Davos Newbies

I’ve pinned my colors to the Obama mast and I was delighted at lunch last week to hear his staff declare that California would be the crucial context on tsunami Tuesday, February 5. New York and New Jersey, the thinking goes, will almost surely go for senator Clinton. Illinois will unquestionably plump for its own senator Obama (although Clinton is Illinois born and bred, that isn’t much of her biography these days). So California, the greatest delegate prize of all, becomes the decider.

Michael Tomasky provides an analysis in The Guardian which suggests that Clinton is going hammer and tongs for California while Obama is concentrating elsewhere. I hope this isn’t the case, since I suspect such a strategy would be as good as confirming Clinton’s nomination. The latest Field poll makes it look like it will be very tough for Obama to overhaul Clinton here, but surely he has to try.

Incidentally, I haven’t become a total Obama KAD. I think Hillary would make a good and winning candidate and probably a good president. I just believe Obama will be an even better candidate and a potentially transformative president at a time when that’s what the nation needs. As a Democrat, I’m delighted we have two wonderful candidates (who I wish would spend less time trying to cut each other off at the knees) while the Republicans have a mediocre clown show of presumptives.

Timothy Burke explains why MythBusters, which my children rightly love, is a wonderful advertisement for a liberal arts education:

If you were the president of a liberal arts college, I think you could do a lot worse than sitting down with Jamie Hyneman, paying him a consultant’s fee, and asking him, “How would you build a curriculum designed to train a MythBuster?”

My wife returned from a week-long visit to England on Saturday with one vocal lament: she misses the richer, more complex language you hear every day in England. She, of course, listens to Radio 4, reads The Guardian and watches BBC Newsnight, not Capitol Radio, The Sun and Coronation Street. But still. She quoted one woman she heard on the radio who was discussing her discovery, relatively late in life, of scuba diving. The wind “wafted” and the water was “turbid”. Two words, the supposition was, that you wouldn’t hear in ordinary discourse even in Berkeley.

Funnily enough, this morning I heard one example that thoroughly confirmed Tracey’s view, and one that demolished it.

Listening to KDFC, the San Francisco classical music station, this morning, I heard the following intro, which must rank as the most dumbed-down ever voiced on a classical station: “He wrote it in 1787 and no one knows why. But we’re glad he did!” That to introduce Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Yikes. (You can get a sense of what a sad classical station KDFC is by their slogan: “Casual, Comfortable, Classical”. But it’s all we have here.) But then I was listening to Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum and he described someone’s behavior as eleemosynary. Wow.