mr. Hawley said of Al Qaeda and like-minded militants: “They have been trying since 2001, and they are going to keep trying. You have to keep your vigilance up over the long term. That is the hard thing.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt in Washington, Sarah Lyall in London, Micheline Maynard and Nick Bunkley in Detroit, and Matthew L. Wald in Sarasota, Fla.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in US (2 of 20) » A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
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Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
Ok. Here we go…
Since Thanksgiving, we’ve engulfed ourselves in the Holiday traditions. We pull out our decorations from the past, hung year after year on the Christmas tree. Some of us use the same tree, while many of us bring freshly cut, aromatic pines and spruces home, to be adorned, watered, and ultimately enjoyed…
Nat King Cole always sounds good as he sings The Christmas Song. We listen to him, Doris Day, Robert Goulet, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others for four weeks or so, sing our Carols and Hymns, worship the birth of our Savior, and wish each other the compliments of the season…
Andy Williams was right. It is indeed the most wonderful time of the year…
Merry Christmas.
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