Pelican road is closed for summer


Helena Agnew, "She's Looking at Me", Acrylic & Digital Photography

* From Harper's

-- Increase in the total value of U.S. residential property since 2000, expressed as a percentage of GDP: 60

-- Increase in the value of all U.S. stocks between 1995 and 2000, as a percentage of GDP: 59

-- Number of consecutive years that the value of housing in Japan has dropped since its housing bubble burst: 14

-- Minimum number of American universities with their own student-run erotic magazines: 6

-- Year by which Brazil's government will have switched its computers entirely to open-source software: 2010

-- Number of Danish graduate students who last December releaseda copyright-free recipe for an "open source beer": 15

* Douglas Brinkly on Hunter S. Thompson, from (originally from Stop Smiling Issue 22). excerpt:

SS: Did Hunter use drugs to become more productive?

DB:He used drugs for fun. He gained insights from them, depending on the drug. Like William S. Burroughs, Hunter was a glossary of drugs. He was a bit of an alchemist in that way. Of course he loved Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Freud's Cocaine Papers. He was attracted to drugs that kept him up for days on end - speed, amphetamines, cocaine. He wasn't looking to numb out. Unlike Tim Leary - who thought he should go to a green pasture and relax and get in tune with nature while on LSD - Hunter always believed you should eat LSD and go into the worst urban evironment you can get into, like a ghetto or a combat zone, because his constitution was so strong, and his mind was so strong, he could handle it.

SS: Was Hunter's physical agony the deciding factor for his decision to end his life?

DB: Absolutely. Health was the primary factor leading to Hunter's decision that he had lived long enough at age 67. He couldn't swim anymore. He couldn't really walk; he needed a walker or a wheelchair. He didn't really need to push it any further. I think if he had been in better physical shape, he would be with us. The hip-replacement surgery didn't bring the beneficial results that he hoped for.

* Michelanglo Signorlie. excerpt:

"When last we heard from the rector at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Monsignor Eugene Clark, it was April of 2002, when he made headlines amid the priest sexual abuse scandal, practically calling for a new Spanish Inquisition, this time directed solely at homosexuals.

"Standing in one Sunday for the befuddled and hiding Cardinal Egan – under attack for having ignored abusive priests – Clark, rector at what is arguably the seat of the Catholic Church in America, ranted that homosexuality is a 'disorder' and said it was a 'grave mistake' to allow gays into the priesthood, blaming them for the sex abuse scandal. Clark has long upheld the Vatican belief that homosexuals – and the liberals who support them – are bringing down society, and, of course, want to destroy the institution of marriage. He also attacked those who are critical of celibacy.

"Now here is Monsignor Clark, three years later, at the age of 79, exposed last week as engaging in an adulterous affair with a married women 30 years younger, proving that the greatest threat to marriage is in fact pompous, hypocritical, heterosexual men who can’t keep their dicks to themselves even as they become octogenarians."

* Twofer Tuesday, Minutemen edition: history lesson part two and this ain't no picnic.