At present, the only evil blob in the entire USA is sitting directly over Indiana (see above)—conjuring images of Zeus hurling lightning bolts upon us for our incredible stupidity.

We are sullying the one event that is perhaps Indiana’s greatest claim to universal fame outside basketball—the Indianapolis 500—by inviting the crazy infamous blowhard Donald Trump here to drive the pace car.

Can I even describe the many ways this makes me want to take a shower. This man is not someone who endeavors to make the world a better place; rather, he is adept only at self-promotion, and lately, at outrageous accusations devoid of Truth.

Trump’s ignorance is on full display in a letter he sent to New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins. Click here to see Trump’s letter and here to see Collins’s column from today’s paper, in which she unpacks Trump’s outrageous claims and outright lies against President Obama, regarding the president’s citizenship and birth, with verifiable, sourced facts.

Nothing Trump does falls within the realm of civil, respectable behavior that is the hallmark of Hoosier hospitality. Much has been done in recent years to “clean up” the “show us your tits” culture of the Indy 500. Now, unfortunately, with cynicism and ignorance on full display, we’re showing a lot worse. Trump’s appearance here on Race Day brings shame on the Indy 500 and on the City of Indianapolis.

In today’s New York Times: letters regarding an op-ed from last Sunday: “Teaching to the Text Message,” by Andy Selsberg.

The letters reminded me that when I first read Selsberg’s essay a week ago, I intended to comment, but was waylaid by work and then beset by an upper-respiratory affliction so severe that I have been utterly tormented and unable to put a sentence together for four entire days. At last, however, the faint light of Hope glimmers ahead….

Selsberg wrote that he instructs the students in his freshman English class to write captions and product descriptions en route to learning longer-form writing, such as essays and research papers. The point of these exercises is to “reward concision” and encourage “economical and innovative” use of language. However, Selsberg takes off points for “gratuitous argot and emoticons.”

OMG. And to think that this very week, the Oxford English Dictionary LEGITIMIZED these very “popular Internet slang terms” by adding them to its hallowed lexicon. (See AP story here.)

As anyone who has studied language surely knows, it’s not untouchable or static. Language is constantly evolving because the speakers of languages interact. Back in the olden days of chain mail and swords — the lyfe so short and the craft so long to lerne — interaction happened by force and conquering. Then as people spread across the globe, languages spread with them, and we ended up with everything from outright adoption of languages across cultures to pidgin forms that marked entire societies.

Today we have TECHNOLOGY spreading language across our flat world instantly. And we have flattened our interactions with this new code they call  “popular Internet slang.”

Why do we punctuate our emails with a :)? What’s the point of LOL? If I sign off with <3, is that less amorous than “I love you” but stronger than XXX?

I know in my communications, particularly with some colleagues, a message is sometimes softened with a :) much more easily than by using words. Text communications lack the inflections and facial cues that mark in-person communications. So emoticons are a way of adding personalization. “Initializations,” or abbreviations, also have their utility, adding loads of meaning without the bulk.

It’s not that I think we should completely abandon Standard English and replace it with these abbreviated and symbolic forms. I’m every bit as much of a snob about some abuses — like people pronouncing “nuclear” as “nucular” — as the most buttoned-up grammar maven. But the goal of language is to communicate, and no one can argue that Internet slang doesn’t do that, both economically and innovatively.

So *\O/* (cheer)!  <3 (heart) the dynamics of language. And have a good day

You first encounter the montage of photos on a wide pillar, around which you walk, slowly scanning captions and pausing to reflect on the emotions the art suggests. Only after you’ve come clear around do you notice the larger prints of these same photos that line the walls of the adjacent gallery.

Kevin Carter for The New York Times, March 26, 1993.

Of all these Pulitzer Prize winning photographs, one kicks you squarely in the gut. A starving child crouched in the dirt with a vulture waiting nearby for the inevitable to occur.

To contemplate the gravity of that moment you sit a bit outside the gallery before continuing to explore the rest of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. But that picture never leaves you, and you wonder from time to time how you can ever again feel right about a world in which famine and vultures exist.

The photographer, 33 year-old Kevin Carter, could not feel right after years of chronicling the horrors in Africa. In his suicide note, he revealed he was “haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners….”

Pity the limits of mere words to portray a story like a powerful photograph. Today’s “The Year in Pictures” in the Week in Review section of The New York Times illustrates the human struggles in Pakistan, Haiti, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Some pictures I remember seeing when they were originally published, like the one of bloodied babies being wheeled on a hospital cart following a bombing in Pakistan. And another of a woman last March outside her ruined house in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake, which captures the exact moment of her breaking heart. I clipped that one to remind myself I’m never really having a bad day, NOT EVER, REALLY, compared with so many people. [photo]

One powerful picture in today’s NYT — not part of the year-end picture collection — is a photograph of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which spreads over 8 columns and covers two-thirds of pages A26-27.

 You can view the picture  here online, but it won’t have the same effect as holding that fire right there in your hands.

Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard

Heaven forbid that a single day should go by without a deep new learning curve about the financial crisis. In today’s New York Times, revelations that the Fed’s intervention with banks, going back to late 2007, was exponentially broader, more global and more expensive than anyone previously knew. (“Fed Documents Breadth of Emergency Measures”)

With so much public screaming going on about “bailouts” and spending, much of it totally uninformed, I decided long ago it was important to me to at least understand the basics of events leading up to the Great Recession, Second Great Depression or (as I’m now thinking of it), the “Greatest Depression.”

What’s been useful, besides reading the newspapers and magazines I regularly consume, are a couple of documentaries. “Inside Job,” a film remarkably now into its third week at Keystone Art Cinema, laid out the relationship in artistically graphic terms between borrowers, lenders and investors. Narrated by Matt Damon, it explains derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other instruments and their regulation or lack thereof.

My only criticism of the film is that a real journalist should have conducted the interviews. The film’s producers ought to have ponied up for real talent, such as Vanity Fair editor Bethany McLean, who outed Enron in Fortune Magazine in 2001 and is coauthor of a new book about the financial crisis, “All the Devils Are Here.”

I presume it was Mr. Damon conducting the interviews, which as a result, are often less-than-professional in that they’re poorly edited and overwrought. But overall he gets an A for effort, and the film is definitely worth seeing if you want to understand just how the players on Wall Street cruelly screwed you and me on Main Street.

PBS’s Frontline documentary, “Inside the Meltdown” was also very instructive, in that it laid out the timeline of the financial crisis, from the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to JP Morgan Chase for $2 a share, to the federal bailouts of mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the sale of investment bank Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, to the breathtaking bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers, to the rescue of “big insurance company” AIG. (Best of all, you can watch the entire film online at no charge.)

So after all this personal investment in understanding the financial crisis, today I read the NYT article referenced in the first paragraph above, which says (among much more), “In the first week of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Fed bought more than $225 billion in debt. Companies ranging from Ohio’s Fifth Third Bank to the best-known bank franchises of Europe and Asia, like Royal Bank of Scotland and Sumitomo, were the primary occupants of the new lifeboat, along with the finance arms of the nation’s hard-pressed automakers.”

Good Lord! “The primary occupants of the new lifeboat”??! What’s a “Commercial Paper Funding Facility”? Just tell it to me straight. My brain is already deep-fried.

And, 5/3 Bank? My bank?! That really brings the crisis close to home.

What ticks me off the most is that these banks and other corporations who have been receiving bailouts with OUR MONEY — that’s YOU AND ME, TAXPAYER — are continuing to spend millions buying the votes of lawmakers from sea to shining sea. IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, any institution receiving taxpayer money to keep itself afloat should be prohibited by law from spending money on political action or lobbying of any kind. That includes direct contributions to candidates as well as contributions to the shadowy Political Action Committees (PACs) distributing their vitriol and lies on OUR PUBLIC AIRWAVES. (“Companies That Got Bailout Money Keep Lobbying”)

None of us can afford to be ignorant about the financial crisis, or worse, to form our opinions from hearsay, partisan entertainer-pundits and “loose cannon” bloggers. It’s a steep curve to learn all this mumbo jumbo, but somebody has to do it.

When you’re an opinionator like me (or opine-ator, depending on your opinion), it’s good to divulge where you’re getting those opinions. One’s news sources are crucial to developing rational ideas and arguments about the range of issues facing our society. I don’t claim to have any “pure” news sources, but I feel compelled to point out that some outlets are unfairly and vociferously vilified by monied interests BECAUSE THEY REPORT THE NEWS. That would be NPR and The New York Times, primarily, wrongly labeled as the “liberal media.” No, they are the truthful (albeit not perfect) media.

I try to avoid the so-called “24/7 media,” because it’s just a fact that the nature of being constantly on means they run out of news. Case in point: just last week I witnessed CNN reporting on the wedding dress Kate Middleton “might” wear when she weds Prince William next spring.

Good grief.  The report even included a lineup of the “proposed” dresses.

Such TV trash is proof that unless there’s truly breaking news, we are just filling airtime here, folks, and you know what they say about garbage in, garbage out.

Daily I consume The New York Times and The Indianapolis Star (real newspaper versions). I read The Nation magazine weekly and Mother Jones magazine monthly (again, real paper versions). I listen to NPR seemingly all day and all night long. I watch CNBC for stock market info, the CBS Evening News and local news programs every evening, FOX 59 morning news once in a while because it runs longer than the other stations and seems better reported, 60 Minutes, ABC’s This Week, Face the Nation, Indiana Week in Review, CNN for breaking news and the Daily Show and Colbert Report for sh**s and grins.

When I’m in another city I always buy a local newspaper, and recently treated myself to several days of The Washington Post. I check Google News for what’s aggregated, and have CNN and NYT breaking news alerts sent to my email. I receive Google Alerts on several areas of interest, including colony collapse disorder, chytrid, white nose syndrome, rfid and other topics I’ve written about in The Star.

I feel fairly schooled on the financial crisis, thanks to the NYT, which was reporting a “housing bubble” way back in the halcyon days of 2005. Which is proof that if more people actually read the news, there would have been fewer people shocked, shocked! at the resulting meltdowns on Wall Street.

I have to believe that the majority of people who consume digital versions of newspapers are not getting the best overall understanding of national and international events. Online versions make you choose what you want to read. But a newspaper allows your eye to meander across the page, so you might actually read something titled, “Pentagon Report Cites Gains in Afghanistan” (in today’s NYT on page A8 right next to “Names of the Dead” — all 5,804 service members killed in the Iraq-Afghanistan wars).

The digital version of this story just doesn’t have the clickability of say, “Lady Gaga to William and Kate: ‘Don’t touch my junk.’”

It also helps to know some reporters. This just in: “Was bck in knightstown today…. School bd member chewing out a bus driver on tape.” See Fox 59’s venerable Russ McQuaid for that report.

Happy Thanksgiving.